CHAPTER 1

SATURDAY 28th June 2014 – DAY 1

The Times: BRITAIN NEARS EU EXIT

The Guardian: CAN A FEMINIST GET MARRIED?

The Sun: SCHOOL FURY AS BOY 7 DOES A SUAREZ

One was standing, hands on hips, her toes curled over the end of the diving board. The other was lying on a sun-bed, her back arched, laughing. Bent over her in pink turtle-covered shorts, clutching a beer, the man was planting a raspberry on her flat stomach.

‘Don’t be daft.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘So am I.’

Frank leaned back in his chair, pushing his glasses up onto his forehead. ‘Look at the contrast, the blue sky, the white villa, the little splash of colour from the umbrella, the olive trees. And Burke’s shorts. And those bloody girls.’ He spread his arms. ‘I’m telling you, Sam, that is art.’

‘Can I remind you we don’t have a culture section? Last Sunday we gave X-Men five stars.’

Sam was standing at the sliding glass doors that could open to the terrace, looking out and back up the Thames. If it had been a normal summer’s day he’d have been be able to see over the Eye and all the way to Heathrow. ‘They’re Vilebrequins.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘His shorts are, Cameron wears them. Don’t go all Brian Sewell, they’re just pictures that tell a story.’

‘But it’s a classic, all four in focus, pin sharp.’

Sam came over, looking over Frank’s shoulder at the layouts on his desk. ‘How do you get four?’

‘Nipples.’

‘Very funny.’ He leaned on the desk, thinking about all the options. He could see how each image could be cropped, what headline would work best. ‘That one.’ He pointed at the shot where Burke was on his back on the lounger this time, propped up, with the blonde one astride him, again in just the tiniest of bikini bottoms.

‘Face?’

‘Exactly. We need to see it is him.’

‘But the big wobbly gut hanging over his shorts is good, and then I can’t use the RASPBERRY NIPPLE headline,’ said Frank.

‘Exactly.’

Sam walked across the office, looking to his right through the long glass wall, past Mary, Frank’s PA, typing away, and across the packed newsroom. At the horseshoe of sofas he sat down and looked up at the muted wall of TV monitors that showed what was happening in the world. ‘Good job Wimbledon built that roof. Nadal’s killing this guy now.’

Frank played with one of the remotes. ‘Lost the first set. Football’s on in a minute. But I’m still not sure you’re right about this.’

‘Give me strength.’ Sam pushed himself up and went back. ‘This is a serious story, Frank.’ He stood next to him again. ‘That one’s going on five.’ Looking at it all laid out, it was the best story they’d done for years.

‘You sure we can use THREE IN A BED with it?’

‘Housekeeper’s affidavit. Says he did.’

‘Lucky bastard.’

Through the glass Mary was now waving, two fingers raised, mouthing ‘Lomax, line two.’ Frank put him on speakerphone.

‘Hi Carson, I’m with Sam. Where are you?’

‘The boat’s going back to Monaco, we’re taking the jet to Nice in a minute.’

Sam resisted saying ‘Of course you are’ and said, ‘Good trip?’

‘Yeah, really good. But Caroline needs to get back. All under control?’

Frank said, ‘Yes, fine, we’re leading with your mate Lord Nigel Burke.’

‘Good. Hi Sam. Anything new on it?’

Sam perched on the edge of the desk. ‘No, we tried again today, it’s still just no comment through his lawyers. No denial. There’s nothing new on the story.’

‘And guys, he isn’t my mate.’

‘Doesn’t he come to your big summer party?’

‘Hell, who doesn’t?’

‘Well, we don’t,’ said Sam.

‘If you fellas came nobody else would.’

They exchanged a look, both imagining their owner, Carson Lomax, padding round the deck of his yacht with a cigar in one hand and the photos in the other, probably in similar shorts. Given his wealth, the Hic Salta was fairly modest at two hundred odd feet. As owners went he was fine, but he wasn’t a newspaper man at heart. He was interested, helped when he could, but Sam reckoned most of the time he was just doing what he thought Rupert Murdoch would do.

‘Anyway, there’s more at stake than any friendship I might have. What’s your intro? I haven’t got that.’

Sam picked up the layout – ‘MARRIED Tory Peer Lord Nigel Burke can today be exposed as a sleazy love-rat who took part in a tryst with a pair of stunning Ukrainian women a THIRD his age. As our shocking exclusive photos reveal, the 61-year-old dad of three was caught red-handed romping with two girls in their TWENTIES in a Black Sea love nest – behind the back of his loyal wife SARAH.’

‘Love it,’ said Lomax. ‘What’s the headline?’

Frank said it as if he was announcing a royal birth. ‘It’s RASPBERRY NIPPLED.’

‘What?’

‘Raspberry Ripple. It’s ice cream,’ said Sam, with no enthusiasm.

‘I can’t see any ice cream.’

‘He’s giving her a raspberry,’ said Frank, looking at Sam for support, not getting it, and giving him a thumbs down.

‘In what I’m looking at he’s giving her a beer.’

‘It’s an English expression, blowing a raspberry.’

‘Caroline, you have to listen to this, Frank’s telling me that in England you blow raspberries.’

Sam suppressed a laugh, knowing that Caroline wouldn’t.

‘Oh, she says you do.’

Frank didn’t want to give in. ‘It’s cockney rhyming slang, ripple nipple. As in she’s got great raspberries. Which they have.’

‘Stay there, Carson,’ said Sam, putting Lomax on hold to talk to Frank. ‘Actually that’s wrong. Raspberry ripple is a cripple, not nipple... you berk.’

Frank went back, ‘We also like YOU BURKE.’

‘That even I get. Your choice of course. By the way, best photos we’ve had for ages – collector’s items, like that German guy.’

‘Helmut Newton,’ said Sam.

‘That’s the guy. What else you got?’

‘An eight page pull out on Scottish devolution.’

‘Very funny, Sam. Birds and soccer then. This guy Sánchez really bite somebody?’

‘Suarez. Oh yes. You supporting USA?’

‘Hell no. Canadians don’t do that, it’d be like you guys supporting the Welsh. OK, and how‘s your new boss doing?’

‘Fine, good, great’ said Frank, looking at Sam and shrugging as if to say, ‘What am I supposed to say?’

‘Listen guys, got to go, you know what’s at stake, this is huge. Hold on.’

They could hear Lomax having some sort of discussion in the background. He came back on, ‘Sam, Caroline says are you at the usual place later?’

‘I will be. So you OK with it?’

‘Guys, you two run the paper, you know I never make those calls, that’s why I pay you the big bucks.’

Frank hung up and said, ‘Thanks for that.’

‘Come on, for years we worked for a chinless wonder trapped in the past, then you moaned about the aggressive venture capitalists, and now we’ve got a fairly laid back billionaire who basically lets us get on with it.’

‘I know, I know. And I guess you can’t dislike somebody who makes your soulmate Caroline happy.’

‘True. But we have now got the boy wonder,’ said Sam, pointing at the ceiling.

‘One year making tea at the Calgary Herald, and he thinks he’s Citizen Kane.’

‘Anyway, what are we supposed to say to him? Carson, your son Jay’s an irritating little shit and when he’s not playing golf or out on the pull he’s interfering, and trying to show he’s in charge, while we put the paper to bed, yet again?’

‘It’s a small price to pay.’

Frank went out and asked Mary to fetch the new girl.

Mary gave him a filthy look. ‘She does have a name.’

‘Sorry.’

She waited.

‘Remind me.’

‘It’s Justine. Walker. Try and remember.’

Sam looked at it all again. There really was a lot at stake here. For weeks they’d been running on empty. BGT, Bieber, Plebgate, lizard-face Farage, the World Cup, Murray mania, endless muslim scaremongering, royal babies. The irony was that the real political significance of nailing Burke would be lost on their readers. It annoyed him that the so-called serious newspapers would have the field day with the story.

Frank came back and sat on one of the sofas next to Sam, who had his feet up, scrolling through the shots on his laptop of the girls cavorting – maybe frolicking was better – by the pool.

‘He’s right. They are a bit Helmut,’ said Sam.

‘Gary will be flattered by the comparison. How did Boris describe the Olympic beach volleyball girls?’

‘Glistening like wet otters.’

‘Sure it wasn’t beavers?’

‘It wasn’t.’

‘Think that might be lost on our readers anyway,’ said Frank, trying to get some volume on the football.

Sam switched to the website version of the Burke story. ‘What do you think?’

Frank said, ‘I can look at the paper and tell you what’s wrong with it in five seconds. That? I’ve just got no idea, it’s a mystery.’

‘Well, this is the only place that this story will be real news.’

‘Yes, but it’s not a paper, is it?’

Sam looked around at Frank’s time-warp office. Papers piled everywhere – the massive oak desk, the filing cabinets. Frank was old school. He admired his insistence on still coming to work in a suit, usually pinstriped, and a bright silk tie and cufflinks, his last defiant stand against the brave new digital world. Sam looked out into the newsroom where their senior crime writer was working away head to toe in lycra, a fluorescent yellow cycling jacket hanging on his chair, and thought maybe Frank had a point.

‘The paper that drops on the doormat is about seven hours out of date, it might as well be seven days. It’s reviews and previews.’

Frank looked at the web page. ‘Who are all these women I’ve never heard of? Billi Mucklow. Iggy Azalea. Are they real people?’

‘Sure are.’ Sam scrolled down. ‘Look at this.’

‘Christ, that must be Photoshopped.’

‘No, that’s Kim Kardashian. Plan was that her arse would break the internet.’

‘I like her already.’

They’d joined the paper on the same Monday in May 1980, both just twenty. At their Friday induction session the Sports Editor Rhod Boughton asked them to critique that day’s Sun preview of the FA Cup Final where West Ham would play Arsenal.

Frank interrupted from the back row, ‘That’s bollocks.’

Boughton said, ‘What? Who said that?’

Sam and everybody else in the room turned to look at Frank.

‘That’s not the team, Devonshire and Pearson will both play.’ Sam tried desperately not to laugh.

‘You don’t know that, son.’

‘Want to bet?’

Boughton, a notorious Welsh Fleet Street drinker and punter, said, ‘Go on then.’

‘If I get the West Ham starting eleven right then I start in sport for you on Monday.’

‘OK, Billy big bollocks, you’re on. But if you’re fucking wrong you’re fired.’

‘You’re on too, Rhod.’

Frank got up, marched to the front, and shook on it. Late the next night Sam found Frank in the pub. ‘That was ballsy. How did you do that?’

‘My cousin’s in the youth team. Trevor Brooking told him, he cleans his boots.’

‘You could have been fired before you were hired.’

‘Exactly. A bet to nothing.’

And that was it, they were mates. And living proof that opposites attract. Sam was drawn to the front page, Frank to the back – though Frank had somehow completed the journey before Sam had even started. Sam took a little longer.

Frank outlasted most of the managers he knew on first name terms and became Sports Editor. From there it was a small step to be Editor twenty years later, helped by Sam telling the then chinless proprietor Viscount Woodbury that he couldn’t see anyone else he could work for, and refusing to do it himself.

Sam knew that in theory it was simple now. They were too expensive to fire, and too good at what they did to replace. Sam had steered them clear of phone hacking and all the scandal that went with it. But he found himself increasingly wondering after all this time if this was all they’d ever know or do, or whether they were earning too much to do what they really wanted to, whatever that was. The last time they’d talked about it properly Frank had said, ‘Cheer up, you make it sound like we’re in the waiting room at Dignitas.’

Sam looked out across the office and something caught his eye. Way across the office, a girl was talking to somebody on magazines, both laughing. Then she turned and started heading their way. He didn’t see a single person of either sex she walked past who didn’t turn to look. And while she knew it, there wasn’t a hint of self-consciousness. She seemed to be feeding off it, weaving through the desks. The way she moved reminded him of someone or something. No, he couldn’t place it.

‘Who’s that?’

Frank looked up. ‘Who?’

‘Who do you think? The girl who looks like she’s lost and looking for the Vogue offices.’

‘That’s the new girl. Justine, I think.’

‘Bloody hell.’

Mary showed her in. Sam took his feet off the table, stood up, and slipped on his shoes.

Frank said ‘Sam Plummer, this is Justine….’

She filled the gap, ‘Walker.’ He couldn’t help thinking she could hold her own with the two girls he’d just been looking at. Then he caught himself as he always did when he looked at a girl who he knew wasn’t much older than his daughter.

‘Justine’s joined the legal team. She’s on today,’ said Frank.

‘I thought Charlie was dealing with this?’

‘I’ve been working for him, he’s at a wedding today.’

Sam said, ‘Are you new?’ knowing she had to be. He would have noticed.

‘Yes. I’ve been seconded, from the group.’

Sam turned to Frank. ‘So where’s the big white chief?’

‘Donald? The Lomax’s have got him in Canada, some huge group legal issue.’

‘Has he signed off on Burke?’

‘He told Charlie to deal with it. I hear he sorted the problem and Lomax told him to go fishing, so you know what Don’s like, he’ll be in some salmon river in the middle of nowhere.’

Way back when Sam had been in the front line he earned a reputation for being able to read people straight off, particularly women. He couldn’t ever remember being wrong. She looked nervous but at the same time confident, determined even, and finally trying hard to look more businesslike than sexy – on that one Sam thought she was failing. Yes, she was in a suit but the skirt was cut just that bit tighter and shorter than most would try. He knew she was a lawyer, but if it had been his birthday he’d still not have been surprised if she’d turned out to be a strippergram. He tried hard not to stare.

They sat down. ‘Has there been anything more?’ she asked, looking at her notes.

Frank intimidated a lot of people, but Sam liked the way she was cool with him. He said, ‘We’ve had this for nearly two weeks, we can’t wait any longer. Burke’s had his chance.’

Mary was now semaphoring and it was enough to get Frank out of the room.

Sam carried on, ‘Not really. Been trying for a good follow up for next week, but it’s a bit thin, no ex-boyfriends or pimps for the girls, they’ve never left Ukraine, I expect, and he’s snow white – but that’s why it’s a good story. We do have more good pictures.’

‘The one with the ice cubes is great,’ she said with a straight face. He found the way she maintained eye contact interesting, almost unnerving.

‘Isn’t it likely somebody else he’s slept with will come to us for a kiss and tell?’ He was impressed she’d made an effort to understand the business.

‘True. Our man on the ground, Damir, is still out in Odessa, babysitting the housekeeper. She’s key. We’ve got her affidavit – saw all of it, him in bed with the two of them, cleared up the condoms. We paid her. More than she’d earn in a year.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘He’s got her in a hotel, apparently she wants to go back to Kiev. It’s one of those stories that unfolds very quickly – sometimes they take months – but it’s watertight.’

‘So what is the most likely follow up?’

‘Burke will speak to somebody after this breaks. I’d like it to be us, but that’s unlikely now. He’ll use somebody, a fixer.’

‘Like Max Clifford?’

‘If he wasn’t in jail, yes. What we can do is find the two girls – we’ve got a head start, and they’ll be good value. Get the gory details, if we’re lucky they took pictures.’

She smiled and said, ‘Everybody seems to these days.’

He let that go. ‘Burke has a huge amount of public support. All those years on TV, everybody likes him, sort of Michael Palin meets Jon Snow. But fatter.’

‘But you don’t.’

‘Like him? No, we all hate him. What he’s proposing, more regulation, is a disaster.’

She picked up the draft pages. ‘That doesn’t seem to be in here.’

‘Our readers want sleaze, not politics.’

‘So basically you’re doing the heavy lifting for the
broadsheets?’

She was impressing him more now than when she’d sashayed across the newsroom floor as if she was in a shampoo commercial.

‘You don’t know for a fact that he’s actually had penetrative sex with either or both of them though, do you?’

She looked him in the eye as she said it, then crossed her legs. Sam was sure he blushed. She seemed awfully sure of herself.

‘We don’t actually say bonk or shag. All we say is ‘“love rat’, love triangle, unfaithful, two-timing, usual stuff .”

‘If three in a bed is true, three-timing even. Well, he probably just wants a show, doesn’t he? He is sixty-one after all.’

He let that go, too. ‘Video is the best, but stuff like Colin Farrell and Paris Hilton ends up on line. And you get sued – and we don’t often get pictures of actual sex acts, unless it’s a honeytrap or blackmail – or you get very lucky with CCTV.’

He couldn’t help hoping the Lomaxes would keep Donald waist-deep salmon fishing a bit longer. Don didn’t come to meetings in Louboutins. Justine gave the impression she wouldn’t be intimidated easily, not by men anyway. Frank had once said, ‘Why have you got this pathetic weakness for strong intelligent women?’

Sam had said, ‘Sorry, how would that be a weakness?’

She carried on. ‘Have you seen the Tulisa video?’

‘I have. Crazy. And it was the guy who took that.’

‘That was fairly obvious. Doesn’t justify what they did to her.’

‘Mazher? That was another story, but I agree. Look, the media coverage of the last year or so paints us all as monsters, we’re not. There are a lot of good people in our business.’

‘Well, considering you write it, you get a pretty bad press.’

‘If you only read the Guardian and Private Eye, that’s true.’

‘So where do you draw the line?’

‘Well, I have some rules, but that comes down to values, judgement.’

‘I’d like to hear the rules some time.’

Sam thought that was a toss-up between genuine interest, patronising him, or just taking the piss. He quite liked it.

And he hated being compared with Mazher Mahmood. The Fake Sheikh had carried on at the Sun where he left off on the News of the World. As far as Sam was concerned, claiming a story was in the public interest simply didn’t always wash. And he knew right now at the Old Bailey a judge was hopefully agreeing. Ironically, they just weren’t allowed to write about it.

She said, ‘So back to Burke. Why not just deny it, rather than just say “no comment”?’

‘Because it’s true, why else? You with us next week?’ He hoped she was.

‘Yes, I was seconded for a couple of months. I’m on this group fast-track programme.’

‘Enjoying it?’

‘Yes, very lively, rather fun. If you need to contact me here’s my card.’ She slid it across the table. As she leant forward he tried not to look down her shirt. ‘My mobile’s on all the time. Do you need help on the follow-up?’

He ran his thumb across the card. ‘Hope so, we need a good one.’

‘What will the Government do?’

‘Drop him like a hot potato. Another really daft appointment.’

He thought they were done but she went over to the wall behind Frank’s desk and said, ‘So will this one go up there?’

He looked at the framed front pages, four rows of six, that covered nearly the whole wall.

‘The Wall of Shame? Sure.’

‘All yours?’

‘All since Frank and I ran things, so about fifteen years’ worth.’

She looked at them all, noticing how the masthead had subtly changed over the years, the acres of flesh and screaming headlines. SHAME was the most common word, closely followed by DRUGS and SEX.

‘Will you start another row?’

‘No, we keep it at twenty-four. Somebody will go. Probably the Hamiltons, fed up with them.’

‘Which are your favourites?’

‘I like the real ones. Politics is fun, Paddy Pantsdown, John Major. Mandelson, I loved doing him.’

‘Not the showbiz?’

‘The Hugh Grant one was good. Prescott, bought that off Max Clifford. We all called him Max Factor.’

‘Why?’

‘The make-up artist.’

She laughed. ‘Any entrapment up there?’

Sam scanned them. ‘No. Look, I’ve done it but I’m not a big fan.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, if you get a hooker to tell some B-lister in a nightclub it’s £500 for a quickie and you can snort coke off my tits and he goes for it, fine. But you can’t say you’ll give somebody a few million for a bit part in a movie, then badger them for sex and to score some drugs that you then supply.’

‘Still naive to fall for it.’

‘Staggering, but people do. And I simply don’t believe it’s real journalism. We’re supposed to report stories, not create them.’

She stood looking up at them, with her back to him. The shirt was white, and looked new, cut narrow at the waist. The skirt could not have been a better fit. She was reading all the short punchy headlines, the photographs with acres of flesh. ‘Dominant theme really.’

He was looking at her legs, not the stories. ‘You can’t have Watergate every week.’

She turned back. ‘Do you put “gate” on everything now?’

‘If we wrote Watergate now, our readers would think it actually was a story about water.’

She picked up the layout from Frank’s desk, looking at the three pages. He went over and stood next to her.

‘We call that a 1-4-5.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Classic format, front page splash, double page spread on four and five.’

‘Are you really allowed to put nipples on a front page?’

‘No, we’d blank them out or cover them with text, that’s easy. There’s loads we can use though.’

‘But you can show them inside?’

‘Try not to, but in this case it’s justified, so yes.’

She put it back down. ‘With this story, these two Ukrainian girls look amazing, but isn’t it just stereotypical to talk about them as bimbos? I read the notes – they seem pretty hard-working and well educated.’

Sam really was surprised and impressed that she’d read all the research behind the story. He sat down in Frank’s chair.

‘We don’t call them bimbos. Nobody’s used that word for a couple of years.’

‘You know what I’m saying, sex objects.’

‘I know one of them’s at university, but then so’s every girl in Ukraine, eying a way out, flirting with the escape committee, trading favours for a visa if they’re good, and a black Amex if they’re bad. They learn French and English so they can do the summer circuit in Monaco and winter in Courchevel.’

As she sat on the edge of the desk and looked down at him, he thought if she turned up in either place she could start a turf war.

‘That’s just cynical.’

She was right but he said, ‘Unless incentivised, beautiful young women tend not to go to bed with middle-aged men.’

‘If you say so.’

Before Sam had a chance to respond, Frank strode back in.

‘How are you two getting along?’

‘Emily Pankhurst is ahead on points.’

Justine laughed and stood up. ‘Sam’s been very helpful, yes. What would you like me to do?’

‘You’ve not done much of this before?’

‘A little in the group but to be honest we don’t get many political sex scandals at Auto Trader.’

‘Don’t worry, we’ve done this a thousand times. It’s just process. You’ll need to stay until it’s ready to go. Keep your phone on if you go out.’

Sam said, ‘On-line is the issue. Once we put it up, it’s out there. All over the world there are so-called journalists and all they do is look at social media and recycle it.’

‘It’s a joke,’ said Frank.

‘So what we often do, and we’ll do tonight, is spoof the first edition with something else – that stops other papers getting it in their first editions. Frank, what are we using?’

‘Nurses or Suarez.’ Frank held up the layout, turning serious. ‘Do you know why this is a great story, not just good, but great?’

She thought about it. ‘Major political figure, sort of. Happily married, we think, or thought. Ukraine. Sex. Drugs. Exclusive?’

Frank signalled for Mary to come in, and he held up the front page mock-up. ‘Mary Cheetham, your specialist subject is tabloid journalism. Your time starts now. What makes this a great story?’

‘It’s “c”, Chris. The tits in focus. All of them.’

‘Final answer?’

‘Final answer.’

‘You are funny, Mary, don’t humour him,’ said Sam.

She carried on, ‘It’s because Lord bloody Nigel Burke is the architect of the proposed bloody daft Tory media reforms, and for some bizarre reason Cameron and his cronies listen to him. But now it’s another huge error of judgement, like Andy Coulson. If we nail him you two’ll never have to buy another drink in Fleet Street or Wapping.’

‘You’re wasted out there, Mary, wasted.’

Justine said, ‘Is that really what this is all about?’

Sam was on his feet, wanting it to finish on the right note. ‘Yes, but not for our readers. They’ve mostly got double digit IQs and the attention span of Russell Brand. Both answers are actually right. If we ran that story with no pictures, you wouldn’t believe it. It’s like the Fergie toe-sucking, you just couldn’t picture it yourself. It wouldn’t have any credibility.’

‘Anyway,’ said Frank in closing, dropping the layout on his desk, ‘you get Sam’s point: it’s irrefutable, the camera never lies.’

‘Clearly,’ said Justine, following Mary, closing the door on her way out.

Frank was looking at the story again. ‘THREE IN A BED is a bit of a cliché, when did we last use it?’

Sam had to think. ‘Couple of years ago, that darts player and the women, wasn’t one a traffic warden? Or did we go with double top? Or double yellow?’

Frank leaned back. ‘OK. Beautiful girl, that Justine.’

‘One ugly flaw, sadly.’

‘Really?’ Frank seemed surprised.

‘She was wearing an engagement ring.’

‘Ah. Well, that never stopped you.’

‘That’s wedding rings.’

CHAPTER 2

SATURDAY

Sam worked his way across the newsroom, stopping and chatting as he went. While technically Frank’s domain, everybody knew that the two of them worked in tandem. If Sam said something, they did it. He climbed one floor by the back stairs to his own department, using the keypad to get access.

The hot desks were half full. It had a different feel to the bustle of the newsroom downstairs – higher-spec furniture, more space, better hardware. He went into his corner office, which had the view up the river, turned on one TV to Sky News and the other to the tennis. The Royal Box was packed with sports stars: Becks taking selfies with volunteers, a bearded Sir Brad, Ian Poulter in a shocking checked suit.

He liked a simple office. Not much paper, no paintings, no framed front pages, just the screens, fridge, laptop and his desk phone.

It had been a slow week for news, Cameron having moved on from the hacking trial fallout to getting Britain out of Europe. And there was nothing on the horizon; it was as if everybody stopped during the World Cup. It was too good to be true – the quietest news week of the year and he was about to drop a bomb.

He did emails and went over a few stories, all knocked into shape by the subs and the back-bench. While he was at it he pushed a speed dial button. The one he always did when he needed to think out loud – Terry Thomas. He was really Henry Thomas, but he had the cigarette holder, the loud waistcoats. He was a rascal, so he was inevitably known as Terry, which he played to. He would pepper conversations with ‘hard cheese’ and ‘how perfectly jolly’. Sam still used him as a sounding board, the voice of reason.

Terry was certainly at least sixty-five, but they’d all been lying about his age for so long nobody could remember exactly. Sam put the perma-tan down to growing up in India, which also explained his love of all things colonial. He’d once asked Terry about his odd career change. ‘I was pigeonholed as a foreign expert. There was nowhere else to go at the Observer, they wanted me to go to Washington. My wife Grace had just died, we had no kids, I needed a change, and I’d never worked for a tab.’

So he’d arrived in ’84, just after Sam’s Paris adventures with Caroline had propelled him forward.

‘Terry Thomas speaking.’

‘Hi, Terry, can you talk?’

‘Of course, dear boy.’

Terry was at home, retired for fifteen years since he had handed over early to Frank and Sam, but Sam kept him on a retainer. Sam put him on the speaker while he looked at his screen. ‘I’m on my own. You knew Nigel Burke, didn’t you?’

‘Absolutely. Have you got him?’

‘Splash tomorrow.’

‘Crumpet trouble?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Proper swordsman, world-ranked, even worse than you. We’ve got him with two young girls.’

‘Goodness me, Yewtree? I never figured him as one of those.’

‘No no, not that. Legal, twentyish. Ukrainian.’

‘Filles de joi?’

‘Maybe semi-pro, we think. How do you know him?’

‘I was at Reuters in Delhi, just before I joined the Observer. He was there with the BBC doing some documentary. Christmas 78, most Brits had gone home, but I lived there. Indira Gandhi got arrested and chucked in jail for a week.’

‘I remember that.’

‘He was the only person there, and they made him do live pieces for the news. He just knew nothing, still doesn’t in my view. He was a 25-year-old researcher, so I wrote it for him, then the next day I helped him get a couple of interviews, told him what to ask. He came out of it really well. On TV he’s a natural.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘Yes but at three in the morning I get a call from a senior police officer I had on retainer, saying he’d harassed some female guest at the Oberoi and had been arrested.’

‘Don’t tell me they took him to the same jail?’

‘They did, Tahir. So that was locked down as you can imagine.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘India has the IB, the Central Intelligence Bureau, like our MI5 really. I knew the local Deputy Director. We went down there. Poor old Nigel was in a cell with three locals, crapping himself, literally and metaphorically. I got him out.’

‘So you kick-started his TV career?’

‘You might say that. Be rather neat if you can end it, old fruit.’

Sam made another coffee and walked over to the meeting room for the four o’clock. He knew that working for him was considered the main prize in tabloid land. The department had been known for a while as the ‘School for Scandal’. People even put it on their CVs, but it was now generally referred to simply as ‘The Plumbers’. He’d always preferred the ‘Desert Hamsters’, even printing T-shirts with Freddie Starr dressed as Rommel.

The stories just kept coming now. It fed itself when you had so many good people and such a big network. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually followed up a lead himself or interviewed anyone. And as far as actually investigating or writing was concerned, he just didn’t do it, and his name never appeared on a story. He missed it. Whenever he was asked for his occupation, he still wrote ‘investigative journalist’, but he should have prefaced it with ‘former’.

They were in the small meeting room that connected to Sam’s office. There were only six familiar faces now and Justine. Old habits die hard, and though he trusted his team, he told people on a ‘need to know’ basis. Every paper had a ‘secret room’, but it was self-defeating; everybody knew where it was, and when it was being used it meant a belter was on the cards.

Sam sat down at the head of the table. ‘I guess some of you have been working with Justine there, she’s on Donald’s legal team.’

She smiled easily and looked around the table.

He had his laptop open and looked at CMS, the content management system. It showed him all 72 pages, neatly laid out. He could click on each page to blow it up, and just he and Frank had password access to change anything. He also had an A3 print-out that he would scribble pencil notes on.

Sam turned to Johnnie Brydon, his right hand man for the last ten years. He was an ex-policeman. Sam liked unconventional backgrounds.

‘Right, what we got?’

Johnnie still looked like a policeman. ‘Page one. Burke.’

It looked good now, properly laid out. YOU BURKE worked. They’d touched the picture well, though it didn’t need much.

Next to it they had some girl from Corrie recreating the famous tennis poster, lifting her skirt to show her bottom. Johnnie said, ‘That links to the Hot Bods section – you know Abby, Becks, Dan Osborne.’

‘Who’s he?’ asked Sam.

‘TOWIE.’

Sam wished he could be ignorant of this low water mark.

Then Johnnie led them through the whole paper. The usual depressing stuff – Danny Dyer, Rihanna or RiRi when over a single column, Lineker on Ipanema, a banker doing ketamine and meth, Kiefer Sutherland after another night out. 24 BEERS wasn’t bad. A regular Harry theme seemed to be developing. Prince on the front, Redknapp on the back and Styles somewhere in-between.

He scanned the entire paper. ‘Nothing on the hacking verdicts?’

‘Old news.’

‘It was Tuesday for God’s sake.’

Johnnie said, ‘Our readers don’t care, it’s Guardian stuff.’

Sam knew Johnnie was right. For him and his like, it had been a fascinating insight into the relationship between politicians, the police and the press, but in the end all that his readers wanted to know was if Simon Cowell really can change a nappy.

They carried on, commenting as they went, making minor changes to their own stuff, and adding more comments to be passed on. They got to CORRIE STAR IN VAJAZZLE SELFIE SHOCKER, and he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

It was all vaguely depressing – a paper held together by football, reality shows, B-listers and listings. And all written in some ghastly new language he’d helped invent. Heartache, terror, shock, quiz, betrayal, romance, fury, spin, anguish, blasts, menaces, meltdowns, wannabes, beasts, brawls, perverts, psycho-killers, twerkers and tweeters, pitbulls and paedos, untold stories, top brass and – as if anybody thought it was – the truth.

They were up to page forty and on to book club and special offers. ‘Johnnie, you take it from here, I’ve got stuff to do. Good job, everybody.’

Sam got back to his office in time to see Brazil kick off against Chile. While Terry was great as a sounding board, the most important man was the one closest to the story, the one on the ground. The man he had been twenty years ago. So he rang Damir Tanasijevic, the no-bullshit Serbian still out in Odessa. Sam had never figured out how Damir had survived the nineties in old Yugoslavia. The story was that he’d played soccer in the USA and used his dual nationality and languages to move around, keeping countless foreign photographers and hacks out of trouble, saving lives.

Damir answered. Sam knew what he would say.

‘Privyet Plumski.’

‘Privyet Damir. Anything happening?’

‘Still working on a statement from the driver.’

He spoke perfect English, but his American accent and jargon couldn’t win the battle against his Yugoslav origins.

‘What’s the issue?’

‘Usual, money.’

‘Just pay, rather have two. Housekeeper OK?’

‘My guy’s babysitting her in a hotel.’

‘Any sign of the girls?’

‘She said they were going on vacation somewhere. They won’t go back to Kiev yet, I guess. We’re looking.’

‘Where would they go?’

‘Not far, we’re six hundred kilometres from Kiev and the same with Crimea. It’s like Miami here, boiling, why leave?’

‘OK, you’re saying I shouldn’t be worried?’

‘No, boss. Chill.’

Saturdays were always the best day. At seven he went down and sat with Frank to watch extra time, and they went through the whole paper again.

People came and went asking advice and checking. It was pretty much open house on Saturday nights. What Sam loved about Frank was that even though he struggled to write a shopping list, he was a great editor. He listened, he led. He was an extrovert, people followed him, often purely out of curiosity. Above all he knew what the reader wanted, and he didn’t need an army of researchers or focus groups to know. He was the last of a dying breed. Frank liked the obvious comparison with Kelvin Mackenzie, but as he always said, ‘Kelvin buggered off to the telly and topless darts; I’m still here.’

They’d kept the Burke story very tight, but word was out on the floor now and everybody knew. That’s what put Sam on edge. It just needed one loose word. Any idiot could put tits on the front page, but how many people could put it in the context of a real belter of a story, particularly one which didn’t involve a footballer or a soap star? The Sunday Times or Observer would have run this story.

Frank was looking at the CMS when he said, ‘Fuck.’

‘What?’

‘I haven’t got a leader on Burke.’

Sam knew they needed a serious 250-word piece, the paper’s own editorial position.

‘Get JR or Kerry to do it.’

‘They’re busy, come on, you want to go for the record?’

Sam laughed. ‘Christ, when did I last try?’

Frank fished in his drawer and found a sheet. ‘Right, the Speed Leader Leaderboard.’ He scanned down it. ‘You last had a go in October 2008, Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand and the prank call. You did it in three minutes, fifty-one seconds. It was brilliant.’

‘What’s the record now?’

‘3:36. Henry Dean on Maggie when she popped her socks.’

‘I don’t write any more, you know that.’

Frank made clucking noises and flapped his arms. ‘Chicken.’

Sam went over to Frank’s desk. ‘Move your arse.’

Frank got up. Sam locked his fingers and stretched out his arms, like a concert pianist about to start. ‘Rules again?’

Frank read from the sheet. ‘250 words, plus or minus ten, no typos, no grammatical errors. Oh, and I have to agree it can be published.’

Sam pulled his chair in. He got a blank page up, set up word count, and just stared at it. He remembered at the height of his powers doing it in one sentence on Jeremy Thorpe. It was scary. Shit, he just needed the first line or word.

‘Hold on. Give me a minute.’

Frank looked at his watch. ‘Sod that. Three. Two. One. Go.’

He finished and stood up. Frank sat down and read it. ‘No errors I can see. 242 words. I feel like Jeremy Clarkson. Sam Plummer, you did it in… three… .’

‘Get in.’

‘Forty-one.’

‘Bugger. But is it any good?’ He realised he was desperate to know, and that what Frank thought was far more important than his lap time.

‘OK, you tell me, I’ll read it to you.’

Sam sat down and closed his eyes as Frank read it out loud.

‘This newspaper stands for everything that is great about British journalism. We have always fought to maintain the highest standards, never flinching, never stepping down into the gutter. We have played by the rules. We have risen above the tawdry catalogue of shame. The appointment of Andy Coulson to a key role inside Number 10 was a colossal error of judgement by this government. The ensuing hacking trial needlessly exposed us all to the grubby world of the dark arts, to the seedy underbelly of Fleet Street. Nothing could have more clearly illustrated the sordid relationship between sections of our media, the police and the government. Now that very same government has done it again. Lord Nigel Burke was their misguided choice to oversee media reforms that would have taken away our freedom and put even more power in the hands of the very people we are here to bring to account. We have today done this country, and the fourth estate, a great service. We have exposed him, literally, as a shameless serial adulterer. More importantly, we have exposed him as a hypocrite, as a liar and as a cheat. Doing so is most definitely and undeniably in the public interest. His position is now untenable. This paper says good riddance. On the very day last week that Mr Coulson was found guilty, a well-known tabloid trumpeted that it was “a great day for red-tops”. It wasn’t. Today is.’

Sam wasn’t sure. ‘What do you think?’

‘Honestly? It’s a crying shame you stopped doing it. It’s perfect.’

Frank cut and pasted it into page twenty-three. ‘Right, next. You got the memo about meeting the Milky Bar Kid?’

’Do I really have to come in on a bloody Monday?’

‘Jay wants to flex his muscles again. Show who’s boss. It’ll be the usual stuff, we just have to suck it up. I know it’s not fast enough for you, but we can be out of here in five years, home free, and the paper will still be going then, probably. We’re laughing.’

He checked his phone. There was an email from Justine, quoting extracts from the research his team had produced on the girls. He got the Burke story up and inserted the key facts. Irina was doing hotel management and, more impressively, Tatiana was at the Taras Shevchenko National University reading astrophysics. Was it important the world knew they weren’t good-time girls? Justine thought so, but not really, and who the hell ever got to the last paragraph anyway?