‘is said to be’ and ‘rumoured’ out of her copy. She knew the golden rule: any headline with a question mark at the end of it deserves the answer ‘Nah, not really.’ She also knew all too well that over the next few days she would either establish herself among the wiser heads in the Westminster lobby, as one of those who had called the referendum right … or she’d fail. No pressure, then. She’d become a bit of a favourite of the prime minister, mainly because she read the political biographies, and could quote them back at him. (Most political reporters have virtually no understanding of or interest in politics; serious politicians adore the few who do.)
‘Hello, Ken. How long have we got? Things are getting interesting over at Number 10.’
‘No more than twenty minutes, Lucy. The country may be about to commit political fucking suicide, but I’m running a newspaper on life support, and I’ve got to go and grovel to some fucking marketing meerkats before conference. So keep it clear and keep it snappy.’
Lucy Scadding sat down, though her editor was standing at his desk, and flipped open her iPad, dabbing a finger on it until she found what she was looking for.
‘Well, first off, general sit-rep. Everyone still expects a “Yes” to Europe, although there are signs that the gap’s narrowing. Ipsos Mori, YouGov, Populus – different methodologies, but all pretty much in the same place. The City boys say gilts are holding up well, and the top Footsies are all bobbing on a rising tide. We’re expecting the PM to do a final regional tour, and a big presser either today or tomorrow. We think he’ll choose the Birmingham area, because it’s very tight there. I’ve been talking to the usual suspects at Number 10 this morning, and the mood there’s pretty chipper. Some of the inner circle seem a bit frantic, though. Something’s up, I know it is. I just can’t put my finger on it.
‘On the other side, Olivia Kite’s people are insisting it’s still all to play for. They say they’re going to be unveiling a few renegade Tories and some very senior Labour people later today. Again, I’m expecting them to do it in Birmingham. But I’m not convinced it will be enough. I think it’s time for a big, bold prediction on the front page – we’re staying in.’
‘Whoa, girl. Steady. Let’s not cross the fucking finishing line before the nags are out of the fucking boxes,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s playing out more or less as we predicted. The PM out on the stump, and Olivia just a little too far behind. But you’re right, it does look like game over. So what happens afterwards? We’ll have a reshuffle almost immediately, eh, Lucy? He can’t keep the rebels in the cabinet after what they’ve been saying over the past few weeks. Get ahead of the fucking game, girl. I want a down-page piece giving me the new cabinet.’
‘I’m not so sure there’ll be a reshuffle. After his deal with the Germans, and assuming he pulls this off, he’ll go down as the most successful PM since Thatcher. He’ll be a hero for a few weeks at least, and he’ll be able to pick any international job he wants in due course – but he’ll still be party leader, and he can’t expect to win a general election with the party in splinters. He’ll want the maximum party unity he can salvage out of this smash-up. He’ll try to settle the succession – he won’t be able to, but he’ll try – and bind the wounds. So I think he’ll be very cautious in victory. He’s got a tight little cabal of good people around him, but I expect he’ll resign, probably by the end of the year.’
‘Well, fucking fine for him. Fucking good for us too. We’ll have called it right anyway.’
Cooper meant, of course, that he himself had called it right. The proprietor’s increasingly obstreperous son was a convinced ‘patriot’ and ‘No European tyranny’ man. The proprietor had agonised for weeks about the line the paper had chosen to take, and the pressure had been unpleasant. Cooper had regarded himself as a friend of the prime minister’s ever since his early days in Parliament. They ate the odd meal together even now. So he had gone with his man, and with the PM’s utter conviction that the referendum had to be won – and would be won. His veteran political columnist, a frog-eyed intellectual, took the opposite line, as did half the newsroom, mainly the younger ones.
Once, Cooper would simply have sacked the columnist and intimidated the others. He had always made a point of the Courier’s tradition of dissent, holding out against the Cameron government’s new press censorship law for two long years. There had even been talk of jail. But with the owner not knowing what to think, and his son on the warpath, sales weak, and fucking bloggers and other assorted digital wankers making so much of the running, Ken Cooper’s old certainties had long gone. He also believed in creative tension between his journalists, and had just about held the editorial line. Lucy Scadding had become an important ally. Perhaps, he reflected briefly, that was why she’d taken a seat on his office sofa so comfortably. But the frog-eyed columnist was now standing at the door, and he pitched in.
‘The thing is, Mr Cooper, it’s not quite adding up. All respect to Lucy, I agree that something’s up at Number 10. I think it’s the latest polling figures that are making them uneasy. All that cash that’s been slung into the “Yes” campaign seems to have moved things very little – if at all. There are signs that it’s getting too close for anyone to assume anything. We haven’t even got a clue how many people are going to come out and actually vote. So I really don’t see why everyone seems so confident.’
Lucy Scadding stopped playing with her mobile phone, and started to talk Ken Cooper’s language. ‘It’s really down to the PM. They – we – still believe in the bugger. He’s a shit, and he’s fucked up so many times – but he’s our shit, and he’s got that smile that makes people want to smile back. And he’s never lost an important fight. Not one. He’s leaving it a bit to the last minute, though. I can’t think why he didn’t do the Andy Marr show yesterday. Barney Jones was beside himself. I’m guessing he’s got something special up his sleeve.’
‘Most likely. Will he write us that fucking piece, do you think?’
Lucy tapped her mobile again. ‘Yes, yes. I got a reply back about half an hour ago. He says it’ll be mostly by “the team”, but that he’ll personalise it for an old friend like you.’
Good, thought Cooper. There are some places where I still count. Leaving Lucy Scadding and frog-eyes behind him, he bounced out into the newsroom – which, as always, struck him as sadly quiet compared to the old days. Half the people there were poor, benighted ‘media studies’ graduates working for nothing. What a fucking con, thought Cooper. All those student loans piled up to keep obsolete hacks-turned-professors in work, on the hollow promise that the deluded kids would get gainful work. Well, there was no gainful fucking work left. Maybe when they finally fired him he’d tour the universities with a placard: ‘Media Studies? Starve in Fucking Style.’ They’d probably arrest him. That would be a fucking story.
At the newsdesk Eddie Fitt was on the phone. He saw Cooper and shook his head. Still no McBryde.
‘Fuck, fuck and fuckety fuck,’ muttered Cooper. They had been a pretty unimaginative lot, he admitted to himself, those Anglo-Saxons.
Two figures lay in adjoining frosty cubicles, awaiting the folding steel tables on small rubber wheels. One was the headless and handless body of the sixty-ish man recovered from the Thames, now cleaned of mud and slime. The other was the broken but otherwise intact body of the twenty-eight-year-old newspaper reporter Lucien McBryde, by now also naked. That the latter had been given the task of investigating the former was something nobody present could know.
The mortuary was a long, low building with a high brick wall and an electric steel gate, lacking any sign or distinguishing number. Not far from the fashionable Chelsea Harbour, and opposite a bland international hotel, it was the designated holding place for central London’s sufferers of violent death. Here had come the torn victims of the 7/7 bombings, the possibly murdered, the certainly murdered, the suicides, and the children who had killed and then been killed in the gang wars of Brixton and Hammersmith.