Exposé Read online

  Exposé

  By Paul Ilett

  For

  Barbara Peach

  and Gerry Murnane

  CHAPTER 1

  Colin Merroney’s entire adult life had been consumed by other people’s secrets. He had spent more than thirty years exposing the private lives of the rich and famous, and wore his title of the ‘Kiss-and-Tell King’ like a badge of honour. He knew his track record was second to none and that dozens of other journalists had tried and failed to steal his crown, but no one could touch him. Over the years he had targeted everyone from actors and sports stars to politicians and royalty. It was Colin who broke the exclusive story about the young England player with a weakness for transsexual hookers, and the married ‘Songs of Praise’ presenter who had a secret posse of lesbian lovers. He had exposed the dogging obsession of the nation’s favourite TV chef, and dramatically ended dozens of ministerial careers by catching a never-ending procession of MPs with their pants down.

  Everyone in the public eye knew that, one day, they might get the phone call of doom from Colin Merroney. It was a reputation he cherished, a reputation that had won him countless press awards and paid for his expensive London house. And throughout his career no one had ever challenged his right to probe the private lives of celebrities or expose their secrets for the world to see. But more recently times had changed. The previous couple of years had not been kind to Colin’s newspaper, the Daily Ear, or the rest of the tabloid press. He and his colleagues had found themselves more and more in the spotlight, with their working practices under increasing levels of scrutiny and criticism. They were now subject to a government inquiry, police investigations and numerous court cases with the smallest details of their work picked to pieces by thousands of pedants across the likes of Twitter. After decades of doing what it pleased, the media was suddenly being held to account. And Colin hated it.

  Over the past year, one way or another, he had become the public face of the Daily Ear. In countless media training sessions, he had been the only member of staff who’d been able to offer plausible arguments, shrewdly rebut accusations and maintain a humorous demeanour throughout. His editor Leonard Twigg flatly refused to speak to other parts of the media (particularly the BBC) and the newspaper’s owner, Howard Harvey, simply couldn’t control his temper long enough to get through an entire interview. They had tried out Daily Ear columnist Valerie Pierce a few times, but it was felt she lacked Colin’s warmth and credibility. And they only ever wheeled out the company’s chief executive as an absolute last resort. Gayesh Perera was considered a weak link but, coming from India, had proven a useful figurehead whenever the paper had been accused of being racist. Which it often was.

  And so partly through his own skill, and partly through the failure of his colleagues, Colin was considered a safe pair of hands. As a result he’d appeared on the BBC, ITN, Sky News and This Morning, to name just a few. That evening, he’d even been roped into doing Newsnight. He begrudged the amount of time he had spent in radio and television interviews in defence of himself and his newspaper, but he knew there simply wasn’t anyone else who could do it.

  Colin also suspected it helped that, despite pushing 50, he had kept his looks. His hair had remained full with no whispers of grey, and he had held off his middle-age spread. His suits were from one of the new bespoke tailors on Savile Row, ensuring he never dressed like an old man. And although, at five foot five inches, he’d spent most of his life wishing he was taller he now accepted he’d kept a boyish quality that belied his actual age. He also knew there were entire threads on gay forums dedicated to screen grabs of his crotch. The size of his bulge was legendary in the newspaper industry and his young wife assured him it was important to keep the gays happy, which is why he always wore tight trousers for TV interviews.

  But there was a strange atmosphere in the Newsnight studio that evening. He had felt it the moment he arrived. The presenter had been unusually frosty with him. She seemed to have a look of pity in her eyes, like she could smell blood, and Colin didn’t trust BBC journalists at the best of times. It was never a fair fight. They always had people helping them, whispering in their ear. Up beyond the bright lights of the Newsnight studio was a whole gallery of overpaid producers, and Colin imagined they had spent their entire day lolling around in a pampered brainstorming session, sprawled out across luxurious leather sofas and drinking expensive lattes. They would have pored over all the articles on newspaper standards where he had been quoted and then dissected every comment he had made. They would have reduced his every sentence to a base level until they could find something, some tiny hole, in his argument which they could fixate on during a TV debate. Others had tried and failed, of course, but for some unknown reason tonight felt different.

  Newspaper standards was hardly new territory for Colin or the Newsnight team. In fact, this was Colin’s second appearance on Newsnight on the same topic. The only new element was the second studio guest, Adam Jaymes. He was a 28-year-old performer who held a lifetime of grudges against the Daily Ear. He had started his career as a child actor in a soap and later gone on to be a popular Doctor Who companion. He had then been a surprise hit on the West End stage before becoming a Tony-nominated Broadway performer too. Of late, he was breaking into US TV with a regular role on True Blood and a guest spot on Glee. It was like the phrase ‘rising star’ had been created just for him.

  But Colin had a personal vendetta against Adam. The actor was the only person who had managed to maintain his privacy and successfully evade all of Colin’s attempts to infiltrate his personal life. For years, Colin had suspected the actor was gay and had dedicated an enormous amount of his own time and the Daily Ear’s resources to publicly out him. But somehow Adam had remained impossibly elusive and then had selfishly beaten Colin to the punch by releasing a statement through the Press Association. Adam Jaymes had come out with dignity and on his own terms, and Colin had never forgiven him for it.

  Despite his public statement, Adam had remained as private and mysterious as ever. Colin had licked his wounds and then redoubled his efforts to get some dirt on the star. If he couldn’t out him, he would sure as hell get the exclusive story about Adam’s first gay relationship. But even that didn’t work out in Colin’s favour. He had sent the Ear’s chief photographer Jason Spade to Los Cabos in Mexico where he finally came up trumps and captured Adam canoodling with a gay American billionaire. Unfortunately Jason couldn’t claim it was the result of an inside tip from Colin because no one had even known Adam Jaymes was in the area. Jason had actually been sent to Los Cabos to pap William and Kate and had simply followed the wrong yacht.

  But accident or not, it was still the first time anyone had managed to take such intimate photographs of the actor and the pictures caused an international sensation: the handsome and muscular British star and the dashing American entrepreneur 10 years his senior, wearing nothing but swimming trunks and snogging on the deck of a private boat. The Ear’s website crashed the moment the pictures were uploaded, and Jason made a small fortune on re-sales.

  However, Colin’s victory was short-lived when the couple released a statement to announce they had been secretly dating for more than a year. To make matters worse, the Los Cabos cruise wasn’t just a holiday, it was their honeymoon. The world’s media, Colin included, had missed the whole thing. There were suggestions online that Colin had lost his touch, and there were mutterings within the Daily Ear’s own newsroom along the same lines. As far as Colin was concerned, Adam Jaymes had a lot to answer for.

  There was a flutter of activity on the other side of the studio, and through a small group of excited technicians and assistants Adam Jaymes appeared as he was quietly escorted to his seat. Despite their long history, Colin and Adam had never actually met face to f
ace and it was slightly disconcerting for Colin to finally see his opponent in the flesh looking so self-assured and handsome. He was wearing a smart, three-piece grey suit and a blue tie. His dark hair was swept back from his face, and his dusky brown eyes seemed to note that Colin was present without actually making contact.

  The Newsnight studio seemed busier than last time and Colin suspected not all the technicians, assistants and producers “on duty” that night were really on duty at all. They were there to catch a glimpse of Adam. Perhaps, he wondered, that was the cause of the strange atmosphere in the studio: the BBC’s ‘gay mafia’ out in force to support one of their own. But whatever additional support Adam might have in the studio, Colin remained confident he would easily hold his own throughout the discussion.

  The presenter was engrossed in a two-way with a BBC reporter who was giving a rundown of another day at the inquiry from outside Parliament. Colin hated two-ways; “Reporters interviewing other reporters? Narcissists! You won’t catch me doing that,” he thought to himself. But he had learnt it was best to start each interview by being as civil as possible and so as Adam took the seat opposite, Colin smiled at him and then silently mouthed the word ‘hello’.

  But Adam didn’t reply. He offered Colin little more than a cold, hard stare and swiftly turned his back to watch the rest of the presenter’s two-way. “Well,” Colin thought, “that was fucking rude.”

  Fiona McCoy hadn’t intended to stay in London forever. She was going to finish her degree and then move back home to Edinburgh, get a job near her parents and marry a local lad. Her three-year stay in London was simply meant to be a big adventure, one she would be able to tell her future children and grandchildren about. And everything had been going according to plan. She’d rented a flat with a couple of fellow students, had a part-time job waiting tables in an upmarket restaurant and thrown herself into the city’s nightlife with great enthusiasm. Life had been good.

  But then Colin Merroney had entered her life, a funny and charming older man who had dined at her restaurant eight months earlier. Despite the age difference (almost thirty years, she eventually discovered) there had been an instant chemistry. He had a killer smile, all dimples and white teeth, and through a number of good humoured exchanges quickly proved himself to be both clever and funny. He had complimented the prettiness of her eyes and talked with genuine fondness of the many business trips he’d made over the years to her home city.

  After two courses and many bottles of wine, he excused himself from the table and followed her into the ‘staff only’ area. Throwing caution to the wind, she had taken him by the hand and led him into the linen closet, expecting a few minutes of drunken fumbling and groping. But instead he had surprised her with an astonishing session of intense, passionate love-making. And as they had stumbled from the closet, laughing and a little embarrassed, Colin had passed Fiona his business card and they had made a casual plan to meet up again at some point.

  But those casual plans proved fortuitous as, within a couple of weeks, Fiona realised she was pregnant. She had seen a lot of men over the years. Her sense of humour, curvy figure and flame-red hair meant she was rarely without a date. But she had genuinely felt there was something different about Colin, this short older man with amazing hair and confident voice. They really seemed to have a connection, despite the age difference.

  Colin was a life-long bachelor who’d never been in a long term relationship or had kids. His job simply hadn’t allowed for it. But whisked along by the excitement of the linen closet encounter and the romantic notion that they had simply ‘clicked’, he asked Fiona to marry him and she said yes. Within weeks of telling Colin she was pregnant, Fiona became Mrs Merroney and moved into his home in Wapping. She finished her degree and then watched from the side-lines as her university friends all left London. The life she had mapped out for herself no longer existed. She was 400 miles from home, married and pregnant and spent most of her days alone because her husband was always chasing some story in another part of the country. She filled her time trying new recipes in an expensive kitchen which, prior to her moving in, had never been used. And it was during those lonely months that she could sense a change in herself, as though she was becoming a quieter person. She could feel her quick wit and her ability to colour any conversation with humour and sharp observations gradually drain away. Hardest of all was the change in her own body. She had hoped to be like one of those celebrity mums, sailing through pregnancy without gaining an ounce of fat and just wearing her pregnancy bump like a fashion accessory. But her body had other ideas and the extra three stone left her constantly tired and with back pain.

  That night she had guests: Colin’s parents and his best mate Terry and his wife Laura, both friends from Colin’s school days. They had congregated at the house to watch Colin’s latest TV appearance. Fiona’s lower back was hurting, she felt over-heated and the smell of the canapés she had prepared were making her feel nauseous, but she was determined to be the perfect host. Her pretty freckled face was shiny and flushed, and her long red hair was tied back in a ponytail to keep it out of the way. “Now, has everyone got a drink?” she asked, trying to hide the fact that she was already out of breath.

  “Yes darling,” Mrs Merroney responded. She patted the empty space next to her. “Now come and sit down, you’ll wear yourself out.”

  Colin’s mum and dad were on the couch, both comfortably decked out in cardigans and slippers. Terry and Laura were sitting on the two-seater, the Thames framed in the bay window behind them. Terry looked every bit his age, with grey receding hair and a pot belly from too many beers. Laura was a businesswoman and always looked well turned out, even for informal gatherings such as this. She made an effort with her appearance in a way her husband had clearly given up many years earlier.

  Terry grabbed the remote control from the coffee table and turned the volume up. “He’s on” he said with excitement, swirling a glass of brandy in his other hand. “He’ll rip the shit out of the pair of them, no problem. Go on my son!”

  “Why does he always sit like that?” wondered Mrs Merroney. “He needs to sit up straight with his knees together. He looks like he’s lounging around, not taking it seriously.”

  Terry and Laura smirked at each other.

  “You must tell him, Fiona, when he gets home, that his mother wants him to sit properly when he’s on television in the future.”

  Mr Merroney had fallen asleep and started to snore, and so Fiona took the glass of bitter from his hand before it spilt on the carpet and placed it on the coffee table. She then picked up a plate of canapés and offered them around. “Does anyone fancy a samosa or bhaji?” she asked. She failed to get any response and so finally lowered herself down onto the seat next to her mother-in-law.

  “Fiona, how come it’s always Colin that ends up doing these interviews?” asked Laura. “I mean, he’s very good but it does seem a bit unfair that he has to take the heat for the whole newspaper. “

  “Oh, I don’t think the editor likes to do interviews,” Fiona replied. “Besides, I don’t think any of them would be able to handle it as well as he does.”

  “Well I hope they’re giving him a bonus.” Laura sat back in her armchair and continued to sip from her glass of red wine, gently stroking the arm of the two-seater. “And he does look great on TV.”

  “As a newspaper, our glass is definitely half-full. If we can find something good to say about a celebrity, we say it. We’re proud to say it. We’re the positive paper.” Colin was pleased to have been able to start the discussion. It gave him the chance to make a few generic sound bites rather than having to respond to anything Adam had to say.

  “Are you surprised to hear that, Adam Jaymes? The Daily Ear is known for positive, pro-celebrity reporting?” the presenter probed, with an incredulous tone to her voice.

  Adam ran his fingers through his dark hair, his brown eyes sparkling in the studio lights in the way only a celebrity’s ever did. “I think it just
underlines how detached from reality Colin and his colleagues at the Daily Ear have become,” he said, his tone calm and measured.

  Colin got an unexpected buzz from Adam using his name. A famous person, using his name! On telly! But he quickly regained his composure and as Adam continued with his response, Colin tried to remember each of the five points he needed to make during the interview, one point for each finger on his right hand. The first (his thumb) he had already used - promoting positive stories when they had the chance. Point two (index finger) was about the hypocrisy of celebrities who whored their private lives for publicity one minute and then complained about invasion of privacy the next.

  Colin had very little time for celebrity privacy arguments. You want privacy? Then don’t become a household name. They’d all asked for it, he thought, one way or another – Grant, Miller, Partridge, all the others. And what was the angle on Adam Jaymes? Oh, that’s right. Point three (middle finger): Adam Jaymes had appeared in a movie that was partly funded by Harvey Media International which owns Harvey News Group which owns the Daily Ear. So he’s a hypocrite. Taking money from the Harvey family and then moaning about them behind their backs.

  The presenter suddenly swung around and looked at Colin. “That’s an interesting point, Colin. What do you say to that?” she asked.

  Oh shit! “Sorry?”

  “What do you say to Adam’s accusation that in the current climate your paper has become increasingly driven by sales rather than journalism?”

  “Oh bollocks!” he replied which, in that moment, seemed a perfectly good answer.

  “Ah-ha! Brilliant!” roared Terry. “Brilliant.”

  “Oh, and please tell him his mother doesn’t want him swearing on television as well.”

  The presenter raised her hand and gestured for Colin to be quiet. She stared straight into the camera, which Colin thought presenters weren’t supposed to do. Or is that actors? “Can I just apologise to the viewers at home for that,” she said. “This is a live programme, and sometimes when we’re discussing controversial issues our guests can forget where they are.” She looked at Colin again. “If I could ask you to articulate your point of view in a more appropriate manner?”