The Spoiler (40 page)

The last quote was from Tamara herself. Her missing byline still rankled but, she reminded herself, one particular satisfaction would not escape her—Tania Singh’s long, drearily respectful article on the now-discredited Honor Tait would have to be spiked. Not even the books pages would run a fawning piece about the sordid old child abuser now.

An hour later the phone rang. It was Tim, and he was exultant.

“It’s a cracker. This is global. We’ve had loads of interest. TV, too.”

“What about my byline, you double-crossing bastard?”

“I meant to talk to you about that.”

“What happened?” She was shrill with anger. “You promised!”

“I know, I know. Old Perry kicked up a fuss. I owed him.”

“You owe me, too. Remember?”

“Look, our financial arrangement still stands, and the fact that your byline didn’t appear could work to your advantage. You’re not implicated. How about doing a follow-up for next week, setting up a face-to-face with the old woman, getting the dope on her spicy life with the stars?”

Tamara hesitated.

“Money?” she asked.

“Shedloads, darling.”

“Byline?”

“Picture byline.”

“Guaranteed?”

“Guaranteed.”

“Staff job?”

“I’ll see what I can do. Honest. This story’s going to run and run, and
if you can get the follow-up, you’ll be able to walk into any job in Fleet Street.”

“But I can’t really see Honor Tait agreeing to an interview with anyone from
The Sphere
. Especially after today.”

“Did anyone mention
The Sphere
? Don’t you work for
The Monitor
? For now, anyway.”

The Gut and Bucket was enjoying an unexpected surge in business. Across the road, outside Holmbrook Mansions, the jostling photographers, reporters and TV camera crews, waiting since dawn for an appearance from the “randy gran,” were using the pub as their catering unit. The news desks from every paper, from the most scapegrace tabloid pranksters to the broadsheet upholders of all that was decent in British civil society, were represented in the jostling scrum. The broadsheets were there not to cover the story itself but to report on the antics of the tabloid underclass, with the haughtiness of anthropologists observing the sacrificial rites of a Stone Age tribe, but their supercilious accounts would also serve the useful purpose of providing sophisticated readers with the saltiest details of the Honor Tait story.

From a safe distance across the street, Tamara spotted Bucknell gloomily fingering a roll-up on the edge of the crowd. Tom O’Brien was in a huddle with the show-business reporter from
The Star
and
The Sphere
photographer Tamara had worked with on the story about the policeman’s drug-using son. Milly Hall-Westmacott was handing out polystyrene cups of coffee. Tamara crossed the road, slipped past them unnoticed and dodged into a cobbled mews heaped with damp litter.

She was not entirely alone. A stout middle-aged woman, dressed in muted tweeds as if for a pheasant shoot, was standing on tiptoes, rummaging through the large metal bins beside the service entrance of the mansion block. It was Bernice Bullingdon. She was wearing yellow rubber gloves, and open at her feet lay a large wheeled suitcase, into which she was dropping damp gouts of garbage. Hearing Tamara’s footsteps she glanced up with the toothy alertness of a startled meerkat. No words were exchanged. Bernice Bullingdon did not recognise Tamara from
The Monitor
—the younger journalist had been too lowly to merit attention—but she swiftly deduced that the girl was no threat and turned back to
her task, sifting through another suppurating mound of old newspapers and kitchen waste. What was she looking for? Honor Tait’s discarded love letters? Her credit card statements revealing details of trysts in Paris or Rome?

It was Tamara’s story that had generated all this industry, that had summoned up the restless, good-humoured crowd outside the flats and set Bernice Bullingdon ragpicking. Uplifted by an unfamiliar sense of power, Tamara walked on to the service entrance and pushed the buzzer. Ruth Lavenham had arranged for the doorman to meet her there, and he grinned as he beckoned Tamara in. He was enjoying the subterfuge.

“Haven’t had anything like this since the time they said one of the Beatles spent a night here with an Iranian princess. Pack of lies, of course. But we couldn’t get rid of them. They were out there for days.”

She followed him down to the basement, a fetid concrete bunker housing a vast and ancient boiler.

“They’ve tried all sorts,” he said, leading her into the shabby service lift. “Dressed as bike messengers with urgent packages for her, pretended to be florists delivering bloody great bouquets to her. They even got a window cleaner’s cradle from somewhere. Went up the outside of the building with mops and buckets. I noticed the cameras just in time. I threatened to cut the cables.”

He got out at the ground floor and, smiling conspiratorially, extended his stubby hand. Tamara shook it vigorously, but a look of displeasure clouded his face as the doors closed between them. Only then did she realise she had been meant to tip him. Never mind; she was unlikely to be back here for another visit. She continued up to the fourth floor alone. The building was silent, apart from the creak and wheeze of the lift doors and Tamara’s own footsteps, which rang out ominously as she walked along the corridor. Where was everyone? Were they all hiding from the press?

She rang the doorbell. Minutes passed, marked by the scrape of bolts and jangle of keys, before the door was finally opened a couple of inches, secured by a brass chain, giving Honor Tait a full-length crack through which she could safely satisfy herself that the girl was entirely alone. The chain was unfastened and Tamara was admitted in silence.

This time, the old woman had made no attempt to smarten herself up for the interview. Her hair was unkempt, wisps of it coming astray
from hastily fastened hairgrips, and her dress—probably the same black dress she had worn for their first meeting—was stained and creased. She looked appropriately haggard, this seedy corrupter of boys and defiler of young men, as she led Tamara into the sitting room. This too had changed. The room was shockingly empty. The place had been stripped. The old woman sat down, breathing heavily, and placed her hand across her bony chest to calm her heart.

“What is it you want?” she said eventually.

“I thought it was you who wanted me,” Tamara replied, briskly laying out her tape recorder and notebook.

Honor looked across at her, taking her in properly for what seemed like the first time—a gift-wrapped package of ignorance and greed. Was that twist in the girl’s mouth a simper of satisfaction?

“I’ve agreed to give a further interview for your magazine,
S
^*
nday
,” Honor said. “I’d be grateful if you could make this as brief as possible.”

“I won’t be long,” Tamara said, pressing the record button. “I just need to fill in a few gaps. You talked a lot about your work last time, but I wanted to ask a few more questions about your life.”

Honor sighed.

“What you don’t seem to understand is that my work is my life. There is … has been … nothing else.”

“It’s not your work
they’re
interested in, is it?” Tamara said, indicating the front door with a nod. “That lot out there.”

Honor leaned forward, her hands kneading the arms of her chair, and spoke quietly, as if to herself.

“It’s been ghastly. A complete nightmare.”

“I suppose in one way it shows just what a respected figure you are,” Tamara offered, anxious to get the interview moving. “That people are still so keen to read stories about you. You’re a cultural icon.”

Honor’s laugh was like a howl of pain.

“You’ve read these ‘stories,’ I take it?”

“I’ve seen a few things in the press, yes.”

“A ‘few things’? It’s everywhere, impossible to escape. On the wireless, too. And the television.”

“Really?” Tamara felt another flush of pride.

She had watched a fusty academic, T. P. Kettering, being wheeled out on several TV news programmes to give his considered views on Honor
Tait’s “tempestuous love life.” Kettering’s biography of the old woman, previously remaindered, was being rushed into print again with a new chapter taking in the recent revelations.

“I’m the Monster of Maida Vale to the tabloids,” Honor continued, “and a vain old fool to the liberal press. An object of loathing and a national laughing stock.”

International, too. Under Gifford-Jones’s byline, Tamara’s story had gone out on the wires and been sold round the world.
The Sphere
’s usually becalmed syndication department had to get in extra temporary staff to deal with the frenzy of enquiries. Tamara would get 30 per cent of the fees, but the money seemed almost superfluous now; the real reward was the transcendent euphoria of generating the biggest story of the day.
El País, Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Izvestia, Kathimerini, O Globo, La Prensa, The Times of India
—they had all bought it and, in the case of those papers without the funds or inclination to buy the piece from
The Sphere
, simply lifted it, gratis, and rushed to publish it before their rivals, generating a planetary pandemic of spoilers. All of them, those papers that had paid for it and those that had pilfered it, claimed the story as their own and, with the exception of the
New York Times
, had labelled it as “exclusive.”

In the U.S., newspapers and magazines had focused on Honor Tait’s Hollywood connections and her anti–Vietnam War stance. TV stations were running the story with old film footage unearthed of a charity event she had attended with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, though Tait was not actually caught on camera with either of them.

VETERAN WAR REPORTER, 80, IN BRITISH TABLOID SEX SCANDAL
, was the
New York Times
headline. It used the picture with Sinatra, and a recent photograph of Tait taken at a theatre first-night party with a dashing left-wing playwright and the actor Jason Kelly, but the paper refrained from printing
The Sphere
’s snatched photographs with Dev.
El País
, similarly reticent, focused on Tait’s role in the Spanish civil war and chose the Franco shot to illustrate its story. For
Le Monde
it was an opportunity to air respectful accounts of her
amitié
with Cocteau and Picasso in its news pages, and for its commentators to shake their heads over Britain’s unsophisticated attitude to sex. In the UK, however, there was homogeneity in approach if not in presentation; newspapers, broadsheet and tabloid, were unanimous in their condemnation of Honor Tait—the hypocritical
champion of the weak, the Kid’s Crusader, who had, all along, been abusing the vulnerable in the most evil way imaginable.

As the veteran war reporter buried her head in her hands, Tamara wondered if she should rummage in her bag for a tissue and present it with a cocked head and an understanding smile? But Tait had paid no heed to Dev’s tears. She was at the end of a long life of boundless privilege and had never been called to account for her crimes until now. A few years of public disgrace at the end of her days—tears before bedtime—were the only price she would have to pay. He was a young man with years ahead of him, and he had been robbed of any chance of happiness and a normal life. She had got off lightly.

The old woman looked up and clenched her frail fist at an invisible adversary.

“Almost worse than the howling lynch mobs and the sneerers,” she said at last, “are the feminists, the Isadora Talbots, who have spoken out—for a reasonable fee, presumably—solemnly defending what they call the ‘unsung sexuality of the postmenopausal woman.’ ”

“It’ll blow over,” Tamara said.

“ ‘Blow over’?” Tait’s voice cracked. “Like a tropical hurricane, I suppose. Leaving devastated towns and countless corpses.”

Tamara glanced at her tape recorder and wondered how much more humouring she was going to have to do here.

“Your publisher agreed that this was the best hope of setting the record straight—a long and sympathetic profile, reminding people of your achievements, the other aspects of your life. Your legacy.”

Honor rallied.

“Ah yes. ‘Setting the record straight.’ You mean giving me the opportunity to damn myself further for the idle pleasure of your readers?”

Honor had set several records straight herself over the years, duping conceited fools into greater indiscretions. But she had run out of options. Ruth and Aidan had tried to persuade her to sue
The Sphere
, and Clemency, after a period of sulky evasiveness—the story had generated some unhelpful publicity for her new charity—had offered to fund her costs. But Honor had refused to take legal action.

“Do you really think I want to spend weeks in court, paying expensive libel lawyers, entertaining this pernicious nonsense?”

Bobby volunteered to run a piece in
Zeitgeist
. It would, he had
insisted, be entirely about Honor’s work, and would make no reference to the tabloid storm. But Ruth had been dismissive.

“
Zeitgeist
has no real heft. It’s full of lightweight reviews of best-sellers and blockbusters and has no international profile.”

Besides, she said, Bobby had no influence on the rest of the paper and any
Zeitgeist
piece on Honor, no matter how sanitised, would be trumpeted on
The Courier
’s front page, providing its news desk with an excuse to air, all over again, every last lubricious detail of the original tabloid story.

“Your only hope is some high-minded hagiography,” Ruth had continued. “
S
^*
nday
magazine—see the girl from
The Monitor
again.”

So here it was. Today, in her own home, with the bawds and the titillators baying outside, Honor was entrusting her reputation, her legacy, to this little booby and her fatuous magazine.

“Did he ever sing to you?” Tara Sim was asking.

“I’m sorry?” Honor was perplexed. “Sing? Who?”

“Sinatra!” The girl’s tone was sardonic. She was frustrated by the old woman’s failure to keep up. “When you were alone together. Private … intimate … moments. You know, ‘Strangers in the Night’? ‘Fly Me to the Moon’?”