Of all the
people in the office, Harry considered Giselle his favourite, and she
his. At least that was the impression
she gave him from the very first days he was taken there as a child, and later
when doing work experience.
She had made
the law fun and was one of the reasons why Harry had originally chosen to follow
a career in law. To begin with, at any
rate.
But, as Harry
began to discover when he started law school, the law was anything but fun. It was a time when he also discovered that
she hadn't been showing him the right way to do things. And that, Harry considered, was wrong, and
caused him to suspect her motives for doing so.
It went on to
fuel an investigation into her background, her style of practising the law, and
her knowledge of the law in practice.
And that investigation had ended with a discovery that changed
everything, and especially his desire the practise law at all.
A simple open
and shut case, Sims v Simpson, a case brought by Sims that alleged that a piece
of property belonged to him, and not the defendant. Suffice to say, documents were discovered,
documents were either altered or forged, and a travesty of justice was
enacted.
A year later,
her role in the case was discovered, and it led to a very quiet end to what had been, up to then, an interesting career, if somewhat lacklustre after she had
married the elder Walthenson.
It could be
said she tried to use the case to impress her husband, but by then their
relationship had fractured past the point of no return and the marriage was
over. What had been planned as her
saving grace had exactly the opposite effect she had hoped for.
Officially,
she had ended up in the basement because she decided it was time to stop front-line lawyering as she called it, and move into a research role. And not long after that old man Walthenson
divorced her.
Not because of
another woman, younger and more motivated, but because of a legal disaster that
cost the practice a small fortune to keep it private.
It was just
another secret, one of many that pervaded any legal practice. The saying, he had heard spoken of in hushed
tones within those hallowed hallways, if the court doesn't know about it, no
harm done.
Winning then,
apparently, was everything, no matter what the cost.
But it was
another powerful reason why Harry hated the idea of becoming a lawyer, and even
more so in his father's practice.
And after
making the discovery which Harry knew his father was privy to, but never spoken
of, he decided to keep it to himself as well
No need to upset their rather fractious relationship any further.
Not unless he
needed it as a bargaining chip.
Giselle wasn't
at her desk that morning he decided to visit the office. Fortunately, neither of his brothers were
there either, both out visiting clients.
A quick chat
with Merilyn told him that Giselle would not be in until later that morning, so
it gave him time to poke around in the filing system, one that Giselle had
devised to keep others from finding anything in the research system unless she
delivered it.
She had told
him a long time before what she had to do to ensure her continued employment
and had shown it to Harry, whether deliberately or by mistake, and thus he also
knew his way around the filing and computer systems. He had been hoping she might be out because
he wanted to look at some of the files, if there were any, relating to the
dockside plot.
He needed to
know what his father had known.
He also needed
to look at his father's electronic diary, not something he could do by asking Merilyn
his personal assistant, if she would open it for him. His credentials for the investigation, given
by his mother, were not all-encompassing, and anything she hadn't considered
blocking, his brother Robert, had. That
was reason enough to believe his brother had something to hide or was currying
favour from Alicia.
There were too
many important company trade secrets that the practice could not afford to give
access to his brother had told him, a valid enough reason. Harry thought he would ask first, knowing
that he wasn't going to take heed of his brother's decree. It wouldn't be difficult to get what he
needed, and the icing on the cake, he would do it using his brother's access
code, and what that didn't cover, well, he had the back door login used by the
programmers, people he had worked with when they were installing and setting up
the systems.
It was this he
could use to gain access to the master hard drive where everything was stored,
and where, particularly, his father's and brothers' diaries were stored. He was not interested, yet, in any other
diaries other than those belonging to the family. It also included his mother whom he knew
sometimes consulted for the practice.
And there were
also the email accounts, always a go-to when things went awry in business, and
something the others didn't know, deleting emails didn't actually delete them,
it just hid them from view.
Fortunately
for him, the server bank was installed down in a room off the archive and was
rarely visited except by the maintenance company, and any one of three
servicemen. Giselle also poked her head
in the door from time to time, pretending she didn't know what was going on,
and was, as far as Henry was concerned, more switched on to an opportunity when
one presented itself to her, and poking around in the computer’s filing system
was one of them.
She had been
the first person to put her hand up as a network system administrator.
There were two
computers side by side, near the server room door, one an administrative
machine, the other for upstairs staff to use for searches of online documents.
The first
thing Harry did was put a USB drive into the main server to upload a small
program that Felicity said would enable her to log in as an administrator and
leave no trace of her activity. He
trusted her when she said it would not do anything else.
Then Harry sat
at the search machine so that if anyone came down, they would not see him on
the admin machine and raise suspicions.
He knew the necessary login information worked on both machines, unlike
those upstairs in the offices, set up for only one user, and their rather
narrow permissions.
He logged into
the mail administrator and brought up all the accounts. His father was first, and he picked three
days on either side of his disappearing.
Those emails before were standard requests and discussion points with
clients as he gathered evidence and discussed strategy for his current cases,
and then one, from Argeter, setting up lunch the day he disappeared. Nothing was added to say what it was about,
just a time and a place. He noted down
the details in his notebook.
Harry then
narrowed the search to only Argeter's emails, and firstly, noted a consistent
email on the 25th of May of each year reminding his father of the interest and
principal repayment due but the end of the month. An amount wasn't mentioned but Harry got the
impression it was a substantial amount.
Harry then
checked for an expense spreadsheet, a specially created ledger account each of
the lawyers had so they could bill their time and expenses to clients and found
no mention of Argeter. It must be, he
thought, somewhere else, though it was odd to Harry that the head of chambers
didn't have such information.
Harry made a
note that it might be a secret loan, his father not wanting to borrow money
from his wife, or her family, or, for that matter, his father, what was once a
sticking point for him. Another note
gave the impression that Argeter might be a reason for his disappearance,
perhaps because he couldn't pay back the money.
Or did his father use the money for gambling? He remembered a long time ago when he and
his brothers were home for the holidays, the arguments their parents had over
his father's drinking and gambling.
It was an odd
memory that popped into his head, the fact that his father had resented the
fact his wife was an heiress, and richer than he ever would be, and the fact
that he had told her he would make his own way in the world, without the
benefit of her wealth. They seemed to
him, now, such an unlikely couple, and more than once he had thought she might
be better off without him. That shine of
those early days of marriage had long worn off, and she had often moved in her
circle without him.
More than once
his friends had told him his parents were 'odd fish'.
Odd fish
indeed.
© Charles Heath 2020-2022
