Three Favours Away

The second interview was held in a smaller room than the first, which Asha understood to be a compliment. The first room had a view. This one had a jug of water, three people, and a door that had been shut by somebody who did not intend it to be opened.

“We won’t keep you long,” Delacroix said. “We have read everything twice. I will be direct, since I think you would prefer it. We would like you to run Compliance.”

“Thank you,” Asha said. “No.”

Pratt looked up from his tablet for the first time since she had entered. Delacroix, who had spent thirty years arranging his face, permitted himself a small revision of the eyebrows.

“That was quick.”

“You said you wouldn’t keep me long.”

“May I ask what the objection is? Compensation is not usually the objection at this level, though I have been wrong before.”

“It isn’t the money.”

“Then I would genuinely like to know, and not for form. We can repair a great many things. We cannot repair what we are not told.”

She had prepared a longer answer on the train and abandoned it somewhere around the third stop.

“I will not run a function I am not permitted to change,” she said.

The sentence sat in the middle of the table. At the far end, Ibori wrote something down. Asha had been told by three separate people that Ibori never wrote anything down.

“Big claim,” Pratt said. “For a job you’ve not done here.”

“I have done it twice somewhere else.”

“Go on then.”

“Your last two heads of Compliance reported to the General Counsel. The General Counsel reports to the Chief Executive. So the function whose whole purpose is to be able to say no to the Chief Executive sits, by design, three favours away from him. I don’t think that’s a scandal. I think it’s an organisational chart nobody has read aloud in a while.”

Delacroix poured a glass of water he had no intention of drinking.

“And you would want to report where?”

“To the audit committee of the Board.”

“That’s a smaller job,” Pratt said.

“It’s a shorter distance.”

The chair had been left at somebody else’s height, and she had been arguing for eleven minutes from four inches below Pratt’s eyeline before she noticed. She found the lever. The chair came up in one jolt, with a noise like a small animal being stepped on, and stopped a good deal higher than she had meant it to.

“Better,” said Delacroix, who was in the middle of a sentence and did not appear to have left it.

“You’re taller than the last one,” Pratt said.

Nobody said which last one. There had been two, and both had gone within the year, and both had afterwards been described, by people who were not unkind, as not quite the right fit.

“I have heard three explanations for why they left,” Asha said. “None of them was the reporting line. All three were about temperament.” She said it to Delacroix and looked at Ibori while she said it, which was a mistake, and she knew it while she was still making it.

Ibori looked back at her with the mild attention of a woman waiting for a bus.

“Somebody has been generous with you about this table,” Delacroix said, without any change of warmth at all.

“That isn’t.” She stopped, and started again lower down. “Yes. Somebody was.”

“Names?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so.” Pratt almost smiled. “Doesn’t matter. It’ll be one of four people and we’ll know by Friday.”

She had given away a person in order to make a point about a chart. It had taken her nine words.

“Then let me ask it the other way,” Delacroix said, with the same care he had used all afternoon. “Tell me what you would change, if you were permitted.”

Her own sentence had come back with one verb turned around. No longer what she would refuse to run; what she would do if allowed. It was courteously done, and it was the point at which the conversation stopped being about whether she would come and started being about what she would cost.

“The line, and nothing else in the first year,” she said. “After that it depends what the first year costs.” It was the truest thing she had said all afternoon, and she heard it leave her as an answer rather than a condition, and there was no getting it back.

Delacroix nodded slowly and wrote nothing down. Neither of them had touched the water.

“We will come back to you,” he said.

“I would rather you went back to the Board.”

Her phone rang between the fourth floor and the third. Not the recruiter. Ibori.

“Thursday, ten minutes, no papers,” Ibori said. “The audit committee has spent two years trying to show the executive that the control functions are not independent. It has one former head of Compliance who wrote a letter on her way out, and one who signed an agreement and cannot discuss why she left or on what terms. You are the third. You are the first who said it before we hired you.”

“So I would be evidence.”

“You would be evidence,” Ibori said. “The letter will be read out. So will the agreement the second one signed instead of writing one. Neither woman will be in the room.”

The lift doors did not open at once. Asha thought about the woman who had written the letter, and about that letter being read aloud on Thursday by people who had not read it when it arrived. She thought about somebody upstairs who was one of four until Friday and had not been told. Then she heard herself say that Thursday would suit, and understood, as the lobby came into view, that she had agreed to something a good deal larger than a Thursday.