The Turning Tide (22 page)
They sat in uncomfortable silence for several more minutes while Buster and Seminole Billy sipped their drinks. ‘You got a radio in here?’ Billy said, looking around the kitchen. ‘Only we’re missing the end of something I was listening to on
LCC
.’
‘Stuebner show?’ Erykah said, and ran her fingers over the tablet screen to bring up the Internet radio stations. ‘I love her.’ The dulcet tones of Diana Stuebner reading the headlines at the top of the hour poured out of the surround sound into the whole house.
Buster let out a low, appreciative whistle. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he said. ‘Nice system you got. Sounds a lot better than that piece of shite you call a car stereo, Billy.’
Seminole Billy pushed his empty mineral water bottle in Erykah’s direction. ‘Missed the last of the call-in though,’ he said. ‘My favourite thing on the radio. That woman can talk a wasp out of its sting. We’re out. Buster, come on.’
‘Aww, I was getting used to this,’ Buster said, looking longingly at the rest of the food.
‘Don’t make me have to persuade you, mate,’ Seminole Billy said in his low voice. Buster sprang off the chair in record time. ‘Be in touch,’ Seminole Billy said, and gave Erykah an offhand salute. ‘And give your husband our regards.’
Erykah smiled and nodded until they were gone, then let out a ragged sigh. What a day. She tore open the brown envelope Billy had given here and found a stack of odd-looking cash. Crisply ironed fifty-pound notes, but green instead of pink? Instead of the familiar image of Her Majesty the Queen, the stippled head of a man in a ridiculous wig looked back at her. She turned the notes over – Royal Bank of Scotland. Surprise, surprise. Counted it up. Just shy of twenty grand. Not as much as she had hoped. So maybe a used yacht. Or a new rowing boat.
Diana’s voice danced over the headlines. ‘The whistle-blower known only as Media Mouse has resurfaced today with allegations of a senior woman politician trading sex for positive press,’ the smooth voice purred from the radio. ‘The claims came to light in the last hour from the now notorious anonymous social media account. Number 10 have released a statement categorically denying any of the cabinet are the target of the blind item. Opposition parties have not yet responded.’
Was that . . . ? Yes. Erykah clicked rapidly back to Twitter to find Media Mouse at the top of trending topics already.
@MediaMouse One way to get good press: front bench woman having affair with news producer. The future of hands on journalism? #blinditem
‘Posted only fifteen minutes ago.’ Erykah’s breathing went short and shallow with excitement and her fingers flew over the tablet screen. The game was most definitely on.
‘Morag?’ Arjun tapped on the door between their offices, opening it a crack. ‘Call still on hold,’ he whispered.
Morag Munro was not feeling entirely herself. The tailored suit jacket hanging off the back of her chair could do with a dry clean. She had woken up with dry eyes so was wearing her spectacles, which made her look older. Her shoes were a new pair, not yet broken in, and pinched at the toes. She kicked off the patent red heels under the desk. On top of that Delphine had been bombarding her with emails about new rumours that had popped up overnight, that someone on the front benches was shagging a journalist. Morag was not interested in taking any calls just now.
‘Are you feeling all right?’ Arjun asked. He slid a mug of tea across the desk to her alongside a folder of selected clippings from political websites that morning, issues that were tipped to become the day’s talking points.
Her superfood chia porridge and yoghurt smoothie sat on her desk, both untouched. All of her meals were delivered these days, the better to fit in between meetings. It suited her. She ate for fuel only.
‘I’m fine,’ Morag nodded. ‘Thank you,’ she said. She nodded at the folder. ‘Sit down. What’s the takeaway from the press this morning? Apart from the obvious.’
‘More European elections nonsense,’ he said, making the exaggerated shrug that indicated he knew she had no interest in the topic, but that he thought she should pay more attention to it. ‘Anti-devolution candidates are starting to campaign north of the border, one of them mentioned you.’
‘Really?’ She raised her eyebrows above her glasses, which made her look like a startled owl. ‘Good or bad?’
‘Let’s see, shall we?’ Arj rifled through the clippings and held up a printout from a site known for its parliamentary gossip. ‘Quote from Major Whitney Abbott, the
SLU
candidate,’ Arj said. ‘You know of him?’
‘Yes. Old goat with a tenuous claim on heroism,’ Morag said. Arj wasn’t even old enough to have been alive during the Falklands War, much less remember it. ‘Go on.’
‘Says he thinks you should join his party and bring the fight for a, quote, Re-United Kingdom, unquote, to Westminster.’
Morag took off her glasses and massaged the crease in the middle of her forehead. ‘You know I can’t touch that. Next.’
‘A-level student in Cheltenham overstayed her visa and is making an asylum claim. Home Office are moving to deport so a good chance to come out on the right side, a solid social media win? There’s an online petition. Emma Watson tweeted support.’
‘State school student?’
‘Cheltenham Ladies’ College.’
This did not sound hopeful. ‘Is she black? Or Muslim? Any
FGM
risk?’
Arjun shook his head. ‘Canadian. White as the driven snow.’
‘Really? Canadians can claim asylum now?’
‘Her solicitors are angling for a domestic violence exception. Parents divorced, but the court records are sealed. She’s being sent back to her dad.’
‘Deadbeat redneck? Trailer park? Give me something to work with here,’ Morag said.
‘I wish. On-paper billionaire with oil sands extraction patents and Russian oligarch friends.’
Morag sighed. ‘Ten thousand forced removals every year, and no one gets exercised until it’s some . . .’ She flipped open the folder. She replaced her glasses and examined the grainy photo. ‘Pom-pom girl from Alberta. I despair.’
‘Tabloids are likely to jump on this one,’ Arjun said. ‘You know how they love blondes in distress.’
‘Yes, well,’ Morag said. ‘Pull a neutral response from the archive – rule of law applies equally to all, support a sensible and sustainable policy . . . you know the rest.’
Arjun nodded and withdrew.
Morag grimaced as soon as the door shut. On any given weekday, Westminster was teeming with people, everyone living in everyone else’s pockets. She was accustomed to the loss of privacy, but his keenness was beginning to get on her nerves. She slurped the tea and scowled. It was perfect even by her specifications: strong, dash of milk. His careful study of her habits, her moods, her likes and dislikes, infuriated her. She didn’t care for people who were too observant. More to the point, she didn’t trust them.
The light on her office phone blinked twice, then went dark, then blinked again. Over and over, indicating a call that was on hold and had been for a quarter of an hour.
Morag placed a hand on the phone. She supposed she would have to answer it sometime. She picked up the receiver and hadn’t even said a word when a breathless man blurted, ‘Have you seen the fucking tweet?’
‘Hello to you too, Jonathan,’ she said coolly. ‘I have heard about yesterday’s tweet.’ There was no avoiding the developing scandal about the rumour of a politician sleeping her way to good press. She had feigned ignorance when Arjun mentioned it in the lift, but wondered if perhaps she had played her surprise too strongly. What was the saying – the lady doth protest too much? Her name was coming up no more frequently than that of any other female MP’s. The problem was: with few women to choose from, she did not feel safe from suspicion.
‘Fucking disaster,’ Jonathan said. ‘Christ. What do we do now?’
Morag frowned. He was meant to be the media professional. Last thing she needed was for him to lose the plot. ‘No one suspects us yet,’ Morag hissed into the phone. ‘Emphasis on
yet
. Speaking of which, what part of “don’t ring me at the office” was so difficult to understand?’
‘Like I had a fucking choice,’ Jonathan said. ‘I couldn’t reach your mobile and didn’t want to leave a voicemail in case someone hacked it.’
‘Yes. I turned it off because there’s someone I’m trying to avoid.’
‘You mean that Media Mouse twat?’
‘I meant you.’ Morag said acidly. Her fingers started drumming the desk. ‘So instead of waiting for me to ring back, you decided to make a call to a landline that will no doubt be logged in official records. Thank you for that,’ she said, her Scottish accent unfurling luxuriously over the syllables.
‘Fuck sake . . .’ Jonathan grasped for words. ‘Why can’t you tell your staff it was an interview request?’
‘And then when they ask why it didn’t go in the bookings diary?’ she said. ‘You have no idea what it is like here. I can’t fart in Westminster without someone finding out about it. If Arjun was any further up my backside right now he would be chewing last night’s dinner.’
‘Well, that’s your fucking problem, not mine,’ Jonathan said. ‘I have to talk to you. Now. We need to get our stories straight in case anything does surface.’
She hated when he spoke to her like that. As if she wasn’t the older of the two of them, as if she wasn’t who she was. She suspected most of his previous relationships had involved junior researchers at the station, maybe some Internet dating. Places where his bad temper read as impressive, not unhinged. Places where the short-fused Alpha Male act was expected or perhaps tolerated. But she had seen enough silverbacks in the wild to know Jonathan was not quite the thirty-stone gorilla he pretended to be.
They had first hooked up at the last party conference. She was coming off the high of delivering a speech that she knew would guarantee her ascendance to the Shadow Cabinet. He was simply high. It had seemed like a permissible, illicit thrill at the time, taking him back to her hotel suite. But after he’d slunk out in the morning, dressed in the same clothes he had been wearing the night before, she realised what a risk she was running. And yet, it was she who called him first after conference season was over.
‘I just came out of an editorial meeting,’ he said. ‘Diana is pushing hard for these rumours to be today’s call-in. News updates are already covering it, but she wants to strike while it’s trending.’
‘A call-in?’
‘I talked her down, the stupid bitch,’ he said. ‘Said it was too much of a libel risk if we open the switchboards.’
‘Aren’t you the white knight,’ Morag said. ‘Tell me Media Mouse isn’t someone inside the station,’ she said.
She heard Jonathan swallow. His answer was a few moments coming. It was clear to her he had never even considered the possibility. ‘Fuck off. It isn’t someone inside the station.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘No one here has seen us together, they don’t . . . I mean, for all we know it’s a wind-up. It might not even be about us,’ he said. ‘It’s a nasty rumour. Just some twat fucking with people.’
Morag had to admit – obscenities aside – that this was not only possible, but likely. It wouldn’t be the first time she had spent days in fear of what the media might be onto, only to find the darkly hinted scandals that had been occupying her thoughts never made waves at all. But that was no reason to be complacent.
‘Are we OK?’ he said.
Morag sighed. ‘OK as in how?’
‘You know . . . are we still on,’ he said. ‘Last week you said you wanted more time to think about us, about where we were going . . .’
‘Listen. Jonathan, thank you for the call, but no, we are not OK, and no, I don’t need more time to think about it.’
‘You can’t fucking do this now! Morag—’
‘In fact, while I’m having another think, I think I feel very differently about you,’ she said. ‘This is not working for me. Calling my office, the indiscretion of it—’
There was a noise that might have been the sound of him punching his desk. ‘You’re being unreasonable, Morag.’
‘ . . . the standing assumption that us – this – whatever we have, is some sort of direct line to me and my office, then no, I think I’m having second thoughts about you. And I should have done this weeks ago,’ she said. ‘Jonathan, take your stupid glasses and your silly turtlenecks and your anger-management problems and fuck the fuck off out of my life.’ She hung up the phone with a finality that startled even her.
Morag breathed deeply and went to her office door. ‘Arjun, you are not to put through any more calls this morning,’ she said.
She decided to check her email instead. One in particular caught her eye. It was flagged urgent, with the mysterious subject line Heads-Up.
Forget that. She’d had enough of rumours for one day, and it wasn’t even ten o’clock yet. Morag marked the email as spam and deleted it.
Erykah kept the radio on the morning news while she worked online. She nibbled absentmindedly at a plate of cold leftovers from the night before. Rab had refused to come downstairs even after Seminole Billy and Buster left, saying he wasn’t hungry. She hadn’t heard a peep from him this morning either. The rice might be a bit dried out now, but the chicken was still succulent and the goat lovely and spicy. His loss.
One of the courses she had loved at university was codebreaking. The history was fascinating. Over and over again, mankind had invented unbreakable codes that were broken. And almost always not because of some mathematical prowess, although that did contribute to breaking codes sometimes. But the reality was usually far simpler than that. People did not use codes in the way they were intended to be used and gave up crucial clues that allowed others to find their way in.
The principle didn’t only apply to codes, but anything to do with privacy and security. Technology was only perfect if it was used perfectly. In theory, an environment where people interacted only electronically should have the best chance of maintaining security. But people weren’t online simply to transmit data; they sought out community, connections. The only way to guarantee total anonymity was to have no contact with anyone else – but that would go against the point of being on social media in the first place.
Media Mouse was back and tweeting. She had the foothold she needed. If she could lure Media Mouse into revealing more than they ought, she could catch them.
Her ears perked briefly at the mention of a murder on the radio. Diana Stuebner’s honeyed voice poured out of the speakers. ‘I’m joined on the line now by Harriet Hitchin, the Home Office pathologist in Cameron Bridge, Scotland, who has been dealing with this case.’
‘Hello,’ Harriet said over what sounded like a crackling phone connection.
‘Dr Hitchin, thank you for joining us,’ Diana said. ‘Is there anything you can tell us? Something that might help any potential witnesses who decide to come forward?’ Diana asked.
‘Obviously, there are some details we can’t discuss while the investigation is ongoing,’ Harriet said in her nasal voice. ‘But we can advise that further to reports putting the remains in a container, that the body was discovered tied up in a sports bag.’
‘A sports bag. Interesting,’ Diana repeated. ‘Any special make or type? Maybe a particular club?’
‘The police haven’t been able to identify its origin yet,’ Harriet said. ‘But I can say that it was printed with a Union Jack motif on a blue background. The sort of bag you might see in tourist shops throughout London.’
‘Very interesting,’ Diana said. ‘Blue sports bag, Union Jacks. So if there are any potential witnesses out there – perhaps you were out late in London on January 15th and saw someone, perhaps carrying a Union Jack sports bag – please be sure to contact police as soon as possible.’ She tapped the table with her pen. ‘Some sources have hinted that Professor Schofield may have been tortured before he was killed. Can you confirm or deny these rumours?’
Schofield? Erykah’s blood ran cold. She had been in his office only yesterday. He was supposed to be missing, presumed dead. Now they were saying he was identified?
‘Um! Well,’ Harriet was taken aback. ‘I can’t clarify exact details of the post-mortem. No one from our office would have released such information,’ she said, but there was a note of uncertainty in her voice.
Erykah bit her lip. With a body identified, the Met would probably go back in to check his office more carefully now. Or worse – maybe that Peter might remember seeing her photograph in the newspaper, put two and two together, and tell the police.
Her prints would still be on file from when Grayson killed Rory Lovelace. They would surely dust everything in Schofield’s office for fingerprints and find she had been at the computer keyboard.
‘Is there anything else we can say that might help listeners at home with information pertaining to the crime?’ Diana said.
‘The police will be following all leads,’ Harriet said. ‘And we want to reassure the family of Professor Schofield, his friends and colleagues that everything possible will be done to bring his killer to justice.’
If this was the same body found on a beach that she had heard about, could the tide really have carried it all that way? Erykah quickly looked up a map of tidal flows online. No, that didn’t seem likely – anything coming out of the Thames would end up on the east coast or even Europe, not the west coast of Scotland. So either he had been taken there alive then killed, or someone had gone all the way to Scotland to try to make sure the body was never found. Whoever did it was trying to cover their tracks completely. Otherwise why not throw him in the Thames?
‘And can we remind any callers,’ Diana said. ‘If you have information pertaining to the investigation, please ring the police – not us! Thank you for joining us today, Dr Hitchin.’
‘Thank you for having me.’
Erykah nibbled a cold patty and put the murder out of her head while she tried to draw Media Mouse into more conversation.
The thing was, Media Mouse was more receptive to chatting than she hoped. Enjoying the renewed notoriety, most likely. And with the press as yet unable to discover who it was – well, they probably put their guard down after the first wave of attention passed.
So far Erykah had sent them several private messages, all of which contained links to news stories. But what most people would not have noticed was that before landing on the stories, whoever clicked the shortened link was forwarded via another server before their final destination. An old domain that Erykah had used to back up the rowing website, but had never hosted any content. By checking the logs she could collect the IP address of whoever clicked the links.
<3 the account! What gave you the idea?
I had a housemate who was really into twitter,
Media Mouse typed.
Never saw a use for it until now! LOL
As yet no links had been clicked, but the conversation was flowing and that was a start. What she needed was to build trust with Media Mouse and keep sending messages until they accessed their account from a place she could easily trace, such as their home, or where they worked. And then from there, well, she would figure that bit out when it happened.
Meanwhile she tried to get more information about the woman the Major and Peter both mentioned. Livia. She was proving equally difficult to identify. Public paperwork on the SLU showed no one by that name, or any similar name. And without a surname straight searches would be a problem. Where would Lady Livia be? No mention of anyone by that name on the
Tatle
r website. Announcements in the
Telegraph
and
London Gazette
came up empty as well. She flicked through websites with photos from last summer at Henley where the Stewards’ enclosure was heaving with potentials of all ages. Society blondes bared their whitened teeth for the cameras, each one richer or more aristocratic than the last. But no one seemed to fit the bill.
As long as Mouse was still on the hook, though, things were looking up.
Don’t you worry about being found?
Erykah typed in a private message.
*shrug*
, Media Mouse typed back.
Mostly I don’t think about it . . . killing time at work.
So they were at work. Good. Success was so close Erykah could almost taste it. She sent Media Mouse another link by direct message, this time to a gossip site.
Media mouse messaged back almost immediately.
That’s just tittle tattle. Wait til you see what I have coming next. Double trouble.
Are you sure?
This is interesting stuff. Jobless figures being manipulated, could be juicy.
Ha, no. Read it. No one cares about statistics. I mean big time. As in corruption investigation big time
.
Interesting. Erykah wondered what that could mean, and whether it might have anything to do with the SLU. But more importantly, they had finally clicked through on a link and she had an IP address for Media Mouse.
She copied the IP numbers into a website search form and hit return. When the result came up, it was a moment before she realised what exactly she was looking at.
Whoever it was, was tweeting from inside the
LCC
radio station studio. Right now.
It was so obvious in hindsight. Who knows better how to manipulate the news cycle, how to get a so-so story to trend, than someone already in that world? She got a shiver looking at it. Who could it be? A guest? A presenter?
What if it was Diana Stuebner herself?
Erykah’s lips curled up into a smile. So what if she wasn’t getting yacht money for this, she could certainly afford a holiday. She thought about how a drink on a boat moored up in the sunny Caribbean might taste right now. The soft lapping of warm, gentle waves on the bow. The hot sun on her arms and legs.
This was better than good; this was amazing. But she needed to be sure before she let anyone know.
Hey, is your work Internet an open network or sign in only?
Sign in. Why?
I know your IP address. I know the radio station where you work.
Who are you?
Was it too early in the day for a beer? Who cared? There were still three Red Stripes in the fridge. Erykah sipped from the cold can. It tasted glorious.
No one of consequence,
she typed.
Meet me.
Forget it. All you have is one building where hundreds of people work. You don’t know who I am.
Erykah chuckled. Ah, bravado. She had done enough of it herself. But it was true, in a way: she didn’t know exactly who Media Mouse was. Not yet. She was getting there though. The legwork might take a day or two, maybe more. It would mean some early starts to get into town, but with the money literally on the table it was definitely worth it.
Then I’ll stand outside the station every day til I find you. Meet me.
No response.
Meet me.
Meet me, or I’ll come find you.
