Harry met Meg the day after she returned from Newcastle, at the Captain Kidd in Wapping.
He could tell she was on one from the moment she walked in, several faces in the room looking up and watching her cross towards the crowded bar, the energy coming off her like warning shots.
‘Sambuca or tequila?’ she asked without taking off her jacket, rubbing her hands together in fingerless gloves.
Harry tilted his head. ‘Maybe. You all right?’
‘Fine. Fucking Newcastle, man. Boring as fuck.’
Harry leaned towards the barman and signalled for two tequilas, hesitating before handing her the glass, watching her neck tense as she leaned back and let the liquid run down her throat.
‘Has something happened?’ he asked and Meg frowned.
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know,’ Harry said. ‘You just seem jumpy.’
‘Jumpy?’ She sneered. ‘I told you, I just don’t like going home. But I’m back now and I’m fine, so get us another one of those shots.’
They moved from pub to bar, making their way back towards Bethnal Green. At the off licence nearest the flat, Meg picked out an armful of gin and tonic in tins. Harry paid and they walked towards the apartment the agency had given him occasional access to, in a handsome Victorian mansion block on a quieter street behind the main road. As soon as they were upstairs, Meg pulled out the wrap of white powder she had been snorting bumps from all night using her house key, and Harry thought, with a flicker of regret, of his time in her flat, the ring binder full of information about carers and medication.
He watched her now as she cut out a series of lines.
‘Haven’t you got any music?’ she asked. She rolled a note and inhaled one line and then a second.
‘I can sing to you, if you like?’ Harry joked, taking the note from her pale fingers and hoovering up the last of it.
‘What the fuck’s wrong with you?’ she said, tilting her head back, wiping the remains of powder from the base of her nose and sniffing hard. Her pupils were small and sharp. ‘You can’t trust people who don’t listen to music. Why don’t you have a girlfriend? You’re too old to be single.’
‘Jesus.’ Harry rubbed his temples. ‘Anyway, who says I don’t have a girlfriend?’ He stared back at her and then he shrugged, leaning forward and touching her face. ‘I don’t know why. Maybe because I’m never here.’
She pulled away from his touch, moving around the living room, which was largely bare aside from a few books and a couple of soulless photographs framed on the wall. After a moment, she stopped and turned to him.
‘So where are you?’
His eyes narrowed. ‘Is that an existential question?’
‘Anna told me you were fired from the paper. For fucking a teenager. Is that true?’
Harry’s face stilled. Christ. He had assumed from the lack of confrontation before now that Anna hadn’t said anything, or that the gossip-mill at his old paper had long since reached her and she wasn’t bothered.
‘Do you think it’s true?’ He was genuinely intrigued.
Meg started to walk around the room again, picking up one of the cans from the table and cracking it open with a hiss.
Harry was about to speak again but Meg interrupted.
‘Don’t you ever get bored of this shit?’
‘Bored of …?’
‘Life. All of it. It’s so fucking mundane. I had this idea, you know, that I would become a journalist and work at a newspaper and do shit that mattered, that I’d make a difference. But it’s just bullshit, it’s all bullshit, isn’t it? I’m just there making cups of fucking tea for entitled old men who don’t give a shit about me or what I can do, pretending that I don’t mind being their fucking lap dog.’
‘I didn’t know she was fifteen,’ Harry said. He needed her to know that.
‘What’s the difference. Fifteen, sixteen, eighteen. You’re all the fucking same, it’s just what you can get away with.’
She tipped the last of the gin and tonic into her mouth and scrunched up the can. ‘I just want to do something. You know? What am I even saying, of course you don’t.’
‘Yes, I do.’ Harry’s voice was even. ‘Traditional journalism is bullshit. I know it. Why do you think I got out?’
‘’Cause you were fired?’
She looked amused by her own quip.
‘I was fired because my editor wouldn’t back me, even though he knew I was right. My story stood up regardless of the other shit. The story should be what matters, irrespective of the means by which it is obtained. The PCC, advertisers, they’re all calling the shots so that the freedom of the press – or rather the substance of the story in its purest form – is compromised.’
She stopped pacing.
He was on a roll now. ‘There’s always an agenda. The problem with newspapers is that the agenda isn’t always clear. There is always a reason why one story is pursued or ignored at the expense of another. There is no objective truth in journalism. The transactional nature is necessarily polluted – but it’s dressed up as neutral.’
‘Jesus. Remind me never to give you coke again.’ Meg rolled her eyes, moving back to the wrap and racking up another couple of lines with the side of her credit card.
‘You can take the piss if you like, but you know I’m right.’
‘So what’s the answer?’
‘Depends what the question is … If the question is how do you uncover truth and do so in a way that is untainted by false ethics and a hypocritical code of conduct, then the answer is that you make it a purely financial transaction.’
Meg looked up from her task.
‘What the fuck are you on about?’
Harry studied her face for a reaction. ‘There are companies that hire journalists, lawyers, people who are expert at uncovering the truth in all its magnificent, fucked up glory – people like us. Unlike newspapers they pay extremely well, and there is no hidden agenda dressed up as a moral code.’
This was a lie and he knew it. The agenda in this instance would be set by the client who was picking up the tab, whether or not he knew who that person or organisation was.
Meg sat back on her calves, watching him.
Harry paused. ‘If you were interested, I could bring you in.’
‘You know I’m interested,’ she replied without hesitation.
‘Good. The case I’ve been hired to work on at the moment involves a corrupt company. It’s my job – and could be yours, too – to find out information about this company.’
‘Why me?’
‘Because you’re smart. Because you’re dedicated. Because …’ He took a deep breath. ‘Because the company is connected to someone you know. Someone you know well.’