Falling (16 page)
Leonard is, or rather was, a
workaholic. In before me. Out after me. Weekends were just additional work days
and I can’t remember the last time he had a holiday. I could never figure why.
We weren’t overloaded. I had as much on as he did and I knew it. Our regular
monthly meetings were designed to re-distribute work load around the department
if it looked like someone was sinking but in all the time I had been at the firm
I can’t remember Leonard calling out for help. Still I assumed he was putting
in the hours to get by because he had to and every time I brought it up at the
monthly meet he would dismiss it all and tell me that we all had our own way of
working. I would shrug and tell him it was his grave he was digging. He would
shrug and smile. It pissed me off.
Leonard played stuff close to his
chest. As a result it was a bit of a surprise when mid last year he turned
turtle and threw up his hands and admitted he needed a bit of help. He told me
a client had just landed him with a shed load of nonsense and he needed to off
load a little of his other work for a short period. I told him to bring it up
at the monthly meeting. To say he wasn’t keen on this suggestion would be an
understatement. He said that he didn’t want to let the others know and then
asked me if I was averse to a little homer or two.
I wasn’t. Nobody in the firm was.
It was strictly against the rules and therefore everybody did it. Only they did
it very quietly and very carefully. There is nothing like prohibition to spur
on enterprise.
Most of my homers were family and
friends - if you were smart this meant more friends than family - it is hard to
charge your family for advice. In the main it was tax advice and the occasional
piece of investment advice.
Leonard opened up a little and it
transpired that I was in the lower divisions on this front and Leonard was
aspiring to the Premier League. He told me he was doing a little extra
curricular work for Retip Ltd and would I mind covering the day to day on their
core business for a while. In return he would cut me in on the deal he had with
their management but if anyone asked I could, with a clear conscience, tell
them I was doing work for, and billing for, Cheedle, Nudge and Baker. I asked
what the other work was - but he blanked me and when the brown envelope turned
out to be worth a thousand a month, who was I to complain? The most I ever made
from my own brown envelopes was a few hundred quid.
In this way I got to know Simon,
the Managing Director; Karen - HR and Robin - the FD, and from the off I didn’t
like them. Everything about them smelled like old cheese in a well worn sock
but like a good boy I put my head down and did the work avoiding them as much as
I could.
All went well until Leonard was
hit by an industrial bout of man flu. He tried to keep up work from home but
his man flu turned real on him in a bad way. Robin was on the phone to him
daily but eventually Leonard had to call it quits and told Robin that he would
be back in a few days and could he just park what he could till then.
The following day Robin appeared
in my office. His face was flushed and he said that he couldn’t get a hold of
Leonard. This wasn’t surprising since Leonard’s wife had taken Leonard’s mobile
off him and confiscated his laptop and Blackberry. Robin had even gone round to
his house but Leonard’s wife had blanked him. I was obviously the last resort.
He asked if I was able to access
Leonard’s system and I said I could but I wasn’t allowed. In an instant he
produced a wedge of cash and dropped it on the table. There had to be close to
five grand in two bundles. I stared at the cash and then at Robin. He told me
he didn’t want to dick around. He needed some info and only Leonard had it. The
money was mine if he could log onto Leonard’s machine for ten minutes. Ten
minutes max and then he would be gone.
I’d love to say I hesitated and
had a moral crisis but I didn’t. I fired up Leonard’s machine, logged on and
went back to my desk. Robin was as good as his word and after grabbing some
sheets from the printer was gone in less than ten.
I went over to close the machine
down but out of curiosity I decided to see what he had accessed. I also wanted
to make sure he hadn’t gone surfing into anyone else’s accounts. I breathed a
little easier when I found out that he had simply opened up some Retip Excel
documents and printed them off.
I clicked on the documents and
was rewarded with a list of names and a bunch of dates. The same names that
were in the parcel that Tina held - only this time the names were accompanied
by a list of company names. Company names some of who were all good Cheedle,
Nudge and Baker clients. Clients who were in receipt of backhanders if the list
in the parcel was anything to go by.
I told George and Tina that I had
closed down Leonard’s computer and went back to work happy with my five grand
on my hip and an additional grand a month in undeclared income. To date I was
now fourteen thousand pounds to the good and there was no way that I could
claim that I knew nothing was amiss in Leonard’s dealings. At the very least
Robin had the five grand over me. I couldn’t stop George and Tina going to the
police but it would be without me. I told them that I needed to sort this out
but I knew, as I said it, that this was just plain beyond me in my present
state.
I wasn’t sure how they would
react. George is a passing acquaintance and I only met Tina an hour ago - and
yet I had just confessed to fraud and deception. George said he wanted to chat
with Tina and they got up and went outside. I saw them sit on a bench in the
middle of the main mall drag and start to chew each other’s ears with serious
vim and vigour. I drifted in and out of sleep and was wrestled back to the real
world by the sound of raised voices.
I looked out at the mall and Tina
was standing over George, hands on hips giving him a right doing. George was
head down taking it like a man.
Tina is going off at the deep end.
Big style. Around us the shoppers have come to a halt. There is nothing like a
couple having a screaming argument to bring out the nosey in you. I’m staring
at my feet and yet I can tell that there is not an eye in the place that isn’t
focussed on Tina and me.
I was only trying to get
everything out in the open. ‘Fess up’ as my brother’s kid would say. Tina seems
to have gone into stuck record mode. She just keeps screaming
‘What’
like some crazy burglar alarm. I reach out and try and touch her leg. She jumps
back but at least she stops shouting. I count to ten and look up and she is
standing about six feet away. Her face is flushed red and her eyes have a wild
look that I’ve never seen before. She is framed by the steel and aluminium
edifice of a Next shop and as I look left and then right, there are still a
fair number of people fixated on our little scene.
I feel like standing up and
telling them to mind their own business and then I wish the chair was a James
Bond prop and that it would sink into the mall floor to be replaced by an
identical but unoccupied copy.
The ball is in Tina’s court and I
wait to find out if she is going to slam it into my privates or just flip it
skywards and walk off. She does neither. She walks forward and slumps into the
seat next to me. The world around us switches frequency and we are old news.
‘Why?’
She looks at me. OK so here’s the
rub. After Charlie had confessed to his little misdemeanour we had come out to
figure what to do next. Tina - in the middle of an act of self preservation -
says we should still go to the police and if it dropped Charlie in it then so
be it. I was less than keen. Partly because Charlie was one of life’s good guys
and hadn’t taken the piss out of my indiscretion in the cupboard, partly because
I had fed the police a line of nonsense less than a few hours ago but in the
main because I maybe wasn’t as clean as I might be.
Now don’t get me wrong I know
nothing of the whole Charlie/Leonard/Retip thing. All of this is news to me but
there are certain things that I would rather stayed in the darker corners of my
life. I’m no career criminal but I have a nice little side line going down at
Tyler Tower and it is not the sort of side line that I want the police sniffing
around.
It started in a small way. People
asking me if I knew where they could get their hands on small everyday office
stuff - paper, pens - you know. It was easy. Most of the offices had their own
stationery suppliers but some of the offices used me as a source. The smaller
offices found that I could provide a very reasonable service at prices
substantially below the market norm. I also provided them with a paper trail
that indicated a far higher selling price than was the case. I’m happy and they
are happy.
In time this developed into other
areas. Tickets for concerts - all because my brother wanted to off load a
couple of Neil Diamond tickets. CD’s and DVD’s - high quality copies - no
rubbish. Small electronic items - I’m a whiz at the cut price iPod - to larger
items - white goods are becoming a speciality. I became the source for many a
thing in the building. To date my biggest deal was on a Volkswagen Golf Plus at
a very non VAT price. All in all the transactions earn me a nice little
supplement to the pitiful wages my firm think I’m happy with.
I see myself as providing an
essential service. Unfortunately the service involves less than kosher gear and
no mention to my tax man. Not that I feel guilty about this. I mean it goes on
in every corner of every part of this planet. In Italy tax dodging is the
national sport and you tell me how many real Rolexes you find on the street
corner when you next visit any one of a dozen Far East cities.
It was when I passed on this info
to Tina that she hit the roof.
Next to me she was talking again
and trying to tell me that we could still tell the police about Charlie et al
and I could keep quiet about my entrepreneurship. Cool I say until I tell her
that Retip and by Retip I mean Robin and Karen are two of my best customers.
Drop them in it and they won’t hesitate to pull me down with them.
Especially as Karen is sitting on
the hot VW. A pressie for her niece. And Karen is more than aware that it is an
oven glove special. Well heeled and moneyed up as she is, the chance to get a
brand new car at the same price as a third hand, high mileage model was too
good to pass up.
Tina tries to argue that no one
is going to admit to receiving stolen goods. I don’t buy it. Robin is into me
for forty iPod nano’s - last year’s Retip client Christmas presents. Forty for
the price of ten. He currently has another order for fifty and a friend of his
wants the same again twice.
Tina still doesn’t think they
will bother with me.
I play the trump card. The
aforementioned iPods are currently sitting in my little cubby hole in the
office along with three docking stations, ten pairs of Parasuco jeans - not
quite from the original manufacturer - a good few hundred CD’s and DVD’s -
unfortunately the DVD’s are of films that have yet to make their cinematic
debut, a range of brand name perfumes and aftershaves, a brand new set of Nike
golf clubs, four Sony Vaio laptops, ten sets of Wusthof kitchen knives and a
veritable pot pourri of small but eminently desirable objects. Even if Karen
and Robin stay stum I need time to move the stuff out. As soon as the police
start snooping and my name comes up I’m a goner - sure as eggs is eggs my
little stash will be found.
A quick check of my little den
and its hello Mr Sheriff.
Tina slumps back and I suspect I
am no longer the perfect find that Tina thought I was. I refrain from telling
her that I would have been the cream at furnishing her new flat. I’d already
sourced an Aga at a very favourable price - she told me within an hour of
meeting about her desire for an Aga.
Sitting next to me, the calm
after the storm, I knew she still had a few options that neither Charlie nor I
could take advantage of. She could just leave. Walk. Claim no knowledge. She
would probably get away Scot free. Or she could also roll up at the police and
drop Charlie, me and the rest in it and I couldn’t see she would be in that bad
a place. But I can tell she is struggling. Maybe my down to earth charm is
difficult to live without?
‘This is the wrong place to do
this.’
With this she gets up and walks
back into the Starbucks.
The drive back from Karen’s house
did my mood no good. I slam the car door and I kick the front door for good
luck. As I charge into my house I note that Quentin is spreading like a virus.
The hardware that had decorated the main room has been added to by coffee cups,
plates and a take away pizza box. I know better than rattle his cage but I rip
him a new one for the mess. He takes the kicking in silence and begins to tidy
away all his gear. He was leaving. I knew it. He knew it and he knew I knew it.
I took a deep breath, went into apology mode and promised him a bonus if he
could crack the code tonight. He stared at me, mid pack. I stared back.
I knew he would back down and get
back to work. He knew he would back down and get back to work and I knew he
knew that I knew. I left to make a coffee too many. My mobile goes off. I pull
it from my pocket and check the caller but the number is withheld. I let it
trip to answer machine. While I wait for the caller to leave a message I charge
up the espresso machine. I press the go button and set it in motion. The phone
bleeps in my hand. I dial up the answer service. It is ‘the Voice’. I head for
the office. I retrieve a Pay As You Go and dial the number. Answer machine. Ten
minutes. Phone rings. I answer.
