Plantation A Legal Thriller

by J M S Macfarlane

  Chapter 30

  In one of the remaining Georgian buildings which had survived the wrecker’s ball in Seething Lane and just a stone’s throw away from Plantation’s office, a tailor’s shop displayed pin-striped suits, striped shirts and silk ties in its front window. Adjacent on the wall was a dull brass plate which said ‘Meredith & Macready Solicitors’.

  Their office was on the second floor, up a flight of old, timber stairs which had been worn down in the middle over the years, as if the weight of everyone’s worries had depressed even the floor itself.

  Meredith was the sole owner of the firm. At one time, he’d had a partner, a Northern Irishman, Macready who had gone off somewhere – no-one seemed to know where – but his name had stayed.

  Meredith, as the only principal, ran everything himself and on a shoe-string. Some of his clients would have said that the shoe-string had broken long ago and been replaced with chewing-gum or anything which could be scavenged. But that was why they liked him. He was supposed to be cheap – or at least, far less expensive than the larger firms.

  The office had only one part-time secretary. When she was there, she doubled as the receptionist and telephonist, in between making cups of tea and bashing out letters on an antiquated golfball typewriter. The client files filled a row of rickety, second-hand, steel filing cabinets and the accounting system was double-entry ledger books kept going by an Indian man who came in once a week to do the book-keeping. There was no computer system although such things did exist in the larger firms at that time albeit limited to bright green characters against a black background and nothing else, if it could be imagined.

  The office was open plan so that once you stepped through the front door, you were immediately in the workplace itself where Meredith could be seen at his desk, typing something or droning into a dictaphone or on the telephone to someone. If you happened to be a client, the sight of this activity was at first daunting as there was nowhere to escape to – there were no meeting rooms. In the case of sensitive information, Meredith always took his clients to the back room of the Oporto wine bar down the street where the floors were covered in sawdust and it was usually fairly quiet before five o’clock when it filled to capacity.

  The story of how he’d scaled to these Olympian heights could be told briefly but had taken him almost ten years.

  After studying Italian and French in Padua and Bordeaux and learning all about the wine trade which had inspired him nightly as the right sort of career, he’d instead ended up doing a training contract with one of the large commercial law firms in London. Before going down this path, a friend had warned him that the slaves in ancient Rome probably had an easier time of it, even though they were whipped. Meredith wasn’t actually whipped but often felt as if he had been. His friend was right – for two years he was a general dogsbody, copying documents and running errands, not to mention having to endure short-tempered partners who pretended to be teaching him. If that was what they did, then Meredith became an excellent drudge. At last, however, he qualified as a solicitor – in the general parlance, one who engages in the grubby trade of actually procuring clients, with which the higher end of the profession – the bar, traditionally never soiled its hands – or at least, not in those days anyway.

  At that point, he could see ahead of him, extended years of dreariness and even longer hours when his life would be occupied by nothing but work. Five per cent of the bills he charged to clients was paid to him in salary. The partners took the rest. The distant prospect of joining their ranks was forever dangled in front of him, if he worked hard (meaning that in the winter months, he would see the sun for fifteen minutes each day when he went to the local cafe for a quick lunch.) Others before him had heroically grasped the same nettle. As he’d decided to do court work (to try and get out of the office), he decided to make himself known to the important clients. He became recognised in marine and Admiralty circles and to the ‘P&I Clubs’ – the public and indemnity insurers used by shipowners. He also concentrated on the clients with claims work – the underwriters and brokers. All of them had offices near the Risk Exchange which was like a hive with brokers buzzing in and out all day.

  In Meredith’s early years, the insurers had sent him menial cases such as defending their underwriters at Bow Street Magistrates Court on anything from drink driving to being arrested in a brothel. Over time, he began to pick up commercial cases after he’d made a name for himself and clients were asking for him personally.

  He’d decided to leave where he’d worked for seven years, to set up his own practise with Macready who was a colleague with the same idea. At the end of twelve months together, Macready had been disillusioned with the whole thing and had walked out, leaving Meredith with the upkeep of the lease, the wages for their secretary and the hire charges on the third-rate office equipment which kept breaking down. Fortunately, he had enough work coming in to keep everything going but it was still touch and go. He decided to make do without a secretary and to type his own letters (in addition to being the outdoor clerk, postboy, delivery courier and cleaner). Rather than sending out bills every three months, as was the custom, he sent off invoices every month as regular as clockwork. This had aggravated some clients no end and they’d taken their business elsewhere. However, the majority stuck with him and he was able to afford the occasional lunch with an underwriter or to go carousing with the brokers in the evenings, to try and attract work. Thus, Plantation’s six cases had been a godsend and with luck, he would be able to employ a secretary again.

  The day before when Simon Wells had spoken to Meredith on the telephone, the repairman had just been again and Meredith had kept Wells on the line for a solid hour, going through the Stratos claim.

  Meredith spent a lot of his time on the telephone, drinking cups of tea and eating biscuits which ended up becoming his lunch. Like most lawyers chasing work, he preferred to deal with clients personally so that they had as close an association as possible without being married. (No doubt some readers will imagine that they are virtually married to their legal advisor which can be a happy association as long as the bills are paid and on time.)

  This approach had worked like a charm with Wells who remembered Meredith from an earlier case.

  During the conversation which had rambled on, Meredith said he vaguely recalled reading a report about the Captain Stratos years earlier in a maritime journal. Something about the sinking had rung a bell.

  After seeing Wells again and going through the facts more closely, Meredith had gone back to his office. For the next hour, he rooted around in a box full of back copies of 'P&I Gazette', a newsletter which went out to all of the shipping companies, charterparties, sea-farers, marine underwriters, brokers and lawyers who worked in the shipping trade. After a further hour spent trying to find the right article, he was on the point of giving up when he came across it. “Loss of Captain Stratos Freighter” it was headed.

  After giving the same information which he’d read in Plantation’s files, the article said something unusual :

  “The ship’s master, Constantinos Christoforou had been reinstated to his command two years earlier by a Marine Board of Enquiry in Athens. At the time, the Board had found that allegations made against Christoforou were unproved regarding his command of the Greek vessel Aegean Star which sank off the coast of northern Cyprus in April 1979.”

  So, he was right – this was what he’d been looking for : according to the press report, the master of the Captain Stratos had also been the Captain of the Aegean Star : both ships had sunk with one of the losses being investigated by a Marine Board of Enquiry.

  By co-incidence, one of Meredith’s other cases for a different insurer had looked at the events surrounding the sinking of the Aegean Star.

  After getting out his old case files, there was further information of interest : in the Board of Enquiry into the Aegean Star, it had been vaguely alleged that the Captain intentionally scuttled the ship. The only evidenc
e of this was an unrecorded conversation which the second mate had had with a marine inspector in Athens. For some reason, the Board had allowed the matter to rest and nothing further had happened.

  When Meredith scoured through his old papers, he could find no actual mention of Christoforou as the master of the Aegean Star. All of the documents and statements referred to different people being involved. He asked himself whether the press report had got it wrong. Could it have been the same man ? And also, what had happened to the second mate ? Was there a common thread, he wondered.