Sheila massages her temples, ignoring them both.
‘This is awful,’ I say, quietly. ‘Sheila, I’m sorry.’
She ignores me too. ‘I – oh, God,’ she mutters. ‘Poor Jeremy. It says on the newswire that she’d seemed depressed in recent weeks but I . . . I just can’t believe that. She’s always been so . . . so fine.’
My editor remembers his job. ‘Very worrying indeed. But – ah . . . Do we have a stock on file?’
A stock is a pre-written obituary. We keep thousands of them in our filing cabinets, but Janice Rothschild, who is only about fifty and without any reported health concerns, has not even made it onto our ‘just in case’ list. She’s in a BBC adaptation of Madame Bovary right now, for goodness’ sake – I watched it on Sunday evening. Emma went to bed soon after it started, saying she wasn’t a fan of Janice Rothschild, but I thought she was excellent.
Sheila leaves her desk to call Jeremy.
Kelvin calls the pictures desk. ‘Can we please get a selection for Janice Rothschild? Maybe include a few of her in Madame Bovary . . . What? Oh, sorry – we’ve just heard she’s disappeared. I know – a bit shocking. Anyway, can we get a few of her with her husband? Just in case?’
Jeremy Rothschild presents the Today programme on Radio 4; he and Janice Rothschild have been married for decades. I look up his Twitter account, but he hasn’t said anything in seventy-two hours. Everyone else on the obits desk is doing the same. As one, we look up Janice’s Twitter, which has been silent for three weeks, and Jonty goes off to make tea. ‘She is delightful,’ he says, angrily. ‘I really will not cope if she’s taken her own life.’
I put my headphones on, unable to listen to my colleagues any longer, and spend a few minutes looking at #Janice-Rothschild. It really is breaking news; there’s only a little more than five minutes of tweets. I watch an achingly funny clip of her guest-starring in Ab Fab, and a very moving one of her overcoming chronic vertigo to climb a rock face for Sport Relief. By the time she reaches the top, everyone’s crying, even the cameraman.
None of these early tweeters seemed to have any idea why she’s disappeared. I run a quick check on our archive but only find one potential clue: a picture of her leaving a psychiatric unit nineteen years ago, a few weeks after giving birth to their son. Since then, nothing. She’s one of those relentlessly funny, upbeat women; the sort you wish you were friends with when you see them sparring with Graham Norton on TV. I wouldn’t have had a clue.
Sheila returns to her desk with a large bag of Wine Gums. She says she’s been unable to get hold of Jeremy. She doesn’t offer the sweets around. Instead, she eats, mechanically and in solitude.
‘Do not ask me to write a stock for her,’ she says, after a while. ‘I do not believe she could commit suicide. I’m not getting involved.’
‘But you know her so well,’ Kelvin tries, after a pause. ‘It would be a really personal piece.’
‘Which is precisely why I won’t do it.’ Sheila’s voice is crisp. ‘I’m not condemning a perfectly healthy, very precious friend to death.’
Kelvin nods his assent. He is the editor, and I’m his deputy, but nobody’s in any doubt that it’s Sheila who runs this desk.
Kelvin gives the obit to me, and I get writing. I know my colleagues at all the other newspapers will be doing the same thing; that we’re all now working against the clock, checking regularly for an announcement that a body has been found.
I try not to think about Sheila’s refusal to ‘condemn’ her friend to death. Is that what I’ve been doing, writing Emma’s obituary?
On the news floor TVs, I can hear someone from the Metropolitan Police confirming that they’re looking for a missing woman in her fifties. Then an actor, who has no idea where Janice is, saying he has no idea where Janice is.