Never Mind The Botox: Rachel (24 page)

She looked at her watch. Tim Archer was already ten minutes late. She grabbed the opportunity to try to prepare by flicking though their files and reminding herself of the information they had that might be useful.

Ten minutes later, Tim rushed into the room looking like a mad scientist who’d just blown himself up. His short brown hair was sticking up in all different directions, his tie was crooked, as were his glasses, and he was sweating profusely. He was wearing a badly fitting brown suit and a pair of very battered black shoes with incredibly thick soles that formed a ridge round the outer edges like an inflatable dingy. As a result, he bounced up and down as he walked.

Rachel stared at him. He couldn’t have been less like the sort of person she’d been expecting to meet. He made the deli sandwiches look almost posh in comparison. How could Beau Street have hired him to help with their image-driven marketing campaign? It was almost comical. Rachel concluded he couldn’t possibly have been at the pitch meeting.

‘Hello, you must be Rachel Altman,’ said Tim, proffering a large, sweaty hand that Rachel shook with as little contact as she could get away with. ‘So sorry I’m late. Traffic was rubbish, but I’d left the office too late anyway. Clive Steele has decided he’s going to join us. Sent me into a bit of a flat spin, actually, as he didn’t tell me until last night. You know what it’s like when the boss suddenly says he’s turning up. Makes you check your work a few more times, eh!’

Rachel couldn’t help smiling at his honesty.

‘That’s okay, don’t worry. Is he on his way?’ Rachel asked.

‘He’ll be here in about ten minutes. Said we should start as he can’t join us for the whole meeting – he’s having lunch with someone from here afterwards, I forget who.’ Tim stared absently into space, trying to remember.

‘Maybe Tom Duffy,’ Rachel suggested. ‘They know each other quite well I think.’

‘No, it’s a woman. I heard him on the phone in the office last night. Alice, Annie someone? Anyway, it doesn’t matter,’ said Tim.

‘Not Audrey Fox?’ Rachel asked in surprise. The nurse was turning up all over the place! Why would she be meeting Clive Steele?

‘Yes, that was it. Audrey Fox. Anyway, shall we get started?’

Tim sat down and started taking papers out of his briefcase.

Much to Rachel’s relief she found the meeting pretty easy. Most of the information Tim wanted they already had, and those bits they didn’t have wouldn’t take long to prepare.

‘You see, we just need some killer stats to make these headlines pack a punch. A top quality joint marketing plan is a really big part of making this deal work,’ said Tim. ‘The information you have as part of your report will really help with that.’

‘What like fifty per cent of women have bunions?’ Rachel asked, recalling Charles Sutton’s comments about the growth in toe reshaping.

‘I was thinking of something more like “We performed more than two thousand breast augmentations procedures last year, so when it comes to finding someone you can trust, we think size matters”,’ said Tim.

‘Very good,’ said Rachel, laughing. Maybe he was better than he looked. ‘We have all the details on the numbers of the procedures they’ve performed each year, so that’s easy,’ she said.

They were mid discussion on what else Tim needed when there was a knock on the door.

‘That will be Clive,’ said Tim, jumping up to let him in.

Clive Steele was short and stocky, with curly black hair and a moustache. He was wearing a navy blazer with gold buttons and a pair of beige trousers that were rather faded and stretched at the waist. The handkerchief in his breast pocket said smart, but it didn’t look like the rest of his clothes had been listening. His jacket had dandruff on the shoulders and the elbows were shiny with wear. His brown, slip-on loafers, once quite formal, were in need of a polish and showing their age. Rachel looked at him in amazement. What a pair he and Tim were. How on earth they’d landed this job she didn’t know. However he did look familiar. She thought she recognised his name, but she couldn’t work out how. She racked her brains.

‘Ah, Rachel Altman, how are you?’ said Clive, holding out a chubby hand.

He clearly knew who she was.

‘Gosh, I’m sorry, have we met? I did think your name seemed familiar but I’m afraid I couldn’t place it,’ said Rachel, rubbing her nose.

‘Oh, don’t worry, it was quite a few years ago and I guess you’ve probably tried very hard since to forget about me,’ said Clive, winking at her.

Rachel frowned. He was a bit creepy. What could he be talking about?

‘Corporate finance at Payne Stanley now, eh? Very impressive. I take it you’re not into climbing clock towers any more then?’ Clive asked, grinning at her slightly sleazily.

Rachel took a sharp intake of breath. How did he know about the clock tower? She’d been at university then.

‘How do you know about that? You seem, er, well…’

‘… older than you,’ Clive finished. ‘Yes, I am, much. I wasn’t a student; I was on the board of governors.’

Clive Steele from the board of governors at university. Holy fuck! Rachel’s memories came flooding back.

It had been a cold evening in November during her last year at university and Rachel and a group of friends had been out on a pub crawl. Rachel had a tutorial at ten o’clock the next morning and if past form was anything to go by she was likely to be late. She wasn’t that great at mornings, particularly after a big night out.

Rachel was also sleeping with her economics tutor. Adam Radford was twelve years older than Rachel, but still young for a university lecturer. Rachel had fallen in love with him the moment she saw him. He had collar-length blonde hair, green eyes and shoulders like a lumberjack. Instead of the usual corduroy trousers and jumpers with elbow patches, Adam was often to be seen in a tight-fitting t-shirt and black jeans, which caused Rachel to spend hours dreaming about taking them off. After a few weeks of following him around and generally swooning in his direction, she’d unashamedly thrown herself at him. It had worked.

They were soon spending most nights together, regularly making Rachel late for her classes. Adam was much more disciplined about getting up. In the centre of the university buildings was an ornate Victorian building with a small octagonal clock tower offset to one side. The clock chimed loudly on the hour, and as Rachel rushed late and sweating into Adam’s tutorials, he would often say, ‘The clock tower has chimed already, Rachel. We all heard it. Do please try to be on time.’ Rachel would look very serious and apologise, later catching his eye and giving him a long, smouldering look. Before long, the expression ‘making the clock chime’ took on a whole new meaning for them.

On the night of the pub crawl, Rachel had been drinking heavily. Each stop had involved at least one pint of lager or glass of wine, mostly followed by some hideous tasting liqueur chaser. As last orders were being called, Rachel had heard the clock tower chime and smiled to herself. As she played out the usual scene at Adam’s tutorial the next morning in her mind, she had a totally crazy idea. She should climb up the clock tower and change the time! That would be hilarious − she could turn up late for Adam’s tutorial the next morning and the clock wouldn’t have chimed. It would be her and Adam’s little secret, as only they would know what it meant.

She finished off her compulsory glass of sickly aniseed flavour green liqueur and wandered out of the pub into the cold evening air. She surveyed the climb in front of her. It didn’t look too hard. There was a large fire escape at one side of the tower that would take her onto an adjoining roof. She could scramble across the roof and then onto a wide ledge just below the clock. The hands of the clock would be easy to reach from there.

Apart from being quite steep, the fire escape was easy. Rachel got to the top and peered over the edge at the sixty or so foot drop below her. The top of the fire escape was attached to the wall just below the roof line and she had to stretch pretty high to get a good grip on the guttering and pull herself up on the roof. The roof tiles were much more slippery than she’d envisaged, and for the first time she started to feel a little scared. The cold was also starting to have a sobering effect and her short skirt and high heels weren’t ideal roof climbing attire.

She wriggled slowly commando style across the roof and over to the ledge by the clock tower. Swinging her legs over the edge of the roof, she managed to climb backwards onto the ledge and then slowly stand up. She’d made it! She reached up to the big hand on the clock face and tried to push it back. It wouldn’t move. She tried again, pushing as hard as she dare given her precarious position, but it still didn’t budge. Bugger! You must need to be inside the clock tower to move the hands.

She turned round and started to climb back. She reached up towards the gutter and pulled, but as she did, it started to come away from the wall. She slipped slightly on the ledge, letting out a sharp scream, and just managed to grab a drainpipe to steady herself. She waited a few moments until the panic had subsided a bit and then tried again, but the gutter just wasn’t strong enough to hold her.

As she hung on to the drainpipe, terrified and freezing cold, she heard a group of students laughing and joking below her and decided to shout for help. It took the students quite a few moments to work out where she was, and at first they thought it was quite funny. However, they soon realised that it really wasn’t and called the fire brigade. Rachel’s fingers were just starting to go numb as she heard the sirens of the fire engine approaching and, as a handsome young fireman helped her onto the rescue platform at the top of a very long ladder, she couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry.

News of the ‘clock tower incident’ spread like wildfire and for a short while she was almost a celebrity. Adam, however, hadn’t seen the funny side. After a long talk and lots of tears and pleading on Rachel’s side, he’d ended their relationship, citing ‘age differences’. And just as her heart was breaking, she was called in front of the university’s board of governors, including one very slimy Clive Steele, to explain her actions.

In a final act of kindness towards her, Adam had written a very supportive letter to the board, citing somewhat falsely what a talented student she was. In front of the board, Rachel had grovelled, begged and pleaded to be given another chance. In the end, they’d given her a written warning and a fine. Rachel then had to finish off her year being taught by a distant and very grown-up Adam. The whole experience had been totally humiliating.

And Rachel certainly didn’t need it being brought up now. She had quite enough on her plate and she didn’t think that Payne Stanley would see the funny side.

‘Yes, well, as you say, that was many years ago,’ said Rachel to Clive Steele in a brisk voice.

‘This all sounds very intriguing,’ said Tim. ‘Come on, fill me in. What’s the story here?’

‘It’s nothing,’ said Rachel. ‘Clive was a governor at my university, that’s all.’

Rachel looked pointedly at Clive.

‘Yes, I guess that’s all, for now,’ said Clive, raising one eyebrow. ‘How nice that we know each other, though. I’m sure that means we’ll be able to work very well together.’

Rachel didn’t like the implication in his voice or the leering look on his face. He clearly thought that he had something on her and it looked like he intended to make the most of it. Well, two could play at that game.

‘I understand that you know Audrey Fox,’ said Rachel. ‘Tim mentioned that you’re having lunch with her after this.’

Clive looked surprised and frowned at Tim, who shrugged back at him.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Clive. ‘Do you know her too?’

‘Only through this project. Is that how you got this assignment?’ Rachel asked, trying to look innocent. She couldn’t see how this pair of misfits had ended up working for Beau Street otherwise. There must be hundreds of other PR firms they could have chosen.

Clive shifted uncomfortably. ‘No, we were awarded the project after a competitive proposal. But Audrey is an old friend and she was very supportive of us during the process,’ said Clive.

Gave them the inside track more like, thought Rachel.

‘Yes, I understand Audrey is very good to her old friends,’ said Rachel.

She found it hard to believe that Audrey’s relationship with the distinctly dumpy Clive could be anything more than friendship. He was hardly in the same league as Carl, or Lloyd Cassidy for that matter.

Clive eyed Rachel sharply and changed the subject. ‘Perhaps we should get on,’ he said, sitting down next to Tim.

Rachel was sure she was onto something. And if she wanted to make sure that Clive didn’t start telling people about the clock tower story, she needed to get to the bottom of it.

Chapter 19

Carl came back to the project room at Beau Street about ten minutes before the three
o’clock meeting with Lloyd Cassidy and Audrey Fox was due to start. Rachel studied him carefully for outward signs that he’d met Audrey while he’d been gone. There were none. He was as calm and composed as when he’d left.

‘Did you get your calls done?’ Rachel asked.

‘Yes, thanks,’ Carl replied.

He wasn’t giving much away.

‘How was the partners’ lunch? Did you eat somewhere nice?’ Rachel asked.