Six Day Week

Monday, 11:00am

Troy walked briskly across the green lino to the rarely polished oak door of the editor's outer office. This was Pauleen's domain. Those without appointments were brutally intimidated and sent packing. She believed, dedicated girl, that although editors might come and editors might go, she would nevertheless go on for ever. She was knitting at something or other, which no other secretary in the taut building dared to do, when he opened the door.

"A splendid scene of domesticity. Expecting?"

Ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have received a devastating reply designed to make them miserable and repentant. But she had a soft spot for Troy. He was so good-looking, and always doing exciting things. Secretly she kept a scrapbook of his cuttings, his world adventures. He was her pin-up boy, her private Beatle.

So she ignored the riposte. "Better not keep the Old Man waiting," she advised, using the description of the chief that she reserved for her intimates, "the horn of the rhino is into him today."

"His lordship?"

"Yes, Lord Moneybags. Who else?"

"It's nothing to do with me?"

He looked at her anxiously.

"Don't be silly. I told you that he has a job for you. It's the story we missed this morning that's causing all the trouble. It concerned one of his lordship's school chums. They were dining together last week and our peer didn't get a sniff of what was up. He had to read it in the opposition and now he's blaming everyone else. But it has absolutely nothing to do with you, so forget it. Don't keep the chief waiting."

She signalled Troy towards the sanctum with a flick of her right hand.

Troy rapped on the inner door politely, but with deliberate brusqueness. He loathed newspaper creepers, the human vines that clung desperately and subjectively to the walls of the men in power, whoever they were. He thrust his head inside the big room, the room with the view out over the confusion of newspaper vans with their floppy rubber mudguards, and immediately caught the attention of the big fellow behind the desk.

The man who paid him.

Jack Heron was the current incumbent of the £35 swivel chair known as 'the hottest seat in Fleet Street'. His lordship changed editors as often as he changed suits, and regarded them as equally expendable. One could feel only sympathy for the man who was 'in' for he was already on his way out.

It was probably the over-generous Golden Handshake his lordship was prepared to offer ad infinitum that attracted a steady stream of new recruits. No one could regard that seat as a career. Editorship of the Globe was as perilous as starring in a musical that hadn't been written by Lionel Bart. Heron, however, was as tough as old boots, a campaigning editor as astute as an Arab merchant closing an arms deal. His face was permanently bland. His iron-grey hair added the requisite touch of authority, his steel-rimmed glasses the seal of intelligence. Yet, superficially, he was full of fun.

He gave the impression that if he were to dispense with a man he would do so with a smile on his lips, and a conspiratorial wink. His belly was a good deal larger than it should have been, the result of countless expense account lunches, and a fold of flesh flopped over the edge of his desk as he scribbled an inter-departmental memorandum.

"Ah, come in, Troy. It's good to see you."

The Globe's New York man closed the door softly and started across the carpet. The pile was of a thickness that must have made its mark in the balance sheet and the Globe's former editors, the legions of the lost, gazed down at them from silk-papered walls.

"Pull up a chair."

The instruction was unnecessary since a large mahogany seat, its brown leather facing veined with age, was ranged before the oblong desk like a witness stand.