To Play the King (2 page)

'Miss
Quine
. Sally. I'm so glad you could come. I've wanted to meet you for a long time.'

She knew that to be a lie. Had
he wanted to meet her before he
would most certainly have arranged it. Something had happened to make him want to meet her now, and alone. He escorted her into the main room around which the penthouse apartment was built. Its external walls were fashioned entirely of toughened glass, which offered a magnificent panorama of the parliament buildings across the Thames, and half a rain forest seemed to have been sacrificed to cover the floor in intricate wooden patterns. Not bad for a boy from the back streets of Bethnal Green, he occasionally admitted, but the description was redundant. They had all been back streets where he was born.

With so much light the apartment seemed to hover in the air, suspended halfway between street and sky, gazing down upon the politicians and law-makers on the other side of the river and thereby diminishing them to the scale and significance of punctuation marks in one of his editorials, an effect she felt sure was intentional. It was Olympus, an eyrie which seemed to cut them off from reality, and Sally off from any means of escape. But that was why she had come, the challenge of meeting a man of power face-to-face, the opportunity to test herself, to prove she was as good or better than any of them, perhaps to beat them at their own game and to get her own back. It might end in disaster, of course, in a crass attempt at physical flattery and seduction or even coercion, but it was a risk she had to take if she were to stand any chance of getting what she wanted. Risk was all part of the exhilaration.

He ushered her towards an oversized leather sofa in front of which stood a coffee table laden with trays of piping-hot breakfast food. There was no sign of the hidden helper who must only recently have prepared the dishes and laid out the crisp linen napkins. She declined any of the food but he was not offended. He took off his jacket and fussed about his own plate while she took a cup of black coffee and waited.

He ate his breakfast in single-minded fashion; etiquette and table manners were not his strong points. He offered little small talk, his attention focused on the eggs rather than on her, and for a while she wondered if he might have decided he'd made a mistake in inviting her. He was already making her feel vulnerable. Eggs finished, he wiped his mouth and pushed his plate away.

'Sally Quine. Born in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Aged thirty-two, and a girl who's already made quite a reputation for herself as an opinion pollster. In Boston, too, which is no easy city for a woman amongst all those thick-headed Micks.' She knew all about that; she'd married one. Landless had done his homework; he wanted to make that clear, and to know what she felt about her past being pawed over by him. His eyes searched for her reaction from beneath huge eyebrows tangled like rope. 'It's a lovely city, Boston, know it well. Tell me, why did you leave everything you'd built there and come to England to start all over again? From nothing?'

He paused, but got no reply. 'It was the divorce, wasn't it? And the death of the baby?'

He saw her jaw stiffen and wondered whether it was the start of a storm of outrage or a move for the door. But he knew there would be no tears. She wasn't the type, you could see that from her eyes. She was not unnaturally slim and pinched as the current fashion demanded, her beauty was more classical, the hips perhaps a half-inch too wide but all the curves well defined. She was immaculately presented. The skin of her face was smooth, darker and with more lustre than any English rose, the features carefully drawn as though by a sculptor's knife. The lips were full and expressive, the chin flat and the cheekbones high, her long hair thick and of such a deep shade of black that he thought she might be Italian or Jewish. It was a face full of strength and passion, capable of defying the world or captivating it as she chose. Yet her most exceptional feature was her nose, straight and a fraction long with a flattened end which twitched as she talked and nostrils which dilated with emphasis and emotion. It was the most provocative and sensuous nose he had ever seen; he couldn't help but imagine it on a pillow. Yet the eyes disturbed him, didn't belong on this face. They were shaped like almonds, uplifted, full of autumnal russets and greens, translucent like a cat's, yet, while the nose was prominent and almost public in its emotion, the eyes hid behind oversized spectacles. They didn't sparkle like a woman's should, like they probably once had, he thought. They had an edge of mistrust, as if holding something back, and when she concentrated her mouth turned down puckishly but defiantly at the corners. She was a woman who would not easily lose control, nor readily give of herself.

She looked out of the window, ignoring him. Christmas was but a couple of weeks away, yet there was no seasonal cheer in the air. It was a typical December scene for London, wet and dreary as if the day had not properly woken. Low clouds scudded across the sky, seemingly only feet above their heads. It was a day when Waterloo Bridge would be tap-tap-tapping to the sound of umbrella points as pedestrians hid inside their raincoats and tried to make it across to the other side before the next squall hit. Street traders would be cursing as they struggled to keep their Christmas stock from getting soaked while trying to entice customers out of the warm coffee shops and pubs. Another couple of pounds would be added to the fare of every mini-cab and to hell with the punter who argued. The festive spirit lay discarded in the running gutters, and somehow it didn't seem a propitious day for changing Prime Ministers.

A seagull beaten inland by North Sea storms cartwheeled outside the window, its shrieks and insults penetrating the double-glazing while it made repeated attacks on their position, envying them their breakfast and beating up against the window before finally tumbling away through the blustery sky. She watched it disappear into the greyness.

'Don't expect me to be upset or offended, Mr Landless. The fact that you have enough money and clout to do your homework doesn't impress me. Neither does it flatter me. I'm used to being chatted up by middle-aged businessmen.' The insult was intended; she wanted him to know he wasn't going to get away with one-way traffic. 'You want something from me. I've no idea what but I'll listen. So long as it's business.'

She crossed her legs slowly and deliberately so that he would notice. From her days as a child she had had no doubts that men found her body appealing and their excessive attention meant she had never had the opportunity to treat her sex as something to treasure, only as a tool to carve a path through a difficult and ungenerous world. She had decided long ago that if sex were to be the currency of life then she would turn it into a business asset, to open the doors which would otherwise be barred. While captains of industry drooled and got a tight sensation in their pants, she would put a contract under their noses and get them to sign. Men could be such dickheads. She saw Landless's eyes following her ankles. So, he was just like the rest of them and she had dressed for the part. A meanly cut black cashmere sweater which hugged those parts of her figure it didn't reveal and a Donna Karan skirt straight from Fifth Avenue which was tight and shorter than most professional women would dare to wear but not so short as to make her seem a tart. Anyway, she had the legs for it. And she wore a fashionable and expensive silk-cotton jacket from Harvey Nicks which hung loosely over her shoulders. She could shift around inside it and either expose her cashmere-covered breasts or hide them, as she chose. It was all part of the risk, of the tension of dealing with men and exploiting their weaknesses. She dressed to dominate and to be in control. Power dressing. And in the tight-assed business circles of London it seemed to work all the more effectively. 'You're very direct, Miss Quine.'

'I prefer to cut through it rather than spread it. And I can play your game.' She sat back into the sofa and began counting off the carefully manicured fingers of her left hand. 'Ben Landless. Age . . . well, for your well-known vanity's sake, let's say not quite menopausal. A rough son-of-a-bitch who was born to nothing and now controls one of the largest press operations in this country.'

'Soon to be the largest,' he interrupted quietly.

'Soon to take over United Newspapers,' she nodded, 'when the Prime Minister you nominated, backed and got elected virtually single-handed takes over in a couple of hours' time and waves aside the minor inconvenience of his predecessor's mergers an
d monopolies policy. You must've
been celebrating all night, I'm surprised you had the appetite for breakfast. But you have the reputation of being a man with insatiable appetites. Of all kinds. So what's on your mind, Ben?' She spoke almost seductively in an accent that had been smoothed and carefully softened but not obliterated. She wanted people to take notice and to remember, to pick her out from the crowd. So the vowels were still New England, a shade too long and lazy for London, and the sentiments often rough as if they had been fashioned straight from the dole queues of Dorchester.

A smile played around the publisher's rubbery lips as he contemplated his good fortune and her defiance, but his eyes remained unmoved, watching her closely. His humour seemed confined to the lower half of his face, not touching his eyes nor penetrating beneath the skin. There is no deal. I backed him because I thought he was the best man for the job, but there's no private pay-off. I shall take my chances, just like all the rest.'

She suspected that was the second lie of the conversation, but let it pass.

'Whatever else happens, it's a new era. A change of Prime Minister means fresh challenges. And opportunities. I suspect he'll be more relaxed about getting the wheels of business turning and letting people make money than was Henry Collingridge. That's good news for me. And potentially for you.'

'With all the economic indicators scooting downhill?'

'That's just the point. Your opinion-research company has been in business for . . . what, twenty months? You've made a good start, you're well respected. But you're small, and small boats like yours could be swamped if the economy gets rough over the next couple of years. Anyway, you've no more patience than I do in running a shoestring operation. You want to make it big, to be on top. And for that you need cash.'

'Not your cash. If I had newspaper money poured into my operation it would ruin every shred of credibility I've built. My business is supposed to be objective analysis, not smears and scares with a few naked starlets thrown in to boost circulation.'

He ran his thick tongue around his mouth as if trying absent-mindedly to dislodge a piece of breakfast. 'You underestimate yourself,' he muttered. He produced a toothpick, which he used like a sword-swallower to probe into a far corner of his jaw. 'Opinion polls are not objective analysis. They're news. If an editor wants to get an issue rolling he commissions people like you to carry out some research. He knows what answers he wants and what headline he's going to run, he just needs a few statistics to give the whole thing the smack of authenticity. Opinion polls are the weapons of civil war. Kill off a government, show the nation's morals are shot to hell, establish that we all love Palestinians or hate apple pie. You don't need facts, just the blessing of an opinion poll.'

He grew more animated as he warmed to his theme. His hands had come down from his mouth and were grasped in front of him as if throttling an incompetent editor. There was no sign of the toothpick; perhaps he had simply swallowed it, as he did most things which got in his way.

'Information is power,' he continued. 'And money. A lot of your work is done in the City, for instance, with companies involved in takeover bids. Your little polls tell them how shareholders and the financial institutions might react, whether they'll be supportive or simply dump the company for a bit of quick cash. You can discover how opinion is running amongst the analysts and financial journalists, not over some wine-sodden lunch at the Savoy Grill with a company chairman but back at their desks, where it matters. Takeover bids are wars, life or death for the companies concerned, and your job is to tell them whose guts are most likely to be spread over the floor at the end of the day. That information has great value.'

'And we charge a very good fee for such work.'

'I'm not talking thousands or te
ns of thousands,' he barked dis
missively. 'That's petty cash in the City. The sort of information we're talking about allows you to name your own figure, if you make it work for you.' He paused to see if there would be a squawk of impugned professional integrity; instead she reached behind her to pull down her jacket, which had ridden up against the back of the sofa. As she did so she exposed and accentuated the rounded curves at the top of her breasts. He took it as a sign of encouragement.

'You need money. To expand. To grab the polling industry by the balls and to become its undisputed queen. Otherwise you go belly-up in the recession. Be a great waste.'

'I'm flattered by your avuncular interest.'

'You're not here to be flattered. You're here to listen to a proposition.'

'I've known that from the moment I got your invitation. Although for a moment there I thought we'd wound up on the lecture circuit.'

Instead of responding he levered himself out of his chair and crossed to the window. The gun-grey clouds had descended still lower and it had begun to rain. A barge was battling to make headway through the ebbing tide beneath Westminster Bridge where the December winds had turned the usually tranquil river into a muddy, ill-tempered soup of urban debris and bilge oil. He gazed in the direction of the Houses of Parliament, his hands stuffed firmly into the folds of his tent-like trousers, scratching himself.