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

CHAPTER 2

The following Monday morning, the laboratory crickets chirped away merrily behind the luxuriously warm steam radiator as I looked through Friday’s chromatograms. There was a lot of waste going on in the process and with the identification of these peaks, it now looked as though we could determine how much was being lost and just where for the first time.

I eventually managed to retrieve all but three of the car park samples from the back of the old sample cupboard and started preparing them for the chromatograph. I got the distinct impression that there was a dusty pile of bottles underneath that bench somewhere, probably being guarded the dried out exoskeletal remains of an enormous spider that before its departure from the living had been under the false impression that there was plenty of food about. The only wildlife on the inside of the lab walls were the crickets and I don’t think that any spider was big enough to catch one of those. By the time I had finished, it had crept around to half past eleven and it was now raining heavily. It was too late to start anything else important before lunch so I decided to give Harry a ring. I wondered if I would catch Eric on my phone to his bank again.

* * *

The three, 12 foot square box offices knocked into one formed the elongated work base for the smoothly functioning technical department. The three of us had a desk each — from their generous size, the quality of workmanship and the fact that they were made from wood, they were all clearly from the days when telephones were made of Bakelite and operators had heard of jack–plugs. Eric’s was nearest to the door and Kevin’s was at the opposite end, giving him a good warning of anybody coming into the office. My desk was in the middle, a sort of no–man’s land providing a dumping ground for paperwork when people couldn’t think of anywhere in particular to put it. Kevin had his own telephone whereas I had to share my wall socket with Eric and my telephone with every rep that had a new valve, gauge or gasket to sell or person off the plant that wanted to make a quick call on a phone that had outside line access by dialling a 9 rather than by going through the operator. My telephone was even used by the mysterious new bod who didn’t seem to communicate with anyone but Deryck and Martin — I didn’t even know his name. Notice boards overladen with pieces of paper and minutes of meetings four deep, filing cabinets from the 1930’s that wouldn’t lock, shelves bending under the weight of text books, old copies of chemical engineering magazines and plant manufacturer’s advertising made it an office typical of the site. Almost as an unexpected, although perhaps more accurately, ‘unwanted’ bonus, and as a result of it being made up of three offices was the fact that each of us had a window with which to view the newly laid car park and the rusting corpse of the old F42 polymer plant as they sat, battered by the heavy morning rain — the F42 fraction towers looking like passing ships in a storm.

Between Kevin’s desk and mine stood the computer workstation. Unlike the others, this was a brand new utility unit in glorious, imported, machine–crafted, imitation veneer with moulded brown plastic corners and edging, a slide–out ledge to put the keyboard on and nowhere to put your legs. In addition to carrying the computer and its bits, all supplied by and supporting the gaudy little rectangular stickers of a local computer sales outlet, curiously called InComp — they thought that they were ‘In Computers’ but we thought that they were not very good — the desk also had a place for the printer and the obligatory two large boxes of paper that seemed to accompany every computer in the wonderful world of the paperless office. Typically, the waste paper bin next to the computer always filled up first.

I sat down and Eric started on some of the paperwork that he was supposed to be doing. It turned out that Harry was busy and later in the week, he was away in London so I said I would get back to him the following week. Harry and I had known each other for nearly two years although we had never met. I first came into contact with him when another program I had written had been accepted for publication on the cover disk of Universal PC magazine back in 1992 — Harry was the cover disk editor at the time. Over the years, we had found that we had a lot in common and had helped each other with a number of computer related problems. At the moment, Harry was using his contacts to try to sort out a security problem that Eric and I had uncovered on one of the computers that was going to be linked into the proposed Local Area Network (LAN) that the rather aggressive Col Burgess, the information technology co–ordinator had planned for the area, giving the impression that everything worked together.

On one night back in July, there had been a break–in on the site and the LIMS computer wouldn’t start up. We thought that it might be a virus so while we awaited the arrival of a virus checker, I had a look at the system to see what had happened. I quickly found that somebody had deleted two important but replaceable files, renamed the hard disk ‘DISK_ERROR’, presumably as a joke and that this had happened at about twenty five past midnight. Eventually, Col arrived with our very own copy of Shimsom’s Anti–virus Software and thankfully, it told us that the system was clean. Col told Eric and I to look through the virus encyclopaedia that came with it in order to see if there was anything that looked like it might have done the job. However, the seemingly endless trawl through thousands of entries failed to reveal anything that was even remotely like what had happened to our system.

Later, Col informed us that elsewhere on the site, they had stolen about twenty computers and attacked the mainframe three times overnight, overloading it each time. He said that they had done it at seven in the evening, half past midnight and five in the morning. A short while later, Col rang me back to tell me that they had attacked the mainframe computer using one of the computers downstairs in the office block. I had been there until eight that evening in our office at the other end of the block, getting Kevin out of trouble with a project on the plant but had heard nothing at the time. Col suggested that if they could break into the mainframe, they could change the records so we didn’t even know if they really had used the office block anyway as it could just as easily been anywhere — possibly not even on the site.

Later on that day, Eric bleeped me and when I got to the lab, he told me that he and the shift supervisor had discovered some pornographic computer programs in another supervisor’s locker. Having checked it for viruses and other nasties and found it clean, we ran it, out of morbid curiosity of course. The graphics were astounding. This type of program, the sort of thing that would be passed under the counter in the porn capitals of the world, would be ideal for anybody wanting to spread a virus. I wondered where he had got it from. The most likely source was somebody in systems but nobody would say. This turned out to be a serious thorn in the side of the LAN as viruses that were LAN–friendly would be able to damage all of the machines in an instant instead of having to wait while somebody took a floppy disk out of one machine and put it in another. As a result of this, I could only ever recommend delaying its installation until after the drive problem was sorted out whenever the topic came up during the meetings of the Information Technology Strategy Development Group which Col had put me on. Fortunately for Col, he knew that I knew Harry and that he had a lot of contacts. He also knew that Computer Consultant’s time was expensive and if he could get it for free, he would, so when I suggested asking Harry if he could do anything about the security problem for us, he jumped at the opportunity. However, listening to Col’s contributions to those meetings, I got the impression that turning the LAN into a reality, regardless of its integrity, seemed to be the only purpose in his life.

* * *

After lunch in Manchester, the weather had cleared and the sky was now in its deep blue, post–storm glory with the dusty, white tops of the storm clouds miles away in the distance sheared off in wisps to one side as they iced into the stratospheric wind. The air was clean and everything was brightly lit and wet — it was as though somebody had been fiddling around with the view’s brilliance and contrast and managed to get it right.

As Eric and I walked across the car park back to the office, a light aircraft flew particularly low over the K51 plant — its white wings twitching as the pilot kept it straight and level. We were only a few miles from the local flying club so we regularly had aeroplanes flying over the site, but not normally as low as this one.

Back in the office block, Jim Stutton, K51’s middle aged colour–blind engineering manager was leaning against his office door frame, devouring one of his crab paste sandwiches and talking to Frank Bury the draughtsman.

“Did you see that aeroplane?” Jim asked as I got to the top of the stairs. “It flew over the DBCP storage tanks. I thought he was going to take a sample.”

“I’ve never seen one as low as that before,” I said. “I reckon they were blue but Eric thinks they were brown.”

I put my pasty in the microwave oven and setting the timer while Eric went into our office.

“Blue? ... Brown? ...” Jim asked curiously.

“The pilot’s eyes,” I said, pressing the start button.

“Oh. I thought they were blue,” he said. “Yes, definitely blue.”

“I told you they were blue,” I shouted to Eric. He had sat down and had started devouring the contents of his foraging bag from our expedition.

“Oh. It wouldn’t be so bad but,” Jim said, swallowing the remains of his sandwich, “our whole CIMAH case depends on aeroplanes not flying over the site.”

As I walked past him into the office, I got the distinct impression that he wished he could un–say what he had just said. He had been in charge of the engineering department since the plant started up so he must have known what he was talking about. I closed the door behind me and Eric watched curiously as I sat down.

“What was that?” he said conspiratorially, leaning forward over his desk.

“He was just worried about that aeroplane being so low.”

“No, I mean the CIMAH case,” he whispered.

“I think that they’ve gone and told the HSE that aeroplanes don’t fly over the site. They must have kept to the same story for years, hoping they’d never find out.”

“They’ve lied to the HSE? But you can always see aeroplanes flying over the ...”

At that moment, Jim came in, scoffing his next sandwich and perched himself on the corner of Eric’s desk. The microwave bell rang.

“I’d better go and get my lunch,” I said.

I got up and wandered into the corridor. Nobody had ever involved me in a CIMAH case, they were always done in whispers and behind closed doors. I was aware that the management had to present one to the Health and Safety Executive on a regular basis and when they passed, as, for some reason, they always did, they all seemed particularly pleased with themselves.

Back in the office, I waited until they had finished their conversation about the soccer on Saturday.

“Where’s my personal appraisal, Jim?” I asked.

He looked uneasy and got up, brushing the bread crumbs off his trousers onto the floor.

“It’s nearly done,” he said. “I should have it ready for you in a few days.”

He disappeared around the corner and into the sanctuary of his own office.

* * *

Thursday. On my desk after lunch was waiting a ‘Deryck Special’. This little gem ‘asked’ me to calculate how much DBCP vapour would escape from the storage tanks during venting. I had already done something similar to this earlier on in the year when I was preparing the mass balance for the whole plant. I had sampled and calculated the DBCP and other emissions into the air for each vent so that the figures could go into a big, state–of–the–art computer model at the Stoke site. The DBCP figure seemed high so I modelled the venting process and vapour concentrations on the computer but all that did was confirm the analysis as correct. In fact, after Deryck had received the figures from the computer model, he took me to one side in the lab and informed me that as the Stoke computer model showed that they were ten times the legal limit at the perimeter fence, I had to re–sample and recalculate the results. The new figures turned out to be identical, thus confirming again that the first set was correct. Now, however, I needed to find some other details about the tanks.

The specifications for every tank on our part of the site were on a collection of flowsheets stored in a special cabinet in the drawing office. Looking like a giant, cream coloured pitcher plant, the flowsheet cabinet stood on the floor, coming up to just above waist height. Inside, a runner along each end carried three pairs of special jaws that spanned the gap, each jaw having long, shiny, curved metal teeth on them like a giant Venus Fly Trap and with an equal tendency to snap shut on the unsuspecting. The jaws were even painted blood red. The teeth located in holes along the top edge of each of the flowsheets so they could hang freely inside the cabinet. Risking life and limb — or at least the continuing ability to play the double bass — it wasn’t long before I found the sheet I needed, had carefully removed it and started looking down it for my tank. Just then, Carl came in and peered over my shoulder.

“Oh, you want to take that with a pinch of salt,” he said.

I looked at him gone out.

“You don’t want to believe everything you see on there,” he added.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Well, for a start, the siphon breaks on those dip pipes,” he said, pointing to the tank that I was looking at.

I didn’t know what to think. He knew what was what with the plant. The main loading line, a three inch diameter stainless steel pipe, went in through the top of the tank and straight down to the bottom. Dip–pipes like this were normally used to empty the tank using gas pressure above the liquid, a little like an aerosol spray can. The diagram indicated that there was a siphon break, a hole cut into the dip–pipe wall near to the top of the inside of the tank so that if the pipe failed on the outside of the tank, such as in the event that a lorry ran into it, the hole would just let the gas out without spilling any of the contents so that it wouldn’t look like a large ornamental fountain or, if the contents were set alight, like a first stage rocket engine test firing.

“There aren’t siphon breaks on any of those tanks you know,” he said, pointing to three of the tanks on the flowsheet. “They’ve only been drawn in. They don’t really exist.”

“Have you seen them?” I asked.

“Yes. Last time they were inspected. About a year ago.”

“And there were no holes.”

“No holes,” he repeated.

The flowsheet I had in my hands with all of its tanks, pipes, level indicators, thermocouples and load cells had taken on a completely different character. Instead of being an integrated catalogue of the design of the plant, it was now a piece of evidence in a fraud case. While Carl went over to Frank to ask him about something else, I quickly copied down the information I needed and went back into the office to phone the control room about the levels. This was becoming rather odd. All of a sudden, people were telling me things that could embarrass the company, almost as though I was their ambassador. But to whom? When?

* * *

On the way to the lab, I popped the result onto Deryck’s in tray. He was sitting at his desk looking at some graphs and picking the filth out from under the ends of his nails with the end of a letter opener.

“Ah,” he said, looking up at me and swivelling around on his executive leather upholstered chair. “I’ve got something for you.”

I wondered what it was. He didn’t seem to be getting in touch with his feminine side. He carefully put the letter opener next to his rolled gold, young executive pen set, making sure that it was perfectly parallel, stood up, quickly looked through some piles of papers, pulled out a single sheet and started rolling it up to form a small tube. Deryck was one of those people who didn’t seem to mind violating somebody’s personal space and in his box office, he was now standing close enough to me for me to be able to smell his breath freshener — an olfactory sensation that produced the illusion of an awkward combination of peppermint and phenolic drain disinfectant.

“Thanks to you,” he said prodding me rhythmically in the chest with the tube, “I’m not getting any expenses for that trip to Nottingham you did. I need to break through that tax threshold. That’s why I let you use my car.”

“But I went the same way that ...”

“No,” he interrupted. “We are only allowed to go by the shortest route now so thanks to you, those miles aren’t allowed.”

“But ...”

“Next time, go by the shortest route,” he said.

“Fair enough,” I said.

There were times when working for Deryck seemed to be little more than an exercise in humility.

* * *

It was Saturday at long last and time to escape from the one–dimensional, bipolar, Sisyphean slog of home to work and back again. Playing Bass Guitar part–time for a cabaret band wasn’t supposed to be as much of a challenge as playing double bass in a modern jazz sextet but the fact that we were never supplied with the music beforehand made up for it to some extent. It was also a challenge to find the venue. Back in August, the band leader had told me that the booking was in Kettering so at work, using a computer route planning program that Deryck had for his obsessive, spring equinox, annual holiday in Devon, I had prepared a nice little map. ProRoute used to live on the LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System) computer but when the IT department had clamped down on programs that were not allowed on company machines, it ended up at Deryck’s personal request along with a myriad of other programs, in a special collection of nearly fifty discs that we called SRA discs after Deryck — ‘Simpson’s Reserved Applications’. To make the job of finding the programs easier, I had printed out a TREE list and as a result, Deryck’s requests for the use of these ‘slightly less authorised’ programs as Deryck put it, could be satisfied in less than two minutes. He was most pleased. I had found that if I reverse–photocopied the ProRoute map and put it on the dashboard, I could read its reflection in the windscreen without taking my eyes off the road. Eric’s passion for fighter–plane flight simulators had given me that idea.

That night’s venue turned out to be a large, plush, deep–pile carpeted room in which there had already arrived the obligatory disco and this time, rather curiously, a magician. Having set up and checked the equipment, we quickly located the bar that was furthest away and sat down. I hadn’t seen most of the rest of the band for almost a year so there was a lot of catching up to do and we only had three clear, uninterrupted hours to ourselves. There followed curious stories of recording studio session work disasters where a band’s vocalist had decided that he was going to rewrite material in the most expensive rehearsal room you can hire and a wedding reception where the generator was tested and condemned, resulting in a precarious chain of disparate extension leads from the socket next to the kitchen window to the marquee at the bottom of the garden. With stories of disastrous residencies, incompetent sound engineers and appearances on ships, ten o’clock soon came around and it was time to perform. Half an hour of middle of the road material that I could play without thinking about too hard and we relinquished the stage for the magician for an hour and a quarter before commencing our last set. If only I could get more of this type of work. It was little more than talk all of the time at the booking with no worries. By the time I started driving home at two o’clock in the morning, all of the inebriated drivers had either made it home somehow or had ended up in a ditch making it the best time of the day to drive — a four hour slot between the end of the drunken pandemonium and the start of commercial vehicles setting off. It was bliss. Once I had got onto the open motorway, I put my foot down and let the cavernous 1100cc engine take me to the horizon accompanied by Cassiopeia and the Plough. Zero to sixty in less than a day. I should be home before sunrise.

* * *

On Sunday morning, I got down to some serious DIY. Saturday had witnessed a significant victory against capitalism when Marie and I had obtained a piece of kitchen work surface, managing to beat the shop at its own pricing game when we were lucky enough to find somebody else who was after the same thing, thus allowing us to go shares on a larger piece. The shop even cut it for free. With the wood already the correct size, I managed to assemble quite a presentable wall mounted desk without having to resort to using a pad saw — an Eclipse saw blade with a bit of cloth wrapped around it to form a handle. After thirty minutes, I had a sturdy work surface on which I could do all of the band’s paperwork. I wondered if perhaps, one day, I would have saved up enough money to update my Sinclair QL to a PC, but that was just a dream. Frank was into DIY, having made his grandson’s cabin bed so this story could at least go part of the way to making one weekday lunch–time bearable if I couldn’t get on the computer and Deryck didn’t turn up.

After lunch, we went to the park. Using his baby seat mounted steering wheel, Jonathan had driven the car all of the way there whilst Helen, who was just old enough to go to nursery, sat in the back, talking continuously. It didn’t matter whether it was something that we had just driven past, something that one of her friends was doing or something about some character on children’s television, there was always something to talk about.

With the car now safely parked, the first stop, as always, was the ducks on the mill stream. Marie and I loved this park. Here, the trees always seemed bigger, the grass brighter and the keepers friendlier. It had remained mostly unchanged in the last thirty or so years, the only significant difference being a new play structure designed for children in wheelchairs. Everything was now wheelchair–friendly. The gates were wheelchair–friendly, the surface up to the wheelchair–friendly play–ramps was wheelchair–friendly and even the corners of the structure were wheelchair–friendly so, no matter what your disabilities were, if you could go there in a wheelchair, you would be both safe and able to do everything. The only drawback with it was that its decorative roofs were low enough for me to bang my head on. This was a conspicuous hole in their disability planning provision as there was no apparent explanation for why they had completely failed to design it for disabled people in wheelchairs who came up to a height of five feet ten inches sitting down.

As Marie and I walked along, slowly, hand in hand, soaking up the view, Helen pushed Jonathan in his pushchair down the winding, gently sloping path towards the children’s play area. The trees had already lost their leaves and those that the groundsmen hadn’t collected formed drifts of red and gold against the less accessible trees in the park. The place had the cool, refreshing wintry, smell of damp, dead leaves and fungus, occasionally producing the distinctive whiff of a stink horn — one of those smells that whilst not unpleasant, you know when you have smelled it. It was wonderful. Along the banks of the mill stream, a number of mature limes formed an aquatic avenue solely for benefit of the ducks and water voles. Some of the older lime trees had been cut back about half way up, giving parts of the avenue the appearance of a row of giant, brown, craggy, fingerless forearms sticking out of the bank. They formed an impressive gateway to the children’s play area that we were now walking through. This was fenced off and declared ‘Dog Free’ so it was safe to let children run free, or run wild in Helen’s case.

Beyond this haven and through another spectacular arboreal entrance lay a huge lake supplied with water from the mill stream by way of an ornamental water wheel next to the ubiquitous craft shops selling all manner of candlesticks, vases, hand painted glassware, peculiar scents, coloured soaps with bits of plants in them, wooden toys and so on: things that you would buy for people as gifts when stretched for ideas at birthdays and Christmas but wouldn’t really want to buy for yourself.

The park was a godsend, an escape from the daily, repetitious grind of Gazelles. In the summer, Marie would bring Helen and Jonathan here on the bus. After work, I would join them for a picnic, taking them back home by car. Eating out meant no mess to clean up afterwards and exhausted, Helen and Jonathan usually went straight to bed. The car brought it all within our reach. Without it, getting there and back was four bus journeys at considerable expense. This park was situated in a more prosperous area of Manchester so the quality of the children’s play areas of the local parks didn’t come anywhere near this one. Slides with muddy puddles at the bottom for your child to sit in; layers of graffiti and black covering paint; broken swings; bent or missing gates; unspeakable things discarded in and around the fire–blackened, partially melted yellow plastic litter bins; child–safe, springy surfaces that had shrunk by six inches around the edge, revealing the gravel foundations; and, people taking their dogs for a walk. These were all good reasons to make the effort to use this park instead.