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‘The list seemed fine to me. I did notice that you’ve proposed Starwear for the Best Developing Nations Employer prize.’
At the other end, he felt his heart pound in his throat. Please, dear God, don’t object to Starwear.
‘An excellent choice,’ she told him. ‘I knew Nathan. So sad.’
He sighed, with real feeling. ‘Actually, that was what I wanted to discuss with you. As you can see, Starwear has been nominated for several categories. So a few members have suggested putting Starwear forward for the main prize. Would you have any objections?’
‘Not per se. But isn’t this something we really ought to discuss at Council?’
‘Under normal circumstances—’
‘I realise you’re under time pressure. But, as you say, this will be a high-profile event – the first time most people will ever have heard of GlobeWatch. It’s important to me that we’re as transparent in our workings as possible.’
Transparent. Claude thought instantly of Jeannie. Poor, mad Jeannie. His whole life had been founded on deception. Well-intentioned deception, but deception nonetheless.
‘I agree, an open forum would be more, as you put it, transparent; but, Ellen, I can’t tell you the huge pressure I’m under from our sponsors to get this thing finalised.’
She couldn’t mistake the frustration in his voice, like a deep and unexpected groan of weariness. It seemed so unlike Claude, who was always so upbeat and energetic. It made her pause for thought.
It hadn’t escaped Ellen that Claude was seeking approval from her for a proposal at the very same time that she was seeking funding approval from him. If she’d had a more developed sense of paranoia, she might even have imagined there was a direct correlation between the two: let Starwear get the big prize, and you’ll have your funding; if you don’t agree, forget it. But Ellen wasn’t paranoid and, besides, despite the procedural irregularities, she didn’t think, for a moment, that Claude would ever get tangled up in anything like that. What she did say, however, was, ‘Tell me, Claude: I notice that Starwear is on the list of GlobeWatch sponsors; was their donation significantly bigger than any of the others?’
‘I’d have to look at my files to see how much they gave,’ he lied. He knew, perfectly well, that Starwear was the only real donor. All the other companies had come from the client list of some PR agency, and had agreed to chip in £100 apiece. It made for an impressive list, nonetheless, which concealed the true purpose of the exercise. Having come to the nub of the matter, Ellen’s question now was excruciating.
‘Obviously, if they were one of the bigger sponsors—’
‘Of course.’
‘And I think I deserve a direct answer.’
18
Judith paced about the sitting room of her Earl’s Court flat in jeans and bare feet, a glass of red Chateau Cardboard in one hand, and a cigarette in the other. Laid out on the carpet around her were piles of all the documents she’d collected during the past five and a half weeks for her Starwear investigation. This Wednesday night, the flat was her own. Simon had gone off with some tough old queen from Hamptons, the gay pub just around the corner. He wouldn’t be back till at least three a.m., which meant she had the place to herself, thank God. Time and space to think. Laying out all the documents in carefully ordered piles was the way she liked to put things together. Physically walking around the ideas, preferably with a glass of something alcoholic by way of a relaxant, was how she preferred to work out her stories. Once she had the big picture in her mind, she found, the story would write itself.
Sipping deeply from her wineglass, she glanced across at all the evidence she had assembled. The first pile was what had got her started out on this investigation – printouts of company accounts from the disk Denise Caville had backed up from Merlin’s computer. The Ultra-Sports and Trimnasium accounts, with Merlin’s annotations, provided all the evidence she needed of Jacob Strauss’s disastrous career prior to his joining Starwear. In the next pile was the press pack issued by Lombard on Strauss’s appointment as CEO of Starwear, with all the glowing prose extolling his business prowess, as demonstrated in his track record with Ultra-Sports and Trimnasium.
One pile along from that were the Forbes reports on the Quantum Change programme, showing all the business re-engineering that was necessary to arrive at certain ambitious factory outputs. The outputs were all forecasts, of course, as the Quantum Change programme had still to be implemented. But next to this were Starwear’s own annual reports and accounts showing the real figures once Quantum Change had been put in place – figures that far exceeded even Forbes’s most optimistic expectations. The cuttings showing press reaction to the Quantum Change results were all there too. Judith couldn’t help marvelling at how few questions had been asked about why the fruits of Quantum Change had been so abundant – having more, rather than less, seldom aroused curiosity in the City.
Then there were the notes of her meeting with Mark Hunter, and his explanation of why actual profits had been so far in advance of the Forbes figures. It was all to do with the disposal of assets – to be precise, the sale of an office block. But in that same pile was a recording of her interview with Prince Abdul, who confirmed that no such disposal had ever taken place.
The final pile consisted of transcripts from last night in Southfields: pages and pages of first-hand accounts by children, now living with their families in London, who had literally been incarcerated for months at a time in a corrugated-iron shed in conditions that equalled the most Dickensian excesses. These children had been forced to sleep under workbenches – never having more than six hours’ sleep a day – and had been fed on slops and made to work, supposedly to pay off family debts. Last night, as she’d sat with her tape recorder on the floor in front of her, she had barely been able to believe the matter-of-fact way in which the children had recalled the most appalling experiences of abuse.
From ages as young as six, children would be forced to sit on production benches, under a blaze of bright, fluorescent light, working their nimble fingers tirelessly to stitch the identical seam on a hundred garments an hour. Production was constantly monitored and the punishment for those who fell behind their target was instant and severe. Seats would be taken away from them, so that they had to stand for hours at a time, sometimes days, while they continued working. Those who complained were administered severe beatings. The slave masters who ran the factory were careful never to hit them on the arms or face – instead they’d be forced on to their stomachs and flogged until they bled from their backs and buttocks and legs. Some of them, including Vishnu, had rows of ugly weals to prove it.
Pleas to be allowed to go home to parents or other relatives were met with news that they were no longer wanted at home. So there they would stay until they were thirteen or fourteen, by which time they would have outgrown their usefulness. No illness of any kind was tolerated – nothing must interrupt production. When children collapsed from exhaustion or any other condition, they were removed, never to be seen again.
The results of this appalling cruelty could be seen in a huge shed near Jaipur which housed dozens of emaciated children, many of whom were pathetically small for their age, and who knew nothing except work and brutality. Physically scarred an
d emotionally traumatised, many had forgotten any other kind of existence, or were too exhausted to care. They were children living a barely human existence, the victims of abject, Indian poverty – and cut-throat retail pricing in the shopping malls of Europe and America; small, dark shadows living in the twilight who’d had their childhoods stolen from them.
The ones Judith had met were the lucky ones, God help them. At least they’d had, through family networks which extended into Britain, some hope of having debts paid – as little as £300 was all that was needed to release a child from six years’ bondage to his ‘owner’. But what about all the others – the pathetic little scraps of humanity who were, at this moment, slaving under the fluorescent glare, stitching Starwear garments to be sold in British shops in a fortnight’s time? There was no escaping the reality of their tortured existence.
Never had Judith’s emotions been engaged as strongly as they were on this story. Twenty-four hours after meeting the children, she could still barely believe what they’d been through. Not only was this a story that would rock the headlines, she thought, it was also one demanding to be told. But how should she tell it, and where did it fit in with all the other information she had pulled together? As she paced between the piles of paper, taking occasional sips of wine and drags from her cigarette, she tried to get her head around it; to decide from which angle to come at it.
Usually, it didn’t take much working out to decide how to approach a story. Most investigations were single-pointed. But this one had so many different strands to it. The main story, of course, was the exploitation of child slaves by Starwear. Here was a company which professed to be a leader in the area of corporate citizenship and business ethics, enslaving poverty-stricken six-year-olds in order to be able to sell tracksuits from Los Angeles to London. Here was a company whose leader, corporate guru Nathan Strauss, in explicitly denying using slave labour, had clearly lied. This was more than just another business story: it was front-page material. The moment it was published in The Herald, it would be picked up by every other news channel, television included – and not only in Britain, because this was an international problem.
The consequences for Starwear would be instant and apocalyptic. Every shop stocking Starwear merchandise would have to dump it – or risk a consumer boycott. Sales of Starwear goods in the developed world would collapse – and so, too, would Starwear’s share price. The Starwear brand, today worth a supposed $10 billion, would overnight become valueless, regarded, if anything, as a symbol of evil. The company would be forced to close its child slave factory in Jaipur – and wherever else it was exploiting cheap labour. If there was anything left of Starwear by the end of it, and if it managed to hold on to any market share at all, the company would be ripe for takeover.
A secondary string to the main story was the financial manipulation of Starwear executives like Mark Hunter, in their efforts to keep the truth from shareholders. Through the Company Report and Accounts, Starwear had clearly misled shareholders about their source of profits – that alone would have been enough to cause a furore in the business press, and deal the share price a devastating blow.
