Page 93 of Going Solo

I hadn’t heard anyone laugh at their own jokes like that since Aunty Cheryl knocked back a balloon of nitrous oxide in a Benidorm backstreet and tried to get sassy with a street lamp. When they noticed I wasn’t laughing, they straightened themselves up.

“Sorry,” Ludo said, handing me the book. “Got a bit carried away.”

Wilhelmina joined in the apology. “It’s been such an enjoyable mission.”

“Mission?” I was confused.

“Stealing the book,” Ludo said.

“Youstoleit?”

“Not me,” Ludo said. “Wilhelmina ‘Quick Fingers’ Post here swiped it off the desk ofThe Sentinel’s music reviewer.”

“Oh my God! Won’t you get in trouble?” I asked.

“She won’t even notice it’s missing,” Wilhelmina said. “She reviews music forThe Sentinel. Musicians only appear on her radar after they’ve been dead for two hundred years. Minimum. There’s no way she’s heard of Cole Kennedy, let alone plans to write about him.”

Ludo tapped the top of the book. “Besides, by the time the embargo lifts,The Bulletinwill have printed all the juiciest bits already, and all that’ll be left for everyone else to write about is how jolly terrible the syntax is.”

“Have you read it?” I asked. “Is it bad?”

“The syntax?”

“The things Jasper has said.”

Ludo grimaced. “I’ve skimmed it.”

“And?”

Ludo fished around, looking for the right words. “Look, I guess it’s a bit ‘rock and roll.’ But who among us hasn’t made the odd youthful mistake?”

Wilhelmina’s pin-thin eyebrows leapt so high they risked catching a breeze and taking flight.

“Who among us hasn’t been shagged in a toilet on a four-day cocaine bender?” she said.

The words twisted in my heart.

“Oh, come on, Willy, that’s a British rite of passage,” Ludo said. “Do you think people go to Ascot for the horse racing? No, they go to snort fat lines of dirty drugs off grubby Portaloo seats and get buggered senseless by the hot older brothers of the chaps who bullied them at Eton.”

Wilhelmina squinted. “That was oddly specific, Ludo.”

Ludo’s eyebrows went up. “Not me. I didn’t go to Eton.” He quickly turned his attention back to me. “Bad news on the acquisition.”

“Acquisition?”

“Of the Pure Network. ByThe Sentinel.”

“What do you mean? What’s happened?”

Ludo shrugged. “Bit of a wrinkle, I’m afraid?—”

The bells started to ring, calling the audience into the theatre. The poster on the wall showed it was preview night of a new production of Arthur Miller’sThe Crucible.

“That’s us,” Ludo said. “Listen, Sunny is stuck at work, so I have a spare ticket, if you’d like to see the show? Then we’re meeting my brother at Maxime’s afterwards, if you fancy it?”

The book was itching in my hands. I’d delayed too long as it was. I needed to get this contraband copy ofDirty Little Secretto Fiona so she could start working her way through it. The first serialisation would appear inThe Bulletinin the morning.

“I better go,” I said. “But, quickly,The Sentinel’sstill buying Pure, yeah?”

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