Come to Grief (27 page)

“Yes,” she said enthusiastically. “Mr. Yorkshire, he likes things nice.”

“Is he the boss?”

“The chief executive officer.” She nodded. The words sounded stiff and unfamiliar, as if she’d only newly learned them.

“Nice to work for, is he?” I suggested.

She confessed, “I haven’t met him yet. I know what he looks like, of course, but ... I’m new here, like I said.”

I smiled sympathetically and asked what Owen Yorkshire looked like.

She was happy to tell me, “He’s ever so
big.
He’s got a big head and a lovely lot of hair, wavy like.”

“Mustache?” I suggested. “Beard?”

“No,” she giggled. “And he’s not
old.
Not a grand-dad. Everyone gets out of his way.”

Do they indeed, I thought.

She went on, “I mean, Mrs. Dove, she’s my boss really, she’s the office manager, she says not to make him angry, whatever I do. She says just to do my job. She has a lovely office. It used to be Mr. Yorkshire’s own, she says.”

Miss Rowse, shaped like a woman, chattered like a child.

“Topline Foods must be doing all right to have rich new offices like these,” I said admiringly.

“They’ve got the TV cameras coming tomorrow to set up for Monday. They brought dozens of potted plants round this morning. Ever so keen on publicity, Mrs. Dove says Mr. Yorkshire is.”

“The plants do make it nice and homey,” I said. “Which TV company, do you know?”

She shook her head. “All the Liverpool big noises are coming to a huge reception on Monday. The TV cameras are going all over the factory. Of course, although they’re going to have all the machines running, they won’t really make any nuts on Monday. It will all be pretend.”

“Why’s that?”

“Security. They have to be security mad, Mrs. Dove says. Mr. Yorkshire worries about people putting things in the feed, she says.”

“What things?”

“I don’t know. Nails and safety pins and such. Mrs. Dove says all the searching at the entrance is Mr. Yorkshire’s idea.”

“Very sensible,” I said.

An older and more cautious woman came into the office, revealing herself to be the fount of wisdom, Mrs. Dove. Middle-aged and personally secure, I thought. Status, ability and experience all combining in priceless efficiency.

“Can I help you?” she said to me civilly, and to the girl, “Marsha dear, I thought we’d agreed you would always come to me for advice.”

“Miss Rowse has been really helpful,” I said. “She’s going to find someone to answer my question. Perhaps you could yourself?”

Mrs. Dove (gray hair pinned high under a flat black bow, high heels, customer-relations neat satin shirt, cinched waist and black tights) listened with slowly glazing eyes to my expanding tale of the nutty farmer.

“You need our Willy Parrott,” she said when she could insert a comment. “Come with me.”

I waggled conspiratorial fingers at Marsha Rowse and followed Mrs. Dove’s busy back view along the expensive passage with little partitioned but mostly empty offices on each side. She continued through a thick fire door at the end, to emerge on a gallery around an atrium in the main factory building, where the nuts came from.

Rising from the ground, level almost to the gallery, were huge mixing vats, all with paddles circulating, activated from machinery stretching down from above. The sounds were an amalgam of whir, rattle and slurp: the air bore fine particles of cereal dust and it looked like a brewery, I thought. It smelled rather the same also, but without the fermentation.

Mrs. Dove passed me thankfully on to a man in brown overalls who inspected my dark clothes and asked if I wanted to be covered in fall-out.

“Not particularly.”

He raised patient eyebrows and gestured to me to follow him, which I did, to find myself on an iron staircase descending one floor, along another gallery and ending in a much-used battered little cubby-hole of an office, with a sliding glass door that he closed behind us.

I commented on the contrast from the office building.

“Fancy fiddle-faddle,” he said. “That’s for the cameras. This is where the work is done.”

“I can see that,” I told him admiringly. “Now, lad,” he said, looking me up and down, unimpressed, “what is it you want?”

He wasn’t going to be taken in very far by the farmer twaddle. I explained in a shorter version and produced the folded paper bearing the analysis of the nuts from Combe Bassett and the Land-Rover, and asked if it was a Topline formula.

He read the list that by then I knew by heart.

“Where did you get this?” he asked.

“From a farmer, like I told you.”

“This list isn’t complete,” he said.

“No ... but is it enough?”

“It doesn’t give percentages. I can’t possibly match it to any of our products.” He folded the paper and gave it back. “Your cubes might be our supplement feed for horses out at grass. Do you know anything about horses?”

“A little.”

“Then, the more oats you give them, the more energy they expend. Racehorses need more oats. I can’t tell you for sure if these cubes were for racehorses in training unless I know the proportion of oats.”

“They weren’t racehorses in training.”

“Then your farmer friend couldn’t do better than our Sweetfield mix. They do contain everything on your list.”

“Are other people’s cubes much different?”

“There aren’t very many manufacturers. We’re perhaps fourth on the league table but after this advertisement campaign we expect that to zoom up. The new management aims for the top.”

“But ... um ... do you have enough space?”

“Capacity?”

I nodded.

He smiled. “Owen Yorkshire has plans. He talks to us man to man.” His face and voice were full of approval. “He’s brought the old place back to life.”

I said inoffensively, “Mrs. Dove seems in awe of his anger.”

Willy Parrott laughed and gave me a male chauvinist-type wink. “He has a flaming temper, has our Owen Yorkshire. And the more a man for that.”

I looked vaguely at some charts taped to a wall. “Where does he come from?” I asked.

“Haven’t a clue,” Willy told me cheerfully. “He knows bugger all about nutrition. He’s a salesman, and
that’s
what we needed. We have a couple of nerds in white coats working on what we put in all the vats.”

He was scornful of scientists as well as women. I turned back from the wall charts and thanked him for his time. Very interesting job, I told him. Obviously he ran the department that mattered most.

He took the compliment as his due and saved me the trouble of asking by offering to let me tag along with him while he went to his next task, which was to check a new shipment of wheat. I accepted with an enthusiasm that pleased him. A man good at his job often enjoyed an audience, and so did Willy Parrott.

He gave me a set of over-large brown overalls and told me to clip the identity card on the outside, like his own.

“Security is vital,” he said to me. “Owen’s stepped it all up. He lectures us on not letting strangers near the mixing vats. I can’t let you any nearer than this. Our competitors wouldn’t be above adding foreign substances that would put us out of business.”

“D‘you mean it?” I said, looking avid.

“You have to be specially careful with horse feed,” he assured me, sliding open his door when I was ready. “You can’t mix cattle feed in the same vats, for instance. You can put things in cattle feed that are prohibited for racehorses. You can get traces of prohibited substances in the horse cubes just by using the same equipment, even if you think you’ve cleaned everything thoroughly.”

There had been a famous example in racing of a trainer getting into trouble by unknowingly giving his runners contaminated nuts.

“Fancy,” I said.

I thought I might have overdone the impressed look I gave him, but he accepted it easily.

“We do nothing else except horse cubes here,” Willy said. “Owen says when we expand we’ll do cattle feed and chicken pellets and all sorts of other muck, but I’ll be staying here, Owen says, in charge of the equine branch.”

“A top job,” I said with admiration.

He nodded. “The best.”

We walked along the gallery and came to another fire door, which he lugged open.

“All these internal doors are locked at night now, and there’s a watchman with a dog. Very thorough, is Owen.” He looked back to make sure I was following, then stopped at a place from which we could see bags marked with red maple leaves traveling upward on an endless belt of bag-sized ledges, only to be tumbled off the top and be manhandled by two smoothly swinging muscular workers.

“I expect you saw those two security men in the entrance hall?” Willy Parrott said, the question of security not yet exhausted.

“They frisked me.” I grinned. “Going a bit far, I thought.”

“They’re Owen’s private bodyguards,” Willy Parrott said with a mixture of awe and approval. “They’re real hard men from Liverpool. Owen says he needs them in case the competitors try to get rid of him the old-fashioned way.”

I frowned disbelievingly. “Competitors don’t kill people.”

“Owen says he’s taking no risks because he definitely is trying to put other firms out of business, if you look at it that way.”

“So you think he’s right to need bodyguards?”

Willy Parrott turned to face me and said, “It’s not the world I was brought up in, lad. But we have to live in this new one, Owen says.”

“I suppose so.”

“You won’t get far with that attitude, lad.” He pointed to the rising bags. “That’s this year’s wheat straight from the prairie. Only the best is good enough, Owen says, in trade wars.”

He led the way down some nearby concrete stairs and through another heavy door, and I realized we were on ground level, just off the central atrium. With a smile of satisfaction he pushed through one more door and we found ourselves amid the vast mixing vats, pygmies surrounded by giants.

He enjoyed my expression.

“Awesome,” I said.

“You don’t need to go back upstairs to get out,” he said. “There’s a door out to the yard just down here.”

I thanked him for his advice about the nuts for the farmer, and for showing me around. I’d been with him for half an hour and couldn’t reasonably stretch it further, but while I was in midsentence he looked over my shoulder and his face changed completely from man-in-charge to subservient subject.

I turned to see what had caused this transformation and found it not to be a Royal Person but a large man in white overalls accompanied by several anxious blue-clad attendants who were practically walking backwards.

“Morning, Willy,” said the man in white. “Everything going well?”

“Yes, Owen. Fine.”

“Good. Has the Canadian wheat come up from the docks?”

“They’re unloading it now, Owen.”

“Good. We should have a talk about future plans. Come up to my new office at four this afternoon. You know where it is? Top floor, turn right from the lift, like my old office.”

“Yes, Owen.”

“Good.”

The eyes of the businessman glanced my way briefly and incuriously, and passed on. I was wearing brown overalls and an identity card, after all, and looked like an employee. Not an employee of much worth, either, with my over-big overalls wrinkling around my ankles and drooping down my arms to the fingers. Willy didn’t attempt to explain my presence, for which I was grateful. Willy was almost on his knees in reverence.

Owen Yorkshire was, without doubt, impressive. Easily over six feet tall, he was simply large, but not fat. There was a lot of heavy muscle in the shoulders, and a trim, sturdy belly. Luxuriant closely waving hair spilled over his collar, with the beginnings of gray in the lacquered wings sweeping back from above his ears. It was a hairstyle that in its way made as emphatic a statement as Jonathan’s. Owen Yorkshire intended not only to rule but to be remembered.

His accent was not quite Liverpool and not at all London, but powerful and positive. His voice was unmistakably an instrument of dominance. One could imagine that his rages might in fact shake the building. One could have sympathy with his yes-men.

Willy said “Yes, Owen,” several more times.

The man-to-man relationship that Willy Parrott prized so much extended, I thought, not much further than the use of first names. True, Owen Yorkshire’s manner to Willy was of the “we’re all in this together” type of management technique, and seemed to be drawing the best out of a good man; but I could imagine the boss also finding ways of getting rid of his Willy Parrott, if it pleased him, with sad shrugs and “you know how it is these days, we no longer
need
a production manager just for horse cubes; your job is computerized and phased out. Severance pay? Of course. See my secretary. No hard feelings.”

I hoped it wouldn’t happen to Willy.

Owen Yorkshire and his satellites swept onwards. Willy Parrott looked after him with pride tinged very faintly with anxiety.

“Do you work tomorrow?” I asked. “Is the factory open on Saturdays?”

He reluctantly removed his gaze from the Yorkshire back view and began to think I’d been there too long.

“We’re opening on Saturdays from next week,” he said. “Tomorrow they’re making more advertising films. There will be cameras all over the place, and on Monday, too. We won’t get anything useful done until Tuesday.” He was full of disapproval, but he would repress all that, it was clear, for man-to-man Owen. “Off you go then, lad. Go back to the entrance and leave the overalls and identity tag there.”

I thanked him again and this time went out into the central yard, which since my own arrival had become clogged with vans and truckloads of television and advertising people. The television contingent were from Liverpool. The advertisement makers, according to the identification on their vans, were from Intramind Imaging (Manchester) Ltd.