by Simon Brooke
“We don’t know of anyone,” I say, deciding not to mention Nora.
“Oh, okay.”
“Does this sound a bit odd?” I ask.
“Odd? Erm, not really. Men in their late twenties, early thirties, are one of the most likely groups of people to disappear, actually. Them and teenage girls.”
“Right.”
“On the other hand, we don’t know that they have really disappeared. Sometimes people just go off without telling anyone—they forget or suddenly decide they need to get away from it all.”
“I know how they feel.”
“Don’t we all? We’ll carry out our own investigations and as soon as we hear something we’ll let you know.”
“Thanks.” She gives me the number of the Missing Persons Helpline and I hang up.
“Well?” says Scarlett.
“You heard what I told her, what more can we do?”
“Why don’t you ring Nora Benthall about that piece?”
“I don’t trust myself not to yell abuse at her.”
“So? Yell abuse at her.”
I look at Scarlett for a moment while I think it over and then I ring Nora’s number.
“Hey, Charlie,” she says, bright as ever.
“Thanks for the piece on Saturday.”
“No worries.”
“Nora, I’m being sarcastic.”
“Why? What’s wrong? It’ll help find them.”
“I asked you not to write it.”
“Charlie, you can’t tell me what I can and can’t write. It’s a good story. We’ve already had a couple of calls about it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, hang on, let me find them. Jenny, where’s that note about those calls? Thanks. Right…oh, perhaps we need to wait a little bit longer.”
“Why? What do they say?”
“A Mr. Hampson from Birmingham called in to say that it serves you right for worshipping mammon and you’ll all go to hell—”
“Great, very helpful.”
“And someone called Jeremy from Southampton rang. He wants to know where you got the shirt you’re wearing in that picture because he’d like to get one too.”
“Oh, case solved then.”
“Okay, I admit those probably aren’t going to produce very good leads but someone else might crop up.”
“Well, call me when they do. You owe me, all right?” I tell her and put the phone down.
“So?” asks Scarlett. I can hardly bear to repeat the conversation but I do for her and Zac’s benefit. She thinks about it for a moment and then says, “Well, if you don’t mind me saying…that shirt was horrible. Why would anyone want one like it?”
“What are you on about?”
Zac is smirking.
“Glad you think it’s funny you, you sniggering nerd.”
He bursts out laughing.
“Am I the only one who gets what’s happening?” I ask. “A lot of money has disappeared here. Am I the only one who actually realises that this whole thing is collapsing around our ears?”
Zac stops laughing, sits up and leans across his desk. “No, bud,” he says. “You’re the only one who ever thought it wouldn’t.”
I go out and walk up and down the street for a while to regain my composure. What does Zac know? Cynical, sneering net nerd. Nobby no mates. But I am the most visible aspect of this site, aren’t I? Spokesman, front man. The embodiment of 2cool. Muse? Fall guy? Director more to the fucking point. I did sign some cheques, six, in fact. I counted them as soon as I got back to the office on Monday after talking to my dad. Over £40,000 worth. Oh, for fuck’s sake. If 2cool’s crashed in flames then so have I. And very, very publicly. I could go to prison for it.
Images of a celebrity trial begin to flood into my mind. Stories of our spending. Me arriving in a van at the Old Bailey. Is that right? Would that happen? Or would it be a smaller court? Who cares? My old mates at the agency reading about me and gossiping at castings as my case goes on. Penny smiling grimly in that little office of hers. My poor mum. It would kill her.
I ring Lauren’s number but get her voice mail. I leave a short message asking her to call me when she can. We’ve hardly spoken over the last few days. After the party on Sunday she went into town to do some shopping and I came back to the flat and watched telly. I really need to talk although I know what she’ll say.
I go into a newsagent. On the front of a women’s magazine are a guy and a girl from my old agency. Smiling, hugging, gazing adoringly at each other, so in love. Well, in love for £100 an hour on a Thursday morning in a studio in Clerkenwell, hair and makeup provided, but no wardrobe at that price so bring your own selection of smart-casual tops. Not a lot of money but a nice cover shot for your book.
I ring Karyn at the agency.
“Hey, how are you?” Not saying my name out loud, I notice.
“All right. How’s it going? Busy?”
“Yeah, it is quite.” I didn’t want to hear that. “You?”
“Did you see the piece in the Post on Saturday?”
“Yes, Penny pointed it out.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Difficult times?”
“You could say.”
“So where are these guys? Derr! Sorry, obviously you don’t know but it does seem very odd, doesn’t it? They’ve really just disappeared into thin air, then?”
“Yep. It’s too weird.”
“You sound down.”
“Just a bit. It’s all a bit worrying, you know. I’m sure it’ll be fine.” I feel I have to add the last comment so that she doesn’t think I’m a complete crook. Or a naive fool. “Anyway, you’re busy, then.”
“Yeah, pretty. Little jobs.” The kind I used to moan about and turn my nose up at. Suddenly they sound safe and familiar. Boring but manageable.
“Better than nothing,” I say, hoping it doesn’t sound like I’m angling for something.
“You never used to say that,” says Karyn, teasingly.
“Yeah, I know.” There is a pause. I nearly ask about going back. It does sound tempting—so much easier after the stress of 2cool.
“A couple of people have been asking about you.”
“Really? That’s nice.”
“Penny’s a bit funny about it, though. Keeps suggesting other models.”
“No, of course. Well, she’ll be even funnier about it now.”
“Probably. She’s out to lunch with a client today so she’ll be totally smashed when she gets back.”
“Good old Penny.”
“Give me a ring if you want to have a drink sometime, Charlie.”
“Will do. Take care, babe.”
I go back to the office after half an hour or so. Fortunately Zac has gone to lunch. Scarlett is on the phone.
“No, you’ll get your cheque, I promise. It’s just that we’re up to our eyes at the moment and our, er, accounts department has got a bit behind. No, they’re not here at the moment but I’ll pass your message on. Well, I can’t comment on press stories. You believe whatever you like, but as soon as they come back I’ll get them to sign the cheque and we’ll bike it straight over. Okay, will do. Bye.” She puts the phone down. “Honestly, some people. Money, money, money. Don’t they know there’s more to life?”
“Have we had a lot of calls like that?”
“Quite a few. Well, quite a lot actually. But what can we do? I don’t know where the chequebooks are.”
“Even if we find them I certainly don’t want to go signing any more until I’ve spoken to Guy and Piers and seen the bank statements. Let’s look in their desks, see if we can find these statements and the chequebooks.”
“I feel a bit funny about rummaging around while they’re not here.”
I laugh bitterly. “Yeah, but where the hell are they? Anyway, I’m also a director. I just want to see the figures.” Saying that, I realise that I don’t. “Come on, Scarlett, someone’s got to do it. This is getting silly.” Not to mention frightening.
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br /> “Okay.” She goes over to the end of the room where Guy’s and Piers’s desks are. I’ve checked the surface of the desks a hundred times over the last few days for clues as to their whereabouts but I’ve never looked inside the neo-industrial filing cabinets that surround them.
“I’ll need to get into their computers too,” I tell her as she gets the keys.
“They’re password protected and I don’t know—”
“Where’s Zac?”
“At lunch. Playing pinball across the road.”
“Ring him and get him over here, can you? Ta.”
I open the first drawer of one of the filing cabinets and almost gasp in shock. Hundreds of bits of paper are stuffed into it. Most of the suspension files are hanging off their rails, documents squashed down between them. I pick out a piece of paper at random. It’s a bill for red roses. £350 worth from a smart florist in Notting Hill. I flatten it out and put it carefully onto Piers’s desk. Slowly I pull out another piece of paper, dislodging a few others and sending them cascading onto the floor. This one is a receipt for a couple of suits and trousers from the press office of an Italian design house. “Sample loan. Please return in good condition to London Press Office by 20 June.” Three weeks ago. I look around hopelessly as if the suits might be hanging up somewhere.
There are bills, invoices and statements of account from clothing companies, taxi firms, stationers, restaurants, PR companies, event organisers, video production people and hotels, as well as plenty of well-known designer names. Many of them are red bills and final demands. There is even one for a model agency I know: £3,500-a-day shoot fee and usage agreement.
Some bills are for hundreds, some for thousands and some for tens of thousands. Others are for forty or fifty quid. Many are related to the launch party. Others I recognise from things that have just appeared in the office or been mentioned by the others.
I begin to try and sort them in date order but I’m soon running out of desk space. There are big ones, small ones. Some are on coloured paper and some are handwritten. There are ones with familiar logos and addresses and ones where even the type of goods isn’t apparent. Who the hell is Watson Blencowe? And what are “professional services”?
“Hey, dudes,” says Zac as he strolls in.
“Have you seen these?” I ask. He looks across at the papers in my hand.
“Oh, hello, twenty-first century calling. Why do people still do it on these bits of paper? Haven’t these people even heard of ecommerce…?” But his voice trails off as he nears the desks and sees the other drawers full of papers. “Holy sssshit.” Zac serious. Now I’m really scared.
“Why didn’t we notice this?” I ask the others, sheaves of papers in both hands.
They stare in silence for a moment and then Scarlett says, “Because they were always in the office before us and still working after we’d all left?”
At that moment the phone rings again. She answers it and as soon as she starts, “Yes, your invoice has been logged and you’ll get a cheque very soon,” the three of us exchange glances. Eventually she puts the phone down.
“Zac, we need to get into their computers.”
“No problemo,” says Zac, but without his usual chilled bravado. He sits down at Guy’s desk and switches on the machine. Then he kicks his foot against something, looks under the desk and says, “Oh, shit.” He pulls out another box, overflowing with invoices.
“Oh, my God, how could anyone spend money so fast?” I ask the world in general.
“They have been working eighteen hours a day for the last few months,” points out Scarlett. “Shop till you pop, you know.” I pull out some more bits of paper. “And…we’ve all been doing our fair share,” she adds.
I think of my new suits, cars everywhere, the champagne we’ve got into the habit of opening at five o’clock.
“Okay,” says Zac from the other desk. “We’re in.”
In what, I don’t know. There are files of letters, games, lists, press releases and finally some spreadsheets. But even these don’t say much. Lists of amounts with dates and names, most of which mean nothing to me. I look down them just in case. The money has certainly been pouring in—until recently, anyway.
“Don’t they have bank statements?” I ask Scarlett.
“I don’t know, I suppose so. Actually I have opened letters with bank statements in.”
“So have I, come to think of it,” I tell her. I remember Guy grabbing them off me a couple of weeks ago. No wonder he didn’t want me to see them. Was it all going wrong even back then?
We ignore the phones and spend another few hours rooting around the desks for some evidence of any sort of correspondence from the bank, but we find only more invoices. Some envelopes, I realise to my horror, are full of things that have been ordered by me. I stuff them back in a drawer.
My mobile rings and it’s Lauren.
“Hi, babe,” I sigh.
“Hi. Got your message. What’s the matter? You sound really down.”
“Just this money thing. I’m trying to sort out the invoices and bank statements here. Look, I’ll be late tonight—I’m going to try and get this stuff in some kind of order if I can.”
“Okay, I’m seeing, erm, seeing Peter tonight, anyway.”
“Yeah,” I say, without having to add, “thought you might be.”
“He wants me to watch some of the tapes I’ve made recently to see where I can improve my performance.”
I’m tempted to make a cutting remark about Peter and her performance but I decide against it. I’m just so pissed off.
A few minutes later my phone rings again.
“Hi, Charlie, can you talk?” says Nora.
“Sure,” I tell her, trying to sound cheerful, learning from my last mistake.
“Good, listen. I’ve gotta be quick because I’m on deadline but a couple of people, sane people, that is, have called in about Piers and Guy.”
“Really?” Some good news at last.
“Yeah. Okay. Pier’s parents live in South Africa and he doesn’t see them much which is I suppose why they haven’t reported anything yet. I’ve broken the news to them and I told them I’d pass on anything I could. You haven’t heard anything?”
“No, nothing.”
“Okay. Guy’s parents are both dead unfortunately and his only blood relative is an older brother who’s an entomologist in the Galapagos Islands. We’re trying to contact him at the moment.” Somehow the kind of thing you’d expect of Guy. “But, and this is a bit of good news, there’s a party tomorrow night—”
“Nora, I’m not really in the mood, thanks anyway—”
“No, banana brain! It’s being thrown by…by, here it is, Sir James Huntsman, whose son and daughter are friends of Piers. I’ve got us invited—my friend Anna knows them. I say we go along and do some snooping, okay?”
“And I say this isn’t Scooby Doo, you know.”
“I know, Fred, but we might as well go along and talk to some people, see what we can find out.”
“What the hell are we going to find out?”
“Haven’t you got any sense of curiosity?”
“Haven’t you got any sense?”
“It can’t do any harm, can it?”
“I suppose not. If we turn up anything though, we go straight to the police.”
“Oh, sure,” she says unconvincingly.
“We don’t publish it.”
“Well, that depends.”
“All right, I’m not going then.”
“Don’t be silly, Charlie, you can’t stop me writing about any conversations I might happen to have with anyone.”
“Okay, but don’t include me.”
The party is at an address off Kensington High Street. We agree to meet in a pub nearby at 8 P.M. I’m past feeling nervous about it.
By about seven, Scarlett, Zac and I have got most of the receipts in some sort of order. They are now spread across Guy’s and Piers’s desks as well as mine and
Scarlett’s with the most up-to-date being lined up against one wall of the office. The monotonous process of sorting them by date order and category—the biggest of which is miscellaneous—has almost put us into a kind of trance, but now that we can see the full extent of 2cool’s financial predicament spread around the office we’re numbed by it.
I tell the others to go home.
“Don’t stay too late, hey?” says Scarlett, stroking my cheek.
“No, don’t worry, I just want to have another look at those spreadsheets and check a few names and things. See you tomorrow.”
I make myself a cup of coffee to keep me awake and begin to read through the spreadsheets that Zac has printed out for me from the other computers. I realise that part of the reason I want to sort this out is because I want to show my dad that my first proper job hasn’t been a total fiasco. I want to show him that I’ve saved it, or least done all I can to stop it going under and walked away with a clean conscience and the knowledge that I did my best, that I learnt something from it. No criminal record would also be nice.
He got used to my doing the modelling thing after a while, but I know he was never particularly proud of the career path his only son had chosen.
I’m still there at ten when the buzzer for the outside door goes. I walk across the office which is now in darkness apart from the light over my desk. I pick up the entry phone.
“Hello?”
“Pizza.”
“Pizza? I didn’t order a pizza.”
“Er, you sure?”
“Yeah, honestly. Sorry, bye.”
I put the phone back. It buzzes again before I’ve got to my desk.
“You definitely didn’t order a pizza?” says a voice above the street noise.
“Yeah, really, I’d remember.”
“Oh, well, it must be a mistake. Look, someone ordered a pizza and I’m only going to have to take it back. You might as well have it.”
I realise that I won’t eat anything any other way tonight. “If you’re sure. Thanks. Come up. Second floor.”
I buzz him in and stand by the door of the office, waiting for him to come up the stairs. After a few moments a guy in leathers with a black crash helmet appears. He doesn’t look like a pizza delivery man, not least because he doesn’t seem to have a pizza with him. I’m just pondering this when his hand comes up and pushes me hard in the chest, sending me staggering back into the office.