Who's Afraid of MR Wolfe? Read online

  WHO’S AFRAID OF MR WOLFE?

  Hazel Osmond has been an advertising copywriter for many years, working on a variety of accounts, from house builders to building societies; furniture stores to museums. She won the 2008 Woman & Home short story competition sponsored by Costa. She lives in Northumberland with her husband, two children and two cats. She is currently working on her second novel.

  WHO’S AFRAID OF MR WOLFE?

  Hazel Osmond

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by

  Quercus

  21 Bloomsbury Square

  London

  WC1A 2NS

  Copyright © 2011 by Hazel Osmond

  The moral right of Hazel Osmond to be

  identified as the author of this work has been

  asserted in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication

  may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

  or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any

  information storage and retrieval system,

  without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 84916 418 4

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,

  businesses, organizations, places and events are

  either the product of the author’s imagination

  or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to

  actual persons, living or dead, events or

  locales is entirely coincidental.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Typeset by Ellipsis Books Limited, Glasgow

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  To everyone who likes to have the last word …

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to my sisters, my mum and my beautiful daughters for their enthusiasm and support, to those friends and family in the UK and US who read, gave feedback and did not snigger (unless it was one of ‘those’ bits) and to all those on the C19 website for the hilarity and generous advice.

  I’m also indebted to Woman & Home magazine for kick-starting things and to Broo my agent and Charlotte at Quercus for ‘getting’ Wolfie right from the start.

  What, no men? Yup, three lovely ones. Thanks to Dad for the humour (I know somewhere you’re still causing laughter), the actor Richard Armitage, because without his cravat and scowls there would be no Jack Wolfe and most of all to Matt my husband, ever patient and ever romantic in the face of dreadful housekeeping and writer’s flutters.

  CHAPTER 1

  ‘… and then the knickers are going to sing,’ Ellie said.

  ‘Sing,’ Hugo repeated slowly, running a finger between his thick neck and his stripy shirt collar.

  ‘Yes, and if possible do a little dance. It’s meant to be funny.’ She grinned. ‘Very tongue in cheek.’

  Across the room she heard Lesley, her creative partner, snigger, a surprisingly large noise from such a petite person. That was one joke they had missed during the two days spent kicking around the singing-knickers idea.

  Hugo made a huge ‘Puhh’ noise and loosened the knot in his tie, pulling it downwards aggressively.

  ‘They’ll be little models of knickers, of course,’ Ellie added.

  That fact didn’t seem to make Hugo any happier. He frowned and his piggy eyes, already alarmingly small, disappeared altogether.

  ‘And Gavin’s cool with this?’ he snapped.

  ‘Loves it,’ Ellie said, and then instantly hoped that Hugo hadn’t picked up on her little mistake. Gavin, her boss, was too icily sophisticated to love anything. He was a creative director who prided himself on stamping on everything that wasn’t arty or filmed in black and white. Luckily, at this moment he was shooting an ad for suntan lotion on an island somewhere in the South Pacific.

  Ellie’s mind flitted back to the telephone conversation during which she’d tried to tell Gavin about the knickers idea. Hugo need never know that it had consisted of huge bouts of static and Gavin shouting, ‘Pardon?’

  Her advertising guts told her this was a good idea; her writing guts told her this was a good idea; she wasn’t backing down.

  ‘Gavin thought it was really … cutting edge.’ She crossed her fingers under the desk.

  Hugo continued to eye her suspiciously and a little red spot appeared on both of his cheeks. He threw his pen down on the desk.

  ‘I can’t believe this,’ he said, shaking his head in disgust. ‘You really think that the San Pro market is ready for your idea? While our competitors talk about “peace of mind” and “wings that won’t let you down”, this agency is going to throw a load of singing knickers at the client?’

  ‘Not literally,’ Ellie said.

  ‘And besides,’ added Lesley, her short, spiky crop bobbing as she got into her stride, ‘you’ve let the client motor along nicely for too long. It’s time for a radical departure. All this stuff about wings, it’s like they’re selling model aeroplanes, not panty-liners.’

  Ellie yet again thanked whoever the god of advertising was for pairing her up with Lesley. Designers came in all shapes and sizes. Ellie could have got a monosyllabic one who only knew how to draw and work an Apple Mac. Or one who viewed themself as a personal reincarnation of Michelangelo and thought that Ellie, a mere writer, was pond life. Instead she’d got lucky with Lesley, and three years down the line their creative brains were spookily in tune. Now they couldn’t always remember whether a good idea had started with Lesley’s images or Ellie’s words.

  Hugo rubbed a hand over his eyes in a weary fashion and Ellie saw that the wet patches under his arms were spreading rapidly. He was in danger of disintegrating into a puddle of sweat and hair gel.

  She looked away and kept her lips firmly sealed; a little trick she had picked up from Hugo and knew unnerved him. Anything that unnerved Hugo was fine by her. He had always been her least favourite account executive, or ‘pig in a suit’, to give him his proper title. Apart from actually looking like an overfed pig stuffed into a pinstriped suit, he had a public-school bray that made her fillings vibrate. The important thing with Hugo was not to be browbeaten by his assumption that, being a man and owning half of Shropshire, he was predestined to get his own way.

  To him, females came with an Alice band and a trust fund and they stayed at home and pushed out heirs to the family seat. He was unable to cope with any deviation from that norm, and as far as he was concerned, Ellie and Lesley were way off the scale. Particularly Lesley, who, as a ‘gal who liked other gals’, was practically a witch in his eyes. Like Queen Victoria, Hugo obviously doubted whether lesbians actually existed at all.

  When he couldn’t argue his way to a victory, he would use silence, on the assumption that nobody had as stiff an upper lip as he did. The opposition usually caved in, if only to avoid any more embarrassment.

  Ellie found this all the more irritating because of the fawning and toadying he lavished on those higher up the food chain in the agency, such as Gavin. As she remembered one particularly vomit-inducing display, she glanced across at Hugo, still rubbing his eyes, and gave a little cough. Hugo lowered his hand and stared at her. She opened her mouth as if to say something and saw a look of triumph start to spread over his face. A silent count to three and she closed her mouth again. She was pleased to see from the expression now on his face that Hugo realised she was baiting him.

  Then they were all back playing the silence game.

  Ellie distracted herself by looking around at the way Hugo had decorated his office. A large framed
photograph of a gun dog dominated one wall. It was the famous Stumpy, who, Hugo had once proudly informed her, had survived having his tail accidentally ‘shot orf’ by his father. On the other wall was an aerial view of Hugo’s family home, strategically placed, no doubt, to cow any visitor with its size. It looked ancient and crumbly and cold, very much like his parents, whose photograph was displayed on the third wall. On Hugo’s desk was a snapshot of Cicely, his girlfriend, who had a lot of forehead and even more jaw. Ellie noticed that her picture was much smaller than Stumpy’s and drew her own conclusions from this.

  Other than that, there was nothing in Hugo’s office to hint that he had any kind of inner life at all. Except Ellie knew that he had a drawer stuffed with soft porn. Rachel on reception had told her, although how she knew was anybody’s business.

  Ellie preferred not to think about Hugo sweating over those magazines and hoped to God none of them featured a ‘bitch of the month’.

  Hugo jutted his chin out, what little there was of it. ‘Now listen, you two. I have looked after the Sure & Soft panty-liner account for three years. Three good years.’ His tone of voice reminded Ellie of the one teachers employ to talk to not very bright children. ‘It is a product that needs our finest work and delicate, delicate handling, so when the account came up for review, I knew I should let all three of the creative teams have a sniff of the brief.’

  Ellie wondered if that had been an intentional pun on Hugo’s behalf, and then remembered that this was ‘Hugo the humourless’ and went back to listening to his little speech of reasonableness.

  ‘I decided I would give you all a chance, as it were,’ he was saying, ‘and then I could take the best concept forward to the client. It isn’t rocket science.’ Hugo turned an accusatory look on Ellie. ‘Two of the teams have given me some lovely stuff.’

  Ellie knew that across the room Lesley would be thinking the same as she was: the other teams had probably gone down the tired old route of subtle treatments featuring pert women wearing white trousers. Thanks to the product, their lives were carefree, their world transformed.

  Ellie sensed that it was time to break her silence. ‘Sorry to correct you, Hugo, but it’s not you who’s deciding on the best concept. It’s not even going to be Gavin – he won’t be back.’ She ignored Hugo’s poisonous look and carried on. ‘I’d heard we were all going to pitch our ideas to Jack Wolfe. He’s the one making the final decision about what goes forward to the client.’

  Hugo gave a nasty, dry little laugh. ‘And you think Jack Wolfe is going to like your idea any more than I do? You must be mad.’

  Ellie decided not to respond to that.

  ‘I should have known you two would come up with something difficult.’

  Lesley gave a groan. ‘It’s not difficult, Hugo, it’s different.’

  ‘I’m their account executive,’ Hugo shot back. ‘I handle their account week in, week out. I listen to what they want from their advertising. I sort out their problems. This isn’t what they expect.’

  ‘Hugo, that’s the whole point. We don’t want to give them something they expect.’ Ellie could not help letting her exasperation show. ‘We’ve come up with something new and memorable that will make the client stand out from their competitors.’

  While she had been speaking, the small red spots on Hugo’s cheeks seemed to have taken over his whole face. He was a very peculiar colour. Ellie was absolutely certain that she wasn’t going to give him mouth-to-mouth if he keeled over. For a second or two Hugo locked eyes with her and it was like ‘Lord of the Manor meets peasant wench’. Ellie held her ground and saw Hugo’s shoulders start to sag. The next time that he spoke, his voice had a pleading tone.

  ‘You don’t honestly want us to go in and see Jack Wolfe and pitch him this idea, do you?’

  It was no surprise to hear that Hugo was scared of Jack Wolfe. If Hugo was Lord of the Manor, Jack was the gamekeeper who could break your leg with a look and then shag your wife in the shrubbery.

  Ellie folded her arms and saw out of the corner of her eye that Lesley had done the same. Hugo treated them to his full repertoire of angry and disappointed expressions, so Ellie simply turned and stared innocently out of the window. Hugo’s office had one of the better views and if she leaned slightly to one side, she could see the spire of a Hawksmoor church, the tops of some trees and the edge of a wall of glass that formed part of a trendy art gallery, but today it was all uniformly dull, with the rain slashing down and the sky a low, unremitting blanket of grey. A single, bedraggled pigeon was sitting on the windowsill blinking in at them. It reminded Ellie very much of Hugo. She turned back to look at him and saw he had progressed to drumming his fingers on the desk.

  If Ellie had to abseil down the side of the building and break into Jack Wolfe’s office to make sure he saw their idea, she was going to do it. Even in the rain, even with her fear of heights.

  With Gavin out of the picture for a few weeks, the singing-knickers idea just might make it through to the client. It had a fighting chance of escaping Gavin’s ‘Net of Immaculate Taste’. While the thought of pitching the idea to Jack Wolfe was already setting up all kinds of palpitations in Ellie’s chest, it had to be better than seeing their idea suffer death by sarcasm courtesy of Gavin.

  Ellie chanced another look at Hugo. He couldn’t physically stop them from pitching their idea to Jack, but he could drop a few poisonous words in his ear beforehand. Never mind that the little runt would have to stand on a box to do it.

  She had to be realistic, though. Locking horns with Hugo didn’t seem to be getting them anywhere. Ellie plastered her best smile on her face – this was going to hurt.

  ‘Hugo, I appreciate that you understand your client better than we ever could, but really you have nothing to worry about … if you play this right. Why not put the other two teams on before us with their nice ideas and Jack will see that you know your stuff? He’ll be very impressed.’ Ellie widened her smile. ‘Then you slip us on last with our wacky idea and Jack will give you points for having the guts to suggest something different.’

  She tried to ignore the impressive eye-rolling and fingers-down-the-throat actions that were coming from Lesley. She couldn’t blame her: flattering Hugo was making her feel a bit queasy herself.

  Hugo stopped drumming his fingers on the desk, but he still appeared to be weighing up the risks. ‘What about when Gavin comes back?’

  Ellie fired up her encouraging smile again. ‘When Gavin comes back, it will all be sorted. Either Jack Wolfe will have strangled us with his bare hands or he’ll have chosen our idea. And Gavin’s not going to reverse any decision that Jack’s made, is he?’ She didn’t add that nobody in their right mind would change a decision that Jack had made. ‘It’s a win-win situation for you, Hugo.’

  There was a beat of hesitation and then Hugo tightened the knot in his tie and sat up straighter. ‘OK,’ he said slowly. ‘OK, we’ll give it a go.’

  She had judged his level of cowardice correctly; he would stick a neck out as long as it wasn’t his own.

  ‘Great,’ Ellie said, jumping to her feet and gathering her papers. ‘All we’re asking is that you give us a good build-up in your little introductory patter to Jack and don’t make any “I don’t like this idea” faces behind our backs.’

  Hugo opened and closed his mouth, a picture of hurt innocence.

  ‘Come on, Hugo,’ Lesley said, standing up too. ‘If you get behind us, we’ll get behind you.’

  There was a loud barking noise that confused Ellie until she realised that it came from Hugo. ‘You’ll get behind me?’ he said. ‘I don’t think so. Personally I think it would be better if we all got behind something solid, like a table on its side.’ He put the top back on his pen with an unnecessary flourish. ‘You know what Jack’s like if he takes against something.’

  ‘Oh well,’ Ellie said lightly, trying to mask the very real panic that was rising in her at the thought of being on the receiving end of Jack’s tempe
r. He had a reputation for not suffering fools or foolish ideas gladly. The swirl of panic in her stomach did another couple of revolutions before she got control of it.

  ‘See you, then, Hugo,’ she said quickly, and headed for the door. Prolonging the meeting might give Hugo the opportunity to change his mind. Or even worse, he’d try to make small talk, which in Hugo’s case was absolutely miniscule and made him sound like one of the Royal Family desperately trying to bond.

  As she reached the door, Lesley was right behind her. ‘Run,’ she heard her whisper, and they both shot out of the room and raced past the moody black-and-white photographs of London to get to the stairs.

  Back in their office, Lesley shut the door firmly behind them. ‘Bit sticky back there in places, but I don’t think it went too badly – tit-head was almost happy at the end.’ She plonked her papers on her desk and caught the side of her pencil pot, sending the contents cascading over the desk and on to the floor. ‘Oh bugger,’ she said, getting down on her hands and knees to pick them up. Behind her, a small blow-up Elvis drifted off the bookshelf and bounced across the floor.

  Ellie bent down to scoop up Elvis and tried to balance him back on the shelf. When that didn’t work, she pulled open a filing-cabinet drawer and shoved him in there. As she closed the drawer, she automatically reached out to steady the mini-fridge, which was wobbling on top of the cabinet. For a little space under the eaves their office certainly held a lot of stuff. If they didn’t have another good tidy-up soon, they were going to disappear under piles of paper, pens and Post-it notes. It was now touch and go whether Lesley’s Elvis collection or the tower of paperbacks Ellie had never got round to taking home would win the battle for domination of the office.

  Ellie looked over at Lesley as she put her pencils back in the pot and couldn’t help smiling – unsharpened ones in the middle, sharpened ones round the outside; always the same. Hard to believe that this woman, now humming away contentedly as she made order out of pencil chaos, had once seemed seriously intimidating. Or that, in the days before they were partners, Ellie used to give her a wide berth if she saw her in the pubs and bars frequented by the advertising mob.