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‘From the age of five until he was eight,’ his aunt was explaining, ‘then he ran away to the police who managed to find his other uncle in Jaipur. Vishnu was one of the lucky ones.’
‘Several other children here worked in the same factory,’ B. J. Singh was saying now.
‘Really?’ asked Judith. ‘Who?’
There were assorted calls from around the room. This was incredible! There must be at least half a dozen.
‘You’re all absolutely sure it was Starwear? Not Starwear knock-offs?’
The room was filled with strenuous denials.
‘These children can tell fake Starwear just by looking at it,’ R. J. Patel told her. ‘They know Starwear garments down to the last detail.’
‘We had to do it right,’ the boy on the floor was looking up at her and speaking again, ‘or we were punished.’
Bobby was flicking through all the papers in his box file again, before producing a black and white photograph which he handed to her. It showed three men outside a large, corrugated-iron shed. ‘This is the factory,’ he told her. ‘My brother in India, he took the picture for our group. And this one,’ he pointed at one of the men, ‘he is the slave master, isn’t he, Vishnu?’ He showed the photograph to the boy.
The child took one look at the photograph before turning to his aunt, burying his face in her sari.
‘It’s all right, Vishnu,’ she comforted him, ‘you’re far away now. Safe with us.’
Meeting Judith’s eyes she said, ‘Every time we go past a shop selling Starwear he is like this.’
Elliott North had thought Cullen was about to try firing him. He’d never seen him so angry – hadn’t thought him capable of such elemental fury. Not, thought North, that it mattered a damn. The simple truth was that Cullen couldn’t fire him – unless he was prepared to put the Starwear account in serious jeopardy. And nothing, he knew, was more important to Mike Cullen than Starwear and his precious Four-Point Plan.
He’d been right, of course. Cullen hadn’t tried scalping him, though he would have liked to. Instead he’d summed up what he wanted North to do in a single word – apologise. After all the storm and bluster it had been pathetic, thought North. Wet and witless. He’d demanded that North do some serious ass-creeping with Taylor and her journalist buddy at the Sunday Telegraph. He was also supposed to sweeten up Treiger, whom he’d hardly seen since throwing out his academic treatise; ever since he’d heard he was balling Judith Laing, North had been keeping his distance.
Apologising was the very last thing he planned to do, knowing it was Taylor who’d come by the Ultra-Sports and Trimnasium accounts. As if it wasn’t bad enough keeping the hacks in check, now they were being sabotaged from within. He hadn’t liked Taylor from the start – and she made it clear she didn’t approve of him. The snooty cow thought her ‘principles’ put her way above him. The problem was that she was the most important person working on Starwear in Britain, with the exception of the Grand Four-Point Planner in the Sky. Despising her was one thing – but she’d become a real problem. Now she knew too much and, like Merlin de Vere, was too close to too many people. Something would have to be done about her, pronto. Something for Solly Kuczynski.
And it wasn’t just Kate Taylor who knew too much. As he sat in the darkness of the microfilm viewing cabin in Monitoring Services, rolling film laboriously through the machine and staring at it through his steel-framed lenses, he thought about Jay’s private life – and the threat of a serious leak there. Jay’s demands had been getting more and more extreme, and it was North’s job to make sure his boss’s desires were fulfilled – and no one else got to hear about them. But the greater the demands, the higher the risk. And every instinct told North they’d gone one risk too far. Something would have to be done to contain the leak. Another one for Solly.
It was all getting hectic. Too hectic. Like their last days in New York. But he did have his plans. Sure, things were coming to a head, driving towards an inexorable climax. But he had made arrangements. And part of the arrangements included what to do with someone who’d started out as a mere irrit
ant, but developed into a potentially far more devastating adversary: Judith Laing.
It was all very well for that smug prick d’Andrea to tell him Laing’s computers at work and at home were blanks. He’d said the same thing about Treiger. ‘Squeaky clean’, he’d said, before it turned out Treiger was rooting Laing. Talk about colossal cock-up. When he’d got on to Alex Carter, the guy had acted like he was doing North some huge favour even mentioning Starwear to Laing. He was quite happy to take their money, of course, but ask for something back and he gets all up himself with his lordly airs and graces.
When Carter had finally got back to him, he’d been no better than d’Andrea. Laing had done some ‘gentle probing’ into Starwear, he said. The kind of thing that went on all the time. Every day his hacks looked at half a dozen different stories, but would only write up one of them – and even that might get spiked if a really big story came along and took the space.
North hadn’t thanked him for the sermon on how a newspaper works; he’d just hung up. He’d never operated on the basis of what people said, but on what he suspected them capable of. And he suspected Judith Laing capable of a lot. She wasn’t the type to go rifling through Forbes documents, compare their analyses to sets of annual reports, ask Mark shit-for-brains Hunter about the discrepancy – and then just walk away from it. No way, José. She’d be right in there, and her investigations would take her exactly where she couldn’t be allowed to go. Because where she was heading was more than explosive. Jay’s miserable business failures were as nothing compared to India. That was meltdown material.
Christ knew what she’d already told Treiger, and what Treiger would do, which was why they were both being watched twenty-four hours aday. The activity reports had shown nothing more suspicious than visits to friends’ houses for dinner – all very twinky. Which, in itself, was suspicious. Wouldn’t be long now till the game was up, thought North. The final curtain. But, until then, he had to keep a grip on things.
Eventually he found what he was looking for. The record of the deal with Hydrabull Investments, consisting of a wadge of documents, some on Hydrabull letterhead, which provided contact details for the Company Chairman, Prince Abdul. Checking his watch for the time difference – early evening over there – he picked up a telephone receiver and started dialling.
‘Can I speak to Prince Abdul?’ he demanded when the phone was finally answered after much clicking and long-distance signals.
‘Just hold on.’
There was a lengthy pause, during which North gazed into mid-distance, lips pursed with impatience.
Then at the other end, ‘Who is calling?’
‘John Acker from the Wall Street Journal.’ The name tripped out with ease of practice.
There was another long pause before a voice came on the line. ‘How may I help?’
It was a public school voice – upper-class Indian twit, no doubt. ‘John Acker, Wall Street Journal, Prince Abdul,’ he said. ‘Sorry to disturb your evening. I’m just researching a story on Starwear.’
