"I don't make a habit of exploiting people, Mrs. Powell, and I am interested in Billy Blake's story. Look, what have you got to lose by seeing me? You have my word that we'll abandon the whole thing if you don't like the way the interview's going."
"All right," she said, with abrupt decision. "I'll expect you tomorrow at eight." She rang off without saying goodbye.
The Street offices were a tired reminder that its namesake, Fleet Street, was once the glorious hub of the newspaper industry. The building still carried the masthead above its front door, but the letters were faded and cracked and few passers-by even noticed them. As with most of the broadsheets which had moved into cheaper, more efficient premises in the Docklands, the writing was on the wall for The Street, too. A new dynamic owner with ambitions to become a media tycoon waited in the shadows with plans to revamp the magazine by achieving lower costs, improved production and a twenty-first century image through one galvanizing leap into pristine property in an outer London suburb. Meanwhile the magazine struggled on with outmoded work practices in elegant but impractical surroundings under an editor, Jim Pearce, who hankered after the good old days when the rich exploited the poor and everyone knew where he stood.
JP, still ignorant of what awaited them in the first few weeks of the new year (in his case enforced early retirement) but increasingly worried about the present owner's refusal to discuss anything that smacked of long-term strategy, sought out Deacon in his office the following afternoon. The only concessions to modernity were a word processor and an answering machine; otherwise the room looked as it had done for thirty years, with purple walls, an oak-panelled door covered in sheets of cheap white hardboard to smooth out unsightly bumps, orange floral curtains at the window, all of which were the height of interior design in the heady, classless days of the 1960s.
"I want you to take a photographer with you when you interview Mrs. Powell, Mike," said Pearce in the belligerent tone that grew more ingrained as each worrying day passed. "It's too good an opportunity to miss. I want tears and breast-beating from a Thatcherite who's seen the light."
Deacon kept his eyes on his computer screen and continued typing. At six feet tall and weighing over 180 pounds, he wasn't easily bullied. In any case, he'd lied to Mrs. Powell, and he didn't particularly want her to know it. "No way," he said bluntly. "She did a runner the last time photographers turned up looking for pictures, and I'm not giving up precious time to go out and interview the silly cow only to have her slam the door in my face when she sees a camera lens."
Pearce ignored this. "I've told Lisa Smith to go with you. She knows how to behave, and if she keeps the camera out of sight till she's inside, the two of you should be able to talk Mrs. Powell round." He cast a critical eye over Deacon's crumpled jacket and five o'clock shadow. "And, for Christ's sake, smarten yourself up, or you'll give the poor woman the screaming habdabs. I want a rich well-fed Tory weeping over the iniquities of government housing policy, not someone scared out of her wits because she thinks a middle-aged mugger's come through her door."
Deacon tilted back his chair and regarded his boss through half-closed lids. "It won't make any difference what her blasted political affiliations are because I'm not including her unless she has something pertinent to say. She's your idea, JP, not mine. Homelessness is too big a social problem to be cheapened by one fat Tory weeping into her lace handkerchief." He lit a cigarette and tossed the match angrily into an already overfull ashtray. "I've sweated blood over this and I won't have it turned into a slanging match by the subs. I'm trying to offer some solutions here, not indulge in yah-boo politics."
Pearce prowled across to the window and stared down on a wet, grey Fleet Street where cars crawled bumper-to-bumper in the driving rain and the odd window showed an ephemeral gaiety with lighted Christmas trees and sprayed-on snow. More than ever he had a sense of chapters ending. "What sort of solutions?"
Deacon searched through a pile of papers on his desk and removed a typed sheet. "The consensus sort. I've taken views from politicians, religious leaders, and different social lobby groups to assess how the picture's changed in the last twenty years." He consulted the page. "There's across-the-board agreement that the figures on family breakdown, teenage drug and drink addiction, and teenage pregnancies are alarming, and I'm using that agreement as a starting point."
"Boring, Mike. Tell me something new." He watched a progression of raised black umbrellas pass below the window, and he was reminded of all the funerals he'd attended over the years.
Deacon took in a lungful of smoke as he studied JP's back. "Like what?"
"Tell me you've got a statement from a government minister saying all single mothers should be sterilized. Then maybe I'll let you off your interview with Mrs. Powell. Have you?" His breath misted the glass.
"No," said Deacon evenly. "Oddly enough I couldn't find a single mainstream politician who was that stupid." He squared the papers on his desk. "How about this for a quote? The poor are always with us, and the only way to deal with them is to love them."
Pearce turned round. "Who said that?"
"Jesus Christ."
"Is that supposed to be funny?"
Deacon gave an indifferent shrug. "Not particularly. Thought-provoking, perhaps. In two thousand years no one's come up with a better solution. Certainly no politician anywhere at any time has managed to crack the problem. Like it or not, even communism has its share of paupers."
"We're a political magazine, not an apologist for born-again Christianity," said JP coldly. "If mud-slinging offends you so much then you should have kept your job on The Independent. Think about that the next time you tell me you don't want to get your hands dirty."
Thoughtfully, Deacon blew a smoke ring into the air above his head. "You can't afford to sack me," he murmured. "It's my byline that's keeping this rag afloat. You know as well as I do that, until the tabloids raided my piece on the health service for scare stories about chaos in the A and E departments, ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent of the adult population of this country had no idea The Street was still being published. I'm a necessary evil as far as you're concerned."
This was no exaggeration. In the ten months since Deacon had joined the staff, the circulation figures had begun to show a modest increase after fifteen years of steady decline. Even so, they were still only a third of what they had been in the late seventies and early eighties. It would require something more radical to revitalize The Street than the occasional publicity that one writer could generate, and in Deacon's view that meant a new editor with new ideas-a fact of which JP was very aware.
His smile held all the warmth of a rattlesnake's. "If you'd written that story the way I told you to, we would have benefited from the scare stories and not the sodding tabloids. Why the hell did you have to be so coy about identifying the two children involved?"
"Because I gave my word to their parents. And-" said Deacon with heavy emphasis-"I do not believe in using pictures of severely damaged children to sell copy."
"They were used anyway."
Yes, thought Deacon, and it still made him angry. He had taken great pains to keep the two families anonymous, but checkbook journalism had seduced neighbors and friends into talking. "Not because of anything I did," he said.
"That's mealy-mouthed crap. You knew damn well it was only a matter of time before someone sold out."
"I should have known," corrected Deacon, squinting through the smoke from his cigarette. "God knows I've spent enough time listening to your views on the subject. You'd sell your Granny down the river for one more reader on the mailing list."