Paradise City by Elizabeth Day

Author:Elizabeth Day
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-03-23T04:00:00+00:00

Esme

Esme wants to believe it is the winning combination of her personal charm and professional competence that has coaxed Sir Howard Pink into giving his first full-length interview about his daughter’s disappearance, but she has a sneaking notion that all is not what it seems. Perhaps it’s because she’s become a horribly cynical tabloid hack ever since working at the Tribune but she can’t shake the suspicion that Howard Pink has an ulterior motive. Cathy had told her once about a famous pop star who sold a story about his child’s terminal illness to the red-tops in exchange for the discreet dropping of an exclusive about an extra-marital affair. That was pre-Leveson, of course, in the days when the chequebook was king and all you had to do to prove a Cabinet minister was shagging his secretary was dial in four simple digits to access a mobile phone’s voicemail.

Things were tougher nowadays, Esme thought. Tougher and more boring. Last week, Dave had spiked a piece about a celebrity’s honeymoon because the fame-hungry wannabe in question had got her lawyers to email claiming they’d invaded her privacy by taking photographs of her on a ‘secluded’ beach. What the lawyers failed to acknowledge was that the celebrity had tipped off the paparazzi in the first place. And why wouldn’t she, thought Esme, when said celebrity had spent several thousand pounds on cultivating the perfect bikini body with the costly help of a pre-eminent plastic surgeon and needed some free publicity for a new range of false eyelashes she was promoting (‘super-long with diamanté sparkle’ according to the press release)?

Anyway, the Howard Pink thing just seems a bit too easy. Esme was used to pursuing interviews for months on end through a tireless campaign of phone calls and emails and follow-up emails and emails following up the follow-up emails, falsely claiming that there was a problem with the work internet server and could she just check that her last one had got through? But for the first time ever, a potential interviewee had come to her. Or at least to Dave.

‘He asked for you by name,’ Dave had said to her on the Monday that she’d rushed back to the office, leaving her mother waving goodbye from the train platform with an aggrieved expression on her face. ‘Said he’d felt “a connection” with you over lunch.’ Dave winked. ‘A connection, eh, Es? You wanna be careful you don’t end up as the third Lady Pink.’

Esme blushed and looked down at her jeans. She had thought carefully about precisely what clothes to wear for this unanticipated appointment with the object of her irrational affections. It was a tricky sartorial challenge: she wanted to look casually attractive, as though she had made no effort, and yet still manage to convey elegance and sex appeal. In the end, she had opted for skinny jeans, a t-shirt with something French written on the front and ankle boots that made her a few millimetres taller than Dave. He had turned up in awful grey trousers and a navy fleece.

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