The Fourth Estate

Townsend had felt sick. “Is there nothing left that I can do?”

“No, nothing,” Ms. Beresford had replied firmly. “Just sit and wait for Pierson to call. If I’m going to make the next flight to New York, I’ll have to dash. I should be with you around midday.” The line had gone dead.

Townsend continued to think about her words as he rose from his chair and began pacing around the room. He stopped to check his tie in the mirror above the mantelpiece—he hadn’t had time to change his clothes since getting off the plane, and it showed. For the first time, he couldn’t help thinking that he looked older than his sixty-three years. But that wasn’t surprising after what E.B. had put him through over the past six weeks. He would have been the first to admit that had he sought her advice a little earlier, he might not now be so dependent on a call from the president of a small bank in Ohio.

He stared at the phone, willing it to ring. But it didn’t. He made no attempt to tackle the pile of letters Heather had left for him to sign. His thoughts were interrupted when the door opened, and Heather came in. She handed him a single sheet of paper; on it was a list of names arranged in alphabetical order. “I thought you might find this useful,” she said. After thirty-five years of working for him, she knew he was the last man on earth who could be expected to just sit and wait.

Townsend ran his finger down the list of names unusually slowly. Not one of them meant anything to him. Three had an asterisk against them, indicating that they had worked for Global Corp in the past

. He currently employed thirty-seven thousand people, thirty-six thousand of whom he hadn’t ever met. But three of those who had worked for him at some point in their careers were now on the staff of the Cleveland Sentinel, a paper he’d never heard of.

“Who owns the Sentinel?” he asked, hoping that he might be able to put some pressure on the proprietor.

“Richard Armstrong,” Heather replied flatly.

“That’s all I need.”

“In fact you don’t control a paper within a hundred miles of Cleveland,” continued Heather. “Just a radio station to the south of the city that pumps out country and western.”

At that moment Townsend would happily have traded the New York Star for the Cleveland Sentinel. He glanced again at the three asterisked names, but they still meant nothing to him. He looked back up at Heather. “Do any of them still love me?” he asked, trying to force a smile.

“Barbara Bennett certainly doesn’t,” Heather replied. “She’s the fashion editor on the Sentinel. She was sacked from her local paper in Seattle a few days after you took it over. She sued for wrongful dismissal, and claimed her replacement was having an affair with the editor. We ended up having to settle out of court. In the preliminary hearings she described you as ‘nothing more than a peddler of pornography whose only interest is the bottom line.’ You gave instructions that she was never to be employed by any of your papers again.”

Townsend knew that that particular list probably had well over a thousand names on it, every one of whom would be only too happy to dip their pens in blood as they composed his obituary for tomorrow’s first editions.

“Mark Kendall?” he queried.

“Chief crime reporter,” said Heather. “Worked on the New York Star for a few months, but there’s no record of your ever coming across him.”

Townsend’s eyes settled on another unfamiliar name, and he waited for Heather to supply the details. He knew she would be saving the best for last: even she enjoyed having some hold over him.

“Malcolm McCreedy. Features editor at the Sentinel. He worked for the corporation on the Melbourne Courier between 1979 and 1984. In those days he used to tell everyone on the paper that you and he were drinking mates from way back. He was sacked for continually failing to get his copy in on time. It seems that malt whiskey was the first thing to gain his attention after the morning conference, and anything in a skirt soon after lunch. Despite his claims, I can’t find any proof that you’ve even met him.”

Townsend marveled at how much information Heather had come up with in so short a time. But he accepted that after working for him for so long, her contacts were almost as good as his.

“McCreedy’s been married twice,” she continued. “Both times it ended in divorce. He has two children by the first marriage: Jill, who’s twenty-seven, and Alan, twenty-four. Alan works for the corporation on the Dallas Comet, in the classifieds department.”

“Couldn’t be better,” said Townsend. “McCreedy’s our man. He’s about to get a call from his long-lost mate.”

Heather smiled. “I’ll get him on the phone right away. Let’s hope he’s sober.”

Townsend nodded, and Heather returned to her office. The proprietor of 297 journals, with a combined readership of over a billion people around the world, waited to be put through to the features editor on a local paper in Ohio with a circulation of less than thirty-five thousand.

Townsend stood up and began to pace around the office, formulating the questions he needed to ask McCreedy, and thinking about the order he should put them in. As he circled the room, his eyes passed over the framed copies of his newspapers displayed on the walls, bearing their most famous headlines.

The New York Star, 23 November 1963: “Kennedy Assassinated in Dallas.”

The Continent, 30 July 1981: “Happily Ever After,” above a picture of Charles and Diana on their wedding day.

The Globe, 17 May 1991: “Richard Branson Deflowered Me, Claims Virgin.”

He would happily have paid half a million dollars to be able to read the headlines on tomorrow’s papers.

The phone on his desk gave out a shrill blast, and Townsend quickly returned to his chair and grabbed the receiver.

“Malcolm McCreedy is on line one,” said Heather, putting him through.

As soon as he heard the click, Townsend said, “Malcolm, is that you?”