by David Cooper
Craven Conflict
David Cooper
Copyright © David Cooper 2015
David Cooper has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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Also by David Cooper
Hatred, Ridicule and Contempt
Infernal Coalition
"I found myself surprised by how much I enjoyed Hatred, Ridicule & Contempt ... it is a novel which should have a wide appeal, particularly for those who enjoy legal thrillers and would like to try something different to the usual American fare." - CURIOUS BOOK FANS
“Absolutely brilliant writing! Move over John Grisham and Michael Connolly – [Hatred, Ridicule and Contempt] is beautifully written, very well plotted and has a great twist. Well done.” – M.L.EATON, author “When The Clocks Stopped”
Thursday 14 th March
“I’m really sorry, Wayne. I think I’m going to have to let you go.”
It was never going to be easy for Karen Rutherford to break the news to one of her staff members that he might be on the verge of losing his job. She tried to keep eye contact with the calm figure sitting opposite, as he looked back across the office with a barely discernible hint of surprise, and it was plain that her attempt was doomed to failure. He showed no sign of replying, and an uneasy silence descended.
Karen glanced out of the office window where her recruitment agency Rutherford Professional & Legal Recruitment occupied a small suite of rooms on a second floor in Temple Street, and caught a glimpse of the sign above the entrance to The Trocadero, a historic city centre pub well known to many a thirsty worker in the local commercial neighbourhood. It was just after midday, and she noticed a trickle of eager lunchtime drinkers already heading inside. Dragging her thoughts back to the nettle that she had finally steeled herself to grasp that morning, she found her voice again and broke the silence.
“You know how badly the legal division’s doing right now. There’s only enough work for one of us. Even in a small operation like this.”
There was little doubt in Karen’s mind. She could no longer delay forcing the issue that she had already avoided confronting for far too long. She needed to tell her right hand man Wayne Avery that she might have to make him redundant. And in order to avoid the risk of a claim for unfair dismissal, she was under a duty to give him every reasonable chance to fight his corner before she could progress to a final decision.
As a recruitment consultant specialising in the legal profession, running a niche agency of her own, Karen had been only too aware of how three harsh years’ worth of economic downturn had taken its toll. Her early life as a sole trader, after her distaste for office politics had led her to walk away from the career ladder at a major practice, had brought good fortune and prosperity. But those days were long gone. The sector was greatly oversupplied. There were too many lawyers chasing too few vacancies. The fact that many local law firms had chosen to batten down the hatches, in the hope of riding out the recession by consolidating rather than expanding, only made matters worse.
Karen herself needed no reminder that the boom times, when the solicitors’ profession had recklessly assumed an infinite demand for its services and had encouraged almost unfettered entry from the aspiring students at the proliferating law colleges, were unlikely to make an early reappearance. Rutherford Professional and Legal Recruitment (Birmingham) Limited, or Ripple Birmingham as she had branded the company from the outset, had suffered ever increasing collateral damage while the legal profession paused for breath.
She looked across the desk once more, anxious for Avery to respond before the silence became too uncomfortable. He held her glance, his expression still deliberately neutral rather than hostile, and made as if to flick a speck of imaginary dust from his left lapel, his fingers slipping underneath the folded fabric in the process. The gesture was not lost on Karen.
“Oh, come on, Wayne. I wasn’t born yesterday. Put it on the table.”
For his part, Avery had once been an ideal solution to Karen’s aim of striking a balance between her working life and the lure of her outside interests. He had chosen to turn his back on a university degree course altogether when he narrowly failed to gain a place at Cambridge, eagerly embracing the world of recruitment instead. Having rapidly worked his way through the ranks of a leading agency with a nationwide presence, he soon decided that he would rather not wait there indefinitely and risk never gaining the recognition that he felt he deserved. Working for himself, when he judged the time to be right, could not come soon enough. A smaller practice was the way forward.
Four years earlier, Karen had been pursuing political ambitions. It was no easy task to find a means of keeping her business on the right track while pursuing the chance of a Parliamentary career. But she had been greatly impressed by the ambitious young man who seemed so readily to fit the profile of a trustworthy colleague who might one day become her equal partner in the firm, despite only being twenty five years old. Avery’s eagerness to proclaim ‘everything I touch turns to sold’, and his persistence with the painful cliché even after its coincidental ridicule via reality TV, had once been an endearing quirk. His fee earning skills soon won him a pay rise, director status, and a promise of an equity stake in the company if he continued to impress.
But the passage of time had eventually led Karen to abandon all ideas of ever becoming an approved Conservative candidate. Her active involvement in politics, after leaving the party over an issue of principle and then being welcomed back a year later following a root and branch upheaval in her local association, had finally come to nothing. It all seemed so futile to her once she had concluded that she held little affinity for what she saw as the needlessly wasted years of Coalition government.
Having decided to commit herself fully to the world of recruitment again, and to free herself from time consuming distractions as far as possible, Karen had not taken long to notice that her efforts to focus on rebuilding a full personal caseload had coincided with a distinct decline on Avery’s part. The downturn in legal sector recruitment activity was insult to injury, but no excuse. It was then only a matter of time, as Avery’s apparent complacency began to grate on her all the more, before she reached her almost inevitable conclusion. There was never going to be enough law firm recruitment work at Ripple for two headhunters. She would need to have the courage of her convictions, and initiate a discussion that was virtually certain to lead to the two of them parting company.
“Fair cop.”
With a grin flickering across his face, Avery reached into his breast pocket, took out the miniature tape recorder, and deliberately placed it in the middle of the desk between him and Karen.
In Avery’s early days at Ripple, when he had begun the process of building his workload up to full capacity, Karen soon came to hear that an increasing number of client firms and candidates were remarking upon her new assistant’s astonishing feats of memory. Despite rarely taking notes in meetings, and concentrating instead on an intensely focused blend of questions and advice, his subsequent written work and correspondence following the meetings seemed to show an incredible eye f
or detail. Karen would never have found herself any the wiser, had it not been for Avery’s boasting to Dawn Vallance, Karen’s PA, about how he managed to create such an impression.
“Let me just make one thing clear first, Wayne.” Karen was determined not to allow herself to feel unnerved, despite the knowledge that every word she said was now being captured for posterity. “I haven’t made a final decision about this yet. It’s my duty to explain what’s behind it all, and to make sure I’ve consulted you properly. If there’s anything you can think of that might point me in a different direction, this is your chance to tell me about it. I really don’t want to lose you, but this isn’t a perfect world, and I can’t pretend that the situation out there isn’t getting desperate.”
“So you think that taking my candidates and my clients off me is a magic bullet?”
There was a touch of blatant insolence in Avery’s response. Karen made a supreme effort to stay calm.
“They’re not yours, Wayne, they’re mine. I own the firm, not you. Anyway, surely you can see that you’ve hardly covered your salary and your overheads ever since last summer?”
Avery shrugged. “What about Neeta?”
“She’s still well ahead, just as she always has been.”
In marked contrast with the firm’s legal division, the management accountancy area of the practice had been notably resilient despite the recession, thanks to the diligent efforts of Neeta Patel. Never one to show off, her fee earning had reflected her understated drive to succeed in her own way. Karen was well aware that Avery had little in common with his quiet and unassuming colleague. And it was entirely within character for him to draw her into the debate despite the lack of justification for doing so.
But after another few moments of awkward silence, Avery’s next comment was far from what Karen might have expected.
“Well, maybe you’re right. Maybe there isn’t enough legal work on the books to keep Ripple afloat.”
Ignoring what she took to be a contrived pun, Karen passed over the typed summary of the firm’s position and prospects that she had prepared earlier. She had included enough information to make it plain that making Avery redundant might be a fair and reasonable option, in the face of Ripple’s difficulties, but she had also been careful not to disclose anything of a sensitive financial nature. She was never going to overlook the fact that Avery was only an employee.
“Can I suggest you have a good look at this. If you haven’t got anything in the diary, I’d be happy for you to take the afternoon off to think about everything. Tomorrow as well if you like. Let’s pick up on everything on Monday morning at 10.00, shall we?”
“OK then, if you say so. I’ve got no meetings planned, and I’m only waiting on….. no, I’m not really waiting on anything. It doesn’t seem like a great deal of consultation, though.”
Karen bit back an exasperated response as her eye fell on the tape recorder once more, and she thought quickly for a more diplomatic way to phrase what she had intended to say.
“Well, I can’t exactly sack myself, as you know. As I’ve explained, Neeta’s safe, and there’s good reasons for me to make that clear. I’d love to move somewhere less expensive, but there’s another two years left to run on the office lease. And I don’t imagine for one minute you’d want to go part time and drop your salary. If all these law firms would start taking more people on, we wouldn’t be in a situation like this.”
Wayne nodded, picked up the tape recorder and pushed his chair back.
“OK, Monday it is. I’ll go off and gather my thoughts. For the record, you can take it as read that I’m not very happy.” Slowly and deliberately, he switched the recorder off and put it back in his pocket. Without a further word, he stood up, walked out of Karen’s office and retreated down the corridor to his own. Karen braced herself for the sound of a door slamming, but it closed quietly.
Glancing across her desk as the tension of the meeting dispersed, Karen noticed the unopened copy of the latest edition of “HR Now” and a feature headline beneath the plastic wrapping that read “Work-Life Balance: New Perspectives”. She gave the magazine a bitter scowl. It was a cruel time for any self employed small business owner, particularly one involved in a ruthlessly competitive industry and a struggling sector, to be reminded that work was only supposed to be a means to an end.
But as her thoughts turned to what lay beyond the workplace in the outside world, having had little reason to celebrate her thirty-fifth birthday a few weeks earlier, she could only shake her head in disbelief at where she found herself. Eighteen months earlier, not long after she had finally abandoned any hope of a career in Conservative politics, she had lost her widowed mother to a sudden and aggressive form of cancer. The ritual formula ‘passed away peacefully after a short illness’ did her little justice.
Having picked herself up and thought long and hard about what might give her the chance of enhancing her overall quality of life, Karen had taken the paradoxical decision to uproot herself from her home in the East Worcestershire countryside and move to an executive flat on an up and coming development in Moseley, not far from central Birmingham, in the hope that she might feel more comfortable in an urban setting after all. And, indeed, that she might improve her chances of finding the committed personal relationship that had eluded her for so long.
As Karen tried her best to banish the unwelcome memory of the closest she had come to achieving this in the previous year – a short lived affair with a married man who had betrayed her by meekly returning to his wife after less than a month, his blunt final text message standing in symbolic contrast to his earlier effusive promises – the phone rang. Two messages from Dawn brought her quickly back to reality. Gemma Gabriel, a prospective new candidate who had seemed full of enthusiasm to launch her quest for a commercial litigation role that would match her seven years of experience, had cancelled an initial interview that had been Karen’s sole diary commitment for the next day. And the head of Human Resources at Howe & Palmer had called to confirm that they did not wish to arrange a second interview for a candidate who had been quietly confident when he had called Karen to tell her how his first interview had gone. No, she thought, it never rains but it pours.
* * * * *
“Just take a seat back in reception for a few minutes, if you would. We need to have a brief chat in private.”
The interview was over. Paul Craven heard the meeting room door close behind him, and selected a convenient chair to relax in while he waited for the two men who had questioned him in detail over the previous hour to come to a conclusion. He thought quietly to himself that he had finally managed to give the interview performance of his life.
It had been bad enough for Craven to be forced to pick up the pieces, in his early thirties, after being made redundant. His law firm employer had fallen on hard times and had decided to close his department in the process of slimming itself down to make itself more attractive for a takeover. There had been too many firms in the already declining Stoke on Trent area competing for too little work, the acclaimed Potteries all but a footnote in industrial history. A steady loss of clients as a result of business slowdown and insolvency had hit some firms harder than others. The niche firm where Craven had worked as a legal executive, dealing with the disputed claims that emerged from commercial debt collection work, had been ruthlessly targeted by rivals offering cut throat fee discounts that had proved too tempting for its clients to refuse.
What had made matters so much worse for Craven, as he saw his employer abandon its litigation practice altogether ahead of throwing in its lot with a larger firm, was that job interviews were completely unknown territory. Indeed he had never worked anywhere else in his life. Having left school at the first possible opportunity, with a respectable set of exam results but little desire to continue academic studies in a setting that he found oppressive, he had gratefully taken up the office junior’s role that his solicitor uncle had arranged for him in a law firm not far from hom
e.
Craven’s keen eye for detail, alongside his dedication to mundane tasks that his colleagues spurned, was soon recognised. An impressive spell as an accounts clerk led in due course to the firm deciding to sponsor him through evening and home study law classes. He gained admission to the Institute of Legal Executives without seeing the need to boast unduly about his achievement, and quickly settled into his new fee earning role in charge of contested debt collection, working on his own. At one stage there had even been talk within the firm of encouraging him to undertake further professional studies and aim to qualify as a solicitor, despite his lack of a degree. However, he saw little appeal in either the sabbatical from work or the more intensive round of wider learning that this would have involved. The job he did was sufficient for his needs, and he held no greater ambitions.
But the good days were long gone as the firm spiralled into decline and lost its independence. One of its most reliable and dedicated employees suffered the ultimate form of collateral damage, as its door closed on him for the last time. With a bare minimum severance payment in his pocket, and with no prospect of persuading the predator firm to take him on alongside most of his old colleagues, Craven had been left way outside his personal comfort zone when faced with the need to seek a new job, for the first time in his adult life. Over and above his very bald CV, he discovered the cold reality of his home town of Stafford having even fewer law firm opportunities than the Potteries region from which he had just been ousted. Widening his search, he had contacted a sympathetic recruitment consultant in Birmingham whom he had chanced upon after a great deal of online trial and error. A couple of days later, he caught a train for an initial get together in the New Street station concourse, accepting the consultant’s explanation that this was more likely to put him at his ease than a formal meeting in the office.
