Free Spearfield's Daughter by Jon Cleary

her as it had been with all the others since Emma had left him twenty years ago.
    He pressed a button and the glass between him and Sid Cromwell slid down. “Sid, see about some roses for Miss Kidson first thing in the morning. White ones.”
    â€œBig or little bunch, m’Lord?”
    â€œBig.” After all she had lasted three years, even if there had been others at the same time.
    Up front Sid Cromwell smiled to himself, made no comment. He had worked for Lord Cruze for fifteen years, from the very day the Boss had bought the Examiner, and since then he had sent enough bloody roses, red and white, to stock the Chelsea Flower Show. He saw himself as the Boss’s executioner, but at a safe distance: he was never close enough, when the women’s heads were chopped off, to see their tears or whatever it was women did when they got the shove. He had felt sorry for some of them, especially the young ones; but he was not sorry to see Miss Kidson go. She had begun to make the Boss look ridiculous and Sid Cromwell, a working man with a proper sense of class, did not like to see lords lose their dignity.
    He’d go to the florist first thing in the morning and order a small bunch of white roses, maybe just half a dozen. The Boss wouldn’t know and Sid Cromwell felt he was entitled to make his own comment. Old-fashioned enough to believe in the dignity of lords, he also did not believe in career women.
    II
    â€œWho are you?” said Lord Cruze.
    â€œI’m Cleo Spearfield. I work on the Examiner, my Lord.”
    He eyed her from under a hairy brow. She had not said m’Lord, making it sound like one word as it should be sounded: she had said my Lord, stretching the two words into what sounded suspiciously like a send-up of him. He recognized the accent, remembered her by-line: another Australian come to Britain to take the mickey out of the Poms. He knew the name of every by-lined journalist on his papers, but he never went near the offices, neither to Fleet Street nor to the offices of the provincial papers; people might work for him for five, ten years, maybe more, and never be anything but faceless names to him. But he read every word they wrote and it did not take him long to size up their talent, their attitude and their prejudices. This one was an iconoclast, a word that never appeared in the plain-English pages of a tabloid like the Examiner.
    â€œWho sent you?”
    â€œMiss Kidson.”
    The bitch. She had sent the Hatchet Lady to do a job on him. He knew the reputation and nickname that Miss Spearfield had earned for herself in Fleet Street over the past six months. Felicity had probably already resigned, was already talking to the Mirror or the Express; but before she relinquished control of her women’s page, relying on his boast that he never killed a story that his editors wanted to run, she would feature Miss Spearfield’s demolition of him. It would create a one-day sensation in Fleet Street, the home of sensation, and it would do him no real harm. But it would satisfy Felicity’s urge for revenge. He smiled, perversely pleased that Felicity felt something.
    â€œHave you come to write something on me?”
    â€œJust the Horse Show in general, my Lord.”
    â€œNo photos of me, you understand.”
    It was an iron rule that no pictures of him ever appeared in his newspapers. He had his vanities, but seeing his picture spread across his own papers was not one of them. Besides, he knew he didn’t photograph well. He always looked shorter than he actually was, which was five feet seven; and his square face seemed to broaden in a camera’s lens, so that he looked as if he had a flat-topped head. His brows, heavy enough as they were, thickened into hairy awnings that left his eyes in shadow. Photographs made him look evil, and he wasn’t that at all, though not everyone took him at his word.
    â€œYou look very smart, my Lord.” Her face was