Conflict of Interest

‘I don’t know what he expected. Did he think he was going to bluster me into just caving in?’

‘I’m mortified,’ she said with feeling. Not far beneath the surface, she was also furious; absolutely livid with North for trampling across her patch with such brazen disregard. Relationships with senior journalists like Jim were sacrosanct. How dare he abuse that trust?

In Jim’s case, fortunately, North’s barracking hadn’t had the slightest impact. Now he was telling her, ‘You know, I get calls from bleating PRs fairly often. But I would never have expected that kind of conversation with someone from Lombard.’

Kate was shaking her head. ‘I don’t know how he acted in New York, but he’s just not house-trained.’

‘Tell me about it,’ he agreed. Then leaning across the table he lowered his voice, ‘To be frank, I wouldn’t have given the subject a second thought if it hadn’t been for what North said next.’

Could it get any worse?

‘He started rambling about vintage cars, wanting to know how many I had. As you can imagine, by this time I wasn’t in a conversational mood. Then he was going on about Jacob Strauss’s contacts in sports racing. I told him,’ Jim was dry, ‘I didn’t quite see the connection to Formula One racing.’

Kate was following him intently, dreading what she suspected he was about to say.

‘He said that Strauss had connections throughout the motor industry. Deals could be put together to minimise expenses. I couldn’t fathom what he was trying to say, to begin with. Then I worked out he was offering to subsidise my habit.’

Kate closed her eyes, and was shaking her head slowly.

‘He used this phrase a couple of times, oh aye, “an understanding”, he kept saying. After a while I told him, ‘Elliott, if I didn’t know Lombard better, I might think you were trying to bribe me.’

‘I just can’t believe—’

‘He backed off instantly. Some guff about Jacob Strauss having a personal interest in vintage cars.’

There was a long pause while she regarded him across the table, shamefaced. ‘Jim, I really am so sorry,’ she said eventually, ‘I just don’t know what to say.’

‘Oh,’ he was dismissive, ‘it takes a lot more than that to upset me. What I find so amazing is the effrontery of it all. If you can’t bully the journalist into submission, then try a bribe.’

She grimaced. ‘You can rest assured I’m going to do something about it when I get into the office tomorrow,’ she told him, determined.

‘I’ve dealt with American PRs before,’ he continued thoughtfully, ‘they’ve never behaved in such an extraordinary way. What I want to know is, where did he pick all that stuff up?’

Halfway through Thursday morning, Judith was lighting her sixth cigarette of the day in The Herald’s smoking room. She’d been spending a lot of time in here recently. Thinking through things seemed somehow easier with a cigarette. Not that there was anything easy about the way she was feeling right now. The burglary two days earlier had left her charged with a cocktail of emotions that were deeply unsettling. Seeing how easily her flat could be broken into and vandalised made her feel vulnerable – at risk in a way she had never felt before. But the same thing also made her furious. How dare they do this to her? What kind of an idiot did they take her for, if they thought she hadn’t worked out instantly what was going on? The only grim satisfaction she derived from it all was the fact that she’d cheated them of what they were after. They still had no idea at all what she knew about them. Right now, she was only the more determined to crack the story.

The night of the break-in, after the WPC had left, she’d found herself hauling all the bedclothes off her mattress and taking them down to the launderette. Remembering what the WPC had said about the teenage gang and their ‘signature’ – even though they weren’t the ones who’d broken into her place – had made her feel sullied and revolted. She’d returned home from Sanjay’s with an armful of detergents and brushes, and commenced scrubbing every surface of her room. She needed to get rid of the intruders; eliminate all evidence that any strangers had ever been there.

After the scrubbing there was the vacuuming; the clearing out of assorted debris from under her bed; the rearrangement of all the stuff on her dressing table, in her wardrobe, even the furniture in her room. She had to clean it, change it all and make it different. And that was just her bedroom. Moving through to the sitting room, she had found it virtually unchanged from the way she had found it earlier in the evening. Her flatmate Simon had spent the past three hours perched on one corner of an overturned sofa, smoking cocktail sobranjies, and with the phone to his ear, thrilling his friends with descriptions of the chaos, and revelling, in particular, in the ejaculatory details of the local teenage gang. Throwing a brush and pan in his direction, Judith reflected, not for the first time since they’d moved in together, that she’d have to revise her view about a gay man being a girl’s best friend.

By the time the flat was habitable once again, it was nearly eleven p.m. She had quickly packed an overnight bag and gone round to her cousin’s place in Redcliffe Gardens. She and Michelle would often call on each other in times of crisis. Tonight she was in need of a long, hot shower and a bed for the night; Michelle’s sofa was, she decided, preferable to her own bed right now. She needed a night away from it all.

Since then, her every waking moment had been dominated by thoughts about Starwear. And as she stood in The Herald’s smoking room, staring out of the window, unseeing, at the view of the river, she was so wrapped up in her thoughts that she didn’t even notice when the door behind her opened.

‘I thought I might find you in here.’ Alex Carter stepped in, resplendent in red braces and bold pinstripe navy trousers. He had never been in here before – she’d always thought of the smoking room as a Carter-free haven – but as he stepped over towards her, he pulled a cigar from out of his pocket, and began the great ceremony of lighting it up. Carter, she had observed before, spent a very long time playing with cigars – rolling them between his fingertips, squeezing them, moistening them, preparing to light them before, at the last minute, hesitating; he spent very little time actually smoking them.

‘I was going to call you into my office, but it’s just as private here,’ he glanced over his shoulder at the closed door, ‘and we can indulge in our filthy sin.’

Judith chuckled mirthlessly. The morning after her conversation with Chris, she was still feeling a bit shaky – and in no mood for a confrontation with Carter. Watching him discard the Cellophane wrapper of his cigar, and begin fingering and squeezing it, she felt a strong desire to end this suspense.

‘So,’ she asked, as he extracted a cutter from his trouser pocket, ‘what did you want to speak to me about?’

‘Ah, that.’ He glanced at her with a cryptic expression as he inserted the end of the cigar into the cutter and forcefully snapped it shut. ‘Let’s just say that your … behaviour over the past couple of weeks has been noticed.’

‘My behaviour?’ She kept her tone expressionless. She had been out several times on the investigation, although she’d always tried to time her outings when she knew he’d be in a meeting.

‘Oh, I know you probably think I’m too caught up in management meetings to notice these things but I actually keep very close tabs on what every member of my team is doing. I notice things.’

‘Right.’ She took a drag of her cigarette and exhaled. She supposed it could be good news. After all, she’d produced more column inches in the past few weeks than in her whole life as a journalist. And then there was her growing collection of miniskirts. But it wasn’t like Carter to make a fuss of his staff. Frolicking or bollocking – those were his two styles. And he already knew she wasn’t the type to be frolicked with.