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

CHAPTER 17

Even though Marie and I tried our best to resist it, thoughts about framing some pictures for the hall, buying some new kitchen floor covering and even a car occasionally slipped into our minds. Inevitably, the company had managed to ruin a second Christmas. There was no honest, rational explanation for the way they had behaved.

Harry sent us a Christmas card he had received from an anti–virus software company. It showed a man and a woman at the office party. The man sat at a computer with the letters falling to the bottom of the screen in much the same way that they would with the real Cascade virus. He was saying ‘You’re kidding? I thought it was my new screen saver’.

* * *

Thursday 29th December came and all day we thought about what the tribunal were going to say to each other and then to us. The following day, Marie telephoned the tribunal and asked if they could tell us the result but no joy because they hadn’t been told themselves. The following evening, we went to bed early as we had done the year before and for pretty much the same reasons. 1994 had been and gone: I wondered what 1995 would bring. David Snaith had certainly won the 1994 Tod Bexley Memorial Award for Conspicuous Mendacity.

* * *

A few days later, Marie telephoned the tribunal again and this time they said they couldn’t tell us because to do so would mean that we would know it before the company and that wouldn’t be fair but it should be in the post by the end of the week. At least we knew that the decision, whatever it was, was in the safe hands of the tribunal’s office although I couldn’t imagine why the company should be allowed to know the result before us unless they had to vet it first.

* * *

A couple of days later, I was reading through the local newspaper when I noticed a picture of the Lord Mayor. I didn’t usually take much notice of these meretricious photo opportunities but I noticed that in this particular case, the figure with all of the jewellery was one of the lay members of the tribunal, the one who we thought had a union background. As lord mayor, he had to promote and support local businesses and probably had certain connections. Just in case things might crop up later on and taking into account Snaith’s peculiar memory, I decided to write down everything that I could remember while it was still fresh in my mind.

Over the next few days I wrote and wrote — everything that I could think of that had happened before I was suspended went down just in case it fell into place and made the whole thing make sense. I knew that some things would eventually turn out to be irrelevant but others, that seemed less important now could well make sense of the whole thing when the final pieces were put in place. One thing that struck me was that this could be just a small part of a very large jigsaw, most pieces of which had already been kicked onto the floor and swept under the carpet.

* * *

It was soon half way through January and we still hadn’t heard anything from the Industrial Tribunal. I wondered if either they had the slowest photocopier on the planet or they had ran out of stamps. Although it was in the back of my mind, the vetting procedure that our request for evidence seemed to have gone through, with its corrupt implications, was beginning to make more sense out of the tribunal office’s inordinate delay than any other theory but we couldn’t really do anything about that.

I carried on writing and then I remembered that Bexley had said if I knew of anything that somebody had done that was illegal, I should tell the appropriate authority or I would be committing an offence myself so I wrote a little letter to the HSE, telling them about the things I had discovered at the site before I was suspended. When I had decided the letter was worth sending, I tried to find their address but couldn’t so I telephoned them to get it. It turned out that the Industrial Tribunal and the HSE were virtually next door to each other.

* * *

The First day of February was Marie’s birthday. The weather was nice and it looked as though it was going to remain so all day. We didn’t have much in the way of money so her presents were of a humble nature. Still, we looked on the bright side, it was a nice day and they couldn’t take the weather away from us.

Later on in the morning, Harry rang up to say that he had received the result from the tribunal and it was bad news. It struck me as odd that all of the other correspondence from the tribunal had arrived at our address as well. He told us that the result was unanimous and read through the brief reasons that he had been sent. It didn’t sound very much like the case that we had sat in on and there were a few peculiarities in the reasons. In all, the chairman had made over a dozen statements that contradicted the evidence that the company had given and in addition to that, the document was incompetently produced with paragraphs numbered incorrectly and so on. We were shocked that such a poorly written document had taken about five weeks to produce and contained such a number of fundamental flaws.

As a start, I put together a list of all of the contradictions that had been talked about in the tribunal hearings. They fell into two categories: the first was where a witness contradicted another witness or piece of paper, like Col Burgess, David Snaith and Tod Bexley all saying that they remembered that I didn’t deny writing the CAPTURE program whereas their own minutes of the hearing stated clearly that I had done. The second was where a witnesses or evidence contradicted themselves like Deryck Simpson with the details about telephoning Harry. By the time I had finished making the list, there were over thirty items that would require resolution by the chairman if he was being honest in coming to his decision.

Harry sent me the copy of the Summary Reasons. It was written so that anybody who hadn’t been there and hadn’t looked at any of the evidence would be convinced that it was genuine. It was a good job that I had kept the evidence. I worked through it, highlighting contradictions and any other things that pointed to the piece being written by somebody other than the chairman. After half an hour, I had finished and there weren’t many paragraphs that were free of the highlighter. In the first paragraph I was referred to as ‘her’ and later on, it stated that I was working on a computer program that could only have been the one that Harry was working on that Col Burgess had denied. It had a similar quality of incompetence about it to Bexley’s unwritten proof of evidence, the InComp report and the way evidence had been supplied by the company. There were so many flaws and contradictions that the only logical step to take was to ask the chairman to supply us with a copy of the ‘Reasons in Full’ as he had called it. We followed the instructions that were supplied with the Summary Reasons, requesting it from the assistant secretary at the tribunal office.

Having posted my letter in the city centre, I had a look in the job centre. One was a job that I had applied for the previous year, its identical, peculiar wording making it instantly recognisable as their lazy human waste department hadn’t bothered changing it. Last time, I didn’t even receive a reply and this time, they weren’t even giving away their address. I had nothing to lose so I decided to give it a go.

* * *

Two days later Harry phoned, asking if I would like to learn another computer programming language. He and Nathan used a fourth generation language called Clarion that required very little in the way of programming abilities as it did all of that itself. All that the programmer had to do was define the way the program looked, how the information was stored and how the parts related to each other. Computer programming had definitely entered the post–skills era. If I learned how to use it, they would be able to accept work in the Northwest as well as the rest of the country. With £200 for eight hours work in a day, how could I refuse? We arranged a time for Harry and his wife Carole to come up and see Marie and the children, planning it to coincide with the school holidays so that Helen was available.

* * *

On Sunday afternoon, I picked up Harry and Carole from the railway station and drove them to their lodgings. It was good to see them again, especially so seeing Harry without having to go through the exhausting process that preceded each of the tribunal hearing days. I was determined that this was going to be a proper holiday for a change.

Converted from the first floor of an old barn, the guest house was situated in a little village on our side of Manchester, not too far away from us so, as I had arranged to borrow the car for the week, commuting wasn’t going to be much of a problem. Situated just off the main road through the village, behind some tea rooms which, a decade earlier were just ramshackle poultry sheds, the farm itself was still working. The woman that showed us up the wooden steps to the landing on the outside of the building, through the solid wooden door and around the snug, freshly decorated room that was worthy of any decent hotel I had ever stayed in, warned Harry and Carole that they ran a serious risk of being woken up every morning at half past five when the cows came in for milking. It looked so nice and peaceful that I was wondering if Marie and I could stay there for a short break some time.

* * *

Monday had been spent as a holiday, driving around Buxton, Bakewell, Baslow, Stoney Middleton and so on, sharing all of our favourite places. So, on Tuesday, we got down to some serious work. With the others already delivered to their respective locations by the Alan Rush taxi service as it had become, Harry started off by going through the main sections of the program. It turned out to be a lot easier than I thought, simply defining how the data was stored and then effectively dragging the controls onto the screen to process it: input; edit; report and that was it. With this basic knowledge, it took only ten minutes to turn out a basic database that was the computer equivalent of a Rolodex.
That evening, I installed a program Harry had given me that would encrypt a computer file so that we could pass information securely to each other over the telephone network: with what had been happening, even the telephone network itself couldn’t be trusted any longer. I tried out the program and it worked well — it looked as though we were going to have some fun with this one.

* * *

First thing on Wednesday morning, as I drove Harry and Carole to the house, the conversation in the car metamorphosed from urinating, gooseberry eyed felines — reflecting the events of the first night in the barn — through ‘what a wonderful place the countryside is’, ‘the pitfalls of on–the–farm methane production’ and somehow ended with which type of single–celled organism best represented the level of evolutionary development and for that matter, the intellectual capabilities of the K. K. Gazelles management.

“Klepto Sporadium,” Harry suggested.

“No,” I said. “That’s the team that looks after the suggestion scheme.”

“How about Candida Albicans.”

“No way,” I said, negotiating one of those small islands that buses and articulated lorries normally just drive over.

“It sums up their line of thinking perfectly,” he said.

“No, I disagree,” I said, putting my foot down. “There’s only one organism that embodies all of them perfectly.”

“Go on,” Harry said.

“Escherichia Coli.”

“E. Coli?”

“Yes. It speaks with the same voice. They probably all went on the same management courses.”

“I see what you mean.”

We rounded the corner into our street and as I drove up to our normal parking space, I noticed a van at the end of the line of cars. It was a dark metallic silver colour with small, smoked glass, circular windows on both sides, near the rear.

“Hey, Harry,” I said quietly as I locked the car doors.

“Mm?”

“You know in films, they’ve always got a van posted outside the place they’re observing.”

“Like a laundry van you mean?”

“Yes.”

“And there’s a man inside wearing a pair of headphones, listening in on the conversations inside the house?”

“That sort of thing, yes. What do you reckon to that one?” I asked, pointing to the anomalous van.

“Yes,” he said quietly as we walked past on the way to the house.

“There’s probably another man inside pointing a camera at us through that round window as well,” I said glancing at it through the corner of my eye.

“Hey,” he hissed.

“What?”

“It is a laundry van.”

I looked around and sure enough, it was.

“What are you two talking about?” Carole asked.

“Oh nothing,” Harry said as we got to our door.

Marie opened it as we arrived and Harry and I gave the van an intense look before we went into the house. I wondered if inside, somebody thought that they had been rumbled. Marie closed the door.

“You’ll never guess what we’ve just seen,” Harry said quietly to Marie as we walked in.

The others went into Manchester on the bus leaving Harry and I to play around with the LIMS program we had already designed. Just like the Rolodex program that I had written on Tuesday, the database editing and report functions just fell into place and it was starting to look as though it was almost completed when there was a flash of lightening. I saved the files and off the computer went, just in case. That afternoon, Harry was meeting a friend of his so I ended up in the house on my own with nothing to so but read the Clarion manual and wait for the others to get back — not quite what I intended.

* * *

On the last day of the holiday, we still had a lot to do. We needed a book that would provide us with enough long passwords to use with the encryption program until we could meet again. Having looked through most of Marie’s extensive collection of novels, we came across Maeve Binchy’s Circle of Friends which we both had, was the same edition and was well over the required 365 pages long. The rules were simple: we could never mention the book anywhere; we would use the whole of the 14th line from the page of that day of the year; if there were less than 14 lines, we would use the last; if the line was less than half a line then we would go up a line until we found a suitable line; and, the characters would be typed in using each letter or number as they appeared but without punctuation and spaces. That was all there was to it.

On the way to the railway station, we were discussing Bexley’s unwritten statement when it occurred to me that we could do a rough check on the statement using Harry’s grammar checker. If it was written by more than one person, not only could it not be admissible as evidence but I felt that it would have been a criminal matter — something along the lines of ‘conspiring to pervert the course of justice’ or whatever the legal jargon was. I volunteered to type it up when I got back and send it to Harry, testing out our new encryption toy in the process.

Back home, I started to type up Bexley’s statement, taking the opportunity to familiarise myself with his vocabulary and sentence structure. As I worked, I noticed that there were some frequent occurrences of words that he would have never used, seeming to be some sort of solicitor speak. One of these words, ‘merit’, stood out from the others as one that the solicitor had used over and over again during the tribunal but I had no recollection that Bexley had ever used it. With this in mind, I loaded up the transcripts and did a search with the word processor. He had never used the word.

Once Harry had arrived back in Stroud, I sent him the finished proof of evidence. He said he would call back the following morning so, ten minutes later, the telephone rang.

“This is very interesting,” he said. “I’ve got through to paragraph 11 but it’s already revealed that paragraph 4 was written by another person.”

“How has it worked that out?”

“It does a breakdown for a number of things for each paragraph, or even a sentence if you want it to.”

“What does it look for?”

“There are loads of things: sentence length, punctuation, even the age required to understand the document. Effectively the IQ of the writer.”

“What does it say about paragraph 4?”

“It seems that Bexley has been writing quite consistently but when he came to paragraph 4, his IQ shot up significantly. After paragraph 4 it came back down to what it was before.”

“Did other parameters do the same thing?”

“Oh, yes. Paragraph 4 is definitely written by somebody else. It could turn out that paragraph four is the only bit that was written by Bexley. Hang on,” he said. “The second half of paragraph 13 is different as well.”

“Is it the same as paragraph 4?”

“I think so.”

“The whole thing is fiction isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said. “I wonder how much more there is.”

“I think that Bexley just had a few notes when he died so they had to cobble something together quickly.”

“It looks like it.”

“Something that made sense and would hold together legally,” I said. “I reckon that’s where they got the National Security idea from.”

“Probably.”