The Special Girls by Isabelle Grey

Author:Isabelle Grey [Grey, Isabelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus Books
Published: 2017-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

33

Ivo had received the call around lunchtime, which left him plenty of time to write the copy and badger his editor into running it. Nothing he loved more than a tight deadline. It gave him a shot of adrenalin, which since he’d given up booze was like nothing else. Besides, he now realized that drink had only ever helped dull the edge of the flat, empty feeling he always had after an edition had gone to bed and he was left alone with the come-down. He supposed actors or singers or stand-up comedians must feel the same when the curtain fell and the lights went out.

But not tonight. Tonight he could go to sleep with the lovely wired excitement of knowing that, for an awful lot of people, tomorrow’s Courier was really going to spoil their day.

The paper’s in-house lawyers, whose eminent counsel had spent billable hours poring over the finished copy, had advised the editor to expect trouble, even though Ivo’s final story merely reported the all-too-brief existence of Operation Mayfly and had taken great care not to accuse Professor Sir Ned Chesham directly of any wrongdoing.

All the same, the celebrated trick cyclist was about to experience that weightless moment before his life took a new and distinctly unpleasant turn. Tomorrow’s Courier and the media doorstepping that would inevitably follow would be just the beginning. Chehsam wouldn’t be able to use his phone because every time he put it on standby a dozen calls would come in. He’d be vilified on social media. Every detail of his past would be raked over. And he’d be suspended from St Botolph’s – albeit with a carefully worded statement of neutral support and on full consultant’s pay.

The shit storm that Ivo was about to release was going to offer Ned Chesham a whole new meaning for the word relentless. Even if it turned out he’d been dragged off his pedestal for nothing, this would never go away. The tag of paedophile would remain, and smear and innuendo would be attached to him for ever. Life as he knew it tonight was over.

Did that bother Ivo? Not one bit. He’d once read a brilliant book in which a neurosurgeon made the point that, if he worried too much about the potential negative consequences of his actions, he’d end up never daring to operate at all. That was the stance that the fourth estate also had to take. Except that for a tabloid journalist there was of course nothing remotely equivalent to the Hippocratic oath. Instead, there was little that most red top editors liked better than a bit of gratuitous hooliganism, trashing reputations in the same mindless fashion that louts smashed up their local high streets on a Saturday night. All part of a great British tradition, innit?

The hospital’s crisis management team would swing into action, especially once it became clear that the chief executive of the St Botolph’s Hospital Trust would be forced to admit that the internal investigation of an earlier complaint had failed to reach as far as actually speaking to the underage patient concerned.

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