Corporate Bodies

by Simon Brett

  ‘So he wasn’t making any point by getting the video shown?’

  ‘No, Chowss, he doesn’t work like that. Daryl was just miffed that he had to go and sit through hours of rehearsal when all he was going to have to do was say “Thank you very much for my car”. So he thought “What can I do to liven things up a bit? I know, bung the bloke in the control box a flyer – get him to show a smutty video.” That’s how his mind works. It’s only a joke – that’s Daryl all over.’

  She looked affectionately across the bar to where her husband was drinking and swapping either scatological jokes or custom car minutiae with a bunch of fellow salesmen.

  Charles was inclined to believe her. It would have been in character for Daryl to stage that kind of meaningless prank. And there was no reason to believe that the Top Salesman had any suspicions about Dayna Richman’s death, so he really had no other motive for doing it.

  For Charles, on the other hand, the video – or rather Ken Colebourne’s reaction to it – had triggered an avalanche of new thoughts.

  The Marketing Director’s first response, before he saw what was actually being shown, was the one that mattered. He had panicked, thinking what was on the screen was not a commercial product, but a secretly-filmed video of a man and a woman making love.

  Charles only knew of one person in the Delmoleen set-up who had ever been into that kind of stuff. Dayna.

  She had tried to persuade Trevor to film her with a sexual partner, and blackmail seemed to be a speciality of hers. Even though the forklift operator said he’d refused her request, it was quite possible that she’d found someone else more ready to co-operate. Or indeed she could have set up the apparatus herself. It wouldn’t have been a problem; camcorders were getting easier to use all the time.

  Assuming then that such a blackmailing tape existed – and Ken Colebourne’s reaction suggested he knew it did – the question arose as to who was Dayna’s co-star.

  And Charles didn’t reckon he had to look far for the answer. Dayna Richman had made no secret of her intention to screw her way to the top. She had confronted Brian Tressider in an unequivocally sexy way in the warehouse on the day she died. And, what was more, he had been on the premises at the time when her ‘accident’ happened. The scandal her disclosure of their relationship might cause to a man in his position was quite sufficient motive for murder.

  All the evidence suddenly seemed to be pointing in the same direction.

  “Well, all that looks bloody boring.’

  Shelley’s words brought him back to the present. She was looking disparagingly at a printed sheet of paper.

  ‘What’s that?’

  “The Wives’ Programme.”’ Her voice was heavy with irony. ‘Always at these conferences they set up some exciting things for the little ladies to do while the men are stuck in meetings.’ She held the paper out. ‘Look – “Visit to the Royal Pavilion and tour of its kitchens; Shopping in the Lanes; Lunch; then a Tour of a Local Winery, followed by Cream Tea” . . . Well, stuff that for a game of soldiers!’

  ‘Doesn’t appeal?’

  ‘No, bleeding boring. Got all the other wives to cope with, apart from anything else. Dreary load of old bags most of them are. And dear Brenda Tressider leading us on, like some bleeding Chief Guide or Brown Owl. Won’t catch me doing any of that, I can tell you.’

  ‘So how’re you proposing to spend tomorrow?’ asked Charles.

  Shelley grinned a rather mischievous little grin. ‘Thought I might look for some entertainment here.’

  ‘Here? What, at the conference, you mean?’

  ‘Nah. Upstairs in my room is what I mean. Do I make myself clear?’

  She certainly did. Charles was once again struck by how very attractive she was. Shelley Fletcher had that overt sexiness which can always override masculine better judgement.

  She chuckled throatily. ‘Might you be free then during the day tomorrow, Chowss?’

  He was hooked instantly. ‘Well, yes. I’ve got to do the Confectionery presentation, but that’s first thing in the morning, so, say, after eleven . . . yes, I am pretty well free.’

  She turned the full beam of her blue eyes on to his. ‘Good. Good.’

  ‘Good,’ Charles echoed.

  “Cause Daryl and some of the lads’ll be able to sneak out from the odd session, I’m sure.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Charles.

  ‘And some of the secretaries, and some of the wives ’n’ all – there are a few who swing a bit and wouldn’t be that keen on the Royal Pavilion, if someone suggested the right alternative . . .’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘No, I think we could have a nice time tomorrow, Chowss,’ she purred.

  ‘Tomorrow. Oh, tomorrow. Oh, Damn,’ he said, preparing to lie. ‘I’ve suddenly remembered Will Parton, my partner in this business, is insisting that I should sit in on as many of the conference sessions as possible tomorrow.’

  He’d had no alternative. He knew it was a hopelessly old-fashioned reaction, but – much though he would have relished an individual encounter with Shelley Fletcher – Charles Paris had never been able to come to terms with the idea of sex as a community activity.

  Perhaps because his day’s drinking had started so late, Charles did find he was rather making up for lost time. Or it may have been the company. The Delmoleen salesmen and their wives seemed determined to enjoy their employers’ hospitality to the full, and round of drinks followed round with astonishing fluency.

  It was only when he crossed the hotel’s reception area to find a Gents and felt a blast of cold air from outside, that Charles realised how drunk he was. Must slow down, he thought. Mustn’t cock up the Confectionery presentation in the morning. A speech delivered by someone with a really bad hangover wouldn’t be much improvement over one delivered by a man with a stutter.

  ‘Excuse me,’ asked a voice from the reception desk, ‘are you Mr Paris?’

  ‘What? Oh. Yes.’

  ‘There was a telephone message for you. Could you ring Mr Skellern as soon as possible, please?’

  ‘Right. Thanks,’ said Charles, as he stumbled on towards the Gents.

  Very unusual, he thought as he peed copiously, for Maurice to be ringing him. But he didn’t have the warm feeling that an actor traditionally gets from a message to ring his agent. His first thought was not that the National Theatre had suddenly decided they wanted him to do his Hamlet. Nor that Hollywood had finally made a decision in his favour about who the new James Bond was to be. No, his first thought was that Maurice had somehow found out that his client was working without telling him.

  Yes, Charles would return the call. But ‘as soon as possible’ might not be very soon.

  Thinking of phone calls, he must ring Frances too. Been a bit unfortunate, their last encounter. Well, their last two encounters, come to that. The day at Wimbledon hadn’t been a major social triumph. No, little bit of minor fence-mending might be needed there. Must ring Frances and sort things out with her. Soon.

  But not tonight. Always better to be sober when attempting reconciliation with his wife.

  One more drink, he thought as he re-entered the bar. Just one, then I’ll stop. Need a clear head for the morning.

  But with the number of such good intentions he had formulated in his life, Charles could have laid out a five-lane motorway to hell. The one drink became four, and those escalated into Room Service bottles of whisky in his bedroom with Will Parton and a bunch of salesmen whose precise names Charles couldn’t recall but whom he knew all to be very good chaps.

  Rendered incautious by alcohol, Charles and Will started saying what they really thought about the corporate world. All the giggling they had been carefully holding in for the last weeks burst out, and Charles found the salesmen an easy and indulgent audience for his impression of Robin Pritchard.

  ‘It’s so big,’ he was saying. ‘I mean, big on a global scale. You know, we’re talking cosmic outreach here. I mean, on a scale of one to ten, the conce
pt scores a cool hundred. We are not talking ordinary muesli bar here, we are talking galactic muesli bar.’

  The salesmen roared their appreciation, encouraging him to continue.

  ‘And the revolutionary thing about this new muesli bar – I mean, the, like, globally, cosmically different element in its concept – is that the new Delmoleen “Green” tastes exactly like a pan-scourer!’

  The salesmen loved this too. They roared again. In fact, the hilarity was so general and so raucous that none of them heard the door open.

  ‘Could you keep the noise down, please!’

  In the doorway, with a face like a glacier, stood Brenda Tressider.

  Chapter Twenty

  EVERYONE was suddenly sober. With mumbled apologies and subdued good nights, Charles’s guests filed past Brenda back to their own rooms. When they had all gone, she shrugged apologetically. ‘I’m sorry. Ken Colebourne’s got the suite above you here. I don’t want him disturbed. His wife Patricia’s not at all well.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry,’ said Charles. ‘Just all got a bit out of hand.’

  ‘Yes.’ He had expected her to turn on her heels and leave immediately. To his surprise, she lingered, as if undecided.

  He gestured to the debris of abandoned glasses. ‘Can I offer you a drink or something?’

  She came forward determinedly and sat down in an armchair. ‘Do you have any mineral water?’

  ‘Tap.’

  ‘All right.’

  He took a glass into the bathroom, swilled it out and filled it. Brenda Tressider thanked him as profusely as if he had handed her a glass of Dom Perignon. As ever, her manners were impeccable. And, as ever, she was impeccably costumed – on this occasion in the little black dress she had worn for the evening’s reception.

  Instinctively, he found himself draining the remains of a whisky bottle into his own glass before sitting on the edge of the bed opposite her. But his head felt clear, his mind sharp.

  ‘You shouldn’t do that kind of thing when the salesmen are around,’ Brenda Tressider announced.

  ‘What kind of thing?’

  ‘Knocking the product. Knocking Delmoleen.’

  ‘Oh, it was just a joke. It was –’

  She overrode him. ‘You still shouldn’t do it. It’s hard enough to motivate the sales force at the best of times. If they start thinking it’s all right to make fun of the company, they stop believing in it.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s easy enough for you. You come in from outside, you have no loyalty to Delmoleen, no doubt the whole business is just a laugh for you –’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t say –’

  ‘For the people in the company, it’s their lives, it’s their jobs. It’s important that they believe in it . . .’

  Charles Paris was properly chastened. He nodded abjectly. ‘I’m sorry.’

  To his surprise, he saw the shadow of a smile on Brenda Tressider’s lips, ‘. . . even in the teeth of the evidence.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that faith in Delmoleen is like any other faith. You have to limit knowledge for it to grow.’ She responded to his quizzical expression. ‘If you start actually analysing the company, analysing what it’s doing, how it works, all that . . . well, you couldn’t possibly sustain your belief in it. So you have to close your mind to the detail, and just hold on to the faith for its own sake.’

  ‘And exercises like this sales conference take place to reinforce that faith?’

  ‘Exactly. Just like a Revivalist Meeting. All this tub-thumping, all this talk of “the Delmoleen family”, the video you’ve been involved in . . . . it’s all there for the same purpose. You may not actually be able to make the sales force believe in the company, but at least you can get them to suspend their disbelief in it.’

  Charles hadn’t expected her to be the kind of woman who quoted Coleridge. ‘And impersonations of Robin Pritchard make it more difficult for the disbelief to be suspended?’

  ‘Yes, they do . . .’ She smiled before the compliment, ‘However accurate those impersonations may be.’

  ‘And what about you, Mrs Tressider? Do you believe in Delmoleen?’

  ‘It’s my job to believe in Delmoleen,’ she replied drily. ‘Or my job to believe in Brian, which comes to the same thing.’

  ‘And do you ever have problems suspending your disbelief?’

  She sighed. ‘It doesn’t really matter whether I do or don’t. I have a function to perform in the company, just as he does. I have to ensure that Brian can operate at his maximum efficiency, I have to see that the home runs smoothly, I have to be on hand for business entertaining . . .’

  ‘You have to make small talk and sound interested in the conversation of all kinds of boring people . . .?’

  ‘I didn’t say that, Mr Paris. You did.’

  ‘You’re very discreet.’

  ‘Something which you, it appears, could not be accused of.’

  ‘No. I’m sorry. You’ve had much more practice at it than I have.’

  ‘That is certainly true.’

  ‘So . . . your life must run on a pretty tight timetable?’

  ‘That is also true.’

  ‘It must sometimes have been hard reconciling the demands of your home and the company.’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Particularly when you had young children around.’

  ‘Brian and I have no children, so that problem never arose.’

  ‘Ah.’ He wasn’t sure whether or not he should say he was sorry. There had been no self-pity or other discernible emotion in her words.

  ‘No, I have great respect for women who manage the demands of a family as well as everything else.’

  ‘So you see your role in life exclusively as looking after Brian?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There are some people nowadays . . .’ he began cautiously ‘– some women, certainly – who would think that was rather an old-fashioned view of a wife’s role.’

  ‘They can think what they like. I have no doubt at all that I work extremely hard to fulfil a very necessary function. I don’t see myself as subservient to Brian. I think my contribution to the success of Delmoleen is quite equal to his – and, if you asked him, I think Brian would say the same.’

  ‘Ah. Well. Good.’ Charles took a swig of his whisky. He was playing for time. He needed to move the conversation on to a more controversial tack, and he wasn’t certain of the most tactful way to do it. In fact, he rather wondered whether there was a tactful way of accusing someone’s husband of murder.

  ‘Mrs Tressider . . .’ he hazarded, ‘presumably someone in Brian’s position has to be very careful not to become involved in any scandal . . .’

  ‘Naturally. Any public figure is aware of that danger. The press these days are all too ready to pillory people.’

  ‘Yes . . .’ He hesitated again. ‘In a set-up that has as many employees as Delmoleen, you’re inevitably going to get a few bad apples, people who might bring the company name into disrepute . . .’

  ‘You run that risk, yes, obviously. But you try to minimise it by careful recruitment and quick dismissal when you realise you’ve made a mistake.’

  Charles nodded, wondering if Brenda Tressider’s professional poise ever broke down. She was so in control, he felt an unworthy desire to see her crack just once, to see the vulnerable female beneath the carapace. But maybe there wasn’t one.

  He decided he’d have to cast caution to the winds and plunge in. ‘Mrs Tressider, you remember the young girl who was killed in the warehouse accident the day we were making the video there . . .’

  Her filing system was as infallible as ever. ‘Of course. Dayna Richman.’

  ‘I’ve heard rumours about the place that she was into a bit of blackmail . . .’

  ‘Oh?’ The monosyllable was almost without intonation.

  ‘Rumours that she used sex to blackmail men in the company. Rumours in fact that video tapes existe
d of her with senior members – or at least a video tape of her with a senior member – of the Delmoleen management . . .’

  ‘Ah.’ This monosyllable contained more. In fact, it contained a lot – an acceptance of a revised situation and the need for a new approach to cope with that situation. But still Brenda Tressider showed no untoward emotion. ‘Brian had hoped that no one else knew about that. He thought the information had been contained. It will distress him considerably to know that it’s common gossip round the company.’

  ‘It’s certainly not that,’ Charles hastened to assure her. ‘I had to make fairly detailed investigations to find out about it.’

  ‘Good. So are you the only person who knows about the existence of the tape?’

  ‘Possibly, yes. Except for the other participant, I assume. It seems reasonable to suppose that Dayna had told him about the tape, had asked for money in exchange for it . . .’

  ‘Yes. She had,’ Brenda confirmed. ‘And now you’re doing the same, are you? How much do you want?’

  ‘No, it’s not that.’

  ‘Don’t play games with me, Mr Paris. You can’t have any other reason for raising the matter. Come on, tell me your price. I’m sure Brian won’t have any difficulty raising the money – so long as you’re not asking something ridiculous.’

  ‘Mrs Tressider, I am not asking for money – honestly I’m not.’

  ‘Then why are you talking about the tape?’

  ‘Because I’m trying to find out what happened to Dayna Richman.’

  “We know what happened to Dayna Richman. She was killed in an accident in the warehouse at Stenley Curton.’

  She said this in such an unarguable, matter-of-fact way that Charles was convinced she really did have no suspicions about the death. Though Brenda Tressider could apparently accept with equanimity her husband’s infidelity, the idea that his offence might be more serious did not enter her head.

  ‘Listen, Mrs Tressider, the timing of Dayna’s death was, to say the least, coincidental.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There are various traditional methods of stopping the demands of blackmailers. One is by paying them off – though the victim can never under those circumstances feel quite secure that the demands won’t recur . . .’