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He accompanies me downstairs to the second floor where the INN television crew have set up in one of the hotel suites.
It seemed smarter to go with a British network; as Marc said, they have less skin in the game politically than the American stations, who make no pretence of impartiality.
Quinn Wilde is the reporter doing the interview. I know her by reputation through my work in human rights law: she’s covered numerous conflicts in places like Syria, whose refugees my firm has represented. I’ve seen her at press conferences over the last two weeks – she’s hard to miss, with that piratical eye patch – but I’m a bit surprised she’s covering this story. I thought she was a war correspondent; when I hear her name, I picture her standing in front of bombed-out buildings pockmarked with bullet holes. Maybe she lost her nerve after she got blown up by that IED a year or two ago.
Whatever the reason, Marc thinks it’s a good thing she’s doing the interview; he says she’ll give it credibility and gravitas. I hope he’s right.
A skinny kid with a quiff of ginger hair ushers me across the INN suite to two armchairs in the centre of a web of cables and lights. Three cameras have been set up on tripods, onepointing towards each chair and a third with a wide-angle view of the entire set.
A cameraman is checking each viewfinder in turn and making adjustments to the height of the tripods. On a table behind the chairs are two small monitors, currently showing a rainbow of vertical bars. Two labels identify them as ‘preview’ and ‘live’.
The skinny kid points to the nearest armchair. ‘We’re a bit tight for time, so if you could sit here, Phil can get you miked up and check for levels,’ he says. ‘Um, Marc, is it? You can wait in the edit suite next door, if you like. There’s a monitor, so you can watch the interview live with me when we go on-air.’
A jolt of panic hits me. ‘Live?’
‘This was supposed to be pre-recorded,’ Marc says. ‘There was never any discussion about a live interview.’
‘The editor’s given you thePrimeTimeslot,’ the skinny kid says. ‘We’re on-air in five minutes. There’s no time for a pre-record. Don’t worry, Mrs Martini, you’ll be fine. You won’t know the difference once the cameras start rolling. Quinn’ll help you through this. And you’ll reach so many more viewers onPrimeTime. Everyone will be watching, which is what we want, isn’t it?’
Marc frowns. ‘This isn’t what we agreed—’
‘It’s OK,’ I say.
The cameraman hands me a small microphone attached to a slender cable. ‘If you could thread this up the front of your blouse,’ he says. ‘Just clip it on your lapel. Yep, that’s perfect.’
He reaches behind me and fastens something to the waistband of my khaki jeans. I’ve lost so much weight in the last two weeks they hang off me, so he has to prop the device against the cushions.
Suddenly the room is filled with a purposeful urgency thatreminds me of the operating theatre when I had my appendix out at sixteen: the same brisk efficiency of people who know what they’re doing and have done it a thousand times before. The cameraman asks me what I had for breakfast so he can check his sound levels, while the skinny kid coordinates with someone on the phone.
Quinn is the last to enter the room. She whispers something in the cameraman’s ear and then settles in the seat opposite me, attaching her own mike with her left hand. Her right arm is stiff and immobile.
‘Two minutes to on-air,’ the kid announces.
The cameraman adjusts the camera pointed towards Quinn, angling it so that it captures a three-quarter profile of her good side on the preview monitor behind her. It’s hard to see beyond the defiant eye patch, but she must have been beautiful before the accident. Her remaining eye is an intense, Elizabeth-Taylor violet-blue, and her choppy, jaw-length black hair dips to a dramatic widow’s peak before falling in a thick wedge across her damaged face.
‘One minute!’
Quinn pins me like a butterfly beneath her singular gaze. She hasn’t lost her nerve, I realise suddenly. She’s spoiling for a fight.
The kid holds up his right hand. ‘Coming to you in five … four …’
