The Trade Off: a Novel, page 14
Stella watches numbly as Jess slaps her about the face and leans in, in the desperate hope that she’ll hear a breath escape.
“W-we need to…” starts Stella, struggling to form a sentence. “The hotel—they’ll know what to do. I’ll … I’ll go to reception.”
“You can’t leave me here with her,” sobs Jess. “Call them, get an ambulance here—they might be able to…”
Stella looks at her, unable to hide her sense of hopelessness.
“It might not be too late,” pleads Jess, pressing down on Yasmin’s still chest. “If we just…”
Stella goes to Jess and gently pulls her away. “She’s gone,” she says. “There’s nothing we can do.”
25
Jess
“How the hell could this happen?” rages Max with his head in his hands. “I mean, was this even a remote possibility?”
I can see his mouth moving and can hear what he’s saying, but it feels like I’m in a bubble, distanced from his words and the distorted faces, which look like they’re staring at me through the bottom of a bottle.
“How will we ever know that?” says Stella, shifting from one leg to the other.
I couldn’t stand, even if I wanted to.
“Well, how did she seem with you?” he asks me, exasperated. “Did you know she was capable of … of this?”
Does he not think I’ve asked myself the same question a million times already? Tortured myself for not seeing the signs. Scrutinized every single word Yasmin said. Analyzed every simple action she performed. Wondering whether it was the prelude to something she had always planned to do.
“That’s not fair,” says Stella, stepping in. “You can’t possibly expect Jess to have known this was coming.”
“Well, she was with Yasmin last night,” Max says as if I’m not here. I wish I wasn’t. “Surely she must have sensed something wasn’t quite right.”
I can feel him staring at me from across his desk, waiting for a response.
“Did she say anything to you—anything other than what’s written in the paper?”
I shake my head numbly.
“If you were in the hotel room with her after the ceremony, she must have said something. Think…” He slams his hand down on the desk.
“What would you do with it, if she had?” I ask acerbically. “Splash it across tomorrow’s front page?”
“No,” says Max resolutely. “I’d give it to the police, as I’m sure they’ll have to carry out an investigation.”
My eyes widen as I look at him. “There’ll be an … an investigation?” My voice is high-pitched, and the words catch in my throat. “Why would they need to investigate? It’s clear what happened.”
Heat prickles my skin, clogging my pores, as I imagine a forensics team combing Yasmin’s hotel room, finding my hair, my fingerprints, my DNA all over the glass that I had drunk from. I shake myself down. I’d laugh, if it wasn’t so goddamn tragic.
“They’ll need a statement from you,” Max goes on, as I shift uncomfortably in my seat. “They’ll need to know exactly what she said, how she was—every little detail of the time you spent together.”
“She took her own life because photographs of herself in a compromising position have been plastered all over the front page of a national newspaper. That’s what this is about, pure and simple.”
Despite myself, I’m once again confronted by what must have happened after I left Yasmin. I picture her arranging a clandestine meeting with the lover I never imagined she’d have, kissing him in what she thought was an empty hotel corridor, and her horror when she realized that she’d been caught on camera.
Had she called me then, desperate to be told that it wasn’t as bad as she thought? Or had she called me earlier, hoping that I’d talk her out of doing it in the first place? Either way, I’d not been there when Yasmin needed me; to tell her that the husband she loved would forgive her, that the children she lived for depended on her, that the public she both revered and despised did not have the right to judge her, and that nothing was worth taking her life for.
No doubt she would have realized all that herself this morning, if she’d only given herself the chance to.
Max lets out a long sigh and runs a hand through his hair. “OK, so we need to treat this with real sensitivity,” he says somberly. “We’ll clear the front page and the inside spread, but I want a well-thought-out tribute to the woman we’ve come to know, from being in our front rooms every week—her best bits from On the Ranch, quotes from media personalities who knew her—”
“Don’t either of you feel remotely responsible?” I ask, interrupting him.
Max fixes me with a steely glare. “Of those responsible,” he says, drawing speech marks in the air with his fingers, “Yasmin is already dead, and the man she was with is no doubt in hiding. While I understand how distressing this must be for you, I have to emphasize that if it were not for Yasmin Chopra putting herself in this position, we wouldn’t have the pictures to run…”
“Yes, but—”
Max holds his hand up. “That’s the crux of the matter, and I won’t have this turn into a witch hunt from one of my own people. There’ll be enough of that going on, without your help.”
I bite down on my lip, feeling the tug of tears pull at the back of my throat.
“Now, why don’t you take yourself off home and try to put this behind you?” he says.
“Put it behind me?” I echo disbelievingly. “People’s lives are being used for clickbait and you just want me to go home, have a cup of tea and shake it off, as if it never happened.”
He looks at me with raised eyebrows. “What choice do you have?” he asks, somewhat condescendingly. “The world keeps turning, and you have to keep turning with it. People will continue to behave badly, and newspapers will continue to report it.”
I snort derisorily. “And you can sleep well at night, knowing the part you play?”
“Jess…” Stella warns.
“It’s the nature of the beast,” says Max. “Now go and take some time out, and come back in tomorrow with a clear head.”
I reach into my bag for my security pass, before throwing it onto Max’s desk. “I can’t even begin to understand how you can do all this again tomorrow to someone else,” I cry. “I will never get Yasmin Chopra’s blood off my hands, and I hope to God you don’t, either.”
26
Stella
Within an hour of Yasmin’s death hitting the wires, Peter is marching across the newsroom toward Max’s office. Stella sits at her desk, her shoulders uncharacteristically up around her ears, in the vain hope that she’ll be rendered invisible. Because there’s no way out of this for her; it’s her name on the copy, so it might as well be her signature on the death certificate.
“Stella!” comes the raucous roar, though she’s unsure which raging lion it’s coming from. The office falls deathly quiet as she makes the thirty-foot walk along the plank—every step steeped in regret, guilt and resignation.
“I don’t even know where to start!” barks Peter, his chest puffed up with frustration. He paces the floor in front of the windows. “I mean, does somebody want to tell me how the fuck this could have happened?”
Stella looks to Max, who’s running a nervous hand through his hair.
“If we’d have thought for one minute…”
“But that’s the fucking problem, Max,” yells Peter. “You don’t fucking think. The news works in twenty-four-hour cycles, and you’ve just proven how one day you’re the cock of the walk and the next a feather duster. This morning everyone was lauding our stellar reporting, and tomorrow we’re going to be vilified for causing someone to kill themself.”
“In his defense,” steps in Stella, even though every neuron in her brain is telling her not to, “the pictures were sent to me, and I was the one who brought them to Max.”
“I don’t give a flying fuck who did what, when—all I care about is salvaging the paper from the jaws of extinction.”
The crushing words—from someone who won’t ever have a bad word said about the institution that is The Globe—pull Stella up. She knows this is bad, but is it really that bad?
“Who spoke to this woman?” asks Peter, looking between them, with his hands on his hips. “Was it you?”
Stella almost wilts under his unrelenting glare. “It was a junior reporter,” she says.
“Well, get her in here,” says Peter.
“She’s gone,” says Stella, half hoping that he doesn’t hear her.
“What do you mean, gone?”
“She wasn’t able to deal with it,” says Max. “She’s only young and, in all honesty, she isn’t made of the right stuff for this game.”
“So why did you send her out, then?” asks Peter. “If you’d sent a more experienced journalist—like Stella—she would have got what we needed to make this look like it was this woman’s problem, instead of ours.”
“This woman’s name is Yasmin,” says Stella defiantly, unable to let the slight go. “And it wouldn’t have mattered who we’d sent out; the outcome would have been the same.”
“Yes, but you would have got something more,” he says, jabbing a finger in Stella’s direction. “You would have got something that would have proved to our readers that this woman was living a lie and couldn’t deal with it anymore. Instead of making it seem that what we did was the only reason she’s topped herself.”
Stella can’t help but blanch at his choice of words. She knows Peter’s a ferocious businessman, but she rather hoped he had a semblance of compassion, somewhere deep down. If he has, it wouldn’t hurt him to show it around now.
“I think she would have done what she’s done, regardless,” says Stella. “It’s the pictures that tipped Yasmin over the edge, and I have to take full responsibility for that.”
Peter’s lips pull back, as if he has a sour taste in his mouth. “To be totally honest, I don’t care what did or didn’t make her do it. She means nothing to me. What matters is my newspaper and my reputation. It’s all about damage limitation from here on in, so we need to get the rookie back in here. And don’t let her leave until she gives us something that proves this woman had things going on in her life that made her do it.”
Stella looks at Max with raised eyebrows. Peter clearly hasn’t met Jess yet.
The mood on the floor is somber, the self-congratulatory bonhomie of a great issue now replaced by the daunting prospect of turning public opinion around.
For once in her life, Stella doesn’t even know where to start.
“I’ve got a call for you,” Lottie calls out. “He asked for you personally.”
“OK, put it through.”
“Sounds a bit pissed off,” says Lottie, a little too late.
“Stella Thorne,” she barks.
“You need to explain … and very fast,” the man says in broken English. “I mean, how is this even allowed?”
Stella is not in the mood for a disgruntled reader, and throws Lottie a cautionary glance for letting him through the net.
“Would you like to tell me what the problem is, sir?”
“The problem?” he repeats, verging on hysteria. “The problem is that you use my photo without permission, without payment … That is not good business, where I come from.”
Stella rubs her temples. “Then you need to take it up with the Picture desk,” she says, going to put the phone down.
“But it is your name,” he goes on. “You need to take the responsibility—because now she is dead.”
Stella holds the receiver back to her ear. “Who is?” she asks, slowly and deliberately.
“The lady chef,” he shrills.
“Are you talking about Yasmin Chopra?”
“Yes—is the one I’m saying about,” he goes on. “She is not with me. I am not with her. Why you make it so?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” Stella says wearily.
“The man in the pictures: he is me…”
Stella’s eyes widen as she assimilates this information. This was not what she was expecting from this call when she first picked up, but now that she has him, she needs to decide what to do with him—and quickly.
“OK, let’s take this nice and slowly,” she says, sounding as if she’s trying to tame a rabid dog. “Can I start by taking your name?”
“Carlos Moreno,” he says. “I can’t have this on my head—it looks bad for me, you understand?”
“Yes, I understand,” says Stella, still not knowing exactly how to play this.
“Is it true?” he asks. “Is she really dead?”
“I’m so sorry,” says Stella, unable to believe that the burden of telling this man his lover is dead has fallen to her. “I can’t begin to imagine how you must be feeling. Is there anything I can do?”
“Yes!” he exclaims. “You will have to be giving me money.”
Stella lets out a long, slow breath. What is wrong with people? She’s just confirmed his lover’s death, and his first thought is of money?
“It’s probably best if we could get together and talk,” she says, sensing an opportunity to appease Peter. She’s got more chance of getting something out of this man than out of their recently departed junior reporter.
“I’m talking now,” he says a little more aggressively. It’s as if he hasn’t got time to talk about Yasmin—he’s simply got dollar signs in his eyes.
“I think it would be better if we meet,” she says, forcing herself to stay patient. “I’d be very happy to listen to you and get your side of the story across. Are you still in London?”
“London?” he laughs. “I’m in Brazil.”
The cogs in Stella’s brain stop turning. She’s never been good at maths, but even she knows that he’d have to go some to have been in a London hotel last night and in Brazil a mere fourteen hours later. It’s possible—but highly unlikely.
“I don’t understand,” she says as the pieces begin to fall into place. “Why did you leave London so quickly? Did something happen between you and Yasmin? Did you fight, after the pictures were taken? Did you know what she’d done before you got on that plane?”
She fumbles to get her Dictaphone out of her desk drawer. Shit! Maybe it isn’t what they first thought. Maybe there’s more to Yasmin’s death—it would certainly make more sense. Jess’s copy suggests a happy woman: the mother of three children, the youngest just a few months old; in love with her husband. Maybe this Carlos guy couldn’t handle that. Maybe he …
But then she pulls herself up, because despite her best efforts not to return to what she saw in that hotel room this morning, she knows everything about it has the hallmark of a suicide. This was no cry for help, and there were no signs of foul play. It was what Yasmin intended.
“Plane?” he says. “I haven’t left Brazil in three years.”
“Wait—what?” exclaims Stella, losing patience. “How could you have been in London with Yasmin last night then?”
“This is what I’m saying! I know nothing of this girl. She is a complete stranger to me—we’re separated by nine thousand kilometers, yet there I am with her.”
Stella laughs, really laughs. Because if she doesn’t, she’ll cry. She’s had some fruit loops in her time, but this guy takes the biscuit. She picks up the copy of The Globe with the offending front page, desperately trying to find the right words. “So you’re saying you’ve never met Yasmin, never kissed her, but you’d like some money because this guy looks a bit like you.”
“He is me!” he says as Stella puts the phone down.
“Another nutter?” asks Lottie.
“Afraid so,” says Stella, absentmindedly moving her cursor onto the email that’s just landed in her in-box from Carlos Moreno. When she double-clicks and the photos appear in all their glory, she gasps.
She’d almost rather he’d killed Yasmin than this.
27
Jess
The waves of regret wash over me as I lie in bed, tears soaking my pillow as I silently beg the clock to turn back. I don’t want much; just a few hours to the time when I could have stopped this from happening.
Yasmin’s words goad me on a continuous loop inside my head, showing me how I could so easily have realized what she was trying to say. It was all there, hiding in plain sight, so why did I ignore it? I was perfectly placed to help her wait out the storm, but I failed her. Not only when I left her alone last night, but when I ignored her desperate cries for help in the early hours of this morning.
I pull the duvet over my head to ward off the glare of the afternoon sun that is streaming in through the window. I hate wishing it were gray and gloomy, but nothing about today is remotely sunny. I doubt it ever will be again. The ringing of my phone interrupts my maudlin thoughts, and I’m grateful for its shrill tone rescuing me.
“Oh my god, Jess,” shrieks Flic. “Have you seen the news? It’s that woman, Yasmin … She’s—”
“I know,” I say, unable to hear her finish the sentence. “I…” My voice cracks and I cough to clear my throat. “I … I found her.”
“What?” she exclaims. “Are you serious?”
I rub my head, wondering what part of Flic would think I was joking.
“It was so … so…” I can’t stop myself picturing Yasmin’s lifeless body hanging there, and my pathetic attempt to save her. “Oh god, I can’t even…” Tears roll down my face faster than I can wipe them away.
“Where are you?” she asks.
“I’m at home,” I sob. “But I don’t know what to do with myself. I can’t believe it’s happening. It’s so horrific and it’s all my fault.”
“Now listen to me. This isn’t your fault.”
“I quit my job,” I cry. “I can’t carry on working for an industry that does this to people.”
A sob catches in my throat as I begin to think about how many other lives have been destroyed by the toxic tabloids. God knows, I’ve seen enough in the short time I’ve been working at one.
