Page 120 of Private Lives

Maybe you’re right, thought Matt, looking back up at the house. Maybe you’re right.

36

Despite working in the media for almost a decade, Anna had never seen a printing press. She had imagined a hangar full of hot iron rollers smelling of wood pulp, the wheezing machines churning out the magazines and newspapers one by one to be collected up by inky-fingered paper boys at the end of the conveyor belt. The reality was much slicker and high-tech – everything automated, robotic and gliding on air like footage from a Japanese car plant. And the noise! That had been the biggest shock: even wearing the unflattering yellow ear-defenders, she could barely hear what her host was saying – or rather shouting – to her.

‘I said I’m not sure I should even be talking to you,’ yelled Bruce Miles, the general manager of the Colby Press, this huge printing plant in Leicestershire. He was leading Anna across a steel gantry, inspecting the printer below as he went. Her grip tightened on the handrail; her four-inch heels weren’t ideal for this sort of environment.

‘You know we do a lot of work for Steinhoff Publications?’ shouted Miles. ‘If they thought I was talking about things I shouldn’t be, they could cut our contract, and do you know how many millions that would cost us?’

‘I

understand your position, Mr Miles,’ said Anna into his ear. ‘And I appreciate you seeing me, but this is the easy way to do it. We could give you a witness summons to attend court, and believe me, you wouldn’t want the hassle of all that.’

He looked at her for a moment, then nodded.

‘Come into my office,’ he shouted, and opened a heavy door. When it was closed, the noise was reduced to a mere whine and Anna gratefully took off her ear-defenders.

‘Tea?’ Miles said, sitting behind his desk. The office was strikingly disorganised after the shiny efficiency of the shop floor.

‘No thank you,’ she said, glancing at the clock on the wall. She had somewhere else to be and needed this to be as short and sweet as possible. ‘I’ll get straight to the point, if I may.’

Miles gestured to the plastic chair facing his desk. ‘Please do.’

‘Well, I know you print the UK edition of Stateside as part of your contract with Steinhoff,’ said Anna. ‘I just need to find out what day last October’s issue of the magazine went to press.’

He reached behind him and took out a red hardback ledger.

‘I’ve got that information right here,’ he said, licking his thumb and leafing through the pages.

Somehow Anna found it strangely reassuring that a cutting-edge operation like the Colby Press still kept all its records in proper books rather than on some computer spreadsheet. She leaned forward as he turned it around for her to read.

‘The content of the magazine comes to us as files. The magazine’s production manager was supposed to send them to us on the eighth of June, but we didn’t get them until three days later, on the Friday.’ He sighed, as if this was something that clients did just to annoy him. ‘So we actually printed here. The twelfth of June,’ he said running his finger along the date line.

Dammit, thought Anna. That wasn’t the news she was hoping for.

‘Well, thanks for letting me know, Mr Miles,’ she said, standing up.

‘That’s all you wanted?’ He looked a little disappointed. ‘Are you sure you don’t want that cup of tea? It’s a long way back to London.’

She glanced at the clock again. ‘I’d love to, but I have another appointment.’

As she walked towards her car, Anna pulled out her BlackBerry and tapped in a message to Helen as she went: ‘Stateside printed 12 June. Balon4Mayor registered 1 June. Enough time for magazine to know about it. Strengthen their argument public interest?’

Inside her Mini, she opened her road atlas, wondering if the detour she was planning was worth the risk. Travelling back to London at this time of day, she figured she could easily claim that traffic hold-ups had stopped her getting back to the office, although she wouldn’t put it past Helen to check that with the AA.

‘Sod it,’ she whispered, firing up the engine. She pulled out of the industrial estate and, ignoring the signs to London, turned the car north.

Ruby Hart lived with her mother in a pebble-dashed semi on a council estate that showed all the signs of poverty and neglect. There was a skeletal Christmas tree still lying on its side in the small overgrown front garden, presumably marooned there since December, and a rusted baby buggy parked by the door, its seat filled with a leaking black bin bag. What a far cry it was from the sleek Thameside flat that Amy Hart had died in, thought Anna as she pulled her car up outside.

She sat in the Mini, hesitating, telling herself that she had about thirty seconds to start the engine and drive back to London. Eventually she got out and walked up the path with purpose. She was just about to press the bell when the door was opened by a tired-looking middle-aged woman.

‘You must be Anna.’

‘That’s me. Are you Ruby’s mum?’

The woman nodded.

‘I suppose you’d better come in.’