Conferences are Murder (22 page)

“Remind me never to call you if I need legal representation,” Lindsay muttered. “Okay, I'll take your word for it, against my better judgement. Just keep your head down, and follow me.”

“Eat your heart out, Catwoman,” Sophie said under her breath
as Lindsay set off, hugging the walls and tucking her head down into her chest.

They quickly worked their way round to the building's entrance, avoiding the arcs of the cameras as far as possible. Lindsay keyed in the combination Pauline had given her for the general secretary. No one had thought to cancel it following Tom Jack's spectacular plunge, and the door lock clicked open. The two women slipped inside, finding themselves in a dimly lit corridor. At the end was a lift. Lindsay punched the call button, and in a matter of seconds, the doors slid noiselessly open.

“Which floor?” Sophie asked, finger poised.

“Er . . . I don't actually know,” Lindsay confessed, scuffing the toe of her trainer on the carpet.

“You—don't—know?” Sophie demanded, articulating each word slowly and distinctly as the doors closed.

“Not as such,” Lindsay said. “I couldn't really ask, could I? Not without making it really obvious in a room full of head office staff that I was about to go off and do a Watergate.”

“Fine. So we're in an eight-storey office building without a clue which office we should be looking in? Well, Lindsay, that's a lot of locks to pick before morning,” Sophie said, pulling a rueful smile to take the edge off her words.

Lindsay scowled and leaned past her lover to hit the ground floor button. When the doors opened, she marched across the foyer to a semi-circular desk marked “Reception. All visitors must sign in here.” The light from the lift provided enough illumination for a cursory search. Sophie leaned against the lift door, her finger on the “doors open” button, a smile in her eyes. Nothing worked better with Lindsay than a little needle, she thought to herself. Meanwhile, Lindsay pulled open the top drawer of the desk. She took out a clipboard with yesterday's brief list of visitors and gave it a quick glance. She let out a low whistle. “Police were here yesterday,” she said. “Let's hope there's something left for us.” Dropping the clipboard, she rootled through the drawer. “Gotcha!” she said confidently, waving a stapled bundle of paper above her head. “Name, title, extension number, office.”

She walked slowly back to the lift, flicking through the pages. “Here we are. Tom Jack, general secretary, extension 8111, room 803. Safe to assume that's on the top floor?” Lindsay said.

“Good thinking, Batman,” Sophie said, pressing the button marked eight. Moments later, they stepped out into blackness, which became impenetrable as soon as the lift door shut behind them. “I don't suppose we remembered a torch?” Sophie asked.

Lindsay rummaged in her bag, finally finding a small pencil torch with a powerful, narrow beam. “Give the girl a coconut?”

She shone the light on the doors as they moved along the narrow corridor. 803 was the third door on the left. Lindsay tried the handle, and to her delight and surprise, the door swung open. The torch beam revealed a small, businesslike secretary's office, complete with filing cabinets, word processor terminal and a low, three-seater sofa, presumably for Union Jack's visitors. On the right-hand wall, there was another door. Lindsay headed purposefully in that direction, while Sophie made for the computer, which she switched on as Lindsay opened the door to the inner sanctum.

“Well, Union Jack didn't stint himself,” Lindsay commented as she swung the torch beam across the room. The office was done out in top-of-the-range hi-tech black and chrome, a style that had already dated. Lindsay walked over to the two walls of windows that made it look as if the corner office extended indefinitely into the sodium-lit night streets. There was an array of buttons in the central pillar, and she pressed the one marked “close.” A sweep of vertical blinds whispered across the windows, shutting out the town below. She moved over to the desk and switched on a black halogen lamp. On a stand to one side was a PC, but Lindsay wasn't interested in that. She knew her limitations. Besides, she could already hear the sound of Sophie's fingers on the secretary's word processor. When she'd had enough of playing with that machine, she could unravel the secrets of Union Jack's PC.

Lindsay sat on the edge of a luxurious black leather swivel-and-tilt chair and tried the drawers of the massive black ash desk. They were locked. Of course, the police would
presumably have had Union Jack's keys. They wouldn't have had to bust open his expensive desk. And she didn't want to if she could avoid it. “Sophie?” she called.

“Problems?” came the reply.

“Are the drawers in that desk open?”

There was a brief pause while Sophie experimented. “All except the bottom one. Why?”

Lindsay returned to the outer office. “Any keys in them? I'm looking for a key that would unlock a serious desk.”

“Help yourself,” Sophie said, returning to the menu on her screen. Lindsay searched the top drawer, with no result. Then she felt the underside of the drawer.

She let out a satisfied sigh. “Oldest trick in the book,” she said, pulling the key away, complete with the Sellotape that had held it in place. “I don't know, some days it's just all too easy.”

Back in Tom Jack's office, she slipped the key into the lock that held all three drawers on the left-hand side shut. It turned effortlessly, and Lindsay started her search. The top drawer contained stationery, a couple of half-used pads with scribbled notes from committee meetings, pens, pencils and paperclips. The second drawer held three loose-leaf folders crammed with press clippings about Tom Jack and his role as general secretary of AMWU. There were also a few computer discs and a contacts book, which Lindsay slipped into her bag for later.

The third drawer was filled with an assortment of document wallets. The first few contained details of union-management disputes which Lindsay soon discovered involved Tom Jack himself. They had all been resolved, not exclusively to the greater good of the AMWU members, but there was nothing contentious enough in any of them to lead to threats, never mind murder.

The next said on its cover SIGS. It contained a bizarre assortment of documents. There were photostats of membership applications for the former Journalists' Union, some going back more than twenty years. There were nomination forms for JU lay officials' posts, properly filled in and signed by the appropriate branch officers. There were applications for Press
passes, photocopies of motions for annual delegate conferences sent in by branches and a few meetings' attendance sheets. All the documents related to the JU, but there was no other common factor that Lindsay could discern, apart from the fact that they all seemed to be completely in order. Frustrated, she shoved the contents back into the file and continued her burrowing.

The bottom folder in the pile was unmarked. Lindsay opened it and pulled out a thick sheaf of expenses dockets. Almost all of them were JU forms, though the last few dozen were AMWU ones. Off the top of her head, Lindsay estimated there must be several hundred. A quick flick through the pile revealed they had all been stamped “paid.”

Lindsay sat back in the seat and began to go through the dockets more carefully. Soon, she began to discern a pattern. The earliest went back almost nine years. They covered a wide range of committee and executive meetings. What was fascinating was the signatures on more than three quarters of the dockets. In an assured, sprawling hand, they read “Laura Craig.”

13

Feeling slightly dazed, Lindsay walked back through to the outer office, where Sophie had also closed the blinds and switched on a desk lamp. “Find anything?” she said, with an air of preoccupation.

“I think so. I'm just not sure exactly what it is. How about you?” Lindsay asked, leaning over Sophie's shoulder and peering at the screen.

“Nothing of any interest. Letters, balance sheets, confidential reports about restructuring. I suppose some of it must be controversial, but I can't for the life of me imagine anyone killing Union Jack because he proposed halving the size of the Printing New Technology Steering Group,” she said drily.

“Is this machine a stand-alone or part of a network?” Lindsay asked.

“My God, Gordon, you're not finally getting to grips with modern technology, are you? Where did you learn about things
like networks? Have you been reading adult magazines again?”

“Very droll. I didn't just ask for fun, you know,” Lindsay said huffily.

Sophie cast her eyes heavenwards. “So-rree. It's part of a network.”

“Does it have committee minutes on it?” Lindsay asked.

“I don't know. Let's have a look.” Sophie left the file she was reading and made her way back to the main network menu.

Lindsay scanned the list and pointed to the seventh item. “That'll do. Industrial Sector Councils. Can you get that for me?” Sophie hit a key and brought up a sub-menu. Lindsay consulted her dockets, then said, “Broadcasting Technology.” Sophie selected another key, and an array of dates appeared. “Okay. Let's try 25.2.92.” Sophie moved the cursor over the date Lindsay had chosen and hit “enter.” On the screen, the minutes of the meeting appeared.

Lindsay ran her finger along the list of those present. Then she checked two of her dockets. She compared them to the list again, then let out a long, slow sigh of satisfaction. “I can see a light at the end of the tunnel, and I'd bet a month's salary that it's not an oncoming train.”

“Care to enlighten me? Or do I get treated like the typical Watson, kept in the dark till the very end?” Sophie asked.

“Sorry. I think that someone has been fiddling expenses on a scale to make your eyes water. It works like this. When you're a lay official of the union, and you come to head office for meetings, you're entitled to claim travelling and meal expenses, and sometimes overnight allowances too. If you're a freelance, you can also claim a sum of money that's supposed to go some way towards covering loss of potential earnings while you're attending meetings. What usually happens is, you get to the meeting and the full-time officer who's responsible for that sector of the union dishes out expenses forms. You fill in your form, the officer authorizes them with a signature, takes them up to the accounts department and goes back in an hour or so to pick up the cash and hand it out.”

“Cash? In 1993?” Sophie said incredulously.

“The theory is that it's cheaper to the union than issuing dozens of checks for relatively small amounts. Anyway, not everyone gets round to filling their form in on the day. For example, if you're actually chairing the meeting, it can be difficult to make the time. So in those cases, you send the form in later, an officer authorizes it retrospectively, and the accounts department hang on to the dosh till the next time you're in head office for a meeting. If you specifically ask for it, they'll send you a check, but they don't like doing that. So what I have here is a bundle of expense dockets that have apparently gone through the system and been paid out. Only problem is, according to at least one set of minutes, people appear to have been paid money for attending meetings they weren't at. And in the vast majority of these cases, Laura Craig was the officer responsible for signing the dockets.” Suddenly, Lindsay leapt to her feet with the look of a woman whose brain has just made a racing change from second to third gear.

She dashed back through to Tom Jack's office, shouting, “And that's what the SIGS file is for! Union Jack was comparing the signatures on the dockets with those people's real signatures!” She came tearing back with the SIGS wallet. “He was stitching her up! He'd signed some of those phoney dockets himself, and so had other officials, but I bet she'd actually taken them up to the finance office and grabbed the dosh. He was covering his own back by stitching her up!” Lindsay sounded like an over-excited five-year-old on Christmas morning. She thumbed through the documents till she found the one she was looking for.

“Here!” she shouted triumphantly. “Look at this. It's Peter McKellar's signature on his application for a Press card. Now look at this expenses docket that's supposed to cover his return train fare from Newcastle!” She thrust the documents under Sophie's nose. While there were similarities between the two signatures, it was clear that they were by different hands.

“The one on the expenses form is much more rounded,” Sophie said. “I agree, they do look as if they've been written by different people. So where exactly does that take us?”

“Sophie, we're looking at thousands of pounds here over the last nine years,” Lindsay said, awe in her voice. “Tom Jack was obviously about to expose Laura Craig. There's no way she could survive that. She'd be facing charges of fraud, maybe even prison. One thing's for sure, she'd never work in the labor movement again. What better motive could anyone have for getting rid of him?”

Sophie got to her feet, switching off the computer as she rose. “Personally, I'd sell my soul to someone who promised me I'd never have to work in the labor movement again. Your theory does presuppose that she knew what he was doing. I suppose you want me to have a poke about in his PC to see if there's anything in there to support that?”