I didn’t wait to be offered a chair, I sat down facing her. ‘I thought we should meet,’ I replied. ‘Imagine my surprise when I found that we had already.’
‘Indeed. Maybe you think I should apologise for my small deception in Diego’s office. If so, tough; apology is not my style.’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t give a toss,’ I said. ‘I would like a drink, though. It’s going on lunchtime.’ I glanced at a wine fridge in the corner. ‘White wine, slightly dry, that would be nice.’
Natalie gazed down her nose at me. ‘If you wish. I might even join you.’
She rose, walked across to the cooler and took out a bottle; Fransola, by Torres, I saw from the damp label. It had been opened but it was kept fresh by a pressure cap. She poured two glasses, and handed me one. The bitch had legs to die for, and clearly she was committed to figure-hugging clothes.
She eased herself back into her swivelling seat. ‘You must be pretty close to setting a record,’ she murmured, ‘for the shortest period of office of a company chair.’
‘I’ll be there until my successor is appointed,’ I pointed out. ‘That can’t happen overnight. You still have minority shareholders to buy out.’
‘I take it the Gantry board will recommend against acceptance.’
‘We’ve still to reach a consensus on that. I’m against, of course, and so is Audrey Kent, but my colleagues are still considering their position. Have you had any other acceptances yet?’
‘It’s a little early for that.’ She frowned, very briefly, but it was her first sign of anything short of total confidence.
‘You’re still working on it, aren’t you?’ I said.
‘Working? On what?’
‘On how I knew before I walked in here that Kim Coates was actually you, given that you seem to be very camera-shy. Your face doesn’t appear in any of Torrent’s corporate brochures, and when I trawled the internet I couldn’t find a single photograph.’ I reached into my bag, took out a print of Liam’s image and tossed it across to her. ‘That’s how.’
She picked up the image, and as she realised what it was, her eyes widened then she frowned again, full force, for real. ‘What the hell is this?’ she hissed.
‘What does it bloody look like? What I don’t understand, Natalie, is … why the hell didn’t the idiot bother to close the curtains? Do you like it in the daylight, is that it? Can you fake it either way?’
‘You cow! I could go to the police with this.’
‘What makes you think I haven’t?’ I shot back. ‘You and Culshaw, with the aid of his ageing and gullible uncle, have conspired to cheat the majority shareholders of the Gantry Group into accepting an offer for the business that undervalues it ridiculously. And he’s gone further; the people he’s cheated are my son’s sister and brother, by committing their controlling interest to you at that price.’
‘Oh really,’ she blustered. ‘Don’t be so fanciful.’
‘Don’t give me that!’ I shouted at her. ‘I bloody know, okay! And what makes me even angrier is that I also know I’ll never be able to prove it! I’m angry because I’ve spent some time as a guest of Her Majesty, and I would so enjoy sending you to do the same. So think on that, madam chairin-waiting, as you’re running the merged company with not much more than the percentage you have already. My guys and I haven’t reached a recommendation to minority shareholders, because that’s pretty much us now. My partner has an investment, Phil Culshaw and Gerry Meek have private holdings, Buddy Beaujean, my Texan support, he has a sizeable chunk. When you add them to my son’s twenty-six per cent … and he has said, Natalie, without my coercion that he’d rather stick hot needles in my eyes than sell to you … we will have a block that’s big enough to be a fucking spear in your side, never mind a thorn.’
‘And I don’t care,’ she yelled back, ‘because I’ve got it. Susie Gantry’s business, bloody Oz Blackstone’s business is under my control; my only regret is that they’re not here to see it! I’d have loved that even more. I don’t care about the company; all I want to do is wipe it off the face of the earth. I hated Oz for what he did to me, when I was with Ewan Capperauld! But for him, nobody would ever have known about it, but he spilled the beans and caused the chaos that followed. Then when I tried to get even with my first takeover bid, he got in the way of that too.’
She had so lost it that I thought for a second she was going to spit at me. ‘As for Susie,’ she hissed, ‘little miss perfect? Businesswoman of the Year three times? Sure, thanks to her sucking every dick in Glasgow to get the votes! Well, let them fucking rot, the pair of them, because finally I’ve had a day of my own against them!’
She was out of her seat, leaning across the desk, glaring at me, eyes like organ stops.
‘Sit down, Natalie,’ I told her quietly. ‘You’ve made your points; some of them might even be the truth. Now just tell me, how long have you been using Duncan to hatch these plots of yours? Because they weren’t his alone, that’s for sure. He’s not the sharpest tack in the box. The exposé book about Oz for example; I’ll bet that was your idea all along.’
‘Okay, I’ll give you that one,’ she conceded. ‘You want to know? Is your mobile switched off?’ she asked. ‘I don’t want to fall for that one the way he did.’ I took it out of my bag, showed it to her, then laid it on her desk. ‘Good,’ she said, ‘then I’ll tell you, for it isn’t going to do you any good. Duncan and I have been a couple for a few years, but we kept it quiet.’
‘How did you get together?’ I asked.
‘He did some writing for me. I fancied him, and it went on from there. He is a bit of a stud, I must tell you; his sword is mightier than his pen, and no mistake. We didn’t make a noise about it, though, because I didn’t want old Phil to know. The last time I tried to take over the Gantry Group, when Oz got in the way, Phil helped him stop me.’
‘Are you telling me you were using the guy as a weapon all along?’
She shook her head. ‘No. I didn’t have that in mind at the start. But when Phil introduced him to Susie, and he told me that she’d made a flat-out play for him, I thought, “why the hell not?” so I told him what I wanted him to do. At first, all I’d thought about was getting some revenge in general. Yes, the book was my idea; I know that Oz was no lily-white, and don’t you try to deny it, Primavera, so do you. But it was meant to embarrass Susie, that was all. Using it to extort cash from you, that was all Duncan’s stupid idea. I don’t know why, but Duncan hates your kid; that’s where it came from, why he did it.’
She paused for a couple of seconds. ‘Yes, I know, it was stupid; I went ballistic when he told me, I almost chucked him out, I was so mad. He backed off from Susie, thinking you’d be bound to tell her, then, just a couple of weeks later, Phil told him that she was ill, very seriously ill, maybe even terminally, and that he’d be pretty much running Gantry for a while.’
‘Was that when you came up with the Babylon Links scheme?’
Natalie smiled, her self-confidence and self-satisfaction restored. She nodded. ‘I’d owned the land for years. My Uncle James bought it for a song from a friend who needed some cash. He was a secretive sod, was old James; in particular he wasn’t a big fan of inheritance tax, and did everything he could to avoid it. He salted away all sorts of assets in offshore companies, mainly Monsoon, using a nominee shareholder, usually Diego Fabricant. They all came to me when he died. Some I disposed of, but the Monsoon Holdings land was pretty much useless, so I was stuck with it.’
She sipped some wine and gazed at me, across her desk. ‘There are some big advantages in looking like me,’ she said. ‘Probably the biggest is that people focus on one’s body without even considering one’s mind. But in business that can work against you, especially when you find yourself running a major company in your twenties as I did. That’s why you didn’t find my image on any of my corporate literature: I don’t want it to affect perceptions of Torrent PLC. You must know this, Primavera; you’ve probably experienced it yourself. Little Susie, on the other hand, not being quite so gifted in the looks department, found it much more easy to be taken seriously as a businesswoman. You with me?’