Take My Breath Away (4 page)

‘Let me have a love contract?’

Joel Anthony was teasing her, Roxanne decided. Or maybe not. With Joel, it was hard to tell. His face was straight; surely he wasn’t flirting? He was willowy and handsome with elegantly manicured fingernails and a gold stud gleaming from his ear. When she’d first met him, at the interview, she’d assumed he was gay.

‘A love contract?’ she repeated. She leaned back in her chair, annoyed with herself for being baffled and sounding naive.

He smiled. ‘Not come across the term before?’

She shook her head. ‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t be, I should have explained. It’s an American idea. Dreamed up by lawyers acting for employers who are sick of being sued for millions of dollars when a relationship at work goes sour. Say two colleagues have an affair, then one of them moves on. If the other can’t come to terms with rejection, the next move may be a harassment suit.’

‘So the company asks the couple to sign an agreement not to litigate if they split?’

He nodded in approval. ‘You’ve got it. When the relationship starts, they are supposed to confirm in writing that they’ve embarked on it voluntarily. Personally, I can’t think of a bigger turn-off, but there you are. We act for the London subsidiary of a Boston corporation and they’ve discovered the finance director is seeing his secretary. So in-house counsel wants them to confirm in writing that it’s consensual nookie.’

‘It won’t work in this country,’ she said. ‘You can’t
sign away your right to bring an employment claim. And if the boss is a bully, why couldn’t he bully her into signing just as easily as bully her into having the affair?’

He grinned. ‘You spotted the flaw. Never mind. If the client’s willing to pay and we’ve disclaimed responsibility, all we have to do is write up the agreement and send in our bill?’

The people who consulted her at Hengist Street hadn’t wanted advice on love contracts. For them, going to law was a matter of survival. Many worked in the rag trade, earning a pittance in factories down Brick Lane.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Anything in the precedent books?’

‘Uh-uh. All the sample documents I’ve seen are iffy. You’re better making it up.’

She so nearly said she was good at making things up. Joel was someone with whom it would be easy to loosen your tongue. An uncommon man, she sensed. Gay or straight, who cared? He was good to look at and an expert listener. She liked his company, but she’d have to watch herself with him.

He opened the door of her room to leave, then turned to face her, Columbo fashion. ‘So – how’s it going, Roxanne?’

‘I’m loving it.’ As the words left her lips, she realised that she meant them. She was in her element here. Day two and so far Creed was everything she’d dreamed it might be.

‘Terrific. So you made the right decision?’

Joel’s boyish features would not have looked out of place in a sixth form school photograph. He’d risen fast. He had a first from Balliol, but even so, few people in a top London firm made partner so young. The legal
directories rated him as the outstanding advocate of the new generation. A paragon: it was astonishing that she didn’t loathe him. In fact, she found him mysteriously easy to talk to. There was no sign that success had gone to his head.

‘This is the chance of a lifetime,’ she said. ‘Everyone’s heard of Will Janus. Any employment lawyer with an ounce of motivation would want to work in his firm.’

‘You flatter me, Roxanne,’ a familiar voice said. ‘May I call you Roxanne? This is a first name firm.’

She turned to see the man who had strolled in to the room. Handsome as a star of a daytime soap, in his mid-forties but looking younger. There was a spring in his step, an eagerness in the way he carried himself, as if seeing her was a long-held ambition. Amazing. Will Janus himself had spared the time to come and look her over.

A couple of months earlier she’d queued at the Barbican to hear him speak in a debate set up to raise funds for a lone parents’ charity. The motion was that
lawyers are the guardians of justice in a free society.
He’d argued in favour and his speech was eloquent and witty, charming yet full of conviction. Naturally his advocacy carried the day. Afterwards she’d asked him to autograph his manifesto for the legal ethics in the twenty-first century,
Purer Than Pure
. He’d chatted with her and hadn’t seemed in the least hurried despite the impatience of his minders from the publishing company.

Quite simply, Will Janus was hot. Whenever a high profile case was heard, whether at the Royal Courts of Justice or in Brussels or Strasbourg, it was safe to bet that Will Janus would be around. Making a statement outside the door of the court, chairing a press
conference or offering incisive comment to a heavyweight news programme. He wrote a weekly column for
The New Statesman
and presented documentaries for Channel 4. He owned a penthouse on the South Bank and a nineteenth century mock-castle in the Kent countryside which had been the subject of a photo-shoot for
Hello
. He was everywhere. He was so much more than a lawyer with a conscience, he was a celebrity, an icon for his generation.

‘Good to meet you.’ He paused and studied her face, before a faint smile of recognition spread from mouth to eyes. For a moment she was transfixed by fear. Had he somehow fathomed her true identity? ‘We’ve met before, haven’t we? A seminar at King’s College, or that debate at the Barbican, perhaps? You must forgive me, my memory’s getting terrible in my old age.’

His handshake was firm. There was no doubting either that somehow he’d remembered her or that he was genuinely pleased to see her again. Roxanne stammered something incoherent and he smiled again, a maximum-wattage beam this time, to put her at her ease.

‘Joel has been pulling my leg about this tan. Francine and I have just come back from three weeks in the Seychelles and I’m a bit worried that I may not have been missed. Ben’s told me all about you, of course.’ As Roxanne moistened her lips, he added, ‘He absolutely raved about your advocacy in that case you fought a while back.’

It was true what they said in the papers, Roxanne thought. Will was such an ordinary man. It was a special talent, making success seem like winning the lottery. His life might be yours, or at least what yours
might become. He didn’t have a posh accent, he hadn’t been born with a silver spoon. He worked hard, but he hadn’t omitted to get a life as well. His favourite food was cod and chips, he was an ardent football fan. How could anyone so decent possibly make you reach for the sickbag? He was just a nice guy who deserved his fame, his fortune and his lovely family.

‘I lost the case. My client pulled out.’

Another grin, frank yet engaging. ‘Should have taken the settlement when it was on the table, eh? Never mind, we live and learn. I suppose you’re finding this different from your last place? Not too many Kandinskys in reception there, I bet. Are you interested in art, Roxanne?’

She cast her mind back to the squiggles and blotches on the wall, wishing she had taken more notice. No doubt he meant to flatter by consulting her opinion, but the pictures meant nothing to her: colourful whizz-bangs with less inner meaning than a bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. She thought wildly of saying she didn’t know much about art, but she knew what she didn’t like, before saying cautiously, ‘They are very – audacious.’

At once she saw that it had been the right reply. Will Janus smiled – no, she thought, he exhibited his teeth – in evident pleasure. ‘You’re so right, actually. They represent some of his most turbulent work. We have a few originals up in the boardroom. Did you know Kandinsky intended to lecture in law?’

Roxanne shook her head. She was out of her league. Best to say as little as possible.

‘Yes, he was regarded as an outstanding talent. Yet he gave it all up because he discovered a vocation he believed in even more. A remarkable man.’

She felt compelled to say, ‘I’m not that remarkable, I’m afraid.’

‘But you are,’ he insisted. ‘We don’t employ clones, the type of people the big City firms hire by the truckload. You may be a paralegal, but please don’t feel intimidated. From what I hear, you’re a damn good litigator. A fighter. You gave Ben a run for his money, and that’s something not many can say. You hail from Buxton, I gather?’

He bestowed his smile upon her once more, a lord of the manor dispensing largesse to a tiller of earth. He’d taken her by surprise, the mark of a skilled cross-examiner. She wasn’t ready with an answer, since she’d never dreamed the senior partner would show an interest in the track record of a newly recruited minion. It shocked her: surely he didn’t
know
? She could not have uttered a word even if she had wanted to. She simply stared at his regular features, trying to read what was going through his mind.

‘That’s right.’ She found her voice at last, although it was little more than a croak. ‘I come from Derbyshire.’

‘Nice part of the world. Bracing.’

And that was it. No more probing, no third degree. She was worrying over nothing, perhaps she’d mentioned her home county to Ben and Joel at the interview and then let it slip her mind. Will gave a casual nod, exchanged a little more small talk and then excused himself because he had to prepare for an interview with the BBC. He was due to be quizzed about the burdens on business imposed by the latest European directive on health and safety. Later it occurred to her that a few years earlier Will would have been campaigning on behalf of workers endangered by dangerous conditions on the shop floor, not speaking up for
employers forced to meet the cost of making their factories safe. But it didn’t matter. She was just relieved that he hadn’t interrogated her about what she had been doing before she’d started work at the agency in Hengist Street.

So much to learn. Not just about the law, but the minutiae of working in private practice, stuff she’d never needed to bother with before. Half way through the morning she underwent a crash course in the art of time recording. A black art, according to Ibrahim, who had worked in law firms before fleeing to the voluntary sector. Everyone hated it, he said, because there was no way of fiddling the system. If you didn’t record your time in full, it looked as though you weren’t working hard enough. If you charged for every moment you spent working on a file, you had to convince a sceptical client who asked for a breakdown that you had added value to the transaction. If you wrote off a portion of the time you recorded, to keep the bills low and the clients happy, you had to justify yourself to the managing partner. The only people who liked time recording were the partners whose profit shares depended on it.

‘Solicitors sell two products,’ Ben Yarrow told her. ‘Time and expertise. Clients take our expertise for granted, so it’s all the more important to keep a close check on how many hours and minutes we devoted to working for them. Time is money, yes?’

‘Of course it is,’ she chanted, like an obedient fifties schoolgirl repeating her tables. Perhaps Creed wasn’t quite so different from other firms as the partners liked to make out. ‘Time is money.’

‘All you need to remember is this. For a lawyer, time is the quintessential legal fiction. Fifteen minutes for us
might be thirty seconds for any other mortal being. You see, we divide each hour into four equal units. If you so much as breathe on a file for a couple of moments, you chalk up a unit. And we charge the client for the full quarter-hour. It’s not stealth billing, it’s all perfectly legitimate and above board. Time-honoured practice, you might say.’

His lips twitched and she realised he’d cracked a joke. She managed a smile and gave a sigh of relief when he left her alone in the room to set about acquiring the knack of recording time. Playing by the rules of a strange game which needed to be mastered before she could make headway with the cases she’d been hired to fight. She must concentrate on parcelling up her day into fifteen-minute slices and logging each of them faithfully on to the computer network. Each input included a terse note explaining what she had been up to, the clients she had advised, the colleagues she had consulted. A record of how she spent every fraction of the day. Kafka would have loved it and Orwell wouldn’t have been in the least surprised. The system was intrusive, it was oppressive, and yet she did not find herself itching with resentment. At least she could take it in her stride, after being watched for so long.

Chloe brought the bad news in the afternoon. She put her head round the door and said, ‘I took a call while you were having your sandwich. The woman didn’t want to leave a message on your voicemail, said she hated talking to machines.’

At first, alarm bells didn’t ring. Roxanne was scanning a CD-rom on screen, checking one last point before submitting her draft love contract to Joel Anthony’s gaze. Keeping her eyes on the text, she said, ‘Uh-huh. You have a number?’

‘And a name. Hilary Metcalf. She’s a solicitor. She was on her mobile. Sounded a bit uptight, but she wouldn’t give her client’s name. She was adamant you were the one she wanted. New case, is it?’

Roxanne stared at her. For a moment she thought she had lost the power of speech.

‘You all right?’ Chloe asked.

‘Fine, yes, I’m fine,’ Roxanne said. She hated herself for her frailty. She ought to be stronger than this. ‘Hilary Metcalf, yes. I – I think I know what it must be about. You have her number?’

‘Here.’ Chloe handed her a piece of paper. ‘Maybe I should have emailed you, but to be honest, I like to have a word with a fellow human being every now and then. Don’t tell Ben. He’d have me handcuffed to my desk if he had his way.’ After a moment she added with lifted eyebrows ‘If you know what I mean.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Roxanne stammered. ‘Thanks.’

Chloe lingered in the doorway. ‘Settling in okay, then?’

‘Fine,’ Roxanne said quickly, ‘Yes, absolutely fine.’

‘Anything you want, just sing out, all right?’

At last she closed the door behind her. Roxanne buried her head in her hands.
Hilary
. She was a problem Roxanne thought she had solved. Of course, that had been too optimistic. She saw it now. One thing about Hilary: she didn’t give up easily.