Exposé

by Paul Ilett

  “We certainly feel under fire,” she said. “There’s very much an ‘in the trenches’ mentality at the moment. But it’s been strangely unifying too. It brought all us old soldiers back together. I spoke to people in the company yesterday that I haven’t spoken to in years. Years!”

  “My enemy’s enemy?”

  Yes, that. I’ll use it. “Something like that,” Valerie said.

  Audrey ordered a fresh pot of tea and the sandwiches were replaced with cakes. “There’s a countdown, you know, on his website.”

  “Ticking quietly away like a landmine, just waiting for some poor soul to step on it,” Valerie replied, and then decided her ‘war’ analogy had run its course for that conversation. “Yes. It all hits the fan again tomorrow night at 9pm. You know I’m favourite, don’t you, to be next on Adam Jaymes’ hit list?”

  Audrey grinned. “Don’t take this the wrong way, dear, but I hope you are. If anyone could brazen this out, it’s you.”

  Valerie laughed out loud and immediately all the other guests turned to look at her, a wall of alarmed faces. ‘Was laughter a faux pas in the Ritz?’ they all seemed to be thinking. ‘Was this woman in the purple suit about to be escorted from the premises?’

  Valerie laughed again, just to make a point. “He can print anything he likes,” she said to Audrey. “I’ve lived my life by my own standards. If he wants to criticise those standards, let him. But I’ve nothing to be ashamed of.”

  Audrey didn’t reply. “You’ve got nothing to be worried about either, Audrey,” Valerie said. “Of course you haven’t. Let’s face it, the most controversial thing you ever did was marry Howard. And I still suspect you only did that to annoy your father.”

  With that comment, the mood lifted and they both smiled. “Oh no, my father liked Howard,” Audrey said, but then clarified her comment. “Well, he grew to like him.”

  “I wish I’d been a fly on the wall the first time you took him home,” Valerie said. “The lanky, working class boy from Ilford visiting the Grosvenor family’s historic Norfolk estate. Be honest, your parents were horrified weren’t they?”

  “To be fair I think they were perplexed more than horrified,” Audrey said. “Howard was so handsome back then, in the seventies. I think that’s the first thing my mother saw when we walked in. A very handsome young man, trying his hardest to fit in. She could see why I liked him.”

  “But your father?”

  “Daddy took him shooting. I thought for a moment I’d never see poor Howard again. He was useless with a gun, of course. But he knew how to talk business, had a real passion for it even then. By the time they came home that evening, I think my father was a little enamoured with him too.”

  Valerie had interviewed Audrey’s father once, years ago, for a series of features about fox hunting. She remembered him being very old and very polite. Helpfully, he had also been willing to say anything Valerie wanted so long as the article backed the campaign against the Hunting Act. “Your father was a very fair man,” Valerie said.

  Audrey was silent. She had never been one to over-share, and was certainly not prone to melodrama. But as her expression changed ever so slightly, hinting at a sadness that she was far too proud to admit, Valerie realised that she still mourned her old life as Mrs Howard Harvey. “It’s a blessing they’re not here, Mummy and Daddy,” Audrey said, pouring from the tea pot that had just been delivered to the table. “I think it would have broken their hearts to know that we’re not together anymore.”

  Suddenly, their quiet moment of reflection was shattered. A fierce young woman had spotted them from the corridor, marched over to their table and started yelling at Valerie. A stream of insults was fired so rapidly from the woman’s mouth that, at first, it was difficult to gauge precisely what offence Valerie had caused.

  Audrey sipped her tea, as though nothing was happening, and then started to pick at a French fancy. Valerie stared at the young woman, trying to place her. But she had the generic look of many minor female celebrities – long blonde hair, dark tan, big boobs and tight clothes. She could be from TOWIE, Valerie thought. But then she might also be a WAG or someone from Hollyoaks or the X-Factor. It was so hard to tell these days.

  Valerie listened hard to what the woman was shouting and just managed to distinguish the words ‘bitch’, ‘lies’ and ‘bitch’ (again). The waiters didn’t quite know what to do, and Valerie noticed one slip away to find the manager. “I’m sorry,” Valerie said, loudly, interjecting during one brief moment when the woman had paused for breath, “but who are you again?”

  “Who am I? You absolute monster!” the woman screeched. “You write an entire page attacking my husband and me, ridiculing our wedding, the most important and ... and wonderful day of my life ... and then you don’t even have the decency to remember my name. How many people’s lives have you tried to ruin that you can’t even remember what your victims look like?”

  Valerie tried to recall the last time she had written about someone’s wedding. Was this one of those dreadful little trollops from Big Brother? “I’m sure whatever I wrote was meant in good faith,” she said, and then waved her hand as if to send the woman away.

  But that gesture was the final straw. The woman saw a sparkling glass of champagne nearby, the theatre-goers at that table enjoying the show. She picked it up and tossed the contents directly into Valerie’s face. “Have a drink on me, you evil witch!” she screeched and stormed out, tweeting as she went. The tea room erupted into conversation as the manager appeared and apologised for what had just happened. A waiter brought napkins for Valerie to dry herself, and the group at the nearby table were given a complimentary bottle of champagne.

  “It would be nice, dear,” Audrey said “if we could get through at least one meal without a complete stranger throwing a drink in your face.”

  Valerie mopped her cheeks. “Hmmm,” she said, “I think this champagne is burned.”

  Sam looked around his new office and was already missing the space, sunshine and technology of the one he’d left behind in Los Angeles. He knew it was likely to be the largest office in the building but it was half the size of his old one. And although the heavily textured glass walls afforded him some privacy, they still left him feeling exposed.

  His introductions with the executive team had been mostly routine, but he was surprised at how reassured they all were by having a Harvey in the building again. Even Twigg, who Sam had never liked, had met him with a smile and been thoroughly supportive during his morning of back-to-back meetings. He had escorted Sam around the building, and covered all the tricky questions before it became obvious that Sam didn’t know the answers.

  One of the senior team had even suggested Sam’s presence had given back to the company some “much needed gravitas”. But Sam didn’t like the word gravitas. He worried it raised expectations around him undeservedly. He stood at his large window and stared at the view. The view was OK, he decided, overlooking the Thames and with Canary Wharf in the distance. He hadn’t realised how striking London’s skyline had become over the past 10 years.

  A knock at the door brought his attention back inside the room. “Come in,” he said. A young woman entered, carrying some files. He had met her earlier when she had made him a coffee. “These are all the cuttings we have on Adam Jaymes and the more recent cuttings on Project Ear,” she said, and placed them on his desk.

  “Thank you,” he said and then cautiously added, “... Miss Snow?”

  She smiled. “That’s it. Well done, Mr Harvey! But you can call me Felicity.”

  He returned her smile. “There is one thing I am a bit confused by,” he admitted. He sat at his laptop and clicked opened his calendar. “I seem to have lots of appointments in my diary already. I’m pretty much solidly booked for the next two months.”

  Felicity nodded. “Because Mr Perera left so suddenly, I transferred all his appointments to you. I thought we could go through them together and I can cancel those which you don’t think a
re necessary.”

  Sam was still perplexed. “But none of them are anything to do with the business,” he said. “They’re all seminars and conferences, and restaurant bookings or gallery openings, or theatre trips. He’s got all sorts of meetings with all sorts of people, but I can’t work out how any of them are related to his role as chief executive.”

  During her internship, Felicity spent a month in the chief executive’s office and had quickly come to the same conclusion about Gayesh. But she also knew, as an intern, it wasn’t her place to talk down a member of staff. “He did get invited to an awful lot of events,” she said, “and so that was his diary for the coming few months.”

  Sam dropped his face into his open palms and released a disapproving groan. “Oh dear lord. No wonder things got into such a mess. How on earth did he run a company of this size when he was never bloody here?” he asked. He flopped back into his chair and stared at the ceiling. The company had needed leadership, but all the evidence suggested Gayesh had done little else during his five years as chief executive but schmooze people he thought could get him a seat in the Lords. He sat up and looked at Felicity, who had taken the chair opposite him and was waiting with a notebook and pen in hand. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But this is so frustrating.”

  Felicity could tell he was reaching out to her, trying to engage her in a conversation. Intern or not, she realised he was looking for an early ally to give him the truth about the way his predecessor had run things. “I think Mr Perera saw himself as the public face of Harvey News Group,” she said, softly. “I think he saw his role as being very outward-facing, and he left the day-to-day business to the rest of the executive team.”

  Sam looked at Felicity, “And no one ever complained that he wasn’t doing any work?”

  Felicity shrugged and shook her head. “If you want me to be very honest, Mr Harvey, I think the executive team liked having him out of the way. It meant they could get on with running things. Whenever he was here, I think they felt he was very much under their feet.”

  Secretly, Sam felt a little relieved. Perhaps stepping into Gayesh’s shoes wasn’t going to be so difficult. All he needed to do was provide a degree of leadership, draw up some clear red lines for the organisation and offer Twigg his help with the fallout from Project Ear. But overall, he just needed to keep a respectful distance from the executive team so they could continue running the show. Sam knew his head still wasn’t in the right place, and so asked Felicity for a cup of coffee so he could have a few moments to himself. He then sat quietly in his new office, wondering how long it had taken the facilities team to strip away any remnants of his predecessor. Not long, he guessed. He doubted Gayesh had ever really committed to it as a work space. For Gayesh it seemed the city of London and all of its facilities had been his work space.

  Sam had always admired his father’s judgement, that amazing ability to walk into a room of a hundred graduates and spot a future business leader. Howard rarely ever poached from other companies because he liked to find raw talent, and then invest his time and money to produce a new star. They weren’t always young or clever or well educated. They were often just people who had talent and were still looking for that lucky break. Sam knew the list. It had started with Twigg, Howard’s first major find; hired straight from Cambridge and put in charge of a group of local papers that formed the original parts of the Harvey News Group. Twigg quickly showed an astonishing aptitude for understanding his readers and driving up sales, and was moved into the major league the moment Howard bought the Daily Ear in 1983. The paper was the company’s first major purchase, and at the time was a failing national daily that was considered little more than a pale imitation of the Sun and the Mail. Howard sacked pretty much everyone at the top and handed Twigg the editorship. Twigg and the Daily Ear turned out to be a match made in heaven.

  Colin had been one of Howard’s discoveries too, in the early days of the Daily Ear. He had been a young trainee reporter who no one would take seriously, until he exchanged a few pleasantries with Howard during a brief journey in a lift and (according to Howard) that was all it took. Colin was fast-tracked through the system and within a couple of years had been transformed into one of Fleet Street’s most sought-after newshounds. And as the years went by, Howard found dozens of other unknowns and turned them into industry stars, including the likes of Valerie Pierce and Jason Spade.

  His latest find had been Oonagh Boyle. He came across her during a weekend break with Estelle in Dublin. Howard had been queuing in a coffee shop and heard Oonagh chatting to a friend about a web strategy she was writing for a children’s charity. He followed her out of the shop and, after a 10-minute conversation in the middle of the street, offered her a job with a six-figure salary and relocation expenses. It was a great story that both Howard and Oonagh had repeated in various trade press interviews, and so Sam had always assumed it was at least mostly true.

  But Gayesh hadn’t been one of Howard’s. He’d been hired during one of Harvey Media International’s more turbulent periods when Howard had been abroad, juggling too many balls. He had allowed himself to be pressured into a quick appointment and so agreed for an outside firm to run the selection process. Sam knew that, in retrospect, the process had been too long and complicated and had relied heavily on generic point scoring and automated responses. Howard had not been able to play a meaningful role and just waved it all through, giving his long-distance approval. Perhaps, Sam wondered, his father was simply too proud to admit his mistake and so had allowed Gayesh to coast for all these years.

  Felicity returned with his coffee and sat back down, notebook in hand again.

  “You look poised to do some work,” Sam said and smiled. “Are you my PA?”

  “Actually, I’m just an intern” she replied. “But Mr Perera’s PA resigned yesterday, when she heard Mr Perera had left. And so Mr Twigg asked me to work with you until a replacement is appointed.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Six months.”

  “And you’ve worked across the company?”

  “Yes, I’ve had placements in quite a few of the departments.”

  An intern? Brilliant! Smart, work ethic, keen, and months of experience of how all the departments at the Daily Ear operate. That was exactly what Sam wanted to hear. “Felicity, I’ll be relying on you quite a bit in the coming weeks,” he said. “Just until I’ve settled in of course.”

  Felicity didn’t know it, but she had just been enlisted into Sam’s London team.

  There was a knock, and another member of the executive floor’s support staff poked his head around the door. “Sorry to bother you,” he said, “but there’s a barber here for Mr Perera.”

  Sam glanced at Felicity. “Barber?”

  “It’s a traditional Turkish barber,” she replied. “Wet shave, hot towels, head massage. Mr Perera said it helped him think.”

  Sam’s mouth was slightly open, and for a moment he thought he might just laugh at the ridiculous extent of Gayesh’s self-indulgence. But then Felicity added, “It’s booked and paid for, Mr Harvey. It seems a shame to waste the appointment.”

  And so Sam spent the next hour using the time to think.

  CHAPTER 6

  “Gayesh was a lazy, status-driven freeloader.” Sam poured himself another glass of wine and glared at his father across the table. Howard could tell his son was trying to instigate a row and, he suspected, had wanted to do so since being ordered back to the UK. And although he liked these occasional flashes of passion from his usually composed boy, he wasn’t enjoying being chastised in his own home within earshot of his wife.

  Estelle had nipped out to the roof terrace for a cigarette. She had always thought Gayesh was a waste of space, and Howard knew she would be thrilled that someone was finally agreeing with her. “He did the job,” Howard said. “And when he stopped doing the job, I fired him. End of.”

  With more than a hint of exasperation is his voice, Sam replied. “And
at what point did he do the job, Dad? Seriously, have you seen his diary? It’s like we gave him a five-year paid holiday.”

  “I know, I know,” Howard said, his hand raised to signal the conversation was definitely drawing to an end. “I’ve seen his diary. His PA emailed it to me last week by accident. It’s one of the reasons he left without a fight.” He stood up and started to clear away the dinner plates. He’d cooked his famous pork belly roast as a welcome home for Sam and was a little deflated after Estelle and Sam had eaten it without much comment. It usually provoked great enthusiasm from dinner guests. Clearly, he thought, his wife and son had been spoiled by too much fine dining in expensive restaurants.

  “Dad, I’m not going to labour the point,” Sam said, “but I’m going to review all the senior staff over the coming week. Any under-performers, and they’ll go the same way as Gayesh.” He was pleased to have the chance to talk about sacking people. It presented an image he knew his father would appreciate, a toughness he doubted Howard – or, indeed, anyone else – would think he owned. It also pleased Sam to highlight Gayesh’s shortcomings, and deflect the conversation away from his own performance.

  The layout of Howard and Estelle’s modern, open plan apartment meant the conversation could continue uninterrupted as Howard cleared away the main course and brought in the dessert and coffee. “You do whatever you need to do,” Howard said. “You know who my untouchables are but everyone else is fair game. It might do the company some good to give everyone a shake up.” And then, with a mischievousness tone in his voice, Howard added, “Oh, and that’s a nasty nick you’ve got behind your ear, son. Shaving cut?”

  Sam automatically raised his hand to cover the red mark where the barber had caught him earlier that day. “Just a little gash. It was a Turkish,” he said, defensively.

  “Really? And when did you find time to get out of the office for that, then?”