Chapter 10

This is a double header, told from Dave's point of view when the text is upright, Debbie's when it's italicised. I hope that this is clear enough (and that it works in your browser) ... and be grateful that I didn't go with the original idea of doing the whole thing in parallel columns...

Friday morning and it was raining heavily as I got to Hertford Square, not in the best of moods after a series of delays on the tube had added a little extra sparkle to the joy that is commuting in London. So I wasn't my normal cheerful self when I let myself into the office, observing Seffi already engrossed in an animated conversation on the phone, no Naz, and ... sitting at Naz's desk, Gareth the Legal Bloke, who smiled at me somewhat bashfully. I probably didn't smile back ... to be honest I just wanted a coffee and some space to go through the e-mails, calm down a bit before having to face the world.

However, I am a Brit and politeness is kind of ingrained, so I offered Gareth a coffee, made him – and Seff – one while I was getting my own, then dragged myself behind my own desk, powering up the PC even as I asked Gareth what brought him into the office. Turns out he was taking another illicit break from the day job, his more detailed examination of our contractual position, viz a viz our paymasters at PCW, having revealed some ambiguities which he wanted to talk to me about. Which was admirably keen of him – and, I was sure, the best hope we had of a solution to our various problems – but to be honest my heart fell. I don't do contracts, or at least not the sort of contracts we'd signed when we were setting the company up. I think it takes a peculiarly perverse type of mind to draft or decode a spiders web of interrelated clauses, wherefores and thereunders, conditions and codicils ... and that was one perversity, at least, that I didn't have. Nonetheless, I put on my best intelligent face and sat back to listen to what he had to say.

Half an hour later, Gareth was still talking – Seff still on the phone – and I was losing the will to live. Occasionally, he would come back to something I vaguely recognised as English, my mind would bravely try to catch up and then he was off again ... completely fluent gibberish ... might as well have been speaking Chinese as far as I was concerned. This was all a bit embarrassing as I could see that he was making a real effort to put this in a lawyers equivalent of idiot speak ... and it was still passing me by completely. I was saved by Naz arriving, slamming through the door in what just had to be Naz-in-a-state-of-high-excitement mode, Gareth only just getting out of the way in time as he virtually threw himself into his chair – seemingly oblivious to the fact that someone else had been sitting there seconds before.

Half an hour after that, I was still listening to Naz, talking at me, this time, about air turbulence and fluid dynamics, I think, a subject which had apparently kept him up most of the night – Seff, her conversation paused for the moment, gave an exasperated sigh at that, presumably having been kept up with him – and which promised great but fuzzy – at least to me – benefits to us, the wind generator guys and, hell, the rest of the world, too, by the sound of it. Frankly, I didn't understand a word but it was nice to see Naz so enthusiastic ... and that Gareth, too, was looking a bit dazed by the rant. I felt a headache coming on, wondered which of the two I should try and deal with first ... and then reception buzzed up ... we had a visitor.

I went down myself, if only to catch a moment of sanity, and found myself greeting a tall woman of about my age, dressed in an ankle length black skirt, a very wet black soft shell jacket ... and an emerald head scarf. She smiled as I introduced myself, her eyes a deep golden brown, laugh lines showing against the slightly tawny skin, introduced herself in turn as Niusha. Ah yes, I thought, mentally cursing the fact that my morning had given me no time to either talk to Seff or even check my own appointments, Niusha ... the CareSpan administrator that May had offered to "lend" us so that Naz and Seff could get over to Germany. I asked her to come on up, apologising for the fact that things were a bit chaotic, that we were not as prepared as we might have been for her arrival.

Things had not changed much when we got back upstairs. Seff was still on the phone, albeit now apparently swearing quietly to herself in German, while Gareth was now backed into a corner, taking the full force of Naz's attempts to explain his new ideas, which now included, I saw, a number of complex diagrams ... which didn't make any more sense than the verbiage. I gave Niusha a quick, consoling, grin, then interrupted enough to do some basic introductions ... even Seff briefly surfacing and giving her a quick wave. I made coffee.

At least I understood the coffee machine, I thought...

I got a few hours sleep back at the hotel before coming down to meet Colin for breakfast, watching snow falling heavily outside, already beginning to drift slightly in the breeze. He was efficient and focused, so that I felt the attitude slowly infecting me, displacing the slight vagueness I'd experienced after a night without much sleep and with ... a lot of excitement. We talked about plans.

Colin had prepared a variety of options, as I'd requested, the three most developed ranging from a very basic renovation of the current near ruin, bringing it up to modern minimum standards, through to a comprehensive eco-workover, including heat pumps, wind and solar electricity generation, triple glazing and thermal sumps, reed bed sanitation ... the works. I gave them a brief scan – they were impressive pieces of work, detailed and comprehensive – before indicating the third version.

"Its Dave's decision, of course," I told him, "but he'll go for the full option, I know, so I think we need to work that one up to the stage we can begin tendering for the building work" He looked a bit dubious, pointed out that it was going to be expensive, might be seen as over-the-top by some. I agreed that this was true, but, "Two points, though ... firstly, if the North Atlantic Gyratory does finally switch off, this is the sort of building we'll all need; secondly I know Dave ... and I know that he knows we'll only get one chance at this, so best to do it well. So how soon can you give us the specs? The bill of works or whatever you call it?"

Except, of course, that I knew how to make what you might describe as English coffee. Niusha was polite, but you could tell it wasn't really her thing. I raised a quizzical eyebrow, engaging with her more to avoid Naz's continuing rant than anything else.

"Sorry ... I'm Iranian. And while I might not have lived there since my teens, this is still not coffee, in my opinion: It is slightly darkly coloured water. I will have to educate you about this, I can tell."

I was about to say something witty in response – there was something I really liked about her attitude – the provocative grin she gave me as she disparaged my last remaining competence – but I was distracted by Seff putting the phone down, at long last, and doing so with a violent gesture and a vehement burst of guttural German. Now that didn't sound good, I thought.

Actually, Seff didn't carry on yelling, just expressed her frustration briefly, then sat at her desk, not saying anything, not looking at anyone. I got Naz to shut up – by yelling at him, quite loudly, I'm afraid – and then went over to Seff, crouching down beside her. She looked a bit surprised to be the centre of attention, nodded jerkily when I asked if she was OK.

"Yeah ... sorry ... just a bit of an over-reaction, probably. Its just that I've been talking to FreiBank – the people from Baden-Wurttemberg, you know? – and they weren't being terribly helpful ... or candid. They have sent the preliminary data you asked for – you'll see their e-mail – but ... I don't know ... something's up. They were also supposed to finalise a contract – pay us money in other words ... and I can't find anyone who can tell me why they haven't ... or when – or if – they will."

I picked up on the edge to her voice. "It couldn't just be an oversight, I suppose?"

"A bank that size? Overlooking a contract? No."

OK. So how worried should I be? Well, for better or worse, for the moment I wasn't all that bothered ... or, rather, I felt that I had more urgent things to worry about. Yes, they were just about the nearest thing we had to a paying customer, so far, but this was one of the contacts we'd been working on that I just had a bad feeling about. So I wasn't going to loose sleep over it just yet. I stood up, gave Seff my best reassuring smile, said, "Well, lets file it under curious for the moment. I'll have a look at the preliminary stuff as soon as I can. Meantime, I think its about time we got organised."

"Gareth – I think you need to talk to Debbie ... I'm not going to be able to help much with your questions, largely because I haven't got a clue what you're talking about. So ... why don't you take yourself off to Cumbria for the weekend ... kill a few birds with a single stone. That way you get to meet Debbie, at last, see where we're planning on working from and resolve the contracts stuff. If its OK with Debbie, obviously, but if it is, we'll pay hotels, fares all that stuff ... OK?"

He nodded, so I turned to Seffi. "Can you give Debbie a call – its snowing up there, at least that's what Radio 4 said this morning, so she might well be in the hotel. If not, leave a message but check its OK for Gareth to come up, and if so, sort out the necessaries."

"Naz, sit down behind a computer and do whatever the hell you need to do. Then, at some point, you can tell me about what you've achieved – show me a revolutionary turbine blade or something – sparing me the details of just how clever you've been in the process. Not that I'm not interested, but you lost me sometime in the first twenty seconds of the explanation." He grinned, already lost in a sea of equations, algorithms, whatever. He'd emerge eventually, I knew.

"And Niusha, when Seff has a moment free, I need you to talk to her in some detail about just what we're trying to achieve here, what you're likely to have to cover for. And when you've done that, I'll take you and Seff out for lunch ... and we'll try and find some coffee that you'll actually enjoy ... and you can educate us. Now lets get on with things, OK? We have a business to run, here...

Niusha and Seff hit it off right away, sitting drinking tiny cups of pretty much solid caffeine outside an Iranian café N knew just behind the British Museum. I admit I was fascinated by her, the easy way she lived across her two cultures, her obvious confidence and competence at work, her deep affection and respect for her homeland. She'd shrugged off Seff's query about the headscarf – no, it wasn't religious, just cultural ... she'd left Iran because her professed atheism and socialism had made her unpopular in certain quarters, did not see any reason to abandon a mode of dress she felt comfortable with just because she was now living in the UK. Which was hard to argue with, not least because some women – and Niusha in particular – do look very nice in a scarf...

I also knew that May was very impressed by Niusha, so I asked her for a while about her experience with CareSpan. Turned out that she'd been one of the people that our CastList work had really impacted on, in her case moving her from PA to the finance director to a free floating role co-ordinating the whole central management team. Which, as she put it, was the job she'd been born for ... no two days the same and every day a problem to be solved. Seff and I laughed at this, said almost simultaneously that we felt that the new placement might prove to be similar in that respect, at least.

When we got back to the office, Seff took Niusha through the work we had planned and in prospect and began to introduce her to some of the systems she'd invented. Naz appeared not to notice that we'd even come back, sitting in his corner typing very rapidly, taking time every now and then to jot something down on a note pad on the desk in front of him. I did take a brief look over his shoulder at his screen, saw quantities of what looked like very complex code, went back to my own desk. He'd come round soon enough, I knew, and in the meantime, I needed to make a start on the FreiBank stuff. And quickly realised that I had a problem.

OK, so all I had to go on were the psychometric data on the banks top hundred or so executives and traders ... all anonymised so that I couldn't even tie it into roles or grades – which could be useful when beginning to sketch out a plan of action. In this case, though, there simply wouldn't have been any point. Not only would that approach not work, but, I quickly realised, neither would any of the others. It seemed that on day one of job one, I'd discovered the fatal flaw. Oh, bugger, I thought.

Actually, the problem was not entirely unexpected, just vastly more apparent than I could have imagined in my most cynical moments. I was used to working with charities and there are a lot of reasons why people choose to work in that field – some people Want To Do Good, of course, others want a family / gay / difference friendly environment, some people see it as an easy life, a cushy number ... though the latter don't tend to last long. In any case, the diversity of the workforce offered opportunities for constructive change. The gentlemen of FreiBank, on the other hand, had a single, universal driver, every single bloody one of them motivated by exactly the same thing.

They wanted to make money, lots of it. And from the psychometrics, each and every one of them would be quite prepared to club new born babies to death with his grandmother to do so.

This was, I realised, going to make it difficult. Identifying alternatives, introducing new factors, changing things around a bit ... what we were planning to do, in other words ... simply would not work. From these results, if it didn't make shed loads of wonga, they wouldn't be interested. It was depressing. It really was.

In fact, I struggled on with the data for a while, drilling down into the level two stuff that this particular organisation had provided. These supposedly indicated more subtle character traits / predilections on a level which HR people rarely bothered with – I wondered whether whoever had set up this system had encountered the same issues – but it didn't help all that much. A few people were marginally honest, while a few appeared to have major antisocial personality disorders, but on the whole the initial impression that these guys were one self sustaining, homogeneous mass was hard to refute. So I made some more coffee, spent some time looking out the window. I find this effective, problem solving wise – do nothing and often things come right all on their own – and in this case my superstition was justified gratifyingly quickly.

Specifically, Seff looked up from where she was talking to Niusha – going through the contacts lists, giving thumbnails sketches of the various individuals she'd been dealing with in getting things even as far as they had with some of our prospective clients – and waved to attract my attention. "Think we may have an explanation for FreiBank's evasiveness earlier on, she said ... just got a non-work e-mail from one of my contacts there ... think its been written in a cafe or something."

Something in her tone ... a sort of grim satisfaction, I think you could call it ... caused me to get up and go over to her desk, leaning over between the two of them to read the message on her screen rather than have her forward it over to me. Interesting, I thought ... definitely wouldn't want that in your work sent items folder...

Another false alarm. This time it was a guy called Carol (he said), been given the number by Rosie, apparently. Oh yeah, I thought – the wind generator guy, wondering how I could help. Turned out he was at Bowmere station, just come up from London, wanted to come and meet me if that would be convenient? I said something about the snow but he laughed in a way that probably meant something like 'wait until you've been here a few years and see if you still call this snow' and I found myself agreeing to meet him at the old slate works in an hour. Well, I'd been planning to go over there later, anyway...

In fact, young Andrew was no more unpleasant than he probably was just by nature of being him. Patronised Linda massively, of course, but didn't try anything on with me – not so such much as a lascivious smirk. OK, so he tried to get us to pay for a whole load of the electrical work – in his bloody building – but that didn't take long to sort out (its true ... all bullies really are cowards) and I got the contracts signed, work to be completed within a fortnight. Which was good. I did think of offering him extra – if he would remove himself from the premises for the duration – but let it lie. If all else failed, we could always set Rosie on him...

What Seff had uncovered ... or her mole had revealed, actually ... was that FreiBank were basically on the point of pulling the plug on the whole deal. Which at first struck me as the answer to a prayer – even if I didn't know I'd said one – but on closer consideration looked rather more problematic. In fact, what seemed to be going on was that PCW had 'indicated' – no clue as to how or to whom – that they would no longer guarantee us. Not directly financially ... the actual overheads for the work were so small that we could afford to do it on spec, collect the money on delivery to satisfied customer and all that ... but, rather more worryingly, they were no longer presenting us as trusted corporate partners, suitable to be given access to highly confidential – and potentially highly profitable – information. Which, even I could see, could easily kill the whole thing stone dead. If nothing else, we didn't have either the capitalisation or the track record to insure ourselves against that sort of level of liability so if things did go wrong – deliberately or otherwise – they couldn't recoup the damages by suing us. And even if they tried, from the looks of this, they'd be second in line behind PCW anyway.

I'm not sure that Niusha saw the problem, immediately, but Seffi clearly did. She didn't look too happy ... casting an annoyed glance at Naz, who was still oblivious, wrapped up in his code, typing away ... but not actually distraught, either. I could almost see her brain working, going through all her contacts at PCW, thinking who might be able to provide more information, how she / we might go about getting it. While she was thinking, I filled Niusha in on the implications, watching as it sank in and she had the decency to look quite upset on our behalf. I mean, it wasn't her problem, so...

By the end of the afternoon I wasn't sure it was my problem, either. OK, so I'd ruled out some of the more extreme suggestions – when we'd finally got Naz to engage with reality he'd suggested having a go at some of the gaps in PCW's firewalls he remembered from working there – get the information we needed by simply hacking their systems – though I didn't think that criminal activity was justified just yet – but otherwise Seff sort of took over. She did try phoning Debbie, see if she had any suggestions, but couldn't get hold of her, just left a message to phone one or the other of us – she didn't need to describe it as urgent, Debbie would get the point. Then she made a few phone calls – not asking any direct questions, just getting a feel for the terrain, as she put it. Which revealed nothing more than the fact that people who'd been fine to chat a couple of days ago were a lot less friendly now.

Which was hardly a surprise. Eventually, we decided we'd call it a day. Naz left first, en route to some university library, intent on blagging some journal articles he hadn't been able to find on public access on the web, followed by Seff, still deep in thought but smiling happily enough as she left, giving me a hug and pointing out that these things had always worked themselves out in the past, so...

Which left me with Niusha, looking slightly shell shocked after what had, after all, been quite an eventful first day. So I thought it was only polite to offer her a drink.

I certainly didn't want to start drinking on my own. Not in the mood I was in.

We got back to the Slate Works in time to find everyone finishing up, or, at least, Jane and her students were, while Rosie seemed to be quite deep in conversation with Karol ... wind turbines probably not uppermost in either of their minds, from the look of it. So I suggested that we all head back to the hotel, Linda and I joining Jane's students in the back of the college minibus, Rosie swiftly taking up the offer of a lift with Karol.

Colin was already sitting in the bar when we got back, looking a bit anxious – there was a message for me to phone either Seffi or Dave, as soon as possible, he said, no details given. Well, OK, but the either or both bit suggested that this was out of the ordinary. I decided discretion was in order, so got Colin to buy drinks for the assembled locals and suggested that he might want to talk to Jane before she had to get the students back into town. Then I went up to my room to use the phone there in some sort of privacy.

I called Dave first, chatted for about ten minutes – he was in a bar, of course, this time with our prospective temporary administrator, who he seemed impressed by – and then I called Seffi. She was outside the UCL library, waiting for Naz to get something or the other, and thus actually able to talk more openly, not that I learnt much more than Dave had implied, specific information being one thing we were clearly short of. After which, I sat back on the bed for a while, thinking about the news. It was interesting – not unexpected, I had to admit to myself – and there were people in PCW who might be a little more willing to talk to me than they had been to Seff, people who owed me favours, but that would have to wait till Monday. Anyway, our incredibly keen new Legal Bloke was coming up for the weekend, maybe he'd have a cast iron contractual solution to all our problems. Or, more probably, he wouldn't. Ah, well, I sighed inwardly, then decided to change ... put on something nice for the evening, act happy ... however I felt inside.