“What data was this exactly?”
She seemed to ponder. “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to tell you that, sir.”
Suddenly she’d switched from “Mike” to “sir”. It was not a good sign. In an effort to restore informality I said, “That’s OK, Eliza. I think it was customer data, wasn’t it?”
It was a long shot, but it partially hit its mark. She said, “You may have been told that, but I’m afraid I can’t comment.”
“And you say this happened some time after Rob left you. Do you mean weeks later, or a year or more?”
She paused again for a moment, then said, “I believe it might have been about fifteen months after he left.”
I felt I was part-way on to something, but there were still gaps. All the same, given that The Spine was in California and I was in Camden Town, I felt it was a result.
Chapter 30
“Mike, how’s it going with the police? They haven’t hassled you any more over that guy Rob Openshaw’s death, have they?”
It was Nick Hathaway. He’d called me next morning as I was trying to pick up the threads of my regular working life. I felt I was in uncharted waters; we’d never spoken on the phone before. I said, “Well, as it happens they did haul me down to the police station for a second visit, but I was able to sort things out eventually.”
“You should have let Bernard know. He’s all teed up to deal with these things.”
“Thanks, Nick, I appreciate it, but I managed to get out on my own this time.” I wondered if I should bring Dave’s name into the frame, but decided I wouldn’t. Let Nick speculate on what had happened.
“Well keep him in mind. Have they told you you’re off the hook yet?”
“On the contrary, they told me I should expect to hear from them again.”
“There you are then. If that happens, you’ll certainly need representation.”
I felt out of control on the trajectory Nick had initiated. The idea of using his lawyer suggested cost and hassle that I didn’t need and couldn’t afford. However, there was no point in antagonising him. I said, “I’ll contact him if the need arises.”
“You must.” He lowered his voice. “That other matter you raised with me – the leaked information about that logistics contract?”
I’d almost forgotten I’d even mentioned this to him. I said, “Of course. What about it?”
“I might have some information for you. I think you may have been right that someone leaked confidential information to the company that won the contract.”
It was hard to force my thoughts away from my book promotion research and back to the mundane world of logistics. Floundering, I said, “You’re talking about someone at the property agency that represents the warehouse?” I was struggling to remember the name.
“Cavenham Risby? No, not exactly.” He lowered his voice further. “The thing is, Cavenhams use a firm of chartered surveyors here in Banbury – Landsholme. What I’m picking up is that one of the guys who works there was a school friend of a director at the logistics company you mentioned, Antler Logistics.”
“Would this guy know anything worth repeating to them?”
“I’m just telling you what I heard.”
I said, “If you don’t mind me asking, how on earth do you know any of this?”
He chuckled. “I don’t want to sound evasive, but could we just say I have my sources?”
I wondered what to say. I hadn’t asked Nick to pursue this for me, but he’d done it anyway, and now I was apparently in his debt yet again. Uncharitably, I wondered if this was his strategy in life – to cast beneficence around him, then call in favours when he needed them. It made me uncomfortable.
All the same, I heard myself saying, “Do we know the name of this person at Landsholme?”
He hesitated. “Sorry, no. This is all very secondhand.”
Was he being genuinely circumspect, or was he toying with me because it amused him? Somehow I kept finding ulterior motives in everything he said and did. However, I merely said, “Fair enough, but I can’t really take this any further without having details.”
“I understand.”
“How about the contact at Antler Logistics – are you able to say who that is?”
He hesitated again, then said, “Yeah, I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you that. There’s no proof, but I’m hearing that it could be a man named Hobbs.”
Now we were getting somewhere. Gary Hobbs had been the renegade marketing man at Latimer Logistics in Cornwall – the one who had tried to steal a contract from the company a couple of years ago and set up on his own. Now here was a further hint of evidence that he was doing the same thing at Antler Logistics.
I tried to hide my piqued interest, and merely said, “Thanks for keeping your eyes and ears open, Nick. It’s really helpful. I’m not sure how I should deal with this new information at the moment, but it’s really useful to have it.” A little reluctantly I added, “It seems I owe you again.”
* * *
I rummaged through my inbox. An email had come in a couple of days ago from Will Ponsonby, the head of Antler Logistics – presumably containing his edited version of my draft article about the company. When I’d spotted it I’d immediately archived it. At the time I couldn’t bear the thought of reading it and finding out how many of my well-chosen words he might have deleted.
The email stared up at me with the file attachment in place. “Hope you don’t mind the amendments,” read Ponsonby’s accompanying message. “Call me if you have any questions.” At least the tone was positive. Holding my breath, I opened the Word file.
It wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. At first glance the text seemed spattered with red deletions and amendments, but on closer examination, some of the changes were trivial. One or two were merely supposed grammar “corrections”. I muttered “Cheeky bugger” to myself, changing the wording back to what I’d originally written.
He’d toned down my description of the way his company had clinched the electronics contract, but he hadn’t removed it altogether, and he’d taken out one or two other bits of speculation by me. Fair enough.
All in all, the revised article would stand as a bland but adequate piece of reporting for the web site – a snapshot of the workings of a new player on the logistics front. The question now was whether I wanted to run it like that, or hold it back and augment it with new information based on Nick Hathaway’s tip-off.
On the whole, I decided it would have to run as it was. If I added new material, it would still be the same article, and arguably I would have broken my word to Ponsonby by throwing in details that he hadn’t checked. I didn’t want to put the web site in an invidious position or open myself to accusations of duplicity.
If I found out more about the mysterious source of the leak, I could write it as a follow-up, and Ponsonby needn’t get his hands on that at all.
Chapter 31
“I thought this was meant to be your stop-press exclusive,” Guy Dereham grumbled, clearly unimpressed. “I could have written this piece with my eyes shut.”
“Don’t spare the praise, will you?”
“I’m only winding you up.” He gave me a brief smile. “All the same, you know what I’m saying.”
“Change of plan. This is just a scene-setter. I still have a couple of leads to chase down. When I get them nailed I can write the follow-up. That should give you the exclusive you want.”
“Glad to hear it. Let’s make it soon.” He gave me one if his meaningful looks. “By the way, my new man Piers won’t be arriving for a while yet. There’s been a complication.”
I looked at him curiously. “Complication?”
“He’s my nephew, if you must know. He took a year out after university, and he’s been delayed in South America.”
“Oh great.”
He gave me a defensive glare. “So I’ll need you to keep on with the routine work for a while.” He paused. “But I still want the in-depth stuff as we
ll.” He turned, then paused again. “That won’t be a problem, will it?”
It seemed the good will of our last conversation had disappeared, and we were back to our usual adversarial positions. When Guy had originally persuaded me to work with him he’d been reasonably respectful – acknowledging that I’d once been assistant editor of a leading trade journal, and giving me due credit for my track record. Running his own show seemed to have made him increasingly demanding and intolerant. Unless I wanted to fall out with him it appeared that I had to take it on the chin.
So how could I advance the story about Antler Logistics? Could I find the name of the man Nick had mentioned at Landsholme, the chartered surveyors in Banbury? Nick had said the man had been a school friend of Gary Hobbs, one of the Antler directors. Perhaps that was the lead I needed. I googled Hobbs, and found he’d attended a school in Warwick.
I looked up the web site for Landsholme, the surveyors in Banbury, and navigated to the company’s “About us” page. As I hoped, it included a list of key staff members. There was even a thumbnail photograph of each of them.
There were only seven male staff, and three of them looked much too old to have been at school with Gary Hobbs. That left four possible candidates. Two of them had attended other schools, but the final two made no reference to their school in any of their public profiles. One of them could be the man I wanted.
I tried googling the names of the two likely candidates in combination with that of Gary Hobbs; and that’s how I eventually got my answer. A consultant at the surveyors named Neil Wardell had been Hobbs’ tennis partner for three seasons of inter-school championships. It had to be him.
The question now was what I should do with this knowledge. I couldn’t just contact the man and ask him outright if he’d leaked confidential information to an old friend. He would tell me nothing, and from then on he would refuse to speak to me at all. I had to be circumspect.
I was out of practice with this kind of thing. Confronting Will Ponsonby at Antler Logistics had been nerve-racking enough, and that had been in the context of a pre-arranged meeting. Here I was running blind. I needed a strategy.
In the end I decided to stay as close to the truth as I could. I called the company and asked for Neil Wardell, and I was in luck – I was put through immediately. I told him my name and the name of the news web site, and said we were preparing an article about industrial warehousing.
“We’re looking for the surveyor’s perspective,” I added. “I was hoping you might be able to spare me a few minutes for a chat?”
“I’m afraid that’s a bit above my pay grade.” He had an amiable voice: middle class and good-natured. “You’d need to talk to my boss about that. I’m not authorised to speak for the company.”
“I’m not asking you to tell me anything specific about Landsholme – just to give me a general insight into how things work from your point of view.”
“Yes, I see that, but I still can’t talk to you. We’re not allowed to speak to the press at all.”
I said nothing, hoping he might relent. Instead, he said, “Can I ask how you came to single me out for this? I’m just a member of the team here. Why didn’t you go straight to my boss?”
I had no answer to that. Improvising, I said, “Your profile picture made you look more friendly.”
He laughed good-naturedly. “Kind of you to say so. My boss is all right, though. Shall I transfer you to him?”
I couldn’t very well say no, so I thanked him and waited until he’d initiated the transfer, then ended the call.
* * *
I was tempted to drop the exercise there and then. As far as I could see, the only way I would find out anything useful from Neil Wardell would be by ambushing him somewhere and talking to him in person. I’d done that kind of thing in the past, but I hated it. Adrenaline junkies might relish the rush of a confrontation, but my stress levels had always gone through the roof.
Yet I was reluctant to admit defeat – and besides, I had no other hot leads with which to wow Guy Dereham. In truth I was beginning to wonder if my time with him was limited anyway, but while I was there, I needed to show I was buying into his aspirations.
So how could I catch Neil Wardell? I had a sense that surveyors probably tended to spend a lot of time away from the office – surveying. Not much point in turning up at his office, only to find he was out.
I looked again at the Landsholme web site, and by good fortune it offered a useful clue. In the blog section there was chat about “The Friday Focus”, which turned out to mean a regular Friday afternoon get-together in which staff exchanged news about what they’d been doing and what they planned to do next.
Tomorrow was Friday, and the site’s contact page said the company’s office hours were 9.00 to 5.30. My plan was taking shape.
Chapter 32
I considered catching the train to Banbury, but my car appealed more. One of the benefits of Camden Town was that it was on the north side of London – the right side for a quick getaway. However, London traffic was always worse on Fridays than on other days. To ensure that I had enough time I left just after lunch.
Landsholme’s office turned out to be in the same part of Banbury as Nick Hathaway’s, but half a mile further down the road. I parked as discreetly as I could and positioned myself on a bench obliquely opposite the entrance. Then I sat nervously waiting for well over an hour.
Half past five came and went, and no one emerged from the building. Had I got this horribly wrong? All I could do was hang on and hope. Then at ten to six the front door opened and two people stepped out into the sun. Neither was Neil Wardell, but their emergence seemed a hopeful sign. I waited, and three more people came out, then another two. My pulse was racing as I watched.
Finally there he was. His hair was longer than it had been in the photograph, and he was dressed more formally in a suit and tie, but it was unmistakably him. He was somewhere in his thirties, clean-shaven and as genial-looking in three dimensions as he’d sounded on the phone. He lingered on the pavement for a moment, chatting to another man. Would they walk off together? That would make my life harder. No, they finished their conversation, and I could just hear their parting comments as they went their separate ways.
I jumped to my feet and waited for a break in the traffic, then hurried across the road. Presumably he was on his way to his car, and I didn’t want him to get there. From a few paces behind I called, “Neil Wardell?”
He wheeled round and stared at me. “Can I help you?”
I gave him what I hoped was my most engaging smile. “I’m Mike Stanhope. We spoke on the phone yesterday.”
His air of puzzlement resolved itself into one of suspicion. “But I told you I couldn’t help you.” He looked me up and down. “Are you stalking me or something?”
“God, no.” Well actually, yes. “I just wanted a private word. If you’ll hear me out, I think you’ll understand.”
“A private word? But we don’t know each other, do we?”
I hesitated. “It’s about Antler Logistics.”
I was watching his face as I named the company, but I saw nothing other than further puzzlement. He said, “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
“That’s what I wanted to establish.”
“I’m afraid you’ve lost me.” He glanced at his watch. “Look, I need to get home. I’m not comfortable having this conversation.”
I made a show of relaxing and took a small step back. “I think I’ve been misinformed. If you need to go, please don’t let me stop you, but if you could spare me a minute more of your time, I could confirm that I’m right, and then I’ll be out of your hair forever.” I attempted another smile.
He still wanted to walk away, but I could see that he was slightly intrigued. He said, “Misinformed about what?”
“I was told there was a meeting between Cavenham Risby and Vantage Express, and you sat in on it for Landsholme.”
He frowned. “I don’t know
where you’re getting all this from, or why I should talk to you about it.”
I took a deep breath. I had an instinct that this was the point where I should lay my cards on the table. I said, “I was told that you leaked information about that meeting to a third party, Antler Logistics.”
“What? You must be joking. I’m not continuing this conversation.” He started to turn away.
“But you didn’t, did you? You didn’t leak anything. In fact I don’t think you were even at that meeting. Am I right?”
He turned back to me. “No I bloody well wasn’t – not that it’s any of your business. I don’t know who’s feeding you this information, but as far as I can see they’re simply making mischief. You should check your sources properly before you go harassing people like this. I’ve never known anything like it in my life.”
I held my hands up in defeat. “I apologise. I’ve got this all wrong. Please forgive me.”
He stared at me a moment, then shook his head despairingly. “I’d hate to do your job.”
I shrugged. “I hate it myself.” I hesitated. “Any vacancies at Landsholme?”
A glimmer of a smile passed over his face. I gave him a faint smile in return. I said, “I don’t suppose I could buy you a pint?”
* * *
Five minutes later we were leaning against a bar counter with two beers in front of us. I hadn’t for a moment expected him to agree to the drink, but I gradually realised there was more to Neil Wardell than met the eye. He radiated a deep-seated self-confidence – a willingness to form his own judgements and make his own decisions. He was comfortable in his own skin.
“You’re saying that a single source told you I was in on that meeting,” he said. “Is that source usually reliable?”
“It wasn’t a regular source, and the answer is that I’m thinking not.”
“Then perhaps you’ll think twice before you believe what he or she tells you in future.”
The Concrete Ceiling Page 13
