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‘Oh, I can’t wait to read it – can’t wait!’ enthused Strauss. ‘You know Snyder learned it all at Starwear. He stole the QC programme and ran off to copy it at Active Red. As for Reid, the guy’s a complete crook.’
Chris knew all about the cash-flow difficulties at Active Red, but wouldn’t exactly have described Snyder as a crook. Instead he told Strauss, ‘He certainly runs his operation close to the wire.’
‘Close to the wire!’ Strauss laughed dryly, as he met Chris’s eyes across the room. ‘You Brits are masters of understatement. Anyway, the chickens will all come home to roost when the amendment comes up.’
Studying Strauss closely across the dark shadows of Cullen’s office, Chris couldn’t help being surprised. Quite apart from the simple but undeniable magnetism of his physical presence, which took some getting used to, Jacob Strauss seemed far more personally caught up in the machinations of Starwear’s commercial enemies than any CEO he’d ever worked with in the past. Bob Reid and Ed Snyder clearly stirred his emotions. What’s more, Chris was amazed how confident he seemed about the outcome of the Textile Bill amendment. In the past fortnight, Chris knew, Nick King and the boys from lobbying had been frenetically lobbying every MP and senior civil servant in the Department of Trade and Industry they could, rehearsing all the arguments in favour of an amendment. But it wasn’t looking good. By the time a Bill got to the House of Commons, it was already too late. What’s more, as a Government-sponsored Bill, the chance of provoking back bench rebellion was remote. Didn’t Strauss realise that things over here were different from on Capitol Hill? Besides, what did Project Silo have to do with the Textile Bill amendment? The two were completely unrelated.
Uncertain how to respond, Chris simply said now, ‘We certainly live in interesting times.’
Strauss shook his head with a grin. ‘Lombard sure is a refreshing change after all the bullshit I get from Hill Stellar. You just get on and do the business.’
‘We try.’
Strauss was moving back across Cullen’s office towards the door, with his easy, leonine poise. As they made their way back towards the lifts, he repeated, ‘Can’t wait to read your report.’
Chris nodded. ‘I’m just putting the finishing touches to the Executive Summary.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t bother. I’ll be reading the whole thing.’
Pressing the lift call, Chris turned with raised eyebrows. ‘That’s very unusual sir, for someone at your level?’
‘Why wouldn’t I want to?’ Strauss retorted with a grin, looping the towel from round his neck over his arm with a flourish. ‘I’m going to lap up every last detail.’
A few minutes later, Chris was behind the wheel of his BMW and heading west along the Embankment, Nina Simone playing on the CD.
Something about his encounter with Strauss disturbed him. Jacob Strauss may have been every bit as charming and charismatic as he had expected – and some – but the encounter had left Chris ill at ease. Strauss seemed a man more driven by emotion than by commercial imperatives. North had kept asking him about ‘digging up the dirt’, and he’d picked up a similar preoccupation from the Starwear boss. Unlike his brother Nathan, whose modus vivendi was one to which Chris had felt attracted, Starwear’s super-icon seemed more street-fighter than strategist.
He was still mulling this over when he turned left into New King’s Road, not far from home, heading in the direction of Parson’s Green. Up ahead of him a red Ferrari had pulled over by the kerb, bringing the inside lane of traffic to a bottleneck. Drivers caught behind the Ferrari were nosing into the right-hand lane. Well behind the action, Chris watched as the Ferrari’s passenger door flipped open and out stepped a kid in school uniform, hurrying across the pavement towards the entrance of a large, Victorian building. Chris saw the purple blazer and cap.
As he drove past where the car had pulled up, Chris glanced over. Even though the driver’s head was turned, he recognised the profile. He hadn’t known North drove a Ferrari, but it didn’t surprise him. What did surprise him was that the mighty Starwear was giving handouts to kids from a little-known Catholic orphanage in West London – an orphanage to which many thousands of pounds’ worth of tracksuits and trainers could be donated without Starwear benefiting in any definable way.
Chris often drove past St Stephen’s Home for Boys at the weekends – there’d be schoolboys swarming everywhere in ubiquitous purple. He always felt sorry for the kids, knowing that none of them had homes and families to call their own. Now he remembered what Strauss had told him.
‘Charity thing,’ he’d said. ‘We give them free sports kits, that kind of stuff.’
As he turned right into Harwood Road, Chris thought again about his first impressions of Jacob Strauss. Maybe there was also a human side to him. Maybe he shared a sense of altruism with his late brother, Nathan, even if he expressed it differently. Maybe you couldn’t
always tell by first impressions.
•••
Across town, in the Virgin Heathrow Upper Class lounge, Mark Hunter grimaced as his mobile telephone sounded. Enjoying a shoulder rub from a luscious young masseuse amid subdued lighting and Baroque cadences, he had been starting to unwind. Now work called.
‘Mark, it’s Elliott. I’m not disturbing anything?’
Sitting forward in his chair, concern clouded the Starwear director’s face. Elliott North was the very last person from whom he wanted to hear. Quite apart from his suspicions about North, whom he thought of as Rasputin at the court of Strauss, he was feeling vulnerable about his latest encounter with the press.
‘I was just wondering how things went with Judith Laing?’ North enquired, nosing his Ferrari homewards down the King’s Road with one hand, while holding his mobile phone to his ear with the other.
‘Oh, standard stuff. John and I ran through the usual presentation.’ Hunter knew he hadn’t handled the interview well. He’d handled it disastrously, if the truth be told. The encounter had been on his mind ever since – and he’d been trying to work out damage limitation to cover his ass.
‘Any curved balls?’ North wanted to know.
‘Not really. She did mention production figures. Nothing we haven’t handled in the past.’
Long before North had called, Hunter had decided he would neither volunteer anything but, if pressed, nor would he deny it. That way, no one could later accuse him of lying. ‘De-emphasising’, he believed, was the term used by the PR boys.
At the other end, North was suspicious. As a heavy-hitting investigative hackette, fireside chats with company directors weren’t Judith Laing’s style. Either she’d gone Mary Poppins, or Hunter wasn’t telling the whole truth.
