Conflict of Interest

‘Well, thank you very much,’ she was sarcastic, ‘so the little visit was down to you.’

‘What little visit?’

‘My flat yesterday afternoon. Petty crime look alike – stole the video, trashed the place. But it was a professional job. No doubt they’ve been through my computer files. They wouldn’t have found anything.’

Both of them were thinking of Merlin de Vere.

‘You know who’s behind it?’ she asked.

‘That’s why we need to meet.’

Well, if we are to meet,’ she was prickly, ‘you’d better come unescorted.’

‘I have a plan.’

‘Yeah. Right.’

‘How about this Friday?’

‘Get a life!’ she snorted.

‘Well, you suggest a date.’

‘I’m going to need some time.’

‘And I need some answers.’

‘The thirty-first’s free.’

‘That’s over a fortnight away! Anything could happen.’

‘Charming. I don’t suppose you’ve worked out just what the hell I’m supposed to do about my personal safety?’

‘Actually, I have,’ he told her simply. ‘You’ve got to act normal.’ His voice was firm.

‘Oh, yeah, that’s a big help.’

‘Just act’, he ignored her sarcasm, ‘like everything’s totally normal.’

A few minutes later, he put the phone down and took a mouthful of Scotch, pulling a face as he swallowed. Taking action helped stave off the knowledge that somewhere out there in the darkness, someone was waiting for him.

And in the meantime, there was the flat. Pulling a Yellow Pages directory across the desk towards him, he flicked through it until he came to an advertisement in the ‘Security’ section. ‘Detection and clearing of listening devices’, it read. He glanced at his watch. Nearly ten. But there was a mobile telephone number to ring. It was worth a try.

That same Wednesday evening, Kate stepped into the bathroom leading off her office, and closed the door behind her. She was one of only a handful of Lombard executives with a private bathroom. She’d demanded it be written into her contract before she agreed to join the company. Not that she was driven by corporate one-ups-man-ship or ego. The fact was, she needed a shot of insulin three times a day to stay alive, and she preferred having somewhere private to inject herself.

Though the bathroom did also make for a wonderful retreat when things out in the Pit were going mad. It was a quiet place where she could escape for a few moments of tranquillity when things were particularly manic. And on nights when she was heading straight out to dinner – most nights of the week, in fact – it was nice to have a place where she could do her make-up in private, as she was about to do now.

As she unzipped her cosmetics purse and pulled out a bottle of mascara, she supposed she thought of her private bathroom as one of the perks of her job, like her Saab cabriolet, her flat in Chelsea, her wardrobe of designer clothes.

When she’d started out in PR, in her early twenties, building a successful career had been the most important thing in the world to her. Her father, in his day, had been a leading Harley Street physician, and from him she’d inherited the gritty determination to succeed – to prove she was as capable as he in her own field. Financial PR had provided an excellent choice for someone of her skills. Bright, literate as well as numerate, and a strong communicator, she’d known all along that so long as she worked hard, all the rewards were there for the taking.

She’d started out as a humble account assistant at Lowe Bell, then graduated to an account manager job at Brunswick. By the time Mike Cullen approached her with the idea of setting up a new consultancy, she was in her late twenties and a well-established account director. She knew Mike Cullen from various industry bashes – the IPR City branch, PR Week’s annual awards – and she’d always held him in high regard. So when he offered her the chance to join him in a new venture, getting in on the ground floor of an agency that had huge potential, she didn’t have to think too hard about it. Those early days at the agency, she often thought, had been among her happiest, because after the initial bedding-down period, Lombard quickly began acquiring big, blue-chip clients, and Kate found herself working harder than she had known she was capable of as Mike’s vision of a superlative agency quickly turned into a hugely successful reality. By the time she was in her early thirties, Lombard’s success, and her own part in it, was on a grander scale than she would ever have conceived.

Now, in her early forties, however, things looked very different. While Lombard was easily the biggest name in corporate and financial PR, Kate couldn’t help feeling that, somewhere along the line, she’d lost the plot. Somewhere in the past ten years, she’d begun to realise that all she was doing in her job was the same thing, over and over again. ‘Every deal is different,’ was one of her PR mantras. While technically true, the reality was that every deal was just another variation on a small number of well-worn themes. And she was exhausted playing them. There had been just too many cancelled dinner dates and an increasing number of working weekends; too many late-night phone calls with clients in a panic over hostile takeover bids; too much work and not enough play. In particular, no time for a love life.

Her single status had, over the years, been the cause of enormous heartache for, as well as the lack of time for a relationship, it seemed to Kate that with age came increasing discrimination. There had been moments, more and more frequent in the past couple of years, when she had found herself, late at night or on a Sunday afternoon, feeling a sudden, deep loneliness at the realisation that life was passing her by and that she had no one to share it with.

All of which made her value her relationships with close male friends even more; friends like Jim Ritchie, whom she was seeing tonight. Bastion of the Sunday Telegraph City office, Jim was a craggy, charismatic Scotsman. A bon viveur with an aphorism for every occasion, Jim also had an encyclopaedic mind from which he would constantly extract arcane gems, as well as embarrassing reminders. Being around Jim certainly kept you on your toes. Had he been a few years younger, and not married with three children, thought Kate, she would certainly have contemplated a happy union with him, but alas …