Cathy Kelly - Past Secrets

‘You’ll talk to him?’ Grace asked warily, also seeing the look.

‘I’ll talk to him,’ Faye agreed.

The women around the table grinned at each other. Mr Brooks was about to be taken down a peg or two. If only they could witness it, but they wouldn’t. Because Faye was so famously discreet.

After the meeting, Faye poured herself another coffee and shut the door to her sanctum.

She loved her job. Recruitment suited her perfectly because it was about placing the right person in the right job and to a woman who liked the towels in her airing cupboard folded just so and in the correct place, it was very satisfying indeed. People were not towels, but life might have been easier if they were.

Over the years, she’d discovered that the main skill was interviewing potential employees and working out whether a certain job and company would suit them. With no training whatsoever, Faye turned out to be a natural at it.

‘It’s like you can work out precisely what sort of person they are from just twenty questions,’ Grace said admiringly.

‘Yes, but you’ve got to know which twenty questions to ask,’ Faye said. She was justifiably proud of her ability, if a little amused. It was odd being successful in business by seeing through people’s façades to the character within, when the biggest problems in her private life had come from being unable to do just that.

‘It’s easy to suss people out when you’re not involved with them,’ she added. ‘You might never have met them before but it’s possible to gauge fairly soon whether someone is hard-working, easy-going, anxious, a team player, whatever.’

In the early days, they only recruited secretarial staff and the competition was vicious, but the combination of Faye’s talent and Grace’s business savvy meant the company took off. Then, there would have been no question of dropping difficult clients: they needed everyone they could get. But not any more, as William Brooks was about to find out. Recruitment was a small business where everybody knew everybody. Faye phoned a couple of her old colleagues, now with other agencies, and asked what the word was on William Brooks. Fifteen minutes later, she hung up the phone a lot wiser.

After a moment or two of deep thought, she dialled the number for Brooks FX. She was put straight through to Mr Brooks, probably because he thought she bore news of a suitable PA with the required Miss World physique.

‘Well,’ he snapped. ‘Found anyone?’

‘I’m not sure Little Island is the right recruitment agency for you,’ Faye began blandly.

‘What?’ He was instantly wrong-footed, she knew. Few agencies could afford to turn down business.

‘As you know, we work with Davidson’s and Marshal McGregor.’ She named the two biggest stockbroking firms in the country, both of which could buy and sell Brooks FX with the contents of their petty cash boxes. ‘And we have excellent relationships with both those companies, but you do appear to have peculiar requirements, Mr Brooks.’

‘I’m exacting, that’s all,’ he snapped. ‘You’ve been sending me morons. Call yourselves a recruitment agency…’

‘You’re more than exacting,’ Faye interrupted, feeling cold rage course through her. She’d planned to do this the official way, but it was clear that Brooks needed the unorthodox approach. ‘Let’s put it this way, Mr Brooks, if we were offering sports massages, I believe you’d be the client insulting our therapists by asking for a massage with a “happy ending”.’

‘What?’ exploded out of him again, and Faye grinned to herself. ‘Happy ending’ was code for a massage with sexual services included, the sort only available in red-light districts.

‘How dare you…?’

Probably nobody had ever talked to William Brooks this way. She knew his sort: a bully. And, importantly, she now knew some even less pleasant things about him.

‘We have our reputation to consider too, Mr Brooks,’ Faye went on, the vein of ice evident in her tone. ‘And we’ve been hearing stories from the staff we’ve placed with you, stories that neither of us would like to hear repeated. You see, we place temps in the equality agency too, and with some of the city’s top legal firms, and we can’t have any hint of scandal associated with our company.’

‘What are you implying?’ he roared.

‘We’ve placed a lot of staff with Wilson Brothers too,’ Faye went on. ‘They’re one of our best customers and actually handle our legal affairs, so if there was any, shall we say, unpleasantness, we’d naturally go to them.’

This time, there was an audible indrawn breath at the other end of the phone.

Wilson Brothers was a law firm where the senior partner just happened to be William Brooks’s father-in-law. The unspoken message was that Mr Wilson would be fascinated to learn of his son-in-law’s fondness for touching up his assistants.

‘How about we pretend we didn’t have this conversation, Mr Brooks,’ Faye went on, ‘and we’ll resume our search for a PA for you. However, if and when we do find one, I shall be in constant communication with her and I assure you, I expect any Little Island person to be treated with the utmost respect and dignity. I’m sure you agree that bullying and sexual harassment cases can be so messy and time-consuming?’

‘Oh, yes,’ blustered William Brooks but the fight had gone out of him. ‘I’ll talk to you again, Mrs Reid,’ he muttered and hung up.

Result, thought Faye, leaning back in her chair, relieved. She knew that what she’d done was unethical and that Grace would have had a coronary had she overheard, but sometimes the unorthodox approach was required and this time, thankfully, it had worked. She’d never had a problem thinking outside the box when it came to business. And being tough was second nature to her now.

Some people thought it was being hard-nosed, but it wasn’t: it was self-preservation.

She’d tried to instil that and a sense of personal power in Amber.

‘You are responsible for you,’ Faye used to repeat mantralike. ‘It’s not clever to be led by other people or to do what you don’t want to do, just to fit in. You have the power to do and be anything you want and to make your own choices. Believing in yourself and in your own power is one of the most important things in life.’

‘Ella’s mum says to behave like a little lady, not to hang around with rough boys in the park and that if a stranger tries to get you into a car, to scream,’ Amber reported when she was younger and her friends thought Faye’s ‘be your own boss’ mantra was cool. ‘But Ella thinks your rules are better. I told her you were a feminist because you never let anyone walk all over you. It’s because Dad’s dead, I said. You had to be tougher because we were on our own.’

Faye spent an hour on paperwork, then returned her emails, by which time her eyes were weary from staring at the screen. She fetched another coffee, shut her office door firmly, kicked off her shoes and lay down on the couch for a few minutes. She was tired today. The reason still worried her. Amber had woken her up at three the night before, talking loudly to herself in her sleep, saying, ‘No, I will not!’ firmly.

Faye had stood at her daughter’s door in case this middle-of-the-night conversation became a nightmare, but it didn’t. Amber muttered ‘no’ a few more times before turning over and falling back into a silent sleep.

Amber had been prone to nightmares when she was a small child and Faye, who couldn’t bear to think of her darling lonely and frightened in her bed, would carry the pink-pyjama-clad little girl into her own room.

Having your baby sleep with you when you were a lonely, affection-starved single mother was probably against every bit of advice in the book, Faye knew. But she needed the comfort of her little daughter every bit as much as Amber needed her. The sweetness of that small body, energetic little limbs still padded with baby fat, gave Faye strength. No matter how tough life could be, she’d go on for Amber. Her daughter deserved the best and Faye would provide it, no matter what.