Ellie had four sons under seven. Harry had never met them, but Ellie’s home life always sounded like a sitcom.

‘Did you get my message about the tip off?’

‘I tried to call you straight back,’ Ellie said. ‘Janssens are scumbags. But that story needs a heap of work to be publishable and they’ll sue for sure.’

‘But they won’t have a leg to stand on if we do it right,’ Harry said.

‘The Janssens will find something,’ Ellie said. ‘Even if it’s just an exchange of legal letters, it’s a couple of thousand dollars in lawyer bills. If it gets to court, you’re looking at twenty large.’

‘I was thinking—’ Harry began.

‘Sounds dangerous,’ Ellie interrupted.

‘Let me finish,’ Harry told him. ‘The Fawn Janssen chair-whack video has already brought in four grand. I don’t have time to go to California, but what if we used some of that money to hire a PI?’

‘A private investigator?’ Ellie blurted, outraged. ‘Why are you so keen to spend my money today?’

‘Nobody does proper journalism any more,’ Harry protested. ‘Twenty years ago, Vegas had three local newspapers, with teams of writers who’d have bitten Earl’s hand off to investigate a juicy story about the Janssens. Now, it’s all about scraping content from other sites, click-bait adverts and hoping some fat lady gets videoed hitting a wasps’ nest with a broom.’

‘It’s not my fault people are cheap,’ Ellie said. ‘They’ll eat ninety-nine-cent burgers with meat from God knows where. They pirate their favourite TV show, then complain when it gets cancelled. And they don’t want to pay for quality news. The newspapers with proper journalists died, or got bought by billionaires, to go with their sports franchises and hundred-foot yachts …’

‘My mum would spin in her grave if she saw the trash I put on the Vegas Local home page,’ Harry reflected. ‘And people like the Janssens are bribing every cop in town and literally getting away with murder.’

‘Have I explained the super-lean business model?’ Ellie asked.

‘Three thousand times,’ Harry groaned, knowing he was about to hear it again.

‘We keep costs down by encouraging user-generated content. Elliegold Media will build a portfolio of profitable local news sites in the fifty biggest media markets. If we stick to my super-lean business model, in five to seven years I can have profitable local news websites in America’s biggest advertising markets and a media company worth half a billion dollars.

‘And, don’t forget, when you bailed me out with the money from the Rock Spring bombing footage, your auntie’s clever lawyer made sure that your one-third share of Vegas Local is convertible into five per cent of the parent company so that’s …’

‘Twenty-five million dollars,’ Harry said as his car advanced out of the parking lot. ‘But, apart from Vegas Local, how many of your other sites are currently profitable?’