“Is this a good time?”
“Good as any. I've eaten, I'm still under the limit and I still have my clothes on,” I told her.
“We need your help, Kate. I don't like to ask, but I don't know who else would know where to begin.”
This was no pick-your-brains business call. When Alexis wants my help with a story, she doesn't apologize. She knows that kind of professional help is a two-way street. “Tell me the score, I'll tell you if I can help.”
“You know that piece of land we're supposed to be buying? The one I showed you the pics of yesterday? Yeah?”
“Yeah,” I soothed. She sounded like she was about to explode.
“Well, you're not going to believe this. Chris went up there today to do some measurements. She figured that if she's going to be designing these houses, she needs to have a feel for the lie of the land so the properties can blend in with the flow of the landscape, right?”
“Right. So what's the problem?”
“The problem is, she gets up there to find a couple of surveyors marking out the plots. Well, she's a bit confused, you know,
because as far as we know none of the other self-builders we're working with have asked anyone to start work yet, on account of we haven't completed on it yet. So, she parks up in the Land Rover and watches them for half an hour or so. Then it dawns on her that the plots they're marking out are different altogether from the plots we've been sold. So she goes over to them and gets into conversation. You know Chris, she's not like me. I'd have been out there gripping them by the throat demanding to know what the hell they thought they were up to.” Alexis paused for breath, but not long enough for me to respond.
“But not Chris. She lets them tell her all about the land and how they're marking out the plots for the people who have bought them. Half a dozen have been bought by a local small builder, the rest by individuals, they tell her. Well, Chris is more than a little bewildered, on account of what they are telling her is completely at odds with the situation as we know it. So she tells them who she is and what she's doing there and asks them if they've got any proof of what they're saying, which of course they don't have, but they tell her the name of the solicitor who's acting for the purchasers.”
This time, I managed to get in, “I'm with you so far,” before the tide of Alexis's narrative swept back in. Richard was looking at me very curiously. He's not accustomed to hearing me take such a minor role in a telephone conversation.
“So Chris drives down to this solicitor's in Ramsbottom. She manages to convince their conveyancing partner that this is urgent, so he gives her five minutes. When she explains the situation, he says the land was sold by a builder and that the sales were all completed two days ago.” Alexis stopped short, as if what she'd said should make everything clear.
“I'm sorry, Alexis, I suspect I'm being really stupid here, but what exactly do you mean?”
“I mean the land's already been sold!” she howled. “We handed over five grand for a piece of land that had already been sold. I just don't understand how it could have happened! And I don't even know where to start trying to find out.” The anguish in her voice was heartbreaking. I knew how much she and Chris wanted this
project to work, for all sorts of reasons. Now, it looked as if the money they'd saved to get their feet on the first rung of the ladder had been thrown away.
“OK, OK, I'll look into it,” I soothed. “But I'm going to need some more info from you. What was the name of the solicitor in Ramsbottom that Chris saw?”
“Just a minute, I'll pass you over to Chris. She's got all the details. Thanks, Kate. I knew I could count on you.”
There was a brief pause, then a very subdued Chris came on the line. Her voice sounded like she'd been crying. “Kate? Oh God, I can't believe this is happening to us. I just don't understand it, any of it.” Then she proceeded to repeat everything Alexis had already told me.
I listened patiently, then said, “What was the name of the solicitor's you went to see in Ramsbottom?”
“Chapman and Gardner. I spoke to the conveyancing partner, Tim Pascoe. I asked him the name of the person who had sold the land, but he wouldn't tell me. So I said, was it T. R. Harris, and he gave me one of those lawyer's looks and said he couldn't comment, only he said it in that kind of way that means yes, you're right.”
I looked at the names I'd scribbled on my pad. “So who exactly is T. R. Harris?”
“T. R. Harris is the builder who was supposedly selling the land to us.” There was a note of exasperation in her voice, which I couldn't help feeling was a bit unfair. After all, I'm not a fully paid up member of the Psychic Society.
“And your solicitor is?”
“Martin Cheetham.” She rattled off the address and phone number.
“He your usual solicitor?” I asked.
“No. He specializes in conveyancing. One of the hacks on the
Chronicle
was interviewing him about how the new conveyancing protocol is working out, and they got talking, and they got on to the topic of builders catching a cold because they'd bought land speculatively and the bottom had fallen out of the market, and this hack said how one of his colleagues, i.e. Alexis, was looking for a chunk big enough for ten people to do a self-build scheme, and
Cheetham said he knew of a colleague who had a client who was a builder who had just the thing, so we went to see Cheetham, and he said this T. R. Harris had bought this land and couldn't afford to develop it himself so he was selling it off.” Chris talks in sentences longer than the law lords.
“And did you ever meet this builder?”
“Of course. T. R. Harris, call me Tom, Mr. Nice Guy. He met us all out there, walked the land out with us, divided it up into plots and gave us this sob story about how desperate he was to keep his business afloat, how he had half a dozen sites where the workers were depending on him to pay their wages, so could we please see our way to coughing up five thousand apiece as a deposit to secure the land, otherwise he was going to have to keep on trying to find other buyers, which would be a real pity since it obviously suited our needs so well and he liked the idea of the land being used for a self-build if only because he wouldn't have the heartache of watching some other builder make a nice little earner out of such a prime site that he'd been really sick to have to let go. He was so convincing, Kate, it never crossed our minds that he was lying, and he obviously fooled Cheetham as well. Can you do something?” I couldn't ignore the pleading note in her voice, even supposing I'd wanted to.
“I don't really understand what's happened, but of course I'll do what I can to help. At the very least, we should be able to get your money back, though I think you'll have to kiss goodbye to that particular piece of land.”
Chris groaned. “Don't, Kate. I know you're right, but I really don't want to think about it, we'd set our hearts on that site, it was just perfect, and I'd already got this really clear picture in my mind's eye of what the houses were going to look like.” I could imagine. Eat your heart out, Portmeirion.
“I'll take a look at it tomorrow, promise. But I need something from you. You'll have to give me a couple of letters of authority so that your solicitor and anybody else official will talk to me. Could Alexis drop them off on her way to work tomorrow morning?”
We sorted out the details of what the letters should say, and I only had to listen to the tale once more before I managed to get
off the phone. Then, of course, I had to go through it all for Richard.
“Somebody's been bang out of order here,” he said, outraged. He summed up my feelings exactly. It was the next bit I wasn't so happy about. “You're going to have to get this one sorted out double urgent, aren't you?”
Sometimes, it's hard to escape the feeling that the whole world's ganging up on you.
5
I gave Alexis her second shock of the week next morning when she dropped off the letters of authority. It was just before seven when I heard her key in my front door. Her feet literally left the floor when she walked through the kitchen doorway and saw me sitting on a high stool with a glass of orange juice.
“Shit!” she yelled. I thought her black hair was standing on end with fright till I realized I was just unfamiliar with how untamed it looks first thing. She runs a hand through it approximately twice a minute. By late afternoon, it usually manages to look less like it's been dragged through a hedge backwards then sideways.
“Ssh,” I admonished her. “You'll wake Sleeping Beauty.”
“You're up!” she exclaimed. “Not only are you up, your mouth's moving. Hold the front page!”
“Very funny. I can do mornings when I have to,” I said defensively. “I happen to have a breakfast meeting.”
“Excuse me while I vomit,” Alexis muttered. “I can't take yuppies without a caffeine inoculation. And I see that being conscious hasn't stretched to making a pot of coffee.”
“I'm saving myself for the Portland,” I said. “Help yourself to an instant. It's still better than that muck they serve in your canteen.” I plucked the letters from her hand, tucked them in my bag and left her deliberating between the Blend 37 and the Alta Rica.
Josh was already deep in the
Financial Times
when I got to the Portland, even though I was four minutes early. Eyeing him up across the restaurant in his immaculate dark blue suit, gleaming white shirt and strident silk tie, I was glad I'd taken the trouble to get suited up myself in my Marks & Spencer olive green with a cream high-necked blouse. Very businesslike. He was too
engrossed to notice till I was standing between the light and his paper.
He tore himself away from the mating habits of multinational companies and gave me the hundred-watt smile, all twinkles, dimples and sincerity. It makes Robert Redford, whom he resembles slightly, look like an amateur. I'm convinced Josh developed it in front of the mirror for susceptible female clients, and now it's become a habit whenever a woman comes within three feet of him. The charm comes without patronage, however. He's one of those men who doesn't have a problem with the notion that women are equals. Except the ones he has relationships with. Them he treats like brainless bimbos. This makes for a quick turnover, since the ones who have a brain can't take it for more than a couple of months, and the ones who haven't bore him rigid after six weeks.
In spite of keeping his emotions in his underpants, when it comes to business he's one of the best financial consultants in Manchester. He's a walking database on anything relating to insurance, investments, trust funds, tax shelters and the Financial Services Act. Anything he doesn't know, he knows where to find out. We met when I was still a law student, eking out my grant by doing odd jobs for Bill. My first ever undercover was in Josh's office, posing as a temp to track down the person who was using the computer to divert one pound out of each client account into his own unit trust account. Because our relationship started on a professional footing, Josh never came on to me and it's stayed that way. Now, I take him out for a slap-up dinner every couple of months as a thank you for running credit checks for me. The rest of the work and advice, like this, he bills us for at his usual extortionate hourly rate, so I got straight to the point.
I outlined the problem facing Ted Barlow while we scoffed our bowls of fruit and cereal. Josh asked a couple of questions, then the scrambled eggs and bacon arrived. He frowned in concentration as he ate. I wasn't sure if that was because he was thinking about Ted's problem or appreciating the subtle pleasures of the scrambled eggs, but I decided not to interrupt anyway. Besides, I was enjoying the rare pleasure of hot food so early in the day.
Then he sat back, mopped his lips with the napkin and poured a
fresh cup of coffee. “There's obviously some kind of fraud going on here,” he said. With anyone else, I'd have made some sarcastic crack about stating the obvious, but Josh did his degree at Cambridge and he likes to establish the ground under his feet before he builds up the speculation, so I managed to keep my mouth zipped.
“Mmm,” I said.
“I would say that the chances are the bank has a pretty shrewd idea of what that fraud is. They obviously think, however, that your Mr. Barlow is the villain of the piece, and that is why they have taken the steps they've taken, and why they are refusing to discuss their detailed reasons with him. They don't want to alert him to the fact that they have worked out for themselves what he is up to, so they have shrouded it in generalizations.” He paused and spread a cold triangle of toast thickly with butter. The way he was chugging the cholesterol, I didn't feel at all confident he'd live long enough to retire at forty. I don't know how he stays so trim. I suspect there's a portrait of an elephant in his attic.
“I'm not sure I follow you,” I admitted.
“Sorry. I'll give you an example I came across a little time ago. I have a client who owns a double-glazing firm. They had a similar experience to that of your Mr. Barlowâthe bank closed down their credit and a few days later, the police were all over them. It turns out that there had been a spate of burglaries around the North West that all followed the same pattern. They were all houses that had a drive at the side with access to the rear of the house. The neighbors would see a double-glazing firm's van turn up. The workmen would start removing the ground floor windows, while one of them was removing the household valuables through the back or side of the house and loading them into the van. The neighbors, of course, thought the family were simply having replacement windows installed. They might wonder why the workmen disappeared at lunchtime and failed to return, leaving plastic sheeting over the window holes and the old windows sitting in the drive, but no one wondered enough to do anything about it.