The Concrete Ceiling

by Peter Rowlands

  The affability belied Rick Ashton’s tough character. You didn’t get to be chair of a nationwide parcel delivery company by being a nice guy. Cheerful and charismatic, Rick had the hard edge common to many business leaders. However, in my case he tempered it with grudging respect. I’d once helped him extricate himself from some business troubles, and he hadn’t forgotten. That was no doubt why I’d been able to reach him this morning at the first attempt.

  I said, “It’s about Antler Logistics. I wondered if you could tell me a bit more about what happened with them?”

  My call was in pursuit of Guy Dereham’s demand for a dirt-dishing article. Having ransacked my brain for a suitable theme, I’d only been able to summon up this one possible lead. I’d picked it up a fortnight ago at a press conference held by Rick’s company, Vantage Express. During a buffet lunch after the presentations I’d found myself chatting to him over canapés, and he’d let drop that his company had lost a contract under mysterious circumstances.

  He now said, “You’re writing for that Smart Headings web site, aren’t you? Is this for publication, mate?” He’d lost none of his distinctive Australian accent.

  “It could be, so long as I’m not treading on your toes.”

  He thought about that. “Yeah, why not? There was something a bit weird about what happened. No reason why the world shouldn’t hear about it. People should know what’s going on.”

  “Fire away then.”

  “OK, let me think.” There was a pause. “We were about to sign a contract to handle UK distribution for a range of Japanese consumer electronics. That’s what this is about. It’s a new venture for us. Then suddenly these Antler Logistics people jumped up from nowhere and snatched the deal from under our noses.”

  “I suppose it happens.”

  “It may well do, but not on my watch. This was going to be our big expansion into contract logistics, and we were fucked at the last hurdle, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

  “But was there anything seriously underhand about the way it happened?”

  “Why don’t you be the judge?” He paused again to assemble his thoughts. “This electronics company had agreed in principle to sign the contract with us, so we were good to go. We ordered new trucks and trailers, and we found a nice warehouse that was just the right size for the job. It was here in Rugby, not far from our headquarters, which was an added bonus.”

  “But?”

  “We went over to sign the lease on this warehouse, but then at the last minute there was a delay. The landlords wanted to change the rate and the terms – all kinds of crap.”

  “Is that unusual”

  “Well, I suppose it happens sometimes, but the landlords had only just refurbished this place after the previous occupants moved out. Why would they want to cause grief for a new occupant with good money to spend?”

  “So who are the landlords?”

  “Some property consortium. I’d have to look it up. The letting agents are Cavenham Risby.”

  I scribbled that down. “And what about Antler?”

  “They jumped up and snatched the contract away while we were still negotiating with these warehouse people. We were left looking like pillocks with our pants down.”

  “Coincidence or conspiracy?”

  “Ha! Well, we found out later that the Antler people had already signed a lease on another warehouse over in Lutterworth. And get this – they did it while we thought we were still in discussion with the customer. They were all set to pick up the job before we even knew we’d lost it. And to add insult to injury, we heard that their bid was only fractionally lower than ours.”

  “Are we talking illegality here, or just sharp practice?”

  Carefully he said, “I can’t point my finger at anything actually illegal, but there was definitely something strange going on.”

  I wanted a little more from him than this. I said, “If you were in my shoes, would you consider it worthwhile digging a bit further into this?”

  “I’d say it’s certainly worth putting out a few feelers. Find out who these Antler people really are, and how come they can swing things like this and get away with it. And let me know if you need anything else from me.”

  * * *

  I had no idea if Rick’s lead would go anywhere, but it felt important to let Guy Dereham know I had something in the pipeline. I phoned him as soon as Rick and I ended our call and told him the good news.

  “I’m glad to hear your investigative juices haven’t run dry,” he said with irony.

  “It’s early days yet, Guy. Don’t get too excited.”

  “You’re the one who’s phoning me.”

  “Ah, yes. I just wanted to check on travel expenses. I might have to go to the Midlands to talk to some of these people face to face. These stories don’t come free. I wanted to be sure you would be prepared to pay.”

  “Do what you can from your desk, but yes – I understand that you sometimes might have to go eyeball to eyeball. Just keep it within bounds, will you?”

  I disconnected irritably. Guy always wanted more than he was entitled to, and it annoyed me that I had to play along with him. If I could find another way to earn a living, I was ready to snap it up.

  Chapter 4

  One star – it was what no author ever wanted: a one-star review out of a potential of five. My book had just gained a pair of one-star reviews on the same day.

  I stared at the book’s web page in dismay. The worst review I’d ever had until now had been a two-star, and there was only one of those. Most of the couple of dozen others were four-star or five-star.

  I knew I had to be thick-skinned. Even the most popular books sometimes garnered one-star reviews. They might be genuine, or they might be the work of trolls – bloody-minded people who took pleasure in spreading unkindness and stirring dissent. The more copies a book sold, the more such reviews it was likely to attract.

  Yet my book had escaped this fate for three years – and now overnight it had been hit with a double dose.

  I examined the two new reviews more carefully. They were from separate reader accounts, both of them apparently genuine, and were quite different from each other in style. One, from an unnamed reader, simply said, “Rubbish from start to finish. Don’t waste a single moment on this tripe.”

  The other was longer and more considered, and was from someone with the online identity “Gatekeeper777”. I read it several times.

  People who know Mike Stanhope’s work might have expected better from him than this misguided, formulaic nonsense. Although it is his first foray into fiction, as a journalist he has been wowing the arcane world of logistics with his insights for many years, and once won a minor award for his investigative skills. Having apparently abandoned that role, he has attempted to draw on his knowledge of the seamier side of his world for this debut novel. Regrettably he offers us very little that is new.

  Worse, he chooses to mingle his cops-and-robbers piece with a tangled tale of adolescent frustration and thwarted romance – derived, one must assume, from the disappointments and setbacks of his own life. The result is a mishmash of misplaced investigative zeal and frankly embarrassing navel-gazing. If the book has any merit at all, it lies in the determination of his leading character to persist in his relentless quest for answers. But when he succeeds, the outcome descends into wholly predictable melodrama.

  Shame on you, Mr Stanhope. Is this the best you can come up with?

  I’ll admit it – I was stung by this disturbingly plausible dismissal of my efforts. It didn’t sound like the vitriol of a troll. If anything, it sounded like the measured and calculating tones of someone who actually knew me, or at least had come across me somewhere. I didn’t want to believe any of it, but I found it hard to ignore the more incisive barbs. Self-confidence had never been one of my strong suits, even at the best of times.

  I stared at the screen, trying to summon up a sense of anyone I’d encountered who would be literate enough to write t
his stuff, and also cruel enough to be so relentless in their condemnation. No one came to mind.

  I clicked through to the reader’s profile, and found that this was apparently the only book review he or she had ever written. That seemed significant, and distinctly suspicious. Unfortunately there was no way of identifying the person from the web site, or even of finding out anything else about them. In itself, the review seemed perfectly legitimate.

  What should I do? I could appeal to my online publisher to remove the reviews, but what grounds did I have? I couldn’t demonstrate that they were actually malicious or fake. Getting into a wrangle about it would be time-consuming and probably counter-productive.

  Yet if I did nothing, those reviews would sit there forever on my book page – a perpetual contradiction of any positive comments made by others.

  I wondered how much importance readers really attached to online book reviews. I’d heard that the answer was a lot, but I didn’t really know that from my own experience. I grabbed my phone and called Joanna, the wife of a college friend. Over the years she’d become my closest confidante, but she’d moved with her husband to Dortmund last year, so we weren’t in such close touch these days.

  “When you buy eBooks,” I asked her, “how much importance do you attach to reader reviews?”

  “They’re the first thing I look at. How many reviews are there, and what do the first few of them say?”

  “So if you found a very plausible one-star review, would that deter you from buying the book?”

  She thought about this for a moment. “It wouldn’t put me off if there were dozens of five-star reviews alongside it. It might put me off if there were only three reviews altogether, and this was one of them.”

  I decided I needed a second opinion. I called Hal, the joint owner of a gourmet restaurant. “You read a lot of eBooks,” I said to him. “Do you take any notice of reader reviews?”

  “Couldn’t do without them, darling.” His exaggerated camp tone always made me smile. “You know how much I like to follow the herd. If other people don’t like a book, I know I won’t either.”

  I had to weave through the self-mockery to work out what he really meant, but I concluded that reviews mattered to him. I said, “So you wouldn’t buy a book that had really negative reviews?”

  “Well, I might read the reviews out of sheer bloody-mindedness. Then I might still buy the book if I was intrigued – just to see how bad it could be.”

  “You’re a great help.”

  “OK, OK. If you want a proper answer, then yes, I do read reviews. You can’t ignore what other people say, can you?”

  Perhaps a sample of two readers wasn’t enough to draw conclusions from, but these two certainly didn’t make me feel any happier about the one-star reviews.

  I read the longer review again, and I was struck by something odd. The writer had mentioned a “minor award” that I’d once received. Clearly he or she had cited it in an effort to damn me with faint praise, but in fact it really was a minor award, and I’d received it many years before. I’d never mentioned it in any online profile or on my own web site – it didn’t seem significant enough. Yet somehow this person knew about it.

  That seemed to reinforce my feeling that the writer actually knew me personally – or else must have gone to inordinate lengths to discover details of my past life. It was hard to imagine anybody I knew writing such a contemptuous review, but who else might have done this, and why?

  It was a question for another time. Meanwhile, it seemed to me that the only way to counter these dismissive reviews was to accrue a lot more good ones – to dilute the negativity. Ashley had been right; if I wanted my book to win more sales, I needed to promote it. Unfortunately, the task had just become that little bit harder.

  Chapter 5

  “Samantha Adams is getting married.”

  I’d taken a deep breath before telling Ashley this. Skype video could be unnervingly revealing; your face was so close to the screen. Dissembling was hard. Not that I was planning on doing any dissembling.

  It was a Saturday afternoon in London – one of our best opportunities for communicating: breakfast time in Los Angeles, tea time in Camden Town. Ashley was seated as usual at the desk in her apartment. Behind her I could see part of a bookshelf against a white wall. Her dark hair looked subtly different – shorter, possibly? I knew I should have commented on it immediately, but I’d resolved to tell her about the wedding, and I wasn’t geared up for any distraction.

  She frowned slightly, as if wondering why I was sharing the information about Sam. She said, “Good for her.”

  Ashley knew about Samantha, but had probably never known the extent of my interest in her. Or perhaps I was deceiving myself about that.

  I said, “It’s next spring. We’re invited. I explained that you might be otherwise engaged.”

  I was hoping this might prompt her to give me some clue as to whether she expected to be permanently back in England by then, but the ruse backfired. She immediately said, “You explained?” Now I would have to recount my phone conversation with Sam.

  “They’re holding an engagement party in a few weeks’ time. She called me to ask if we were coming to that. I think the invitation must have been lying around in the flat in Truro for a week … ” My explanation petered out as I realised I was protesting too much. Lamely I finished, “They wanted to check the numbers.”

  She let this pass, and asked, “Who’s the lucky guy?”

  “Someone called Nick Hathaway. I googled him. He’s an estate agent.”

  “Sounds a bit boring for a free spirit like Samantha.”

  I hadn’t realised Ashley knew so much about her. I couldn’t think of any suitable response, so I said nothing.

  “So will you go?”

  “I might.” I waited a beat. “What about the wedding? Shall I say we’ll both go to that?”

  A tiny pause. “I’ll come if I’m around, so you might as well say yes.”

  I decided I’d better not pursue this aspect any further. I said, “You’ve had your hair cut.”

  “Styled.” She smiled faintly.

  “I like it.”

  “Thank you. It’s cooler in this hot climate.”

  “We’ve got it here too. A heatwave.”

  “That flat in London must be stifling.”

  “I’ve known cooler.”

  “Your choice to be there, Mr Stanhope.”

  A buzzer sounded in the background. Ashley looked round abruptly, then back at the screen. “That’s Katy. Shopping. I’ve got to go.”

  No “Love you”, no airy “Byee”. We didn’t do those. Just a brief smile on both sides, and that distinctive sound of the connection being squelched.

  * * *

  I closed the Skype window, aware of the same sense of dissatisfaction that I often felt these days when we had one of these video conversations. There was a perfunctory air about them – a lack of joy.

  Our relationship had nearly come unstuck last year when Ashley thought she might be pregnant, then found she wasn’t. Our confused reactions to the prospect had thrown many aspects of our relationship into doubt. But somehow we’d survived it, and seemed to have reached a tacit agreement to mend fences.

  Looking back, I was the one who had insisted on persevering. I still had an intense awareness of the magic of our early days, and I’d convinced myself that we could recapture it. But over the next few months our relationship had merely stuttered along. It wasn’t enough.

  Matters would surely have come to a head, but then Ashley was asked by her boss if she would spend a few months in California. He wanted her to help reinforce a “strategic alliance” his firm was establishing with a freighting company in Pasadena. It was an offer she couldn’t refuse.

  It all unfolded with what seemed to me unseemly speed. For several weeks Ashley was caught in a whirlwind of planning and preparation, and was far too busy to pick over our relationship. Then suddenly she was gone.


  I’d flown out to visit her after the first two months, and she’d taken delight in showing me the sights of Los Angeles. It seemed like a vacation to both of us, but that had probably deflected us from dealing with the underlying cracks in our relationship.

  Now here we were, another four months on and no further forward. Something had to be done to resolve the situation, but neither of us seemed ready to make the first move.

  I stared round at the flat. I liked the style of it – the varnished floor, the windows at both ends of the lounge, the shelves full of books, the mix of modern and period furniture. It made me feel interesting. It seemed more real somehow than the distant world of Cornwall. It felt like the kind of place where a TV script writer might hang out, or maybe a university academic.

  I was aware that the living I was scraping as a jobbing journalist didn’t really fit this fantasy, but a bigger problem for me was that it wasn’t my flat. I’d done the owners a favour, and as a reward they’d let me live here part-time at a greatly reduced rent, but everything about it reflected someone else’s style. Some of the furniture had belonged to the previous occupant, the rest was theirs.

  The flat I was still renting in Cornwall said even less about me. It was modern and full of showroom furniture, but it was soulless. Yet when I’d been married and lived in London before, the house my wife and I had shared had been equally lacking in character. In the early days we couldn’t afford much to furnish it with, and by the time we could, we’d lost the appetite. I felt that most of my forty-odd years had been a preparation, but I still hadn’t worked out what I was preparing for.

  This flat seemed the nearest I’d come to my mental picture of myself. I liked Camden Town, too – the bohemian atmosphere, the perpetual tourist buzz, the closeness to central London. The owners even had a lock-up garage where I was able to keep my car.

  The trouble was that Ashley would never want to live here. She was rooted in Cornwall – or at least, I’d always thought she was, though lately she seemed to be having a high time in California. That was a puzzle I still needed to crack.