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‘As always,’ he responded, looking up. Then, seeing her expression, ‘You OK?’
One thing she definitely wasn’t was OK. ‘That obvious, huh?’ She glanced at the door leading from Chris’s office to Charlotte’s room.
‘She won’t be in till ten,’ he told her.
Kate walked over to Chris’s desk and sat in a chair opposite him. Then she recounted her conversation of the night before with Jim Ritchie.
Chris sat absorbing Kate’s story, noting the heat in her eyes as she described North’s meddling and attempted bribery. And as he listened to her tirade of indignation, he kept thinking to himself: She couldn’t be connected to the Jacob Strauss cover-up. It just wasn’t possible. As far as she was concerned, North was in the opposition camp. She’d made clear her frustration with North from the start. Now, after the Jim Ritchie dinner, things had developed way beyond frustration. It was clear, from the way she was speaking, this was a resignation issue.
Meeting her eyes, still fraught with emotion, he spoke evenly. ‘All that stuff you sent to Jim Ritchie about Jacob Strauss – it was the press pack I’ve seen, was it? The one issued when he was made CEO, about all his entrepreneurial successes in America?’
She nodded with a weary sigh.
There was a lengthy pause, then, across the grey, morning light of his office, he asked her seriously: ‘Let’s say you had this hypothetical client. And let’s say you found, one way or another, that you’d misrepresented him to the media – not just exaggerated, but actually put out the complete opposite of the truth.’ He swallowed. ‘What would you do?’
She was following him closely, wondering about the recognition she’d sensed in him as she’d been telling him about the night before. There had been a resonance there. More than simply a resonance. Just how hypothetical was this client?
She sat back in her chair. ‘I’d need to know a couple of things first,’ she told him now, trying to be matter-of-fact. ‘For instance, how reliable was the evidence that what the client said wasn’t true?’
Chris nodded. ‘Company accounts.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘And did the client knowingly mislead the agency?’
‘Very knowingly,’ he told her.
There was another pause while she thought awhile. Then she said, ‘You know, the stock exchange has certain rules. Distributing misleading information about a publicly listed company is illegal. For starters, the agency would have to resign this “hypothetical” client.’
He leaned forward on his elbows, his voice just above a whisper. ‘Even if the client was the agency’s biggest – by a huge margin?’
She fixed him with a hard expression, trying to fathom him, before asking outright, ‘What are you saying, Chris?’
What was he saying? If he told her, maybe she could take it up with Mike and that could be a way out for him. It wasn’t as if he’d be breaking client confidentiality. He hadn’t done anything illicit to get hold of the information. It was there, in America, for those who knew where to look for it.
‘What I’m saying,’ he said carefully, ‘is nothing that Madeleine Strauss hasn’t been saying about Jacob to God knows how many people.’
‘There’s no love lost there – everyone knows.’
‘At the art exhibition she told me that Jacob had the anti-Midas touch. Everything he had contact with turned to dust.’
‘Typical Madeleine remark,’ she said with a grimace.
‘She said he’d never been any good at making money. I couldn’t help thinking back to the press pack. I think the words “entrepreneurial genius” were used.’
‘Elliott North’s words.’
‘I couldn’t help wondering – just what’s going on here?’
She was following him intently, hardly bearing to guess where this conversation was heading.
‘It so happens,’ he told her, ‘that I have a friend in the States who runs a desk research operation. If there’s a single sheet of paper that’s ever been generated about a company, he’s the man to find it. Last night I was faxed the company accounts of Ultra-Sports and Trimnasium.’
He reached into his top drawer and pulled out a sheaf of fax paper which he handed over the desk to Kate. ‘Jim Ritchie was being very generous when he questioned the relevance of Jacob Strauss’s previous experience …’
For a few moments she flicked through the pages in silence. Reading company accounts was second nature to her, but these she had to double-take. She could scarcely believe them. For the past God knows how many weeks, she’d been sending out press packs to her closest journalist contacts, positioning Jacob Strauss as the great sporting icon and entrepreneurial wunderkind. Meantime …
‘If this gets out—’ She was shaking her head. ‘It explains Elliott North. But if this gets out …’ She put down the pages and stared at him. ‘This changes everything,’ she said. Then, glancing back at the pages, ‘I’m going to have to tell Mike. This,’ she shook the pages, ‘this is a hostage to fortune. It’s only a matter of time before it blows up in our faces.’
Pushing his chair back from his desk, he got up and walked to the window. He hadn’t planned to do what he’d just done. But what had he planned to do? He was sure he could trust Kate. So where was the problem?
