Conflict of Interest

North shook his head. ‘The calls won’t stop, Claude. Like we told you at the outset, getting Kennedy on board is just the beginning. What we’re really after is first prize. The gold star. Cum laude. Whatever you people call it.’

‘And as I told you at the outset, unlike you I’m not into mind control. I can assemble persuasive arguments; I can work for consensus. But you’re dealing with some highly intelligent, independently minded individuals with their own agendas. The best I can do is lead them towards a certain conclusion.’

‘You’ll have to do a lot better than that if you don’t want your sister splashed all over the tabloids.’

From the brown envelope beside him, North extracted a photograph and flicked it over the desk top towards Bonning. It was a photograph of an attractive young woman taken in Montreal. Picking it up, he stared at it, shaken, before suddenly wondering if it was North’s only copy.

‘Why don’t you take it home?’ North asked, as though reading his thoughts. ‘Stick it on the mantelpiece. Show the kids. In fact, I’ve an even better idea. Why don’t you run it in next month’s Family First magazine?’

It was a long while before Bonning finally met his eyes, with a shake of his head. ‘You’re a sick bastard.’

‘Oh, Mr Bonning, “Judge not lest ye be judged.’” North rose from the other side of the table and walked over to open the door. ‘Isn’t that the phrase you folks use at Family First?’

6

There was something odd about Elliott North, decided Chris. More than just odd. As the Lombard lift doors slid shut in front of him, and he descended from the fourth floor to the basement garage at the end of another fifteen-hour day, he searched for the right word for Elliott North. ‘Sinister’ was maybe overdoing it, ‘eccentric’ altogether too tame. He had to mull it over a few moments before he knew he had it; the word was ‘unsavoury’.

He hadn’t noticed so much that first time they’d met in Mike Cullen’s office. North had seemed rougher around the edges than most other Lombard consultants, but Chris hadn’t seen any great significance in that. During subsequent encounters, though, he’d picked up something more. Working flat out on Project Silo, he’d been using every trick in the book, and calling in all the favours he was owed from MIRA days to obtain all the information he could on Sportex and Active Red. So far he’d uncovered no sign that either company was, as North had suggested, waging a dirty tricks campaign against Starwear. What he had found, however, was evidence of cash-flow problems at Sportex, and distribution failures at Active Red – information that would be invaluable in planning Starwear’s future strategy.

In the course of his research during the past three weeks Elliott North had visited him several times. Each time he’d used the same phrase: ‘Are you digging up the dirt?’ Chris hadn’t been sure how to react at first: the competitor research was revealing, but he didn’t see himself as being in the business of digging up dirt. Maybe that was just North’s way of putting things. So this evening when North had stepped into his office, Chris had told him about the findings on Sportex’s liquidity problems and Active Red’s failure to secure several major distributors. North had seemed interested – but not that interested. Instead he’d asked about Bob Reid and Ed Snyder – the respective CEOs of Sportex and Active Red. How had the two of them screwed up, he’d wanted to know. What skeletons were rattling in their cupboards?

North was missing the point. The personalities of Jacob Strauss’s counterparts might be titillating, but what really mattered was coming up with ways that Starwear could exploit the operational weaknesses of its rivals, and flex its brand to maximum effect. Mike Cullen had said as much himself.

It was as if Elliott North was out of sync with the rest of the agency and had his own agenda for Starwear which was different from the one everyone else was following. One of the first things Kate Taylor had told Chris about Starwear was that the agency was committed to a Four-Point Communications Strategy. She’d shown him a summary consisting of four goals highlighted with bullet points:

To establish Jacob Strauss’s credentials among Starwear’s key audiences.

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To ensure the Textile Bill, about to be debated in Parliament, was amended to protect Starwear’s interests.

To achieve recognition for Starwear’s human resources management in developing countries.

To generate maximum benefit from Starwear’s annual results, to be released in a few weeks, which would show record profits.

All of that made sense to Chris, even though he didn’t understand the rationale behind every point. So where was Elliott North coming from with all this talk about skeletons in cupboards?

The lift doors opened and he stepped into the basement garage. Walking over to his car, he heard footsteps on the concrete behind him and turned to find Kate emerging from the stairwell. ‘Came down the lazy way,’ he smiled.

‘You’re a few floors up from me.’ She approached him, looking in her handbag for her keys. ‘Things going OK?’ She glanced up.

It was a couple of days since they’d last spoken.

‘Very well,’ he confirmed. Then, lowering his voice, ‘Pulled in some great stuff on the project whose name I dare not speak.’

‘Excellent!’ She knew he was working on something confidential for Mike.

They were walking together towards where their cars were parked, just a few yards away.

‘And otherwise – things OK?’ she asked.

He nodded, although she detected a hesitancy in his expression.

‘But?’ she prompted.

They carried on walking till they had reached her car, a midnight-blue Saab convertible. Kate was looking up at him now with an intensity that made him wonder if he should have left this alone. Although, even on his first day she’d signalled her own reservations about Elliott North.

‘Well I – I don’t want to make a big deal out of this …’