Take My Breath Away (11 page)

‘Incidentally, you are sleeping better these days, I hope?’

Nic rarely spoke about his insomnia. He had no idea how Fergus had heard of it, but knowledge was power, and Fergus exuded power. He would have made a formidable advocate.

‘You know the old line. I may have insomnia, but I don’t lose any sleep over it.’

Fergus sniggered as the applause thundered. ‘So, another triumph for Will power.’ There was affection in his tone, and something else. Nic thought he heard amusement and contempt. Like a ventriloquist singing the praises of his dummy. ‘Ah well, now the serious networking begins. I’ll have to circulate. Hey, say hello to Joel Anthony here. Joel, this is Nic Gabriel, the writer. I told you, he’s thinking of writing about Creed. Nic, meet Joel. Super advocate. A rising star.’

‘He’s so sweet to me,’ the young man said, offering Nic his hand as Fergus slipped away into the crowd. ‘Actually, I recognised you from the photograph on the jacket of your book. I’ve heard a lot about you.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Well, I hear you’ve been asking questions about Matthew Creed and Bradley Hurst.’

‘News travels fast.’

‘Will and Fergus were talking about you before breakfast. I was intrigued. I suppose I’m a bit of a nosy parker. You know what lawyers are like. The worst gossips in the world.’

There was an eagerness, a naivete almost, about Joel that Nic found appealing. He said, ‘Dylan mentioned something strange. About Matt Creed burning in Paradise.’

Joel stared at him. ‘What – what do you know about that?’

‘Not as much as I’d like to.’

Joel took a breath, as if taking a decision. He hesitated, looked around. The room was emptying, no one could overhear.

‘I shouldn’t say this.’

An irresistible line, if ever there was one. ‘Go on,’ Nic said.

‘It’s true,’ Joel whispered.

Nic stared. ‘Meaning what?’

‘This – this is off the record?’

‘Non-attributable. Even if I use it. That’s all I can promise.’

Joel swallowed. ‘You’ll find out sooner or later. If we don’t come clean, you might think the firm had something to hide. Which we don’t.’

‘If you say so.’

‘It’s like this. Matthew was very good to me, gave me a lot of help when I was a young solicitor, just starting out. He had a rough time with his wife’s illness. For all his success, for all his wealth, he was a lonely man. He needed – outlets for all that energy.’

‘Such as?’

‘There was this sauna off Chancery Lane. He used to head off there after a day’s work. Maybe after having a few drinks at El Vino’s or somewhere.’

‘When you say sauna…?’

‘Massage parlour, brothel, whatever you like to call it. The ultimate pleasure palace, that’s how they advertised it in the
Evening Standard.
Its name was Paradise. The girls would make you believe there is a God, after all.’

‘And?’

‘One night, Matthew followed a tough day in the High Court with a few too many beers. He turned up and went into a cubicle on his own. Then he fell asleep.’ Joel paused, his voice barely audible. ‘An hour later they broke down the door and found him lying on the bench. Scalded to death.’

Nic felt his gorge rising. He couldn’t help picturing the scene in the pleasure parlour. Matthew Creed, pissed and ageing, closing his eyes for a while as he acclimatised to the heat. Nic imagined the temperature rising, the smoky smell of burning flesh.

‘Jesus.’

‘So you see,’ Joel whispered, ‘it is possible to burn in Paradise.’

‘None of this hit the Press. There was a cover-up.’

‘That’s harsh. Unfair. No one wanted Matthew’s widow to suffer. She was a nice lady. Think of the hurt that publicity would have caused.’

‘To her? Or the firm?’

Joel coloured. ‘I wasn’t a partner at the time, but I can understand why they wanted to keep things tight. Like I said, it was a tragedy. No one’s fault.’

‘Same as Bradley Hurst?’

‘We didn’t have much in common except for Creed. Even so, the accident came as a terrible shock. Bradley dead and Alice left in a wheelchair.’

‘Alice?’

‘Alice Wythenshawe. Equal Rights officer for one of our major clients and someone very definitely going places. At the party on the night when the accident happened, they spent most of the time in a corner, canoodling. We were all happy, we’d all put a lot of drink away, it was fun to see them getting it together.’

‘Why did Bradley drive if he was drunk? Wouldn’t it have been easier to catch a cab?’

‘Of course. That was the crazy thing. Half an hour before the pair of them disappeared, he said he might run Alice home. I told him not to be so silly. He’d already had a skinful. I thought I’d extracted a promise from him that he’d be sensible. Ben talked to him as well.’ Joel shook his head. ‘Something must have made him change his mind.’

As a flunkey shooed them from the room, Nic asked, ‘Any idea what that something might have been?’

‘None at all. I simply remember looking round later and noticing that they had gone. They must have slipped out of the party while the rest of us weren’t looking. I’m not sure that they said goodbye. Mind you, I’d had a few myself by then and I’m not used to drinking heavily. Especially not champagne.’

‘So what happened to Alice?’

‘She had to sue, of course. I visited her in hospital. I felt a bit guilty – we all did. Somehow we should have stopped Bradley taking the wheel. I don’t know how it happened, but I wanted to do anything I could to make up. I put her in touch with a good personal injury firm and a deal was done. By that time she’d moved back up north.’

They were standing alone on the landing, waiting for the lift. Nic said, ‘So why are you telling me all this?’

‘Like I said, it’s better to be upfront about these things. Others might disagree, nobody likes washing dirty linen in public. But I’d rather you knew everything.’ Joel paused. ‘Here’s the lift. You go down, I’ll take the stairs. I don’t want the other partners to think
I’ve been talking out of turn. Fergus would go apeshit. But I suppose – it’s about time someone like you asked a few questions. For all our sakes.’

‘Roxanne? News from the hospital.’ Ben Yarrow on the phone. He had a rich voice; if she’d heard him before she’d met him, she would have guessed at a Tom Jones type. Not only appearances that are deceptive. ‘Howard Haycraft died in the early hours of this morning.’

In her mind she pictured the accident in Chancery Lane. Howard Haycraft had left her knowing that his career was over.
Deep, deep trouble
. Joel had been proved right. It didn’t matter whether he’d meant to walk under the wheels of the lorry or had simply been too distracted to take care. The end result was the same.

‘All very unfortunate, of course,’ Ben said briskly. ‘As you’d expect, the company is doing the right thing. Everything is under control. Welfare counsellors will look after the widow and there’s a handsome death in service benefit scheme. A few weeks on and he would have been out of a job and his family would have been dependent on goodwill. This way, the insurance people will pay up. Every cloud, you know…’

‘No silver lining for Howard Haycraft,’ she said.

Ben sighed. She had a vision of him, fiddling impatiently with his moustache. ‘He had no one to blame but himself.’

‘He was a creep, but I don’t think he ever meant to…’

‘Roxanne, Roxanne. You know as well as anyone that his intentions aren’t relevant. This was a case of sexual harassment.’

‘Alleged.’

‘Quite,’ Ben said irritably. ‘But Gina Mandel says he made her feel uncomfortable. He would leer at her, make inappropriate remarks. Harassment is subjective, remember. Doesn’t matter if other people say that you’re making too much of things. Even if it’s all in the mind, it’s still real. Remember, bullying is all about the abuse of power.’

Roxanne snapped, ‘I do know this. I’ve represented my share of applicants, remember?’

‘Then why have you forgotten the lessons you’ve learned?’ His tone was acerbic, reminding her of his crucifixion of Tara Glass. ‘Don’t mourn Howard Haycraft, Roxanne. He’s better off dead.’

When Joel asked her to step into his office, he didn’t waste time with preliminaries. ‘Ben’s told you the news?’

She nodded, reluctant to trust herself to speak. Everything was falling apart.

He stroked the stud in his ear. ‘You think it was your fault, don’t you?’

‘Once he talked to me, he thought his life was over.’

‘You were only doing your job.’

‘Whatever the coroner says, I bet it was a kind of suicide. I don’t know, perhaps I should have…’ Her voice trailed away. She didn’t know what to say, far less what she should have done.

He shook his head. ‘There’s nothing to blame yourself for.’

She exhaled. ‘Well…thanks.’

‘You did the right thing. I told you before.’ He was willing her to see things his way. ‘You did the right thing.’

Nothing for it but to bury herself in her work. Any
work. Ben had asked her to help tidy up a job for one of the privatised utilities. A reorganisation scam. When people weren’t performing, an employer had various options. One, Ben had explained, was the departure lounge. A Japanese idea, they called it the persona room. When you wanted one of your employees to go, you shifted their office to this bare little hutch next to the toilets and waited for them to get the message. Only problem was, a few introspective under-achievers actually liked having nothing to do and minimal contact with their colleagues, so other measures became necessary. When large-scale disposal of second-raters was called for, the preferred solution was to redefine their jobs out of existence. A new set of tasks – or a list of old tasks with sexy new names – would be concocted and the under-achievers required to apply for posts in the so-called new structure. They would be objectively measured against wide-ranging criteria and if care was taken, not only would they fail to secure a job but their resistance and morale would have been worn down so that even if they did bring claims of unfair redundancy, they wouldn’t have a hope in hell.

Mid-way through the afternoon, Will Janus’s PA asked her to come up to the senior partner’s office for a conference with Will and Joel. Roxanne didn’t know what to expect. The tune in the lift was ‘I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself’.

Joel said, ‘I hope you’re not still worrying about Haycraft, Roxanne. That was no one’s fault but his own.’

‘Haycraft?’ Will said. ‘Yes, Ben told me he’d died. All things considered, perhaps it was for the best, actually. Fergus says he has been in touch with Ali about a
suitable statement if there’s any contact from the press.’

‘Where’s the story?’ Joel asked.

‘There isn’t one. I can’t see the papers holding the front page. More to the point, Fergus agrees. Like he says, a middle-aged manager gets knocked down in the street, big deal. All the same, it pays to be prepared. Meanwhile, life goes on. We need to help Ali update the company’s recruitment systems.’

Roxanne shifted in her chair. Joel seemed to sense her discomfort. ‘Roxanne,’ he said, in his quiet persuasive tone, ‘we’re pleased with the start you’ve made here. You realise Ali is an important client of the firm, but maybe you don’t realise quite
how
important he is. Confidentially, we bill fifty per cent more per annum to Thrust than any other client.’

‘It’s not just about money,’ Will said. He’d frowned as Joel spoke and Roxanne guessed that he didn’t care to discuss billing figures with a new recruit, however good an initial impression she might have made. ‘Ali is a dear man. Like any high achiever, he has his share of enemies. Jealous, little people who would love to embarrass him in a tribunal. We need to protect him.’

‘What would you like me to do?’ she asked.

Will reached for a thick file of papers on the coffee table in front of them and passed it to her. ‘Here’s a rough first draft of the documentation. Think back to your days in the advice agency. Imagine you were consulted by a disgruntled job applicant who had applied to work for Thrust and been turned down. Read the company’s paperwork. Search out the loopholes. On paper your client was the best qualified candidate. But – he’s black. Or HIV-positive. Or she’s a woman with epilepsy. Your client claims the company
was only paying lip service to dignity at work and equal opportunities. What is your best line of attack? We want you to think the unthinkable.’

‘That’s right,’ Joel said. ‘Think the unthinkable.’

‘You’re ideally suited, with your background at the advice centre,’ Will told her.

Joel nodded. ‘Poacher turned gamekeeper.’

Roxanne picked up the file.
If only you knew. I’m not the hunter, I’m the prey.

You can change your name, but you can’t change who you are.

How could she hope to go on keeping her secret? It was suffocating her. She dared not confide in anyone. Certainly not Ben: she might owe him her job, but she was sure that he would have no qualms in sacking her if he discovered she’d misled him. Not Joel: he was sympathetic, but he was a partner and his loyalty must be to the firm. Not even Chloe: tempting, but too risky. She talked too much. Something she’d overheard at the weekend came back to her mind. There was another possibility, a way of confiding in others without destroying the career she’d only just begun. A long shot, but worth a try.

Decision made, she forced herself to concentrate on her work. Thrust Media wanted to employ the best people. Only the best. Ali Khan bragged about it in his introduction to the new draft staff handbook. People were the company’s biggest asset, he proclaimed, as if sharing the secret of eternal life. Joel had highlighted the phrase in red and put a couple of exclamation marks in the margin. She liked Joel. He played the game, but he knew it was only a game.

The recruitment procedures seemed to go on forever.
When it came to getting a job with Thrust, only the strong survived. If the psychometric analyses did not weed you out, the genetic testing would. And that was before the company graphologist was called in to express an opinion on every loop and curl of the requisite handwritten letter of application. Nowadays a loser like Howard Haycraft wouldn’t even make it on to the bottom rung of the ladder.

Thank God for the way Ben Yarrow had relied on instinct in calling her in for interview and offering her the job. Amazing that he should be so casual. But then, when did a lawyer ever practise what he preached?

She left the office at eight, but didn’t take her usual route for the station. Instead she traced a path through the warren of streets around Covent Garden. In less than ten minutes she found the place she was looking for, a tiny bar with the name
Sigmund’s
scribbled across a green and white striped canopy. Hanging baskets full of fuschias hung low over the pavement. She paused by the window and peered inside, brushing away a tendril from one of the baskets that seemed to want to twine with her hair. A wrought iron spiral staircase in the centre of the room led upstairs.

Click-clack, click-clack.

‘So this is where you hang out, is it?’ Chloe called. ‘Looks cosy. Can I buy you a drink?’

Roxanne spun round. Chloe was a couple of metres behind her. No mistaking her musky scent. There was something of the animal about her. Something predatory. And yet Roxanne felt her heart leaping at the sight of the other woman. The thought that she had followed her was scary. Her pulse raced. Scary, yes, but exciting.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I was late, finishing a rush job for Joel, an expatriate’s contract he wanted faxing to Hong Kong. I heard you shutting your door but by the time I was ready, the lift doors were closing on you. I thought you might fancy a quick drink and I caught sight of you through the revolving doors, but you didn’t head for Charing Cross. You obviously had a destination in mind. I couldn’t help being curious.’

‘What’s to be curious about?’

Chloe flushed at the abruptness of the question. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.’

‘What’s the idea, then?’

‘Don’t be cross. I spotted you leaving the office. I did wave, but you took no notice. You obviously had something on your mind. You crossed the Strand instead of making for the station. Before I knew what I was doing, I was trying to catch up.’

‘I don’t understand why you’re doing this,’ Roxanne said.

Chloe clutched her arm. ‘You look so lonely sometimes. You never mention any friends. Or family. And then, when I saw today that something was bothering you, well, I wanted to help. That’s all. I like you, Roxanne. I really like you. And I haven’t got anyone to go home to either. Of course I shouldn’t intrude if it bothers you. I know I keep doing it, but I never meant to infringe your privacy. If you want me to go, just say the word and I’ll not bother you again. Promise.’

She released her grip and looked down at the paving stones. Roxanne swallowed, then made her choice. ‘No, come in with me. It was just a shock, seeing you here.’

‘I’d have called out to you sooner,’ Chloe said, ‘but
you set such a fierce pace. It was all I could do to keep up.’ She gestured towards the bar. ‘So this is one of your haunts, is it?’

‘No!’ Roxanne’s denial was more vehement than she had intended. She regretted it at once. ‘I mean, I’ve never been here before. I overheard a girl in the supermarket, telling a friend about this place. It sounded – unusual. I thought I’d give it a try. A spur of the moment thing.’

Oh God, now she was babbling. Fortunately, Chloe seemed not to notice. She was peering through the window, misting the glass with her breath. ‘Well, I’m intrigued. Can’t see anything naughty in there, though. No whips, no stripping nuns, nothing but loads of people knocking back pricey cocktails. Very disappointing. Maybe there’s a bit more action up that staircase? Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound. So will you let me buy you that drink?’

Roxanne nodded and led the way inside. The ground floor was cramped and she couldn’t see any spare seats, even though one or two people were drifting up the stairs. As they waited to be served, she said, ‘You guessed right. It all happens upstairs.’

Glasses in hand, the pair of them climbed the wrought-iron staircase. The final curve in the spiral led to the first floor. A man at a small table collected a fiver each from them and they moved under an archway to find themselves at the back of a gathering of fifty plus. They were sitting in a semi-circle around a bald man with a tolerant smile and shoulders whose slope suggested a lifetime spent in study. He had a drinking straw in his hand and was twirling it around as if it was an aid to thought. A waiter navigated a passage among the audience whilst a woman with short
blonde hair and Home Counties vowels talked in the sort of jerky, high-pitched voice she might otherwise have reserved for issuing commands to a golden retriever.

‘I feel so wretched, you see. Of course I regret what happened, of course I do. Now it’s preying on my conscience. I mean, I betrayed his trust and now I have to put things right. Tell him what I did, beg him for forgiveness. That way we, you know, start over.’

‘You really think so?’

Moving to the side of the room, Chloe following, Roxanne had a better view of the man who asked the question. He chewed at his drinking straw, then put it down and stretched his hairy arms behind the back of his head. His name, she remembered, was Kobus. She’d overheard the girl in the check-out queue saying that he was a top psychotherapist. Two evenings a week he forsook his rooms in Harley Street for a couple of hours at Sigmund’s. The girl had raved to her bored friend about his insight, wisdom and compassion.

The blonde woman cleared her throat and said, ‘But we’re getting married in a fortnight. I slept with his best man. On the floor of our kitchen, while my fiance was out buying paint to redecorate our bedroom. Surely he has a right to know?’

A couple of men in the audience murmured agreement but Kobus pouted. ‘Do you have a right to destroy his happiness? That is what you’re asking me, make no mistake.’

‘You mean – it might be better if I were dishonest?’

‘Let me tell you this, Sara. Honesty is the most dangerous prescription someone like me can write.’