If the hat guy had given me data on Verity, maybe that was a company Andrew was considering saving. I pulled up Natalie’s file and read all the documentation. Verity, Inc. began as a serious, journalist-led magazine at the start of the last century—like a British version of The New Yorker—but had been reinvented at some point. Now it was more like the National Enquirer.
It didn’t take an MBA to spot falling profits and plummeting circulation on the papers Hat Man had given me.
The company was ripe for a turnaround.
This must be Andrew’s next project. I just needed to figure out how to get him to hire me, so I could help turn Verity around.
Three
Andrew
Didn’t people understand that I wanted peace? I cancelled the call from Tristan flashing on my mobile and minimized my email screen, turning back to the Financial Times and the article about Goode Publishing.
For the most part, Bob Goode was good at what he did. He was managing to buck the trends with rising profits and increased circulations with most of the magazines he owned, but Verity was the exception.
My phone started to buzz again. Fucking Tristan. I stood—what I always did when I wanted a call or a meeting to be as short as possible. Just as I was about to accept Tristan’s call, there was a knock at the door.
I ignored it. My first meeting didn’t arrive until one and my team knew better than to bother me before midday.
I pressed accept. “Andrew Blake.”
“Honestly, Andrew. I’m calling you. I know it’s you. You know it’s me. Have you ever thought of starting a phone call with a simple hello?”
I had no intention of replying to Tristan’s bullshit, but even if I’d wanted to, I wouldn’t have gotten a chance. Despite me ignoring the knock on the door, another one followed, and then the girl from this morning appeared with papers in her hand.
I cancelled the call with Tristan and watched as the woman grinned at me, marched over to my desk, and put two sets of papers down.
“The older gentleman with the hat asked me to bring you these,” she said, pointing to the papers on the left. “And this is your mail.” She pointed to the papers on the right. “Which I’ve opened and put in order of priority.”
Why was she still here? And why was she acting like she worked for me?
“Get out,” I said, my tone low and serious.
“No,” she replied. It was like she’d hit me with a hammer.
“Excuse me?” Bloody Americans.
“No, I won’t get out.” She folded her arms and looked me square in the eye. “I’m going to stay and be your new assistant. I don’t expect a better package than the last assistant you had, and I’ll work just as hard and be just as dedicated.”
“Dedicated?” I asked, skipping past the fact that not only had the woman in front of me refused to leave, she was now demanding I pay her. “My last assistant left. If you can’t be more dedicated than her, you should definitely leave.”
I sat and brought back up my email account, clicking open the folder on Verity and scrolling through to bring up last year’s financial results.
“She quit because you’re difficult to work with. Not because she’s not dedicated.”
I didn’t say a word. There weren’t many people in my life who spoke to me like that. Certainly no one who worked for me. They didn’t need to. I worked with a talented, dedicated team who got paid handsomely.
“I’ve got a thicker skin than her,” she continued, lifting her chin.
That sounded like a challenge. I didn’t deliberately try to run off my assistants, but they couldn’t handle the pressure. Since Joanna retired, they’d all been sacked or left before they hit the six-month mark. Some hadn’t even lasted six hours. They obviously wanted handholding and platitudes, while I just wanted to get on with my job. I wasn’t interested in office banter and chat about whatever watercooler show was on Netflix. But according to Joanna—who I’d called on average once a week to try to persuade her out of retirement—that’s what I needed to be doing.
She called it “soft skills.”
I called it bollocks.
“I’m way over-qualified for this job. I have an MBA from Columbia. I’m clever, organized, and not afraid of hard work. You’re lucky to have me.” She was speaking as if she already worked here.
“Then why do you want the job?” I asked, intrigued despite myself. Getting accosted outside my offices before six in the morning wasn’t new. I’d made a lot of cuts in my career, fired a lot of people. And although I’d done it so a business could survive and so not all employees lost their job, some people didn’t see it that way. Some people blamed me rather than the incompetent management who’d brought me to their door. All I did was clean up someone else’s mess. But I hadn’t ever been accosted in the street because someone wanted to work for me.