Corporate Bodies (19 page)

‘Hm. I've heard people say she wanted to screw her way right to the top of the company . . .'

“Wouldn't have been out of character.'

‘But you can't give me any names . . .'

Trevor gave a decided – but incautious – shake of his head. He winced as the pain from his leg tore through him.

‘I'll call an ambulance,' said Charles. ‘And, actually, I don't think I'll be around when it comes.'

‘Probably just as well.'

‘Another industrial accident. Likely to get as detailed an investigation as the last one.'

‘I should think so.'

The atmosphere between the two men had changed. It was never going to become one of complicity or even friendship, but at least the overt hostility was gone.

‘By the way,' said Charles graciously, ‘I'm prepared to forget the fact that you tried to kill me.'

He got a gruff ‘thank you' for that. ‘I'm sorry, but I couldn't have you going round saying I'd murdered Dayna. I mean, that was bound to open up a whole can of worms about . . . you know, other things . . .'

‘Don't worry. I won't make the accusation again.'

‘Right. Good. So that means you know I didn't kill her.'

‘Sure,' Charles agreed. ‘All you did was switch on the forklift's ignition.'

And he was very close to being convinced that that really was all Trevor had done.

But he'd reserve judgement until he'd watched the video cassette that nestled in his jacket pocket.

For the call to security that announced an accident in the warehouse, Charles used the voice he had perfected for
Gaslight
(‘Charles Paris was about as sinister as a teddy-bear with a bow round its neck' –
Leicester Mercury).
The security guard didn't sound very frightened by it either, nor particularly interested, but he said someone would be over there soon.

Charles made good his escape by the same route that he'd entered the warehouse and, to his amazement, got to Stenley Curton Station in time to join Will on the ten twenty-seven train to Bedford.

‘What the hell's happened to your suit?' the writer asked.

Charles looked down. A pocket flapped, torn down one side. Two of the double-breasted buttons had gone. The fabric was scored with furrows of black dirt.

‘Oh, er, I fell over,' he replied feebly.

On their journey back he told Will Parton nothing of what had happened. Nor did he mention what he was carrying in his suit's surviving pocket. This was partly because secrecy seemed essential until he'd got a few more details sorted out. And partly because he gave in to the healing sleep that his battered body cried out for.

At St Pancras, still muzzy and confused, Charles hailed a cab and gave the address of the only discreet person he could think of who owned a video.

‘What the hell's happened to your suit?' Frances asked.

She stood in the doorway of her flat in a dressing-gown, face puffy with sleep. Someone who always hated being woken up in the middle of the night, she did at least have the restraint not to say, ‘Do you know what time it is?'

‘Take a long time to explain,' said Charles. ‘Look, for reasons which would also take too long to explain. I need to borrow your VCR.'

Frances looked at her watch and raised her eyebrows. ‘I see.'

The tape was a commercial hard-core pornographic film. The antics of the cast demonstrated a bored mechanical professionalism. There was no soundtrack, but the looks of the participants suggested a German or Scandinavian origin. None of them was recognisable from Delmoleen.

Charles looked at the screen with a mixture of cheap arousal and fascination. Incredible to think that these people belonged to the same profession as he did. Or did they? Was it necessary to have an Equity card for this kind of work? Did such performers have their own professional directory, he conjectured, like the more traditional actors'
Spotlight
? And, if they did, what kind of photographs did they put in it? And what physical characteristics did they list? It was mind-boggling.

After four or five minutes of the film, Frances said shortly, ‘I'm going back to bed.'

Charles had planned an appealing, dog-like look, followed by a request for permission to sleep on her sofa. There was always a chance of graduating from sofa to bed. Or of taking Frances a cup of early morning tea . . . which could always lead to a nice little restorative cuddle . . . and a nice little restorative cuddle could always lead to . . . He composed the appealing, dog-like look and turned its full power on his wife.

‘I'm sorry, Frances, I do have to watch this all the way through.'

‘Yes, I'm sure you do, Charles,' she said drily.

‘But I was wondering if I could –'

‘Let yourself out when you've finished,' said Frances, and closed the door.

The singer stopped with arms outstretched and the four dancers froze in an unsteady tableau around him. The pianist folded his arms, face expressionless, mentally off-duty until next summoned to do something.

‘Yes,' said Robin Pritchard, ‘yes. I think that's beginning to come together.'

‘We'll be running it a few more times,' Will Parton assured him. ‘You know, to get it really crisp. And, of course, it'll look different when we've got the prop.'

Robin Pritchard pursed his lips. ‘It's a real bugger that wasn't here for this run-through.'

The prop to which they referred was a six-foot-long model of a Delmoleen ‘Green', which was to feature prominently in the dancers' routine. The yard-broom which was deputising in the rehearsal didn't really give the same impression.

‘I know,' Will concurred. ‘God, I'll never use that company again. I've been on the bloody phone to them every day for the past fortnight. They swore it'd be here for today. It's just not good enough – particularly when you consider what they're charging to make the thing.'

‘Well, they won't get paid, that's for certain,' said the Marketing Director with the grim satisfaction of the man who was controlling the sales conference budget.

Robin Pritchard took another critical look at the stage. ‘The actual bar is going to make a big difference to the look of the thing. But I think there's no question the presentation's going to wake the sales force up. They're never going to have seen anything like that before.'

‘You're certainly right there, Robin.' Ken Colebourne's expression was sardonic. He hadn't been keen on the song-and-dance idea at the outset, and nothing in its subsequent development had made him change his mind. The benefits of such presentation remained dubious, and the complications it introduced – organising accommodation for the performers, arranging the presence of a piano, having costumes and props made – were the last thing he needed at his busiest time of the year.

The strain seemed to be getting through to the Marketing Director. Charles thought he looked frazzled, and on one or two occasions when things had gone wrong in the run-through, Ken's temper had proved to be very short. Still, putting on a major sales conference must be a stressful business. Or then again, Ken Colebourne might have problems at home. Perhaps Patricia's health was deteriorating further. One could never really know the pressures inside a marriage like that.

‘I wonder if you want me to make it a bit more Tom Jones-like?' the singer asked.

He was an identikit club singer, spreading to fat, with hair dyed black to give him an ersatz Mediterranean look. Though currently in pastel golfer's leisurewear, he was the kind of performer, Charles felt sure, whose stage suit was a shiny midnight-blue tuxedo worn over ruffled shirt and corset-like cummerbund.

‘How do you mean exactly?' asked Will.

“Well, I could do a bit more . . . you know, gyration of the hips. Make it more obviously Tom Jones. I mean, I'm doing his voice, so a lot of them are going to get it all right, but we want them all to recognise that it is Tom Jones I'm doing, don't we?'

‘Most of them won't even know who Tom Jones is,' muttered Daryl Fletcher truculently. He had been dragged down to the conference hall because Ken Colebourne insisted that they should rehearse the presentation of his car, and Daryl really didn't think his presence was necessary. He'd rather have been up in the Panorama Bar on the eighth floor, knocking back a few drinks and lording it over the other salesmen whose annual figures hadn't been as good as his.

Actually, Charles agreed with Daryl's reservation. Although he had shared Will's excitement when they decided to parody
The Green, Green Grass of Home
for the launch, and shared the hilarity with which they had adapted the lyrics, he had always had a sneaking suspicion there was something wrong about the choice. A 1966 hit for a singer who'd since virtually given up the British scene for the lucrative American cabaret circuit was not calculated to strike many chords in the hearts of salesmen in their twenties.

‘No, I think what you're doing's probably enough, erm . . .' Will Parton had completely forgotten the singer's name, ‘love,' he concluded safely.

Actually, the ‘love' was a bit more than just a cop-out. Now Will was directing, he had become frightfully showbiz. It must have been all those patient years of being a television writer – agreeing with directors' increasingly illogical suggestions, meekly rewriting and rewriting until his original concepts vanished in a welter of words – that made him so relish the role. Here, in the unobserved environment of the Brighton Ambassador Hotel and Conference Suite, he could indulge his show business fantasies and gain a private, but sweet, revenge on every director he had ever worked with.

‘Now have you tried on the cozzies yet?' he continued, directorially bossy.

‘When?' asked one of the bored female dancers. ‘We was called for two o'clock, we've been here since two o'clock. It's now eight o'clock. When are we supposed to have had time to try on costumes, eh?'

They had been kept busy all that time. There were two men and two women, though the one who rather grandly designated himself ‘Dance Captain' kept referring to them as ‘boys and girls'. He had kept them at it, learning the very basic choreography of their number and the necessary manipulations of the yard-broom, on the stage when it was free and at the back of the hall when it wasn't. The rehearsal they had just done had been the first full one, with music and singer. Clearly more work was needed, but Ken Coleboume kept looking anxiously at his watch. They were overrunning their scheduled time, and there was still a lot to be run through.

‘We got to move this on, Will,' he said.

‘Yes, of course. Time for one more run of the song.'

‘No.'

‘Oh, come on, it's not up to standard yet,' Robin Pritchard protested.

‘That is your problem, not mine,' said Ken Colebourne, with a degree of satisfaction. ‘If you'd kept the presentation simple, we'd be finished by now.'

The Product Manager for Biscuits and Cereals argued, but for once he didn't get his own way. Despite the stresses of what he was doing, Ken Colebourne had great experience of organising sales conferences, and there was no doubt that he was in charge. Robin Pritchard accepted defeat, and went off with his grumbling singer and dancers for a dress parade. The singer was to wear a green tuxedo, the ‘boys' green waistcoats and trousers, and the ‘girls' green catsuits.

‘OK. Next I want to run my marketing overview sequence,' said Ken. Then he noticed someone hovering at the back of the hall, trying to attract his attention. ‘Yes, Heather, what is it?'

Charles turned to see the secretary from the warehouse step forward. He was not surprised to see her. Apparently the two days of the sales conference was a kind of bonus granted the more senior Delmoleen office administration staff. According to the nudging information of Daryl Fletcher, most of them used this as an annual licence for a bit of extramarital hanky-panky. As Heather Routledge coughed diffidently before speaking, Charles could not somehow imagine her to be involved in any such goings on.

‘There was a message for you, Ken. Could you ring Nicky Rules?'

‘Oh, God, he's not going to cancel on me, is he?' The Marketing Director had so much on his plate at that moment that the thought of having to find a new cabaret for the following night's banquet was more than he could contemplate.

‘No, it's all right. Just a couple of things he wants to check about the company.'

‘Oh, all right. I'll ring him when we're through here. Thanks, Heather.'

She walked awkwardly back out of the hall. She wasn't actually ungainly, Charles decided, just lacking in confidence. Her movements had the self-defeating clumsiness of someone desperately unwilling to draw attention to herself.

‘I don't know,' said Ken to Will. ‘That Nicky Rules does go on. Prides himself on tailoring his material to his audience. Likes to make in-jokes about people in the company. So he's on the blower to me about three times a day. And I gather he's been talking to other management people too. Suppose I should be grateful that he bothers, but, God, it all takes time.'

He moved towards the stage. ‘Right, I'll do my presentation. Just to check that the script's coming up right and the slides are in the right order.'

‘Oh, look, when do we get to my bit?' Daryl Fletcher complained, seeing more valuable drinking time slip away.