Christopher Brookmyre - Parlabane 04 by My Enemy v1.0 Be Page A

taking part in sub-drama school role-playing games is gaunny make them perform better at their jobs? Or that it makes you closer to your colleagues to know that they caught you when you fell backwards during one of those trust exercises - which I fully expect to be engaged in before nightfall, by the way.'
    'If it makes you feel any better,' she replied, 'if we are made to do one of those trust exercises you described, you can rest assured I won't attempt to catch you.'
    Parlabane's name was familiar, to say the least, even before UML requested he be invited. It was part of her job to know, or at least know about, as many journalists as possible, and though he wasn't likely to be on her guestlist for a new gallery opening, she'd been aware of his byline and his reputation even before he became Ian Beadie's nemesis. Granted, little she had heard about him prior to that had been complimentary, but anyone Ian Beadie hated so much that he'd tried to kill him couldn't be all bad. Working at what might be termed the sunnier end of the PR industry - parties, junkets and launch events, mainly for fairly small, leisure-and media-based businesses - she had thus far no occasion to lock horns with Parlabane, nor had she imagined doing so unless his editor went insane and made him the food critic. This was something she was grateful for, and the reason she lobbied hard, if ultimately in vain, against UML's wish to invite him.
    Emily had imagined him to be bigger, somehow. Older too, gnarled, nicotinestained, beer-bellied and grey-skinned from a lifetime under flickering striplights: the grizzled old school hack to out-grizzle all old-school hacks. What she'd seen standing by the minibus she had in fact taken to be part of the UML set-up, as he looked lithely fit and had something unmistakably of the outdoors about him. It wasn't just that his face looked healthily weathered by sun and wind beneath a dirty-blond mop that seemed likely to shed sand if he shook it; some people (and there were a few present) simply looked out of place away from their desks, their phones, their bar or their favourite table, and he conspicuously wasn't one of them. It probably enhanced the impression that he was standing next to the infamous Rory Glen, who had typically spent a lot of money on looking the outdoor type, but who had succeeded only in looking all the more like a yuppie on a weekend country break. Parlabane's photographer was a surprise package too. With Parlabane hav51
    ing cultivated - some might say hammed up - his anti-establishment credentials through the self image he conveyed in print, it seemed particularly incongruous that he be accompanied (as a condition of attendance, no less) by someone who could have walked out of a No''el Coward play. He was another who looked cut out for whatever the weekend might have in store, though she couldn't decide if he looked fit beyond his years or facially aged by his outdoor exertions. Neither could she decide of which thespian Fox brother he most reminded her, nor explain why she could as much picture him looking through a scope as a lens.
    'I'd argue that any social activity - the more pleasurable the better - would bring work colleagues closer together,' offered Rory Glen. It was an intervention for which Emily was grateful enough to offer a conspiratorial smile, even at the potential cost of offering encouragement to a man whose reputation for promiscuity was often denoted by the phrase 'ferret up a drainpipe'. 'Actually,'
    he continued, 'it might be more accurate to talk about morale-building than team-building, if it's the latter you're so sceptical about.'
    'So why not gather the staff and just go for a few drinks, if it comes to the same thing?' Parlabane asked, turning in his seat to take on Emily's ally. 'Why come all the way up here with them?'
    'Because you can get to have a few drinks up here too. It's what else this weekend might offer - and what your local pub presumably doesn't - that