Who's Afraid of Mr Wolfe? (2 page)

Ellie chanced another look at Hugo. He couldn’t physically stop them from pitching their idea to Jack, but he could drop a few poisonous words in his ear beforehand. Never mind that the little runt would have to stand on a box to do it.

She had to be realistic, though. Locking horns with Hugo didn’t seem to be getting them anywhere. Ellie plastered her best smile on her face – this was going to hurt.

‘Hugo, I appreciate that you understand your client better than we ever could, but really you have nothing to worry about … if you play this right. Why not put the other two teams on before us with their nice ideas and Jack will see that you know your stuff? He’ll be very impressed.’ Ellie widened her smile. ‘Then you slip us on last with our wacky idea and Jack will give you points for having the guts to suggest something different.’

She tried to ignore the impressive eye-rolling and fingers-down-the-throat actions that were coming from Lesley. She couldn’t blame her: flattering Hugo was making her feel a bit queasy herself.

Hugo stopped drumming his fingers on the desk, but he still appeared to be weighing up the risks. ‘What about when Gavin comes back?’

Ellie fired up her encouraging smile again. ‘When Gavin comes back, it will all be sorted. Either Jack Wolfe will have strangled us with his bare hands or he’ll have chosen our idea. And Gavin’s not going to reverse any decision that Jack’s made, is he?’ She didn’t add that nobody in their right mind would change a decision that Jack had made. ‘It’s a win-win situation for you, Hugo.’

There was a beat of hesitation and then Hugo tightened
the knot in his tie and sat up straighter. ‘OK,’ he said slowly. ‘OK, we’ll give it a go.’

She had judged his level of cowardice correctly; he would stick a neck out as long as it wasn’t his own.

‘Great,’ Ellie said, jumping to her feet and gathering her papers. ‘All we’re asking is that you give us a good build-up in your little introductory patter to Jack and don’t make any “I don’t like this idea” faces behind our backs.’

Hugo opened and closed his mouth, a picture of hurt innocence.

‘Come on, Hugo,’ Lesley said, standing up too. ‘If you get behind us, we’ll get behind you.’

There was a loud barking noise that confused Ellie until she realised that it came from Hugo. ‘You’ll get behind me?’ he said. ‘I don’t think so. Personally I think it would be better if we all got behind something solid, like a table on its side.’ He put the top back on his pen with an unnecessary flourish. ‘You know what Jack’s like if he takes against something.’

‘Oh well,’ Ellie said lightly, trying to mask the very real panic that was rising in her at the thought of being on the receiving end of Jack’s temper. He had a reputation for not suffering fools or foolish ideas gladly. The swirl of panic in her stomach did another couple of revolutions before she got control of it.

‘See you, then, Hugo,’ she said quickly, and headed for the door. Prolonging the meeting might give Hugo the
opportunity to change his mind. Or even worse, he’d try to make small talk, which in Hugo’s case was absolutely miniscule and made him sound like one of the Royal Family desperately trying to bond.

As she reached the door, Lesley was right behind her. ‘Run,’ she heard her whisper, and they both shot out of the room and raced past the moody black-and-white photographs of London to get to the stairs.

Back in their office, Lesley shut the door firmly behind them. ‘Bit sticky back there in places, but I don’t think it went too badly – tit-head was almost happy at the end.’ She plonked her papers on her desk and caught the side of her pencil pot, sending the contents cascading over the desk and on to the floor. ‘Oh bugger,’ she said, getting down on her hands and knees to pick them up. Behind her, a small blow-up Elvis drifted off the bookshelf and bounced across the floor.

Ellie bent down to scoop up Elvis and tried to balance him back on the shelf. When that didn’t work, she pulled open a filing-cabinet drawer and shoved him in there. As she closed the drawer, she automatically reached out to steady the mini-fridge, which was wobbling on top of the cabinet. For a little space under the eaves their office certainly held a lot of stuff. If they didn’t have another good tidy-up soon, they were going to disappear under piles of paper, pens and Post-it notes. It was now touch and go whether Lesley’s Elvis collection or the tower of
paperbacks Ellie had never got round to taking home would win the battle for domination of the office.

Ellie looked over at Lesley as she put her pencils back in the pot and couldn’t help smiling – unsharpened ones in the middle, sharpened ones round the outside; always the same. Hard to believe that this woman, now humming away contentedly as she made order out of pencil chaos, had once seemed seriously intimidating. Or that, in the days before they were partners, Ellie used to give her a wide berth if she saw her in the pubs and bars frequented by the advertising mob.

Everything about Lesley had made Ellie feel like some gangly, over-ripe frump just up from the country. She had a trim little figure poured into something edgy, her hair colour changed almost every week, and always, always there was a slightly spaced-out girl hanging around her. Ellie had invariably reacted by saying very little and trying to poke her own hair back into whatever half-arsed version of a French plait she had cobbled together that morning.

Ellie had been forced to remove Lesley from the ‘trendy and heartless’ pigeonhole into which she’d shoved her when they’d both ended up judging a student advertising competition. They had agreed right down the line on the marking, chucking out anything that was so far up its own backside you couldn’t tell what product it was selling. They ended up giving the prize to the dorkiest guy in the
room, reasoning that he needed more encouragement than the rest.

When Lesley had revealed later that she felt music had died along with Elvis, Ellie realised that all the cool and scary stuff about Lesley was simply a layer of armour that allowed her to appear tougher than she was. This was something Ellie could relate to, having used her sense of humour in a similar way for years.

A few weeks after that, when Lesley suggested they get together and persuade Wiseman & Craster that the company needed another creative team, Ellie didn’t hesitate. Now, between them they managed to present a united front against the waves of testosterone that powered the rest of the agency.

Lesley finished arranging the pencils and Ellie knew that the next thing she would do would be to polish her glasses. Sure enough, Lesley reached for the faux leopard-skin case and was soon rubbing the lenses vigorously with a cloth.

Ellie switched on her computer and dragged her mind back to the tricky subject of Hugo. They’d have to keep an eye on him. He couldn’t be trusted further than you could throw him, which, with so many expense-account lunches under his belt, wasn’t very far at all. She knew he was going to drop them in the poo somehow.

She was aware that Lesley had stopped polishing and was now looking at her. ‘Quit worrying, Ell,’ she said. ‘It’s
going to be fine. No one’s going to stamp on our idea this time.’ She got up, went over to the mini-fridge and pulled out two bottles of Italian lager. ‘And may I say congratulations on that excellent bit of massage you did on tit-head’s ego? Have yourself an Oscar.’ She placed one of the ice-cold bottles in Ellie’s hand and then scrabbled around in her desk for a bottle-opener. ‘Little swine, making us jump through all those hoops when he’s not even the one we’ve got to impress. He’ll agree with whatever Jack thinks.’ Having found the opener, she leaned over and took the top off Ellie’s bottle and then her own. ‘Cheers.’

Ellie raised her bottle, tapped it against Lesley’s and there was silence as they drank.

‘Well, that should get the creative juices flowing,’ Lesley said, sitting back down. She glanced at her watch. ‘There’s a fair bit to do to get these knicks knocked into shape. You need to ring Sam, tell him you’ll be late?’

‘No, he’s out again entertaining the Germans. Doing his bit for whatever “
entente cordiale
” is in German. However late I’m going to be, he’s bound to be later.’ Ellie took a long drink and then opened an art pad. The paper glistened up at her, white and inviting.

‘So … no good trying to busk it with Jack. We’ll need to set it all out clearly – why we think it will appeal, how much it’s going to cost. One slip-up and Jack will tear us apart.’ Ellie took the top off a fine liner and started to write a list of things that they had to cover in the pitch.
Then she stopped: Lesley was staring into space, her glasses hanging from one of her fingers.

‘Jack tearing us apart,’ Lesley repeated softly, and then gave a low whistle. ‘What wouldn’t most of the women in this agency give to be in our shoes?’

Ellie rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, no, don’t start. Not all that again.’

‘Just think, Ellie, Jack sinking his—’

‘Nooooooo.’ Ellie ripped the page off the art pad, screwed it into a ball and threw it at Lesley’s head.

‘Sorry, Ellie, but come on,’ Lesley said, ducking, ‘you must be a bit excited. You’re a woman, heterosexual, and our first chance to pitch our work to Jack and you get to flash your knickers at him.’

Ellie made a vague noise in reply. Jack Wolfe had been at the agency for just under two weeks and it was as if he were pumping pheromones into the air-conditioning system. Colleagues who appeared perfectly sane in every other way had suddenly taken to flirting and giggling when Jack was about. Even some of the men.

Lesley retrieved the ball of paper and lobbed it into the bin. ‘It’s all right for you – you’re such an old married woman you’re immune to Jack. Either that or you need your eyes testing.’ She took a swig of her lager. ‘Hell, I’m a lesbian and even I can see why women fancy Jack.’

‘My eyes are fine,’ Ellie said, putting the top back on her pen in a manner she hoped said, ‘Can we talk about
something else?’ but when Lesley continued to look at her, she held up her hands in mock submission. ‘OK, OK, I admit Jack’s a good thing for the agency, especially if he manages to give Gavin a kick up the backside.’ Ellie took a second or two to savour that image. ‘And I think it’s great, if a little scary, that we get to pitch to him, but I’m not stupid. He’s here to streamline the place and everybody seems to have overlooked what he’s done at all the other agencies he’s ever worked at. Poor Hardy & Wades. By the time he moved on they could have had their Christmas party in a phone box there were so few of them left standing.’

‘Yeah, but they didn’t need to have it in a phone box, did they?’ Lesley was triumphant. ‘They took over the whole of Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s because they’d won nearly everything there was to win that year. He might have cut them to pieces, but the ones that were left were laughing. Simon Winchester’s driving around in a Porsche now, you know?’ Lesley clutched her lager bottle to her chest. ‘Just think, that could be us come Christmas, sitting on Gordon Ramsay’s lap and counting how many times he says f—’

‘Fairly sure you’re going to still be here then, are you?’ Ellie flicked the top off her pen again. ‘Sure you’re not going to be one of the ones standing outside Claridge’s with your nose pressed to the glass? Simon Winchester might be happy, but Gabi and Paul are still schlepping around trying to pick up work.’

‘Yeah, well, they were pretty rubbish. It’s not surprising he turfed them out.’

‘OK, bad example, but you know what I mean.’

Lesley grinned, put on her glasses and started sharpening a pencil, her ritual preparation to actually getting down to work.

Ellie watched her for a while and then shook her head sadly. ‘Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you. Don’t cry on my shoulder when we’re out on the streets selling the
Big Issue
or we’re one of the few teams left and he’s piling on the work. Jack’s got a seat on the board and his name on the door here. That’s a first. He’s obviously got big plans for the place.’ She took another long drink of her lager. ‘I think we’re going to find that there’s only one way of doing anything around here and that’s Jack’s. You wait until you disagree with him. Then you’ll see him completely lose his temper. I bet he throws back his head and howls.’

Lesley stopped sharpening her pencil. ‘Oh my God, we could definitely sell tickets for that. Do you really think he does?’ Her eyes went misty behind her glasses.

‘No, and I don’t think he gets hairy palms when there’s a full moon either.’ Ellie frowned. ‘The culling is going to start soon. Bet that stops all this swooning and that other stuff … all that going on about him being Heathcliff.’

‘Yeah, that’s getting a bit tedious … Although … although as an impartial observer of male–female flirting,
it’s been pretty entertaining. Some women are as subtle as a brick.’

Ellie made a ‘You’re mistaking me for somebody who gives a toss’ face and tried to concentrate on what she was supposed to be writing.

‘Rachel’s the best,’ Lesley ploughed on. ‘Taken it as some kind of challenge, evidently. Skirts getting shorter, tops getting lower every day. Doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere, though. None of them does. He has a thoroughly good flirt and then wanders off.’

Lesley put down the sharpener and gave the point on her pencil a critical look. ‘These ones don’t sharpen as well as the ones from Finland,’ she said thoughtfully, and Ellie hoped that finally, finally they could get on with some work.

Lesley didn’t appear to be in any hurry, though.

‘Want to hear my theory about why he’s not interested in anyone at work?’ she said, raising and lowering her eyebrows suggestively.

‘Not really, Sherlock.’ Ellie made her voice sound as bored as possible. ‘But is it anything to do with industrial tribunals, impotence, latent homosexuality?’

‘Nope, Watson. Too knackered.’

‘Right.’

‘Rachel’s kept a tally. Started it the first time she spotted him at that awards do in the Festival Hall.’

‘Tally?’

‘Girlfriends, odd dates, one-night stands, that kind of thing. He’s a busy man.’

‘Lovely. Great. Happy for him. Now, see this pad of paper?’ Ellie held it up. ‘See what I’ve written on it?’