Conflict of Interest

Now as he stood on the Fulham balcony, surveying the wooded grounds and flowering shrubberies before him, he decided it was time to open a new chapter. Making a rare, impulsive decision, Chris decided to buy the property then and there.

A week before his September start at Lombard, Chris met a few friends for a celebratory drink on HMS Queen Mary. He was standing at the bar, waiting for a fresh round, when the TV up in the corner caught his attention. Trevor McDonald was reading the ITN News, behind him a picture of Nathan Strauss.

‘Can you turn that up, please?’ He nodded towards the TV.

‘Sure, mate.’ The barman hiked up the volume.

The news bulletin had moved to a woman reporter outside the Dorchester, behind her a phalanx of ambulances and police cars. It had been shortly after seven o’clock that evening, the reporter explained, when the body had been found by a motor car salesman. Chris felt a sudden dread as the image of a stretcher, covered in a dark blanket, was carried into the back of an ambulance. Only that afternoon, Nathan Strauss had handed over a £5 million donation to Distress Line, the organisation that specialised in helping those who felt suicidal. It was, she declared, a horrific irony that within hours of the donation, Nathan Strauss had himself committed suicide …

As Chris stood at the bar, the noise of the festivities rising behind him, he felt suddenly dizzy. Slapping two notes down on the bar, he hurried towards the Gents, where he found a cubicle and stood, forehead pressed against the steel of the porthole catch, trying to take it all in. Nathan Strauss dead. It was just too overwhelming to absorb. What on earth would drive someone like him to suicide? And who would take over at Starwear? Working with Nathan had been a large part of the reason for his interest in Lombard – a very large part. Since that first evening with Mike Cullen, he’d spent many hours mulling over the future, and how he’d work with Nathan. Now this. He knew he would never have accepted Cullen’s offer if it hadn’t included being the prime creator of Starwear III. The big bucks, the bonus, the BMW, even his new flat now seemed tawdry and trivial. But it was too late now to go back: he’d burnt his boats at MIRA, and without Nathan Strauss his supposedly glittering new career at Lombard could be a short-lived cul-de-sac. With a lurch of emotion that was to become familiar over the coming months he realised he’d made a terrible mistake.

He left HMS Queen Mary a short while later, no longer in the mood to play. As he walked towards Big Ben, past lamps looped like pearls along the embankment, he was so deep in thought he failed to notice the man walking about fifty yards behind him. The man with the narrow face, hooded eyes and camera case slung over his shoulder, who glanced watchfully about him as he followed Chris along the pavement. The same man who had spent the last two hours on the bridge of the HMS Queen Mary, shooting off a roll of film.

Everyone who’d arrived at Chris’s drinks party had been faithful

ly captured and digitally stored for future retrieval. It had been one of his more enjoyable assignments of late, thought Harry Denton. He’d even managed a couple of quiet pints, thanks to the Lombard new boy.

2

Judith woke to the shrill bleep of her alarm clock, and fumbled for several moments in the semi-dark before finally silencing it. Then she flopped back on to the pillow, closing her eyes. She was exhausted; her head throbbed; her mouth was dry and foul as a sewer. She was desperate for one of the cans of Coke she knew were in the fridge, but the kitchen was down three flights of stairs; it seemed a very long way away. Blinking open one eye, she scanned the small bedroom with its strewn clothes and tipped-out handbag, before closing it again, events of the night before seeping back into her consciousness.

Last night had been a mistake. Not just a boozing, smoking, four-hours-of-sleep mistake. Worse. It had been a Ted Gilmour mistake. She hadn’t slept with him, thank God. She’d only made that mistake once before, and she suspected she’d had more than Carlsberg in her pint glass that particular night. But she’d spent the whole bloody evening with him. She dully remembered the smoke-filled interior of The Mitre, steaming in the late-August heat. He’d chosen the pub in Farringdon, where he was meeting some analysts from Merrill Lynch who worked nearby. A few of their colleagues from The Herald had started off there too. But as the evening had gone on, first the analysts had left and then, one by one, the other journalists, leaving just Ted and her. There’d been a lock-in and the two of them had stayed on into the early hours. She’d needed a shoulder to cry on.

Now she grimaced metaphorically, as she remembered that, some time well after her fifth or sixth, tears had indeed been shed; God – why did she humiliate herself like that? Through the all-engulfing hangover she recalled Ted hammering his fist on the table between them – ‘Alex Carter is the most arrogant shit on Fleet Street,’ he’d cursed with feeling. And therein lay both of last night’s problems. Alex Carter, City Editor of The Herald, Britain’s biggest-selling broadsheet newspaper, was indeed an arrogant shit. He was also sadistic, pompous, sexist, idle, blatantly favouritist – and her boss. Fleet Street, on the other hand, had ceased to be the centre of gravity for national journalism over a decade before – before Judith had even started her career, in fact. But Ted Gilmour still talked about Fleet Street, every reference to it only serving to underline their age difference – only one of many reasons that made the idea of a relationship with him unthinkable.

Her mind slowed way down when she was hung over. Instead of the usual flurry of unrelated mental chatter which perpetually swept through her mind, the morning after the night before she would survey each idea with an alcohol-induced passivity which reduced everything to numbed, slow motion. Not that she wanted to relive the events of yesterday afternoon in slow or any other kind of motion. But she found herself drawn ineluctably back to the moment that Alex Carter, having hit his post-Savoy Grill low, appeared in the doorway of his office and, bellowing across the newsroom, demanded she present herself to him instantly.

It was a well-known fact in the office that Carter’s approach to managing his female staff was a simple, binary one; it was either frolicking or bollocking. Women were either sex goddesses or useless bitches. Summoned to his office they could expect to be flattered and flirted with, or to be heaped with sardonic acrimony. From his tone of voice, even before she’d got to his office door, Judith had had no doubt which this afternoon’s session was to be. She’d felt her stomach turn.

‘Output.’ Carter slammed the door behind her as she stepped inside. ‘What’s yours been? Two, three pieces in the last fortnight?’

‘We have five different investigations underway—’

‘And I have a paper to fill. Twelve pages of business news a day. This newspaper carries the most comprehensive business supplement of any broadsheet. There’s no place for passengers.’

‘We’re pushing ahead as fast as we can. Investigative journalism—’

Carter strode behind his desk and dropped into his chair. He was a short man with a short man’s complex, a large, balding head, glittering, dark eyes and a fat bum. Lard-arse, they called him.

‘Of course, I know nothing about investigative journalism,’ his mouth twisted into a disparaging sneer, ‘I’m only the City Editor, what the fuck do I know about it?’

Judith couldn’t think of anything to say, so she said nothing. She stood there, meeting his blazing resentment with a blank expression until he finally said, ‘You need to cultivate more contacts. I’ve already spoken to you about this before.’

‘Yes, Alex.’

‘If you’re serious about a career in journalism you’ve got to get out there. Circulate. Make yourself available to people.’

She knew precisely where this conversation was heading. And she despised him for it. How dare he question her commitment to journalism? Only nine months before, when she’d still been at The Guardian, she’d been feted as one of their brightest stars. She’d even been the youngest recipient of an industry ‘Scoop of the Year’ award for her investigative piece on the American Tobacco Corporation. But for week after week now, Carter had been so disdainful of her writing, so relentless in his carping criticism, there’d been moments she’d begun to wonder if she really was as good as she’d always thought. Carter just didn’t seem able to accept the fact that investigative work required far more time and effort than standard news reportage. Of course, he paid lip-service to the idea. During her job interview he’d waxed lyrical on the specialist demands and abilities required of investigative reporters whom, he had told her over a glass of the aptly named Meerlust Rubicon in a glistening City brasserie, he regarded as the créme de la créme of the industry. But when it came to the crunch, Carter didn’t accept the realities of investigative reporting. He was only interested in word count. A thousand words a day to be precise.

‘Supporting right-on causes might have served you well when you worked down the road,’ he jerked a disparaging thumb in a northerly direction, ‘but when you work at this level we expect a lot more from you. There’s no place for slackers.’

‘I work longer hours than most in the department.’ Judith wasn’t going to let that one past.

‘Then where’s the output?’ He raised his shoulders, before gesturing to the notice-board running down his office wall, to which copies of that week’s Herald were always pinned. ‘A feisty twenty-year-old from a provincial rag would be more productive. Quite frankly, we’re hugely overpaying you if all you can come up with is an average of two hundred words a day.’

Then go hire yourself a feisty twenty-year-old to lech all over, you slimy ponce, she felt like telling him. But she didn’t. Instead she’d replied, ‘If they’re the two hundred words that make people buy the paper—’

‘My, my, aren’t we grand?’ he pouted, ‘and I suppose Alison MacLean’s articles are just padding?’