Perfect Strangers

‘Okay. Thursday it is.’ The words came out of Sophie’s mouth before she could stop them.

‘Excellent,’ said the woman. ‘Let me take your details.’

Her Chanel quilt bag was hanging off the treadmill behind them. She reached inside and took out her diary.

‘I don’t even know your name,’ she said without looking up.

‘My name’s Sophie Ellis.’

‘I’m Lana,’ said the woman, scribbling in her book with a silver pencil. ‘Sophie, you’re a lifesaver. An absolute lifesaver.’

And here I am thinking exactly the same thing, thought Sophie.

4

With a pencil wedged between her teeth, Ruth scrolled through the news stories on her computer screen. She had five pages open, all from different news outlets reporting on the same event.

Nodding to herself, she took the pencil and annotated the spidery flow chart in front of her with more circles and arrows, and when she had finished she tapped her knuckles against the desktop with satisfaction. She had been working on something all morning, trying to draw together a seemingly disconnected collection of names and events – and it all seemed to be coming together. Well, possibly. Of course, now she had to back up her theory: she needed documents, photographs, maybe even get an interview, someone on the record. But there was a story there. She could feel it.

She sat back and took a sip of her now tepid coffee, thinking of her father. Art Boden had been a newspaperman too. Not a hotshot editor at the New York Times or the Washington Post – no Woodward and Bernstein fame for him – no, Art Boden had been the news editor on the fly-speck Greenville Chronicle, ‘a small-town paper for a small town’, as he had always put it. But despite his small circulation, he was passionate about what he did. He loved the chase, the story, the joy of conjuring something from thin air, and as far as he was concerned, there was only one way to find the biggest scoops: instinct. It was a word he drummed into Ruth summer after summer when she had interned at his paper during college. ‘Instinct, Ruthie,’ he’d say. ‘You either got it or you ain’t and it’s something all the fancy journalism schools in the world can’t teach you.’ Well, right now, Ruth’s instinct was telling her she had something. She hoped it wouldn’t let her down, because she desperately needed something right now.

‘Ruth, meeting room!’ Chuck Dean, the Trib’s junior reporter, called as he walked past. ‘Jim wants a catch-up.’

Ruth rolled her eyes. I bet he does, she thought as she gathered up her notes. Jim had been putting more and more pressure on them to produce ‘significant’ stories, but only Ruth knew why. The problem was, however, that Jim’s sudden enthusiasm for scoops had coincided with a sudden dearth of decent stories. Nothing had appeared on the wire services, nothing much in the national inkies. The July and August holiday months were notorious for being a slow news period, but the past few weeks had seen a particularly dry patch.

Ruth closed the door behind her and sat in the last chair around the cramped meeting table. If it hadn’t been so pathetic, she would have laughed. When she was growing up, Ruth had always assumed the life of a foreign correspondent would be terribly glamorous – she had imagined herself riding in the back of bullet-scarred jeeps or exchanging war stories with grizzled old hacks by the pool of some hotel in Singapore or Guam – but here she was, crammed into a tiny rented room, sitting on a rented office chair with the foam leaking out the side. Not much of a bureau to close down, she thought grimly, looking around at her colleagues. The Washington Tribune London office consisted of Chuck, an eager but mousy Yale graduate; Karl, a forty-ish veteran of British local newspapers; and English rose Rebecca, who acted as Jim’s PA and occasionally filed a story on travel or fashion. And then there was Jim Keane himself. If you met Jim at a party, you’d guess he was a banker or a corporate lawyer. In his neat suits and club tie, he had all the polish – and sense of entitlement – of the preppy Ivy League classes. He was a fixture on the Hampstead intelligentsia circuit, and had written a rather pompous and self-regarding book called Sarajevo: City Under Siege, despite having been stationed in Bosnia for all of a week, just as the war was dragging to an end. Ruth had taken a great deal of pleasure seeing it in the window of one of Soho’s remainder bookstores a few months later, but Jim still seemed to believe he was Hemingway reborn.

‘All right, people, before we start, let me say I know all the excuses,’ said Jim. ‘You’re going to say that it’s summer and that nothing ever happens in summer. You’re going to complain that there’re no stories out there, or that there’s nothing to grab them Stateside. But’ – he tapped his signet ring on the desk – ‘we need to work, guys. You’ll all know that Isaac Grey has been over to London, and I want to show him just what we can do.’ He looked around the room. ‘So what have you got?’

As Ruth had guessed, it was pretty slim pickings. The announcement of a new Cy Twombly show at the Tate Modern, a rumoured meeting between the Secretary of State and the Foreign Secretary about the situation in Iran, some royal tittle-tattle. If this was all they had, then perhaps Isaac was right to consider closing the London bureau.

‘Ruth?’

She looked down at her notes and pulled a face. She had wanted to keep this new story under wraps until she had researched it some more, nailed down something more concrete, but they clearly needed something right now. She took a deep breath.

‘Well I guess everyone has read the latest on the Watson story?’ she began, looking around the table. Sebastian Watson was a senior City banking executive who had been caught out with an escort girl. It had been the splash of one of the Sunday tabloids a few days earlier, and, it being a slow news week, the other papers had waded in, generating enough bad publicity to force Watson’s resignation from his two-million-a-year job.

‘There was more on the wire this morning,’ nodded Chuck. ‘Apparently his wife has left him.’

Jim steepled his fingers together and raised his eyebrows.

‘And?’

‘I think there is a bigger story here,’ said Ruth, noting Jim’s patronising smile. Even before Isaac had effectively put them in competition, Ruth and Jim had had an uneasy relationship, with the bureau chief never missing an opportunity to subtly undermine her in front of the staff. She told herself that it was because he was threatened by her, and while it no longer upset her – you couldn’t be in this business without a thick skin – she never felt entirely comfortable in his presence.

‘How big, exactly?’ said Jim. ‘Sebastian Watson’s story has no resonance Stateside at all; he’s British, barely a celebrity. It’s business gossip at best.’

‘Agreed, but Watson himself isn’t the story – it’s the escort girl. She’s twenty-five and from Chesterfield, a town about twenty miles south of Sheffield.’

‘I don’t see how—’

‘Hear me out,’ said Ruth quickly, opening a file and spreading out copies of various newspaper cuttings.

‘Look at this one. Three years ago, the German finance minister was caught entering a west London hotel with another escort girl. There was little coverage about it in the UK, but the German press got hold of the story and it forced his resignation from the Bundeskabinett.’

She tapped another cutting.

‘Bill Danson. Gubernatorial