Arturo da Costa stated without preamble.
Art sat back, linked his fingers on his stomach and looked at Harold Simpson, a man who was normally calm, measured and so good at his job that Art couldn’t think of a time when anything had been a problem for him. He ran the vast legal department of Art’s sprawling empire with impeccable efficiency.
So at the word problem Art frowned, already mentally rescheduling the meeting he was due to attend in half an hour as he anticipated a conversation he wasn’t going to enjoy, about a situation he would not have foreseen and which would be tricky to resolve.
‘Talk to me,’ he said, his deep voice sharp, knowing Harold was a rare breed of man who wasn’t intimidated by his clever and unashamedly arrogant and unpredictable boss.
‘It’s the development in Gloucester.’
‘Why is there a problem? I’ve got all the necessary planning permission. Money’s changed hands. Signatures have been put on dotted lines.’
‘If only it were that simple.’
‘I don’t see what could possibly be complex about this, Harold.’
‘I suppose complex wouldn’t quite be the right word, Art. Annoying might be the description that better fits the bill.’
‘Not following you.’ Art leaned forward, frowning. ‘Don’t I pay you to take care of annoying problems?’
Harold deflected the direct hit with a reprimanding look and Art grinned.
‘You’ve never come to me with an annoying problem before,’ he drawled. ‘Perhaps I was rash in assuming that you dealt with them before they could hit my desk.’
‘It’s a sit-in.’
‘Come again?’
Instead of answering, Harold opened up his laptop and swivelled it so that it was facing his boss, then leaned away as if waiting for the reaction he was expecting, a reaction which would have sent strong men diving for cover.
Fury.
Art looked at the newspaper article staring him in the face. It was from a local paper, circulation circa next to nothing, read by no one who mattered and covering an area where sheep probably outnumbered humans, but he could immediately see the repercussions of what he was reading.
His mouth tightened and he reread the article, taking his time. Then he looked at the grainy black-and-white picture accompanying the article. A sit-in. Protestors. Placards. Lots of moral high ground about the wicked, cruel developers who planned to rape and pillage the countryside. Him, in other words.
‘Has this only now come to your attention?’ He sat back and stared off into the distance with a thoughtful frown, his sharp mind already seeking ways of diverting the headache staring him in the face and coming up with roadblocks.
‘It’s been simmering,’ Harold said as he shut the lid of his computer, ‘but I thought I could contain the situation. Unfortunately, the lawyer working on behalf of the protesters has got the bit between her teeth, so to speak, and is determined to put as many obstacles in the way of your development as she can. Trouble is, in a small community like that, even if she loses the case and of course she will because, as you say, all the crosses have been made in the right boxes, the fallout could still be...unfortunate.’
‘I admire your use of understatement, Harold.’
‘She can rally the community behind her and the luxury development that should, in normal circumstances, sell in a heartbeat with the new train link due to open a handful of miles away, could find itself sticking on the open market. She’s anti building on green fields and she’s going to fight her corner, win or lose and come what may. Expensive people moving into expensive houses like to fancy themselves as mucking in with the locals and eventually becoming pillars of the community. They wouldn’t like the prospect of the locals going quiet every time they walk into the village pub and pelting eggs against their walls in the dead of night.’
‘I had no idea you had such impressive flights of fancy, Harold.’ Art was amused but there was enough truth in what his lawyer had said to make him think. ‘When you say she...?’
‘Rose Tremain.’
‘Miss...Mrs...or Ms?’
‘Very definitely Ms.’
‘I’m getting the picture loud and clear. And on the subject of pictures, do you have one of her? Is she floating around somewhere on the World Wide Web?’
‘She disapproves of social media insofar as it personally pertains to her,’ Harold said with a trace of admiration in his voice that made Art’s eyebrows shoot up. ‘No social media accounts...nothing of the sort. I know because I got one of my people to try to find out how we could follow her, try to get a broader picture of her, but no luck. There’s the bones of past cases but no personal information to speak of at all. It would appear that she’s old-fashioned like that.’
‘There’s another word for it,’ Art drawled drily.
‘I’ve only had dealings with her over the phone so far, and of course by email. I could give you my personal impressions...’
‘I’m all ears.’
‘Can’t be bought off,’ Harold said bluntly, instantly killing Art’s first line of attack.
‘Everyone has a price,’ he murmured without skipping a beat. ‘Have you any pictures of her at all?’
‘Just something in one of the articles printed last week about the development.’
‘Let’s have a look.’ Art waited, thinking, as Harold expertly paged through documents in his pile of folders before eventually showing him an unsatisfactory picture of the woman in question.
Art stared. She looked like a Ms. The sort of feminist hippy whose mission might be to save the world from itself. The newspaper article showed him a picture of the sit-in, protesters on his land with placards and enough paraphernalia to convince him that they weren’t going anywhere any time soon. All that was missing was a post office and a corner shop, but then summer was the perfect time for an impromptu camping expedition. He doubted they would have been quite as determined if those fields had been knee-deep in snow and the branches of the trees bending at ninety-degree angles in high winds.
Whatever the dark-haired harridan had said to them to stoke up public outrage at his development, she had succeeded because the untidy lot in the picture looked as self-righteous as she did.
The picture he was now staring at, of Ms Rose Tremain, showed a woman jabbing her finger at someone out of sight, some poor sod unfortunate enough to be asking her to answer a few questions she didn’t like. Her unruly hair was scraped back into something, leaving flyaway strands around her face. Her clothes beggared belief. Art was accustomed to dating women who graced catwalks, women who were best friends with cutting-edge designers and spent whatever time they had away from their modelling jobs in exclusive salons beautifying themselves.
He squinted at the picture in front of him and tried to get his head around the image of someone who looked as though she had bulk-bought her outfit from a charity shop and hadn’t been near a hairdresser in decades.
No. Money wasn’t going to get her off his back. One look at that jabbing finger and fierce scowl was enough to convince him of the rashness of going down that road.
But there were many ways to skin a cat...
‘So, she can’t be bought,’ Art murmured, half to himself. ‘Well, I will have to find another way to convince her to drop her case against me and get those protestors off my land. Every day lost is costing me money.’ With his dark eyes still on the picture in front of him, Art connected to his PA and told her to reschedule his calendar for the next fortnight.
‘What are you going to do?’ Harold asked, sounding alarmed,