4

A fortnight into the new job, Chris’s feet had scarcely touched the ground. Every morning had been early and every evening late. Very late. For someone whose job function had never existed prior to his arrival, he’d found it hard to believe the demand for his services. Who’d done all the research and planning around here before? Not that there was any question of him passing up on any projects. He was still the new boy with everything to prove.

Every morning he’d get out of bed at five forty-five, take a shower, get dressed and be in the office by seven. Breakfasts and lunches were snatched affairs on the run; bagels and Danish pastries from the Lombard kitchen, sandwiches from the Prêt a Manger round the corner, all eaten in the brooding semi-darkness of his office while he worked at his computer. Days would end at eight, nine, ten o’clock – on several occasions, way past midnight – six days a week. Sundays he might take some work home with him, or go into the office for a few hours in the afternoon. It didn’t matter when he arrived or when he left, however, there was always someone else in before him and someone who’d be staying later. Downstairs in the Lombard basement car park, there was always a handful of Saabs, Porsches and BMW coupes, whatever the time of day or night. Always a hostile takeover bid to support or fend off, a merger or corporate restructuring to sell or, at the very least, a results announcement to get covered.

At MIRA Chris had been through busy periods, times when the scheduling of client projects meant there’d be weeks of analysis and report-writing without respite. But during those times there had always been an end to it, a cut-off point, at which time normality would be resumed. At Lombard, however, there was no end. Lombard existed to feed the relentless, hungry maw of the twenty-four-hour global media machine. It was an integral part of the editorial equipment of every major national and international newspaper, television and radio station. Lombard was that part of the media machine that manufactured the news. And money was what fuelled its frenetic activity.

Chris soon discovered that the kinds of retainers Lombard charged its clients made the figures he’d been used to bandying about at MIRA look like small change. The agency wouldn’t countenance taking on a client paying less than £10k a month, and most were on £20k plus. What’s more, all the contracts were open-ended so that if Lombard consultants spent more time on an account than was covered by the monthly retainer, every additional hour was charged. Charge-out rate denoted status within the agency; junior consultants were charged out at £100 an hour, Account Directors at £250, Board Directors at £350 and the ultimate spin-doctor himself, Mike Cullen, weighed in at a hefty £1,500 an hour – the highest rate charged by any PR man in the country. Chris’s own charge-out rate was £300, to be reviewed after his probationary period. On his very first day, Charlotte had, with customary efficiency, tutored him on the vagaries of electronic time sheet keeping, and had told him that he would be expected to record at least fifty chargeable hours a week. Ten hours a day of billable time seemed an ambitious figure to Chris, but he soon discovered that most consultants clocked up far more than that; sixty and seventy hours a week were common, and hundred-hour weeks were by no means unusual. During results seasons, the consultants in Kate Taylor’s Financial PR team frequently worked round the clock, ignoring weekends and handing in time sheets in the hundred and twenties.

Time sheet keeping, as Chris soon learned, wasn’t just some administrative chore. It was Lombard’s Holy Grail. Consultants were expected to input the hours they worked each week by the Tuesday of the following week. Then every Friday, the total schedule of hours worked was reviewed by Lombard’s directors, listed against each of their names. The arrangement wasn’t overtly to encourage competition, but in reality the different directors at Lombard were perpetually trying to outdo each other in their bid to clock up more man hours per week, with bigger teams of consultants hiking up higher average charge-out rates. Financial competed with consumer, political was pitched against environmental as each of the Lombard directors vied for a bigger share of the fee income – to which their personal profit share was directly linked.

Pay-out time came twice a year and was always a big event, according to Charlotte. Twice a year, always on a Friday morning, every Lombard director would go up to the fifth floor to listen to the Finance Director report on company results. Total revenue, operating costs and company investments were reviewed. But the real interest was how big a bonus each of the directors was going to collect.

In the past five years, no Lombard director had earned less than a £100k bonus for any six-month period. Often it was way above that figure. Kate Taylor had herself collected £450k after a particularly gruelling but lucrative half year, in which three of her clients had, with Lombard’s advice, successfully fought off hostile takeovers. After each of the directors had been told how much money they had made, staff bonuses were decided over a sumptuous lunch prepared by a former royal chef. No expense was ever spared at these celebrations where the freshest of wild Scottish salmon, the most succulent scallops of veal and the most orgastic of pavlovas were all washed down with copious quantities of Louis Latour claret, Californian White Grenache and, of course, the ever-proffered Bollinger.

Then, over the vintage port and cigars, the performance of every member of agency staff was reviewed and a bonus awarded. Billing hours were, of course, at the heart of all this, but other things counted too. If a consultant was cruising at sixty hours a week, but was directly responsible for bringing in a new £300k client, he could expect at least a £30k pat on the back. Conversely, the ninety-hour-a-week Lomboid whose client had been gobbled up in a takeover could expect little but sympathy – and a not-so-subtle hint that it was time to polish his new business shoes. All the time individual bonuses were debated, Mike Cullen’s secretary went to and fro, inserting figures into letters that had already been prepared. The process could take two, three, four hours.

And then the gods would descend from the Boardroom, envelopes would be handed out to all staff, and the agency would erupt in an orgy of celebration. And like everything else, when Lombard celebrated, it did it bigger and ballsier than anyone else. Brand new Ferraris, Maseratis and MGs would be summoned from sports car dealerships in the City, to be delivered, in a gleaming line-up, outside Lombard offices that very afternoon. Weekend Concorde trips to New York would be hastily arranged. Property deals would be struck, with seven-figure loft conversions changing hands, sight unseen. Bonus Fridays were one of the few times of the year when clients found their advisers at Lombard unusually difficult to get hold of.

Chris was inputting hours into his time sheet for his first week when Charlotte poked her head round the door.

‘Everything OK?’ she enquired.

‘My first time sheet,’ Chris pulled a face.

‘Ah. You’re in creative mode then?’ She stepped into the room and walked to his desk.

Charlotte and he had relaxed into a convivial relationship after he’d bought her dinner one night when she’d stayed till nine-thirty. He’d quickly discovered that behind the carefully cultivated image of relentless efficiency and impossible glamour, Charlotte – now Lotte to him – had a decidedly risqué sense of humour. After a fair few glasses of wine, droll observations about colleagues had been exchanged, and personal lives shared. Back in the office next morning, things had changed between them in a subtle, but important way.

‘I’m supposed to be creative?’ he asked now.

‘Once you’ve been here a couple of weeks I’m sure you’ll be billing the most incredible hours,’ she grinned.

Chris leaned across his desk, speaking sotto voce, “You mean, double-billing?’

‘Double-billing?’ She adopted an expression of mock-contempt. “Think big.’

‘I see.’ Chris smiled.

‘Let me introduce you to the concept of Lombard Time.’ She met his eyes with a twinkle. ‘You see, there’s other PR agencies’ time, and then there’s Lombard Time. Because people who work at Lombard are cleverer and better connected and more effective than everyone else, we get things done in half the time. But that doesn’t mean we only charge them for half our time. We charge them the full whack – that’s how we make our money.’

Lombard Time, Chris soon learned, was a tacitly agreed concept throughout the agency. However many hours consultants worked, their time sheets recorded even more. A morning’s work drafting press releases translated into a full day on the time keeping sheet. A ten-minute telephone conversation was marked down as an hour.

But along with this discovery, Chris also came to learn just why Lombard clients were prepared to pay so handsomely for the services of their PR agency; media control was what Lombard boldly declared it could provide, and media control was what clients got. Lombard virtually ran the City desks of most national newspapers, feeding them most of their stories which would appear, with all the right nuances, in the next day’s papers. Non-business news would be fed through to the domestic news editors, the political or environmental editors, appearing with apparent effortless ease in articles and columnist reviews. Consumer stories would be placed in Sunday supplements, lifestyle magazines and TV programmes. Despite being well versed in the ways of the media before he joined, even Chris was amazed at how much of what passed for ‘editorial’ comment and reportage was material that had come directly off Lombard desks.

And if there was one thing Lombard was better at than getting good stories into the papers, it was keeping bad stories out. Blood-letting in the boardroom, analyst jitters, sales slumps after new product launches; all these were the stuff of headlines that none of Lombard’s clients ever wanted to see – and rarely did with the well-oiled Lombard machine at their disposal. Lombard executives would use the leverage of their massive client list, without compunction, to lean on journalists who were tempted to stray beyond what was deemed desirable. What’s more, they always made sure they had at least one tempting tale to offer by way of a replacement, if negative mentions could be avoided altogether.

At the heart of Lombard’s frenetic media management was Monitoring Services. From behind the Level Three security barrier on the third floor would flow a steady stream of missives and telephone calls throughout the day to various Lombard staff. ‘Alex Carter at The Herald is planning a piece on generic drugs for next Monday’, a note might read, ‘Plug for one of your pharma clients?’ Or ‘Alert! Sue Horley at Guardian writing damaging piece on Elpane Industries. Urgent call.’ Lombard consultants would quickly swing into action, neutralising damage and exploiting whatever opportunities presented themselves.

Chris couldn’t but be impressed by the efficiency of the operation and, in particular, by the accuracy of Monitoring Services’ notes.

‘How on earth do they do it?’ he’d asked Kate Taylor, when a briefing meeting had been interrupted by a telephone call from Monitoring, advising one of Kate’s staff that his client was about to be roasted by The Times.

‘That’, she’d looked at him pointedly, ‘is something none of us is encouraged to investigate too closely. It’s their job to get us the edge over everyone else – including the media.’

Intense, money-driven competition was the energy that propelled everyone at Lombard. It was the reason Mike Cullen had picked him to work as Research and Planning Director. And work he did. In two weeks he’d put in more assignments than he had in six at MIRA. There were journalist audits, analyst trackers and corporate image studies. He commissioned focus groups, panel studies and ad hoc quantitative projects.

But of all the projects Chris was working on, he never had any doubt about which was the most important; he’d been briefed on it his very first day, an assignment so secret it was to be referred to only by its code name: Project Silo. Summoned along the corridor, and through an anteroom where Cullen’s secretary Rosa and her assistant presided over a flurry of fax machines, photocopiers and word processing, he was shown into the Chairman’s office. It was his first visit and he couldn’t but be impressed. One floor beneath the Boardroom, Cullen’s office was at the end of the building, and the entire end wall was glass, floor to ceiling, providing what must be the most breathtaking view of Tower Bridge of any office in the city. Walking into it was like stepping into a spectacular landscape painting.

He paused for a moment, transfixed where he stood. To his left was Cullen’s desk and an arrangement of armchairs. A TV monitor displayed current share prices, the Starwear price prominently displayed. To his right was a huge stretch of rosewood at which Cullen and another man were sitting.

Looking up at him, Cullen smiled. ‘It’s one of the most expensive views in London.’

‘I can believe it.’

‘But worth every penny.’ Cullen met his eyes. Large, imposing, he conveyed that same winning combination of reassuring gravitas and familiarity that Chris had found so compelling the first time they’d met. As Cullen pulled out a chair beside him and gestured that Chris should come across, it was as though they’d been colleagues for a very long time.

‘Chris, I’d like you to meet Elliott North.’

The other rose to his feet and shook Chris’s hand across the table. He was dark and wiry in build, and Chris noted the curious intensity of his pale, blue eyes which blinked behind a pair of steel-framed glasses. Unusually for a PR man, he sported a neatly trimmed, almost military moustache. Chris remembered what Kate Taylor had said about North’s overzealous protectiveness of Jacob Strauss – she had made him out to seem almost obsessive. Not that there was any sign of that now. North was cordiality itself.

‘You’ll remember the conversation we had about Starwear when we first met,’ Cullen started off the proceedings.

‘Starwear III. I’ve actually done some work on it.’ Chris tapped a folder of papers he’d brought up with him.

Chris caught North glancing in surprise at Cullen.

Cullen noted the folder, clearly impressed. ‘Quite a lot of work, by the look of it.’

Chris acknowledged the compliment with a nod. ‘Just some positioning papers and a draft contents outline.’

‘Great initiative. I’m sure it’ll be useful.’ Cullen looked over at North. ‘Hasn’t been with us a day and he’s already drafting major policy statements.’

Across the desk, North chuckled.

‘Starwear III still has a high priority,’ Cullen continued. ‘We’ll want to put ideas together in a month, maybe two. But the tragedy has forced us to reassess our priorities. There’s a planning project we need to get under way before then which is both important and extremely urgent.’

North was nodding, seriously.

‘As we discussed last time,’ Cullen went on, ‘Starwear has always been at the forefront of defining what constitutes good corporate citizenship. “Doing the right thing is the right thing to do” – all of that. But recently we’ve been running into problems.’ He gestured to Elliott North to continue.

‘Some of Starwear’s rivals are not playing fair,’ announced North.

Chris raised his eyebrows.

‘They’re taking advantage of the transition time, as Jay finds his feet, and are hell-bent on inflicting maximum damage.’

‘What kind of damage?’ Chris had opened a briefing pad and was taking notes.

‘Mud-slinging. Rumour-mongering. People out there are trying to make out Jay is incompetent, weak – there are some very nasty allegations circulating. And they’re using dirty tricks on the marketing side, to seize market share. We’re still waiting for details on that from the client. But it all adds up to a pretty worrying situation.’

Chris met his eyes with a look of surprise; mud-slinging and dirty tricks was the last thing he’d expected to be briefed on when he’d been summoned to Cullen’s office. North was clearly disturbed by it all. Chris noticed his temples darkening to a deep shade of red.

‘Sounds desperate.’

Beside him, Cullen agreed, ‘It is.’

‘Who’s behind it?’

‘Bob Reid and Ed Snyder.’ North’s glasses flashed across the table.

Chris raised his eyebrows. The CEOs of Starwear’s two biggest competitors had never struck him as that kind.

‘Reid’s a desperate man. Profit forecasts are looking sick for Sportex right now. But Snyder’s the real worry. Used to be a director of Starwear and still owns substantial Starwear stock. He’s a real wild card that one.’

Cullen glanced over at the Starwear share price on his office terminal.

‘The point is, these guys are inflicting damage. But we hardly know anything about their operations. The only market intelligence we have about Sportex and Active Red is anecdotal. We need to be a lot more systematic’

‘Competitor analysis?’ queried Chris.

‘Exactly,’ both men chimed, before Cullen continued, ‘We want you to find out everything there is to know about these companies – shareholders, chains of command, marketing activities. How we can use the Starwear brand to maximum effect.’

‘In particular,’ added North, ‘we want to know a lot more about what Reid and Snyder are up to.’

Chris glanced up, hesitant. ‘This goes beyond the usual territory of market analysis.’

They both nodded.

‘We could get a certain amount of information through desk research, but we’ll probably need to do some other stuff,’ he mused. ‘Is there a budget on this?’

North shrugged. ‘It’s open. Tell us what you need.’ Then, fixing Chris with a significant expression, ‘Be imaginative in getting the information. Don’t leave any stones unturned.’

Chris absorbed this seriously.

‘And we’d like the report in four weeks. Mid-October.’

‘No problem.’

Cullen pushed his chair back from the table and turned to Chris. ‘This is a priority project, Chris. A lot is hanging on it.’

It was clear that he didn’t only mean a lot for Starwear; the project would also be the test of him.

‘The information we’re dealing with here is highly sensitive. We don’t want you to mention it to anyone else in the agency besides Charlotte. I suggest we give it the code name Project Silo.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Chris wrote it down.

‘As a general rule,’ Cullen met his eyes across the desk, ‘you know, of course, there must be no talking shop outside the office. Even the most casual asides are open to misinterpretation. So, it’s best to say absolutely nothing. Not about clients, not about colleagues, not about anything that you do.’

There could be no mistaking his gravity.

Chris was nodding with equal seriousness when Rosa appeared. ‘Mr Cullen, your five o’clock is in the Boardroom.’

‘Thanks.’ Cullen got up to leave. ‘A copy of the report to each of us, please, in four weeks.’

•••

Mike Cullen looked up from his desk as Rosa stepped into his office. Rosa had been with him since Lombard began twelve years before in a single, serviced office suite, and knew more about the agency and its clients than most of the bright young things who worked on the floors below. She also knew Mike Cullen’s every mood, and had an intuitive understanding of when to offer advice, and when to hold back; what to say, and how to say it. It was, she often used to think, almost like a professional marriage.

Mike Cullen had certainly changed her life. She’d been at a very low ebb when her husband had walked out on her when she was in her mid-forties, leaving her with two teenage children. A regular churchgoer, she had been introduced by her priest to another member of his congregation, a man who helped provide Sunday School outings for under-privileged kids, and whose handsome, open features she could hardly have missed. Mike Cullen had explained that he was starting a new business and was looking for a secretary. Would she be interested?

Since then, Mr Cullen, as she still insisted on calling him, had rewarded her loyalty, not only in purely financial terms, but also by allowing her to take on an assistant to carry out the more routine secretarial work. He trusted her to look after personal arrangements, as well as Lombard business. And to take care of matters like the one in hand.

‘I just wanted to check this with you before sending it to City News,’ she said, holding out a single sheet of paper. It was headed ‘Condolences’ and the message was short but poignant: ‘Merlin de Vere. One of the City’s brightest and best. A respected colleague whose wisdom and friendship will be sadly missed. Sincere condolences to Frances and family. From Mike Cullen and all at Lombard.’

After reading the message, Cullen handed it back to her. ‘That’s fine.’ He spoke quietly. ‘You’ll circulate it round the agency?’

‘Right away.’

He was shaking his head. ‘I had lunch with him just a couple of weeks ago. It’s a tragedy. A real tragedy. His mind was so …’ He gestured with his right hand, holding the tips of his fingers and thumb together,’ … he was right there.’

After a pause, he looked up at Rosa. ‘Has there been an announcement about a funeral?’

“Not yet.’ She shook her head. ‘I expect the inquest …’

‘Yes.’ It would be another week at least before his family was able to bury him. ‘When the date’s announced, you’ll organise things, will you?’

‘Kate Taylor and you will be going?’ she confirmed.

He nodded. ‘And a personal cheque donation to their charity. What do you think – five hundred?’

‘That would be more than generous.’

‘No word to anyone. Wouldn’t want people to get the wrong idea.’

‘Of course, Mr Cullen.’ She bowed out of his office.

The wrong idea, to which he was referring, was the one that circulated about his personal wealth. Masterful though he was at keeping his clients in the public eye, Rosa had always known that Mr Cullen hated having the spotlight on himself. He avoided all personal publicity and, in particular, had a visceral aversion to being thought of as rich. Which was why all the charitable donations he made – and they were always generous – went unnoticed, except by those who benefited directly from them. Her employer, Rosa often used to think, was the most private of men. Deep down underneath, she believed, he was really quite shy.