The Concrete Ceiling

by Peter Rowlands

  “I see your book is up on The Magic Bookseller web site,” I said.

  “Yeah, I was dancing around when I saw that at lunchtime.” He didn’t sound exactly fired up. “Did you do something to poke these people up the backside?”

  “No, not guilty. Maybe they’ve seen the error of their ways. But you don’t sound terribly excited.”

  He gave a sigh. “I still haven’t had a single new sale.”

  “You need to give it time.”

  “I think the real boost in these campaigns comes from the mailings and tweets, not just from a static presence on a web site. But these people don’t seem to have done anything like that.”

  “Maybe they deferred your entire campaign for some reason. At least the book is there now for all to see.”

  “True enough.” Then as an afterthought he added, “How about yours?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  “I suppose they could be working round to it.” He attempted a more cheerful tone. “I’ll let you know what happens with mine.”

  * * *

  My obvious next step was to use the email address I now had for Openshaw. I composed a careful message in which I asked if he’d received my request to cancel, and whether he’d actioned it yet. I left a hint that I would let the promotion go ahead if he could give me a firm date of commencement. I tried to make the text sound reasonably friendly; there was no point in antagonising him.

  Two days passed. No reply.

  Then my investigation took on a dynamic of its own. While I was talking to Ashley on Skype the following Saturday it occurred to me that she’d mentioned Santa Monica once or twice. I had the impression that she sometimes visited the area in connection with her work. I said, “As a matter of interest, have you ever heard of a place called Peace Lake Park?”

  “I don’t think so. What is it?”

  “It’s a business park of some kind outside Santa Monica.”

  “Hang on, I’ll do a quick search.”

  Her eyes dropped lower down the screen and took on a look of concentration, and she muttered a couple of times as she searched.

  “OK, here it is. It looks like an upmarket business park for high-tech companies. There are loads of those around that area.” She looked up again. “How come you know about it?”

  “I’ve used a company based there to run a promotion for my book. They’ve taken my money up front, but they won’t respond to communications about it.”

  “Santa Monica is a long way from Camden Town. How did you latch on to these people?”

  “Most book promotion companies seem to be in America, and this one just happens to be located over your way. It could have been anywhere.”

  She nodded. I added, “Is that business park anywhere near the place you go when you’re working in that area?”

  “Hang on – let me zoom out.” She concentrated on her screen again. “No, it’s right over on the other side of the city. I’ve never been out that way.”

  “OK, I just wondered.”

  “I tell you what, we could drive that way next time we go there. It doesn’t look that much further. We could use Santa Monica Boulevard.”

  I thought about her suggestion. “I wouldn’t want you to get involved with these people. They might be hard cases for all we know. It’s not your battle.”

  “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t. We could just check out the location.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Oh, that’s Filipe. He runs the warehouse here at Maintown’s head office. I sometimes travel with him when we go over to the Santa Monica office. He’s originally from Rio.”

  “Good. Strength in numbers. I wouldn’t want you to meddle with this company on your own.”

  “You think these people are the literary mafiosi or something? We have ways of making you buy this book?”

  I laughed. “Hardly. Anyway, the company trades as The Magic Bookseller, but its real name is Torsional Strength.”

  “Sounds more like an engineering company, or something to do with bodybuilding.”

  “Go figure.”

  * * *

  Ashley phoned me the following Tuesday afternoon.

  “I’m just heading off to work,” she said, “but I thought you might want to hear about that company in Santa Monica.”

  “Excellent.”

  “We went down there yesterday morning, and basically it’s a kind of upmarket mail-drop address. There are no actual companies there. I talked to the woman on reception. She said Magic Bookseller has been based there about a year. They had a phone number at the start, but they let it lapse early on. She wasn’t prepared to tell me anything else about them, but she gave me the impression that she’d never actually met anyone from the company.”

  “That’s brilliant!”

  “OK. Gotta go.”

  What did this mean? Presumably the real office must be less salubrious than the address in Santa Monica – or perhaps they ran the entire operation from someone’s home. That seemed perfectly possible. However, given that these people didn’t publish their street address in the first place, having a vanity address seemed an unnecessary luxury.

  I probably should have halted the search at that point, and if I had, things might have turned out very differently. Somehow I couldn’t let it go. That inquisitive demon was sitting on my shoulder, nagging at me to press on until I had answers.

  I composed a text to Noel. “Street address of California firm is just a mail-drop. Any chance you could find their real address?”

  Chapter 14

  When Rick Ashton of Vantage Express called me next morning I marvelled at the fortuitous timing. I’d just been subjected to another bout of haranguing by Guy Dereham of Smart Headings. He wanted a progress report on my investigative article, but so far I’d got virtually nowhere with it. The thwarted book promotion had been yet another in a long line of distractions.

  “Michael,” Rick began, “did you find out anything about Antler Logistics?” Nothing if not direct. Before I had a chance to answer he said, “Have you come across someone there called Will Ponsonby?”

  I said, “I haven’t talked to anyone at the company. I phoned them, but it seems they have a policy of never speaking to the press.”

  “Maybe you should try a bit harder.”

  “Give me a break!”

  He ignored this. “Do you want to know the latest? This pillock Ponsonby actually had the gall to ask us to quote for home delivery of the consumer electronic stuff. Can you believe it?”

  “I thought the contract was already under way?”

  “No, it starts at the end of next month. They’ve lined up another carrier to do the deliveries, but Ponsonby thought we might beat them on price. He actually called it a consolation prize to us for missing out on the contract itself.”

  “At least he’s being open about it.”

  “Taking the piss, more like. I wouldn’t quote him on this job to save my life.”

  “That’s up to you.”

  “Too right it is.”

  I was silent for a moment, then I said, “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but if you’ve lost the contract, surely there’s nothing you can do about it? Hounding Antler Logistics will just look like sour grapes.”

  “I know that, mate. I just think if someone’s pulling a fast one, the world should know about it. I don’t want to see these people trying the same trick again.”

  Did I believe in this altruistic intent? Not really, but in a way my opinion was academic. Either I was going to follow up the story or I wasn’t. I said, “Look, is there something more that you could give me on this – something I could use to confront these Antler people?”

  He seemed to think for a minute. “OK, well when we worked out our quote for the contract, it included a price per piece delivered. It’s standard stuff on this kind of deal. And from what I heard, Antler undercut that price by a tiny margin. Their quote was so close that they must have known what we were bidding.”

/>   “So somebody at your company leaked the figures.”

  “No mate. Trust me on that.”

  “If you say so.” I paused. “Who else knew your costings?”

  “No one, so far as I know.” He hesitated. “But the property agency might have found out when we were negotiating the lease on the warehouse”

  “Might have found out?”

  Rick huffed. “My man on the ground can’t remember what he told them – but I take that to mean he might have hinted at our costings. He was probably trying to beat them down – to make them realise we wouldn’t sign unless we were sure we would be making money out of the deal ourselves.”

  He was pointing me back towards the property world again. Did this mean I should have pressed Nick Hathaway harder on the matter?

  “OK, well I’ll have another go at Antler – but don’t hold your breath. They’ll probably tell me to take a running jump, and I won’t really blame them if they do.”

  “I’m sure you have ways of dealing with it. I’ll leave it in your capable hands.”

  * * *

  Taking a deep breath, I called the number of Antler Logistics’ head office and asked to speak directly to Will Ponsonby.

  “What shall I say it’s about?”

  The last time I’d phoned I’d been turned away at this point. This time I was ready. I said, “It’s a private matter.” At least that might get me into a conversation with him.

  “Connecting you now.”

  A man’s voice curtly announced, “Ponsonby.”

  “Mike Stanhope here, from Smart Headings, the news web site. We’re hoping to run a profile of you as a new company – to tell our readers and followers a bit about where you came from, and how you managed to establish yourselves so quickly in the crowded logistics market.”

  “We don’t talk to the media. Mary should have told you that.”

  Quickly I said, “It’s not her fault. I told her this was a private call.”

  “Did you now?” I expected a tirade of invective, but actually he sounded faintly amused. “I suppose some positive press coverage might be useful to us.” I could hear him thinking. “Do we get to see what you write in advance?”

  The very idea was anathema to any self-respecting journalist, but this was a case where needs must; I didn’t want to put him off before even reaching square one. I said, “You wouldn’t get power of veto, but you could correct mistakes and tone down any sensitive points.”

  He thought some more, then said, “What would you want to do? Come and see us in Solihull?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “Look, I’m about to go on leave for a fortnight, but how about the Wednesday after I get back? I could give you an hour.”

  I put the phone down with a sense of relief. At least I’d pushed the idea forward. Now it was a matter of seeing where the conversation would lead.

  Chapter 15

  “He’s based in the UK.”

  It was more than ten days since I’d last been in touch with Noel. I said, “Sorry, who is?”

  “Your Magic Bookseller man, Rob Openshaw. He’s a Brit, and he’s based in London. I should have spotted it before, but I wasn’t looking for it.”

  I was already concerned about lack of action from The Magic Bookseller, but I wasn’t sure whether Noel’s information was good news or bad. The date for my promotion had rolled round a couple of days before, and like Graham, I’d seen no result: no promotional emails, no presence on the Magic Bookseller web site, certainly no new sales. After failing to cancel the booking, I’d been hoping against hope that Graham’s experience had been an anomaly, and my book would get the full treatment. My hopes were already fading.

  Noel was saying, “Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you on this. You caught me in the middle of a big client project.”

  “Don’t worry – it’s good to hear from you now. I’m beginning to think this guy is some sort of rip-off merchant, so it’s really helpful to have information on him. I’ve been stung myself: more fool me.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, mate.”

  “So how can he be based in Britain? What do you think it means?”

  “I dunno. All I can tell you is how he got to that point.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, it looks like Mr Openshaw popped up in the United States about fifteen years ago and worked in the publishing industry there. Then the big self-publishing boom came along, and he switched to eBook promotion. He worked for one of the big specialists for a few years, then started up on his own. Originally he had a proper office, but then he switched it to the mail-drop address in Santa Monica, and some time after that he moved back to the UK.

  I said, “This is amazing. You should get yourself a job as a reporter.”

  He gave a modest laugh. “It’s not hard to find out this kind of stuff once you lock on to your target.”

  “But you’re giving me interpretation as well as facts.”

  “What can I tell you? The customers I deal with usually want context, not just the bare bones. Making sense of what I find out has become a habit.”

  “Did you find out anything else?”

  “Yeah, his web site is still hosted in the US, but he manages it all remotely from London.”

  “So his customers think they’re dealing with an American company, but actually they’re not?”

  “Well, it is American. It’s just that he’s over here himself. Subtle difference. You still have to pay him in dollars, and all the promotional material seems to be emailed out from over there.”

  “What about his colleagues? Are they still in the US?”

  “He doesn’t seem to have any colleagues any more. There’s just him. He’s a one-man band.”

  What I was hearing sounded increasingly suspicious. How could one person alone achieve the remarkable results that this man promised? And now I was hearing that he was based in London. Surely this alone suggested that something was amiss.

  I waited to see if Noel had anything more to add. It seemed he hadn’t, but he was disposed to chat. He said, “It’s an interesting world, self-publishing, isn’t it? Did you know there are over five million self-published books out there now? Say a keen reader gets through ten thousand books in a lifetime, and that’s being pretty generous, it would take them five thousand lifetimes to read all that. Or to put it another way, something like three hundred and fifty thousand years. And that’s assuming everybody starts reading books as soon as they leave the womb.”

  I was silent for a moment, trying to wrench my mind away from Openshaw in order to take in what he was saying. Into the space he added, “Course, I’m working on the basis that nobody will write any more books ever again. Given that they probably will, you could multiply those numbers by hundreds of thousands – probably millions. It’s exponential.”

  I wondered about paying him for his research. The subject had never arisen when I’d dealt with him in the past, since Sam had always been acting as an intermediary. I said, “What do I owe you?”

  “Forget it, mate. Any friend of Sam’s is a friend of mine. Anyway, I look on this kind of thing as light relief.”

  * * *

  Did the fact that this man Openshaw worked from London really mean there was something suspicious about his activities? The answer was that I didn’t know. In itself, his location shouldn’t have any bearing on the services he provided, but if he’d lost the rest of his team, it might mean he was no longer on top of his game. And that in turn could explain why he’d apparently let Graham and me down.

  I googled Rob Openshaw. The number of results was surprisingly small, which encouraged me to keep on looking. Finding people’s street addresses in Britain wasn’t always straightforward, but I’d picked up a few tips over the years, and eventually I decided I’d identified the right person. He lived in London N1, which turned out to mean the backwaters of Islington – once an up-and-coming residential area of inner north London, now well and truly up and co
me. According to his LinkedIn CV, he’d once worked for a book publisher in central London. It had to be him.

  How did this help me? Was I planning to confront him? Not yet, though my thoughts were moving rapidly in that direction. I wondered if Graham’s promotion had yielded any further results yet.

  “Nothing doing,” he told me when I phoned him. “My book is still on The Magic Bookseller home page, but I haven’t received any promotional emails from them, and I haven’t had a single new book sale. Needless to say, they haven’t replied to any of my messages, and they clearly don’t intend to.”

  I said, “Nothing has happened with my promotion either.”

  “Well I’ve decided to write off my money as a bad mistake, and move on. In fact I’m about to run a promotion with another company.”

  “But that means you won’t be able to monitor where your sales are coming from, assuming you get some. They might have been generated by Magic Bookseller or by this other company.”

  “I think we can be pretty sure it won’t be as a result of anything Magic Bookseller has done.” He sniffed. “I don’t have time to waste proving that these people are rip-off merchants. The point is already made. What I need is sales!”

  “Anyway, I’ll let you know what comes of my campaign.”

  “I won’t be holding my breath.”

  Chapter 16

  Rob Openshaw’s mid-terrace house turned out to be in a quiet Georgian square with a nondescript lawn in the middle. I approached it diffidently.

  I’d been vacillating for a couple more days over whether or not to confront him, but I’d still received no response to my emails, and there was no sign of action on my campaign: no email to remind me it was running, no tweets, no newsletter with my book cover in place to entice eager readers. My current book sales were stuck on an obstinate zero.