The Reckless Engineer (30 page)

‘Silence in my court!’

Judge Morgan rapped his gavel on the bench.

‘Mr. Stavers, Mr. Davis, Inspector Edwards, see me in my chambers with the defendant at once. This case is adjourned to a date to be determined by the court.’

‘All stand.’

Judge Morgan was already on his way out by the time the clerk announced the conclusion of the session.

Harry held Jeremy by his elbow as they finished their discussion.

‘Jack and I will go in and handle this meeting in Judge Morgan’s chambers, Jeremy. I know that you need to leave for Sally’s Section 2 appeal hearing. We shall reconnect after the hearings.’

Knowing he was running late, Jeremy waded through a sea of loud and excited reporters firing questions at him. Behind him, he heard the clerk call court security to accompany Harry and Jack, who was in severe pain, safely into Judge Morgan’s chambers.

CHAPTER 40

The Four Years Before

Sally had arrived in England four years ago with great expectations. Her dad had moved his family from Perth to London for the duration of his PhD and postdoctoral research in Architectural Design at the University of London when he was young, and Sally had been almost four years old when they had left for Sydney. The earliest childhood memories Sally had were of happy times in England and of fun-filled family trips to the continent. She had been lucky, for her time growing up as an only child in the suburbs of Sydney and her time at University of Sydney reading for her bachelor’s degree and then for her PhD in Electrical Engineering had also been full of happy memories. She had met Dale Thomas, then a student of architecture in her dad’s class, at a campus event. Six years later they’d been married.

The first unhappiness Sally had ever known had come about a year and a half after they had been married when Dale had suggested that she take about five years off work to start and raise a family. Sally had not been able to imagine living without the engineering work she loved. Then the fights had started. The end had come when something in Dale had snapped and he had kicked and punched her over and over while she had been hunched into a bundle on the floor.

Sally had crawled out of the house and called an ambulance. After treatment and being fitted with a neck brace she had gone straight back to her parents’ house.

They had divorced when Sally was twenty-nine. The divorce and the separation of marital assets had been the only thing that had proceeded without a fight in exchange for not pressing charges. With money in the bank Sally had decided to flee the unhappiness by setting out to travel back to the land of her happy childhood memories. And so she had come to be standing on the arrivals concourse of Heathrow Airport on an overcast day in April four years ago.

Sally spent the first six months purely on travel, exploring Europe using London as her base. She loved discovering European cities—especially Rome, Florence, Vienna, and Paris. It took six months for her to start missing her work again. It began nagging her like a stone in her shoe with every step she travelled. And so she sat down at her laptop in her London flat and applied for engineering jobs.

It was Jack Connor and Alan Walters who interviewed her at Marine. She wanted the job not only because the engineering work sounded superb and she felt an instant rapport with both Alan and Jack, but also because she fell in love with the Portsmouth seas at first sight. Sally started work, along with Jeremy Stone two weeks later, the newest engineers in Jack’s Radar Imaging team.

Her need for balance of work and play satisfied, Sally now lived for the weekends again. True England had no mountains of massive heights tall enough to form snow-caps, and the lack of height in the land made a few rivers with rapid descents that formed many waterfalls or exciting white waters to raft through. However, what excitement she missed from the climbs and falls over land, she made up for by discovering the waves of the Portsmouth seas. She joined the sailing club in Port Solent and discovered wind surfing. Whatever wonders she missed of desert sands, winds, and bush creatures, she made up for by discovering European cities that gave up to her the secrets and treasures they hid in beautiful architectures, mysterious curiosity shops, and cobbled side streets.

By the end of her first year, Alan gave her a permanent post at Marine. This gave her the means to convert her temporary UK travel visa to a full-time work visa. It was about this time she also rediscovered love, for it was about the beginning of the second year at Marine that she first started seeing Jack.

It started unexpectedly while working on a new device that threw them together for most of their time in the office. She was surprised by her own feelings because Jack was not her usual type. Jack was a geek and a sissy. Whatever time he did not spend engrossed in the engineering work at Marine he spent obsessing over his engineering designs for BlackGold. He also came with a lot of baggage, particularly two grown up sons with whom he spent whatever little time he had free.

He wasn’t her body type either. He was barely 5’ 9” tall, small compared to the tall, masculine hunk that Dale was. Jack was, however, brilliant, matching her in intellect and exceeding her in experience. He was also fun and very charismatic. He had a pretty face with fine, almost feminine features. That must have been what made her respond to his flirtatious advances eventually—that, and the loneliness of being away from home—for she knew from the start that it could only be an affair. Jack’s life was intricately woven into his wife’s company and money, a web she thought he would never be able to extricate himself from.

However, the charming ladies’ man was persistent in his advances until eventually Sally succumbed, thinking,
Heck, there was no harm in a bit of fun and romance.

She was therefore surprised by the intensity of her own feelings when a year later the newly hired Michelle started going after Jack. The stupid cow was clearly after Jack’s money and was on some kind of jealous and spiteful power trip against her.

Sally soon got over Jack after getting herself drunk and having a good long cry, but what she could not stand were the insults and the professional disrespect at work. Jack, who had no interests other than work had called her a geek, (mocked her psychological analysis of
Big Brother
) in front of that tart and the other engineers. She watched the nightmare unravel around her as Michelle, who had no education other than C grade O levels and no electronics training, started assuming the role of her personal boss, ignoring her testing requirements and cutting her off from important engineering meetings.

By the time Michelle started work with Marine, Jack had been spending two or three nights or an occasional day he took off as sick leave with her. She had been enjoying trying to introduce the nerd to sailing and skiing, her most recent discoveries. However, ever since that Friday Michelle first stole his attention, Jack had stopped all that cold turkey.

Sally asked Jeremy, by then Jack’s best friend, to smooth things over so that at least they could be good friends and work together in a fair way. Jeremy had tried his best to smooth things over, she was sure, but upon receiving pouting and sulking from Michelle, Jack went right back to avoiding her again.

Finally Sally turned to Alan, asking him to help her stop her growing isolation from her team.

Alan became very angry at Michelle’s behaviour.

‘I knew there were some difficulties from Michelle’s interference in Engineering. A couple of my other engineers have mentioned it to me, but I have been so tied up with our integration with AirWater Imaging that I had no idea she was getting so difficult,’ he explained.

‘Sally, AirWater Imaging wants me to appoint our best engineer to head up the product integration work, integrating Marine products with AirWater’s product portfolio. They want the integration engineer to work for six months from the AirWater engineering headquarters in San Hose, near San Francisco, the place that used to be called “The Silicon Valley” in the good old days. I need you for this post.’

Alan walked around and perched himself on the right edge of the table. ‘I know you like to travel. I am happy for you to take the remaining four weeks of holidays and up to two extra weeks of unpaid leave at the end of that assignment to travel in the Americas. I shall have whatever going on here sorted out by the time you get back. How does that sound?’

‘Oh my God! I would love that.’

Sally squealed in delight, sprang up from her seat, and hugged Alan before she realized what she was doing and blushed.

‘Thank you, Alan. You are a lifesaver,’ she said in a more restrained manner.

‘Well, you are doing me a great favour too, sweetheart.’ He laughed. ‘You and Jack are my top engineers and he has too many ties and involvements here for this project.’

‘So when do I leave?’

‘You’ll be flying Friday a week from now. Get ready for the trip love.’

The time working at AirWater Imaging Engineering offices in California was arguably the best time of Sally’s life. She had time to travel over North America. She loved the familiar feel of expansive land in the US and made plans that this was where she wanted to settle. She would continue her work on this project with AirWater at Marine and eventually get a permanent transfer to the Cal headquarters, thus enabling her to get the Green Card to settle in the US.

Back in Portsmouth, Sally returned to work at the Marine offices to a fresh onslaught of jealousy from Michelle. Michelle had convinced Jack that Sally was going over his head to Alan in order to take over Jack’s position as the head of the Radar team, and to drive Michelle out. Clearly Michelle had become professionally jealous of Sally’s growing prestige from her work with AirWater and personally jealous that Sally had also become Alan’s “go-to” engineer in the office.

Sally was aware of fresh chaos breaking out in Jack’s private life by his family somehow getting on-going reports about his affair with Michelle, and she was also aware of Jack’s powerful father-in-law’s meetings with Alan about it. If Jack had been avoiding Sally before, he was now being actively aggressive to her. At least once a day he would shout at her and Michelle would screech at her. Michelle, who by now took the role of the engineering group secretary, was blocking Sally from most meetings, delaying equipment to her, and blocking even stationary supplies. Sally realized she was being severely bullied.

Michelle had by now started seeking out and coming on to Alan. Sally was pained and very afraid. She sensed that Alan had a soft spot for herself and realized she had fallen for Alan too. She had known all along at the back of her mind that Jack had been a mistake, but she had fallen for Alan for all the right reasons. He was a strong and steady man, not a weakling like Jack. She tried to tell herself he would not be manipulated by superficial things. Still her heart was filled with dread for she had remembered believing similar things about Jack at one time. She had backed off and watched Michelle work her witchcraft on Jack at the time, the same things that she was now trying on with Alan. This time she was going to fight back!

At their weekly integration meeting with Alan, Sally broached the subject of how difficult Michelle and Jack had become. She watched carefully for signs of where Alan’s loyalties lay. Alan shook his head, his face filled with exasperation.

‘I can’t afford to have this headache right now at this crucial time with AirWater. I’ve even had a couple of visits from Mr. Douglas McAllen, Jack’s father-in-law, about this situation and I have told him also that my hands are tied. I cannot lose Jack, my top engineer, right now. I have given both Jack and Michelle written warnings to behave professionally, Sally. If they breach the warnings I can look at this again. Please try to get over your personal feelings for Jack and work with him, Sally.’

He came around and perched on her side of the desk again. ‘I’m off to AirWater Engineering to continue our work for a few months, and my flight for California is booked for next week. Try to forget about your feelings for Jack and focus on our work on this side while I’m away. I have to get the engineering division’s reorganization plans approved by AirWater and then I can deal with this mess when I get back.’

Sally nodded, half-smiling at Alan’s belief that she was still pining and fighting over Jack. She hated the asshole and it was Alan that she loved.
You’re my hero.
But she smiled and said nothing.

After Alan’s departure, the daily shouting, the screaming, and the bullying intensified. Michelle cornered Sally in the ladies’ room one day and snarled at her to stay away from Alan, that Alan wanted to get both Jack and Sally out of the way and that it was her, Michelle, whom Alan wanted. Did she not know that Alan got rid of Sally by sending her off to the US? She suggested Alan had started going out with Michelle covertly while she was “out of their way”.

Was that what Alan was hinting, associating Jack with herself so that Michelle would be free for him?

It suddenly hit her that it was Michelle and not her that both Jack and Alan wanted. For a week she looked around for another job that would allow her to realize her dreams of settling in the UK and eventually in the US, but found no other post in the still tough economy. To satisfy the conditions of her Australian work visa to the UK, the hiring company would have to justify that her skills could not be filled by hiring a UK citizen or a permanent resident, and with so many engineers in the market this was difficult to do.

She couldn’t stand this. After another encounter with Michelle, Sally drove home during lunch, taking the rest of the day off. Dejected, depressed, and filled with dread from long sustained bullying, Sally cleared out a section at the back of her garage and commenced the meticulous process of creating and refining the poison. She ordered some of the chemical compounds and the lab equipment over the Internet and drove out and bought the rest in person. She also bought rolls of cellophane, and half a dozen laboratory kits she had used for working in dust and contamination free silicon laboratories. Back in her garage she layered the floor and the walls of the cleared space with cellophane and placed the big black bin, also layered with cellophane, in a corner of the space. It took Sally a day and a half to get this preparation done.

The next day she woke up and went back to work and filed a sick note for her absence of the day and a half, telling herself that she was just getting the stress out of her system. It took a further two and a half weeks for the material she had ordered to arrive. As and when they arrived she simply put everything in the space at the back of her garage and left it there.

A few weeks later Michelle got Jack, still technically her boss, to reassign her integration project with AirWater to Aaron. Michelle cornered her in the bathroom again and taunted her that Alan had emailed them instructions to do so. That work with Alan and AirWater was her ticket to love and the life she wanted.

Sally was crying and sobbing on the drive home. She went straight in the garage and started the chemical processes. After each stage she wrapped the residual material and the kit used in cellophane and stored it all in the black bin, before proceeding to the next stage of the chemical process. It took two further weeks to complete the composition and the refinement of the potassium ferrocyanide and in turn the purified cyanide.