Let The Devil Wear Black by James F Linden (c)2003

PART 1

Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est.
(Knowledge itself is power.)
Francis Bacon 1561 – 1626

CHAPTER 1

My five–point harness was already fairly tight but another tug on the straps wouldn’t do any harm, I thought — we were still descending faster than I felt comfortable with. All of a sudden, we fell a few extra feet, making my stomach feel uneasy but it soon passed. I looked at the altimeter counting down towards the inevitable — feet standing in for seconds as the hot, August haze and the ground made their way up to meet us. I had no idea that it would end like this. I thought of how everything had changed over the last six years — so much had happened. Seeing an experienced Airbus pilot fighting with the controls of the light aircraft was reminiscent of our struggle — nothing turning out the way it should — a system stripped of its control mechanisms flapping chaotically in the wind. It was all so clear in hindsight. All except for one thing.

I suppose that it all must have started around the spring of 1993, or possibly as early as the end of the apartheid regime, especially looking at the company’s special relationship, but there was no way of telling. The first notably odd thing that happened, not that I paid much attention to it at the time, was when we came across Deryck in the supermarket, or perhaps more accurately, when he came across us.

* * *

It was on a dreary night in November 1993 that I was with my wife Marie and my two young children, Helen and Jonathan, on the last leg of our weekly supermarket shopping ritual. Having already endured the crowded route through the freshly baked bread scented entrance, past the overpriced fruit and vegetable section, the so–called fresh fish counter, through a peculiar burning, rotting cheese smell that appeared to linger roughly in the proximity of the in–store, freshly–baked pizza display and then along seemingly endless aisles of unnecessary, flavour–fantasy yuppie meals with only a passing similarity to the food of the countries from which they allegedly originated, we now had only two more aisles to contemplate.

In front of us now stood the chocolate section, an area always worthy of a little more attention than the others but as I pondered over the selection, I began to get an uneasy feeling, as though I was being watched or that something unfortunate was about to happen. I checked that I still had my wallet and car keys but that wasn’t it. Then, around the corner to our right and with the enthusiasm of a loquacious child with something to tell and the effeminate walk of somebody who felt at work that they should overcompensate for it by being overly combative, came my slightly–younger–than–me boss Deryck, still wearing his sharp–shouldered, pinstriped, young executive suit. As always, his short ginger hair had an obsessively neatly cropped and groomed appearance as did the barely visible efflorescence on the lower part of his face. His beard, for that was what he passed it off as, was one of those see–through, ‘I’m having a go at growing one as well’ beards that he had sprouted along with most of the rest of the managers after they had all been on one of those team building courses where they come back hugging people and saying “there’s no ‘I’ in ‘Team’ you know”, even though there is a positive abundance of them in ‘impressionable’ and ‘idiot’. Peculiarly, he was carrying a small bunch of flowers, presumably for his wife, but most noticeable was the fact that he was walking in time with the store musak and therefore to be avoided at all costs.

“I wouldn’t buy food if I were you,” he smirked as he approached.

I didn’t know what to say. Marie and I just stood and looked at each other.

“Food,” he explained, his eyes glancing back and forth uneasily between us. “It’s too expensive.”

He looked at Marie and quickly forced half a nervous smile. Then, without saying another word or giving either of us a chance to reply or even react, he made a quick escape towards a busy cross–roads in the general direction of the pickles and beetroot, the cut ends of his flower stalks dripping water onto the backs of his trousers as he walked.

“Who on earth was that?” Marie asked.

“That was Deryck,” I said. “I thought you knew him.”

“I wish you’d told me. I would have given him a piece of my mind,” she said aggressively.

In the absence of the real reason for not introducing them, that would have been good enough. What my Marie lacked in stature, she made up for amply in terms of her vociferous intolerance for all things that were both middle–management and bullshit, if that wasn’t too much of a tautology. I had known her for almost a decade, having first met her when I was busking during the miners’ strike. I had been instantly attracted to her — a mixture of her cheeky smile, wavy hair and her red T–shirt — and after a year or so of finding out that we had a lot in common, we got together. We never seemed to rush into things and I honestly believed that that, together with a willingness to save–up rather than spend ourselves into thousands of pounds worth of debt in the way that so many other people did, were two of the main reasons why we had stayed together when so many couples around us had fallen apart. Through thick and thin, we had made a go of things, working together and supporting each other, living on the cheap brands when we needed to, appreciating things when we didn’t, each crisis strengthening our relationship instead of weakening it. I loved my Marie and I knew when I married her that we would be together for the rest of our lives.

With the obvious exception of herself, I had always been a far worse judge of character than she had, something that had been proved on a number of occasions. Only a few years earlier, we had got over the last character misjudgement disaster of mine — a cigar–smoking fat–cat who liked to sit back and pollute the working environment with the hideous stench from his cigars and his socks while I wrote computer programs, editorial, provided the cartoon content for and typeset a small newspaper. Marie met him only once when he wanted me to add a few thousand pounds into my already large and unrewarded investment of time and effort with a personal bank loan in my name for, as the bank would think, a car, but in reality, to fund another computer, boxes of cigars and his lunch–time drinking sessions with his dodgy business associates in the local pubs. I didn’t like the idea primarily because it was dishonest and he had instantly made Marie’s hackles rise. A few months later: with a partnership account and an already largely used up overdraft facility with another bank; and, once I had provided him with enough of a backlog of work to keep the business going without me, he changed the locks on the doors; pretended not to be in, no matter how hard I thumped the door, shouted through the letter box or peered in through the windows; started up a limited company under a different name; and, opened a new account with yet another bank. I only escaped substantial payment to the corporate recoveries department of the Carrington and Hale bank by pointing out to them that they had recognised me as an outgoing partner and under the Partnership Act, that precluded them taking my money. Honesty had become an unfortunate inconvenience for them as they now had to get the money out of somebody who had since gone to prison for another one of his nefarious escapades. I was determined that I wasn’t going to be taken in and used like that again so this time, I had taken the precaution of getting a job with a large company.

Although shopping had, as always for a Thursday evening, turned out to be more of a hunter than gatherer experience, that part of the exercise was now thankfully complete as we stood in the relative tranquillity of the queue. Helen, who was four, played peep–bow with Jonathan, her seven month old sibling, who was sitting in the trolley, wearing one of those baby–blue waterproof, all–in–one coats that always seem too big when they are that age. Marie was busy looking through a free, store lifestyle magazine that just happened to show people how to make use of the more esoteric ingredients on sale so I took the opportunity to have a quick look up and down the expanse of checkouts, trying to locate the mysterious Deryck. All of the occupied checkout queues were at least six trolleys long almost as though there was an unwritten, or possibly even written store policy that they could only open up another checkout if they could keep the overall queue length greater than six trolleys. The queues at the basket–only checkouts were even longer but with only one exception, they had only baskets to process. That exception was a grumpy looking, short, red–faced man with a large, especially deep trolley filled to overflowing with what looked like well over a hundred items. Included in his catch was what must have amounted to at least half a dead cow, the annual alcoholic output of a small château, a case of jars of whole black pepper corns, and curiously, many tins of peaches. The mind boggled. I wondered whether or not I should say anything but instead decided that it could well be more interesting to observe.

While we waited, with out of control children running around, pestering their parents for overpriced sweets on the checkout displays, oddly, the only thing that the shop appeared to sell in one–packs, I puzzled over Deryck’s apparition that night. I first met him a few years earlier when he took the job of quality assurance manager at K. K. Gazelle Chemicals. He came heavily recommended by his former employer and had even won the company’s young manager of the year award five years earlier — something that appeared to give him a sense of immortality. Having commuted daily from Stoke–on–Trent, he had moved up to Manchester during the last year. I had worked in the laboratory as an analytical chemist for a number of years and when the lab manager, Norman, retired, Deryck moved me to the technical department in the office block next to the lab, instead of promoting me to lab manager as Norman had requested. My new job was process development chemist in addition to a hundred and one other things, including: computer programmer, consultant and trainer; safety inspection co–ordinator; safety inspector; and, funnily enough, analytical chemist in the lab, even being appointed lab manager when Dawn, who was made quality controller, was not there. For all practical purposes, quality controller was the lab manager but, by not having the word manager in the title, it made Deryck’s balance sheet look healthier.

On Deryck’s arrival, he popularised his brand–new, iconoclastic approach which proved to be very effective, as it already had been in the lab for several decades. The company, or at least our part of it, soon absorbed this new–found oxygen and quickly proclaimed itself a meritocracy. There was even an attempt to breathe life into the foetid remains of the company’s suggestion scheme but unfortunately, old habits remained unchanged and the workforce all but gave up on this decaying relic. The general consensus was that the company was instead a kleptocracy and one intellectual from the office block had the idea of calling K. K. Gazelle, ‘Krank Gesellschaft’.

When the production manager moved away at the first sign that our little business unit was going to be bought out by another company, Deryck took on that role as well so not only did quality come first but also quantity. Nobody seemed to know where safety came. So, with the quality assurance manager now also the production manager, our bonuses continued to soar with escalating plant output and sales but then, his boss, the business unit director retired. There didn’t seem to be any way that Deryck could do that job as well. The replacement, a thin faced, blonde haired Gestapo stereotype that went by the name of Clinton C. Fowlmere soon settled in, working right at the cutting edge of the business, the edge that was cutting back. Foul–mouth’s previous job was as a works accountant but one Christmas, the conspiracy of circumstances brought into serious question his ability to count, when he presented a tin of biscuits with the unsparing request that everybody could have one. In reality, he abandoned them on the conference room table when nobody else was there and just happened to mention it to the secretary as he sneaked out of the building. There were forty two biscuits in the tin and forty nine people working in our business unit that Christmas. The money for his loaves and fishes for managers course had turned out to be a good investment. Curiously, foul–mouth turned out to be the only person that ever managed to unite the workforce at every level. I heard a rumour that one manager was trying to organise a business unit paint–shoot weekend. Clint was to be secured to an appropriate spruce and summarily executed. He could have sold tickets.

It was the October after the biscuit fiasco that, after being on the council waiting list for five years, we moved from our overcrowded upstairs council flat to a proper, modern, terraced house with a reasonable garden. When we sorted out the paperwork with the council, they analysed our total income, including my work as a musician, and we found that we qualified for Family Credit, a consideration aimed at topping up my wages to the amount that the government thought a family of four should have coming in each week. All we needed to do was to fill in the form and send it in. A few weeks later, we received the reply stating that we received too much money. The letter revealed that K. K. Gazelle had stated they paid me more bonus than they really did and a few surreptitious enquiries soon revealed who had completed the company’s reply. Marie couldn’t wait to shake Deryck warmly by the neck. I would have settled for a stoning or perhaps a paint–shoot weekend but I had to work for him. Later, we heard some rumours that other Gazelle employees who had applied for Family Credit had simply been sacked for no apparent reason.

Having paid for our shopping but failed to observe Deryck or any bloodshed from the queue next to us, we stopped at the magazine stand. The cover–disk of the new issue of Universal PC was to have a computer program of mine on it and having eventually located a copy, I skimmed through the pages and soon found what I was looking for. Harry had given me the idea for the robot program around the beginning of September, I had written it out on paper at home over a weekend and spent just four lunch times typing it into the computer, compiling it and testing it — one of the advantages of not getting paid for lunch breaks. At a quick glance, it was a good little article and the magazine included some nice screen–shots on the back cover. I always liked to see my programs in print. I suppose it would have been better to get paid for them as well.

* * *

It was Friday morning and even though I was a member of the technical department, I was working in the lab on the seemingly endless although mildly entertaining effluent project. I felt at home in the lab because ever since as a child, when I had watched Marius Goring as the forensic scientist in the television series The Expert, I knew that that was where I wanted to work. A school friend of mine did manage to get a job in a forensic science lab but she told me that most of the work was analysing samples from cadavers for drugs. Brain, liver, blood, stomach contents — pavement pizza in a plastic bag — not exactly my idea of a good time. In contrast, I had a job in a chemical analytical lab and, although I knew that the image of chemistry being pretty colours, pops and bangs was almost entirely a false one, with the exception of one or two occasions, I still felt that I had fallen on my feet.

Developing and improving existing analytical methods and creating new ones were specialities of mine — it satisfied my hunger to solve problems. I had also written a computer program that handled the bulk of the lab’s analysis–related paperwork and after I had impressed the BS5750 inspectors with it and used my computer model writing abilities for two plant processes resulting in the saving of around £30,000 each year, Deryck had even promoted me to where I was today. In short, I was where I wanted to be and doing a job that had enough variety and challenge to keep me interested.

With the technical department’s glorious, balding midget leader, Kevin Hufter, on his mysterious extended foreign holiday, being replaced in the office only by the Swiss Cheese Plant — which I must admit: sat comfortably at his desk with the fingers of its more mature, large, ovate, perforated leaves holding quite competently a pen and note pad; spent less time in the morning planning its day; was quieter; smelled pleasantly and only of damp peat; made less mistakes; and, didn’t invite in loads of sales reps that would talk loudly, give complementary pads of paper that had their company’s logos on so large that there was little room left to write notes, use my desk as a dumping ground and my phone for all of their outside calls — we had borrowed Eric from the lab for a few months as an assistant while I ran the effluent project.

Although Eric was barely old enough to go on a chemical site legally, he happened to be the eldest son of one of the big fish elsewhere on the site and whilst he enjoyed the benefits of this — automatic promotion, the inability to do any wrong and higher pay rises — he instilled the essential ingredients of extreme youth to our modest team without making use of monkey glands. He was young, loud and enthusiastic, especially about women with abnormally large breasts. He was also tall, clumsy and big–boned with the complexion of somebody who ate nothing but grease. In addition to this, he had a peculiar knack of destroying heating mantles using 47% rayon grade caustic soda — a raw material that was so corrosive that it was normally stored only in plastic bottles as it would slowly dissolve glass ones.

For most of the morning, I had been preparing and injecting samples from the effluent project into one of the lab’s disparate and ageing collection of chromatographs — the modern, high–tech, high–cost, gas–based version of the spreading ink blot experiment that everybody does at school where the dyes that made up black ink separate across a piece of alcohol–soaked filter paper producing bands of bright different colours. The job was normally quite interesting but sometimes it gravitated to watching ink dry on the trace and that was just what I was doing when I noticed something particularly unusual. The chromatogram, the chart that the machine produced, showed a clump of poorly separated peaks that usually formed little more that a slight ripple in the baseline which, around that area, was flat. Here, they had built a proper little mountain range between them.

“Come and have a look at this,” I said to Eric who jumped at the invasion into his thoughts, almost falling off his chair. He got up and ambled over. “They’ve never been that big before have they?” I said, pointing at the trace.

“Mm,” he said, peering, while he chewed thoughtfully at the gratuitously deformed end of his pen. “What do you reckon they are?”

“Just hydrolysis peaks. There’s not a lot else they could be,” I said. “It’s K51 and rubbish from the reactor.”

“Suppose so.”

“I’ll run a test sample,” I said as he wandered back to his chair.

Ten minutes later, the new sample’s solvent peak had already formed and the pen was just settling down on the baseline again. It would be another ten minutes or so before the peaks I that were interested in would appear. So, like happened so many times, I sat, looking through the lab window, across the main avenue, over the gravel which, for the time of year, still had a surprising collection of different species of groundsel, some probably genetic mutations as yet unknown to science, over at the decaying brickwork and pealing the paint of the K51 plant. K51 was Gazelle’s nice little earner and woe betide anybody who got in its way. It was a well–established, specialised, lubricating oil additive used in large quantities in rail transport systems all over the world and was, as you would expect, quite expensive. The manufacturing process involved reacting a number of fairly nasty chemicals together, washing out anything that hadn’t reacted from the reaction mixture and then drying the now clean liquid product by passing it down a falling film drier — a little like dribbling it down the walls of a heated drainpipe through which hot air was blown to take away the moisture. The driers produced a lot of spray with some droplets escaping from the vents, falling onto the roof as a low–level toxic rain.

The wash water was also contaminated with K51 and the effluent disposal method we were using was about to be made illegal so it was the job of the technical department to look at alternatives to the current method which was nothing more technologically sophisticated than parking a road tanker by the river and dumping it, untreated, in amongst the plants and fishes, ready to be passed down the food chain. The process that we were investigating was supposed to eliminate all of the chemical plant’s product, breaking it up into harmless pieces by reacting it with water using special chemicals which were of course, rather expensive. If the company was going to commit itself to buying the process, we had to find out if it was going to do the job.

Two runs later and with the identity of the peaks now confirmed, I sat, waiting for the remaining peaks to emerge. It suddenly occurred to me that there could be another use for this discovery and it called into question the reason why we had never bothered to identify the peaks formally — something I had up until then, assigned to apathy. Earlier on in the year, one of the directors was due to visit our area so the plant needed to be painted for the first time for decades and as a result, something needed to be done about the K51 droplets from the drier vents. The roof and surrounding structure were originally painted when the plant was built in the early 1970s but by the end of the first fortnight, it had all peeled off. As a result, we had to design a vent tower that would eliminate the droplet problem altogether. Against all of the advice that he received, Kevin requested a tower approximately half the height that the safe engineering guidelines suggested although in mitigation, it did have some special features. The problem was that the special features, a number of cyclones, each a sort of spin drier for air, were expensive, so he was instructed from above not to order them.

Early one day in mid–September, the parts for the new tower were brought onto the site by a fleet of lorries and laid down beside the plant. The following day, an enormous crane came on–site and like a giant construction set, the new vent tower was pieced together on its side, on the ground. After checking that everything was the way it should be, or at least the way that Kevin’s plans said it should be, the whole thing was turned upright, lifted onto the roof and bolted into place.

When all was finished, the tower stood perched on top of the low, flat roof, flanked on either side by the two taller production buildings, showing off its brilliant new shiny galvanised steel joists to the small proud crowd that had gathered at a safe distance. In precipitous contrast to the decaying brickwork, exposed rusty girders and grass laden rotting asbestos guttering of its neighbours, its angular framework and lustrous, crystalline, zinc surface radiated a sense of investment. With the dryers now running, the vent pipes traced elegant plumes of white steam, like two silver pencils drawing two straight lines across the deep ultramarine sky. The two plumes were so well formed that they remained quite distinct while the prevailing wind blew them across the car park and over the perimeter fence.

One afternoon, at the end of the shift, the fitters found that their cars were covered in K51, this sticky, slow–acting paint stripper so Brian, their foreman, went straight to Deryck and complained. Kevin was summonsed and later that afternoon, Deryck and Kevin went around the whole K51 business unit, telling everybody that the company was not at fault because everybody used the car park at their own risk. They didn’t seem to value the opinion that the K51 business unit was a good half mile from the entrance to the site, the company had placed the new car park there exclusively for the K51 plant workforce making sure that there were enough spaces for all of us, they had deprived us of access to any reasonably secure car park within half a mile of the entrance to the site and they issued car passes to us that were being used only in that car park. The Middle–Management Bullshit–O–Meter swung violently through the red and pinned itself against the end–stop.

As a result of that incident and a similar one a few days later when Deryck’s secretary heard what she assumed to be his desk being thumped repeatedly, some money appeared miraculously in the budget and the cyclones were ordered. In addition, a monitoring sample plaque, a token piece of 316 stainless steel allegedly meant to catch these fugitive emissions, was put in place so that the problem could be monitored continually. It was mounted at an angle of forty five degrees and we got the distinct impression that this was so that the management could always argue that any calculations based on it were inaccurate thus rendering as void any legal action against the company.

A few weeks later, we received the cyclones in a couple of battered cardboard boxes and they immediately proved to be quite a test for Kevin — at least as far as finding an explanation for Carl, the shop steward in the fitters’ workshop, also happened to be at least half as tall again as Kevin. There were a number of contentious issues: instead of having Carl make them, something that he was easily capable of doing, Kevin had gone to an outside company on the grounds of cost alone; they were built from a far thinner stainless steel sheet than we had ordered; the design missed out a whole section thus reducing their efficiency; the welds looked as though they had been made by somebody who had never welded before; the dents and scuffs that covered the sides made them look as though somebody had been playing football or hockey with them; and, the flanges weren’t even parallel meaning that any pipe–work that they were fastened to would have to be bent so that it would fit. Kevin barely escaped with his life at this and to add to it all, they were installed by Carl. Just to make matters worse, not that that was particularly necessary, one of them started leaking as soon as it had been installed. It turned out that one of the welds had a pin–sized hole in it so we now knew that they had not even bothered to pressure test them. So, having run on two cyclones for about as many hours, we were now down to one cyclone and paint stripper rain over the car park again.

I injected another sample into the machine. The time had crept around to eleven forty. Martin, who was supposed to be working on another part of the effluent project and the mystery chemical engineer had been in and out of the lab all morning, looking as though they needed some help but there was no sign of them now. That left me with enough time to phone Harry. I wondered how he was getting on with a little pornography related problem that had been uncovered on one of the computers earlier on in the year but he wasn’t in so I left a message saying that I would get back to him on Monday.

* * *

After lunch, I managed to catch Martin and the mystery chemical engineer in the lab. Holding a clipboard each and dressed in their navy blue company thermal tank tops, they were loitering with intent around the filing cabinets outside the lab manager’s office. One of them, although I couldn’t discern which, smelled of onions.
“I’m doing a BS5750 internal audit,” Martin explained. “I decided to look at your training records but I can’t find them anywhere.”

“There’s one copy in this filing cabinet and Sonia should have another in her office.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head.

“There is one in here,” I said.

I pulled open the lab personnel drawer.

“I saw it a few months ago,” I added as I flicked through the files.

I had seen the lab copy myself only a few months earlier when Dawn showed me a note in them from Gordon Smith the old training officer that excluded me from any further training.

“I’ve searched through all of the filing cabinets. It’s just not in there,” he said.

“They can’t both have disappeared. Not from two secure filing cabinets in two different buildings. You’d have to get hold of two sets of keys for a start.”

“Sonia says Deryck told her that because you were working in the lab, only the lab copy was needed so she should destroy hers.”

“But I work mainly in the offices. Has he told Dawn to do the same?”

“I don’t know,” he said, pulling out one of the folders and glancing at the name. He looked at me. “It’s as though you don’t exist any more,” he said.

The mystery chemical engineer raised one eyebrow.

“There must be a copy somewhere,” I said.

I was just trying to think of where they could have got to when Eric walked into the lab, letting the door slam behind him which rattled the bottles in the sample cupboard. I remembered that we were going to go into the centre of Manchester for lunch so that he could spend more time with this bank manager.

“Shall we get on with it then?” Eric asked.

I looked at Martin.

“We’ll keep on looking,” he said.