He chuckled, sweeping his ever-present gown around him. "Still up and about with your shenanigans startling people, eh? You know startling's not good for me. Not at my age, at my age, you see?"

"Sixty-nine, Dennis? Barely more than a tiny little puppy."

"It'll be my birthday soon, I'm sure, I'm sure."

I wasn't so sure. "Already? Well, when the time comes, we should have a party," I said, noticing the alcohol had switched on my touchy-feely arms. I consciously restrained myself. "Externally catered, of course. Unless you want a cake with melted polystyrene as an ingredient, in which case college would be fine."

"No fuss, no fuss," he said. And then conspiratorially: "How'd you get on with the Master?"

"Marvellously, if she's listening," I said. Then a whisper, close up: "I should come over for tea. We'll have a splendid natter about the old- the old times. She told me you were upset and all a-quiver."

"If only, lad, if only. My quivering days are long gone. Sorry I had to drop you in it. She rather strong-armed matters. It's the cameras, the cameras." He stabbed up at a metal sphere nesting in a nearby eave.

"Oh, it's absolutely fine, all my own fault," I said. "No hard feelings."

"No, I don't get those any more, either." His head drooped.

I laughed. "Then why are you up so late, my dear Praelector? A touch of the Dryb.u.t.ters?"

"The wretched SPAIN thing. Research, research, as ordered."

I drew back. "You too? Amanda led me seriously to believe I was to be the chair. Shouldn't I be doing the ordering?"

He thought better of something. "I'm saying nothing. I'm saying nothing."

"Well, I order you henceforth to your bed. And no naughty business."

I was too far gone to be overly concerned about the Praelector's words. The ubiquitous cameras straddled both the Archivist's and the Master's domains, and although officially they were for security and long-term insurance, unofficially and most obviously the Master kept the closest of tabs upon both her favourites and her least favourites. Regardless of all that b.u.mfluff, I was already utterly aware that Amanda's hands would be on SPAIN's tiller however the formal roles were dealt. All I could do was puff hard on the sails and try not to vomit over the side.

My college room was silent, cold, orange and spinning. The walls leaned in ever closer. I weaved to the window and drew the useless curtains to darken the orange, and then attempted to identify the cleanest gla.s.s in my vicinity: it was the most recent to contain gin, unsurprisingly. I necked the few drops it contained - never one to waste the magical elixir - and clutched it the few metres along the creaking, distorting corridor outside to the shared kitchen: narrow, drab, cluttered, lit by an unforgiving neon strip, also spinning, but with a cold tap that worked and a hot tap that was several years past its prime.

I hung on desperately to the miniature stainless steel sink as I filled the gla.s.s, downed its contents, and repeated a few times until my stomach overflowed. Were I tremendously lucky I might stave off the worst of the upcoming throbbing, and my head might not explode brain all over the sofa bed like neuronic popcorn. I thought back to the bar, to my embarra.s.sing failure even to connect loosely with Laurie and his companions, even to hold the mildest of conversations, and the dawning realisation of precisely how tremendously, ball-wrenchingly terrible it had all been.

There was Claire, too. She, at least, had prior experience of my excesses and I knew that the rift could be patched by promising to attend her Coriola.n.u.s or whichever was next to be ticked by her am-drams.

And as I gulped more water and stared into the accusatory plughole, I realised that amongst all the nonsense my mouth had emitted was the idea of a charity race. And more: John, Paul, George and Ringo, thanks to Laurie's friends, the couple, Lift and Pavement. What if, I thought, we select two colleges to subst.i.tute for the non-existent St George's and St Ringo's? What if we held a race from St Paul's, to the others in turn, and then back? And what if we could repeat the event each year?

There's nothing worse than a drunk with an idea. It's either genius, and survives the sharp glare of morning, or more likely - far more likely - it evaporates, dream-like, into a random a.s.sortment of meaningless words, a smear of inedible tripe on a cracked white plate. The only way to know for sure is to write it all down, sleep, rise regularly to pee or to throw up or both - though preferably not at the same time - and then once dawn smacks your retina around the chops and the hangover muscles its way in, attempt to examine it with some dispa.s.sion. And then screw it up and toss it in the bin, because it's always unadulterated rubbish. But you'll never know for sure unless you do it.

Back in my room, a fresh gla.s.s of water by my side, I flipped up the lid of my laptop and cursed ferociously at the unfiltered sunlight melting my face. I hammered on the Decrease Brightness key until the nuclear intensity subsided, then blinked away the tears, fired up a word processor and began to mash the keyboard, swiftly and inaccurately.

six.

The Choice The newspaper office was shut on Sat.u.r.day morning - which for me was a very late morning - the paper being a c.r.a.ppy little two-bit local weekly rag with a shoestring budget. But I went in occasionally on a Sat.u.r.day if I thought it might buy me a bit of time to work on something juicy during the week - usually spiked or nicked - or if my alarm didn't wake me up due to a heavy night for one reason or another and I needed to make up the time. So it wasn't too out of the ordinary when I pitched up at the building we shared with a bunch of other s.h.i.tty little companies and used my amazing toothy charm with Colin the security guy, plus my ID card and my key, to let myself in.

Once upon a time a place like this - well, not exactly like this - would be full of copy-girls and ink and cigarette smoke and the mating calls of typewriters. It'd smell of Johnnie Walker Black Label and grease and Old Spice and Chanel No. 5. You'd wade through discarded copy and comps to get your ritual b.o.l.l.o.c.king from a slicked-back sub-editor for s.h.i.tting all over the house style. The editor would survey his alcoholic, cancer-riddled hacks from a sound-proofed, bulls.h.i.t-lined office. Everybody would have a cut-gla.s.s English accent except the cute blond country boy in the post room who you'd have a secret crush on and know, at some point, you'd see in a cottage somewhere with burning cheeks lurking beneath his fedora. And then you'd run away together to Jamaica and set up a news agency and drink rum every evening on the beach watching an enormous sun melt into the horizon. Or maybe that's just me.

These days the Bugle's office looked like any other a.r.s.e-sc.r.a.pingly tedious open-plan workplace. Plasterboard walls you could push a blunt pencil through. A couple of computers, a couple of big displays for them, and a grumbling monster of a printer for checking, which only Simon knew how to feed. A Health and Safety at Work poster dangling on one drawing pin that n.o.body had ever read. A laminated set of instructions on how to give CPR to an ethnically diverse set of fatties, all of whom had mysteriously grown felt-tip moustaches. Windows that defied all attempts to let in air in summer or to retain heat in winter.

If you wanted an atmosphere you opened the drawer with the whiteboard markers and huffed till your eyes spun.

Geoff's desk watched over the room. To his right, Simon's domain: haphazard, disorganised unless you were Simon. To Geoff's left, mine and Manish's area. Kiddy corner, they sometimes called it. We were obliged to keep ourselves nice and tidy, or else. It was part of our "apprenticeship" apparently, along with the c.r.a.ppy wages and the bullying. I think we were allowed one piece of unfiled paper per year of service, which was fine, since paper was for old people.

The editor's desk lay silent and brooding, and locked down tight. I didn't go near it: I was hardly going to tip it upside-down in any case. There wasn't going to be a padlocked box inside a combination safe inside an unlabelled file drawer, marked TOP SECRET: PEARLY t.w.a.t'S EYES ONLY. He'd keep all the dirt on his computer in a folder marked stuff with all the p.o.r.n, like everyone does.

I wasn't here for that anyway. I was here to investigate the h.e.l.l out of Seb's story. I wanted to pull at the threads, to see if there was information Seb wasn't telling me. Did his father really leave to set up another business? Was it legit? Where was his mother? What about his sister? What does Seb do for a living now? Were there any baby photos I could embarra.s.s him with?

I knew in my gut it would all check out - he was a clever man and I wasn't exactly daft myself, and he knew I wouldn't blindly take his word for it. This wasn't a trust exercise. I was potentially putting my meagre pittance of a salary on a gossamer line. Geoff would fire my a.r.s.e soon as look at me. There were plenty of more compliant Geoff juniors out there gagging for the gig if I accidentally fell out of the window that didn't open.

Armed with Seb's unusual surname and my infinite Google-fu, plus a quick dance through some news agency archives we must have subscribed to when Geoff was half-cut and more compliant, the information trickled through nicely. It wasn't clear what Daddy Greatsholme was doing now other than sitting on piles of cash: he'd been spending most of his time running and funding impressively lucrative hedges and other shrubbery. There was less on the family side and virtually nothing about Seb specifically, but the internet confirmed that he did, in fact, exist, and he was the guy I was speaking to - and it wasn't those parts of the internet that make themselves up, either. A quick phone call to a college friend, with access to the archives Geoff was too skinflint to cough up for, second-sourced a lot of it.

The big fat c.o.c.kney b.a.s.t.a.r.d unknown in all this was Geoff. He was a git to be sure. That's partly the job of an editor: spike that story, sub out that gossip, drag you away from that tea to fill that gaping s.p.a.ce with yet another story about those dreary punt wars. It didn't make him evil, or vindictive, although he was.

I despised the man. But was it right to pursue him for a dodgy story two decades old?

Was it wrong not to?

I stayed in on Sat.u.r.day night, which triggered three texts from people asking if I was ill or off the market, and I spent Sunday hibernating and drinking pints of strong, sugary tea. I needed some kind of plan for Monday.

The traditional Bugle extended Monday pub lunch was an opportunity to chew over the gristle of the weekend and its dull football results and maybe pitch a story or two for this week's edition. Geoff would always sit at one end of the table with his enormous team, all three of us, along the sides: it was an editorial meeting with beer and Thai food.

Geoff had a face etched on leather by an unhappy child: circular, with round eyes, round nose, and a thin wonky line for a mouth. By all accounts he'd chubbed up a bit over the years and now looked like a thuggish younger Churchill: fight 'em on the beaches or I'll kick yer teef in. The hair had all but disappeared two newspapers ago, he'd told us. On his right, as ever, Psycho Simon, not that anyone except Geoff ever called him that if they valued their t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es. Geoff and Simon divided the plum stories between them and played good cop bad cop whenever the law or related s.h.i.te needed laying down. Simon had an east-end Goebbels look about him, wired on intravenous espresso. Always with a cigarette or a subst.i.tute in his mouth.

Opposite Simon sat Manish: the other junior, dogsbody, tea-maker, court-sitter, RTA-attender, doorstepper, and whatever else Geoff and Simon didn't want to get off their a.r.s.e to do. I'd started at the paper before Manish - a whole week before - and regularly gave him the benefit of my greater experience. For some reason I'd never once persuaded him to make me a cup of tea. He was of south Asian stock, via Birmingham. Now I was no heavyweight but he was stick-thin. He'd made the cla.s.sic mistake of telling us that his nickname at school had been Twiglet, and so Twiglet he'd instantly become. h.e.l.l, if I had to deal with the ginge and the top-o-the-morning s.h.i.te day in, day out, he could cope. We took the p.i.s.s out of each other all the time, which he claimed wasn't flirting.

After an hour of curry and planning we'd reached the any other business part of the meeting, which was the cue for the bashful little Thai waiter who wouldn't meet my eyes to clear the plates away and deliver the second pints. I decided it was now or never and with a decent hit of endorphins buzzing through me I gulped down a mouthful of beer to gird my ever-fruitful loins.

"Hey, Geoff, tell us about the olden days back when you were thin," I said. "You do any vice stories? Ever had to pull your trousers up, make your excuses and leave?" I wanted to keep it oblique, chummy, k.n.o.bs-up-muvver-braahn.

Geoff gained a far-away look in his eyes. "Once or twice," he replied finally, and I worried for a moment he might tell us more than I wanted to hear. "Back when I was young and virile. And could run." He laughed. "What was 'er name, Psych? That Madam in Chelsea?"

"Which one?" replied Simon. "There was the House of Feather, Jill's Union, the Iron Lady, Chocolate Mansions..."

Geoff laughed again. "I knew you'd remember 'em, you perve. Customer one day, next day outside in a car with a notebook and a photographer."

Simon raised a hand. "Vile slander, that is. Contact in the vice squad. Cost a few quid but she was worth it."

"Yeah, like the prossies."

"See anyone famous?" asked Manish with a half-burp, his fist against his mouth.

Great thing about a table of journalists: everyone starts asking questions, taking the heat off you.

Geoff grunted. "Not 'alf, Twiglet. Couldn't publish, though. The old moneybags' briefs slapped an injunction on us. Can't say a d.i.c.kie about it. Not till you're all grown up, anyway. Nothing to do with the injunction, by the way - you'd blab. Kids always do."

Simon added: "It'd be all over the b.l.o.o.d.y Twitter."

They were a right little twosome. Not in that sense: it was more Fat Ant and Dec than Elton and David. Of course they knew all about me liking guys - I'm not sitting in anyone's closet. If Manish turned up on a Monday morning bleary-eyed and bragging from a dirty weekend I sure as h.e.l.l wasn't going to play little miss prim and proper. If it got them uncomfortable and shifty-a.r.s.ed, it was all the better. I gave not one single toss.

I kept prodding at the editor. "What about, I dunno, businesses? Did you bring any of them down?" I asked.

Geoff turned to Simon and c.o.c.ked his head in my direction. "Jeez, all these questions, Ginge thinks he's a proper journalist." Back to me: "Keep it up kid and we might give you a f.a.g-and-sherry." He supped his beer.

Manish jumped in again. "What's a- what?"

Foam moustache. "Think about it, son. A f.a.g and a sherry. What all the 'undred-year-olds say when you ask 'em why they're not dead yet - you know, the 'to what do you owe your longevity' b.o.l.l.o.c.ks."

Simon, as so often, had a different take. "No-one ever answers 'sitting around watching Countdown and Swedish hard-core p.o.r.nography' do they?" He added a grumpy cackle that evolved into a wet belch.

"I don't know," I replied. "Do they even allow p.o.r.n in retirement homes?"

"G.o.d I f.u.c.king hope so," said Geoff. "The missus is not gonna bleedin' last."

I tried to reverse the conversation gently out of p.o.r.no sidings and back onto the main line to self-destruction. An appeal to the ego seemed like it might get us chuffing along the right track: "So, you didn't bankrupt anyone then. You know, I thought-"

"Yeah, course!" said Geoff, sitting up and preening. "Businesses go t.i.ts-up all the time, but yeah, we 'elped a few out. Only the ones that deserved it though. There was that one, what was its name..."

Simon again, with a tight smile: "GH Instruments?"

Geoff picked at his fingers. "Not the one I was thinking of. But yeah."

"GH Instruments?" I said. "Never heard of them. What did they do?" I knew exactly what they did.

"Fiddled the taxman," said Simon. "Claimed they didn't but the proof was all there in black and white." He swept the back of his hand across the rough table, miming the evidence.

"What kind of proof?" I was trying to strike a casual pose between tedious-lack-of-interest and keep-digging-you-s.h.i.thead. I was pretty much aiming directly for keep-talking-so-we-can-stay-in-the-pub.

"From the auditors," said Simon. "We had about a-"

"Enough of all this c.r.a.p." Geoff slapped his hand abruptly on the table. "This is supposed to be an editorial meeting not a bleedin' history seminar. We're not sitting around a fire toasting m.u.f.fins and smoking dope. Drink up, you've got five minutes. I'm off for a slash."

I wasn't sure what I was expecting. A signed, tearful confession to wrongdoing was never on the cards. I guess an evil glint and some hand-rubbing would've helped. There was no indication of remorse, or regret, or shame. He seemed happy. Entirely happy. In fact they both did.

I spent the afternoon back in the newsroom beneath my headphones listening to something heavy and obnoxious, while laying out c.r.a.ppy shop adverts in the grid and trying not to punch Geoff in the nose.

The clock ticked finally over to five thirty, and I logged out and went straight to Bar Humbug leaving a trail of dust behind me. The two pints at lunchtime had been and gone and needed replacing in spades while I thought about what to say to Seb.

Eddie looked at his watch and smiled as I walked in. The guy with the furry hat was in his usual seat. He must've been installed there permanently by law as part of some cruel and unusual punishment.

"Bit early for you, darling," said Eddie. "Looking for an expose? Cornelius here will give you an expose, won't you dear?" He nodded at the guy in the hat.

I made a noise and he understood: pub-grunting is a universal language. He was professionally sympathetic until I crossed his palm with a fiver and Cornelius the hat guy's waving arms demanded his attention.

I found a corner of the bar with a high stool and a table and did the a.r.s.e-dance to get myself comfortable. The last of the daytime crowd was drifting away into the cold - home for their tea and their soaps. Their cosy family school night in, little Timmy whining about homework, and his son with a switchblade threatening to cut him if he didn't do it. Happy families.

My own childhood was a haunted forest of arguments. Arguments between my mother and my father, until my father had had enough and slammed his way out. Between my mother and my two elder brothers, until they got girlfriends and had arguments with them instead. And between my mother and me, starting the day I came out to her aged thirteen and ending two years later when I moved in with my grammy.

I was the third of two children.

Grammy had run a middle-of-the-road B&B in Dublin near a theatre. She'd seen a thing or two, and sometimes more than two. She'd put me in her attic room with a lock on the door and told me to use it. And I used the bejesus out of it. Occasionally I'd see a critical eye on her at breakfast and we'd have A Discussion, during which she'd wash the same plate forty-nine times and I'd tell her everything was just hunky-dory in fairyland and she didn't need to worry about me. I did my homework, I did my share of the housework, more or less, and I ate all my peas except for the ones I gave to her little Westey when it sat up and begged like one of the boys from school.

And sometimes at school I got beaten up, and had a cry, and she was there for me, and she didn't argue with me.

She was there waving at the door when I left for college. She wasn't there for my graduation. n.o.body was there.

Ancient history.

I couldn't fix my own childhood, and I couldn't fix Seb's either. I wasn't sure whether he'd ultimately gain any solace, any happiness, from kicking Geoff up the metaphorical a.r.s.e. I knew why he wanted to do it, though.

Seb strolled into the bar almost exactly thirty minutes after I did. I showed no surprise, just raising my near-empty gla.s.s a fraction and allowing myself a small grin. Perhaps his source was Eddie, perhaps the hat man, perhaps some ninja hiding under a banquette blending in with the grime and the faded white paint, just out of the corner of my eye.

Seb bought a soft drink, causing all manner of fake outrage and eyebrow action from Eddie, and took the stool beside me. Compared to Friday he'd downgraded the dress code to catalogue casual. One of the expensive catalogues. Pale blue cashmere and mustard chinos: he looked like a damp beach.

"What a coincidence!" he said, knowing I knew.

"Good to see you again," I smiled. "If I'd known you were this loaded I'd have let you buy all the mojitos."

"I did offer."

I could only agree.

I expected at least a few minutes of banter before we got down to business, but he had other ideas. He looked me in the eye: "So, Conor. Three days. What have you learned?"

I bought a few seconds of thinking time by downing what remained of my drink.

"I'm a mere junior reporter," I said. "I don't have super-mega-ultra-clearance on the top-secret database held in the evil journalist castle just outside Slough. I've learned enough, though."

"Will you help me?"

It was at once the trickiest and easiest of questions. To say yes would turn me from a simple and/or naive journalist seeking the truth into a vigilante, a cowboy gunning down other cowboys in the not-so-wild west. To say no would mean I wasn't interested in the truth, or the short-term or the long-term effects of the stories I hypothetically wrote, when Geoff gave me the opportunity to hypothetically write them and didn't then cross my name out and write his in instead.

I stared at the ceiling. Behind Seb, Eddie was thumping the coffee machine with a c.o.c.ktail shaker and inventing swear words. I could do that instead, I thought. I could work behind a bar. Flirt with customers, pour pints, learn how to juggle. A much simpler life- "Let's make a deal," I said finally. "I call this the Give Him Enough Rope deal. Together, we'll come up with a story, somehow, I don't know how, that's going to tickle the interest of the dynamic duo back in the office. And we'll make sure it's juicy, lucrative and one thousand and one percent toss. And we'll see if Geoff sticks his little round head into the noose. If he does, there you go. We pull the whole rug out."

"And if he doesn't?"

"Let's hope he does."

Seb studied his gla.s.s, a p.i.s.s-weak concoction of lime and lemonade overdosing on ice. He spun it slowly round, examining it like a delicate artefact just unearthed from the ashes of Pompeii, except a little wetter. I was biting so hard on my tongue to stay quiet I expected a chunk of flesh to flop into my pint gla.s.s at any second.

He looked up and took a breath. "So what's the story?"