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

PART 2

Si nous ne trouvons pas des choses agreables,
nous trouverons du moins des choses nouvelles.

(If we do not find anything pleasant,
at least we shall find something new.)

Voltaire 1694 – 1778

---

CHAPTER 4

Without either of them saying another word, Deryck parked his enormous throbbing red company car in somebody’s disabled parking space in the old, red–bricked personnel block’s car park. Then, with Deryck leading, we made our way through the rat’s maze of cheaply refitted 1930’s listed building corridors with low voltage, tungsten–halogen lighting, grey cork suspended ceiling and grey and pastel shades wallpaper, eventually arriving at David Snaith’s office.

Inside, seated behind the desk was a grey, almost silver haired figure with a yellow–stained moustache and a hearing aid. Deryck introduced this frail figure to me as Mr Snaith. I held out my hand to shake hands with him but he just looked back down at his papers and shuffling in his seat. Without talking, this ignorant little man, with a forehead like a pile of newspapers that had been left out in the rain and eyes like piss–holes in the snow, gestured to me to sit down. There were two seats empty so I sat on the one that was furthest from him. Something wasn’t quite right here: I didn’t like his attitude and if his body language was saying one thing and his mouth another, I wanted to be the first to know about it.

As I sat there, waiting for him to start, I had a look around. Compared to everybody else’s suits and ties, my bright yellow waterproofs and knobbly black plant boots stood out like a pork pie at a bar mitzvah. The office itself was on the corner of the building with windows on two sides and as a result, it was continually invaded by the rumble of heavy lorries from the busy motorway nearby. In the corner, by his desk sat Simon Collingham, the man who interviewed me for the job years earlier. I had been under the impression at the time that he was the personnel manager. He was certainly better with people that this hideous example of inhumanity. Snaith cleared his throat meaningfully and Simon sprang into action.

“The purpose of this meeting,” Snaith said, reading from his notes, “is to make you aware that there have been a number of allegations made against you about unauthorised telephone usage and the use of company computers in an unauthorised way in company time. Have you any comments on this?”

I was completely taken aback by this, although I was relieved that the family had not been involved in some awful accident.

“I haven’t the faintest idea what you are talking about,” I said.

“I think you have,” he said with a disquietingly vindictive tone in his voice. I got the feeling that if this had been a few hundred years earlier, he would have been torturing a confession out of me and enjoying it. “Have you got permission to use company computers?” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied although I got the distinct impression that he was not the slightest bit interested in my answer.

“Who gave you permission?”

“I got permission from Roger Morton.”

Snaith looked back at his piece of paper as though it was some sort of script and that I had got one of my lines wrong. Roger was the quality assurance manager before Deryck and they had both given me permission. He no longer worked there so he couldn’t get into trouble with the company if this was as bent as it now seemed.

“Have you written computer programs for your own personal use in company time?” he asked, looking up at me.

“Certainly not,” I said indignantly.

“Have you written programs for other people.”

“Yes, but only in my own time.”

“Did you attend a company run course on computer users’ responsibilities in December 1992?”

“No. I went to the advisory meeting but I’ve never been on the course itself,” I said.

He picked up a sheet of paper and handed it to me. It looked similar to the one that we had pulled apart at the meeting because it was written so badly but there had definitely been some changes made to it since then — the most obvious one being the introduction of a section at the bottom for attendees to sign.

“Have you seen this document before?”

“No I haven’t,” I said.

“This is a copy of the document that was given to every employee that went on the course,” he said confidently.

“It could well have been,” I said. “But as you already know, I didn’t go on the course.”

“You were issued with a copy of this document,” he said.

“No,” I said. “This one’s different from the one we were asked to comment on. Anyway, Col Burgess told me that he would put me on the course but never got around to it. My training records will show that I’ve never been on the course.”

He sighed. It didn’t seem to be going quite the way he had planned. He leaned across and snatched back the document, almost tearing it from my grip and turned over the page of his script.

“I am going to suspend you on full pay while we carry out a detailed investigation into the allegations that have been made against you,” he said.

I couldn’t believe he was saying this although saying it was what he was doing — he wasn’t reading it. The script was dead.

“You will leave the site and you will not return until we write to you telling you of the date of the disciplinary hearing,” he continued. “You will be able to explain your side of the story then. Do you have any of the company’s property at your home such as computers, discs, manuals et cetera?”

“No,” I said.

“If you tell us what personal belongings you have on the site, we’ll go and collect them. What do you have?”

“My briefcase, coat, shoes. I can’t think of anything else at the moment.”

“Give Simon the details. You wait up here in the foyer.”

We all stood up and filed out of the room. All of the way through this little charade, I had the feeling that there was something or somebody missing from the meeting. Then it dawned on me.

“By the way,” I said as we walked the few yards down the corridor, “Who is my union representative?”

“I will find out for you,” Snaith said as we went into the foyer. It seemed odd that somebody of his position and implied experience really didn’t know. I wondered if he was new to the job and hadn’t got around to finding out who everybody was yet.

With the list in their sweaty little management hands, I sat with Simon while the rest of them went to my office to recover my belongings or plant incriminating evidence or whatever the agenda dictated at that point. In a state of shock, I chatted with him about anything I could think of. I talked about an internal job I had applied for and never even got an interview, how I had complained over the telephone to Adrian Curry in the personnel department about the way Deryck was victimising me and even Simon agreed that I should have had an interview.

While all of this had been going on, the time had crept around to lunch time and people had started coming out of their offices to go to the old canteen just across the road. I saw plenty of people and in an attempt to hide my utter incredulity, I made a point of saying hello to anybody I knew — a sort of last minute grasp at reality. I suppose that some people at least could still be polite to me.

After a while, the middle management of the damned returned with my briefcase, coat, shoes and so on. Deryck came back clutching my coat.

“Is my torch in the coat pocket?” I asked as I looked through what they had brought.

He quickly located the pocket that provided the greater part of the coat’s weight and pulled out my bright yellow safety torch. I had been so impressed with the quality of the SA812 torches that I had bought a new one through the company via Jim about a year earlier to use at jazz band bookings. To prevent it from being confused with other torches on the site, it had the name of the band, ‘Manchester Jazz Sextet’ written down the side in black marker pen.

“I think this is the company’s torch,” he said smugly, like a bully stealing sweets in the school playground. Everybody in our office block knew that it belonged to me and that included Deryck.

I looked at him, wondering what he was playing at. “It’s mine,” I said. “I bought it ages ago and you know it!”

“No, I think I’ll have it,” he said.

I managed just to grab hold of it with my finger tips but he pulled it away again.

“The torch belongs to me so let me have it back, Deryck,” I said clearly and loudly.

Some of the passers–by glanced over to see what was going on. The other managers were getting noticeably twitchy, talking to each other quietly while they looked through the corners of their eyes. They didn’t seem to like other people’s attention as Deryck enacted his middle–management power–struggle wet–dream fantasy.

“It is his, Deryck,” Jim eventually butted in with his deep authoritative voice, breaking the spell. “I can vouch for that.”

Like a child that had just been told to hand it back by the dinnertime supervisor, he grudgingly brought it back within my reach. I was certain that if I hadn’t taken it from him there and then, he would have walked off with it.

Reality was crumbling around me. I was being taken from the site under a cloud of false accusations and, to cap it all, Deryck had tried to steal my torch in front of everybody else. Was this a little something to remember him by? Some crazed power freak making a fool of himself in an act of attempted robbery? Deryck had definitely proved himself to be a loose cannon and the other managers seemed desperate to conceal what was going on.

I went into Simon Collingham’s office and changed back into my normal clothes. I was then escorted down to my car by a rather embarrassed and apologetic security man who knew me by sight, although he wasn’t the one with the speed gun. I gave him my site pass and he followed me off the site in his Land Rover waving to me as I got onto the main road.

As I drove the few miles home, my thoughts wandered to those people who have been given the sack but didn’t dare tell their wife. They carried on going out in the morning and coming back at the usual time but didn’t say anything until cheques started bouncing and they had to come clean. I wasn’t like that, I hoped: the relationship I had with my Marie was stronger than that. We had been together for years and we didn’t have any secrets from each other; it had always been like that and that was one of our strengths. I was going home. Having previously wondered about how people even dare contemplate doing that sort of thing, I now understood why they did it and now had some respect for them. Even so, it still took some nerve going home five hours early and telling Marie what had happened. We also faced the questions from Helen about why daddy was at home instead of at work.

* * *

It had started to rain. The thick clouds blotted out the low winter sun and darkened the front room, making it seem almost like night. In this depressing light, a light that even the Christmas tree lights couldn’t brighten up, I sat with Marie on the sofa in the quiet. Helen was at nursery and Jonathan was asleep in the dining room. Marie had made a cup of coffee and we sat in each other’s arms, watching the second hand of the clock on top of the television time out minute after minute. It all seemed so far removed from the apparent normality of just a few hours earlier. Then, I had a normal job, one that was satisfying and respected but now, I was being treated like some sort of common criminal — guilty until proven innocent — removed from the site so that I couldn’t uncover for myself anything that had happened, anything that might point to the real guilty person, if anything had actually happened. I still had my Marie and we still had each other. This wasn’t going to come between us.

Thinking about it, there seemed to be a vague element of co–ordination to the whole affair and Snaith seemed to be the only one who fitted at the centre of it all. He had defined the charges, if ‘defined’ was the right word, as they seemed deliberately indeterminate and potentially flexible to me. If I was going to defend myself, I needed something that I could use as evidence. The only thing I could think of was the TREE listing on continuous paper in the first SRA computer disk box. The hard drives in the computers were always having files deleted and new ones written to them by many people so the company would never be able to use anything on them as evidence. The SRA discs were made in one go with no deletions so, anything that was on them that was out of place could only be as a result of tampering on their part.

I telephoned Eric at work and asked him if he could send me a copy of the listing. He said that he would see what he could do about that. He also told me that a shift supervisor had caught Col Burgess tampering with the LIMS computer the previous night. It seemed a bit odd that I had caught Deryck on there just a few hours before that. That would make three of them in on a conspiracy — Deryck, Col and Snaith — but nobody ever believed in conspiracies, not even me. This was more like gratuitous incompetence.

A while later the phone rang.

“Is that Alan?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“It’s Deryck here. Eric’s told me that you’d asked for my SRA discs.”

“Has he?”

“Well I’m afraid that we’re not going to allow you to have any discs at all,” he said.

I wondered just what Eric had told him.

“Are you in on this?” I asked.

“I, er,” he stumbled. “Your union rep’s James Markfield. Er ... goodbye,” he said, and put the phone down.

Having phoned James, discovered that he didn’t know what was going on because he had been kept in the dark as well and that these things could take months to sort out, my mind turned to Harry. He was still working on the company’s computer network pornography problem and worse, he was doing it for free. I really didn’t see why the company should be allowed to gain from my contacts, especially if it was breaching my contract as well.

* * *

On Saturday, the four of us were going around the supermarket in the city centre when we came across Dawn. She seemed a bit uneasy and I wondered if they had all been threatened and told not to talk to me. One thing that she did tell me was that on the day that I was suspended, when I was sitting in the foyer with Simon Collingham saying hello to everybody I knew, Michelle, a mutual friend of ours said hello to Simon who failed completely to respond. A few days later, she asked him why he had acted strangely and he told her that I was ‘leaving’ the company. Not just going off–site for a while but ‘leaving’ the company.

That changed things, we might not know when the company was going to have a disciplinary hearing but we already knew the result.

* * *

On Christmas Eve, the letter that we had been waiting for every morning for the last three weeks dropped through the letter box. The first thing I noticed was that it had the wrong address on it, hand corrected by the postman who knew us. What more could be expected from a company that had computerised all of its personnel data? Maybe Col had installed it and it had succumbed to a virus from a pornographic computer program from the IT department. If Dawn’s tip–off was correct, my dismissal had been set at 5th January 1994 at 2 pm. Curiously, the letter said that I would have two union reps with me and then it went on about how this complied with the company disciplinary procedure. The company proclaims compliance too much, methinks. I wrote back immediately, asking for a copy of the evidence and the charges in writing. Without the latter, the case could become dynamic, changing its identity as each hole in their evidence manifested itself. I made two carbon copies and sent him the top copy. Posting it on Christmas Eve meant that even with the Christmas rush, it would get there on the next working day. After all, his had.

* * *

One of the things that made life tolerable was Manchester’s proximity to Derbyshire’s beautiful countryside — an escape from a city trying to pass itself off as clean but failing wherever you looked. However, the car had become a luxury that we would soon have to relinquish. Buxton was around twenty miles away from the centre of Manchester and we would quite often spend a Sunday afternoon in the car, escaping southwards on the A6, turning right at Bolt Edge and then following the old railway line down to the Roman town of Buxton or Aquae Arnemetiae as it was called when the K. K. Gazelle plant was being built. There were two, well maintained, dog–free parks and opposite the Roman crescent, coming out of the hillside was a natural spring, giving a reliable flow of good tasting although peculiarly warm water. On one desperate occasion, I had even used it to top up the water in the radiator.

Further south, within a few miles of the limestone town of Bakewell, were Haddon Hall and Chatsworth. To the north of these was the little village of Eyam where in the seventeenth century, rats were as popular as Deryck in a pay round. Close to Eyam were Castleton and the Blue John mine with that eerie–looking blue, transparent ceiling not that far into the hillside. We spent the last few days before the road tax ran out driving around, soaking up the views of the countryside, continually aware of the unbearable reality of not having enough money to run the car because I wasn’t going to have a job although I tried my best not to let it spoil the last days of that week.

* * *

Marie and I watched the letter box every morning, wanting but not wanting the letter to arrive. By New Year’s Eve, we still hadn’t received anything from the company so I wrote Snaith a reminder, enclosing the bottom copy of the letter I had posted on Christmas Eve. As we had decided that we couldn’t really afford to run the car into the next year, I had just that day to post it at the main sorting office knowing that like the last one, it would get to the company the next working day. That would still allow them almost a week to send the evidence off to me. Perhaps they had already sent it — but they would have to be honest to embark on such a potentially risky course of action.

With the letter safely on its short journey, I drove the car around to my father’s house where it could be parked on private land thus avoiding road tax. Late in the afternoon, I caught the bus back to the city centre. It was already dark and as we drove past the K. K. Gazelles chemical plants, I wondered if I would ever see the site from the inside again. As the silver columns, poking through the escaping steam, lit from below by the yellow sodium lights and brilliant, blue–white mercury vapour lamps started to disappear into the inky distance of the night, it dawned on me that this bus was the first one I had caught for nearly a year. I was going to miss the car.

In the centre, I walked up to the bus shelter and waited on my own in the freezing cold. It was about half past five and everything was beginning to die down in the ghostly, deserted silence of the new year’s eve city–centre. My fingers were starting to go numb. Eventually, somebody else came along — a young lad — and we waited together in silence as so many people do.

After a while, I broke the ice and we got talking about how hopeless the bus service had become since deregulation and how buses never seemed to be there when you needed one. After about fifteen minutes, we decided that the wait was futile so we walked down to the taxi rank and asked one of the drivers how much it would cost. I must admit that I wasn’t impressed by his inflated suggestion as to the value of his service but we had no real option other than walking and I didn’t really fancy the idea of a four mile walk home, especially in this cold. As we got into the taxi, the bus we had been waiting for shot past as though it was being chased by something.

“Follow that bus!” we shouted as we scrambled into the cab.

Half a mile later, we overtook it and then carried on to the next stop. With perfect timing, the bus appeared around the corner when we had just finished paying the driver. We signalled for the bus to stop but even though the driver had definitely seen us and had ample opportunity to stop, it just carried on. I couldn’t believe it. This was the last run of the year and I suspect the driver just wanted to get the job finished. It was clearly an unjustifiable inconvenience to him that we did as well. Having split another taxi fare, I eventually got home and we put Helen and Jonathan to bed. We didn’t bother staying up to celebrate the new year, there didn’t seem to be much point.

* * *

When the shops opened again a few days later, I took the kids over for what I had resigned myself to being the first of many such foraging trips on foot to our local supermarket. Just a short, three quarter mile walk away, it was the one that since we bought the car, we had instead driven a round trip of nearly six miles to avoid. Like the other supermarket, we were blasted with the smell of freshly baked bread as we walked in but after that, the reason we had stopped using it manifested itself cruelly. We didn’t know who it was, where they were, or whether they possessed the uncanny ability to read our minds but no matter which way we turned, how long we paused or even if we doubled back on our route, we were always trapped in a suffocating, invisible tunnel of bio–hazard–rated body odour. Without a single exception, every attempt to produce an avoidance strategy was anticipated perfectly. It seemed to be our destiny to inhale the olfactory cacophony that was the result of somebody’s gross negligence towards their personal hygiene. So perfect were the results that I began to wonder if there were more than one of them and that maybe they worked in a team — possibly co–ordinating events using two–way radios. We never saw who it was but before we had the car, it had happened as regularly as the ticking of a clock. Once again, shopping had become a chore of the highest order, as had getting home.

Although I wouldn’t have liked to have thought of myself as being particularly unfit, it still came as something of a shock to the system to have to carry all of the shopping back by hand. Without realising it, over the last few years and despite working in a band, I had not so much become a couch potato as a driver’s seat potato. There are no doubt millions of drivers out there, even now, who are under the misapprehension that they are fit because they can push a full shopping trolley to the car once a week without getting out of breath. Fortunately for me, Jonathan was still in his pushchair and I was able to fill the tray underneath and hang the remaining bags on its handles, letting it take the strain, something like a four wheeled Zimmer Frame. I had always wondered why the back wheels of pushchairs seemed significantly more worn than those at the front — I now had my answer.

* * *

On the morning of the hearing, or with the inside knowledge we had gleaned from Dawn, the morning of the sacking, we tortured ourselves for the last time by watching our letter box for the evidence. The postman walked by without the slightest suggestion even of any junk mail. This was beginning to look really odd. We had written to the company twice, with good notice and there was still no response. Although I was suspicious from the start, I was beginning to think that I should take some precautionary measures against anything that might happen — retaining a verbatim record of events, just in case. Images of Roger Cook wired for sound and a wearing a radio transmitter with a little man operating a tape recorder in an unmarked van parked outside the factory sprang to mind but I didn’t have the resources of a television production company and an investigative journalist — I was on my own. It all seemed very lonely. However, I did have a nifty little Dictaphone that I had bought a number of years earlier. It even recorded in stereo. I tried it out, putting it in the top pocket of my coat to see if it would record normal conversation. It turned out to be surprisingly clear.

At about half past twelve, I said good–bye to Marie and the kids and caught the bus into the city. There, I took the liberty of going into the library and looking up some details in the law books. After that, I caught the bus to the site and made my way to James Markfield’s office.

James turned out to be a warm, friendly Norfolk man in his fifties with many years of experience. Instead of the dull pinstripes or grey suites that all of the managers wore, he was a tweed man. I felt as though I was in good hands. It turned out that he had sorted out Snaith on many occasions so I couldn’t imagine any middle management bullshit going past him without being detected. It seemed odd that with all of the experience that James had had with Snaith over such a long period of time, Snaith didn’t know who he was when I had the misfortune to encounter Snaith for the first time a month earlier.

Then, looking through a copy of the company’s disciplinary procedures, I found out that things started to fall into place. The only time that the company was permitted to have a meeting of the sort that I was coerced into at the beginning of December was if ‘... the available evidence appears to require speedy action ...’ otherwise a union rep must be present at that preliminary hearing. The problem was that there was no evidence — Snaith had even said so himself — only accusations.

“I’ve never come across a case where they’ve refused to supply any evidence at all,” James said.

“They’ve not given you any either?”

“Not one shred of it,” he said with a glint of disbelief in his eyes.

“I’ve written to the company twice but haven’t received anything. They’ve had two weeks’ notice.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” James replied, sitting back in his chair.

“Have they given us any minutes of the meeting on 8th December?” I asked.

“Yes. Have a look,” he said.

He handed me a sheet of paper headed ‘Notes on a meeting held in the personnel department on Wednesday 8 December 1993’. I read through it and saw that whilst the order of events was similar, the actual details were distorted to the point of being untrue in some cases, particularly the answer that I gave about the computer users’ responsibilities advisory meeting in December 1992 which had been changed around completely.

“I wasn’t imagining it,” I said, “there wasn’t any evidence at the preliminary hearing. They’ve also breached their own procedures about a union rep being present. Look.” I said, showing James the sections in the disciplinary procedures and the minutes. “How is he going to try to cover this one up? This Snaith character should get disciplined himself for this.”

He smiled at the suggestion. “I’ve heard through the union grapevine that there have been a number of cases like this one throughout the company at different sites,” he said. “We’d like to put a stop to it.”

“I’ve got a tape recorder with me.”

“Can it record without being seen?” James asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve tried it out at home.”

I switched it on and put it in my top pocket for a few moments while we talked normally. It replayed it perfectly.

“I don’t think we’ll have any problems there. I’ve just got to sit still.”

James’ face filled with a thoughtful smile and then the phone rang. It was David Snaith. He was ready for us to go down to his office. He was ten minutes late.

“That Snaith’s a right wanker, you know?” James said.