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His right eyelid twitched. ‘What about them?’
‘Well, I dug up a lot more about them than I thought I would.’
‘What?’ He reached out, seizing the article from her, flicking through the pages. There was no doubting she had his full attention now. ‘This isn’t research?’ he demanded.
‘It’s got past the research stage,’ she said, meeting his eyes. He seemed peculiarly agitated. ‘It’s a six-thousand-word article. I spent all weekend writing it.’
He glanced back at her pages, random phrases leaping out at him: ‘Starwear’s squalid child slave factory’, ‘Jacob Strauss’s trumped-up business credentials’.
‘I think it could be the corporate exposé” of the year,’ she said evenly.
Behind his desk, Alex Carter blanched. ‘Leave this with me.’ He shook her article. ‘Close the door on your way out.’
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sp; Back at her desk, she couldn’t stop watching him out of the corner of her eye. She could see everything through the glass walls of his office: how he sat, utterly engrossed in the article, holding his face – she reckoned he could probably hardly believe what he was reading. Then he pulled out a cigar, ripped off its wrapper, and lit up – no fiddling and fussing, no savouring the moment. He was puffing huge clouds of smoke for quite some time, then he was at her article again, pen in hand, scribbling furiously. Next he was making a phone call, pacing up and down behind his desk and jabbing his cigar in the air as he only ever did in moments of high drama. And this was drama all right, she thought. This was the business news equivalent of the atomic bomb.
She tried to distract herself with routine tasks: expenses form, personal filing, going through that morning’s voluminous pile of media releases from PR agencies. Every few minutes she would glance sidelong towards Carter, who seemed to spend the whole morning stamping up and down his office on the telephone. She found it hard to keep her excitement reigned in. He knew, and she knew, this was no ordinary exposé This story would be picked up, instantly, by all the national and international media. Television, radio, you name it. This story would see the demise of Jacob Strauss and the collapse of Starwear – the world’s second biggest brand.
Eventually, some time after eleven, he called her in.
‘This is the most astounding investigative reportage I have ever seen,’ he told her, once she was standing opposite him, in a fug of cigar smoke. ‘Congratulations! You’ve proved that my decision to hire you for The Herald was absolutely right. I don’t think I’ve known of a case …’ He was scanning through her pages again, shaking his head, ‘Incredible. Quite incredible.’
As he glanced up at her she noted now that his whole right cheek seemed to have given way to a nervous tic.
‘I have just one suggestion to make – and I think you’ll agree with me. The central story, the child slave thing …’
‘What about it?’
‘It needs to be stronger.’
‘Stronger?’ She could barely believe it. ‘But, I mean, how could it be any stronger than it already is?’
When she emerged from his office, two minutes later, she was in a state of shock. Alex Carter had come out with the last thing in the world she’d ever expected.
‘Ellen? It’s Claude here.’
‘Oh, Claude.’ Behind her desk, she felt herself rising to her feet with anticipation. ‘How are you?’
‘Very well, thank you.’ He didn’t return the salutations. The truth was, he felt an awful burden of guilt after so blatantly lying to her during their last conversation. Now he just wanted this over with. ‘I’m delighted to say, your proposals have got the go-ahead. Unanimous funding approval. I’ve just posted you a letter to that effect.’
‘Oh, Claude, I am thrilled!’ She didn’t disguise her excitement.
‘So am I,’ he agreed heartily. ‘I know you’ve been forced to keep a lot of those ideas on the backburner for years, but they’ve always deserved funding.’
‘I’ve already given some thought to the next steps,’ she enthused. Then she was telling him about the staff she planned to recruit, and administration arrangements, her budget forecasts and planned timetable.
Bonning heard her out, and they talked for a while about future Executive Council Meetings, before he got to the real reason for his call.
‘Last time we spoke, you mentioned how pleased you were about the recognition we were giving Starwear at our awards ceremony.’
‘I remember.’
‘Well, how would you like to be the one to present the GlobeWatch Company of the Year Award?’
‘That’s … some kind of speech?’
‘Just a short one,’ he told her. ‘Of course, all the media will be there. Good chance to get your message across.’
