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His editor Alec Norton had taken one look at him and ordered him away on extended leave.
‘Somewhere quiet, boy,’ he’d rumbled, and tossed a card across the desk. ‘This is a place that Mary and I use up in the Yorkshire Dales—the Rowcliffe Inn—soft beds, good food, and peace. I recommend it. Put yourself back together, and then we’ll talk.’
Sam had gone up to Rowcliffe, a cluster of grey stone houses around a church, and walked and eaten and slept until the nightmares had begun to recede. The weather had been mixed—all four seasons in one day sometimes—but the cold, clean air had driven the stench of blood, disease and death out of his lungs.
He’d explored the two antique shops that Rowcliffe boasted, eaten home-made curd tart in the small tea-rooms, and visited the surprisingly up-to-date print works of the local paper, the Rowcliffe Examiner. He’d been beginning to wonder how he could ever tear himself away when a message had come for him from a friend on the Echo newsdesk via the hotel’s fax. ‘Houston, we have a problem.’
One telephone call later, his career had lain in ruins about him. Because Alex Norton was in hospital, recovering from a heart attack, and the Echo had a new editor—a woman called Cilla Godwin, whom Sam himself had once christened Godzilla.
She was far from unattractive. In her early forties, she had a cloud of mahogany-coloured hair, a full-lipped mouth, and a head-turning figure. Sam’s nickname referred to her reputation as an arch-predator, cutting a swathe of destruction through one newspaper office after another, inflicting change where it wasn’t needed, and getting rid of those who disagreed with her policies.
He’d no doubt she knew about her nickname, and who’d devised it. When it came to backstabbing, the newsroom at the Echo made the Borgias look like amateurs.
But he’d committed a far worse sin than that. During her stint as the Echo’s Features Editor she’d made a heavy pass at Sam, after an office party, and he’d turned her down. He’d tried to be gentle—to let her walk away with her pride intact—but she hadn’t been fooled, and he’d seen her eyes turn hard and cold, like pebbles, and known he had an enemy.
And now she was the Echo’s boss, with the power to hire and fire.
He’d come back to London to find his foreign news job had been given to someone with half his experience, and that he was on ‘temporary reassignment’ to Features, which was about the most humiliating demotion he could have envisaged. Cilla had told him herself, relishing every moment of it. She had never been magnanimous in victory.
It was virtual dismissal, of course. She planned to make his life such a misery that he’d be glad to resign. But Sam had no intention of playing her game. He had company shares, and belonged to the joint profit scheme, all of which he would forfeit if he simply walked out.
When he left, he meant to have another job to go to and a negotiated settlement with the Echo. Nothing less would do.
‘Lonely in London’ had been all her own idea, of course. It was to be, she’d told him, her eyes glinting with malice, ‘an in-depth investigation of the women who replied to the personal columns’.
Sam had looked back blankly at her. ‘It’s hardly a new idea,’ he’d objected.
‘Then it’s up to you to make it new,’ she said sharply. ‘We want real human interest material—tear-jerking stuff. You’ll have to get close to them—explore their hopes, their dreams, even their fantasies.’
Sam shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. They’ve put themselves on the line already by replying. They won’t want to discuss their reasons with a journalist.’
Cilla sighed. ‘You don’t get it, do you? As far as these women are concerned you’re the real thing. A man searching for real love. You’ll get them to trust you—and you’ll get them to talk.’
Sam said quietly, ‘You have to be joking.’
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