Page 39 of Stolen
chapter 21
quinn
Quinn isn’t happy with the president. His intervention in the Martini case has put the kibosh on any chance she might have had of persuading INN’s editor to let her off the hook on this story. Public interest is off the charts now. Even Quinn has to concede it makes sense to have a senior correspondent covering the story.
The assignment editor has sent one of the new batch of graduate trainees out to Florida to act as her fixer. His job is to do all the scut work, like attending press briefings or chasing down the correct spelling of interviewee names, so Quinn’s free to work the story the way she wants to.
But the kid’s sticking to her like bloody Velcro. She can’t take a shit without him following her to the bathroom. And he nearly took a swig from the contents of her Evian bottle yesterday. She doesn’t mind going toe-to-toe with the News Desk over editorial decisions, but her reputation as a journalist is paramount. Which means there reallyiswater in the damn bottle today.
Timothy – ‘please don’t call me Tim’ – is harmless, Quinn supposes. Despite the ginger hair. And at least he’s figured out where the nearest Starbucks is, which will keep her cameraman, Phil, happy.
The kid returns to their motel room now with a cardboard tray of pumpkin spice lattes and puts it down on the large table where Phil has set up their editing equipment. INN has gone cheap, as usual, booking them into the one-star Starlight Inn on the St Pete Beach strip, even though the negative publicity means the Sandy Beach Hotel now has plenty of free rooms.
Quinn shoves her chair back from the editing table. Enforced sobriety is doing nothing to improve her mood. ‘This piece is shit, Phil,’ she snaps. ‘We can’t keep showing GVs of the hotel and the same fucking photo of Lottie.’
‘We don’t have anything new,’ Phil says, cracking the lid of his latte to let the steam escape. ‘All we’ve got today is Alexa arriving at the campaign HQ. We can drop in yesterday’s talking heads from the presser, but otherwise GVs are all we got.’
He doesn’t point out they can’t pad the story with a piece-to-camera, as most correspondents would. She might get away with her jaunty eye-patch reporting from Raqqa, but not on something sensitive like this. Given how huge the story is becoming, she’s surprised INN haven’t big-footed her by sending out a more camera-friendly reporter from London. The bulletin editors are already bitching because they can’t use her for live two-ways.
‘We need footage of the kid at the bloody wedding,’ Quinn says. ‘Christ! This is the twenty-first fucking century. Every bastard with a phone thinks he’s Stephen Spielberg. How can westillnot have pictures of her?’
Phil knows better than to respond. She’s made the same complaint every day since they got here.
Timothy doesn’t.
‘Wouldn’t it be bad taste to use them, anyway?’ he says. ‘I mean, they might be the last pictures of her alive. It seems a bit … tabloid.’
‘No, we wouldn’t want to lodge those images in anyone’smind,’ Quinn says sarcastically. ‘Just in case they remembered something.’
‘Don’t be a bitch,’ Phil says.
Quinn drops back into her chair. ‘Jesus! Fine. Fine! Give me fifteen seconds of Alexa Martini arriving at the campaign offices,’ she says. ‘Then go to yesterday’s presser with the hair in the evidence bag. Tim, how far into the conference is that?’
He leafs through his notebook. ‘Five minutes twenty-one.’
She feels like Rumpelstiltskin, weaving gold from straw. Somehow she pulls together a two-minute piece for the lunchtime bulletin, stitching together soundbites from the lieutenant and Marc Chapman, who seems to be Alexa Martini’s de facto spokesman, along with reheated general footage from the preceding few days. This story is next to impossible to illustrate with pictures. The police investigation is all happening behind closed doors. Until the kid is found, alive or dead, all Quinn’s got are talking heads and filler.
She watches as Phil lays down the soundbite from Marc. The most frustrating part of all this is that’s she’s got one hell of a story in her back pocket, and she can’t use it. Sian Chapman’s revelations are dynamite, but Quinn simply doesn’t have enough to go public with it yet.
Quinn hasn’t liked Alexa Martini from the start. She has no problem with ambitious, successful women; she respects anyone who’s carved out her place in the world. What she has no time for are women who want to have it all, and then expect allowances to be made.
She’s lost count of the times she’s had to cover for mothers taking time off for their kids’ braces to be fitted or to attend school sports days. And why is it the single women who always have to work Christmas Eve? If a woman wants the babyandthe job, fine. But she should compete on a level playing field. Raising the next generation of taxpayers doesn’t confer specialstatus, as one of her former colleagues once insisted. Quinn isn’t going to be around long enough to collect her pension anyway.
Marnie says Quinn sees all mothers as the enemy: baby-making factories who’ve let the side of feminism down. Maybe there’s a grain of truth in that. But it’s not fair on the kids, either. Women have no business having children if they’re just going to dump them in a boarding school before they turn eight. The nursery and the boardroom don’t mix. Some women shouldn’t have children, it’s as simple as that.
This isn’t about you, Marnie said yesterday.And just because Alexa Martini doesn’t wear her heart on her sleeve, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel things deeply. The woman’s daughter is missing!
Except that’s just it: Quinn isn’t convinced Lottie Martini is missing at all.
Eleven years ago, she covered the disappearance of a nine-year-old girl in West Yorkshire. Twenty-four days later, the mother, Karen Matthews, was arrested for conspiring with a family friend to kidnap her own daughter. For more than three weeks, Matthews had played the tearful victim, pleading for the release of her ‘beautiful princess daughter’, who, it turned out, had been drugged and hidden in the base of a divan bed at her friend’s flat the whole time.
So no, Quinn doesn’t feel bad for being cynical and suspicious. It’s what she’s paid for.
She grabs the bag slung over the back of her chair. ‘Enough of this crap,’ she says. ‘We need to start holding some feet to the fire. Tim, I want you to drive over to the sheriff’s office and make some new friends. I don’t care what you have to do. Sleep with the chief if necessary. But I want to know every single thing that’s happening over there, down to what Bates has in her sandwiches.’
‘Actually, it’s Timothy—’
Quinn is already halfway towards the door. ‘Find out if they’re looking at anyone other than this “thin man”. My money says they’re pinning it on him because they haven’t got any other suspects. Have they even managed to connect him to the motel where they found the girl’s hair? And I don’t want the usual bullshit about promising leads, blah blah. Are they looking for a body? Is Alexa Martini involved, or not?’