Read Online The Butcherbird by Geoffrey Cousins - Free Book Online

with his direct line number and found himself in the restaurant before the week was out. She was extremely professional and businesslike in her approach to the interview, as they sat in a booth at the back of a fashionable restaurant in The Rocks. She ordered the wine and the food, after asking what he’d like, told the waiter to leave the white wine out of the ice bucket, was in control from the moment she arrived fifteen minutes after he’d been seated. Her research was extraordinary. She knew details about his life he’d forgotten himself. When she asked about his competitive streak he’d tried to shrug it off with an ‘Oh shucks’ line, but she brushed it away with facts.
    ‘You won the eight hundred metres open championship in the GPS athletics in one minute fifty-four point two seconds which, although it wasn’t a record, was only nought point five seconds outside; you play golf off a single figure handicap, you blitzed the top end of the Sydney property market for ten years, you’re the CEO of a major corporation. Don’t be coy.’
    The restaurant was nearly empty, and half of the second bottle of wine sat between them. She’d switched off the tape machine ten minutes ago and put the notebook into some extraordinary handbag that appeared to be constructed from rusty nails. They sat, relatively silent after the steady rhythm of her questions. He wasn’t entirely surprised when she carefully removed her glasses and, looking him straight in the eyes, said ‘I don’t normally sleep with the people I interview Jack, but in your case I might make an exception.’ It was two days later and the buzz of press interviews and chance meetings with the Prime Minister had worn off. Jack sat at his desk with stacks of documents arranged across its surface. He’d asked Renton Healey for a summary of the company’s financial position, key performance indicators and potential cost savings, but this trolley-load of unbound papers had arrived. When he’d complained that he was drowning in detail, Renton had replied, ‘Let me know what you feel is irrelevant and I’ll have it removed immediately.’ The implication was obvious—you won’t know enough to sift the gold from the dross.
    But he was sifting: painstakingly, excruciatingly slowly, Jack was working through the piles. And the nuggets were there. Sometimes they appeared to be fool’s gold and raised more questions than answers, but he was determined to grasp the essence of this business. He would not be a once-over-lightly presenter of someone else’s work—a show pony of a CEO. And if any of them thought he’d ever operated that way, they were wrong. Sure he’d been the creative force in his own business, but he’d always understood the detail, even if it was managed by others.
    He was struggling with the detail, or lack of it, in a thick pile of contracts Renton had dropped on his desk. He’d wanted to examine the quantum of HOA’s payments to outside contractors, but instead of an analysis he’d been given all the legal contracts. His initial browsing had been disturbing. The monies involved were way beyond what he’d expected, and some of the contracts were vague in the extreme; the description of the services to be provided was so broad as to be meaningless.
    The further he dug down into the papers the more alarmed he became. Some of these matters he would raise at the board meeting next week. Others would require more intense scrutiny. But he wasn’t going to let it go. He’d sell the story better than anyone, but it was going to be his story.
    ‘Thank you, gentlemen. The hour is past. We have a quorum so let me call the meeting to order.’
    Sir Laurence’s prim tones relayed antiseptically through the next-generation German sound system, bounced dully off the silk-lined boardroom walls and fell mainly on deaf ears. As he glanced around the U-shaped table, he was reminded that the ‘gentlemen’ was no longer entirely appropriate. His