The Judgement Book by Simon Hall

a case, filled with the promise of more extraordinary developments to come.
    The report followed the classical formula for telling a TV story. Start with your best pictures, then move on to your strongest interview. Hook the viewers from the first seconds.
    It opened with the striking shot of the billboard, screaming letters, red on white. It effectively told the story on its own.
    VOTE WILL FREEDMAN MP, PROSTITUTE PARTY
    Dan added a few lines of commentary about how Wessex Tonight could reveal this was the way the blackmailer planned to expose Will Freedman, and the reason why, the MP’s liaison with the prostitute. Then it was a clip of Adam at the press conference, talking about how disgusting the crime was.
    ‘That’s amazingly human for a cop,’ Jenny said as she edited the extract into the report. ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever heard one say anything so powerful and sensible.’
    Sitting behind her at the computer, still working on his script, Dan favoured himself with a wink.
    After that came a few pictures from last night of the Freedman house and the police activity with Dan recapping on how the MP was found dead. Then another clip of Adam, about the blackmailer being dangerous and the urgent need to catch them.
    Dan walked back into the newsroom at 1.25 and made a show of sitting next to Lizzie to watch the bulletin on one of the bank of monitors on the wall. She didn’t speak, just stared at the screens.
    The titles played, the story was introduced, ran and ended. There was no reaction from his editor.
    Dan sensed a challenge, so he didn’t comment but kept his face set and watched the rest of the bulletin. Calls for more help for alcoholics in Cornwall, a big water-main burst in north Devon, Exeter City Council increasing efforts to recycle more domestic waste and the inevitable “And finally”, an appeal to help hungry hedgehogs awakening from hibernation.
    ‘Right, here’s the plan for tonight,’ Lizzie said, when the bulletin was over. ‘I’ll have more of the same from you. I was thinking of sending the outside broadcast truck for you to do a live update from Freedman’s house, or the cop shop. But I’ve got an obituary on him being put together and a live from Westminster about the reaction there, so I won’t need it.’
    Dan pointedly folded his arms and adopted an expectant expression. Not a word of thanks, he noted. Certainly not an apology for her outburst of only an hour ago. But that wasn’t Lizzie. The sorry word wasn’t in her vocabulary. The best you could hope for was a disguised apology, sometimes so well hidden it was nigh on impossible to discern. A miniscule needle in a mountainous haystack.
    But Dan sensed it coming, and kept quiet. Smugly quiet, he suspected.
    ‘You worked late last night,’ she said. ‘You can go home when you’re done.’
    And now, Dan told himself, comes the caveat. It was ever thus. As reaction follows action, and night day, so any ground given must instantly be retaken, or, at the very worst, marked for unfailing attention later.
    ‘But – but! – I want you on call at the weekend. I want you ready for anything. I want you out there at the slightest hint of a development. And I want it on air as soon as it happens. This story’s got real legs. It’s not just a runner, it’s a sprinter. If anything comes up, I want you straight on it.’
    ‘Lovely, thanks,’ said Dan, trying to sound enthusiastic.
    He slowly got up from his chair, gave her plenty of time. He wasn’t finished, wanted to force just the slightest hint of recognition, make a nudge of headway in one of his seemingly eternal battles with his editor.
    Dan fumbled for his satchel, picked it up and they stared at each other. He tried to keep a straight face.
    ‘Oh, and not a bad report either,’ Lizzie added finally and painfully begrudgingly.
    Dan took that atom of victory as his leave to depart.

Chapter Six
    A TRAFFIC JAM WOUND up the hill from the Charles Cross roundabout.