Headhunter

ELEVEN

  What do you wear to a job interview that both is and is not a job interview? What do you wear to a bar in Mayfair that you've only seen in the gossip pages of the newspapers with major football stars and minor royals heading in and out?

  Campbell's not even sure he'll get past the door what with the queue and the security operation.

  He lingers on the pavement across the road for a moment. He has filled his wallet from the cashpoint and has thrown on a black shirt, his most expensive jeans and some beaten up brown shoes. Over this a pinstriped suit jacket, that he will decide whether to keep hold of or dump at the cloakroom once he sees Lawson and his group and can size up the appropriate sartorial approach.

  He heads for the rear of the queue, knowing that though he has arrived with a few minutes to spare, the actual getting in may take longer than the getting here.

  At the door there are two solid looking men in long black cashmere coats and high-tech headsets, who say nothing and see everything. There is a woman in a stylish dress and heels that must make her six feet tall, and who holds a clipboard and a fixed expression of warmth and openness that is completely devoid of sincerity. Campbell watches as three people he does not recognise approach her, then tap at something on her clipboard before she waves them past the large men in black cashmere. After a moment he realises why the fact they weren't familiar was significant. He expected celebs.

  He looks at his watch again. Nine, dead on.

  'Screw it,' he says and steps out from the queue and heads for the woman.

  She amplifies the fake smile and he clocks one of the two bouncers watching his approach.

  'Hello, how are you?' he says to the woman.

  'Very good, sir. Are you enjoying your evening?'

  'Indeed. Indeed.'

  The smile seems almost aggressive, almost a challenge and all the while the clipboard stays clasped to her, completely concealed.

  'I'm actually with some people,' Campbell nods toward the door.

  She doesn't even bother to reply. Just nods and raises an eyebrow.

  He stumbles for a moment, then a moment longer as he sees the other bouncer look at him and move a step forward. He points at the door and then taps at her clipboard which does not give at all, as though fixed in place.

  'In there… I mean… I don't know whose name it would be under. Like the company name or… '

  She keeps smiling the smile at him - through him - and nods again. She will not be surrendering any clues or assistance.

  'Scorpio. Could be under Scorpio. Or Lawson. Giles Lawson.'

  She scans the clipboard and then as one of the bouncers moves a little closer and communicates with her in a way that is impossible to hear or understand, she turns slightly and shakes her head. I can handle this.

  Campbell sees some words on the paper, tries to scan quickly. She moves back into position.

  'Sir-' she begins but he's seen it. A name he knows, or at least, a name he has picked up from his cursory research on Scorpio Capital. A name from their website.

  'Piers Burlingham. The table's in Piers' name.' Blurted out and hurried it would have lacked conviction. But Campbell had authority in his voice and calm assurance, like it had been on the tip of his tongue all along.

  She peered down again at her clipboard and then looked up at him with a look that conceded defeat with grace. 'They're on the mezzanine,' she said and stepped aside.

  His plan, such as there was one, was to scout around the place in the hope of seeing them from a distance. From there he could gauge what the mood was, how formal he needed to be, how many people were in the group. He was hoping he could lose his jacket which was making him feel self-conscious, like he was trying too hard, and that he would find Giles with maybe just one or two colleagues or even just some non-Scorpio friends. He was hoping that the tone Lawson had taken on the phone was in fact in jest but he was mindful of the time and the instruction not to be late. And then, before he could make even a half lap of the club, a hand clamped on his shoulder.

  'No way guy! You made it. You actually got here.'

  He span round to see Lawson smiling broadly at him.

  'Weird place for an interview.'

  'And you're on time too!' said Lawson.

  Campbell shrugs.

  'How did you get in the door? This place is harder to get into than the Pavilion at Lords.'

  'I gave them Piers' name.'

  'How do you know Piers?'

  'I don't really. Just his name. Saw it on the website.'

  'That's tremendous work. We should give you the job just for that. Top blag!' Lawson raises a hand for Campbell to high-five, which he does with some reservation. He's an odd character Lawson, kind of full-on and unselfconscious. He says things like "sitrep" and gives high fives in the middle of one of the most exclusive clubs in London. Campbell wonders whether he's getting himself involved with people that are not his kind of people, but then considers that is precisely what he has decided he should be doing. The comfort-zone has not been working for him, not for a long time.

  Lawson slides a hand across his shoulders and leads him through a narrow passage, up some stairs and to a bar. He listens to Lawson deliver a drink order to a woman who is as beautiful as any he has ever laid eyes on and then watches as Lawson climbs two stainless steel rungs of the nearby balcony and gestures at a group twenty yards away. Shortly they are joined by another man who looks just like Lawson. The same sharp-dressed, slick-haired look. Red ruddy cheeks and a posh accent that has Campbell picturing childhoods of expensive education and live-in domestic help.

  Piers Burlingham has an accent more plummy even than Lawson and employs a similar range of slang terms amidst the well-spoken delivery that Campbell finds distracting, like an attempt to play down the poshness by using vernacular rather than simply flattening their vowels a little and dropping the occasional H.

  They stand at the bar and sip at long drinks in elaborately tall, flute-like glasses that Campbell struggles with. He doesn't want to drink from the straw which makes him feel at once both child-like and effeminate, but the length and narrowness of the glass itself seems as though drinking is the last thing it was designed for. The other two sip at theirs with an effortless insouciance which serves only to make Campbell even more aware of the gulf between himself and the world these men represent.

  He feels acutely the simple functionality of his state education, the university that held an annual Ball for its students rather than seasonal ones, the social circles that they move in that involve attending cricket matches rather than football, where shooting birds is something that friends invite you to do on a weekend, rather than pulling them. He knows that these people have grown up in houses where the study and the guest bedroom are not the same thing.

  He ventures his observation about pulling birds not shooting them and both of them snigger.

  ’Chap, both much the same you know,’ Piers gestures with an eyebrow and Campbell nods but in truth he doesn't know.

  ’Giles, nice,’ Burlingham raises a hand and Lawson meets it mid-air. ’Guy,’ he says turning the flat palm into a pointing finger whilst keeping it raised, ’talk to me. Tell me about Dan the Man.’

  For a split second Campbell ponders responding with ’And who the hell is Dan the Man?’ but plays along instead. Over the top they may be, but this is a job interview, or at least, he must try to treat it like one so far as the circumstances allow. Perhaps this overblown act is just that; an act. Perhaps all this is a test he is required to pass, without being put off by their accents and their easy sexism.

  He reels off a job description and dresses it up with some examples of his finer moments when prompted by both men. Burlingham asks most of the questions, like Lawson knows most of this from their first meeting and has more or less made up his mind. Campbell for his part tries not to get too distracted when he notices his own attempts to exaggerate, knowing that he is not naturally given over to doing so, but is fin
ding himself something of a slave to this situation, not its master. His accent occasionally drifts a notch or two in their direction, subconsciously imitating them, and he has to make an effort to reign it back. They might notice and think of less of him for doing it. He certainly does.

  He talks for maybe twenty minutes before he finds a point at which he can turn it back on the other two and asks what it is exactly that he might be doing if they took him on.

  Lawson takes over and begins describing something vague and yet dramatic sounding. He calls Campbell a ’deal-finder’ and then later a ’point-man’ and after the other man talks for more than Campbell did about himself he begins to get the sense that it might not be too dissimilar to his own job. Research, in the main. Digging out information, sorting the facts from the corporate spin, condensing data down into usable information. But where currently his employer simply produces this analysis and research in order to sell it on to whoever will pay, this will be in-house and purely for the benefit of people like Giles Lawson to go out and do deals with, to buy or sell companies, or chunks of them. He picks up terms like leverage and arbitrage, and others that he doesn't understand. But he remembers Lawson’s words earlier; learn on the job, and make the rest up.

  ’OK, enough shop talk. It's Friday night,’ Lawson announces and Campbell follows the two men up more stairs and across a landing toward a roped-off area with plush, upholstered booths. The hostess smiles them in, just as beautiful as the girl behind the bar, and Lawson leans in and says something to her that Campbell can't catch over the music.

  They move to a booth and there is a slightly overwhelming blur of introductions to a group of people whose names he instantly forgets. Ordinarily being introduced to a table full of strangers would be enough to make him awkward, but in this place, with a gaggle of TV soap opera stars at the next booth and a new job in the balance, he's so far adrift from his comfort zone that it almost makes him giddy. He's only managed the one drink and that did more to wind him tight what with the difficulty in drinking from the glass, than the alcohol did to relax him.

  Edgy as he is, the next thing hits him like a broadside.

  ’I was wondering if you might call,’ she says.

  ’Lisa...’ he says, staring at her, but then the mouth and the brain disengage, lose contact. What’s she doing here?

  She smiles at him as she shifts over a little to let him sit.

  ’I... What...?’ he stumbles again and reflects that he has left a lot of sentences unfinished of late.

  ’I can't decide if you coming down here to see me in person is touching or scary.’ The penny begins to drop as he realises what this must mean. She works at Scorpio. That’s why she was there that night. She was out with Giles and presumably some of the others now looking and smiling at him now.

  ’No, that’s not...’ he begins but then decides that it might actually be best to leave that sentence unfinished as well. ‘Touching is what it is, don’t you think? Not scary. Not me.’

  Her face is unreadable for a while and the thought occurs to him that not only might he have blown it with Lisa before anything had happened between them, but that on top of the intense strangeness of this whole situation - the posh-boys and their drunk friends, the job interview in the exclusive nightclub with the celebs at the next table - on top of that, he'd now have to sit next to a resentfully jilted woman as well.

  When she smiles at him she puts the hostess and the barmaid entirely in the shade. He's mightily relieved that she's not holding a grudge, that she isn't the type to be too bothered by waiting a couple of days for a call and punish him for it. But it's more than just the relief that makes her smile illuminate his night. Lisa is several times more attractive than he remembers her.

  ’Well,’ she says and picks up her drink. ’This just got interesting.’

  TWELVE

  Caspar Hogg watched her leave with an expression that tried to say that he was as embarrassed as she was but really, that was not possible. His own humiliation was far more acute.

  The cleaner had done her usual rounds and then about half way through, there had been an awkward moment where she had needed to reach up to wipe over the shelves above and to the left of him and retrieve some discarded noodle cartons and as she stretched, a button on her dress had popped off, right at the bust.

  The timing was awful for both of them as Caspar had found himself unable to resist a glance to his left where her bosom was at eye-level at that precise moment. The dress opened a few inches, nothing dramatic, but he was afforded a clear view of her cleavage, of the slightly off-white cotton lace, and the squeezed curve of her breast where the too small bra failed in its purpose.

  She reacted immediately and with horror, clasping her arm across her chest and looking right at him and his own eye line. She stepped quickly away and said something in Spanish that sounded, merely by its tone, like an exclamation.

  Hogg dropped his gaze and flushed scarlet, suddenly feeling as though it weren't just that he'd been busted staring at her chest, but that the popping button was somehow his doing.

  She muttered something else to the back of his head and bustled out of the door and Hogg turned at the last moment to say something - an apology or a protest, he'd not even got as far as deciding - but the words were as slow in coming as the cleaner was fast in leaving.

  He could feel his heart going a little quicker and noticed that his fists were clenched tight. Hogg stood and paced a moment, breathing slowly to regain his composure. He felt the warmth in his cheeks and went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face, surprised and annoyed to find that something so trivial had effected him this way. It wasn't as if there had been some developing relationship between them, some nascent romance that fate had decided to snatch away. They were scarcely on speaking terms.

  But that reaction, the instinctive withdrawal from him, was all too familiar.

  Hogg regarded himself in the mirror, turned his head slightly and leaned closer. The red wine stain birth mark extended in a broad sweep from his chin to his forehead, ending in a coarse patch of skin half way up the side if his nose and vanishing beneath his hairline at the temple on the other side. Close up it looked a little patchy and uneven, and the skin looked dimpled and irregular in places, smooth and even in others.

  He wiped the water from his face and then held a hand up to cover that side of his face so just the clear side was visible. He'd done this often as a child, partly as a means to remind himself that he was normal, when so many of the other kids said otherwise, but partly just to see what he'd look like. He'd started doing it with a mirror held up to the centre line of his face and look at the reflection. The clear side reflected in the mirror gave an image of what he might have looked like without the birth mark. Later this had developed to producing incredibly detailed images on the computer of himself with the whole thing digitally removed.

  He had started with a simple bit of alteration on a desktop picture editor on a picture he had uploaded for a social network profile - an irony not lost on him, social networking - and then he had ended up with whole albums of retouched photographs - holiday snaps, school pictures, his graduation, Christmas and birthdays. All fresh faced and flawless, all cute-as-a-button or straight-out handsome.

  Discovering this, that Caspar Hogg was a good looking man, or would have been had things turned out different, had left him cold.

  There had been those adolescent feelings of anger and resentment at the world that something so patently unfair should be visited so randomly upon Caspar and not the next boy, a growing sense of isolation and of being quite clearly, definably different, even if he came to understand that difference was so palpably skin-deep, so superficial.

  But then as he'd grown up he'd come to appreciate that fact and accepted it. The mark was merely on the surface and he had no health problems, had loving parents and a comfortable life, higher education paid for.

  Caspar had developed an understanding that w
ould elude even those closest to him. They would assure him that it was not important, that it was his character that mattered, even that they didn't even see it really, not anymore, not once they knew the person underneath.

  But he knew better. Knew why they used that word: underneath. Because even if they insisted that they didn't see it, that word gave the lie to their words.

  And anyway, Caspar saw it.

  It was just there, on his face. Like a big nose, or a receding hair line. There was no changing it, no covering up.

  But as much as he had come to accept it, even to understand that when people said that it was personality that counted, that his personality was shaped by it, because it was shaped by the way people reacted to it, looked at it, almost the way they spoke to it, rather than to him.

  It was a part of him and not just in the superficial sense. Not just physically.

  Down the years he had been forced to accept that people would treat him that bit differently, they would tease him or ignore him, or worse, they would pity him for it, like this different facial coloration were in some way a disability. He'd faced rejection from the opposite sex in ways that ranged from revulsion to patronising dismissal and it had all slowly worn away at him, waves at the cliff face.

  Slowly Caspar had withdrawn into himself, to a place where there was only indifference and resignation. He felt no simmering resentment or festering anger. Things just were. Caspar just was.

  He didn't care much about who he spent time with, or that he spent increasing amounts of time by himself, but that was not to say he liked being alone. He didn't care about keeping fit or looking good and well dressed, but that didn't mean he'd ever enjoyed the way people looked at him or treated him. He'd long since left behind the sense of gloom and depression that such things would sometimes lead to, but he'd never managed to shed the sense of social awkwardness.

  He didn't much care either what he did to earn money, just that he used what he was good at to earn it and earn enough that he could dispense with money worries.

  It was not right to say he was a nihilist, that he cared for nothing and no one, because he liked watching movies and on-line gaming and he read books and listened to music and all of it gave him happiness and some of it even excited him.

  But it felt like there was something missing in Caspar Hogg, something that had been removed, or worn away.