The Quorum Read online

  * * *

  After her exercise class, they had al fresco lunch in Soho Square. In summer, it was a huge picnic area; now, in early autumn, office workers - publishing, film, television, advertising - melted away, leaving the square to tramps and runners. He had sandwiches while she dipped Kettle Chips into cottage cheese and pineapple. Connor always pushed his idea that Survival Kit do a week-in-the-life-of-a-wino item, unsubtly pressuring Sally to take it into a production meeting. She’d tried to tell him it’d been done before but his excitement always prevailed. Today he pointed out the ‘characters’ who pan-handled in Soho, explaining their fierce territoriality.

  ‘You don’t notice til you’re on the streets, Sal. It’s a parallel world.’

  On a bench nearby sat two men of roughly the same age, a pony-tail in a Gaultier suit and a crusty with filth-locks and biro tattoos. Each pretended the other didn’t exist.

  ‘It’s a pyramid. At the bottom, people get crushed.’

  He was right but it wasn’t Kit. Besides, she was irritated: was he interested in her mainly as a conduit to the inner circle? With one of his lightning subject-shifts, Connor made a grab, sticking his ribena-sweetened tongue down her throat. His walkie-talkie chirruped and he broke off the kiss. It was just past two and lunch hour was officially over. He frowned as a voice coughed in his ear.

  ‘It’s for you,’ he said.

  Knowing thered be trouble, she took the receiver. Tiny had been after her to use a portable phone. She was summoned to the Penthouse. Mairi, Tiny’s PA, conveyed the message. Tiny wanted to chat. Sally assumed she was going to be fired and dutifully trudged across the square to Mythwrhn.

  She stabbed the top button and the lift jerked up through the building. Tiny had a suite of offices on the top floor which she hadn’t visited since her interview. Mairi met her at the lift and offered her decaf, which she refused. She wondered if the girl disapproved of her and Connor. She had the idea it wasn’t done to dally out of your age range or income bracket. At least, not if you were a woman. All the young middle-age male production staff had permanent lusts for the fresh-from-school female secretaries, runners and receptionists.

  Tiny’s all-glass office was a frozen womb. He sat behind his desk, leaning back. She noticed again the figurine on its stand: a bird-headed, winged woman, throat open in a silent screech. It was an old piece, but not as old as some.

  ‘Know what that is?’ Tiny asked rhetorically, prepared to explain and demonstrate his erudition.

  ‘It’s the Mythwrhn,’ she pre-empted. ‘An ancient bird goddess-demon, probably Ugric. Something between a harpy and an angel.’

  Tiny was astonished. ‘You’re the first person who came in here knowing that...’

  ‘I had an interesting career.’

  ‘You must tell me about it sometime.’

  ‘I must.’

  The last time she’d seen a statuette of the Mythwrhn, she’d been on a nasty case involving black magic and death. It had been one of her few exciting involvements, although the excitement was not something she wished to repeat.

  Without being asked, she took a seat. Apart from Tiny’s puffily upholstered black leather egg-shape, all the chairs in the office were peculiar assemblages of chrome tubing and squeaky rubber. As Tiny made cat’s cradles with his fingers, she was certain he’d fire her.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about you, Sally,’ he said. ‘You’re an asset but I’m not sure how well-placed you are.’

  Her three-month trial wasn’t even up, so she wasn’t on a contract yet. No redundancy payment. At least the dole office was within walking distance of the flat. The poll tax would be a problem, but she should qualify for housing benefit.

  ‘Your experience is unique.’

  Tiny’s confrontational, foot-in-the-door interviews with dodgy characters put him in more danger in any one series of Survival Kit than she had been in all her years of tracing the heirs of intestate decedents, finding lost cats and body-guarding custody case kids. But he was still impressed by a real life private dick. April said the term was sexist and called her a private clit.

  ‘You know about the franchise auction?’

  The independent television franchises, which granted a right to broadcast to the companies that made up the ITV network, were being renegotiated. There was currently much scurrying and scheming in the industry as everyone had to justify their existence or give way to someone else. There was controversy over the system, with criticism of the government decision that franchises be awarded to the highest bidder. The Independent Television Commission, the body with power of life and death over the network, had belatedly instituted a policy of partially assessing bids for quality of service rather than just totting up figures. In the run-up to the auction, battles raged up and down the country, with regional companies assailed by challengers. More money than anyone could believe was being poured into the franchise wars. A worry had been raised that the winners were likely to have spent so much on their bids they’d have nothing left over to spend on the actual programmes.

  ‘Mythwrhn is throwing in its hat,’ Tiny said.

  For an independent production company, no matter how financially solid, to launch a franchise bid on its own would be like Liechtenstein declaring war on Switzerland.

  ‘We’ll be the most visible element of a consortium. Polymer Records have kicked in, and Mausoleum Films.’

  Both were like Mythwrhn, small but successful. Polymer used to be an indie label and now had the corner on the heavier metallurgists, notably the ‘underground’ cult band Loud Shit. Mausoleum distributed French art and American splatter; they were known for the Where the Bodies Are Buried series, although Sally knew they’d funnelled some of their video profits into British film production, yielding several high profile movies she, along with vast numbers of other people, hadn’t wanted to see.

  ‘Deep pockets,’ she commented, ‘but not deep enough.’

  Tiny snapped all his fingers. ‘Very sharp, Sally. We have major financial backing, from a multi-media conglomerate who, for reasons of its own, can’t be that open about their support. I’m talking newspapers, films and satellite.’

  That narrowed it down considerably. To a face the size of a condom packet, in fact.

  ‘We’re contesting London, which puts us up against GLT. So it’s not going to be a walk-over.’

  Greater London Television was one of the keystones of the ITV net, long-established monolith with three shows in the ratings Top Ten, two quizzes and a soap. In television terms, it was, like its audience, middle-aged verging on early retirement. Mythwrhn had a younger demographic.

  ‘I’d like you to be part of the bid,’ Tiny said.

  She was surprised. ‘I’m not a programmer or an accountant.’

  ‘Your special talents can be useful. We’ll need a deal of specialised research. In wrapping our package, it’d be handy to have access to certain information. We need to know GLT’s weaknesses to help us place our shots.’

  This sounded very like industrial espionage. As a field, IE never appealed to Sally. Too much involved affording the client ‘plausible deniability’ and being paid off to sit out jail sentences.

  ‘You’ll keep your desk and your official credit on Kit but we’ll gradually divert you to the real work. Interested?’

  Thinking of the Muswell Hill DSS, she nodded. Tiny grinned wide and extended a hand, but was distracted by a ringing telephone. It was a red contraption aside from his three normal phones, suggesting a hot-line to the Kremlin or the Batcave.

  Tiny scooped up the receiver, and said, ‘Derek, good to hear from you...’

  * * *

  ‘Since the franchise schmeer,’ April said, a drip of mayonnaise on her chin, ‘the whole building has gone batty.’

  Sally ate her half-bap in silence. She wasn’t the only one diverted from usual duties and hustled off to secret meetings.

  ‘They should put valium dispensers in the loos.’

  When the consort
ium 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.