The Borough

by Steve Dockray

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  By the fresh light of a new day the Town Hall seemed comfortingly ordinary and safe. Winner had slipped out for an hour in the morning to see the locksmith at his flat. The man had politely tried to stifle his amusement when Winner had shown him the existing lock. Winner had left him to it after the packs with new locks in had been opened so that he could take a set of keys with him. The locksmith would post the others into Winner's ground floor letterbox before he left.

  Despite the new enthusiasm for action, there was no possibility of doing much before Friday, as that was the first appointment in Cavendish's diary where they were sure that they could identify the venue. In the meantime there was plenty of paperwork to be cleared in the office, with the budget meetings coming up fast. Linda Price was still away sick, so Winner would have to attend in place of her, which meant he had to be thoroughly familiar with all the various headings in each budget.

  At lunch time Sally went down through the High Street to the quayside with Winner, both of them preferring company now that they had been identified. They stood leaning against the railings looking out over the marina to where La Mouette lay moored to the pontoons.

  "What time's the meeting?" Sally asked.

  "Nine o'clock on Friday evening."

  "It's going to be cold out here at that time."

  "I'll be all right. I'll wrap up well."

  "You can't just follow them onto the pontoons. You'd have to go past the security guard and they might post a guard themselves."

  "The guard isn't there all the time. In the evenings at this time of year the boat owners open the gate with a plastic membership card that they swipe through a reader. If I come along early, I can sneak through behind someone else and hide on one of the other boats. There are always a few people coming and going, whatever the time of day or year."

  "I vote we come down for a burger on Thursday evening and we can watch from the warmth of the restaurant and see how much activity there is."

  Winner turned away from the railings and they headed back towards the shops. There was no rush to get back to the office, but despite the strengthening winter sunshine, it was still much colder on the waterfront than in the shelter of the High Street. Sally stopped to look in the window of the estate agents.

  "How about that one?" she asked, pointing at one of a group of luxury residences displayed separately from the run of the mill housing estate properties.

  "What, the five bedrooms with half acre garden, swimming pool and spectacular views. A bit too near Cavendish, I should think. Three hundred thousand and it's only got one double garage. Not bad though, I suppose."

  "I was rather hoping that Cavendish might help us to buy something like that."

  Winner liked the way she said 'us', as if implying a reasonable future for their relationship.

  "I haven't quite managed to work out how we're going to persuade him to part with the money," he said. "Nigel obviously tried to, with somewhat less than satisfactory results."

  "He definitely underestimated the opposition. We must take extra care."

  Winner spent some time in the afternoon trying to work out how they could relieve Cavendish of some of his un-necessary wealth. The best plan appeared to be to entice him into some further deals with a lure of more money, but what the right sort of bait would be was a bit of a mystery.

  Just after Christine Tucker had come into the office with a cup of tea, Peter Vaughan walked in, coffee in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other.

  "Can you spare a minute?" he asked.

  "Take a seat."

  "I've got a rough draft of the storm damage details that you wanted. Even if we can charge some of the promenade works as a capital scheme, we're going to need to find at least a hundred and fifty thousand from the General Fund."

  Vaughan handed over a copy of the summary, which Winner looked at for a few moments.

  "I saw Westerman briefly this morning," he said, glancing up at Vaughan. "He's quite keen to see a copy of this. He told me that he's spoken further with three of the chairmen and they've agreed to further maintenance cuts to finance the storm repairs."

  "That's ridiculous. Some of the maintenance works have been put off so many times now that the buildings need major surgery."

  "We all know it's false economy, Peter, but what are the alternatives? What I'm not sure that the members understand, despite me explaining it to them, is that cuts in maintenance mean less income for the Direct Services Organisation, which means they'll have to make job cuts."

  "Perhaps they understand, but don't mind getting rid of manual workers as much as salaried staff?"

  "If they cut down the manual workforce, they'll have to cut the administrative staff as well, or the oncost rate will be so high that they won't win any tenders. Sanderman's not going to be pleased when he hears about these extra cuts, especially with the worry of the imminent tender opening session for the grounds maintenance west contract."

  "He seems to have a suspicious knack for putting in the lowest tenders."

  Winner looked from the figures and frowned slightly. "You're not the only one to have noticed that, but I can't say anything about it at the moment. I'd rather you didn't mention it to anyone else."

  Vaughan left after he had answered a few questions about the figures, and only a few seconds after the door had closed the phone started ringing. Winner picked it up and gave his name.

  "It's not a matter of any concern to you who I am," said an unfamiliar male voice. Winner grabbed his pocket memo recorder from the top of the open drawer beside him and clamped it to the earpiece. "Just listen carefully. You've been poking around in other people's business and they don't like it. They're prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you've been working in the interests of the Authority. Somebody had a nasty accident last night, but he's been persuaded not to do anything about it if you'll do as you're told."

  "That depends what you want."

  "Oh no, Mr Winner, you're not really in a strong bargaining position. We could deal with you any time we want, but we're basically nice friendly people. The next time that you look on your bank statement, you'll see that you have been credited with ten thousand pounds. That's good news for you, but if you continue to annoy us, we'll use the evidence of that deposit to convince others that it was you who was involved in the mysterious loss of fifty thousand pounds. That would be very embarrassing to you and it might well mean the end of your career in local government. All you have to do to protect yourself is to stop the investigations. I hardly need to tell you that Miss Travis will also have to be persuaded to back off. I leave that up to you. I'm sure you wouldn't want anything nasty to happen to her."

  Before Winner could make any response, the phone went dead. At least he had a recording of all but the first few words. He called Sally on the phone and asked her to come in. As soon as the door was closed and she was seated, he played back the recording of the unidentified caller's voice. When it was finished he ejected the cassette and slipped it in his pocket.

  "Do you recognise the voice?" he asked.

  "No, I don't think so. In a way it's rather comforting to get this call."

  "How do you mean?"

  "It means we're not looking over our shoulders all the time in case some lunatic jumps out and attacks us. We're not under threat of immediate reprisals. It also tells us they're still not sure whether we're working for the Council or just for ourselves. The good news is that you're ten thousand better off without lifting a finger, and since one of our objectives was to get money out of Cavendish, it seems we've enjoyed some success already."

  "It also gives us an option to withdraw safely," Winner pointed out.

  "As long as we stop making public enquiries about Cavendish and his companies, they'll assume we've given up. If we're really careful about spying on him, it might be ages before they realise we haven't."

  "So you want to carry on?"


  "With extreme caution, yes."

  "Somehow I thought you'd say that."