Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [243]
Inside the chippy, Zed bought a double order of haddock and chips and a Fanta Orange. Once he had his food arranged on the table in front of him, he unfolded The Source, and he girded himself to look at the day’s lead story and, worse, at its byline.
That louse Mitchell Corsico had both. It was a nothing story, a real piece of rubbish: A very minor member of the royal family had been outed with a bastard child who was mixed-race, photos included. She was a girl. She was five years old. She was also pretty in that way that mixed-race people often are, having received the best of every chromosome from her progenitors. Her royal father could not accede to the throne unless the present monarch and family and extended family were all partying on a ship in the Atlantic the moment that it hit an iceberg, and that detail robbed the story not only of legs but also toes. However, this fact clearly was of no matter to Mitchell Corsico or, obviously, to Rodney Aronson, who would have made the decision to give the tale the front page, no matter how minor the minor member of the royal family was.
The front page suggested this could well be the explosive revelation of the year, the decade, or even the century, and The Source was squeezing it like the udders of a dying cow. Rodney had given it the full treatment: three-inch headline, photos grainy and otherwise, the byline for Mitch, and a jump to page 8— now that said volumes about what Rodney really thought he was offering for public consumption, didn’t it?— where the story went into the uninspiring background of the child’s mother and the even less inspiring background of the minor royal, who, unlike a lot of the monarchical family, at least had been born with a chin.
Of course, the tabloid had to take care, political correctness being all the rage. But really, it was a who-bloody-gives-a-toss piece to offer to the public anyway. Zed’s conclusion was that it had to have been a very slow day in the sewers for this to be what Rodney had come up with.
Zed reckoned this might actually put him in a good position to snag the front page when he lined up his Cumbria facts and worked them into a story. So he pushed The Source to one side, doused his haddock and chips with malt vinegar, popped open his Fanta Orange, and began to sort through what he’d gathered on Nick Fairclough and the delectable Alatea.
Big was not a word that could be used to describe the story he had. The Scotland Yard detective had been right in that. Nick Fairclough and his wife were going to pay a woman more than just her expenses to have a baby for them, and while this wasn’t legal, it also wasn’t a story. The question was how to make it into one, a sensational one, or at least a member-of-the-royal-family-has-a-bastard-child one.
Zed considered his options, which were all those details he had to work with. Essentially, he had eggs, sperm, man, woman, another woman, and money. Whose eggs, whose sperm, which man, which woman, and whose money? were the various topics to be massaged into an epic piece of journalism.
Here, too, there were possibilities. Perhaps poor Alatea’s eggs were not good enough (was there such a thing? he wondered) to do what they needed to do, such as to drop (did they drop?) into her wherever to meet up with Nick’s you-know-what. Since they weren’t good enough, someone else’s eggs had to be used. But Nick and Alatea didn’t want the family wise to this for reasons of …what? Inheritance? What were the laws on inheritance these days? Was there an inheritance involved, anyway, beyond a firm manufacturing toilets and other unappealing products, the mention of which could turn the story into a real boffola with Zed the butt of every joke in Fleet Street? Or perhaps Nick’s swimmers weren’t up to the job? Years of drug use had rendered them too weak to make the journey or to do much poking when they reached the destination? So someone else’s swimmers were being used