Seven Week Itch

by Victoria Corby

  ‘Excuse my asking, but have you talked this over with your neighbour?’ asked the receptionist in a friendly voice. ‘Because once you start consulting solicitors tempers start to rise and it gets more and more difficult to withdraw from the dispute. Before you know where you are, you can be locked into a court dispute that goes on for years.’

  Surely most firms of solicitors were keen to rake in as many clients and as much money as possible, weren’t they? Why did Hamish have to work for one that apparently had a social conscience? ‘It’s gone beyond the stage of talking,’ I said.

  ‘You wouldn’t like to try just one more time?’ she persisted. ‘And I could pencil you in to see Mr Laing next week if it doesn’t work.’

  Next week? I thought in horror. I couldn’t last that long! ‘Er, no, he’s…’ I floundered, trying to think of something that held the necessary urgency. ‘He’s threatened to poison my cat,’ I said triumphantly. ‘I think I need to take immediate action.’

  ‘Well, you can’t have him doing that,’ she said, sounding properly scandalised. ‘It’s really Mr Laing you want to see, because he’s very tied up at the moment? Mr Cathcart could fit you in this afternoon.’

  ‘Mr Laing was especially recommended to me. I was told he’s very sympathetic to people’s problems,’ I said quickly, hoping that she wouldn’t ask who’d made the recommendation.

  ‘He’s very good,’ she confirmed. ‘But he’s terribly busy. Let me see, if you can manage first thing tomorrow morning I can squeeze you in for half an hour. I know it’s not very long, but-‘

  ‘That’ll do fine,’ I cut in. The chances were that Hamish was going to throw me out after half a minute, so there wasn’t much point in taking up an hour of his time. Nor in paying for the whole hour, I decided, after the receptionist kindly told me his truly eye-watering charges, if I ended up getting landed with the bill.

  ‘And can I take your name?’ she asked.

  Name? Name? Someone would probably smell a rat with ‘Jane Brown’. ‘Tradescant,’ I said with sudden inspiration. ‘Miss Lily Tradescant.’

  As I put the phone down with a flush of exultation that I’d at least done something Jenny put her head around the door and called out, ‘Susie, I’ve got a Mrs Murray on the other line.’ She made an expressive face. ‘She’s really in a state about something, wouldn’t tell me, because I’m just a secretary, and wanted to speak to Stephen or someone in charge. I told her you were his second in command. Will you deal with it?’

  She looked at me pleadingly and slightly guiltily too. It meant I was probably in for an ear-bashing of some sort or another, most likely about the agency’s failure to find a buyer for Mrs Murray’s house immediately it went on the market. I couldn’t have been more wrong, Mrs Murray repeatedly apologised for making a fuss, and she was sure it was only a mistake, she knew what a good agency this was but people in her position couldn’t afford to spend money unnecessarily…

  ‘Yes, I quite agree, Mrs Murray. Perhaps you could tell me what the matter is,’ I said, cradling the phone under my chin and bringing up her details, surprised to see from the plan how close she was to Jeremy and Rose. Her cottage was practically next door to the proposed new development, on the other side of the land Jeremy was being asked to sell and was already under offer. She was one of Martin’s clients, I saw in annoyance, which meant as soon as he came back I was in for a carpeting for daring to speak to her.

  I got the impression Mrs Murray didn’t have a lot of people to talk to and she was making the most of the opportunity. I got her full history. She’d moved into her cottage as a young married woman when her husband had been a cowman on a neighbouring farm, she’d brought up four children who’d grown up into fine people, grew all she needed in her big garden and never bought vegetables from the shops, and now that the peace of her cottage was going to be ruined by the new houses she was going to live near her daughter in Worthing. I waited patiently for her to get to the point, my mind wandering under the relentless onslaught of unnecessary details. ‘I’ve taken me time deciding, I can tell you. I wasn’t at all sure I could abide being near our Joan, I’m still not, to tell you the truth. She’s terribly bossy. And I’m not keen on that sea either. Can’t see the point of it. Or the town. Full of old people, it is. But when Mr Prescott said all those houses were definitely being built I decided I didn’t want to be bothered with all that noise from the building work, so I accepted the offer from Mr Jenkins. Mr Prescott says it’s very fair and it’s enough for me, though I’d much rather stay where I am. I like my cottage, I always thought I’d die there.’ She paused to take a breath. ‘Now I got a letter this morning saying there’s a planning application gone in for two houses in my garden. It’s that Mr Jenkins who did it, not me. That’s not right. How can he do it when it doesn’t belong to him? And the council don’t do nothing for free these days, so are they going to send the bill to me? And do I have to do anything?’ she demanded.

  I assured her that, strangely enough, it was quite legal to apply for planning permission on someone else’s land, she needn’t worry about being sent the bill, whether it was granted or not, and they’d informed her of the application, so she could object if she wanted to.

  She cackled. ‘There’s no point. We were told years ago the council’d never give permission to build houses on our land, and Mr Prescott says, even with the development next door, they haven’t changed their minds. I asked him if there was any chance of getting planning permission now. I may be old, but I’m not senile yet! Mr Jenkins is wasting his money, but that’s his look out, not mine. Thank you, dear, I’m glad to have had that sorted.’

  ‘It’s a pleasure, ring me if there’s anything else you’d like cleared up,’ I said automatically, still shell-shocked from the sheer amount of words directed at me in the last five minutes.

  How strange that Martin should be so convinced she’d never get planning permission; it seemed a logical place to grant it since it was bang next door to the new development. Mrs Murray had a big garden with road access and no ponds that might hold rare toads. Maybe the planning department had decided enough was enough, they were often a law unto themselves, after all, but Martin should know. I’d have left a note on his desk to say she’d rung and returned to wallowing in my own problems without ever giving it another thought if I hadn’t happened to idly register as I was closing the page that Mr Jenkins was a local man. My hand jerked above the keys and with trembling fingers I brought it back up again. I wasn’t mistaken. Mr Jenkins lived in Wickham. In fact Mr Jenkins lived in Luke’s house.

  I stared at the address incredulously. Luke didn’t take lodgers. Luke and Martin were friends. Luke was apparently buying Mrs Murray’s house. Martin had told her she wouldn’t get planning permission. Luke had put in for it. Only the most olfactory-deprived idiot would have failed to smell a very large rat. I dialled our contact in the local planning department, knowing that if I was wrong all hell was going to descend on my head when Martin discovered I’d been checking up on him. But Frances, sounding overworked and harassed as usual, had no hesitation in saying she’d told Martin a couple of weeks ago that planning permission for building in the garden of Rosewood Cottage would almost certainly go through on the nod. She seemed curious about why I was bothering her, so I said Martin had been laid low by a killer dose of flu and I hadn’t been able to find his files. She sounded as if it was the sort of thing that happened to her all the time.

  I put the phone down feeling slightly sick. I might not like Martin, no, let’s be honest, I detested him, but it had never occurred to me that he might be dishonest. But what else could you call this? The minimum difference between the with-and without-planning-consent value for Mrs. Murray’s cottage was about one hundred thousand pounds – which Luke was going to trouser with Martin’s aid.

  And what was this about the development definitely going ahead? As far as I knew, nothing had been decided, yet the offer had been put in two weeks ago. A super-large, steroid-
enhanced rat emerged from its hole as I remembered Luke banging on to Rose about the future of the countryside. God, he’d even walked down to the site with her and pointed out it wasn’t nearly as bad as she’d thought it was going to be. Would he give a toss about rural development if Mrs Murray hadn’t decided to sell her cottage? And pigs might fly. How soon after Rose had persuaded Jeremy to accept the developers’ offer would Luke have just faded from her life?

  Had Martin and Luke tried this on anyone else?

  ‘Jenny, how do I get into Martin’s closed files?’ I asked.

  She swivelled around to stare at me. ‘You don’t.’

  ‘But what happens if he’s in hospital or something and there’s an urgent problem that can’t wait?’

  ‘Stephen deals with it, not us. I’m not kidding, Susie. If Martin discovers you’ve been in his files you’ll be out of here so fast your feet won’t touch the ground, no matter how much Stephen likes you. He can’t afford to ignore Martin, he brings in too much money to the firm.’

  ‘Actually what Martin’s about to bring in are the regulators and the police,’ I muttered and told her about Mrs Murray.

  Jenny proved to be someone who believed in making a thorough drama out of a crisis. She started scrabbling through her papers like a demented hen. ‘We’ve got to tell Stephen,’ she wailed. ‘He’s taken his mobile with him, said we could contact him in an emergency. I’ve got his number here somewhere, now where is it? This is an emergency, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s really going to enhance his romantic weekend with Liddy if we ring to tell him his senior negotiator is on the take,’ I said. ‘Besides what can he do from Paris except tell us to sit tight and do nothing? Let’s tell him tomorrow when he’s back and in a work mood.’ I looked at her, wondering how I could get her to do what I wanted. Common sense said to leave this for Stephen to deal with, but I don’t always bother with common sense. Besides, I fancied playing detective, it was a welcome diversion from thinking about Hamish. ‘We really ought to discover if Martin’s done this with anyone else before it’s too late,’ I said cunningly. ‘If he has, and they haven’t exchanged contracts yet we might be able to save the situation.’

  To my relief, Jenny stopped her hand-wringing and nodded solemnly. ‘Stephen’s always telling me to work on my own initiative, I reckon this counts as that,’ she said surprisingly. ‘All the passwords are in one of Stephen’s files. That’s password protected too, but I should be able to work out what it is. Most people’s passwords are pretty simple or they’d forget them.’

  ‘Which means that Stephen’s are even more obvious than most.’

  She grinned. ‘Dead right. When we first installed this system he chose passwords from the dictionary and then forgot what they were. It took me several days to crack them with a special programme, so I don’t reckon he’ll have made that mistake again.’ Her fingers flew over the keys. ‘Ah! I was right, there you are. Everyone’s passwords.’

  I glanced over her shoulder, seriously impressed at her speed. ‘How on earth did you work that one out?’

  ‘Easy,’ she said, in a slightly disappointed voice, as if she’d have liked a greater challenge. ‘It’s the passwords file, so the password is-’

  ‘Password,’ I supplied.

  She nodded. ‘Even Stephen couldn’t forget that. There’s Martin’s. Enormous.’

  We looked at each other and snorted with laughter. ‘Wishful thinking, if you ask me,’ she said.

  We divided the list between us and began to work steadily through it, neither of us were quite sure what we were looking for. It was staggeringly boring. Not only did Martin have a mania for secrecy, he also had the natural soul of a bureaucrat, so every meeting, every telephone conversation was noted in detail, including, I saw with disbelief, the ‘no answers’, but there was nothing that suggested he was indulging in crooked deals. Even the file on Mrs Murray’s cottage looked completely above board. I hadn’t been expecting it, but it would have been nice to find something along the lines of, ‘2 May, in partnership with nasty piece of work, Luke Dillon, decided to rook Mrs Murray. Like taking candy off a baby.’

  ‘There’s nothing in this lot,’ said Jenny. I sighed, I’d have to hand it over to Stephen tomorrow and let him see what he could find after all, and then she added, ‘I wonder if Martin’s still got that floppy in his desk.’

  ‘What floppy?’ I demanded.

  ‘He’s been using our computers for his personal stuff, because his screen’s broken and he hasn’t got round to mending it. A couple of weeks ago I had to come back for something after hours and he was saving a file on a disk which he put in his desk like lightning when he saw me. It might still be here.’

  Martin’s desk was locked, which I should have expected. ‘I don’t suppose you’re as good at picking locks as you are at cracking passwords, are you?’ I asked Jenny without much hope.

  ‘Never tried,’ she said. My heart plummeted with disappointment, we wouldn’t be able to get away with jemmying open his desk. It was just too obvious. ‘I prefer to use the key,’ she said, holding one in the air. ‘This one should do it, it opens mine, Amanda’s and yours, so I don’t see why it won’t work on his too. They’re all the same model.’

  A couple of minutes of judicious jiggling later, Martin’s top drawer slid open to reveal a floppy disk with ‘info’ written across it. I put it in the machine and tapped in ‘enormous’. No dice. ‘Can you do anything?’ I asked the office’s resident computer genius.

  She looked at the screen with an expression of pure joy, at last getting a decent challenge. ‘Let’s have a go. It’s probably either based on his name or connected to his office password in some way, to make it easier to remember.’ Her fingers flew over the keys. ‘No, that one doesn’t work.’ Neither did several versions of‘ Prescott’. She sat staring thoughtfully at the screen, then said suddenly. ‘I wonder! Hand us the thesaurus, Susie.’ I retrieved the company thesaurus from Stephen’s office, wondering why she needed to look up synonyms for ‘superb location’ or ‘charming villa’. ‘Look up “enormous” will you?’ We struck gold with ‘gigantic’.

  ‘How did you think of that?’ I asked in awe.

  ‘Just a little lateral thinking,’ she said modestly, though she looked pretty pleased with herself. ‘Be quick, won’t you?’ she said nervously. ‘I don’t want anyone to come in and see us going through Martin’s private affairs.’

  Neither did I, for that matter, and I wouldn’t have put it past the sneaky bastard to rise from his sick bed to check up on what we were doing. I began to flick down all the file names quickly. Most were self-explanatory names like ‘Pension’, ‘Insurance’ or ‘Tax rebate’ which I ignored, stopping to open and glance through ‘SageCott’, which seemed to be a legitimate attempt to buy a house last year. Jenny was almost hopping from foot to foot in nervous apprehension so I printed anything which had a vaguely non-­utilitarian name, about five in all, and handed the disk back to her. She put it back and relocked the drawer with an audible sigh of relief.

  I settled down to leaf through what I’d got and struck pay dirt almost immediately. Here was the real story on Mrs Murray’s cottage. He’d recorded everything; the date he and Luke agreed to go for it, their shares of the purchase price and the profit, the date the planning application went in on behalf of ‘Mr Jenkins’, Martin’s conversation with Frances, and his negotiation with Mrs Murray about dropping the price by five thousand pounds. I was so angry at this last bit of petty skulduggery, when they were already conspiring to cheat her out of a fortune, that I had to pace around the office twice before I could go on reading.

  It seemed Rosewood Cottage was an opportunistic one-off, the other files didn’t have anything to do with property transactions. I skimmed through them quickly, but found nothing of interest and was about to dump them in my waste-paper basket when it occurred to me it wasn’t very sensible to put them where someone, i.e. Martin, might come in and see them and suss what I’d been u
p to. I stuffed the sheaf of papers in my tote bag, planning to put them in the bin at home.

  I had to tell Rose about this, I thought uneasily, not looking forward to it. But first there was something I needed to settle with Martin. I’d been putting two and two together to come up with another unsavoury four. He could, was going to, tell me if I was right.

  CHAPTER 20

  Martin lived about twenty miles away, in a large village that was beginning to merge into a bigger town. To my relief only his convertible Golf GTi was parked outside his anonymous little house; even I had enough sense to have done a runner if Luke’s BMW had been there as well. I still spent a minute or two sitting in the car and looking around before I walked up the short path to his door and rang the bell.

  He opened the door, wearing a red synthetic-silk dressing-gown that had seen better days, starting slightly when he saw who it was on the doorstep. ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded aggressively. ‘Can’t you see I’m ill?’

  It seemed Jenny had been unfair when she’d suggested he was blowing up a mere sniffle. Martin was not an attractive sight in general, but today the fox-like features of his face had the texture and colour of old goat’s cheese and the point of his sharp nose was a lurid glowing red. He was sniffing too. I recoiled for a moment, wondering if even the causes of justice, information-gathering and general nosiness were worth the risk of being exposed to germs that had been in Martin Prescott. Oh well, I’d better stop off for an extra-large tube of effervescent vitamin C tablets when I left.