The Pink and the Grey by Camber Anthony

Author:Camber, Anthony [Camber, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: David A Smith
Published: 2012-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

twelve

The Replan

I messaged Spencer on Gaydar when I got home on Thursday evening. I hadn’t heard a word from him. I had no idea whether the super-secret fake Archivist and Seb’s wonder document had done the trick, and Simon had been suckered right in, or not. Either Spencer was out celebrating, drowning himself in gin, or he was in commiserating, drowning himself in gin. All systems go, or computer says no?

Seb reached me first and gave me the bad news over the phone, as retrieved from a pretty miserable Claire in the debrief. Apparently, after Simon had run off snickering, the Master swept out in a puff of confusion and Spencer gave the forgery a good honest seeing-to and tinkered with the feng shui of the place a little. Then he’d clattered away to hide in his office and await the apocalypse.

“Should I go over there, do you think?” I asked Seb. “Give him a cuddle and a cup of warm milk and tell him it’s all gonna be alright, somehow, as the lava starts flowing through the letterbox?”

“Inadvisable. I suspect he would not be too coherent.” He sighed. “I assume the Bugle will train its sights on him and St Paul’s — you will no doubt discover tomorrow. We need to subvert this for next week’s edition.”

I shook my head sadly. “I hate to say it but are you sure you want to keep on with this? Our little conniving hasn’t exactly gone well so far.”

“It was a miscalculation. Poor research. Speed-libel is not my area of expertise, I admit. I take full responsibility of course.”

“That’s all fine but it doesn’t do Spencer a gram of good. This is his life, his career, we’re talking about. I freely admit I might have thought he was an arsehole before but he’s doing some good there, I’ve seen it.”

“But how can we walk away now? If we do nothing, if we let it go, then your editor, your paper, will crucify him.”

“I might be able to talk Geoff away from the edge.”

“You do not really believe that, I think. You know what he is like. We both do.”

He was right. Geoff might have had an air pump trained up his arse for the last two decades but the old killer instinct was still there. Once his fangs were fixed on a story he wouldn’t let go no matter how much you shook. I’d seen it a few months after I joined, when some local sports guy — in the soccerballs or the cuddleballs or whichever it was — drove his cockmobile a trifling thirty over the thirty limit and tried to celeb his way out of a ticket. Word got to Geoff by the usual channels and he was bang, bang, bang, a two-year-old with a hammer until he whacked him out of the team. Big headline, DISGRACED, by-line Geoff Burnett, naturally, even though most of the legwork was by Manish.

Spencer didn’t call me until much, much later in the evening, full of the doom and the gloom.

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