Free Doukakis's Apprentice by Sarah Morgan

mess, but there’s at least one person in the company who is exceptional. I’d go as far as to say they’re afloat purely because of the talents of their creative director. Who is he?’
    ‘His name was Michael Anderson and I fired him.’ Damon was staring down at the pages in front of him. ‘And there’s no way these ideas came from him. The man didn’t have an original thought in his head.’
    ‘Maybe it was Prince himself?’
    Just thinking of Peter Prince sent Damon’s tension levels shooting skyward. ‘He’s in his fifties and he’s notorious for abandoning the company when it suits him. From what I can gather he treats it more as a hobby than a business. This stuff is young. Fresh. Visionary.’
    Ellen smiled. ‘And fun.’
    Fun.
    Damon thought of the skull and crossbones on Polly’s nails. The hot pink tights. The fish on the desk. The party atmosphere that hit him every time he went near the staff. ‘They certainly have an interesting work ethic.’
    ‘So if it wasn’t the creative director, who’s coming up with the ideas?’ Ellen gathered up the papers. ‘Thanks to theircreativity they have some major pieces of business. Their billing is haphazard, their cash flow is a nightmare, but we can sort that—’ she shrugged ‘—and absorb them into our business. Just make sure we don’t lose the brain behind these campaigns. We need to find out who it is and lock them into a watertight contract. Any idea who it could be?’
    ‘No.’ Mentally scrolling through the people he’d met, Damon closed the file. ‘But I intend to find out immediately. And I know just the person to ask.’
    By seven o’clock Polly was the only one left on her floor of the office. She’d spent the latter half of the day juggling problems and soothing frayed nerves while taking endless calls from anxious clients who had seen news of the takeover on the TV.
    ‘Mr Peters, I think we should be reviewing the whole media mix.’ Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she talked into her headset so that her hands were free to unpack the last of the boxes, ‘Yes, it’s true that Mr Anderson has gone.’ She retrieved a packet of balloons from the bottom of the box and slid them into her desk. ‘But there are other people more than qualified to advise you on the best strategy.’
Like me
, she thought, rescuing the charger for her BlackBerry and adding it to the stuff accumulating in the drawer. ‘I’m going to schedule a meeting in your diary, get the team to put together some ideas and then we’ll present them to you. I promise you will be blown away by our ideas … Uhuh … mmm, definitely … absolutely top priority.’
    When she finally hung up, she keyed in the task to the ever-growing to-do list in her BlackBerry and carried on sorting out her desk area. The rest of the staff had gone home hours before, all apparently excited by the prospect of riding down to street level in the glass elevator.
    Left alone, Polly removed her boots and settled down to anevening of hard work. Darkness spread slowly over the city as she worked her way steadily through her calls. After a few hours she glanced up at the towering panes of glass and saw that the view had changed from daytime city-slick to nighttime sparkle and she paused for a moment, captivated by the wide-angled view of London at night. The moon sent a sliver of light across the River Thames and for the first time in a horrid, hideous week she felt peaceful.
    Maybe, just maybe, this could turn out to be a good thing. Damon Doukakis was probably one of the few people with the talent to turn the company round, providing he didn’t fire all of them first.
    Romeo and Juliet seemed happy enough in their new surroundings and Polly had discovered that there were enough workstations for everyone without having to operate the Doukakis ‘hot desk’ system. She wondered how his employees must feel, coming to work every day and sitting down at an empty, featureless surface, greeted