Conflict of Interest

9

Judith unlocked the passenger door of her once lime green VW Beetle, and climbed in. Ever since her close encounter with a Cherokee Jeep on Holland Park Avenue while shooting a red light – running late, no change there – the driver’s door had ceased to open. So she had to take the scenic route in, which involved a certain amount of calisthenics getting over the gear shift. But eventually she’d find herself, irked and flushed, behind the wheel, cursing Alex Carter, The Herald, her booze-and-cigarette lifestyle, and journalism for paying so badly she couldn’t afford a better car. Here she was, all dressed up and places to go – and Bernie’s parties were always lavish affairs – stuck in a beat-up old bomb which the AA mechanic had described as a ‘death trap’. She hadn’t sent it in for repair, because she didn’t have the money. Or maybe she did – but spending it on a car just seemed a complete waste.

Turning the key in the ignition, she was relieved when the engine unleashed its distinctive, throaty roar. Pulling out into the Finborough Road traffic, she leaned back in the bucket-seat. She supposed her job did have its compensations. At least it was interesting – at the moment, very interesting indeed – if also unnerving. As she’d suspected, Starwear had been unable to explain the discrepancy between the figures in their own annual report and the Forbes documents. Worse still, they’d lied. Prince Abdul Narish of Hydrabull Investments had laughed when she’d telephoned him to ask if he’d sold Starwear an office block as a package with the factories at Jaipur.

‘I specialise in industrial property,’ he had declared, in a plummy, Eton accent. ‘You can look at my property portfolio in the Delhi land register any time. Domestic and commercial property just isn’t my bag.’

Judith duly had the register checked, finding the Prince as good as his word. At no time had he ever owned the office block Starwear claimed they’d bought from him – and later sold at a substantial profit.

Without Starwear so much as suspecting a thing, in four weeks Judith had gathered enough material for a major exposé. And it was one that would not only exhume a whole lot of skeletons Jacob Strauss had thought he’d long-since buried, but also provide evidence that in the past six months Starwear had misled its shareholders about the origin of seven million pounds profit – a jailable offence. But she still wasn’t ready to run. There were too many unanswered questions – like, where had the money really come from? Why the cover-up? How high up had the decision been taken to cook the books?

Finding out the answers to these questions, she knew, would be the most perilous undertaking of her career; especially if they were the answers she suspected. She’d come up with a theory that seemed far fetched at the moment – but experience had taught her that when big money was at stake, anything was possible. The scenario she’d put together went something like this: Jacob Strauss’s business ventures, launched in his twenties and thirties, had each come unstuck. He is saved the humiliation of bankruptcy only by a private sale to a company no one’s ever heard of. Plus the only person who knows the realities of his finances, his partner Wil

liam van Aardt, is found hanging from his belt in his Vermont shed the week after Jacob bails out. A hasty inquest returns a suicide verdict, according to a piece in van Aardt’s local paper, which Judith had tracked down after an exhaustive media search.

Next, Jacob appears on the Starwear Board – didn’t Nathan know the reality of his brother’s business failures? – and is given the job of heading up International Division. No great shakes there until, in line with its competitors, Starwear decides to move its manufacturing operations into developing world countries, using cheap labour. Jacob Strauss gets Forbes to tell him what to do, but when the Forbes plans are put into action, there are problems; problems which no one seems able to fix.

Strauss gets desperate. The share price is tumbling and someone’s taking a position in the company, buying up shares through off-shore investment entities. Strauss knows he can’t count on big brother to protect him from Starwear shareholders. So he comes up with his own plan to boost productivity. He secretly subcontracts a whole lot of Starwear production to local factories that can turn the gear at a fraction of the cost – because they use child slave labour. Bingo! The graphs head up and he’s back in business. Maestro of Quantum Change. While Nathan Strauss is banging on about corporate ethics, brother Jacob has thousands of street urchins chained up in sweatshops eighteen hours a day churning out Starwear apparel. When word seeps out about child slaves, Jacob vehemently denies it all. Nathan refutes the charge on national television. The question is never asked again.

So much for the theory. When it came to hard evidence, however, Judith could only prove that money was coming from somewhere in India besides the Quantum Change factories. What she couldn’t prove was that that ‘somewhere’ involved child labour. Previous reports about Starwear’s exploitation of children had appeared in only one tabloid newspaper, eighteen months earlier. Judith had tried to track down the Asian correspondent who’d written it, but he’d moved off his post, no one knew where. What Judith needed was fresh evidence for herself– but she realised that, even if she remained in Carter’s good books, a flight to India to investigate a hunch was as likely as a trip to Mars. So, she’d have to come up with Plan B.

In the past couple of days, she’d hardly had any time to think about it. She’d been too busy keeping her nose clean and generating column inches. And right now she didn’t feel like thinking about it because she wanted to have fun; time off from Starwear and the anxieties of coming to the wrong people’s attention; time off from The Herald; from the incestuous relationships of the newsroom; and from Ted Gilmour in particular.

The two of them had had a stand-up row the night before in the Gents of The Slug and Lettuce. Very edifying. There’d been the usual Friday night drinking binge with a whole gang of them from work. Ted had had a few, and so had she, when he pulled her aside and told her he’d booked a weekend away for the two of them at some stately home in Wiltshire.

Another time she might have let him down gently, or laughed him off as a hopeless romantic. But not last night. Last night she’d been in a bad-time-of-the-month, end-of-a-long-week and, worst of all, back-from-a-three-hour-lunch-with-Alex-super-lech-Carter frame of mind. So, she let him have it. He’d told her to calm down – big mistake. She’d told him she wasn’t calming down for him. He’d tried escaping to the toilets. She’d followed, castigating a row of gaping, urinating City suits for being ruled by their dicks instead of their brains, and lecturing that when a woman says no she means no.

She had, of course, been utterly unreasonable. She’d have to apologise to Ted on Monday. But would Ted misconstrue the apology to mean she really was interested? Lordy, lordy, better not even think about it. Why was it her relationships always became so fraught? Like her relationship with Chris, who would probably be coming tonight. They’d both been part of a group that used to congregate in Bemie’s rooms at Oxford – even then, Bernie had wangled himself superior accommodation, lucky sod – shooting the breeze into the early hours. Bernie had always been a natural focus for social activity both at Oxford and afterwards. In recent years, it was at his parties, more than anywhere else, where she and Chris had met again; and where she’d found herself behaving every bit as irrationally towards him as she had last night to Ted. Stoking up tensions that needn’t exist. Biting his head off. Why did she do it? Who was he to her except a well-intentioned, if conventional man, who’d been her lover in the long-distant past? This evening, she decided, she really should make more of an effort.

Arriving in Bemie’s street, she found a space on a single yellow line. Bernie had a typical terraced home, but inside it felt like a palace. He’d had several walls taken out to make fewer, more expansive rooms that were ideal for entertaining. In particular, his sitting room was a cavernous, rag-rolled triumph of luxuriant red. Looking up now from her car, she saw the front door open, and the party already in full swing. Twisting her rear-view mirror down, she checked her appearance – a final smudge of lippie, a last brush through the hair – before twisting herself back across the gear stick on to the passenger side. She was wearing black leather pants and a black halter top, no fancy labels but still she looked pretty svelte; at least the wardrobe she’d acquired for Carter’s benefit had other uses. She slammed the Beetle door shut, and there was an ominous rattle before she discovered the lock was no longer working. The key went in, but it just wouldn’t turn. She tried, punched the door, tried again. Then, flinging the key into her handbag, she strode off in disgust. Who’d want to break into the bloody thing anyway?

Chris ran his index finger along the polished bonnet of his BMW as he walked down the short driveway of his house. It was the first Saturday since he’d joined Lombard that he hadn’t gone into the office; the first Saturday he hadn’t had to work on Project Silo, and he felt great. After a late lie-in – eight a.m. was the height of hedonism now – he’d spent the morning wallowing through the newspapers over brunch at a local brasserie. The afternoon had been spent watching cricket and cracking open a few cans of lager in front of the box. He’d also tidied away a few things into cupboards around the flat. His future study, in particular, had been in a state of chaos. He’d planned to throw out a whole lot of old sports stuff when he moved from Islington, but his mother had delivered a lecture along the lines of ‘It might be rubbish to you, but there are a lot of people who’d be thankful for it.’ She’d persuaded him to donate the stuff to a charity instead … only he hadn’t got around to it yet. Now, freshly shaven, showered and shampooed, he was on his way round to Bernie’s.

Bernie lived a ten-minute walk away; a pleasant walk on a mild, mid-October evening like this. Even so, for a few, brief moments Chris had thought of driving – before admitting to himself that the only reason for doing so was to show off the new car to his mates. Which wasn’t a very good reason at all. In particular, he supposed he wouldn’t mind Judith seeing it. But then, that sort of thing didn’t impress Judith – he should know.

The first few weeks after she’d announced she was seeing Clive Slater had been a painfully schizophrenic time for him. There were moments he just wanted to block her completely from his mind; if he didn’t think about her, he’d get over it more easily. But then there were other occasions – like most of his waking moments – when he would have done anything to change her mind.

When she’d broken up with him, she’d said she wanted them to stay friends. All very civilised. So it was as a friend he’d taken her to L’Artiste Assoiffé, with its candelight and parrots and luxuriant intimacy; as a friend he’d secured tickets in a box at the Royal Albert Hall to watch a Proms concert, followed by dinner at the top of the Hilton in Windows on the World. There’d been the expensive gifts. The desperate efforts at ban vivant.

But of course, in taking her to all the kinds of places Clive Slater could never afford, Chris was only making matters worse. Money was not the currency that impressed her. Like anyone else, she enjoyed the things that money could buy, but it wasn’t her aphrodisiac. Chris doubted that had changed. Now, as he set off for Bernie’s place, a cooler-pack of assorted alcohol in his hand, he thought back to his last phone conversation with Bernie, who had seemed almost apologetic when he told Chris that he’d also invited Judith to the party. Poor chap. Their friends from Oxford still tiptoed around the subject even though it was all ancient history. If Judith turned up tonight he wouldn’t avoid her, but nor would he seek her out. The last few times they’d met, she’d been decidedly prickly – he didn’t need that in his life.

Besides, tonight he was in top form after handing in Project Silo. Yesterday afternoon just after four he’d delivered copies to North and Cullen. At four-thirty he’d taken Lotte down to the local wine bar for celebratory Taittinger. Christ knew, they deserved it.

Now he was looking forward to getting a life; seeing people, going places. When he arrived at Bernie’s house, Chris made his way straight through the house and into the garden, where his host – large, ebullient and check-shirted – was surrounded by a bunch of the other guys in the late-afternoon sunshine.

‘Hey, hey, hey – its Mr Psychographic Mapping!’ Bernie called out as Chris made his way towards them.

‘No – the Invisible Persuader,’ cried another.

‘Not exactly,’ Chris pulled a face, as they looked up at him. ‘What’s going on?’

Tom Allwood, a university friend and now stockbroker, was twirling a golf club. ‘Bernie’s new toy.’

‘Business aid,’ Bernie corrected him with a grin.

The recent acquisition was a golf-drive practice net set up a few yards away. It didn’t only catch balls, it also measured their speed; inevitably a competition was in progress among the men, which Chris soon joined.

Cocktails were a regular feature of Bernie’s parties. Exotic and dangerous concoctions would circulate in a variety of vivid hues, topped with tropical fruit and paper umbrellas. As more friends started arriving, Bernie retreated indoors to mix drinks in his well-stocked bar. Singapore Slings, which, he insisted, were the very acme of the art, were soon being downed, Jimi Hendrix belted out through the speakers, and the party started to swing. It