The Perfect Victim Read online

  ‘We want people to pick up the newspaper, you fucking moron,’ he said, slamming his palms on the desk and machine-gunning the terrified woman with saliva. ‘Legs. We want to see legs. If I see one more photograph of Middleton from the waist up, I’m going to lob you off the roof.’ Lansdowne stalked off, looking for his next fight.

  Adam held up a hand, mouthing ‘two minutes’, and I killed time by thumbing through yesterday’s edition. ROWNTREE VERDICT: COUNTDOWN. Underneath the headline was a family snap of Rowntree’s three sons taken last Christmas. Harry, Danny and Jamie were sitting round a table; all shaggy hair, pimples and teeth. Harry’s party hat had slipped down his head making his ears stick out like a mouse. He leaned against his eldest brother, Danny, who was on the cusp of growing into his ratty features. Except none of the Rowntree boys would grow into anything now.

  ‘What can I do for you, Kent?’

  I tore my eyes away from the front page. Adam’s black moustache was coated in coffee froth and his top button was undone behind his tie.

  ‘I need to speak to Charlie.’

  ‘He’s not here.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Fucked if I know.’ Adam gave his horn-rimmed glasses a quick wipe with his sleeve, then caught my expression and sighed. ‘He’s probably at a briefing.’

  ‘Where’s your chart of doom?’ I was referring to the multicoloured timetable tacked to the wall above Charlie’s desk. Lansdowne had recently forced one on every department; his way of keeping tabs on the staff. No one liked it. Rowley gave his reporters a long leash. The less we were in the office the better; he wanted us out in the wild, chasing stories. But times were changing. I glanced at the Business chart. Today was blank.

  I pushed myself off Adam’s desk. ‘When his Lordship gets in, tell him to get his arse over to News. And tell him he owes me a smoothie.’

  Back at my desk, I dialled Charlie again. ‘You’ve reached Charlie Swift. Leave some words.’

  A shadow passed over my desk.

  ‘Kent.’ Mack’s voice vibrated somewhere between irritation and desperation. ‘Rowley’s leaning on me hard for content. Where are we with the Thames body?’

  ‘A tentative ID, but nothing concrete.’

  Mack tugged at his sleeve and I caught a glimpse of his cufflink; round and silver, with a ‘W’ engraved in the middle. ‘Where’s Kate?’ he said. ‘How’s she getting on with the M4 lorry crash?’

  ‘Ask her yourself.’

  Kate appeared at his shoulder, and pulled a face. ‘What’s kicking chicken?’

  Mack’s expression darkened at the sight of her. Kate took great pleasure in ruffling feathers. Her poker-face was so good that people often mistook her for a bitch. Not that she cared. Kate was a ballsy news veteran with a sharp tongue and no off-switch. Mack didn’t know how to handle her. It didn’t help that his sense of worth was tied up in other people’s respect for him, and he didn’t get that respect had to be earned. He’d perfected the hand-wringing knack of looking busy, particularly in front of Rowley, but it had been months since he’d brought in a story. I suspected it really boiled down to a lack of confidence; the result of reaching the dizzy heights of Desk Editor through the art of office politics, rather than hard grind. It was a mystery to me that Mack had been promoted above Kate.

  Mack opened his mouth to speak but was interrupted by Lansdowne bellowing across the office. ‘Conference . . . NOW.’

  We jumped up and filed into the meeting room next to Rowley’s office. The heating was on the blink and the ‘sudden surge in Spring temperatures’ meant it was even hotter than usual. Someone had improvised by sticking a fan in the corner that blew our pages across the table. It also wafted a stale sewage smell into the room and I covered my nose with my hand.

  ‘Bloody Bannerman,’ Kate said through a pinched nose, as Douglas Bannerman, the Herald’s Managing Editor, shuffled to his seat. In his early fifties, Bannerman sported the ash-like complexion of a man who’s spent too long indoors. And his sluggish digestive system was office lore. Each morning he drank a double espresso, disappeared into the toilet with a copy of What Car?, then trailed the smell around with him all day.

  An emergency conference called for skeleton staff: the top dogs and the news team. Rahid Sawney, the Herald’s junior reporter, was rifling through his notes with a shaky hand. He caught my eye and gave me a small, dry smile. I smiled back encouragingly. I’d been at the Herald for years and Conference still reduced my insides to liquid. Pitching an idea was the moment you stuck your head above the parapet, and I’d watched too many heads get blown to smithereens. Pressure to perform was rocketing as newspapers battled falling readership, limited resources, and social media stole what little impact we had left.

  ‘Right,’ Lansdowne punched through the door, ‘Rowntree has shafted us. Woe betide anyone in this room who does the same.’ He threw himself into a chair with such force that his notepad skated across the table and plopped on the floor. He glared at Rahid who picked it up and handed it back.

  The door opened again and Rowley strode in. His round stomach poked through his unbuttoned jacket as he sat down at the head of the table. His bald head was the colour of pine-wood. He had just got back from a week in the Seychelles, where, judging by how many emails the department heads received, he spent the entire holiday glued to his laptop.

  ‘Let’s make this quick,’ he said in his high-pitched voice. ‘I have a meeting with the Board at midday.’

  There was a collective fidget around the table. Ever since the first lot of grim-faced suits streamed into Rowley’s office a month ago, rumours had been circulating. Was it a merger? A takeover? The apocalypse? Rowley had become increasingly absent and Lansdowne’s behaviour even more extreme. The whole newsroom was on high alert. Men in suits never brought good news.

  Rowley glanced at the ceiling, then at Mack. ‘Your top three, please.’

  Mack flipped open his notebook and patted his shiny black hair. ‘We’re fleshing out the Coventry lorry crash. Four people are in a critical condition, three Poles and a Brit. Rahid is pulling together background on the driver.’

  ‘Cause of crash?’ Lansdowne’s razor-sharp gaze belied his bored tone. He liked to pretend he wasn’t listening so you didn’t see the right hook coming.

  ‘Possible DUI. We’ll know more soon; we’re close to securing an interview with him. If we get the lorry driver to talk, that could make a page, right?’ Mack worked his fingernail with his teeth.

  Rowley mmmhmmed, which meant ‘stop wasting my time’.

  Kate took a deep breath. ‘Two words: Tube strike.’ Kate was a great jazz-hander. One of the only staffers who didn’t seem to feel the pressure. A bomb could go off in the newsroom and Kate would simply dust herself off, grab her notebook, and help everyone down the fire escape while recording eyewitness accounts and writing the headers.

  ‘The bastards are planning a Bank Holiday assault on the capital.’ She paused dramatically, knowing full well that Rowley’s in-laws were visiting from South Africa and he was being forced to stay in London.

  Rowley’s jaw clenched as the nightmare of a grid-locked, tourist-clogged weekend bloomed before his eyes. ‘What’s the angle?’ he said.

  Kate leaned forward. ‘Word is the Transport Secretary approached them for talks but the union leader kept it from the union. I doubt they’ll be too chuffed to hear it.’

  Lansdowne slammed a fist down on the table. ‘Yes, yes, yes, but where’s the death? Are you telling me with sixty million people currently residing in this country, that we don’t have anything more exciting than a Tube strike and a lorry crash on the M4?’ He held up a thick hand. ‘What people really want is sex and death. So unless any of you have a sex scandal you’d like to get off your chests . . .’

  I rolled my eyes, then wished I hadn’t as Lansdowne’s eyes speared me to the chair. He gave a menacing smile. ‘Is there something you’d like to contribute, Sophie? Do tell us if you disagree with the
collective sixty-plus years of experience sitting at the head of this table.’

  Adrenaline coursed through me, unsticking my tongue from the roof of my mouth. ‘I have a murder. A woman’s body in the Thames this morning.’ Lansdowne tipped his chair back, crossed his arms, momentarily placated by the prospect of a dead body. Female, too. The best kind, I thought spitefully. I filled them in on my progress so far.

  Rowley tapped his phone against the table. ‘So, we have a name and a workplace.’

  ‘The name is unconfirmed,’ I said, hearing – and hating – the apology in my voice. ‘But I’m going to her law firm and I found this on Facebook.’ I pushed the Christmas party photograph towards them. ‘I’m interested in this guy, Bert Hughes. Plus she’s been in contact with Charlie Swift on Twitter so that could be another route into her life.’

  Mack, encouraged by Rowley’s expression, placed his forearms on the table and leaned forward. ‘I really think this could work. Off the back of the PM’s speech about crime rates decreasing. Trying to attract women’s votes.’ I held my breath, willing Mack on. ‘Her death sticks a rocket up that. And anything that makes those Tory twats look bad, right?’

  My goodwill towards him deflated. Mack kept his private schooling and second home in Wiltshire on the down-low, thinking it eased the path up Rowley’s arse. Rowley was a Yorkshireman, a die-hard socialist, the first in his family to finish school, let alone go to university. He liked to moan about capitalism but we all knew it was half-baked. It’s hard to preach socialism when you’re chauffeured to work in the back of a glossy Mercedes.

  Rowley cleared his throat. ‘Order of priority is this: dead lawyer, lorry crash, Tube strike. Mack, email me an update at 4 p.m. And if Rowntree comes good before then we can all breathe a sigh of relief.’

  He closed his notebook and we all stood up, desperate to escape.

  ‘Sophie, hold on a moment, please.’

  When everyone had left, Rowley peered at me over his half-moon glasses. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Eager to get on with the job.’

  ‘How did therapy go?’

  I pictured my final session. Dr Spado, in his trademark polo-neck sweater, fingering his glasses and failing to hide his irritation as I dodged his questions about my parents. My fractured relationships with a narcissistic mother and a bully of a father were my business, not his.

  ‘How are you sleeping?’ Dr Spado had asked, his small brown eyes scanning my face.

  I chewed my fingernail. Recently, I’d allowed my personal life to cloud my brain. I made a mistake – a lapse in judgement – that put the Herald in a difficult situation, and so Rowley fired me. Just like that. I realised then that the Herald wasn’t just a job, it was my lighthouse in the dark. Although I was eventually reinstated, fear of losing everything had coiled itself around me like a vine. If I told Dr Spado the truth, he would never have given me the all-clear to return to the Herald. So I told him the nightmares were loosening their grip. Then I showed him a photograph of me and my brother, Tommy, that I’d started carrying around in my purse. I told him how I could look at Tommy’s shy smile and freckled nose without my mind skipping directly on to the next thought: that my little brother was murdered, and he’d called me for help but I was mad at him and didn’t pick up the phone so he died thinking I didn’t care, and how that thought no longer made me want to climb into the space between my bed and the wall and never come out. I repeated it over and over, smiling until my face hurt. Dr Spado sighed and scribbled out a prescription with his black fountain pen. That night I went home and counted out the pills, counted out the sleeps.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Therapy made a big difference.’ The chatter in my brain was loud – blink, smile, smile, blink. ‘I’m sleeping, working. Recovering. Really, you don’t need to ask.’

  Rowley gave me a shrewd look, then gestured to the door. ‘I’ll keep asking until you tell me the truth.’

  3

  Hamilton Law, a tall red-brick building on the north side of Manchester Square, was hidden under scaffolding. I dodged a group of anorak-clad tourists and pushed through the revolving door into a reception area that smelt of peppermint and expensive perfume. The lobby echoed with the tinkling sound of a waterfall cascading into an oval pond. Bright orange fish zigzagged through the black water.

  I paused at Reception where large copper letters spelled out HAMILTON LAW on the marble wall.

  A pretty Asian woman peered up at me, a blank smile on her face. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Is Bert Hughes here?’

  ‘Do you have an appointment?’

  ‘I’m a family friend. In the area. Thought I’d surprise him.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t let you up without permission.’

  I leaned on the desk and smiled at her. ‘Not even for a surprise?’

  The woman gave me a cool look, then picked up the phone. ‘Louise, it’s Dawn downstairs. I have a lady here for Mr Hughes. Says she’s a family friend.’ She drummed her fingers on the desk. ‘Right, I’ll let her know.’ She hung up. ‘Mr Hughes is in New York right now. Won’t be back until tomorrow. Can I take a message?’

  As I opened my mouth to speak, the lift doors opened and a slim brunette woman appeared. She was rifling through her tote bag, a scowl on her angular face. I watched her glide through the lobby; her movements balletic and graceful.

  ‘Rachel Cornish?’ I followed her to the revolving door.

  She spun round, dark eyebrows raised. ‘Yes?’

  She’d scraped her hair into a tight bun that pulled at her temples. Her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying. Did she already know Sabrina Hobbs was dead?

  ‘Could I take up a few minutes of your time?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  I hesitated, then shot for the truth. ‘Sophie Kent. I’m a reporter with the London Herald. I’m working on a sto—’

  Rachel held up a manicured hand. ‘Yeah, I know. Bullying in the workplace. I don’t want to be involved. Even though this place can go to hell.’ She shouted the last part over her shoulder and the receptionist’s eyebrows twitched.

  I fell in step with Rachel as she pounded the street with sharp, angry strides. ‘Can I buy you a coffee?’

  Rachel didn’t object. After a moment, she sighed. ‘Have you ever worked somewhere that – I don’t know – no matter how hard you work, the fact you don’t have a penis is all that matters?’

  I snorted, then caught myself when I saw the serious expression on her face. ‘I work at a newspaper. The ultimate sausage factory.’

  The corners of Rachel’s mouth rose. ‘I’ll take your sausage factory and raise you a law firm. Honestly, if only–’ She stopped, remembering who she was talking to.

  We reached a small café with two chairless tables outside, a red canopy and a laminated menu tacked to the greasy window.

  I followed Rachel inside. ‘What can I get you?’

  She leaned elegantly against the counter. ‘Americano. Black. Cheers.’ She pulled out her phone and pecked at the keyboard with red fingernails.

  I got in the queue, debating how to tackle Rachel. She wasn’t behaving like she’d just found out her boss had been murdered. Which meant I had an awkward conversation coming my way. Breaking bad news went with the territory. I never enjoyed doing it, but I also didn’t enjoy screwing up a lead.

  I held out her coffee. ‘Fancy getting some air?’

  Rachel stuffed her phone into her bag and followed me outside. We wandered back towards Manchester Square in silence.

  Eventually Rachel spoke. ‘I’m sorry. About before. One of those mornings.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Rachel sat down on a bench and sipped her coffee. She winced as it burned her lip. ‘I really don’t want to be involved in the sexism story, you know. Not my style.’

  I wondered what she was talking about, and was about to ask when she glanced at her watch. ‘I don’t have long . . . sorry, what was your name again?’

&
nbsp; ‘Sophie.’ I nodded. ‘In that case, I’ll cut to the chase. It’s about your boss, Sabrina. I’m afraid I have some difficult news.’ I cleared my throat. ‘She’s dead. I don’t know much more than that right now.’

  ‘Sabrina’s dead?’ Rachel jolted her cup and coffee splashed over the side.

  I grabbed it from her and she shook the hot liquid from her hand. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘No. Wow. Sabrina’s dead?’

  I nodded slowly, giving Rachel a moment. I knew she’d have questions and I didn’t want to interrupt her flow.

  Rachel blew on the raw skin. ‘How did it happen?’

  I hesitated, then softened my voice. ‘Her body was found in the river this morning. I was there covering the story. I’m so sorry.’

  Rachel looked away. We sat in silence for a moment watching an overfed pigeon peck at the remains of a burger. I could feel Rachel struggling to keep herself afloat so I threw her a lifeline in the form of a bland question.

  ‘How long have you worked at Hamilton Law?’ I said, handing Rachel her coffee.

  ‘Three, no, four years.’ She stared at the ground, her voice wobbling. ‘Before this I was a dancer. I went to London Dance Academy, graduated top of my class.’

  That explained her dancer’s posture. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I did one show. Chorus line of Cabaret, took a tumble and this happened.’ She thumped her knee. ‘Torn ligament. Bye bye, dance career.’

  ‘So now you work at a law firm.’

  She gave a tight smile. ‘Secretary. Bit of a comedown after the bright lights of the West End.’

  ‘Have you always worked for Sabrina?’

  Rachel shook her head. ‘No. Mr Whitaker first, until he left. Then Mr Hughes, then Sabrina.’

  I frowned. ‘Mr Hughes? As in Bert Hughes?’

  ‘Yes. But only for a couple of months.’

  ‘Why?’

  Rachel looked away. ‘We weren’t a good fit.’

  I drained my coffee and shoved the empty cup in my bag. The slant of her jaw told me I wasn’t getting any further. I leaned forward and took a breath. ‘Rachel, it’s my job to write up Sabrina’s death. I don’t want to let her down. Can you tell me about her? Anything that gives me a sense of who she was.’