shown denying the accusations, while scrambling from cars outside their homes, being pursued by large groups of tabloid reporters and paparazzi.
The news piece wasn’t long, though it had Judith wondering as she swilled the remaining Bailey’s in her crystal tumbler. During the course of her own enquiries she’d checked out Reid and Snyder but hadn’t found anything on them, certainly not in the child slave department. But these new allegations were a bit too much of a coincidence – especially with stories about both Reid and Snyder coming out at the same time. She couldn’t help wanting to know where they had come from. And why.
•••
Chris didn’t get to see the newspapers until eleven thirty on Tuesday, having spent all morning till then at the Indian High Commission. The situation there had been far from satisfactory. Yesterday, after queuing for an age, he’d been told that visa applications took a standard four days. They’d try to process his in two if he came down in person the following morning, but they were making no promises. This morning he’d waited and waited his turn in the queue, but when he finally got to the front, the official told him, categorically, that he must wait until Thursday morning. At this rate, there was no way he’d get out in time for the Jaipur plant tour on Thursday afternoon.
Arriving back at his office, frustrated by this latest turn of events in a day that already felt like a surreal nightmare, he began flicking through the newspapers, and was hardly able to take in what he saw. Every single one of them, broadsheet and tabloid, was full of the stories Kuczynski had dug up about Reid and Snyder. Even from the most cursory glance, it was clear that both men were up to their necks in sleaze. ‘Active Red’s Three-in-a-Bed’ was The Globe’s front-page lead article. According to Shayla Maxwell, Snyder’s ex-secretary who’d charged him with sexual harassment, Snyder had once suggested she bring along a friend for ‘a bit of slap and tickle after hours’. Of course, Snyder and Maxwell had never so much as kissed, nor had Maxwell even proven that sexual harassment had taken place – a point The Globe studiously ignored. Instead, the newspaper had paid Snyder’s former mistress £25,000 to ‘spill the beans’ on their affair of three years earlier. A deluge of voyeuristic detail on where, when and how they’d had sex was laid out for the prurient consumption of over four million readers, including the information that Ed’s mistress had had her pubic hair coloured red and specially shaven in the shape of the Active Red logo for one of his birthdays.
The Dispatch’s front-page piece was headlined ‘Britain’s Biggest Sneakers’ and reported not only on Ed Snyder, but Bob Reid too. Not content with his £450,000 salary from Sportex, The Dispatch told its readers, Reid also had an income estimated to be in the region of £150,000, tax free, from the proceeds of immoral earnings. Without actually calling him a pimp, the paper ran photographs of well-groomed, attractive women entering and leaving his Belgravia flat. One such woman, propositioned by an undercover reporter, had listed her charges, which were published in a separate box – £50 for oral sex, £100 for regular sex, £150 for bondage and domination, with other services negotiable.
In case this character assassination hadn’t quite finished him off, out came the assault conviction made against Reid at Reading Crown Court. Amanda Rider, the former model – whose volatile temperament and vase-wrecking escapade were not mentioned by the paper – had, for a generous financial consideration, no doubt, posed topless on an exercise bike like the one on which she said she and Bob Reid had once had sex.
The broadsheets had also gone to town on the Reid/Snyder stories, providing a fig leaf for the lurid details by explaining that both men were among the most vocal supporters of the Government’s proposed Textiles Act, to be debated in the next few days in the House of Commons. The same stories as those run by the tabloids were pattered out, together with extra, business-related reportage. Bob Reid was a man with a violent temper, said one disgruntled ex-employee, who, if provoked, went completely off the rails. Staff were so terrified of him when he went on factory visits that they used to hide in the cupboards. When Reid snapped back at reporters who phoned him for a reaction to the stories, he only seemed to prove the point.
As for Snyder, morale at Active Red was said to be at an all-time low. The downturn in south-east Asian markets had seen orders collapsing, and Snyder was implementing enforced redundancies. ‘It’s like the end of the coal industry,’ said an embittered Derby worker, who’d lost his second career. ‘These days it’s not a question of “if” Snyder will sack you, it’s a question of “when”.’
But it was the Financial Times story, which included none of the salacious sexual details about Reid and Snyder, that was the most worrying of all. Allegations about the two men, it reported, had first emerged from a confidential analysis of the sportswear market undertaken by a leading public relations company. ‘The analysis, intended for internal consumption, identifies serious allegations of sexual misconduct and errors of judgement.’ Reid and Snyder had both been contacted for their reactions to the report. Both had said the stories were heavily one-sided, and that they were seeking legal counsel. But there were no outright denials – and the protestations of bias only served to underline their apparent guilt all the more. Bob Reid and Ed Snyder had been tried, found guilty and hanged by the national press before they were even aware of what was happening. Whatever else they did in their lives, the damage to their reputations would be serious and irreversible.
Chris surveyed the papers, coldly furious. How could he have been so naive about the real purpose of Project Silo? From the moment North had told him to go digging up dirt he should have realised. Instead, he’d been the innocent all along, unable to understand why the personal lives of Starwear’s competitors should be of the slightest interest. Blind to where it was all heading. No wonder North was packing him off to India the very next day. The stories about Reid and Snyder weren’t one-day wonders. They’d go on and on for the next week at least. The tabloids were already racing about with fat chequebooks, handing out money to whoever had a bad word to say about the two men. The flood of sleaze and allegations would continue. And all at a time to inflict maximum damage to Sportex and Active Red. Members of Parliament, having been lectured repeatedly on the merits of ‘responsible management’ by Nicholas King, would now be made vividly aware of the kind of people pressing for greater competition. When the amendment making an exception of sportswear was put to the House, all the headlines about Reid and Snyder could hardly be ignored.
With the exception of the small number of Financial Times readers, the vast majority of people had no idea where all this information was coming from. They weren’t to know it was a smear campaign deliberately orchestrated to occur at the moment of maximum impact, that it was a confection of half-truths designed to be deliberately misleading. Until today, Reid and Snyder had just been two men running sportswear companies; from now on, whenever their names came up, there would be smirks about their sexual peccadilloes, question marks about their sense of judgement.
So much, thought Chris, for the report of which he’d been so proud – his finest piece of strategic planning to date. It had been hijacked and used by North for a dirty-tricks campaign. Yet another reason why Kate’s death was just too much of a coincidence. She would never have countenanced this kind of activity. Apart from its colossal tastelessness, it could, in the long run, only be bad news for Lombard. Since the mid-nineties the corporate world had had to become more transparent and accountable; an agency that dealt in muck and sleaze was hardly going to prosper.
His immediate impulse was to try to see Mike, but he didn’t even know if Mike was in his office. He had spent yesterday closeted in the penthouse, having cancelled all meetings. According to Rosa, her boss had been utterly distraught. Running to him now with the papers, complaining about Elliott North, somehow didn’t seem right. Besides, he told himself, whatever tales were coming out about Reid and Snyder now would soon be eclipsed by a far bigger story. When Judith’s
piece came out in The Herald, journalists would have a far grander story of deceit and malevolence to explore.
Deep in thought, Chris didn’t even hear his telephone ringing – till Lotte put her head round the door. He picked up the receiver.
‘C. T. It’s Bernie.’
‘Oh.’
‘Look, I’ve got a nice little case of claret in,’ he used the code phrase, ‘would you like to come round to sample it tonight?’
Chris paused. ‘I wouldn’t mind sooner.’
‘When were you thinking?’
‘What about right now?’
‘I’ve got Mr Snyder on line two,’ Rosa’s voice came through on Mike Cullen’s intercom, ‘shall I put him through?’
Mike Cullen looked at his watch. Eleven-thirty a.m. He was surprised it had taken so long.
‘Sure,’ he told Rosa. Then, after a pause, ‘Good morning, Ed.’
‘What in the hell is going on over there?’
Mike Cullen raised his right hand to his brow, massaging his eyebrows with forefinger and thumb. ‘It would seem that a report has been deliberately leaked to the national media.’
‘I had TV cameras outside my office yesterday afternoon, the things they were saying were just so ludicrous I thought it was some flash in the pan. So I came to Berlin, as planned, for a meeting. Now my Corporate Comms guy has been on the phone saying there’s crap all over the papers.’
Mike Cullen sighed. ‘On a personal level, it is very regrettable.’
‘Regrettable! I don’t know if I’ll still have a marriage when I get home.’