On the afternoon of the inquest, Stephen Forsyth was sent home from work. It was all too awkward. Following the euphoria of his newspaper breaking the original story of the body in the lake (online, at least, they even beat Sky News to it), over the following weeks other less convenient facts had kept revealing themselves, like rampaging acne. Facts like the dead woman being a friend of the editor’s wife. Like there having been a group of other women present at the time, including his wife. Like the fact they’d all been arguing just before the woman died, as witnessed by a small-time private detective who had quite remarkably turned out to be Stephen’s very own half-brother.
As the limo (probably the last one he’d get out of this fucking job) crossed Tower Bridge Stephen didn’t bother with the view, he was too busy seething. Those early revelations had been awkward enough, but Stephen had managed to ride out that storm; he had a thick skin, it hadn’t been too bad. It had only been a matter of time after that though – he’d known it would almost certainly all come out at the inquest, even though he’d offered Terry so much money to change his story, just a little. It wouldn’t have changed the outcome, he’d argued, but Terry wouldn’t budge, the sanctimonious wanker – he just kept saying he’d already made a statement, he couldn’t alter his story now. Stephen had tried his hardest to bully him into it, although deep down he’d known it was madness, but he’d been desperate; and besides, he’d got away with worse before. So now, because of his weaselly half-brother’s sudden penchant for integrity, the rest of the unsavoury facts that would ruin Stephen’s hitherto soaring career were out.
Stephen had known he couldn’t hope to have survived putting his own wife under surveillance while all the phone-hacking shit was going on, but it was Juliette’s leaving her friend for dead, she and her friends apparently saying they didn’t care if she drowned, that had caused the most sensational headlines, had finally finished him off. As the car crawled past the dismal sights of the New Kent Road down towards the Elephant and Castle, he let out a groan of humiliated rage, which the chauffeur politely ignored, he’d been doing this job long enough to know when to keep his mouth shut. Stephen was finished, and it was all Juliette’s fault, the fucking bitch.
Back in Canary Wharf, Stephen’s assistant Barry Smiley was jumping for joy, totally cock-a-bloody-hoop. He’d been as gobsmacked as everyone else when the story had started leaking out, in tantalising dribs and drabs at first, and then building relentlessly to the brilliantly shocking revelations of the inquest. He’d been amazed when everything had turned out to be true too: usually in these situations all manner of fantastical stories get bandied about before the less lurid facts are slowly extracted out of the morass of half-truths – but in this case the more wild the rumour the more accurate it had turned out to be. All it had taken was one emergency meeting less than two hours after the curtailing of the inquest for the publisher to decide to grant Stephen what they were euphemistically calling a ‘compassionate leave of absence’, and put Barry temporarily in charge.
But no-one was feeling very compassionate. Barry knew Stephen had been sidelined just so they could crack on with reporting the story, and although he ought to have felt sorry for his long-time boss, for the way his world had come tumbling down, Humpty Dumpty-like, he’d still been smarting from Stephen favouring that upstart reporter Maddie ahead of him, belittling him like that in front of her when she’d come bounding in like a bloody spaniel with her precious sodding lake story. So when Barry had been asked by the publisher to take over the reins, just for a few days initially while they worked out what to do, he had taken tremendous joy in sanctioning every ghastly detail to be printed. He had zero loyalty to his boss now – and why the hell should he after all he’d done for Stephen over the years, and for what? Barry had also delighted in transferring Maddie from the news desk to cover Big Brother, which no one watched any more, and he’d relished having Stephen’s office cleaned out – he, Barry, couldn’t possibly work in all that mess. It was retribution time. It was bloody brilliant.