Never Mind The Botox: Rachel (6 page)

She left the Beau Street office and got on the tube home. As usual it was packed and there were no seats. She watched a man reading a newspaper folded neatly long-ways in one hand. He was hanging on to an overhead strap at the same time and seemed oblivious to the people around him. She wished she could do the same but she had nothing to read except her work notebook, which was hardly escapist literature. Instead, she amused herself by deciding which man in the carriage she would marry if they were the only ones left in the world: a regular game during her commute home. She looked around, examining the men in the carriage: the standard mix of portly businessmen, office workers and tourists. Tonight was easy. It would be the scruffy but acceptable looking student type sitting down the far end of the carriage. If only choosing a partner for life could really be that simple.

When she got home she ran herself a bath. She lay soaking in it for ages, slowly drinking a glass of wine and mulling over the conversation that she needed to have with Harry later. She really wanted him to understand how important it was to her that he didn’t show her up at the summer party. She wanted to show the partners that she was level-headed and responsible, and that included her choice of boyfriend.

Harry arrived shortly after eight p.m. and was in a typically chirpy mood. She gave him a glass of wine and they sat in the kitchen chatting.

‘Our summer party invites have come through at work,’ Rachel said after a while. ‘It’s with other halves this year. Will you come with me?’

‘If I have to,’ said Harry.

At least that’s a yes, Rachel thought.

‘Great, I’d really like you to,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s black tie so we’ll have a chance to dress up for a change, which will be fun.’ She held her breath slightly.

‘Oh, you’re joking! That’s not my idea of fun. And besides, I don’t have a penguin suit,’ said Harry.

‘That’s okay, I can hire one for you. There’s a suit hire place just near the office.’

‘Fine,’ he said, looking sulky.

‘Come on, Harry, it’s not that bad. I go to loads of your work things.’

‘That’s because they’re fun. Your work parties are boring as hell.’

‘That’s so not true,’ said Rachel. ‘You just can’t be bothered to make an effort.’

‘Rubbish. I talked to loads of people at the last one,’ said Harry.

‘Only after you’d pretty much drunk your own body weight in red wine and then you mostly insulted them.’

They sat in silence, glaring at each other, for a few moments.

Rachel decided to change tack. ‘Look, Harry, I really need the next few months to go well for me. The director promotions are coming up and I could do with staying under the radar. Let’s just go and try to have a nice time, shall we? I promise I’ll make it up to you.’ She put her hand on the inside of Harry’s thigh and gave it a gentle squeeze.

‘If you say so,’ said Harry, pushing her hand away and getting up. He went into the sitting room and turned on the TV.

Rachel stayed in the kitchen. Why were these conversations so hard? And why did they always end up arguing? To most people, getting an invitation to a party was a good thing. Maybe she just had to accept that Harry would never be interested in her work. She knew he was interested in her, and after all, that was what mattered.

Chapter 5

Rachel and Rosa spent the next morning preparing a list of invoices that they needed to
get out from filing. Once they’d finished they went into the accounts department and set themselves up on a spare desk near a long row of grey filing cabinets. Around them, the finance team were chatting away, making coffee for each other and generally getting on with the jobs of the day.

‘It’s got a nice atmosphere this place, don’t you think?’ Rosa said.

‘Yes it has. They’re a pretty friendly bunch. I wonder if they get an employee discount on treatments,’ said Rachel.

‘Ooh, I hadn’t thought of that,’ said Rosa. ‘That would be quite a perk! We should see if we can spot people who’ve had something done. Mind you, I guess if they’re as good as they say they are here, we probably won’t be able to tell those who’ve had something done from those who haven’t.’

‘But don’t you think that the office staff here are generally more attractive than your average accounts team, though?’ Rachel asked. ‘Where’s the standard stock of dowdy women and overweight men in zipped cardigans?’

Rosa looked around. She had to admit that the number of flat stomachs, pouting mouths and feline eye shapes was probably quite a bit higher than in the rest of the population.

‘Yup, fair point,’ said Rosa. ‘You can’t blame them, though, can you? I mean, if you work in a cake shop where they give you free cakes, you’re bound to eat them at some point.’

Just as Rosa was talking, a tall skinny woman with a smooth, expressionless face walked past their desk. Rachel nodded at Rosa knowingly and sucked in her cheeks. Rosa looked at the woman, who immediately smiled at her and said ‘Good morning’ in a singsong voice.

‘Oh, er, yes, good morning,’ said Rosa, rather caught off guard and trying hard not to laugh. ‘Rachel!’ she said once the woman was out of earshot.

‘What? You were the one who wanted to play spot the nose job,’ said Rachel, laughing. ‘I couldn’t let a classic frozen fish face go unnoticed. Anyway, that’s quite enough taking the piss out of the client. We should get started.’

‘Yes, quite right,’ said Rosa.

Rachel read out the first invoice number and Rosa carefully worked her way through the filing cabinets until she found it.

‘Does it have the procedure details on?’ Rachel asked.

‘Yes it does,’ said Rosa.

‘Great, let’s get out the ones we need then, make copies of them and then put them back. Then we can use the copies to build up the sales analysis.’

Rachel helped Rosa for a while and then headed back to the project room to carry on with her own work, looking at the average ages of the client base. She still hadn’t spotted a single celebrity name in the information she’d been looking at and was determined to try to find some. She sat down and went back over the analysis she’d been doing over the past few days. The most common age group was coming out at twenty-five to thirty years, which was younger than she’d expected. She’d thought that most people would be having something done to them in their forties. It was probably something to do with the fact that breast augmentation was their most popular procedure. Rachel made a note to chat to Tom about it next time they met.

She moved on to look at average price per procedure, starting with breast augmentation. There wasn’t really that much of a range. Most of the patients had been charged somewhere between four and five thousand pounds. But as Rosa had found, quite a few of the sales records just showed ‘other’ for the procedure type.

It took Rosa two days to find and copy all the invoices they needed.

‘That was a rubbish job!’ she declared as she came back into the project room clutching a large pile of paper.

‘Well done,’ said Rachel. ‘Right, let’s have a recap as to where we are, shall we? AJ, why don’t you talk me through where you’ve got to?’

‘Right,’ said AJ. ‘I’ve been looking at the growth rates of procedures outside of the top five. Some of the fastest growing areas include light treatments for things like thread veins and age spots, Botox and fillers, as you might expect, and also um, um…’

AJ stopped talking. He had started to go red.

Rachel and Rosa looked at each other in amusement.

‘Also what?’ Rachel asked.

‘Well, it’s er, well, um,’ AJ stammered.

‘Spit it out, man!’ Rachel said. ‘You’re going to have to present on this soon enough. No point being embarrassed.’

‘Alright, one of the other fast growing areas is vaginoplasty,’ said AJ eventually.

As he spoke, Rachel and Rosa burst out laughing. He looked cross at first, but soon starting laughing too. They were all still laughing when the door of the project room suddenly opened. It was Tom Duffy. They all stopped immediately.

‘What’s all the hilarity?’ Tom asked.

For a moment none of them said anything as they searched for an answer.

Then Rachel said, ‘Oh, er, AJ was just telling us about a funny best man’s speech that he heard at a wedding he went to at the weekend.’

AJ looked at Rachel in horror.

‘Oh yes, what was that AJ?’ Tom asked.

AJ froze, seemingly totally unable to think of a reply.

Rachel stepped in quickly. ‘He was telling us about the best man who, as it happens, also has a bit of a drug habit.’

AJ looked even more horrified.

‘And he stood up and started his speech by saying, “I had prepared a couple of lines for this speech but I’m afraid I’ve snorted them both.” The young people at the wedding thought it was hilarious but it didn’t go down too well with the bride’s family!’ Rachel said.

Tom laughed loudly. ‘Ah yes, very good, very funny. And what nice company you keep, AJ. Anyway, I’d just dropped in to check that you’d got the information you needed from the invoices you had to pull out.’

Rosa patted a large pile of paper. ‘Yes thanks,’ she said. ‘All here.’

‘Right good, don’t want Equinox to think we can’t keep our books properly. Also, we’re having an all-party meeting on Monday for the deal advisers, bankers, lawyers, et cetera. You guys need to be there to give us an update on your progress. I’ll email you the details. Is that alright?’

‘Yes, no problem,’ said Rachel.

‘Good, I’ll see you then.’ And he left, shutting the door behind him.

‘Why on the earth did you tell him that wedding story?’ AJ said. ‘He’ll think that I’m a right loser now who mixes with a load of druggies!’

‘I’m so sorry, it was just the first wedding joke that came to mind. Anyway, you weren’t exactly leaping in to help and I could hardly tell him that we were laughing at you saying vaginoplasty.’

As she said it AJ winced and they started laughing all over again.

‘Oh dear, we’ve got to get a grip,’ said Rachel, wiping a tear from her eye. ‘We really can’t start laughing every time we talk about these things. We need to be professional about it.’

‘I think we need some practice,’ said Rosa.

Yes, we really do, thought Rachel, with an all-party meeting in a few days’ time.

The rest of the day flew past as they worked through the rest of the information they had.

‘I think we’re just about ready to start interviewing the doctors,’ Rachel said. ‘I still need to go through these papers, but I’ll take them home with me tonight and finish them.’

That evening, Harry was in the kitchen in Rachel’s flat cooking pasta while she was working at her desk. Rachel had the pile of ‘other’ invoices that Rosa had pulled out from the filing cabinets and she was going through them, separating out those that were for breast augmentation. She started putting the cost for each one into the analysis of average cost per procedure that she’d prepared earlier. As she did, she began to notice that the cost of each one was much higher than those she’d taken from the normal records. Some were as high as nine thousand pounds. Rachel took out her notebook and checked the list prices for breast augmentation. The highest list price was five and a half grand. Why would they be charging so much above the list price? These were just records that hadn’t been coded properly. There would be no reason for them to have different prices to any other records.

Harry peered over her shoulder. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. He picked up an invoice. ‘Breast augmentation? I assume that’s a boob job. Eight thousand seven hundred quid! Wow, that’s not cheap!’

‘Put that down,’ said Rachel. ‘And yes, it is expensive, which is a bit odd actually. It’s more than it should be.’

‘And they paid in cash,’ said Harry, putting the invoice down. ‘Flash gits.’

Rachel picked the invoice up and looked at it. He was quite right. In the method of payment box it simply said ‘cash’. She picked up a few more invoices and looked at them. They were all paid in cash too. How often did people pay for this sort of thing in cash? That didn’t seem right. Rachel sighed and leant back in her chair, stretching her neck and back. It was gone nine p.m. and supper was ready. She’d look into it in the morning.

The first thing Rachel did when she got into Beau Street the next day was to look at the other sales records that had the procedures properly noted on them. Not a single one had been paid in cash. Maybe this was another computer glitch caused by the new system. Rachel took a couple of cash paid invoices and headed to the accounts department. Tom had introduced her to most of the team and she was pretty sure which one of them looked after the cash books. She approached a smiley lady in her fifties who was sitting at a desk near the window.

‘Hi, Chris,’ said Rachel in a friendly tone. ‘I’ve got a couple of invoices here that say they were paid in cash. We’ve had a few bits of information missing that may be down to when you moved onto the new computer system. I just wanted to check whether these were actually cash payments. Can you have a look for me?’

‘Sure,’ said Chris. ‘What’s the invoice number?’

Rachel read out the number and Chris checked the bank records.