by Penny Avis
‘Hopefully none of your friends will have a go at me this time,’ said Meredith, recalling the Leon incident.
‘You have my word,’ said Daisy protectively.
After they had eaten, Meredith and Daisy made their way out of the pub.
‘Shall I drop you home?’ asked Daisy.
‘Yes, please, I know it’s not far but I’m not feeling terribly energetic,’ replied Meredith.
Daisy’s dark-green Mini was parked at the top of a small side road next to the pub. Daisy got in and leant across to open the passenger door. Meredith placed the small file of papers that she had taken from the office to work on at home on top of the car as she took her coat off and tossed it into the back seat. She climbed into the passenger seat and put on her seatbelt.
‘Right, home, James, and don’t spare the horses.’
‘Yes m’lud,’ said Daisy, touching an imaginary chauffeur’s cap and revving the engine loudly.
Daisy pulled away from the curb and immediately turned left onto the main road. As she did so, Meredith caught sight of a flutter of paper in the passenger wing mirror. She turned and looked out of the rear window in alarm. Dozens of sheets of A4 paper were floating gracefully behind the car, as if they were being followed by a flock of paper geese.
‘Shit! Pull over!’ shouted Meredith, causing Daisy to nearly jump out of her skin.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I left my bloody file on the roof and my work papers are going everywhere.’
Daisy looked in her rear-view mirror in horror and swerved the car into the left-hand bus lane. She yanked on the handbrake and they both leapt out. The open-sided file was still lying on the flat roof of Daisy’s Mini, but most of its contents had been deposited in a neat semi-circle across the road as Daisy had turned the corner. Meredith grabbed the file and looked at the remaining pages.
‘Oh my God, the Beau Street offer letter and valuation!’ She ran into the road and started grabbing sheets of paper.
Daisy watched her for a few seconds and then quickly followed suit. ‘How many pages are you missing?’ she shouted to Meredith as the two of them darted about, picking up the escaping sheets as quickly as they could.
Meredith glanced at the page numbers she was picking up. ‘I think about…’
But the rest of her sentence was drowned out by the loud blast of a horn. Meredith and Daisy both looked up to see a long bendy bus thundering down the bus lane towards them. The red-faced bus driver was alternating between thumping his horn and gesticulating angrily at Daisy’s car.
‘Get out of the bloody road,’ he yelled out of the open window next to his seat.
He slowed down as he reached the offending obstruction and Meredith ran over towards him.
‘So sorry,’ she shouted, waving the few pages she had already picked up. ‘These are confidential papers. Just give us a minute to finish picking them up.’
The bus driver looked around dubiously at the myriad sheets that were now floating dangerously close to the wheels of his bus.
‘They’ll be no good to you dead,’ he shouted back and slammed his brakes on with a loud screech.
‘I’ve got pages two to five of some sort of letter,’ panted Daisy, ‘and twelve, fourteen and fifteen of something else, sheets of numbers…’
She ran into the path of the cars coming down the road next to the bus lane and held up her hand. Two rather bemused-looking elderly ladies in a blue saloon car came to a gentle halt in front of her. The passenger wound down her window.
‘Are you alright, dear?’ she asked, her face wrinkled with concern.
‘Yes, sorry, just having a bit of an escaped document emergency,’ said Daisy, stepping across to stop the second lane of cars.
With the bus and two lanes of cars held at a standstill, Daisy and Meredith redoubled their efforts to pick up the stray sheets of paper.
‘Thank you, thank you,’ yelled Daisy at the increasingly astonished audience of drivers as she dashed between them, grabbing the muddy and battered contents of Meredith’s file.
Meredith jogged down the side of the bus, seizing several sheets that were scattered on the outside edge of the bus lane. As she bent down to reach a couple of sheets that had drifted just underneath the bus, she heard a shout behind her.
‘Alright, luv, show us yer knickers.’
Meredith quickly stood up and turned to see two guys in a white delivery van stopped behind the blue saloon leering at her out of their window.
‘In your dreams.’ She tossed her head in disgust, trying to ignore the rows of passenger faces that were peering in amusement at her from inside the bus.
‘You’ve missed one,’ yelled the van driver.
‘Yeah, and it’s in my shorts,’ yelled his mate. They both laughed loudly.
Meredith ignored them and marched back towards Daisy.
‘Any more?’ Daisy asked.
The two of them looked around. There were still several sheets on the pavement and on the side road where Daisy had been parked.
‘I think that’s all of them in this road,’ said Meredith, craning her neck.
‘Oh, not quite, one over there,’ said Daisy, dashing off to catch a sheet that had blown into view in front of the white van.
‘Get on with it,’ shouted the bus driver impatiently out of his window.
Meredith glared at him. ‘We’re being as quick as we can.’
‘Right, think that’s it,’ said Daisy, and she waved the cars on their way.
The bus driver shook his head as he pulled out around Daisy’s car and swerved aggressively back into the bus lane.
Meredith and Daisy picked up the remaining sheets on the pavement and in the side road.
‘We need to check whether any are missing,’ said Meredith, staring hopelessly at the dog-eared and crumpled papers clutched in her hand.
‘I need to move the car first.’ Daisy looked back up the bus lane anxiously.
‘Reverse back to where to you were parked.’
‘I can’t reverse up a bloody bus lane.’
‘It’s only a few feet; I’ll watch your back,’ said Meredith, jogging back to the corner. ‘C’mon, get on with it, before another bus comes.’
Daisy climbed hurriedly into the driver’s seat and, with Meredith waving like a policeman on traffic duty behind the car, started reversing back to where they had been parked.
A passing car hooted loudly and the driver made twirling signs at the side of his temple as he glared furiously at their risky manoeuvring.
‘Yeah, yeah, calm down,’ shouted Meredith. ‘Nothing to see here.’
Daisy reversed hurriedly back around the corner and parked the car back where they had started.
‘That’s the last time I offer you a bloody lift,’ she muttered as Meredith climbed back into the car.
Meredith exhaled loudly and slumped into the seat. ‘What an idiot I am.’
‘I’m saying nothing,’ said Daisy.
Meredith sat up and started sorting through the papers, randomly handing Daisy sheets to hold, until the two of them had papers in each hand and on their laps.
Meredith carefully counted the piles. ‘Twenty-three, twenty-four… Yes! They’re all here. Thank God.’
Daisy rolled her eyes, started the engine and drove to Meredith’s flat.
‘See you next Wednesday then,’ she said as she dropped Meredith off.
‘Sure, and so sorry about being such an airhead. Totally my fault.’
‘Yes, it was,’ said Daisy primly. She broke into a smile. ‘Perhaps that’ll teach you to stop bringing your work home.’
Meredith smiled back. ‘Yes, perhaps it will.’
The next day, Meredith arrived at work to find she had an email from Jamie. He had a few questions about some care homes industry statistics that he wanted for his pitch and was hoping she could help.
‘Help your network and your network will help you,’ Meredith muttered to herself as she flicked through
her library of research reports for the answers. Twenty minutes later she had drafted a reply that even she had to admit looked pretty impressive. After she’d sent the email, she called Alfred and Jackie into her office.
‘How’s the all-party meeting going?’ she asked Alfred.
‘All sorted. Charles Sutton and Tom Duffy from Beau Street are coming, along with Stella Webb, one of the doctors working on their business plan. The accountants and lawyers are also both lined up and Ryan will join on the phone. I’ve agreed you’ll dial him in when we’re ready.’
Meredith nodded approvingly. ‘Good, well done.’ She turned to Jackie. ‘I’m just going to take Alfred with me on Monday. You know what these things are like – we’ve already got a cast of thousands by the sounds of it. But can you prepare me an agenda and draft timetable, so that we have something to circulate?’
Jackie nodded and gave a resigned smile. She was pretty used to the back office support role.
‘In the last email I had from Ryan about the meeting, he asked us to call him beforehand so we can agree tactics,’ said Alfred.
‘Oh, okay.’ Meredith looked at her watch. ‘Why don’t we try now; he should be up.’
‘Really, are you sure?’ said Alfred. ‘It’s only just after seven in the US. Shouldn’t we wait until office hours?’
‘No, it’s okay. He’s an early riser,’ said Meredith without thinking.
The others looked at her quizzically.
‘I’ve had several early morning calls with him on this project already,’ she explained, trying to look nonchalant. Damn! That didn’t sound much better. She pulled her phone into the middle of her desk, clicked it onto loudspeaker and only just managed to stop herself dialling the number from memory.
‘Err; I’ll just look up the number.’ She pretended to look it up on her phone, suddenly very aware that the smallest of things could give her away. Ryan answered the phone after a couple of rings.
‘Good morning, Ryan, this is Meredith Romaine from Clinton Wahlberg,’ she said, quickly adding, ‘I’m on the speakerphone with two of my colleagues, Alfred King and Jackie Whitman. Is it convenient to speak?’
‘Well, good morning, everyone,’ said Ryan. Meredith could hear the smile in his voice that showed he’d got the message that this was a business call. She hoped she was the only one who could. ‘Yes, it’s fine. I’m just at home having my first cup of coffee of the day.’
Meredith’s mind was immediately filled with a vision of Ryan lying on the sofa in his immaculate bachelor pad wearing just a pair of shorts. Not helpful! She shook her head in a vain attempt to get rid of it.
‘Great. We’d just like to talk through the plan for Monday’s meeting, if that’s okay?’
‘Sure, fire away.’ They agreed the agenda and tactics for the meeting on Monday and then hung up. Meredith was relieved to end the call; she was going to have to be so careful.
But by Monday morning, she was positively looking forward to the meeting. As she stood in the boardroom greeting people as they arrived, she steered them into a carefully memorised seating plan with Charles Sutton, the Beau Street CEO, in the ‘power seat’ and herself next to him. This was the bit she was good at; like a conductor knocking a new orchestra into shape.
‘Meredith, can I introduce you to Stella Webb, one of our senior doctors. She’s going to be running our integration planning, assuming all goes well,’ said Tom, gesturing at a smartly dressed colleague with shoulder length, bleached blonde hair.
‘Hello.’ Stella smiled at her and held out her hand, but Meredith could tell from her anxiously darting eyes that she was trying to hide how nervous she felt. Meredith smiled to herself; this sort of meeting must be so new for them.
The accountants were next to arrive, Carl Stephens and Rachel Altman from Payne Stanley. They didn’t need to be centre stage, so she directed them to the end of the table, politely waving Rachel away when she tried to introduce herself. There was no point trying to do a whole bunch of individual introductions before the meeting started; they’d be here for ever.
Alex Fisher and Dan Furtado from the lawyers arrived a few moments later, making rather an entrance, as Alex nearly fell into the room and then proceeded to call Alfred ‘King Alfred’, much to his annoyance. Meredith quietly shook her head in amusement and showed them to their seats opposite the accountants. Was she the only one in control here?
Once the room had settled, Meredith opened the meeting by getting everyone to introduce themselves and then gestured to Alfred to pass round copies of the timetable that Jackie had prepared. Ryan was typically impatient about the timetable and wanted the whole process finished yesterday, so her main objective was to make sure that everyone else was on the same page.
‘So, if we could just work our way through this timetable, and make sure we’re clear on what we’re expecting and by when. Then I’ll dial in Ryan Miller, the project leader from the Equinox Practise, who’d like to hear updates from the accountants and lawyers, followed by a presentation on the growth prospects of the business from management.’
Meredith looked around the table at the relevant people, who responded with a series of nods. ‘Great, then I think we can get started.’
As they went through the timetable with a fine-tooth comb, Meredith let Alfred lead the discussion, relying on his near-photographic memory and astonishing attention to detail to make sure that nothing was missed.
‘Are we set?’ she asked once the rather tedious, twenty-minute discussion had concluded.
Alfred nodded. ‘Yes, all done. I’ll circulate a note after the meeting confirming what we’ve agreed.’
Meredith pulled the speakerphone into the centre of the boardroom table, took out a carefully prepared piece of paper with Ryan’s number written on it and dialled his mobile number.
On the call, Ryan was very impressive and, thankfully, totally professional.
‘So, I’d just like to thank Meredith and her team at Clinton Wahlberg for organising this very useful meeting,’ he said as the call concluded.
From the enthusiastic nodding that followed, she could tell that the others in the room thought the same. Meredith smiled warmly at the assembled faces.
‘Well done, that was like a military operation,’ said Alfred, nodding approvingly as they left the room.
‘It’s helps to be clear and decisive, so that everyone knows where they stand,’ said Meredith.
If only the same could be said for the way she was handling Ryan.
Chapter 16
Meredith got back to the office relieved with the way the meeting had gone. After everyone else had left, Charles Sutton had congratulated her on the excellent way the project was being run, and reported that the other doctors were very pleased with the offer from Equinox. Ryan had also emailed her to say he’d been very impressed with the presentation from Stella Webb on the growth prospects for the business and that he was feeling more comfortable with the offer they’d made. Her relief, though, was short-lived. Not long after she had sat down in her office and started going through her emails, Alfred appeared, looking worried.
‘I’ve just had an email from Lars. He’s set up a meeting with the commercial director at Altacon to discuss their “strategic options”,’ he said.
Altacon were one of VuePharma’s main competitors. Meredith sat back in her chair and shook her head in disbelief.
‘Shit. The bloody idiot. When for?’
‘Thursday.’
‘Then we’ll have to tell Nick straight away. Have you made those notes I asked you to?’
Alfred nodded. ‘Nick will kill me.’
‘No, he won’t. It’s not your fault if someone more senior than you does something wrong, provided you don’t cover it up. You’ve done the right thing and spoken up. He can’t ask for more than that.’
Meredith couldn’t quite believe what she was saying, given the circumstances on her current project. What would she say to Alfred if the boot were on the other foot and
he’d found out about her and Ryan? Meredith thought for a moment. She’d hope he’d give her some time to sort it out before running to Nick.
‘Actually, on second thoughts, maybe we shouldn’t go straight to Nick. If I speak to Lars first, tell him to cancel the meeting and stop chasing down any other leads, then maybe we can avoid it. Give him a chance to back off before it’s too late.’
‘Maybe,’ said Alfred, looking doubtful. ‘He’ll still be livid with me, though – and who’s going to look after me if he starts gunning for me?’
‘I will,’ said Meredith firmly.
Alfred didn’t look convinced.
‘I promise, and if he causes any trouble then we’ll tell Nick anyway. Okay?’
Meredith waved a miserable-looking Alfred out of her office and picked up the phone.
‘Lars, it’s Meredith. Glad I caught you. Look, can we grab a coffee?’
‘Sorry, but I’m a bit tied up,’ said Lars rather dismissively.
‘No, you don’t understand. I need to talk to you and it can’t wait.’
‘What about?’
‘The VuePharma pitch.’
There was a pause at the end of the line.
‘Shall we meet downstairs?’
‘I’ll be there in five,’ said Meredith.
She hurried out of her office, gave Alfred a motherly ‘it’ll be okay’ type smile as she walked past him and then made her way to the ground floor coffee shop. Lars arrived out of another lift at almost exactly the same time. They stood in awkward silence next to each other in the coffee queue until they’d got their drinks and sat down.
Lars ran his hands through his blond hair, then sat back and crossed both his legs and arms. He couldn’t have looked more defensive if he tried.
‘So what’s this all about?’ he asked, glaring at her. Meredith had no idea why he seemed to have taken an instant dislike to her. Maybe it was just a competitive thing. She decided to get straight to the point.
‘Alfred tells me that you’ve organised a meeting with Altacon.’
‘Has he now. Well, so what if I have?’
‘You know full well that they’re a direct competitor of VuePharma. If Altacon make a bid for Vue, you and I could end up in direct competition, and you know that’s not allowed.’