Never a True Word Read online

  ‘We need to talk, something has come up.’

  ‘It can wait, mate. I’m going to bed. Whoever organised the fucking diary today is a dickhead. I am going to get some sleep.’

  ‘No, it can’t wait. Annabelle Howard has been on the phone asking about a blue you had with Armstrong in the parliamentary bar last month. She is running the story in tomorrow’s paper. You need to speak to me about this.’

  Sloan looks momentarily bewildered. Then a look of resignation comes across his face. He’s not going to explode at me on this one.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ he says. ‘Ok, check in, give me ten minutes, get Harry and come to my room.’

  We arrive together and Harry knocks on the door. Inside, Ray is sitting at a chair by a small wooden desk. Charlotte is perched on the side of the bed. Ray gets up, goes to the bar fridge and drags out a beer for everybody.

  ‘We may as well have a drink while we sort this out,’ he begins.

  ‘What happened?’ I ask.

  ‘It was late one night. Parliament had risen about an hour earlier. I had some people in the dining room but they’d left so I wandered back to the bar. Armstrong was there having a whinge about how the government wasn’t listening to him about how we needed to close all the pubs at 1 am to stop people getting smashed in the street and punching on.

  ‘I’d had a few and told him to save his sermons for the chamber. Told him if he was ever in government he’d bankrupt the state with all his ridiculous proposals. Then he piped up with: “You are just worried that you won’t be able to get a drink after one, Ray. You might have to go home at a reasonable hour for a change.” That’s where I lost it. I called him a sanctimonious cunt and a faggot, pushed him. He spilled his drink and fell over. I walked out.’

  I am amazed. I had no idea Ray knew the meaning of the word sanctimonious.

  ‘I rang him the next day to apologise and he was actually pretty good about it. Said he’d made a cheap crack, which probably got the appropriate response. We had a laugh about it. He’s not a bad bloke really.’

  ‘Do you think he’s the one who leaked it?’ I ask. ‘He is pretty close to Howard.’

  ‘I don’t think so. He’s a publicity slut but this is not really his style. I have seen him a few times since and he’s been fine, no dramas.’

  ‘Who else was there then? Any from the other lot?’

  ‘Not that I remember. That wing nut Anton Preston was in the room and a few bar staff, but that’s about it.’

  ‘Must have been Preston then,’ Harry says. ‘It doesn’t really matter now though does it,’ says Sloan. ‘The question is how are you two going to pull me out of the shit … again.’

  The last word is said with a smile on his face. Half an hour ago I hated this bloke and everything he stood for. If asked, I would have told you I didn’t give a stuff what happened to him next. He’d fucked up and he could fix it. Now we are getting ready to go into battle to salvage what remains of his reputation. And I do it willingly, because I want to save this poor bastard from himself and not just because it’s the job I’m paid well to do. Perhaps it’s just because it’s Howard chasing the story. So what to do? It feels like we hold Sloan’s future in our hands, although this is probably an over-reaction fuelled by the sense of isolation that being so far from home can bring.

  ‘Let’s keep it short. No long-winded explanations, but no excuses. You take responsibility but let’s not fuel the fire any more than necessary,’ I say.

  ‘Ok, you two have a go. I’m going for a walk for fifteen to clear my head.’

  For half an hour we work it back and forth. We have a dozen cracks at finding the right tone and the right words. Sloan comes back and hovers over my shoulder. Finally we nut it down to three short sentences. ‘Treasurer Ray Sloan acknowledges he acted inappropriately during a disagreement with Alistair Armstrong last month. Mr Sloan apologised to Mr Armstrong the following day. That apology was graciously accepted and the pair have met several times since with no ill feeling.’

  ‘Will that be enough for Howard?’ Sloan asks.

  ‘Oh no. She’s expecting to talk to you. She demanded it in fact. She wants all the gory details and a tearful apology as you beg for your career,’ I reply.

  ‘Won’t this just make her mad then?’

  ‘Probably, but she’s mad anyway. And it doesn’t matter. You are going to get stitched up here and by talking to her all you do is risk giving her all the details she doesn’t already have. You have to remember she’s not your friend. She doesn’t give a stuff about anything apart from the story. That’s fair enough, but it doesn’t help us.’

  ‘What about Armstrong though? He won’t be able to help himself. Gets to paint us as the arrogant bullies he’s always saying we are. Imagine the sympathy vote this will bring him. His mates on talkback radio will be going nuts.’ ‘I’ve sorted it,’ I say. ‘While you were out walking I rang him. He’s appalled it’s come out. He was paranoid you’d think he leaked it and has promised not to say anything to Howard about it.’

  ‘Jesus,’ says Ray. ‘Fuck, I’ll owe him for this.’

  ‘Yes, he did mention that as well.’

  21

  I head back to my room with Harry to ring Howard. I don’t want Sloan around when I have the conversation. There’s every chance he’ll snatch the phone out of my hand while I’m talking to her just so he can call her a fraud and a pretender.

  So I call her. It’s now after 1 am in Houston. I have already booked a wake-up call for 5 am so I’m feeling a little edgy.

  ‘Annabelle, I’m sending you a statement now,’ I tell her.

  ‘No. I said I wanted to speak to Sloan. I don’t want your usual bland statement that’s been through the spin cycle a dozen times. I don’t want your fucking statement,’ she says.

  ‘Fine. I won’t send it then.’

  ‘Fuck you, you fucking jumped-up excuse of a journalist. Do you even remember what it was like to have a real job before you sold your soul?’ Today I’m not reacting to her crap. This may be because I am so tired I don’t have the energy to respond, or at a more worrying level I am just getting used to being abused.

  ‘So, you do want the statement? Sorry, I’m getting confused. It’s very late here and I am pretty tired.’

  ‘Send it,’ she says and hangs up.

  I do and thirty seconds later the phone rings again. It’s fair to say she’s not happy.

  ‘Is that it? Three fucking sentences? This is the biggest story of the year. Your man will swing for this,’ is her summary.

  I laugh. ‘No. It’s not and no he won’t,’ I say. ‘Ray is sorry, Armstrong has accepted the apology. Everyone has moved on. You should too.’

  ‘This will be on page one tomorrow. We’ll see how long he survives after that. This is his last chance to tell his side of the story.’

  ‘Yep, well thanks for the offer, but if that’s it I’m off to my bed. I have to be up in a minute.’

  I then give Ray a quick call to update him on the Annabelle front, including the threat that this will cost him his job, which brings a mournful ‘she could be right’.

  The last thing I do before I fall into bed is switch off my phone. It’s going to ring but I am out of answers and the pull of the bed is overwhelming.

    

  The relief of sleep seems momentary. The clanging of the room phone jerks me out of my brief respite. I pick up but no one is there. I feel the confusion that only a pitch-dark hotel room a long way from home can bring before I realise it’s my wake-up call. It’s 5 am already and my night’s sleep is done. I flick the phone back on. Eight text messages and five missed calls. All from Howard. From her increasingly desperate tone I have the feeling she has promised her bosses she would be able to speak to Sloan. Those three brief sentences won’t have appeased them greatly. By my fuzzy calculations her deadline has just passed. But that doesn’t mean I am about to return her calls or answer her texts. There’s nothing more to be done anyw
ay. In around four hours Howard’s story will go on the web, eight hours after that we’ll get an idea of how the paper has run it.

  After that I expect I will be inundated with phone calls from every media outlet at home. Welcome to another day in paradise. After I fish a clean shirt out of my increasingly ratty suitcase I put on the suit I was wearing a couple of hours back and head down to the lobby to meet the others.

  We have just the one meeting this morning in Houston then it’s off to the airport for a flight to New York. We should be there around mid afternoon and thankfully there are no more meetings in the book for the day. It was going to be a much-needed quiet few hours exploring my favourite city but it’s more likely now to be spent on the phone talking to journos sniffing blood in the water and then placating a no doubt increasingly paranoid Sloan.

  As usual, Harry is already there. He looks terrible but then greets me by telling me how shit I look.

  ‘Did you sleep at all?’ he asks.

  ‘I think so.’

  22

  The next week of the trip takes on the sheen of a paranoid thriller. In it our man, Sloan, is worried he is being chased by unseen enemies, that he is being stalked and followed by people intent on doing him harm. In a sense he is right. By fobbing off Howard we have provoked the mighty national newspaper. Sloan and his parliamentary barny—or to put it in newspapers terms his ‘expletive-filled drunken rant and assault’—has become an obsession and they are determined to find Sloan and punish him.

  My mobile nearly melted after the story was published. Still, it wasn’t as bad as I expected. A small column down the side of page one was how Howard’s paper ran it. I was expecting it to be splashed across page one accompanied by the worst file photo of Sloan they could find. It’s what I would have done, perhaps with a graphic of Sloan’s previous misdemeanours for company. All in all I thought it vindicated my low-profile, say-nothing, do-nothing approach.

  But the downside is that they will now try and hunt Sloan down. The fact we are in the US isn’t going to deter them. The paper has a New York bureau so they certainly have the resources to find us. Whether it has the talent is another question.

  Of course, all the other journos at home piled in when they saw the story. Caldicott was head of the queue, expecting I would deliver Sloan up to him for early-morning breakfast radio, but we were going to hold the line on this one. Everyone who rang, emailed or texted received the same three-sentence statement. They were all furious, but so what? The furore will die down in time. It was a blessing we had another two weeks in the US. If we had been at home cameras and journos would have been camped outside his home, his office and at parliament. There would have been shots of a grumpy and angry Ray barging past reporters.

  So we are happily in exile in America and I maintain the line that if Sloan isn’t offering himself up, the story will slowly die. At least until we return home. But the national isn’t prepared to let him dangle that long.

  As it happens, I know and like the guy stationed in New York from my time working with the august journal. Not that it is likely to help me. From experience I understand just how vindictive the paper can be when it believes it isn’t getting the access or the co-operation it deserves as the nation’s ‘thought leader’, the phrase its top management uses to describe itself in internal communications.

  Cameron Inglis, their man in the Big Apple, is good. Younger than me, he’s a slick, greasy pole climber who has an unrivalled talent for sucking up to the most important person in the room. He has plenty of talent as a reporter but it is his networking skills that make him one of the paper’s favourites.

  Which is not to say I didn’t like him. We were regular drinking partners in the old days, went out for dinner with our respective wives. We were friends, but I never took him too seriously. My general view is that he took himself seriously enough for the both of us.

  We had just checked into our New York hotel when Inglis rang me. It was a great hotel, chosen by Sloan at one of our staff meetings several months earlier. For a change it wasn’t one of the anonymous concrete monstrosities constructed by chains like the Hyatt and the Hilton. This upmarket beauty is a bit more niche, a bit more select, and a lot more expensive than anywhere else. This hotel was another reasons I hadn’t released an itinerary for the trip to the media before we left.

  I really didn’t want anyone Googling the joint to see what it looks like. For a start it is more or less in the middle of Times Square. For another, the lobby doubles as one of the more fashionable bars in the city. Which makes for the weird experience of returning during the evening to see what looks like a cross between a fashion parade and a rave party going on in your hotel.

  Where the staff look like they had just all fallen out of the pages of Vogue, with attitudes to match. I could see why Ray wanted to come here. He’s always seen himself as one of these people. It has a different effect on me. It just deepens the inferiority complex and adds to that chip on my shoulder. I have only been in the room long enough to admire the startling view down Broadway and register the fact that the room is so small that I have to breathe in to fit through the gap between the end of the bed and the wall when the phone rings.

  ‘Is that you, Jack?’ comes a familiar voice. Inglis.

  ‘Hello, Cam,’ I reply. ‘It’s been a while.’

  ‘Too long, mate, we must catch up for a drink. You’ll have to bring your boss.’

  ‘Very funny.’

  ‘No, I’m serious. We both know he has to talk, so we may as well do it over a beer in the pub. You can pay for it with your taxpayer credit card as well then.’

  ‘Not going to happen. He doesn’t want to talk. He doesn’t need to talk. He’s not going to talk.’

  ‘Are we really going to have to do this the hard way?’

  ‘Afraid so,’ I say.

  ‘We’ll find you, you know that and then it won’t be so friendly.’

  ‘You can try. There’s a lot of hotels in this town and we’re only here for a couple of days. I’ll take my chances.’

  As with all these transactions with journalists, on offer is part bargain, part threat. The bargain being that if you do what they want they will look after you. That you will be allowed to ‘tell your side of the story’ in sympathetic terms. That, by unburdening yourself of the massive guilt you are undoubtedly carrying, people will look on you more compassionately. The threat side of the equation is less ambiguous: ‘Do as you’re told or we will fuck you over.’

  Inglis isn’t giving up easily.

  ‘You used to be one of us? What happened to you? Just because you get paid a bucket load of money doesn’t mean you have to give up your ethics.’

  He says it in a jokey, blokey manner, but we both know he means it. We both know he is right as well, which doesn’t help. But in memory of our past friendship he invites me to his place in Brooklyn for a barbecue with his wife and kids.

  Despite the circumstances I am happy to accept. I think I am just desperate to see a new face, even one that wants to fillet my boss and make my life even more unpleasant.

  23

  And so the pattern is set. Harry and I become the advance guard. We are the goons in the dark suits who scout an area to make sure their VIP is safe from harm and snipers on the roof with long telescopic lenses. All we are missing are the guns and plastic earpieces, although I have always fancied a pair of those little radio communicators that double as cufflinks.

  The pair of us are always down in the hotel lobby a good ten minutes before Sloan is due. We sweep around the fashionably dark space to make sure there are no familiar faces waiting. After giving every nook and cranny a thorough going over it is then out onto the street to search for anybody who looks like a photographer, cameraman or journalist. At this point I would have been happier seeing that sniper on a nearby roof than a photographer.

  When it is deemed safe, and the car is in place, engine running, I text Sloan to tell him the coast is clear and it’s safe to
leave the building. I can make this fun by playing the theme music from Mission Impossible in my head.

  This is how we live for our three days in New York. Every time we leave the hotel, every time we turned up for a meeting, every time we return to the hotel it is the same process. I have a word to the hotel manager to tell her that if anybody calls asking for a Ray Sloan they should be told there is no one here of that name unless they add the password ‘Biggles’.

  That is New York. The world’s greatest city and I don’t get a moment to enjoy it thanks to the paranoia of my boss and my own conviction that if we can ignore the story long enough the problem will disappear.

  We spend our days driving to obscure parts of New Jersey to visit (legal) arms dealers and be impressed by military types who used to do things like run the Top Gun school for the US Air Force. Yes, there is such a thing. It wasn’t just made up for the benefit of Tom Cruise.

  24

  Being in the middle of Times Square there’s no shortage of bars, shops and restaurants. Harry and I have a few hours to spare before our next scheduled interaction with Sloan so we decide to go for a walk. By now we are taking each and every opportunity to get away from the boss. It’s just as well there are two of us on this trip. I’m not sure I could have coped by myself and I suspect Harry, even with his more hardened political shell, would be rocking back and forth in his room sucking his thumb if he had been left on his own.

  The result is we rarely go anywhere by ourselves. We tell each other it’s because the next emergency is probably only moments away and it’s easier to deal with whatever the latest catastrophe turns out to be if we are together when the next wave hits. But it’s more likely we have developed an unhealthy psychological dependency on each other.

  We decide we can’t stay prisoners forever. We have to get out, even for a short time. It’s a glorious late-summer day in New York. Real shorts and T-shirt weather. The humidity is in check, the warmth is bouncing off the pavements. It’s a perfect afternoon to find a pub and try to rediscover a little alcohol-influenced balance in our lives. We even find a bookshop. Harry is in search of American car magazines and I seek a little light relief through the world of crime fiction. A gruesome murder or two is just what I need to lighten the mood. Maybe I can find a George Pelecanos thriller I haven’t read.