Altered Life

by Keith Dixon

CHAPTER NINE

  AFTER STARING AT the door for probably only ten seconds, though it felt like ten minutes, I went to my car and drove away without looking back. I drove without knowing where I was going, and caring even less. I drove while in deep conversation – with myself. That’s just great, I told myself. She comes back into my life and stirs me up, and she can’t even bring herself to talk to me. Shows what an impact our marriage had on her. She might as well have kicked me in the stomach and punched me in the teeth for good measure. Perhaps I should just leave her to it and let her sort her life out, if she’s so clever ... I carried on in this vein for a good while, letting righteous anger have a good time with me and with my pride that was more than wounded, it was on its last legs and about to collapse, fatally hurt.

  Thirty minutes later I’d calmed down and began putting some perspective on it. I could hardly blame her for not wanting to talk to me. I suspected she didn’t know what I was doing for a living now. Unless Laura Marshall had told her, she wouldn’t know that I’d been hired by Rory. I supposed she’d seen me in the church at his funeral, but she wouldn’t know why I was there. As far as she was concerned, I was a bad memory—and judging by our previous history, one that she’d rather forget.

  As a way of focusing, I began to consider what I knew of this case—which didn’t take me very far. I knew that Rory Brand was expanding his company into areas in which it was inexperienced and had finagled a great deal of money to do so. I was finding out that his management style left a lot to be desired, and that my ex-wife was his ex-wife, in a manner of speaking, but she didn’t want to talk to me, which hurt. All these facts might mean something eventually. But at the moment they were disconnected, and if they had a meaning it was well-hidden.

  I pulled into a lay-by and rang Laura Marshall. I didn’t tell her what had happened with Tara. Instead I asked for details of the people who’d left Brands most recently. I needed to get on with the investigation.

  Before giving me any names, she said, ‘What exactly are you going to do with these people?’

  ‘Ask some innocent questions.’

  ‘Am I going to get lots of complaining phone calls?’

  ‘Depends on the answers I get, doesn’t it?’

  Somewhat guardedly, she dictated some names and numbers that I wrote down in my note book.

  As I arrived back at my office, two men were squeezing a black three-seater sofa out through the front door, straining and swearing as they tried not to rip its polythene cover. One man was Thomas, the owner, known to everyone as Tommo, a worried, gaunt man whose suits always looked two sizes too big. The other was his shiftless son who never looked you in the eye and gave the impression of laughing at you behind your back. I gave them a hand lifting the sofa into an old Ford Transit. Then a third man who’d stood and watched us climbed into the van and drove it away.

  It was a simple task accomplished quickly. No complex reasoning required. And it felt good doing something physical for a change. I needed to get to a gym or start running again; a few months ago I’d stopped my daily five mile run through the fields behind my house because I’d twisted an ankle, and now I was fit again I missed that tingling sense of exhaustion that good exercise creates.

  Once inside the office, I took off my jacket, made myself a strong coffee, threw two junk letters into the waste-bin, filed a bill into my red Out tray, and forced myself to concentrate on detail. I picked up the phone and began to call.

  I drove past the blue glass pyramid that towers over the main route into Stockport, under the grimy viaduct and up a long hill filled with boarded shopfronts and abandoned warehouses. The roads, buildings, sky and air were grey and everything smelled faintly of petrol fumes. Not for the first time it struck me that Stockport was a town whose time had come and gone. It was hanging around now because it didn’t know where to put itself. It was like a poor relation that refused to go away and instead just embarrassed you in front of your fancy friends.

  Finally I turned into a grove of newly-built mews houses that were intended as starter homes, and knocked on Gerald Finch’s front door.

  Some starter. When he opened the door, I saw only as far as his shoulders. He was enormous. He wore dirty blue jeans and a white tee-shirt with Greaseballs stencilled on the front that was at my eye level. He ducked his head down and said, ‘Come in,’ in a surprisingly high voice. I stepped through and it was if I were entering Lilliput. Finch must have been about six foot eight, while the house looked as though it had been built to three-quarter scale. The ceilings were low, the rooms were small, and there was only a narrow passage between black leather chairs through the front lounge into the kitchen, towards which Finch guided me. ‘Let’s go into the office,’ he said. ‘I’m in the middle of something but we can talk.’

  The office was a white melamine breakfast bar in his kitchen that contained his PC, a printer, one or two pieces of hardware I didn’t recognise, and piles of paper strewn at random. Through French windows I could see a tiny garden falling away in paved terracing towards a small stand of trees. I wondered if it was a bonsai garden reflected through some elaborate mirror trickery, and set up to further confuse the weak-minded.

  A cat slept on the end of the counter and didn’t stir when I sat on a stool next to it. Finch petted it once and then sat down himself. He cleared his screen saver and began to work intently.

  ‘So Rory got it,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t surprise me. He deserved it.’

  ‘No one deserves to be murdered,’ I said, as coldly as I could. Finch shrugged.

  ‘He was always heading for a fall, man. You’ve got to see that. I’ve worked in this business for nearly twenty years and I’ve never met anyone who so refused to listen to other people. Time after time I told him we had to slow down, think it through, but no, he had to do the entrepreneur thing—be first to market, beat the competition, you know what salesmen are like ... ’

  Finch had been the first Operations Director that Rory had hired to run the new IT part of the business. He’d left after only a few months for reasons that Laura Marshall told me were unclear, though there were suggestions there’d been an argument. When I’d phoned he was reluctant to talk to me but became interested when I told him I was investigating Rory’s death.

  Now he was drawing boxes on his computer screen and then writing text in them. He positioned the completed text box, applied formatting—font style, point size, italic or bold—then saved the document.

  ‘I’m told you had a row with Rory,’ I said. ‘Is that why you left?’

  He looked up at me briefly. ‘Wow—is that the story they’re putting out? Doesn’t surprise me.’

  ‘Not a lot surprises you, does it?’

  ‘You’ve got to learn to pay attention, man. They always liked to enhance the truth, you know, like putting it through a graphic filter to take out the rough edges.’

  ‘So what’s your version?’

  ‘I was sacked. Taken out like a bastard. Oh we did it the formal way, calling everyone together in the boardroom so that they could see me fall on my sword—but it was a sacking. I had to go through that, you see, so they’d give me my payout. Have to toe the party line to get what’s rightfully yours.’

  ‘Sounds tough,’ I said. He didn’t hear the irony.

  He said, ‘I knew a guy once who was on the management team, like me, and he left with all guns blazing. Told everyone he’d been given the boot. Just wouldn’t lie down. So of course they didn’t give him the remains of his contract, took his car off him immediately, withheld his holiday pay, petty stuff. But all in all it cost him about fifty grand. So I watched my p’s and q’s, told everyone in the boardroom that I felt it was in the best interests of the company if I went, and I legged it. Best thing I ever did. In business for myself, now. Hence the web page—just doing a spot of re-design. Supposed to be online tomorrow, so excuse the back of my head.’

  ‘It’s excused.’

  ‘So how did Rory get it?’

>   ‘I’ve heard his neck was broken. He was found in his office.’

  ‘Cool.’

  He must have heard the silence. He looked up at me again.

  ‘Okay, that’s a bit harsh. But you meddle with fire, you get burned.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘Do I sound bitter? Fucking tough. Rory was an expert at stirring things up. You could never say he was a placid kind of guy. Get yourself some coffee. There’s a machine over there.’

  ‘I’m OK thanks.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  He suddenly stopped working and took his hands from his keyboard. He turned in his chair and faced me. ‘What do you want from me?’ he said. ‘I didn’t like Rory and I don’t think he liked me. Is that what you want to hear?’

  ‘Why do you say he stirred things up?’ I said.

  ‘His attitude. His manner. Very confrontational. Pissed people off all the time—he couldn’t help himself.’

  ‘Anyone in particular?’

  ‘Well, me. Most of the consultants. People who worked for him. Shall I go on?’

  ‘You’re not exactly mild-mannered yourself.’

  For a second I thought he was going to stand up again, but he shifted his weight back on to his seat.

  He said, ‘Everyone who knew Rory Brand could tell you a story. Don’t pick on me. I’m no different to anyone else.’

  This wasn’t exactly narrowing down the field. ‘What’s the problem with the new IT division?’ I asked. ‘You were heading it up—what went wrong?’

  He picked up his coffee cup and sipped from it carefully, pursing surprisingly delicate lips.

  ‘He wouldn’t stop meddling,’ he said. ‘We’d set a project plan for the next year, and as soon as a client expressed interest in a version of the software, he insisted we change the production schedule to incorporate the new request. We chopped and changed every month. Very un-cool. Brand had his finger in everything, even though he hadn’t got idea fucking one how this stuff works. So we’d go for a few weeks and it would be OK, then there’d be a sudden meeting of the management team and Brand would have a cow because we weren’t delivering what he wanted.’

  ‘Anyone tell him this?’

  ‘I’d argue with him but he’s the boss, so in the end I’d back down and go and tell the guys we’re changing priorities again. Give Microsoft Project another workout. I tell you, I just got sick of it. Anyway my feelings didn’t count, because in the end he fired me. He made it impossible for me to carry on.’

  ‘How did he do that?’

  ‘He talked to Champion—you know, the guys who’d put the money in—and between them they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Walk the plank or be pushed overboard. I took a running jump, I tell you.’

  I frowned. ‘Wasn’t there any incentive to stay?’

  Finch’s mood had turned dark while remembering his time at Brands. He hadn’t heard my question and instead answered one that I guessed he’d been turning over in his head for some time.

  He said, ‘It’s not as if the program wasn’t working, for Christ’s sake. Considering the hassle, it was a gem. All we needed was more time. They had consultants testing it and they thought it was superb, so he should have just butted out and let us get on with it.’

  ‘You must have wanted to get him out of the way.’

  He didn’t hear the insinuation. ‘All management’s the same,’ he said. ‘They all have to put their oar in. In the long run there’s no point bucking the system. You can’t win against the suits. Anyway, in this game you move around a lot. It’s not nine-to-five and it’s not a job for life. You join, you learn some new licks, you make a bunch of good friends that you e-mail forever, then you move on to the next start-up or bright idea. Personalities just get in the way. There’s plenty of work out there. You just pick up your ball and walk off into the sunset. Portfolio career—that’s the name of the game now.’

  I looked around the cramped house in the grey town and wondered if he was actually as happy as he wanted me to think.

  ‘One more thing,’ Finch said, putting his cup down next to his sleeping cat. ‘If you can, take a look at the figures. You’ve got to remember that the consultancy side of the business is bringing in the dollars, and the IT side is spending them.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘There’ll come a point where breakeven won’t be possible,’ he said. ‘In other words they’ll have to sell some product. Each month that goes by costs them a fortune. If consultancy revenues take a dive for whatever reason, they’ll slip into the red. The consultants know that. They aren’t happy. They’ve made Brands the company it is, and now they’ve seen Rory piss it away. Yes they’ve had three mil in funding, but none of that has gone into the consultant pot, and when it’s gone the consultants will be the bankers. Supporting a division they don’t understand and whose product will take work from them. Talk about motivation ...’

  I made a note and thought of another question.

  ‘What did you think of Tara Brand?’

  ‘Great hair, good with clients. Bit of a cold fish with the rest of us.’ He shifted his position and his eyes caught the light from outside. They were palest grey, as though bringing into the room the dead sky outside, and lending him the transparent gaze of someone who really didn’t care.

  ‘How do you think she’d cope?’ I asked.

  ‘She’d tough it out. There’d be clients to service. She wouldn’t let them down.’

  ‘That sounds about right.’

  ‘It might not look like it, but I’m pretty good at reading people. Especially women.’

  And I was shortly to find out that I wasn’t.