Project Rumour Part Two

This is the second in a series about a character who uses rumour, gossip, insinuation and whatever else comes to hand to climb the ladder of success. Read the first story here.

The Eye of the Storm

Justin’s funeral was held in a small Norman church in the East Sussex village where he had taken his first steps. The Kingsholme family had occupied the manor house since it had been built during the reign of Elizabeth Ⅰ, and Charles Kingsholme, the grieving father, was not about to let the walls come tumbling down. Scandal and tragedy were not unknown to the Kingsholmes – Charles later sent me a leather-bound copy of the family history – but Justin’s death put an end to a post-war run in which nothing of interest had occurred. I have no doubt that a few discreet enquiries would have turned up the odd servant who had left under a cloud and/or with a bun in the oven, but would anyone honestly be shocked by that? The church was packed with family and friends, all of whom remained tight-lipped despite the scotch and sherry dispensed by uniformed staff in the great hall after the interment in the family plot. Lawson Humphries was represented by two Partners and yours truly, whose job it was to keep the peace between Buffett and Bentley and to impress upon anyone who asked that Justin had been a true friend and gifted colleague, albeit one which the company had let go just over three weeks before he opened his wrists and bled to death in the bath.

Poor Charles. His stiff upper lip was rock-solid during the service while all around sobbed into handkerchiefs and gripped the pew in front. Afterwards, I watched him stride between the groups in the great hall, accepting condolences, handshakes and a couple of awkward embraces with a dignity I mistook for coldness. It wasn’t until he invited me into his cigar room that I understood his pain. He pointed me to a wing chair and took his Cohiba to the window. I let him smoke and stare while I composed the speech I felt sure he wanted to hear. I like to find the right words in these circumstances and was shocked out of my thoughts when his palm struck the glass. He leaned his forehead into the back of his hand and let out a rumbling moan.

‘My son. My only son.’

‘A terrible loss, Mr. Kingsholme. For us all.’

‘Charles, please.’

I stepped forward with a clean hanky, but he waved me away. He composed himself with a long draw on his cigar and sent forth a plume of smoke which had reached me by the time he plunged into the chair opposite.

‘Such a shock.’

‘To us all, Charles.’

‘To his mother especially; and to me.’

‘One can only imagine...’

‘To his friends too?’

He was desperate for the ins and outs of his son’s social life. He wanted to know, without having to ask, if the rumours were true. Justin had left no note and for all I knew I was the only person to whom he had revealed his sexuality and even then it was no more than a hint and the look he gave me. In the years since, I have fabricated many a story in order to create the illusion of what Charles Kingsholme would recognise as a solid family man, but in that room at that moment what came out was a version of the truth; one which served to comfort the family in its hour of need while ensuring that any putative investigations into the source of the rumours were closed down once and for all. I had put myself in the eye of the storm because that was the best position to be in if one was to be free from suspicion.

‘None of us can quite believe what has happened.’

‘You didn’t see it coming?’

‘Good God, no.’

‘What about his other friends? Did you meet them?’

‘Quite a few yes. A good bunch, all told.’

‘The usual rugger and school crowd, I expect.’

‘Very much so, Charles.’

‘And girls? Were there girls?’

And there it was: the question he had wanted to ask from the moment we had entered his inner sanctum; the instrument of his torture from the second he had walked into a room at the yacht club or onto a tee at the golf course and had overheard two old chums repeating something one of their offspring had heard at an intimate weekend supper in town.

‘No one special; not as far as I know; but who does at our age, Charles?’

‘Playing the field?’ His eyes brightened at the thought and I left it at that, citing an obligation to check on the Partners.

There had been no time to play the field – any field – at Lawson Humphries as Justin and I jostled, albeit sportingly, for the permanent position. And so it continued. I was finding it difficult to enjoy my success in an office haunted by my old flat mate and so the best thing to do was keep my head down until the trip to Azerbaijan, postponed out of respect for the intern who had done much of the leg work, was back on. Two months after the posting had first been mooted I was on a plane to Baku with Andy Buffett, the innocent and unwitting source of Justin’s shame. Like everyone else at LH, he was impressed by my ability to carry on under such challenging conditions and as we taxied along the runway at Heathrow he told me, not for the first time, how commendable it was of me to step into Justin’s shoes on this project. In truth I was exhausted and relieved to be getting out of London, where the rumour mill runs 24/7 and if you aren’t feeding it then it will feast on you. These were the early days, you understand; I was still in training and nowhere near peak fitness.

The Azeri operation was very much under the radar and in retrospect this might have been where I developed my appetite for the cloak and dagger. Regimes of varying political colours had been sucking oil and gas out of the desert for well over a century, but still, it felt like the Wild West. Not the stuff of bordellos and whiskey bars – although they were there if you looked hard enough – but more like a sense that anything was possible and this was a place where a person could carve out a name and a fortune for himself. The ex-pat community was a small one which thrived on – you guessed it – rumour and gossip; I could not have asked for a better place in which to continue my education. For the first few months I moved between our unexceptional lodgings to our office in a (mercifully) air-conditioned building and in the evenings to one of several hotel bars where the movers, shakers and fixers broadcast opinions, bought, sold and swapped information and traded blows: vodka does strange things to men set loose in alien lands. I kept my nose clean in the office and my mouth shut in the bars. Andy Buffett, for whom the whiff of opportunity was tempered by the putrid machismo – don’t you just love an idealist? – maintained a professional distance from the nocturnal shenanigans, but he was more than happy to have a willing helper with an ear to the ground. Our professional contacts introduced us to the heads of government departments and military personnel who made the decisions about which companies would get to drill in the exploratory fields; and my barroom contacts pointed to those who were open to, shall we say, persuasion. We got off to a rocky start in this respect, thanks to a failure on my part to recognise a bum steer.

I would not have identified it as guilt or grief, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that all was not square regarding Justin’s death. It didn’t help that his cousin, one Jolyon Kingsholme, popped up from time to time. I would have preferred to have had nothing to do with him, but his had been the tip which had landed LH in Baku and he held a senior position at our client. He sought me out as people do, and let me know over several beers over several evenings how much the family was struggling to cope with its loss.

‘Don’t take this the wrong way old bean, but we all thought Justin was a shoo-in for your position; not least given my help in securing this contract.’

‘I was as surprised as anyone at the way things turned out.’

‘Perhaps not as surprised as Justin?’

‘Indeed.’

‘And then there’s JB.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Bentley. I know it was his decision; and everyone knows what he’s like. One misstep away from retirement and yet bold as...’

‘I always found Mr. Bentley to be straight down the line.’ [It doesn’t hurt to spring to a villain’s defence once in a while.]

‘Quite right. You should be loyal to your benefactor.’

It was that word – benefactor – that stuck in my mind later that evening as I was brushing my teeth in tepid brown water and preparing for another night with one eye open for the camel spiders and sweating through the sheets to my single mattress. London was three thousand miles away and yet here I was, still connected to Bentley and back in the eye of the storm. Whether the Kingsholmes wanted revenge or an explanation for what had happened to Justin, or both, I had no desire to be the fall guy. Working out how to confirm their suspicions that James Bentley had not played fair with Justin took up too much time and energy; Randall Thompson must have seen me coming.

Thompson was one of those men you saw whatever bar you walked into. He had the look of someone who had been on the ground in Baku since forever, which in this case meant the collapse of the Soviet Union. His Texan drawl – looking back, it was cultivated – was often the first thing you heard above the tinny pop music. He loved the sound of his own voice and the rest of us had no choice but to hear it. He described himself as a Consultant and when pushed he would add ‘to the Oil and Gas, and any other, haw haw, industries.’ He bought drinks so he was tolerated and he spoke Russian which everyone admitted was useful. I should have recognised a fellow trader in hearsay and keeper of notes, but when Andy Buffett tasked me with compiling a dossier about a government minister whose name I dare not use, I turned to him. My head was busy with my stratagem for dealing with James Bentley and I assumed that Andy was looking for background, so I risked a quiet chat with Thompson.

‘Tread carefully in your dealings with that one.’

‘Really?’

‘You looking to set something up?’

‘Isn’t everyone?’

‘You’re aiming high though?’

‘Our client is ambitious.’

‘Who’s your client again?

‘You know the score Randall. I’m...’

‘...not at liberty to say.’

‘I’m sure someone with your experience understands the value of confidentiality.’

‘I sure do. As does your man, but he likes to know who he is dealing with.’

‘We won’t be hiding anything from the minister.’

‘Of course not. You see the thing is, there’s a reason he likes to know.’

‘Like I say, he will know.’

‘If you get to see him.’

‘I think we already have an appointment.’

‘But when he discovers whoever it is you are representing, you might hit one or two problems.’ At this point Thompson held his hairy hand to my face and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together.

I had Andy Buffett in one ear and Jolyon Kingsholme, whenever he chose to track me down, in the other. Added to that I was receiving offers of help from all and sundry. Randall Thompson had not kept quiet about our conversation and shadier characters than him were buying me drinks and offering me counsel when I stepped into the ex-pat haunts. When our meeting with the minister was cancelled at the last moment, Buffett went ballistic: ‘Two months of fucking work down the fucking pan. London is not going to be happy. I don’t care how, but get this sorted.’ All I could think was London might not be happy, but Bentley will be chuckling away.

‘There might be a way to get things moving again.’

‘Go on.’

‘Not strictly...’

Buffett waved a palm at me and held a finger to his lips. He grabbed my arm and took me out of the office, into the lift and down to the street below.

‘Partners cannot be seen to get involved, but there is a slush fund.’

They don’t like getting their hands dirty; maybe they did on their way up, but once they get to the top, Partners and other heads of business, like their politician friends, develop a distaste for battle and a desire for purity. They know about the slush funds, but it won’t ever be their paws dipping into the honey jar. In those days I had no experience of such matters, but I won’t deny the thrill it gave me to hand fifty thousand dollars in mixed notes to Randall Thompson. I never saw him again and when I requested a meeting with the minister’s senior aide, he had never heard of him. Thompson’s parting gift was a drunken boast to Joel Harris, a goggle-eyed stringer who sourced most of his articles from his stool at the resident’s bar in the Holiday Inn. Harris telephoned the office one morning for a comment on a story about a junior aide at a British law firm who had been conned out of a large amount of cash. Evidently Thompson had not named names and I was able to express surprise that someone so green would have been given the authority to make such a payment. Lawson Humphries had long established protocols for unorthodox transactions, I assured Harris; and under no circumstances would the company participate in corruption on behalf of our clients. This seemed to disappoint him, but I reasoned that he would be unwilling to leave his office bar to corroborate Thompson’s bluster. Those were the days when even the sloppiest of journalists stuck to the two-source rule.

I might have killed the story, but that was not the end of the matter. Every time I crossed the threshold of an ex-pat hangout I felt the eyes on me. I saw the nudges and heard the cackles. Wherever I went, someone would offer me a drink because ‘the word is that you’re a little out of pocket’. Sometimes I took the drinks, if only to play along, but I neither denied not admitted being Thompson’s mark. It was good training for holding one’s ground in trying circumstances and besides, like I said, Baku is three thousand miles from London and nearly six from the Eastern seaboard of the USA. And by one of those strokes of luck that seem determined to attach themselves to me, the minister in question was, as it turned out, utterly incorruptible. When I contacted his aide to follow up on the cancellation of our meeting, instead of excuse and prevarication I was offered sincere apologies and invited to lunch. The aide took a liking to me – I can turn on the charm – and I was able to schedule a new appointment for Andy Buffett. Putting the fake Texan and his ill-gotten gains to one side, things could not have turned out better. Until Andy lost his cool for a second time after hearing a version of the Thompson debacle from Jolyon Kingsholme.

‘Look, I know how these things work, but it has to be done on the QT.’

‘The meeting’s back on, Andy.’

‘Yes, but for the client to have got wind...’

‘Is this something we should be discussing?’

‘Bloody Kingsholme. He delighted in telling me.’

‘Telling you what?’

‘About the money?’

‘What money? Whose money?’

‘Are you shitting me? Because if you are...’

‘What did he say exactly? Did he use any names?’

‘No, but he implied that it might have had something to do with you. And me.’

‘But the meeting’s back on.’

‘He’s not going to let it go. He reminded me about reputation management.’

‘But that’s our job.’

‘But we can’t be seen to be doing it. Christ, if this gets back to London.’

‘Let’s give him something else to think about then.’

Have you guessed where we are headed? What was the one thing guaranteed to shift Jolyon Kingsholme’s focus from Baku? Who was lurking in London unpunished for his role in Justin’s death? Andy was again unwilling to sully his mitts, but was strangely happy for me to dip into my own slush fund, recorded as it was in a certain Moleskin notebook.

‘Bentley? No way.’

‘I’m not comfortable speaking ill of a Partner...’

‘We’re not taking minutes here.’

‘It didn’t sit right with me, how he took against Justin.’

‘It’s well known that he has favourites. Are you telling me he made a mistake choosing you?’

‘I’m not saying he made the wrong decision, but I do wonder about his reasons...’ [Sit back and pretend you are thinking. Let your audience catch up.]

‘Go on.’

‘Given what happened afterwards...’ [Sit back again. Adopt a look of concern or fear.]

‘With Justin?’

‘There was one time in the gym. We were running intervals on the treadmills. You were spotting Justin.’

‘I enjoy the weights.’

‘It was something Mr. Bentley said at the time. I put it to the back of my mind, but you must have heard the rumours. The Kingsholmes were distraught.’

‘Does it matter if he was gay or not?’

‘Maybe not to you and me. But the thing is, we shared a flat for six months and there were no signs. I can’t help wondering if someone made it up. Someone who made jokes to me about you and Justin and who made the decision to let him go.’

Andy took his time to digest what I was saying and I had to stop myself going further. You have to let people form their own opinions and plans of action. Consummate professional as he was, he was in no mind to spill the beans himself. He suggested I might want to drop everything I had told him into the conversation the next time I ran into Jolyon. He had everything this man: a lovely set of teeth; a fine business pedigree; and a comprehensive understanding of dark ops. I would have done anything for him.

When we returned to London, James Bentley’s name had been removed from the company letterhead and his office was empty. Andy Buffett enjoyed the celebrity of a returning war hero and to give him his due he let it be known that I was the kind of person who could get things done. I wondered if he was perhaps too enthusiastic about gifting me some of the glory for landing our client the biggest oil extraction contract ever handed out to a foreign company in Azerbaijan; but I still had my notebook and if he had any ideas about pushing me out I only had to remind him that he had been the Partner ultimately responsible for letting fifty thousand dollars (US) escape the slush fund. Not that such a thing existed. And what about the unspoken rule that no Partner should ever make a move against a fellow Partner? How could a trainee of less than twelve months experience possibly have persuaded a client to insist upon the removal of a much loved and well-respected colleague? Having seen me in action, it was in Andy’s best interest to keep me close and content; but I’d had enough of Lawson Humphries and its troublesome reminders of the past. It was time to move on.