She could only agree. After all who would have blamed Roland for thinking she’d lost the plot, if she’d refused. It was her job. It paid her bills.
Even so, as Ellie wandered back to her office she wondered if Roland knew anything at all of Theo Stirling. If he had surely he would have also known that such glamorous pictures rarely existed. The homes he lived in, the cars he drove and particularly the women he was linked with, were all mostly ramped up in the columns that traded on such things, on the basis of nothing more than sightings, rumour and the occasional disgruntled business rival. The privacy of the man was what gave him such journalistic value. With a bit of luck, she told herself with more hope than conviction, he won’t remember me. After all I was still at school. He was, what? Twenty-three, twenty-four?
Turning away from the window she wandered back to her desk, grateful that she had an office on her own. It was a luxury not many people on the staff had, and one that Ellie treasured.
She wasn’t deliberately anti-social, it was simply the result of conditioning that she liked her own space. Brought up in the uncertain hinterland of cultural clout but floundering financially, the Carter children had carved a life for themselves that did not depend on anyone. Instinctively they had grown to realize that the less the world knew about their private thoughts, hopes and wishes, the less chance there was of anyone destroying them. Ellie and Oliver had always assumed only their own efforts would ever lift them above the bare necessities of life that their vague and — it couldn’t be denied — often thoughtless parent provided for them.
But not so thoughtless that he deserved to have lost the little he had.
It seemed to Ellie that having lost their home and pushed to the edge of despair, her father had settled for a life that was safe and private. A life that was at variance with his once flamboyant, dramatic gestures, his need for gossip and wit and to be surrounded by clever people. The cottage and the small tea shop in Devon that was now his life, the walls adorned with all his paintings, had all been Alison’s idea, to get him away, to make a fresh start. At the time Ellie and Oliver had just been relieved that out of the mire of debt and near hopelessness, Alison Goodmayes had appeared in their lives, quietly taken over and gathered together a broken little family and had become, for a time, the central force in their lives.
These days if she thought about it at all, Ellie fleetingly wondered how her father had come to marry her. Ellie didn’t dislike her stepmother; she simply wasn’t at ease with her. In the beginning when she used to appear at their home, Ellie had thought she was a local friend of Aunt Belle’s, to be treated with friendly disinterest by her brother and herself.
And why not? At twelve and sixteen, they were well used to a string of strangers in their house. They had assumed Aunt Belle was a party to the more permanent sea of faces that had proceeded to take over the place.
The old library with its exquisite wood panelling had been crudely divided with plaster board into four bedsits. Aunt Belle had tried for some time to refer to them as flatlets but the impecunious nature of their inhabitants didn’t support this description in any way.
The drawing room and the music room, closed to save on heating bills, had been reopened and rented out to students at the local art college. Only a small suite of rooms near the stone-flagged kitchen had been left for the Carters. The rest of the once rambling, beautiful house was now a lodging house with perhaps the most elegant but unappreciated gravel drive in the county, filled with cars that had seen better days.
All Alison’s idea. All piloted through despite Aunt Belle’s cries of horror. Ellie remembered the row, she realized that Aunt Belle’s reserve had been a thin front for her contempt for a woman who, as she put it, thought you could mend a broken leg with a band aid.
‘Someone’s got to stop the rot. What else would you suggest?’ Ellie had heard Alison demand as the two women confronted each other across Aunt Belle’s packed suitcases the day Aunt Belle had discovered that, for a little extra rent from them, she was expected to supply breakfast to one or two of the students.
‘I suggest,’ Aunt Belle had said calmly, ‘that you lie on the bed you’ve just made — not the one you’ve just come from — and prepare for a future making breakfast for everyone.’
That Alison was sleeping with her father had never occurred to Ellie, or that Aunt Belle might disappear from their lives. At that age, all Ellie cared about was that her father no longer feared every knock on the door. At least for a while he hadn’t.
Swivelling around in her chair, Ellie dismissed her father’s second wife from her mind. In retrospect, all that mattered was that at a time when they didn’t know which way to turn, Alison had quietly stepped in and taken her father in hand. Which, my girl, she told herself sternly, dragging her thoughts back to the present, is something you must do for yourself, otherwise it won’t just be an interview you’ll be losing, but your job.
She pulled her notepad towards her and took stock of what she had to go on. Trying to get an interview with Theo Stirling through conventional channels was just not going to work. She frowned down at the list of names and numbers, and knew that she was going to have to try another route. Glancing at the clock, she saw it was almost two thirty. Maybe Oliver might inspire a thought or two. She needed to talk to him anyway. Reaching for the phone she had barely punched in his number when the internal phone on her desk buzzed.
‘Ellie? Roland’s office, pronto.’
‘Okay, Dixie, consider me there,’ she said, already on her feet.
She made her way across the spacious open plan editorial office, which in spite of modern technology still managed to retain the air of chaos that the staff found strangely comforting and completely conducive to producing what was required of them. Jed had once joked that Focus must be the only office in London where the cleaners were employed to make a mess.
Ellie paused briefly at the door of the fashion room, where the frantic and faintly eccentric style editor, was waist high in a mountain of glittering, glitzy evening wear that had been arriving in her office all day.
‘Hey, I’ve got to see Roland,’ called Ellie, putting her face round the door. ‘So don’t send that Donna Karan back until I’ve tried it on. I need something for the dinner at Grosvenor House on Friday.’
‘My dear,’ sighed Rosie, rising from the colourful mountain, her arms festooned with necklaces, bracelets and scarves like a trader in a Tunisian souk. ‘If you could find a way of making that overpaid nitwit hired to model this lot understand that cutting her hair the day before the shoot, when she was booked for her flowing tresses, was an act to justify her murder, then I won’t send it back. Ever.’
‘Oh, what an idiot,’ exclaimed Ellie, sympathetically ducking out. ‘Tell me all later.’
Rosie waved a languid hand in her direction as Ellie moved on to Roland’s office. It was located at the far end of the corridor and separated from the main editorial activity by two outer offices.
The reception area, with comfortable chairs grouped around low coffee tables strewn with magazines and newspapers, contained a mini gallery of framed covers of Focus and photographs of Roland meeting the rich and famous, or picking up yet another award for his magazine.
The other housed his indefatigable secretary Mary Dixon, Dixie to everyone, who gave a dramatic shudder as Ellie arrived.
‘Go on in,’ she said, as Ellie raised her eyebrows in alarm seeing Dixie’s expression. ‘I’ve had strict instructions from Thelma to lock the drinks cupboard and hide the key to make sure that he’ll get home in time for her dinner party. I’ve had to bribe security to say they can’t find another key until tomorrow. So we’re all suffering.’
Ellie laughed, knowing that Dixie, briskly efficient and with a grown-up family, remained unfazed by her talented but mercurial boss who drank champagne as though he were personally responsible for keeping the vineyards of France in business.
As the door closed behind Ellie, Dixie gave a silent chee
r. Now she would have half an hour to herself. Half hours she didn’t mind. It was the locked door and hour-long meetings with Judith that she struggled hard not to explode about. There wasn’t much anyone could tell Dixie about the comings and goings of the staff of Focus.
The ones who thought their every written word was deathless prose and the ones who needed their egos massaged five times a day; others who regularly regaled the office with every detail of their personal life; and then the ones like Ellie. Dixie knew Roland would go to any lengths to keep her on the staff, and that he had counteracted at least one attempt to lure her away. She didn’t blame him.
Ellie could get the most difficult and evasive of public figures to bare their souls in print. Sometimes seeing their fears and insecurities splashed across the centre spread of the magazine, they would run howling for their lawyers. But few ever tried to take it further. Ellie scrupulously never misquoted and frequently exercised a wiser judgement than her interviewee by carefully refraining from including their more indiscreet revelations.
‘I think your client should be aware that Miss Carter applied great restraint describing their meeting,’ James Baldwin, Focus’s tough young lawyer, would calmly point out. ‘We would be happy to have the case tested in court.’
Then, torn between fury and immense gratitude that Ellie had merely made them look human instead of stupid, nearly all would accept her invitation to lunch to heal the rift and emerge to tell their friends she was one of the few journalists that they could trust.
Meanwhile Ellie, in her editor’s cool, carpeted office, was discussing one writ that wouldn’t go away.
Roland was frowning over an internal memo.
‘It’s not libel,’ he said as Ellie waited patiently for him to finish reading what the company lawyers had to say, having now taken advice from Quentin Anstruther, a leading QC. ‘We all know it isn’t. I think she just wants her day in court and as much publicity as possible to prop up a sagging bank balance.’
Ellie was surprised the case was still being pursued. Kathryn Renshaw, famous for being the former wife of John Renshaw, the ambassador to France, was suing over what she claimed was an attempt, in a profile Ellie had written on her ex-husband, to damage her reputation and to brand her an opportunist.
‘Ridiculous,’ Ellie told Roland calmly. ‘He said it, not me. I simply commented quite legitimately that her social life had certainly blossomed after her marriage and that she did, in the end, benefit enormously from the divorce. The thing is she knows that she stands no chance of getting him into court, but she can go for us.’
Roland nodded and tossed the letter aside.
‘Well, let’s wait and see. You might be right. She wasn’t remotely interested in having space in Focus to put her side of things and she’s rejected the dosh we’ve paid into court to settle.’
‘You mean to make her go away,’ she corrected.
He nodded. ‘Cheaper in the end. Saves us time and money. Frankly, if proof were needed that he was right, this is it. She obviously did marry him for a bit of status and she’s got quite a good screw out of him in maintenance. I wonder what all this is about?’
Ellie, gestured impatiently.
‘Revenge and a shrewd notion that if you shout loud enough, protest too long, judges and juries who tend to loathe the press will be on her side, whether she’s right or wrong. I think we’d better be prepared for her day in court and just hope that the members of the jury aren’t idiots and keep the damages down.’
Roland nodded. ‘You’re probably right,’
‘Is that what you wanted me for?’ Ellie asked, rising to leave.
Roland shook his head vigorously.
‘No, no. Just happened to arrive as you came in. What’s happening about Stirling?’
Ellie tried to sound businesslike. For the moment it was impossible to get past Theo Stirling’s aides.
‘Nonsense. Course he’ll see you. Ring him back,’ said Roland, smiling confidently from behind his vast black-topped desk, rolling an exquisite black Mont Blanc fountain pen between immaculately manicured fingers.
He was a dramatic-looking man of fifty-ish, with a shock of steel grey hair, an ostentatious dresser with a penchant for strongly striped shirts, red braces and of the firm belief that it was only miracles that took a little longer to achieve. Ellie didn’t trust him an inch. But she knew the rules. She smiled at him.
‘What exactly makes you so sure he’ll eventually see me, when he’s turned down all interviews, except for the business sections of the nationals? And precious few of those. After all,’ she went on, trying to sound reasonable. ‘There isn’t one direct quote from him in any of the cuts. All speculation, all repeating the same facts. Theo Stirling, forty, property tycoon, intensely private, divorced, another deal, another takeover... another beautiful woman. I mean,’ she argued. ‘The man is just not interested in talking about himself.’
She didn’t add that she could have recounted all those facts without once looking at the cuttings. There was very little about Theo Stirling she didn’t know, right from the beginning, when his dreadful father had forced them out of their home and terrified her when she had tried to get back into her old home.
When Aunt Belle had gone, her father and Alison piling up a car that Alison had managed to find from somewhere to start the journey to Devon, Ellie had crept back up the drive, skirted the house until she found the library window. She wanted to get to her old room, to take a last look, to gather up things – or at least one thing – that mattered. Who would mind, really mind that she was only taking what belonged to her? The sash window was already slightly up, she began to push until there was just enough room to climb through. And then he had appeared.
‘Hey,’ a sharp voice had called.
She had turned in fright. The voice was coming from the end of the drive. An angry voice. Threatening.
‘Get away from there,’ the voice ordered. ‘Now. Do you hear? Now, I said.’
She had glanced frantically round. She knew who he was. One of them. And angry. Without looking back she had slithered to the ground, and ran, scrambling over the dividing wall, until she reached the relative safety of the car where her father was waiting.
She never saw him again, but she had read a lot.
When he took over the US office of Stirling Properties Inc. straight out of Harvard, he was young, ambitious and keen to prove himself in the family business. While his father consolidated the English side of things, Theo had bought for a song a couple of dilapidated mansions on a central site in Miami Beach.
Once fashionable, the area had become run-down and isolated from the bustling centre of the city. Theo anticipated a revival, but not the one that actually happened. He thought the area would be razed and rebuilt with smart condos and hotels. In fact he miscalculated, but not to his disadvantage. Miami Beach was suddenly touched by fashion. First, artists moved in, drawn by the romantic art deco architecture to say nothing of the cheap rents. They were followed by their patrons, hooked by the raffish atmosphere. Soon Miami Beach was as fashionable as New York’s SoHo, with the advantage of all year suntans.
Theo now owned two of the best looking buildings on the whole Beach. And he waited as rents hiccupped, then lurched, then soared. He waited while boutiques blossomed into designer stores bearing the names of some of Europe’s finest labels, and cafes and bars transformed themselves into high class restaurants and fashionable clubs. He waited until his secretary had to organize a queuing system to cope with builders, real estate speculators, architects and money-men who besieged his office, begging him to wait no longer.
Within two years he had moved the office to New York and then events in Willetts Green had claimed his attention.
When he arrived in Heathrow all those years ago, he was rich, tanned and more than satisfied with himself. Although the American property market was on the slide, and the north of England heading for recession too, London and the rich south was still booming. He wonde
red if there wasn’t a profit to be made in out-of-town shopping malls, like those he was used to in America.
Ellie didn’t want to dwell on the rest of the story, it was too close to home. She gave herself a mental shake and pointed at the screen. ‘And they even get wrong what little they have got on him. He’s a very unpleasant man.’
‘How do you know?’ Roland looked at her sharply.
Oh no, careful, careful, she admonished herself.
‘Well, they all say he’s well liked,’ she said a bit too quickly. ‘How do they know if they’ve never met him? And anyway, few men who get to the top are very likeable.’
‘Oh, there is that,’ agreed Roland easily.
Roland looked keenly at her. It flashed across his mind she might be referring to him. He wouldn’t put it past her. He needed Ellie but he resented her. He resented the exquisitely polite manner, the studied indifference to him as a man. He thought she was cold. It annoyed him to think she could give him the brush off and he had no desire to risk it now.
More profitable for him, he decided, to concentrate on pushing Ellie into this interview, than probing her private life. Jed’s suggestion that they try for Theo Stirling for the Eleanor Carter Interview was inspired. If they could get him, they would leave their rivals standing and it wouldn’t do Roland any harm personally with the Chairman of Belvedere to see that he could still cut the mustard.
At his age and highly paid, the editor was as vulnerable as anyone else. His immediate future was not of the highly secure variety but he hadn’t thought it necessary to include himself in the warning he’d issued that morning. Not necessary at all.
‘Give it a whirl,’ he said now. ‘Let’s see how it goes, eh? Hang on a second,’ he suddenly looked closely at her. ‘Isn’t that where you come from? Dorset?’
Oh God.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t know him. Okay, leave it with me.’
‘Great, great.’ he said warmly. ‘I know you’ll get it. Take your time. But I want it soon. Now, I need a fortifying drink after that.’
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