Almost a Crime (8 page)

ring him. He’s got some prospect or other for you.’

‘Oh, Christ,’ said Tom.

Octavia’s breakfast meeting was at the Connaught; she was

early, but Melanie was already there, drinking orange juice

and coffee like one possessed, glass in one hand, cup in the

other. As always when she suddenly saw her away from the

familiarity of the office setting, Octavia was struck with

great force by Melanie’s rather strange beauty: she was tall,

almost six feet — ‘I look down on most men’ she was fond of

saying — with a strong, fit body, and long powerful legs. Her

streaky brown hair fell below her shoulders in a waving

mass, and her eyes, peering through an over-long fringe,

were a fierce, deep blue. Her nose was rather large, but it

suited her, and her mouth wide and generous. Her voice

was most singular, slightly gravelly in tone, with a South

London accent half worn away by years of contact with the

middle-and upper-class tones of her clients and associates.

She wore clothes with the slightly ethnic look of the

‘seventies, long skirts and elaborately embroidered shirts and

a mass of silver bracelets on her strong brown wrists against

Octavia’s classic chic she looked like some large

exotic bird. Tom Fleming, who tended to like his women

conventional, was surprisingly fond of Melanie, and frequently proclaimed her ‘dauntingly sexy’.

Octavia slid into the seat beside her, nodded gratefully at

the waiter who was advancing on her with the coffee pot.

‘You look rotten,’ said Melanie, looking at her critically.

‘You all right? Not pregnant again, are you? Octavia,

please, please don’t say that.’

‘No, I’m not pregnant,’ said Octavia slightly defensively.

‘Good. Just usual domestic trauma, is it? Wearing you

out?’

‘You could say that.’

‘Surely the divinely handsome Mr Fleming isn’t giving

trouble?’

‘Not as far as I know,’ said Octavia lightly. ‘Honestly,

Mells, I’m fine. Just tired.’

‘Well, that’s all right then. Now let me tell you quickly,

before she gets here, that Mrs B is dead set on a ball this

Christmas. We have to talk her out of it. Those things are

no good at all without a really high-profile patron, and we

ain’t got one.’

‘Any good trying Kensington Palace? She was very keen

we did that, said she was sure Diana would respond.’

‘They all think Diana will respond. No, I did put a call in

to the Palace, but never got past the outside office. Anyway,

it’s no good just saying no ball, we have to come up with an

alternative, something she can latch on to. Any ideas?’

‘I did meet Neil Balcon the other night,’ said Octavia,

‘you know, the thinking woman’s Michael Ball?’

‘Oh, him. Yes. And?’

‘And he’s just done one of those Sunday night benefit

things. They made forty grand for Deafaid. He said it was

always worth asking him, he liked doing things like that. As

long as he was sympathetic to the cause.’

‘Did he? What was he like? You do manage to meet the

most glamorous people, Octavia.’

‘Oh, it was at one of those fundraising bashes for the

Labour Party,’ said Octavia. ‘You know Tom gets invited

to diem sometimes.’

‘What, at Ken and Barbie’s little place?’

‘No, not Follett Towers this time. Brian Tweedie, same

difference. Anyway, he was very nice, and extremely

handsome. So we could try that.’

‘Sounds good. Ah, here’s Kate now. Come and sit down,

Kate. Coffee?’

There was a message for Octavia when she got into the

office, from Lauren Bartlett. Octavia asked Sarah Jane for a

glass of mineral water, took two Nurofen for a thickly

growing headache, and dialled the number.

‘Lauren Bartlett.’ Just hearing her voice put Octavia’s

teeth on edge: slightly braying, aggressively well bred.

‘Oh, Lauren, hi. This is Octavia Fleming.’

‘Oh, Octavia, yes.’

‘You called me. Incidentally, if it was about the party,

Poppy would love to come, thank you. Sounds wonderful.’

‘Fine. I’ll tick her off the list. She has got her own

passport, has she? Last year we had a nightmare because

some child didn’t. I forgot to put that in the invitation.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Right. No need to worry about safety, by the way.

George’s pilot has ten thousand miles’ experience. Never so

much as a bumpy landing.’

‘I wasn’t,’ said Octavia, wondering if she should have

done.

‘Good. Some people were. Now, Octavia, I’m on the

fundraising committee of Next Generation. As you know.’

Octavia did know; it would have been hard not to. Next

Generation was very high profile indeed — at one point it

had been strongly rumoured that Princess Diana was to

become its patron. Capital C had done a presentation to

them two years earlier and failed to get the business; as a

flagship it would be superb. It ran a privately funded

hospice for children with AIDS, and two refuge houses for

abused children. ‘Very fashionable, very Diana,’ Melanie

had observed tartly after the first meeting with them.

Diana’s patronage had not yet materialised, but the charity continued to win a great deal of attention and publicity.

‘We’re planning a fundraising day in September, at

Brands Hatch. We thought of getting professional help and

your name came up. Now, we do know you’re awfully

expensive, so it could be we’d be better managing without

you. I just wondered if you’d consider meeting us halfway

on the cost, as we’re friends and so on.’

‘Unlikely, I have to say,’ said Octavia coolly, ‘this is a

business, you know. But we could talk. It sounds a

wonderful idea, your fun day, and you’ll find it very

productive. We did something similar at Brooklands a year

or so ago. Raised over a hundred thousand for Foothold,

one of our charities. Children with arthritis. I got one of the

big drug companies to come in with lots of lovely

sponsorship money.’

‘Oh, really?’ Interest flashed briefly into the drawling

voice.

‘Yes. So if you did think it might be worth talking—’

‘But you wouldn’t do it for free? For old times’ sake?’

‘Lauren, I couldn’t. Sorry.’

‘Well, we’ll think about it. I must say it seems a bit wrong

- for a business to be making money out of

charities.’

Octavia had had this argument so many times before, she

moved smoothly into her automatic defence of it. ‘Lauren,

you know as well as I do a charity’s books have to balance.

It’s an expensive business running a charity. We do, in the

long run, make it more cost-effective.’

‘Yes, yes, I know that’s the argument,’ said Lauren

dismissively. ‘Anyway, as I say, we may ring you. I must go

now, Octavia. Off to the Harbour Club. Bye.’

‘Bitch,’ said Octavia aloud as she put the phone down.

Tom Fleming forgot about telephoning his father-in-law

until he was in the middle of a very complicated

conversation over lunch. Most of his meals were accompanied

by complicated conversations, indeed every meal he ate during the week was a working occasion. His day began over breakfast, either at a hotel or in a boardroom,

proceeded to lunch, almost always at the Connaught or the

Savoy or the Ritz, and thence to dinner, often after the

theatre or the opera, at some other high-profile eaterie:

Bibendum, Quaglino’s, the Mirabelle. He was never

relaxed, always watchful, platefuls of perfectly prepared,

immensely expensive food being placed before him and

then removed again, sometimes half eaten, sometimes still

less; endless glasses of fine clarets, perfectly chilled champagnes

poured and not consumed while he and his

colleagues and his guests or his hosts stalked one another in

their ceaseless and complex battle for influence.

Tom ran a public affairs consultancy, known in the trade

as a lobby shop. People he met at parties, outside the

business, were always asking him exactly, what he did, and it

always surprised him how hard it was to explain to them.

‘It’s not quite politics and much more fun,’ he would say.

‘It’s all about persuading people, simple as that. Persuading

the clients what to do, and how to do it, insofar as it affects,

and is affected by, politics. And persuading others my clients

are right.’ He would then give them his famously charming

and engaging smile, and refuse to say any more. ‘Otherwise

I shall become boring. And then Octavia will be cross.’

The presentation folder of Fleming Cotterill (glossy, fat,

expensive) went a little further, describing itself as above all

‘seeking to get a company’s case across to people, whether

in Westminster, Whitehall or out there on the Clapham

Omnibus’.

Fleming Cotterill was seven years old, hugely successful,

high profile. Tom and his co-director Aubrey Cotterill had

founded it six years earlier, having formed a splinter group

from another very well-established consultancy; they were

the senior directors and biggest shareholders and there were

now three other directors. The early days had been — as

Tom described it when he had had a few glasses of wine too

many — ‘good for the bowels: we’d both taken out

enormous second mortgages and bank loans. It had to work.’

For the first few months it looked as if it wouldn’t; they

had a couple of clients but not nearly enough to meet their

overheads (small but glossy office in Westminster, much

expensive entertaining, and the high interest rates of the

early ‘nineties). Tom and Aubrey were financially stretched

to the hilt; large personal overdrafts, houses remortgaged.

They always said they couldn’t decide which were the

worst in those early days; the days when the phone didn’t

ring at all, or the ones when it rang and a smooth voice on

the other end would tell them how impressed it had been

by their operation, but nevertheless how sorry it was that it

had been decided to take the business elsewhere this

time …

Then in the space of three days they won two key

accounts: a radio station in search of further franchises; and a

small grocery chain, both classically demanding in public

affairs terms. They proved their mettle immediately; the

radio station picked up an enormous amount of publicity by

fighting off a takeover, Fleming Cotterill advising them

with great success both to capitalise on the inevitable

redundancies if it happened and to hire a highly controversial

disc jockey, and the grocery chain by playing devil’s

advocate and speaking against the Sunday trading lobby.

The radio station won, and the grocery chain lost the battle

but won their own personal war, emerging with their

image enhanced as one of the good guys who cared about

Sundays.

After that Fleming Cotterill became well known very

swiftly; they picked up a lot of new business and launched a

campaign, through a cross-party group of MPs, to improve

food labelling. Perhaps most importantly, not one of their

original clients had left them; nothing could have provided

a better testimony to their skills.

In the heady post-election air of May 1997, when the

whole country seemed to be celebrating, and a new age

truly dawning, everything to do with politics was thrown into the air. Those lobby shops that had grown up in the long years of undisputed Tory rule were furiously hiring

new young Turks who were in with the new in-crowd,

and presenting themselves as politically non-partisan. It was

not an entirely edifying spectacle.

Fleming Cotterill was not among them; two of its five

directors had held posts in the offices of Socialist cabinet

ministers, and a third had worked famously on the Nolan

Committee, with all its whiter-than-white associations of a

new, less corrupt age. Tom Fleming had several longterm

friends in the new government; his star and that of his

company was very much in the ascendant.

Today Tom was lunching with Bob Macintosh, and the

problems under discussion were at least fifty per cent

personal.

The non-personal conversation had been about the

interminable new regulations coming in from Brussels

governing the food industry. ‘They’re going to drive us

mad, Tom,’ said Bob, ‘and costs are going to soar. I really

want to fight at least some of them, but a small voice like

mine won’t be heard, will it?’

‘You need to get the big boys on board, form a coalition,

which might be difficult initially. They can absorb these

things much more easily. But if you can start making

waves…”

‘Well, that’s your department. What do you suggest we

do?’

‘The ideal thing would be an agreement to look at them

very closely at government level. A parliamentary committee,

even. That’s easier said than done, though, especially at

the moment. There’s so much business for them to get

through in this first few months, and whatever Blair says,

he’s passionately pro-Europe, so no one’s going to give it