Chapter 1: Beating the Tom Tom

“Get Barker at the Tribune for me now!” bellowed Scott Newchurch, hunched over his pc in Central Office, “Durdin’s history!”
“I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” a senior aide stooped to deliver her verdict, “He was a big beast and some big beasts simply refuse to be made extinct.”
“It’s not the cigars, Shireen, you bloody idiot. It’s the rest of the stuff he had stashed in the cupboard with all the other skeletons. Look,” he handed her a sheet of paper.
“It’s a photocopy of an invoice,” she murmured, scanning quickly.
“Eighty-five grand,” Scott said tonelessly.
Shireen sat down heavily next to him, “I see what you mean. But how?” She was unable to formulate any of the many questions crowding her mind, edged out by the rapidly coalescing scenes of mayhem and disaster for the party.
“Unfortunately, Durdin had form. Forty years of it. It’s like finding a mass grave, we’re still pulling the bodies out.”
Shireen’s eyes flickered with distaste at Scott’s overstated analogy; one of the many. She suspected that the extreme terminology favoured by the men at Central Office correlated inversely with the dangers they faced in their comfortable desk jobs. Responsible they may have been, indirectly, for sending other young men to their deaths in aimless foreign wars, but they themselves confronted no machines more life-threatening than a malfunctioning photocopier in the course of their day. So of course they compensated with overuse of muscular, militaristic language.
“I told Dick. He went ballistic,” Scott answered her next question before she asked it.
“Don’t let him hear you call him that,” she said automatically. Richard Clarke, the leader (and generally acknowledged saviour of the party) liked to present himself as an amiable kind of guy, but he was distinctly lacking in a sense of humour when it came to deploying the diminutive of his Christian name. Unfortunately, the Red Tops revelled in it and it was this form of disrespect rather than any other that wounded him deeply and spoiled the enjoyment of his public life. Richard Clarke was more in favour of dignity, respect and general obeisance than he cared to let on.
“Come on,” Scott got to his feet, shovelling papers into his laptop bag, “I need you to help with damage limitation.” He picked up his Blackberry and pressed his large, stubby fingers over the tiny keypad.
“Are you summoning back-up?” Shireen asked, playing a mental game of Bullshit Bingo.
“There could be some collateral fall-out,” Scott replied with no trace of irony, “I’m going to need cover. You’re coming with me.”
“Right, I’ll round up the troops,” she said, covering up a smirk with her silk scarf.
“Bingo!” she added, under her breath.