by David Cooper
As Craven neared the end of his active files review, he began to feel troubled. With the exception of the ill fated Dawley Vale Projects dispute, which Squire had promptly taken back to himself as soon as he had heard the client’s damning account of the recent meeting, Craven had not received any new referrals at all from Squire or any of the other partners ever since he had broken the news of his disability. The small number of handovers from Dougall, and the few casual new enquiries that the telephonists had forwarded directly to him, came nowhere near the previous month’s quantity. He was no longer involved on Finnie’s Endbrack dispute, and was in no position to find out quickly and easily how much his contribution on that file would be properly credited. It left him suspecting that he might struggle to come anywhere near matching his first month’s billing performance.
The phone rang half an hour later. It was a client call that Craven had been waiting for, and he was keen to find out what the client thought about the options for progressing his claim through the next stages. He was put out when an office junior made a noisy entrance with a circular while he was carefully listening to a detailed explanation from the client, and his frustration increased when the junior left without closing the door properly. Once the lengthy call was at an end, Craven almost leapt up from his desk. He was on the verge of slamming the door, but paused at the threshold as the familiar odour of cigarette smoke struck him.
“I don’t believe it. All it takes is a few drops of rain…”
Craven looked outside and saw the rear exit wedged ajar. An eruption of rage overcame him as he shoved the door wide open, fully expecting to catch Hutchings red handed. There was no one immediately in sight, but he quickly noticed what appeared to be a solitary figure in the shadows on the landing halfway down the steps, facing the opposite way. Not hearing the low sounds that the noise of the door hinges drowned, Craven shouted down the fire escape towards the haze of smoke.
“Can’t you show some consideration for other people, you antisocial…”
The reprimand froze on Craven’s lips as Hutchings, who had been completely obscured from Craven’s field of vision by the other figure, stepped into view and gave him an insolent look, deliberately choosing to say nothing as his companion slowly turned round and glanced curiously in Craven’s direction.
Craven’s initial shock in realising that Hutchings was not alone turned into horror when he realised that the other smoker, who would have caught the full force of his abortive volley, was Seb Finnie.
In a near panic, Craven jumped back out of sight and inadvertently let the rear door slam shut. Desperate to avoid a confrontation, he scrambled for the paper wedge and pushed the door ajar a couple of inches, jamming the wedge back before hurrying into his office. For the next ten minutes, he made a pretence of looking intently at his computer screen and the correspondence tag from the nearest file on his desk, but was unable to focus on anything other than the door to his office, fearful of Finnie bursting in at any moment.
After what seemed to be an eternity, the rear exit creaked open. The tops of two heads went past the front of Craven’s office, plainly visible through the window above the filing cabinets, and vanished from sight. It slowly sunk in with Craven that Finnie had chosen to avoid an embarrassing encounter with one of his subordinates. A pounding headache began to take a firm grip upon him, as his fear slowly turned to anger at the thought that Finnie had openly defied a policy – no, a legal requirement – that he and the other partners were responsible for upholding.
The rest of the afternoon passed by without a glimmer of hope for Craven to set his mind to anything useful, his concentration broken beyond repair. The arrival of an email from Jackie, letting him know that she would have to skip their Friday lunch because of a client meeting, only added to his despondency. He let ten minutes elapse beyond his normal leaving time, not wanting to risk running into Finnie or Hutchings on his way out, and cursed them both inwardly throughout his journey home. It never occurred to him that offering an apology to Finnie for an overreaction that had only been intended for Hutchings might be a way out. His deep sense of injustice at the incident continued to nag away at him.
Friday 31 st May
Lennie had heard on the previous afternoon from Wagstaff that the new disclosure material would be with him by midday, ahead of the four o’clock deadline that the court had imposed. He had readily agreed to the proposal to defer exchange of witness statements until the following Wednesday, so that both sides could ensure that the statements covered everything relevant within the new material.
Ahead of the anticipated delivery, Lennie took the chance to take Karen through the issues that she would be covering in her main statement.
“OK, Karen, this is going to be all about what’s happened to Ripple ever since you missed out on the temporary injunction. Everything that you know or suspect Wayne’s been up to over the last six weeks. We need to do all we can to get it across that the court should grant you an injunction now, and stop him going after your clients for the rest of the restraint period. And we’ll also need to show what financial losses you’ve suffered since he quit.”
Karen had spent much of the previous afternoon with Dawn, compiling a list of candidate phone numbers from files that Avery had been handling before he had left. The exercise had brought it home to her just how many of the candidates had fallen off her radar altogether since then, despite her valiant attempts to retain them.
“Lennie, I know this is all speculative. The worst case scenario is that I wouldn’t have managed to place any of these people at all. I’d have to accept it as part of the swings and roundabouts of my industry. The best case is that I’d have earned commissions on between thirty and forty candidates who’ve just disappeared into thin air. I know I’m not that good, and in one sense it’s not that much different from spinning the roulette wheel in Las Vegas. But I’m pretty sure that I’d have struck lucky on at least ten of them. And when we’re looking at commissions of anything between ten and fifteen per cent of starting salary, or fixed fees of fifteen hundred quid, I think you’ll get the drift.”
“I know. And if we add in those we know about already – the paralegals, Craven, Russon, Nicholas and Hillier – the lost profits could be anything between thirty and fifty grand, if you won outright on everything. It’s not even as if you’d have clocked up any extra overheads. You’d only have been making more profitable use of your time.”
“Tell me about it.” Karen sighed. “Anyway, we’ve done the best we can to put that list of phone numbers together. Hopefully that’s going to be some help.”
“I’m sure it will. Pity there’s no phone number for Craven on your records.”
“I take it there’s no point in asking Wagstaff to get it out of Wayne?”
Lennie thought for a moment.
“I wouldn’t take his word for it without something more definite. I don’t want to risk Wayne giving us a fake number. Some pizza delivery man who he only speaks to once a month. We’re better off leaving it for the trial. See if the serendipity factor works in our favour.”
“Seren…? You’ve lost me on that one.”
“Sorry, I picked that one up from Alex Harris years ago. Happy accidents. Somebody might let something slip out when they’re on the stand. Let me think…Wayne might trip himself up over something that Dawn’s told us.”
“OK, I get it. I guess there’s no point in asking for a subpoena against Paul Craven?”
“Well remembered, but we’re not allowed to use Latin these days! No, seriously, if we brought him to court under a witness summons, we’d be stuck with whatever answers he gave to our questions, and we wouldn’t be allowed to challenge them if they didn’t help us. That’s the rules.”
“Fair enough.”
Shortly after they had finished their call, the package of copy bank and phone records was hand delivered to Thornbury & Summerson’s office, and was soon on Lennie’s desk. Lennie had set aside the whole of the aftern
oon to analyse them, and eagerly began the task, armed with a checklist covering the main candidates whose defections lay at the heart of the dispute.
Thursday 14th March: Karen breaks the bad news, just after midday.
Monday 18th March: Wayne quits, mid morning.
Tuesday 19th March: Chris Thompson (paralegal 1) defects, early morning.
“Only Wagstaff’s word for your reasons, so far.” Lennie thought to himself. “You claim you knew Wayne personally, liked and trusted him. But you only found out coincidentally that Wayne had set up on his own. What’s going to be in your statement?”
Same day: Mark Davenport (paralegal 2) defects, late afternoon.
Wednesday 20th March: Dale Rider (paralegal 3) defects, late afternoon.
“Exactly the same excuses for you two.”
Craven (legal exec)? No scope to cross-check call traffic. No phone numbers.
Russon (solicitor)? Defected after the first hearing. No news either way since then.
Godfrey (solicitor)? As for Russon, but Karen thinks he’s a write off.
Hillier (solicitor)? Had been down for interview (WMD) on 27th March. Defected on 25th April. Nothing more known about him.
Lennie reached for Karen’s list of phone numbers, eagerly anticipating the task ahead. He managed to catch up with Karen before the end of the afternoon.
“Right, here goes. Let’s start with Thompson. As luck would have it, the first page of phone records goes back two days before you told Wayne he might be redundant. No contact at all with Thompson until that Thursday afternoon. Then there’s four calls to Thompson’s number within two hours. One of them was nearly twenty minutes long.”
“Jesus. He knew damned well what he was doing, then.”
“Looks like it. And four more over and above those, between then and the Monday evening. That brings us up to the Tuesday morning, when Thompson told you he was jumping ship. There’s only a few from then on. Probably no different to the amount of contact that you’d have with a candidate you’d just got managed to sign up.”
“OK. What about the other two?”
“Nothing on the Thursday to Davenport or Rider, but once we get to the Friday, there’s seven calls to Davenport and six to Rider up to and including the following Tuesday. And of course this is all happening after you’d told Wayne he could go home and think about what you’d told him.”
“Any idea how they’re going to explain all these calls…” Karen broke off, realising that she almost had an answer for her own question. “I’ve remembered something. When the first one emailed me, I went ballistic and Dawn had to calm me down. She thought he could be a mate of Wayne’s. I suppose he might have been. But all three of them?”
“I know. It doesn’t sound right. Of course if they’re all going to sign personal statements and rally round Wayne, we’ll soon find out. All we know so far is that they came up with some collective tale of how much they admired and respected him. I’m certainly going to wait and see what’s in the statements before I let Wagstaff know any of this.”
“Any luck with Rod Hillier?”
“Nothing in the early days. There’s a few phone calls starting in April, but they won’t prove for definite that Wayne poached him. Same goes for Stephanie Russon. No idea about Godfrey Nicholas. Only a landline number and an extension on his file, and given that he works at the council there’s no way to be sure about the call traffic. Maybe two or three at best, but nothing definite.”
“And Gemma Gabriel?”
“Yes, there was one fairly long call just before Good Friday. Exactly as she told you.”
“How about the law firms?”
“Not really much chance of pinning anything on Wayne there. He doesn’t seem to have been off the phone on the Tuesday and the Wednesday, and there’s a lot of local landline numbers on the list, but it’s a needle in a haystack job. And we can’t really forget that the firms were never exclusively yours. They were fair game for him. It wouldn’t have been too difficult to trawl the directories.”
“Fair enough. What about the bank records?”
“New account, opened in the last week of March. Looks as if he managed to get a ten grand bank loan to start up. Usual round of outgoings – deposit for his serviced office, computer equipment, insurance, stationery, website design. That reminds me…”
Lennie broke off for a moment and scribbled ‘Check Domain Name’ on his notepad.
“OK then, looking through the income, there’s a receipt in early April that looks as if it came from BLH for commission on Craven. We know he started just after Easter, so no surprise there. This next ones will really annoy you, though.”
“Go on, tell me.”
“Looks as if he managed to place all of the paralegals before the end of April. Only on minimum fees, as far as I can tell, but there’s no mistaking the references to all three of them on the incoming payments.”
“Christ. If they hadn’t all defected, I’m sure I’d have been able to place them. Shouldn’t Wayne have disclosed his invoices?”
“Probably yes, but there’s no point in kicking up a stink over that now. He’d probably claim it was an innocent mistake, knowing him. And we’ve got the information. Anyway, that leads me to Hillier. His commission figure’s there, right at the end. Only paid a few days ago.”
Karen could not refrain from an obscenity when she heard the size of the payment that Wave Recruitment had received, entirely consistent with a premium level salary for a new departmental head. Lennie quickly moved on.
“Karen, there’s something else, before I forget. Would you ever pay anything to a candidate? Come to think of it, would any headhunter ever pay anything, or refund anything?”
“Definitely not. It’s against the law for a recruitment agency to take a payment off a candidate. Not even a refundable deposit. What makes you ask?”
“Well, it might only be a coincidence, but there was one unusual outgoing payment entry for three hundred pounds with ‘Thomp’ as the reference. Only a couple of days after Wayne was paid the commission for placing Thompson.”
“Beats me. Maybe Wayne treated himself to a meal out to celebrate, and went clubbing afterwards. Mind you, wouldn’t Craven have been the first candidate who earned him a fee?”
“That’s true. If there’s anything else relevant in the bank records, I’m sure Soraya will find it before the trial. Right now I’m much more interested in how Wayne’s going to spin his way out of those phone records. Trouble is, we still come back to the fact that you only lost a chance to place the paralegals, assuming the judge decides he stole them off you. There’s no guarantee you would definitely have placed them. And his legal team won’t be letting that go.”
“OK, do what you can. You know I can trust you not to let anything slip by.”
Saturday 1 st June
“I think your phone just bleeped, darling.”
Dawn was almost at the end of one of her favourite early evening TV shows. She nodded in Brian’s direction, remembering that she had left her phone on her bedside table. Brian left her to finish watching the programme and disappeared from sight. She heard the front door close behind him. They were looking forward to a meal out with friends later, and she wondered if it was just a reminder about when they were expected at the restaurant.
She could never have anticipated just how wrong her assumption would turn out, once she had retrieved the phone and touched the screen.
“Wayne? What on earth’s he texting me for?”
Dawn looked more closely at what was now showing on the display. She realised that she had been included on a text message circulation list that otherwise consisted of a series of unfamiliar names and nicknames. For a moment she felt relieved that Avery might only have made a mistake. She wondered exactly what the ambiguous message ‘shall I zoom out? Vote now’ was supposed to mean. But her relief turned to horror when she scrolled further down and found herself looking at a photo image.
“Oh God�
�”
There was no mistaking the time and place when the original photo had been taken. She knew straight away that it was a close up version of the selfie that Avery had taken of the two of them sitting together on her sofa, on the evening that she had invited him round to her house, partly out of sympathy and partly out of spite. Although her face was not in sight, the image was unmistakeably the cleavage that lay beneath her unbuttoned blouse.
Frantically, she stabbed at the screen. The image vanished. Her panic unabated, she quickly glanced around, fearful of Brian coming upstairs and asking her about the incident that she had revealed to no one other than Karen. But she quickly remembered that he had gone out to the newsagent for his weekly Lottery ticket, a ritual that he had never abandoned even after his unexpected business success just over a year ago.
Dawn hurried into the kitchen and poured herself a large glass of Chardonnay, draining it in two gulps. She refilled the glass, deliberately took a much smaller sip and put it down.
“You bastard, Wayne…”
There was no doubt whatsoever in Dawn’s mind that the text message from Avery was neither a mistake nor a coincidence. On the previous afternoon, once Karen had finished her call with Lennie to discuss the new evidence that Avery had finally disclosed, she had reminded Dawn that she needed to check over the first draft of the witness statement that Lennie had prepared for her. Karen had asked her to let Lennie know of any amendments, ahead of his deadline to arrange the exchange of signed statements with Wagstaff. Dawn had conscientiously taken care of the task before leaving the office, only needing to tell Lennie about a few minor clerical alterations.
To Dawn’s mind, there was only one remotely plausible explanation for the text message. It was a blatant threat of what might happen to her if she helped Karen.
