The Quorum (3 page)

When the consortium announced their intention to contest London, GLT replied by issuing a complacent press release. Ronnie Shand, host of GLT’s ‘whacky’ girls’ bowling quiz
Up Your Alley,
made a joke about Tiny’s ego in his weekly monologue. High-level execs were heaping public praise on programmes made by their direst enemies. The dirty tricks had started when GLT, alone of the ITV net, pre-empted
Survival Kit
for a Royal Family special. As payback, Tiny had ordered Weepy Lydia to inflate a tedious offshore trust story involving several GLT board members into a majorly juicy scandal item. In the meantime, the best he could do was give five pounds to any office minion who called up the ITV duty officer and logged a complaint about a GLT show. It had the feel of a phoney war.

‘Bender’s wife chucked him out again last night,’ April said. ‘Found him writing silly letters to Pomme.’

Pomme was an eighteen-year-old PA who looked like a cross between Princess Diana and Julia Roberts. If it weren’t for her Liza Doolittle accent, shed have been easy to hate.

‘He kipped in the basement of the building, blind drunk. Must have walked into a wall by the look of his face. I hope he keeps the scars.’

Six months before Sally joined the company, when April was young and naive, she had slept with Bender. It hadn’t done either of them any good.

‘Are you all right?’

People kept asking her that. Sally nodded vigorously. April touched her cheek, as if it’d enable her to take Sally’s emotional temperature.

The funeral had been yesterday. Sally had sent a floral tribute but thought it best not to go. Connor’s friends would think she was his aunt or someone. She had never met his parents and didn’t especially want to.

From the sandwich shop, Sally saw the square. A knot of messengers hung about the gazebo, all in lycra shorts and squiggly T-shirts. Sprawled on benches, they let long legs dangle as they worked pain out of their knees. Some, unlike Connor, had helmets like plastic colanders. Staff at Charing Cross Hospital had a nickname for Central London cycle messengers: organ donors. Scrapes and spills were an inevitable part of accelerated lives. And so was human wastage. Ironically Connor had carried a donor card: he was buried without corneas and one kidney.

‘Come on,’ said April, looking at her pink plastic watch, ‘back to the front...’

* * *

If she had doubts about the identity of the consortium’s financial backer, they were dispelled by the front page of the
Comet,
tabloid flagship of Derek Leech’s media empire. Ronnie Shand was caught in the glare of flash-bulbs, guiltily emerging from a hotel with a girl in dark glasses. The story, two hundred words of patented
Comet
prose, alleged
Up Your Alley
was fixed. Contestants who put out for Shand (51, married with three children) were far more likely to score a strike and take home a fridge-freezer or a holiday in Barbados. An inset showed Ronnie happy with his family in an obviously posed publicity shot. Inside the paper, the girl, an aspiring model, could be seen without clothes, a sidebar giving details about ‘my sizzling nights with TV’s family man’. Shand was unavailable for comment but GLT made a statement that
Up Your Alley
would be replaced by repeats of
Benny Hill
while an internal investigation was conducted. Sally wondered whether theyd investigate the allegations or witch-hunt their staff for the traitor who’d tipped off the
Comet.

Tiny was a bundle of suppressed mirth at their meeting and chuckled to himself as she reported. She’d carried out a thorough, boring check of the finances of GLT’s component parts, and discovered profits from hit shows had been severely drained by a couple of disastrous international co-productions,
The Euro-Doctors
and
The Return of Jason King.
The interruption of
Up Your Alley
was a severe embarrassment. GLT must be hurting far more than their bland press releases suggested.

‘If it comes to it, we can outspend the bastards,’ Tiny said. ‘We’ll have to make sacrifices. Congratulations, Sally. I judge you well.’

There was something seductive about covert work. Setting aside moral qualms about the franchise system and relegating to a deep basement any idea of serving the viewing public, she could look at the situation and see any number of moves which would be to Mythwrhn’s advantage. Taken as a game, it was compulsive. It being television, it was easy to believe no real people at all were affected by any action she might suggest or take.

‘I’ve been looking at
Cowley Mansions
,’ she said, referring to GLT’s long-running thrice-weekly soap set in a Brixton block of flats. It was said GLT wouldn’t lose their franchise because John Major didn’t want to go down in history as the Prime Minister who took away the
Mansions
.

Tiny showed interest.

‘I’ve not got paper back-up but I heard a whisper that GLT took a second mortgage to finance
The Euro-Doctors
and put the
Mansions
on the block.’

‘Explain.’

‘To sucker in the Italians and the French, GLT threw in foreign rights to the
Mansions
with the deal. Also a significant slice of the domestic ad revenues for a fixed period.’

Tiny whistled.

‘As you know, TéVéZé, the French co-producer, went bust at the beginning of the year and was picked up for a song by a British-based concern which turns out to be a subsidiary of Derek Leech Enterprises.’

Tiny sat up.

‘If I were, say, Derek Leech, and I wanted to gain control of the
Mansions
, I think I could do it by upping my holdings in an Italian cable channel by only two per cent, and by buying, through a third party, the studio and editing facilities GLT have currently put on the market to get fast cash. Years ago, in one of those grand tax write-off gestures, slices of the
Mansions
pie were given in name to those GLT sub-divisions and when they separate from the parent company, the slices go too. Then, all I’d have to do to get a majority ownership would be to approach the production team and the cast and offer to triple salaries in exchange for their continued attachment. I might have to change the name of the programme slightly, say by officially calling it
The Mansions,
to get round GLT’s underlying rights.’

Tiny pulled open a drawer and took out a neat bundle of fifty-pound notes. He tossed it across his broad desk and it slid into Sally’s lap.

‘Buy yourself a frock,’ he said.

In the lift, there was something wrong with a connection. The light-strip buzzed and flickered. Sally had a satisfaction high but also an undertone of nervous guilt. It was as if she had just taken part in a blood initiation and was now expected to serve forever the purpose of Kali the Destroyer.

* * *

As usual, there was nothing on television. She flicked through the four terrestrial channels: Noel Edmonds, tadpole documentary, Benny Hill (ha ha), putting-up-a-shelf. Like all Mythwrhn employees, she’d been fixed up with a dish
gratis
as a frill of the alliance with Derek Leech, so she zapped through an additional seven Cloud 9 satellite channels: bad new film, bad old film, Russian soccer, softcore in German, car ad, Chums commercial disguised as an AIDS documentary, shopping. After heating risotto, she might watch a
Rockford Files
from the stash she’d taped five years ago. James Garner was the only TV private eye she had time for: the fed-up expression he had whenever anyone got him in trouble was the keynote of her entire life.

The telephone rang. She scooped up the remote, pressing it between shoulder and ear as she manoeuvered around her tiny kitchen.

‘Sally Rhodes,’ she said. ‘No divorce work.’

‘Ah, um,’ said a tiny voice, ‘Miss, um, Ms, Rhodes. This is Eric Glover... Connor’s Dad.’

She paused in mid-pour and set down the packet of spicy rice.

‘Mr Glover, hello,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t make...’

There was an embarrassed (embarrassing) pause.

‘No, that’s all right. Thank you for the flowers. They were lovely. I knew you were Connor’s friend. He said things about you.’

She had no response.

‘It’s about the accident,’ Eric Glover said. ‘You were a witness?’

‘No, I was there after.’ When he was dead.

‘There’s a fuss about the insurance.’

‘Oh.’

‘They can’t seem to find the van driver. Or the van.’

‘It was overturned, a write-off. The police must have details.’

‘Seems there was a mix-up.’

‘It was just a delivery van. Sliding doors. I don’t know the make.’

She tried to rerun the picture in her mind. She could see the dazed driver crawling out of the door, helped by a young man with a shaved head.

‘I didn’t suppose you’d know, but I had to ask.’

‘Of course. If I remember...’

‘No worry.’

There had been a logo on the side of the van. On the door.

‘Good-bye now, and thanks again.’

Eric Glover hung up.

It had been a Mythwrhn logo, a prettified bird-woman. Or something similar. She was sure. The driver had been a stranger, but the van was one of the company’s small fleet.

Weird. Nobody had mentioned it.

Water boiled over in the rice pan. Sally struggled with the knob of the gas cooker, turning the flame down.

* * *

A couple of calls confirmed what Eric Glover told her. It was most likely the van driver would be taken to Charing Cross, where Connor was declared dead, but the hospital had no record of his admission. It was difficult to find one nameless patient in any day’s intake, but the nurse she spoke to remembered Connor without recalling anyone brought in at the same time. Sally had only seen the man for a moment: white male, thirties-forties, stocky-tubby, blood on his face. The production manager said none of the vans had been out that day and, yes, they were all garaged where they were supposed to be, and why are you interested? As she made more calls, checking possible hospitals and trying to find a policeman who’d filed an accident report, she fiddled with a loose strand of cardigan wool, resisting the temptation to tug hard and unravel the whole sleeve.

April had dumped her bag and coat on her chair but was not at her desk. That left Sally alone in her alcove, picking at threads when she should be following through the leads Tiny had given her. She had a stack of individual folders containing neatly-typed allegations and bundles of photocopied ‘evidence, all suggesting chinks in the Great Wall of GLT. The presenter of a holiday morning kid’s show might have a conviction under another name for ‘fondling’ little girls. A hairy-chested supporting actor on
The Euro-Doctors
, considered to have ‘spin-off potential’ even after the failure of the parent series, was allegedly a major player in the Madrid gay bondage scene. And, sacrilegiously, it was suggested the producer of a largely unwatched motoring programme had orchestrated a write-in campaign to save it from cancellation. In case Sally wondered where these tid-bits came from, she’d already found an overlooked sticker with the DLE logo and a ‘please return to the files of the
Comet’
message; checking other files, she found dust-and-fluff-covered gluey circles that showed where similar stickers had been peeled off. So, apart from everything else, she was in charge of Tiny’s Dirty Tricks Department. She wondered if G. Gordon Liddy had got sick to his stomach. This morning, she had thrown up last night’s risotto. She should have learned to cook.

Bender popped his head into the alcove. When he saw only her, his face fell.

‘Have you seen Ape?’

‘She was here,’ Sally told him. ‘She must be in the building.’

Bender looked as if he’d pulled a couple of consecutive twenty-four hour shifts.

‘No matter,’ he said, obviously lying. ‘This is for her.’

He gave her a file, which she found room for on her desk.

‘She’s not really supposed to have this, so don’t leave it lying around. Give it to her personally.’

Bender, a tall man, never looked a woman in the face. His eyeline was always directed at her chest. In an awkward pause, Sally arranged her cardigan around her neck to cover any exposed skin. The associate producer was a balding schoolboy.

‘We were all sorry about, um, you know...’

Sally thanked him, throat suddenly warm. She didn’t know why Bender was loitering. Had April taken up with him again? Considering the vehemence of her comments, it was not likely. Or maybe it was.

‘If you see... when you see Ape, tell her...’

There was definitely something weird going down. Bender really looked bad. His usual toadying smoothness was worn away. He had an angry red mark on his ring-finger. It had probably had to be sawn free, and serve him right.

‘Tell her to return the files ASAP. It’s important.’

When he left, she decided to try work therapy. A minion named Roebuck was reputedly interested in being bribed to let Mythwrhn peek at GLT’s post-franchise proposals. He’d contacted Tiny and it was down to her to check his standing. Being suspicious, she guessed Roebuck was her opposite number in GLT’s Spook Dept trying to slip the consortium dud information. She only had a name and she wanted an employment history. There were several people she could phone and - since everyone in television had at some point worked for, or at least applied to work for, everyone else - her first obvious choice was Mythwrhn’s own personnel manager. If he had Roebuck’s CV on file, it might have clues as to his contacts or loyalties.

As she bent over in her chair to reach her internal directory from her bottom drawer, her stomach heaved. Gulping back sick, she hurried to the Ladies.

* * *

One loo was occupied but the other was free. Apart from a midmorning cup of tea, there was nothing to come up but clear fluid. It wasn’t much of a spasm and settled down almost immediately. She washed her face clean and started to rebuild her make-up. The lighting in the Ladies was subdued and the decor was ugly, walls covered in wavy lumps like an ice cave. She supposed it had been designed to prevent loitering.