Stephen sat behind his desk, sleeves rolled up determinedly, running his afternoon editorial meeting in the manner of a despot ruling a tin-pot country somewhere far away. His office was a complete mess – papers everywhere, old editions of the newspaper dumped on the floor like in a hoarder’s home – but his secretary and the cleaners never dared touch anything, it could get them the sack.
‘OK, what have you got?’ Stephen said. His deputy editor ran through the list of stories, an uninspiring lot including an A-list couple visiting Harrods with their kids and having a row in the food hall, a man being trapped for fifteen hours after his ceiling collapsed under the weight of his porn collection, the threat of another economic meltdown in Europe, a primary-school teacher who’d doctored her class’s SATs results, a ten-vehicle pile-up on the M4 in which a baby had been killed, yet another rumble in the phone-hacking scandal.
‘None of this is really front-page news,’ said Stephen, ignoring the last story. ‘Isn’t there anything better?’
‘Uh, sorry, Stephen, that’s all we’ve got,’ said Barry Smiley, his long-time assistant. ‘What about going with the baby story, we’ve got a picture – of him before obviously,’ he added hastily, knowing even Stephen wouldn’t put a picture of a mangled baby on the front cover of a national newspaper.
‘I don’t know, pile-ups aren’t that interesting these days unless there’s at least twenty cars involved,’ Stephen said. ‘I think if that’s all you’ve got maybe we should have a bit of fun with the porn-mag story, it is silly season after all.’
Stephen’s favourite reporter, Maddie, poked her head round the office door. Barry scowled at her; she was a right brown-noser, always trying to muscle in on everything. He was convinced she was after his job, and it kept him awake at night.
‘Sorry to interrupt, Stephen,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Hold the front page – I’ve always wanted to say that! – but a body has just been fished out of The Serpentine.’
‘What, in Hyde Park?’ asked Stephen, a little prick of adrenaline shooting through his neck.
‘Yes, The Serpentine river! It’s a woman, she’s not been formally identified yet, but they think they’ve got the bloke too. Apparently he only went and dialled 999.’
‘Well done, Maddie! Thank God someone is doing some work around here.’ He looked witheringly at Barry, and Barry went puce with anger above his pink-striped shirt (which as it happened was beautifully ironed and cufflinked, unlike his boss’s) at being upstaged like this. It was a bloody disgrace how Stephen humiliated him in front of this little upstart, after all he’d done for him over the years. He needed a drink.
‘Oh well, I’ll leave you to it then,’ Barry said huffily. He stood up, but they didn’t seem to have heard him. He walked slowly across the room, en route to his secret drawer, and then hesitated at the door. He tried to think of a punchline.
‘And, in the interests of factual accuracy,’ he said, always his forte, ‘I think you’ll find that The Serpentine is a lake, not a river,’ but Stephen was still too wrapped up with Maddie to have heard him.