Chapter 3

The office still looked like a bombsite when I got in the next morning, conspicuously the first to arrive, and I sat for a while surveying the wreckage. The computers - powered up by one of Tim's contrivances as I'd come in through the door - blinked and bleeped and generally let me know that there were emails and voice mails and RSS updates and all the rest waiting for me but I ignored them.

One of the shards of crockery, I noticed, belonged to a mug given to me by a favourite ex-girlfriend, another had crumpled the perspex and wire model of The Idea that I'd used to get Tim interested in the first place. Which was one evening in the pub, I felt, almost nostalgically, that really had had consequences. Still, the model was gone, now - and so was the mug - so I thought I might as well do something about salvaging the company it had helped create. Which probably should have involved trying to track down my errant colleagues - or even just checking the messages, in the unlikely event that either of them had bothered to phone in - but instead I called Steve.

Steve from Flexible Energy Technologies - or FlexEnTech as he preferred ... or FlexEnBalls as he generally got - and, more relevantly, the Steve who'd been on the receiving end of Stage One of Maggie's meltdown the previous afternoon. And, yes, in my pacifistic, non-confrontational, argumentophobic way I did want to make peace with him, to an extent. But mainly I just wanted to talk about engineering for a while, share a gripe or two with a fellow entrepreneur ... or moan at a more or less sympathetic ear, basically.

It wasn't what I got. Actually, pretty much as soon as he took the call - or as soon as he'd clocked my voice - he started shouting. Quite loudly.

"Nyah," he started, or at least made the sort of strangled noise its difficult to spell. "Just the man I wanted to talk to. You guys involved with that bastard Simon, these days, man? Actually, we've had a stream of calls from our backers this morning, so I know you are, but I thought you'd like to know that the shithead's been doing some pretty comprehensive mailing - bigging you up and dissing all the rest of us."

He paused, not long enough for me to say anything coherent in response, then went on.

"Oh, and dissing the rest of us with shit we told you in confidence, off the record, in the fucking pub. I mean, we all got to eat, man - so you got a very flash DVD - one of our contacts sent us a copy - and I bet Ruthless Ruth had a hand in that - but even if you're desperate enough to do business with that fucker - and frankly, that's your problem - I for one don't take kindly to details of my business being passed on to my funders by a third party. And especially when the stuff's just plain wrong - we sorted that seal weld problem fucking weeks ago - I mean, it'll take me sodding months to get everyone back on board..."

I was rocked, reader, I was stunned. And even as bits of my brain struggled to process a rather large wodge of new information, I sort of knew what had happened. Well, had happened if I was lucky - was still happening if I wasn't. Someone had pissed Steve off and it wasn't Maggie, someone had disclosed some untoward information and it wasn't me. So it didn't take a genius to resolve that conundrum. I began to try and calm Steve down a bit ... even as most of my brain was wondering what Steve knew about Simon that I didn't.

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I think I did succeed in mollifying the bloke a little - he ended the call almost amicably, or at least with his normal tone of voice and grasp of sentence structure restored - but, unfortunately, concentrating on the human side of things - such as being nice, and conciliatory - meant that I singularly failed to get any knew information viz a viz Simon and his apparently multifarious shortcomings. Or about - what was it? - oh, yeah, Ruthless Ruth. Which gave me pause to ponder.

And ponder I did, albeit without much result. I was, in fact, still pondering when Maggie arrived - or, rather, swept in. Even in my preoccupied state I could see that she was unusually resolved, so I wasn't all that surprised when she simply ignored the evidence of yesterday's shenanigans and proceeded to collect a variety of personal belongings from her desk. Yep, I thought, the body language is clear enough - this is a woman making a life change, specifically chucking in a job - or ceasing to work for (and with) me. Unfortunately, said body language was also screaming 'Don't ask!' quite ... stridently.

So I didn't. I observed, of course - it wasn't a big office - and somehow what I saw was vaguely reassuring. She wasn't, I decided, angry, nor was she actually all that committed to her course of action ... she was a bit too hunched, too defensive for that. Of course, my analytical side chipped in, she is a Catholic, so she's probably guilty about something. So maybe she's doing all this because its simply easier than trying to explain to me what ever - whatever, indeed - might be on her mind. So let her be. See what happens.

And I did that, too. I had things - possibly world shattering things, from my particular perspective - to think about, after all, and over the years I've learned to trust those little inner voices. And, sure enough, after a fairly short while, Mag stopped collecting all her various bits and pieces into a bag ... and noticed the unattended PCs. Maybe she noticed me, too, but somehow I doubt it. In any case, some inner sense of responsibility - possibly even a maternal instinct - cut in and she sort of flipped into work mode.

As to whether she felt maternal towards me or the bloody computers, well ... that was a question...

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In the end, though, we got work done. Tim didn't appear, which I for one didn't find all that surprising, but possibly that was for the best, just at that point in time. Because the messages that Maggie ploughed into turned out to be more than usually interesting. Well, not interesting, exactly - more bloody annoying. Turned out it wasn't just Steve's crew who were - umm - taken aback by some of the stuff that, we learned, had gone out in our name.

Actually, pretty much the entire alternative energy community were ... well, not exactly pleased. Terminally fucked off and really, really angry were probably closer to the mark, but ... not close enough. I was still trying to think of a more accurate description - homicidal rage figured in quite a lot of the attempts - when Maggie interrupted.

"This is Tim's fault, isn't it?" she said, simply enough. I shrugged.

"Oh, Tim is the source, no doubt. But, no its not his fault. He's an engineer: indiscreet, inappropriate and socially inept, yes, but ... this is deliberate. This has been put together by someone who knew what they were doing, someone who wanted to inflict maximum damage on our "competitors" ... and didn't know, or didn't care, that doing so would blow us out of the water, too."