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

CHAPTER 5

Snaith asked me to sit opposite him, claiming that I was a soft speaker. I needed a reasonable signal level for the tape recorder so I didn’t have a problem with that. As I sat down, he carried on rehearsing his script, half mouthing the words to himself while I stole a quick glance at it. To my horror, it was laid out like a primitive script and worse than that, it had my answers already written in, in pencil. I was in no doubt now that recording this meeting covertly was perfectly justified. Should I ask him for a copy so that I could get my answers correct?

As Snaith prepared himself for this little charade, I looked around his poky office. Apart from the union rep, myself and the contemptible Snaith; there was: Roland Bosworth, the company’s systems manager, a slight, wrinkled figure in is late fifties; Simon Collingham, who was sitting in the corner as before; Col Burgess; and, Deryck Simpson. Jim Stutton was noticeably absent. As Snaith read, the middle management filter–feeders sat smugly with the knowledge that they held all of the cards, or, if the tip–off was correct, that I also had none. By far the smuggest were Simpson and Burgess, the former displaying his short orange hair and his see–through beard and next to him Col, exactly the same except in blonde.

I was just beginning to wonder if they had been on the same team building course when Snaith started off by repeating the vague charges. Then he asked me if I wanted to make any comment. James jumped in immediately, demanding to see the evidence and rather surprisingly, Snaith agreed to let us see all of it. After the end of the hearing. If we wrote to him. Promptly.

“We have found that you have been using company phones for a substantial number of private calls,” he started, “which are not, in any way, related to company matters. Over a period of three months, from 8th of September to 22nd of December, you made a number of calls that had no relation to work. Deryck, can you enumerate on some of them?” he said.

Deryck stared blankly at the table. I wondered what calls they would claim that they had logged between me being suspended and 22nd December. Snaith looked at Deryck and coughed quietly. Realising that he had all but missed his cue, Deryck straightened himself woodenly in his seat and arranged a few sheets of paper in his hands as though they had some meaning. I was astounded. Was this what they had been up to in that time? A poorly written play without any latitude for errors — Snaith’s friable script, grinding its coarsely hewn corners against the impenetrable, polished surface of the truth. An image sprang to mind of an amateur dramatics error where the plot demands a murder. The victim should have been shot but in the nervous panic and pressure of a live audience, the murderer couldn’t find the gun so, in an act of pure desperation, he used a knife. As a result, nobody heard the knife go off at a particular time, the forensic paraffin test failed to reveal any explosives residues on the murderer’s fingers, there was no bullet hole in the wall and so on. The whole plot falls apart very quickly. If anything emerged here that contradicted or diverged from Snaith’s detailed script, either he would have to respond to it and every subsequent detail or ignore it, regardless of appearance.

Deryck cleared his throat.

“Early in December,” he said, using a sort of Mr Plod the policeman voice, “I was in the routine process of checking departmental telephone usage on the nemesis computerised logging program and found that there were a lot of calls from Alan’s extension. I noticed some long and very expensive calls to a number in Stroud. There were also a lot of link–line calls to the Carrington and Hale Bank. The calls to Stroud, three very long calls totalling some hour and fifty minutes in total, concerned me the most as they amounted to almost £5.00,” he rambled. “I found the number was that of the editor of Universal PC magazine, Mr Harry Stoke.”

This astounded me as Harry had said nothing of his. I knew somebody had called him back in August because he told me that somebody who refused to identify himself other than that he was from ‘a company in the north–west’ had phoned. There had been nothing like that since. I needed to see the telephone listing for myself. I put Snaith straight about the calls to Stroud telling him that Col had asked me to contact Harry earlier on in the year about the program.

“Can I just ask please,” Col butted in. “What’s this program that I am supposed to be aware of?”

“Well, as you know,” I started. I wasn’t going to allow him to get away with denying any involvement. “The problem is that people go and put their pornographic–software diskettes into the computer overnight. You asked me to arrange with Harry to come up with a solution so that only authorised people could use the disk drive as normal.”

Snaith looked at me curiously. This couldn’t possibly be in his script.

“When was this?” Snaith asked.

“Three, four months ago.”

“I don’t remember that phone call,” Col said rather woodenly.

“Well, it did happen.”

Deryck cleared his throat and stole the lime light before too much of it shone on Col.

“I think we’re saying the phone call on the second of December was overheard because Jim Stutton asked me to track that call.”

“Jim Stutton was in the same office as me at the time so he couldn’t have done what you’ve just said Deryck,” I said. “Why are you lying? I’m sure that Mr Snaith and the union would like to know.”

“You still ...” Snaith interrupted.

“You didn’t make any calls?” Deryck asked.

“To Universal PC Magazine, no,” I answered.

“To Mr Harry Stoke?” Snaith questioned.

“Oh, I did to Mr Harry Stoke, yes, but not to Universal PC magazine as Deryck has just claimed.”

“So you say that you discussed this work with Col Burgess?”

“Yes. Fully,” I said. “He said, ‘go ahead with it’. It was an opportunity that was too good to miss.”

I was beginning to get the impression that in some respects, Snaith concealed his intellect very well — certainly a lot better than the holes in his script. I was starting to wonder whether or not he was in on it as this seemed to be turning into a voyage of discovery for him.

Stirred but not shaken, he went on repeating the point and attempted to get me to explain away the convolutions and contradictions in the company’s version of events. Eventually this line of attack died away and Snaith said he would provide us with their computer printout. I couldn’t wait to see it. Snaith then handed me a copy of the computer responsibilities document. I looked at it and realised that this was yet another version.

“This is not the one you showed me in the preliminary hearing,” I said. “You’ve changed the evidence again.”

“No, I’m asking you if that document there ...” he said. He paused for only half a second but it was enough. “There are only three, slightly amended documents,” he mumbled.

“So you admit that this evidence has been changed?” I interrupted.

“There are three documents,” he repeated, “one has been slightly ...”

“That is what the original meeting was about.” I interrupted. “We were shown what was, after some adaptation by all of us, intended to become the document to be handed to the computer users that attended the final version of the course. But I never attended the course. My training records will show that.”

Deryck looked nervously at the table in front of him at the mention of the training records. It was beginning to look as though Martin’s theory was correct.

“The original computer user’s responsibilities course proposal looked like a recording contract you would give to a band that had never seen one before,” I said. “It was definitely ultravires. It was nothing like this.”

“Roland Bosworth wrote that document and I don’t consider it to go beyond the law at all.”

Bosworth looked sheepishly down at his hands. Snaith clearly wanted me to be on trial here but the evidence seemed to be having the opposite effect. He turned over a page.

“Do you have your own computer?”

“An obsolete one,” I replied.

“You’ve got a ...” he said, stopping mid–sentence. “What’s that?”

“One that’s out–of–date.”

“It’s a Panther, or a ...” he suggested. My part in his little role–playing game was clearly to help him out.

“No, it’s a QL.” I said, blinding him with computer jargon.

“A Sinclair QL?” he suggested helpfully.

Was the frail and aged Mr Snaith actually something of a computer buff with an in–depth knowledge of the history of the personal computer in the early 1980s? I had the feeling that, as far as Snaith’s knowledge of this area of expertise was concerned, there was less to him than met the eye. I hadn’t told anybody on site that I’d got a Sinclair QL but it was written in my CV which was password protected and encrypted although several printed out copies had been stolen since my Chen Chin program was published nearly a year earlier. I wondered if the thief would be exposed. Snaith turned over the next page of his script.

“You said you had permission to do work on computers from Mr Merton?”

“Morton,” Deryck corrected.

“He was one of a number of people who gave me permission, yes.” I replied. Snaith had never asked for an exclusive list.

“Was this permission in relation to any specific project at work or anything else?”

“No, it was with regard to using work’s computers during lunch breaks or any of the rest of my own time for either my own use or company use.”

“Would it surprise you to hear that Mr Morton denies this?”

“I am surprised that he can even remember it,” I said.

“I have a letter from Mr Morton. We contacted him,” Snaith said proudly. I wondered if this was the only bit of investigation they had actually done. “It says this,” he continued. “‘To the best of my recollection, I did not give Mr Rush carte blanche to use the computer system for his own personal business, as Norman Linton confirmed. However, it is fair to say that he was allowed considerable freedom on the system as he was asked to develop a LIMS system he had written. As far as I am aware, some of this work he may have carried on at home.’ Right?” he said, looking up at me.

“I wrote the LIMS system in my own time,” I said.

“I’m not talking about work related stuff. This work was related to your outside activities,” he said.

“That isn’t what Mr Morton said.”

“Sorry?” Snaith said. Reading out some of the evidence was clearly an unfortunate mistake on his part.

“That is not what Mr Morton says in his letter,” I repeated slowly.

“He didn’t give you carte blanche to go and develop personal enterprises for personal ends,” he countered.

“And does it say that there?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “But I’m satisfied that that’s what he meant.”

It was as though he thought that he could say anything he liked because in the end, he knew that it would be my word against his and a load of managers. I was glad I was recording this. Nobody would ever believe me without the tape.

He asked me who else I had permission from so I told him about Deryck. The explosion from the knife discharging echoed around the room. Next, they started the first round of quick–fire questions, asking me if I had hidden files from the computer. It was hard not to laugh out aloud. I wondered who could have fed him such conspicuous lies.

After a bit more of this rather dubious line of questioning, Col asked me if I had deleted the ATTRIB.EXE command from one of the PCs. I didn’t even know that we had ever had one, let alone what it was. Then Snaith accused me of writing a simulation of the Cascade virus and after that, he started going on about copyright. The hearing seemed to have degenerated into a dirt flinging exercise. The next piece of dirt was about Chen Chin and Robot, two programs that I had written before committing either of them to a company computer, and then only with permission from Deryck, but Deryck was denying all of the way. Then they accused me of breaking into the mainframe in July but now claimed that there was only one attempt.

With Snaith in the driver’s seat, the whole hideous affair had taken on a momentum of its own, smashing and crushing its way through any fact unfortunate enough to stand in its way like a blind man driving a tank quickly through a crowded shopping centre. Next on the list was the accusation that I had spent four hundred hours of company time on the Manchester Jazz Sextet but this was encrypted under Deryck’s instructions so I knew that they were making that one up. Having failed to fluster me on that, they then claimed that I had spent fifteen hundred hours of company time working on projects of my own. Self–appointed judge, jury and executioner wasn’t good enough for Snaith, he was now presenting evidence to himself without letting us see or question any of it. Snaith and Col then accused me of writing a program designed to capture the passwords of other users, something that for me would have been totally redundant because I was one of the two people with the top level password for the only program that used them — I denied that one straight away. I was beginning to think that Snaith had received a Computer Misuse Act offence selection box from the company human resources department for Christmas.

“Do you deny that you have been working on your own computer projects in your own time without permission?” Col asked.

“Of course I do. Again. That’s the second time you’ve asked me that,” I pointed out. It appeared that they had all but eaten the first layer and Col had picked a chocolate coated question that had Snaith’s teeth marks in it but that had been returned to the tray because it had left a bitter taste in his mouth.

“The date–time stamps on the computer files prove otherwise,” he asserted.

“Date–time stamps are unreliable. They’re too easy for people to rig,” I said. “You should take them cum grano salis.”

“In your opinion,” Snaith interjected. “It’s only your opinion that they should be taken with a pinch of ...”

“I’m sorry,” Col interrupted. “We only speak English here.”

“But,” I started.

“Can we stick to English so that we can all understand what’s being said?” he reiterated.

I was taken aback by this. I was sure that Snaith had used the term ‘Carte blanche’ and I definitely remember ‘Ultravires’ being used and understood. For a few seconds, we all looked at him in silence, the verbal evidence of his ignorance reverberating uninterrupted in everybody’s minds.

A few minutes later and without apparent warning, the meeting came to an abrupt halt with “time for a break” and we all stood up. As I started to go out, I made a grab for the InComp computer report. I leant across, towards the pile in front of the now rather embarrassed Col Burgess and grabbed hold of it but Snaith was too quick for me, taking a firm grip of it as well — his knuckles turning white in the process. For a second or two, we both held onto it. I certainly wasn’t going to let go.

“Is it all right if he has a look at it?” Snaith asked Col.

Col looked at the cover and nodded back.

Snaith looked a me; “Right. You can have a look at it over the break but we want it back straight away. That’s the original.”

I picked up the report and as I walked passed him, he looked at me.

“The evidence against you is incredible,” he said contemptuously.

Nice of him to admit it at last. I couldn’t wait to see what I had picked up.

* * *

Back in James’ office, I had a look at my catch. It really was the original and had a thick white cover, a blue, comb binder and on the front was the name ‘InComp’. I opened it only to discover that instead of a detailed analysis with observations and conclusions, there was nothing but dozens of pages of what, to the untrained eye, looked like directory listings with various lines highlighted and some comments scribbled in the right margin. This was definitely not the report and on its own, it was useless.

“What is that?” James asked, looking over my shoulder.

“It looks like some sort of directory listing but it’s missing bits that all directory listing have. It’s useless on its own.”

“No wonder he let you have it. I’ve seen InComp on every computer I’ve ever seen on the site,” James said thoughtfully.

“I don’t know how they can call it an independent computer report.”

“How did the tape come out?” he asked.

I had forgotten about the Dictaphone. I pulled it out of my pocket and saw that it had come to the end of the side so I wound it back a little and played it back. Snaith’s unmistakable voice came over as clear as a bell.

“Brilliant,” I said. “We’ll get the rest on the other side.”

I turned over the tape and it was all set to go.

As Snaith played his little waiting game, we sat there, not knowing what to do. They wouldn’t show us any of the evidence although they had promised us enough of it. In fact, we didn’t even know if they had any real evidence. The listings could have been created on a word processor by anybody. They were not evidence. They could have made the whole thing up and just be sitting there with wads of blank paper with only the top sheet looking like evidence. At a distance. And upside down.

We sat there, the silence broken only occasionally by James drumming his fingers on the table. Then the phone went. It was time to go. I switched on the Dictaphone and put it back in my pocket.

* * *

We sat down and made ourselves comfortable.

“Can I have that back please?” Snaith said, pointing at the InComp listings I had placed on the table in front of me.

“No, this is evidence,” I replied indignantly, putting my hands on it possessively. “I did write to you asking for evidence.”

“I didn’t get the letter until yesterday,” he said. It didn’t seem to bother him that I knew he was lying. Col came quickly to the rescue, leaning across the table and with some force, taking back the file listing from my hands. He used so much force that he almost tore its cover off.

“I wrote to you twice,” I said.

“I only got one letter yesterday with a carbon copy of a letter that I haven’t seen.”

“What about the charges in writing?”

There was no reply.

“The point I wish to raise,” James said calmly, “is that normally, when I sit in a hearing, there are hard facts and evidence in abundance, but in this particular instance, there is nothing — no evidence at all.”

“We’ve presented you with hard facts,” Snaith said sternly.

“No. You’ve talked of assumptions.”

“If I ...”

“Assumptions,” James repeated, thumping the desk.

“If I may,” Snaith interrupted. “You do accept that somebody has abused the system to a level that is totally unacceptable?”

“If the claims you have made are real, somebody has abused time on the computers. SOMEBODY!”

Snaith looked worried for a second but once again, gallant cavalryman Burgess came to Snaith’s rescue and handed me three sheets of paper supposedly from the InComp report. It was a table of files that somebody had been tampering with. It was easy to tell from the files sizes and date–stamps that some of them had been copied and renamed. I wondered if that was what Deryck had been up to when I caught him on the computer. On the list, there was a small program that I had written around six months earlier called ‘Balls’. It consisted of a ball bouncing around a screen but in three dimensions, requiring red and green glasses to see it properly. Its copy had to have a different name but somebody was playing a joke on Snaith. Perhaps Col Burgess — seeing if Snaith would bother to look at the evidence.

“Has somebody copied ‘Balls’ and renamed it ‘Bollocks’?” I asked, there was no response. “Somebody’s definitely been tampering with this evidence. That’s why computer listings aren’t admissible. You can copy and rename any file you want to like somebody’s obviously done here,” I said.

Snaith looked a little uneasy at the fact that this piece of his precious evidence, the only pages he felt were of such strength and integrity that he could allow me to cast my eyes upon them, were so conspicuously corrupt.

“You really are scraping the bottom of the barrel aren’t you?” I continued. “Who provided you with this?”

“Could you explain what you mean by that?” Snaith asked.

“Well, just look at what you’ve put in front of me. It’s rigged.”

Snaith didn’t seem at all happy with that.

“There’s definitely evidence of computer fraud here,” I said. “I think we should take this to the police and see if they can prosecute the perpetrator.” I continued. I looked around the office and if demeanour could be construed as and indicator of guilt, I definitely spotted two strong suspects. I scanned further down the list.

“Screen manipulators? I’ve never written any of them for a start,” I said, turning over the last page.

“So, just ...” started Snaith.

“‘Work of a malicious nature’?” I exclaimed.

The heading was half way down the page but there was nothing but white paper below it on this copy. Snaith carried on regardless.

“To pursue the point that you say ...”

“Why,” I interrupted, “why is this document incomplete?”

“Because that’s all I feel you need to know.”

“What does it reveal? Why do you feel the need to conceal the rest of it?”

“Because that’s my decision,” he said.

“There isn’t any more is there?” I said. “Or it’s worse than this listing.”

All of a sudden, the meeting ended. I got the feeling I was getting too close to something.

* * *

Back in the convener’s office, I switched the Dictaphone off.

“What happens now?” I asked James.

“We wait for Snaith’s decision.”

“But we’ve all known that since the beginning of December.”

“He’s just got to make the evidence fit it. He shoots the arrow and then draws the target around wherever it hits,” James said. “He’s tried it on before.”

We had sat there for about fifteen minutes discussing James’ reminiscences of Snaith’s past ineptitude, when Snaith poked his head around the door.

“I’ve decided to think about this one over night so we’ll meet at two o’clock tomorrow,” he said.

“That’s good news,” James said when he had gone. “It means that he’s not sure about something. Or they’re trying to cover their arses. You’ve probably pointed out something fundamental that they haven’t written into the evidence. Something that they can’t hide so easily now.”

* * *

In the morning, I telephoned the main post office and was informed that everything was delivered directly to the site so Snaith would have received both letters the working day after they were posted.

In the afternoon, I arrived at the convener’s office and on cue, we went down to Snaith’s office to continue with the hearing and then, maybe he would have heard enough to make his decision, or perhaps just make known the decision that he made a month earlier. With the tape recorder running and the management none–the–wiser, we all sat down as we had done the day before.

“When I adjourned the investigation yesterday,” he started, “I wanted to establish a few facts. I asked Jim Stutton about half day holidays and he says that you didn’t have any at all.”

“I’m sure Jim would back me up that I’ve had afternoons off.”

“The signing–in records show that there were no half days holidays taken in the last year,” he said. Looking at him, I could tell that even he didn’t believe that one.

He then read out an extensive diatribe about how he had proved beyond reasonable doubt that I had done everything I had been accused of and more. He contradicted Col’s evidence by increasing the number of attacks on the mainframe to two which was still an attack short of reality. He went through everything as though I had admitted it all and had performed a full–blown, tearful confession scene as opposed to trashing it all and my explanations being accepted fully by Snaith. I was surprised that he hadn’t found some way of blaming me for the attack on Pearl Harbour. It was a good job that I was recording the whole thing because once again, although this time with a little more arrogance, his attitude seemed to be based upon the principle that he could say and do anything he liked because nobody would ever believe me. He summarily dismissed me with no notice. While I worked there, I had saved the company tens of thousands of pounds and I was now saving it more by being got rid of in this manner — no notice, no redundancy, no expenditure. I was surprised that he didn’t want to backdate it to the beginning of December. He told me that I had the right to an appeal and that I should notify him in writing within seven days.

When he had finished rambling on, he asked me if I was prepared to give him a list of passwords for encrypted files. I agreed — I had no choice. He was threatening me with the police and bearing in mind what we had both just witnessed, I didn’t know what they were prepared between them to fabricate in order to bolster up the case. He told me he would send the list through the post. I requested some evidence and after a little bit of an argument, he decided that he was going to send me all of my personal appraisals, training records and wage history — so much for the evidence that he had promised earlier. I planned that these could be the basis of an action for victimisation against Deryck. The hearing folded and we all left.

Back in James’ office, I partially rewound the tape and listened to it but this time, the tape produced a horrible squeal. I checked other parts of the tape and they had it on as well. I was at a complete loss as to what could have happened — they couldn’t possibly have known about the recording and organised countermeasures such as jamming the signal by some means.

I sat down and wrote out the request for the appeal. After making a photocopy of it, James and I served it on Snaith in the manner of a summons being served on somebody evading the payment of a long–outstanding, large debt. He didn’t like that. I did. I got the impression he wanted me to put it in the post so he could claim he never received it.

* * *

Back home, I checked the tape all of the way through and found that just the first two thirds of it had the squeal. After listening to it for a while, I became accustomed to the noise and began filtering it out in the same way that you don’t notice the ticking of a clock once you’ve heard it for long enough.

That night, everybody telephoned and I told them the bad news. When I told Harry, he said how sorry he was and asked me if I would like the use of a spare computer — an offer I couldn’t refuse. I took the opportunity of asking him if Snaith had contacted him in the last day or two but it turned out that he hadn’t. It appeared that Snaith viewed interacting with the truth as safe as swimming with jellyfish.

My thoughts turned to music. There was no way that I would be able to continue working as a professional musician. Transporting a double bass to a booking using public transport didn’t seem to be that practical, especially as it was over six feet long and therefore would attract a full fare — although it was over a hundred years old and perhaps qualified for a fare reduction on the grounds that it was well beyond pensionable age. I thought about it over the next day or so but there was simply no way around it, I had to let the band get on with life without me — something that would inevitably take a lot of getting used to. It looked as though I was now destined to have to sit back and watch all of my efforts go to waste. The saxophonist would probably be happy doing four bookings per year, all in local pubs, throwing away the jazz festivals and club bookings I had worked so hard to achieve. I would be losing out on about £400 worth of work that had already been arranged, let alone the work that would have drifted in on its own. I would have to start again from scratch some time in the future when the opportunity arose. I picked up the phone to tell Peter the bad news and as I keyed in the number, I thought of how Deryck’s little Christmas present appeared to form the basis of quite a comprehensive deal. His little chat with me the day before I was suspended fell into place. This was the way he wanted it to play. It was the way that he had designed it.

* * *

Over the next few days, I played around with the Dictaphone and found that I could reproduce the squealing noise if I had the volume turned up full and applied a small sideways force to the record button. This must have opened a contact inside the machine and allowed it to feedback electronically. I eventually deduced that when I checked to see if the recording had worked in James Markfield’s office on the day of the hearing and had turned up the volume to hear it, I had left it set there, not suspecting that doing so would have any consequences. When I checked a bit of the first day’s recordings, I just happened to get a portion that didn’t have feedback on it.