Who's Afraid of MR Wolfe? Read online

  Everything about Lesley had made Ellie feel like some gangly, over-ripe frump just up from the country. She had a trim little figure poured into something edgy, her hair colour changed almost every week, and always, always there was a slightly spaced-out girl hanging around her. Ellie had invariably reacted by saying very little and trying to poke her own hair back into whatever half-arsed version of a French plait she had cobbled together that morning.

  Ellie had been forced to remove Lesley from the ‘trendy and heartless’ pigeonhole into which she’d shoved her when they’d both ended up judging a student advertising competition. They had agreed right down the line on the marking, chucking out anything that was so far up its own backside you couldn’t tell what product it was selling. They ended up giving the prize to the dorkiest guy in the room, reasoning that he needed more encouragement than the rest.

  When Lesley had revealed later that she felt music had died along with Elvis, Ellie realised that all the cool and scary stuff about Lesley was simply a layer of armour that allowed her to appear tougher than she was. This was something Ellie could relate to, having used her sense of humour in a similar way for years.

  A few weeks after that, when Lesley suggested they get together and persuade Wiseman & Craster that the company needed another creative team, Ellie didn’t hesitate. Now, between them they managed to present a united front against the waves of testosterone that powered the rest of the agency.

  Lesley finished arranging the pencils and Ellie knew that the next thing she would do would be to polish her glasses. Sure enough, Lesley reached for the faux leopard-skin case and was soon rubbing the lenses vigorously with a cloth.

  Ellie switched on her computer and dragged her mind back to the tricky subject of Hugo. They’d have to keep an eye on him. He couldn’t be trusted further than you could throw him, which, with so many expense-account lunches under his belt, wasn’t very far at all. She knew he was going to drop them in the poo somehow.

  She was aware that Lesley had stopped polishing and was now looking at her. ‘Quit worrying, Ell,’ she said. ‘It’s going to be fine. No one’s going to stamp on our idea this time.’ She got up, went over to the mini-fridge and pulled out two bottles of Italian lager. ‘And may I say congratulations on that excellent bit of massage you did on tit-head’s ego? Have yourself an Oscar.’ She placed one of the ice-cold bottles in Ellie’s hand and then scrabbled around in her desk for a bottle-opener. ‘Little swine, making us jump through all those hoops when he’s not even the one we’ve got to impress. He’ll agree with whatever Jack thinks.’ Having found the opener, she leaned over and took the top off Ellie’s bottle and then her own. ‘Cheers.’

  Ellie raised her bottle, tapped it against Lesley’s and there was silence as they drank.

  ‘Well, that should get the creative juices flowing,’ Lesley said, sitting back down. She glanced at her watch. ‘There’s a fair bit to do to get these knicks knocked into shape. You need to ring Sam, tell him you’ll be late?’

  ‘No, he’s out again entertaining the Germans. Doing his bit for whatever “entente cordiale” is in German. However late I’m going to be, he’s bound to be later.’ Ellie took a long drink and then opened an art pad. The paper glistened up at her, white and inviting.

  ‘So … no good trying to busk it with Jack. We’ll need to set it all out clearly – why we think it will appeal, how much it’s going to cost. One slip-up and Jack will tear us apart.’ Ellie took the top off a fine liner and started to write a list of things that they had to cover in the pitch. Then she stopped: Lesley was staring into space, her glasses hanging from one of her fingers.

  ‘Jack tearing us apart,’ Lesley repeated softly, and then gave a low whistle. ‘What wouldn’t most of the women in this agency give to be in our shoes?’

  Ellie rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, no, don’t start. Not all that again.’

  ‘Just think, Ellie, Jack sinking his—’

  ‘Nooooooo.’ Ellie ripped the page off the art pad, screwed it into a ball and threw it at Lesley’s head.

  ‘Sorry, Ellie, but come on,’ Lesley said, ducking, ‘you must be a bit excited. You’re a woman, heterosexual, and our first chance to pitch our work to Jack and you get to flash your knickers at him.’

  Ellie made a vague noise in reply. Jack Wolfe had been at the agency for just under two weeks and it was as if he were pumping pheromones into the air-conditioning system. Colleagues who appeared perfectly sane in every other way had suddenly taken to flirting and giggling when Jack was about. Even some of the men.

  Lesley retrieved the ball of paper and lobbed it into the bin. ‘It’s all right for you – you’re such an old married woman you’re immune to Jack. Either that or you need your eyes testing.’ She took a swig of her lager. ‘Hell, I’m a lesbian and even I can see why women fancy Jack.’

  ‘My eyes are fine,’ Ellie said, putting the top back on her pen in a manner she hoped said, ‘Can we talk about something else?’ but when Lesley continued to look at her, she held up her hands in mock submission. ‘OK, OK, I admit Jack’s a good thing for the agency, especially if he manages to give Gavin a kick up the backside.’ Ellie took a second or two to savour that image. ‘And I think it’s great, if a little scary, that we get to pitch to him, but I’m not stupid. He’s here to streamline the place and everybody seems to have overlooked what he’s done at all the other agencies he’s ever worked at. Poor Hardy & Wades. By the time he moved on they could have had their Christmas party in a phone box there were so few of them left standing.’

  ‘Yeah, but they didn’t need to have it in a phone box, did they?’ Lesley was triumphant. ‘They took over the whole of Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s because they’d won nearly everything there was to win that year. He might have cut them to pieces, but the ones that were left were laughing. Simon Winchester’s driving around in a Porsche now, you know?’ Lesley clutched her lager bottle to her chest. ‘Just think, that could be us come Christmas, sitting on Gordon Ramsay’s lap and counting how many times he says f—’

  ‘Fairly sure you’re going to still be here then, are you?’ Ellie flicked the top off her pen again. ‘Sure you’re not going to be one of the ones standing outside Claridge’s with your nose pressed to the glass? Simon Winchester might be happy, but Gabi and Paul are still schlepping around trying to pick up work.’

  ‘Yeah, well, they were pretty rubbish. It’s not surprising he turfed them out.’

  ‘OK, bad example, but you know what I mean.’

  Lesley grinned, put on her glasses and started sharpening a pencil, her ritual preparation to actually getting down to work.

  Ellie watched her for a while and then shook her head sadly. ‘Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you. Don’t cry on my shoulder when we’re out on the streets selling the Big Issue or we’re one of the few teams left and he’s piling on the work. Jack’s got a seat on the board and his name on the door here. That’s a first. He’s obviously got big plans for the place.’ She took another long drink of her lager. ‘I think we’re going to find that there’s only one way of doing anything around here and that’s Jack’s. You wait until you disagree with him. Then you’ll see him completely lose his temper. I bet he throws back his head and howls.’

  Lesley stopped sharpening her pencil. ‘Oh my God, we could definitely sell tickets for that. Do you really think he does?’ Her eyes went misty behind her glasses.

  ‘No, and I don’t think he gets hairy palms when there’s a full moon either.’ Ellie frowned. ‘The culling is going to start soon. Bet that stops all this swooning and that other stuff … all that going on about him being Heathcliff.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s getting a bit tedious … Although … although as an impartial observer of male–female flirting, it’s been pretty entertaining. Some women are as subtle as a brick.’

  Ellie made a ‘You’re mistaking me for somebody who gives a toss’ face and tried to concentrate on what she was supposed to be writing.

  ‘Rac
hel’s the best,’ Lesley ploughed on. ‘Taken it as some kind of challenge, evidently. Skirts getting shorter, tops getting lower every day. Doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere, though. None of them does. He has a thoroughly good flirt and then wanders off.’

  Lesley put down the sharpener and gave the point on her pencil a critical look. ‘These ones don’t sharpen as well as the ones from Finland,’ she said thoughtfully, and Ellie hoped that finally, finally they could get on with some work.

  Lesley didn’t appear to be in any hurry, though.

  ‘Want to hear my theory about why he’s not interested in anyone at work?’ she said, raising and lowering her eyebrows suggestively.

  ‘Not really, Sherlock.’ Ellie made her voice sound as bored as possible. ‘But is it anything to do with industrial tribunals, impotence, latent homosexuality?’

  ‘Nope, Watson. Too knackered.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Rachel’s kept a tally. Started it the first time she spotted him at that awards do in the Festival Hall.’

  ‘Tally?’

  ‘Girlfriends, odd dates, one-night stands, that kind of thing. He’s a busy man.’

  ‘Lovely. Great. Happy for him. Now, see this pad of paper?’ Ellie held it up. ‘See what I’ve written on it?’

  Lesley peered. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Yup, and if we don’t get a move on, that’s exactly what I’ll be reading out in front of Jack, and I really don’t think me saying, “Sorry, but Lesley insisted on telling me about your sex life,” is going to cut it with him as an excuse.’

  ‘OK, keep all that hair of yours on.’

  Ellie stuck her tongue out goodnaturedly and then put her pad back on her desk. ‘Jeez, all this fuss over a guy who looks like a six-foot-three, permanently scowling, sharp-nosed wolf.’

  There was a spluttering noise as Lesley tried to laugh with a mouthful of lager. ‘Blimey, you do need your eyes testing,’ she finally managed to say, wiping froth off her black top.

  Ellie could not help laughing too. ‘Perhaps that was a bit cruel, but talk about looking at him through rose-coloured spectacles. You know why?’ She didn’t wait for Lesley to reply. ‘They’ve all read too many of those romances with alpha males striding their way through them. They think that beneath all that granite they’re going to find a tender, injured soul crying out for their healing touch. Whereas I see someone whose mother didn’t tell him to “make nice” enough when he was little. If he ever was little.’ Ellie finished off her lager and threw the bottle in the general direction of the bin. They both watched it miss and roll until it hit a pile of papers. ‘Jack wouldn’t get away with all that scowling if he wasn’t a director and built like a tank. Imagine if we tried it – we’d have to put up with all those premenstrual jokes.’

  She paused and gave Lesley a hurt look. ‘And that thing you said earlier, about me being an old married woman. That’s not fair. I’m not old and I’m not married.’

  Lesley was looking at the point of her pencil again. ‘I meant to say “settled”. You know, “settled” as in “in a permanent relationship”.’

  ‘Somehow that sounds even more boring.’

  ‘No, no,’ Lesley said, waving her hand about but still not looking directly at Ellie. ‘’Course it isn’t. I meant … you know, not bothered by all that …’ she seemed to be casting around for the correct word or phrase ‘… hormonal stuff,’ she said at last.

  ‘Gee, thanks. Now you make me sound like I’m terminally set in my ways and dead from the waist down.’

  Ellie noticed that Lesley didn’t leap in to contradict her.

  Well, she probably had a point, besides the one on her pencil. Ellie did feel settled. Good luck to the Lesleys and Jacks of the world, out there playing the field, but when you were happy, the secret was to stick with it.

  Lesley saying, ‘Oi,’ very loudly made Ellie jump.

  ‘Miss Eleanor Somerset,’ she carried on sternly, sliding her glasses down her nose, ‘are you going to sit there all afternoon daydreaming, or are you going to pull your finger out and get this pitch into some kind of shape?’

  Ellie made a very rude gesture with two of Lesley’s pencils, but very soon they were discussing the finer points of knickers and how many words in the English language rhymed with ‘gusset’.

  CHAPTER 2

  ‘Which one do you think, Sam?’ Ellie said, holding up two shirts on their hangers. She placed one over her body for a couple of seconds before swapping it with the other.

  Sam pulled on his earlobe and then went back to checking through his texts. His blond hair was falling into his eyes and Ellie had the urge to go over and brush it out of the way. She gave a smile and then threw both shirts on to the bed and did a little naked jiggle.

  ‘Or perhaps, big boy, you prefer the one I’m not wearing?’

  ‘Yeah, very nice.’ Sam didn’t even look up.

  Ellie slowly bent down to pick up the discarded shirts. Time was when she only had to open a top button and Sam would have been all over her. Now she had to practically install landing lights and put a big sign over her head saying, ‘Sex, this way,’ to give him the hint. It wasn’t his fault; it was that ruddy job. He was working too hard, that was the trouble. He had black shadows under his eyes and he was never off his mobile.

  It was a rule of life: whenever you were snowed under at work, your libido took a nose-dive. It was like your body closed down the extraneous stuff so you could send all your blood to your brain.

  Ellie wondered whether she had enough time to lure Sam over to her side of the room and then try some gentle seduction before they both had to leave for work.

  She looked at the bedside clock. No, not really. Shame.

  Bit different from the early days at university, when they had stayed in bed all day, only surfacing for food. Sam had got seriously chewed out by his engineering tutor for missing lectures. Especially when he said he’d been doing his own in-depth research on stress points and angles of thrust with Ellie.

  Not that university was the last time there’d been any romance in their lives. Whenever they had the luxury of limitless time and no deadlines, things got nicely overheated. Like last year in Siena. There’d been something about that hotel room with the windows flung open and the noises coming up from the street below. Their siestas had seemed to stretch into the evening, with the sheets twisted in a heap on the floor. Lying there in each other’s arms, they’d watched the sky growing darker and darker.

  Just like a honeymoon but without the wedding, they’d joked. Ellie grinned. And this year, who knew …

  Thinking about those days made Ellie have another look at the clock and then another look at Sam. Even dressed in his suit, it didn’t take too much imagination to see him as the eighteen-year-old she’d fallen for. He still had that easy-going charm about him, even if the boyish enthusiasm that used to reach out and grab you was slowly being strangled by work. Right there she wished she could take them both back to that first meeting on the lawn outside the pub, him in his tatty jeans and T-shirt, his feet bare, dancing with such earnestness to the music that she hadn’t been able to take her eyes off him. She remembered the thrill of realising that he was dancing closer and closer, and that moment when he’d reached out his hand and tilted his head and looked at her. He hadn’t even said the words ‘Do you want to dance?’ Hadn’t needed to.

  His T-shirt had a couple of studs in it. She remembered they’d dug into her when she held him tight, but it hadn’t seemed to matter. All she’d been conscious of was how his heart thumped along with hers. And how it couldn’t have been from the exertion of dancing. They’d stopped moving long before that.

  The urge to get back to that intimacy was tempting. Perhaps if they were really quick. ‘Sam—’ she started. The sound of his mobile ringing cut her off.

  ‘Sorry, Ellie, important call.’ He darted out of the room.

  Charming. This time she couldn’t hide her disappointment. Maybe if she wanted some uninte
rrupted time with him, she ought to phone him herself. No, that wasn’t fair. At least both of them were free this evening. There was quite a bit more work to do on the pitch for Jack, but if she got a move on, she should be home by eight at the latest. They could have a nice meal, a good bottle of wine and then reacquaint themselves with each other’s bodies.

  Ellie struggled into her bra and knickers, making a mental note to try and get some more alluring stuff on this evening, ready for Sam to peel it all off again. She looked down at the two muddy-coloured shirts on the bed, picked up the first one and then opened her wardrobe. Jeans, jeans or jeans today?

  Five minutes later there was only her hair to do. The hardest part. ‘Lively’ was how her mum had described it when she was little, and it hadn’t got any tamer now that she was grown-up. She bent forward from the waist and dragged the brush through the curls and waves, then stood up and finished it off. Even in the gloom of the bedroom, with the blinds only half up, she could see the red and gold in it glinting in the mirror.

  ‘Sam, you’re going to be late,’ she shouted, picking up some earrings from the bedside table.

  Sam’s face appeared round the bedroom door. ‘Didn’t you have all that on yesterday?’

  ‘No, it’s all different, even the shoes.’ She lifted up a foot to show him her baseball boots and he came right into the room.

  ‘Yeah, stunning difference. Your hair looks gorgeous, though. Lovely when you’ve just brushed it.’

  Ellie looked at his sleepy brown eyes and the way his hair was flopping forward again. ‘You don’t look so shabby yourself,’ she said with a grin. Then she noticed the phone still clutched in his hand. She nodded at it. ‘Trouble?’

  ‘No. Only the arrangements for tonight.’