Twelve Red Herrings

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  TO DEAN PETER F. KROGH

  WITH THANKS FOR HIS KINDNESS TO

  MY SON WILLIAM WHEN HE WAS

  AT GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgments

  TRIAL AND ERROR

  CHEAP AT HALF THE PRICE

  DOUGIE MORTIMER’S RIGHT ARM

  DO NOT PASS GO

  CHUNNEL VISION

  SHOESHINE BOY

  YOU’LL NEVER LIVE TO REGRET IT

  NEVER STOP ON THE MOTORWAY

  NOT FOR SALE

  TIMEO DANAOS …

  AN EYE FOR AN EYE

  ONE MAN’S MEAT …

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  RARE

  BURNT

  OVERDONE

  A POINT

  ALSO BY JEFFREY ARCHER

  PRAISE FOR JEFFREY ARCHER AND HIS BESTSELLING NOVELS

  Copyright Page

  TRIAL AND ERROR

  It’s hard to know exactly where to begin. But first, let me explain why I’m in jail.

  The trial had lasted for eighteen days, and from the moment the judge had entered the courtroom the public benches had been filled to overflowing. The jury at Leeds Crown Court had been out for almost two days, and rumor had it that they were hopelessly divided. On the barristers’ bench there was talk of hung juries and retrials, as it had been more than eight hours since Mr. Justice Cartwright had told the foreman of the jury that their verdict need no longer be unanimous: a majority of ten to two would be acceptable.

  Suddenly there was a buzz in the corridors, and the members of the jury filed quietly into their places. Press and public alike began to stampede back into court. All eyes were on the foreman of the jury, a fat, jolly-looking little man dressed in a double-breasted suit, striped shirt and a colorful bow tie, striving to appear solemn. He seemed the sort of fellow with whom, in normal circumstances, I would have enjoyed a pint at the local. But these were not normal circumstances.

  As I climbed back up the steps into the dock, my eyes settled on a pretty blond who had been seated in the gallery every day of the trial. I wondered if she attended all the sensational murder trials or if she was just fascinated by this one. She showed absolutely no interest in me, and like everyone else, was concentrating her full attention on the foreman of the jury.

  The clerk of the court, dressed in a wig and a long black gown, rose and read out from a card the words I suspect he knew by heart.

  “Will the foreman of the jury please stand?”

  The jolly little fat man rose slowly from his place.

  “Please answer my next question yes or no. Members of the jury, have you reached a verdict on which at least ten of you are agreed?”

  “Yes, we have.”

  “Members of the jury, do you find the prisoner at the bar guilty or not guilty as charged?”

  There was total silence in the courtroom.

  My eyes were fixed on the foreman with the colorful bow tie. He cleared his throat and said,“ …

  I first met Jeremy Alexander in 1978, at a CBI training seminar in Bristol. Fifty-six British companies who were looking for ways to expand into Europe had come together for a briefing on Community law. At the time that I signed up for the seminar, Cooper’s, the company of which I was chairman, ran 127 vehicles of varying weights and sizes and was fast becoming one of the largest private trucking companies in Britain.

  My father had founded the firm in 1931, starting out with three vehicles—two of them pulled by horses—and an overdraft limit of ten pounds at his local Martins bank. By the time we became “Cooper & Son” in 1967, the company had seventeen vehicles with four wheels or more and delivered goods all over the north of England. But the old man still resolutely refused to exceed his ten-pound overdraft limit.

  I once expressed the view, during a downturn in the market, that we should be looking further afield in search of new business—perhaps even as far as the Continent. But my father wouldn’t hear of it. “Not a risk worth taking,” he declared. He distrusted anyone born south of the Humber, let alone those who lived on the other side of the Channel. “If God put a strip of water between us, he must have had good reasons for doing so,” were his final words on the subject. I would have laughed, if I hadn’t realized he meant it.

  When he retired in 1977—reluctantly, at the age of seventy—I took over as chairman, and began to set in motion some ideas I’d been working on for the past decade, though I knew my father didn’t approve of them. Europe was only the beginning of my plans for the company’s expansion. Within five years I wanted to go public. By then, I realized, we would require an overdraft facility of at least a million pounds, and would therefore have to move our account to a bank that recognized that the world stretched beyond the county boundaries of Yorkshire.

  It was around this time that I heard about the CBI seminar at Bristol, and applied for a place.

  The seminar began on the Friday, with an opening address from the head of the European directorate of the CBI. After that the delegates split into eight small working groups, each chaired by an expert on Community law. My group was headed by Jeremy Alexander. I admired him from the moment he started speaking—in fact, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that I was overawed. He was totally self-assured, and as I was to learn, he could effortlessly present a convincing argument on any subject, from the superiority of the Code Napoleon to the inferiority of England’s cricket team.

  He lectured us for an hour on the fundamental differences in practice and procedure between the member states of the Community, then answered all our questions on commercial and company law, even finding time to explain the significance of the Uruguay Round. Like me, the other members of our group never stopped taking notes.

  We broke up for lunch a few minutes before one, and I managed to grab a place next to Jeremy. I was already beginning to think that he might be the ideal person to advise me on how to go about achieving my European ambitions.

  Listening to him talk about his career over a meal of stargazy pie with red peppers, I kept thinking that, although we were about the same age, we couldn’t have come from more different backgrounds. Jeremy’s father, a banker by profession, had escaped from Eastern Europe only days before the outbreak of the Second World War. He had settled in England, anglicized his name, and sent his son to Westminster. From there Jeremy had gone on to King’s College, London, where he studied law, graduating with first-class honors.

  My own father was a self-made man from the Yorkshire Dales who had insisted I leave school the moment I passed my O levels. “I’ll teach you more about the real world in a month than you’d learn from any of those university types in a lifetime,” he used to say. I accepted this philosophy without question, and left school a few weeks after my sixteenth birthday. The next morning I joined Cooper’s as an apprentice, and spent my first three years at the depot under the watchful eye of Buster Jackson, the works manager, who taught me how to take the company’s vehicles apart and, more importantly, how to put them back together again.

  After graduating from the workshop, I spent two years in the invoicing department, learning how to calculate charges and collect bad debts. A few weeks after my twenty-first birthday I passed the test for my heavy goods vehicles license, and for the next three years I zigzagged across the north of England, delivering everything from poultry to pineapples to our far-flung customers. Jer
emy spent the same period reading for a master’s degree in Napoleonic law at the Sorbonne.

  When Buster Jackson retired, I was moved back to the depot in Leeds to take over as works manager. Jeremy was in Hamburg, writing a doctoral thesis on international trade barriers. By the time he had finally left the world of academia and taken up his first real job, as a partner with a large firm of commercial solicitors in the City, I had been earning a working wage for eight years.

  Although I was impressed by Jeremy at the seminar, I sensed, behind that surface affability, a powerful combination of ambition and intellectual snobbery that my father would have mistrusted. I felt he’d only agreed to give the lecture on the off-chance that, at some time in the future, we might be responsible for spreading some butter on his bread. I now realize that, even at our first meeting, he suspected that in my case it might be honey.

  It didn’t help my opinion of the man that he had a couple of inches on me in height, and a couple less around the waist. Not to mention the fact that the most attractive woman attending the seminar that weekend ended up in his bed on Saturday night.

  We met up on Sunday morning to play squash, and he ran me ragged without even appearing to raise a sweat. “We must get together again,” he said as we walked to the showers. “If you’re really thinking of expanding into Europe, you might find I’m able to help.”

  My father had taught me never to make the mistake of imagining that your friends and your colleagues were necessarily the same animals (he often cited the Cabinet as an example). So, although I didn’t like him, I made sure that when I left Bristol at the end of the conference, I was in possession of Jeremy’s numerous telephone and telex numbers.

  I drove back to Leeds on Sunday evening, and when I reached home, I ran upstairs and sat on the end of the bed regaling my sleepy wife with an account of why it had turned out to be such a worthwhile weekend.

  Rosemary was my second wife. My first, Helen, had been at Leeds High School for Girls at the same time that I had attended the nearby grammar school. The two schools shared a gymnasium, and I fell in love with her at the age of thirteen, while watching her play basketball. After that I would find any excuse to hang around the gym, hoping to catch a glimpse of her underwear as she leapt to send the ball unerringly into the net. As the schools took part in various joint activities, I began to take an active interest in theatrical productions even though I couldn’t act. I attended joint debates and never opened my mouth. I enlisted in the combined schools’ orchestra and ended up playing the triangle. After I had left school and gone to work at the depot, I continued to see Helen, who was studying for her A levels. Despite my passion for her, we didn’t make love until we were both eighteen, and even then I wasn’t certain that we had consummated anything. Six weeks later she told me, in a flood of tears, that she was pregnant. Against the wishes of her parents, who had hoped that she would go on to university, a hasty wedding was arranged, but as I never wanted to look at another girl for the rest of my life, I was secretly delighted by the outcome of our youthful indiscretion.

  Helen died on the night of September 14, 1964, giving birth to our son, Tom, who himself only survived a week. I thought I would never get over it, and I’m not sure I ever have. After her death I didn’t so much as glance at another woman for years, putting all my energy into the company.

  Following the funeral of my wife and son, my father, not a soft or sentimental man—you won’t find many of those in Yorkshire—revealed a gentle side to his character that I had never seen before. He would often phone me in the evening to see how I was getting on, and insisted that I regularly join him in the directors’ box at Elland Road to watch Leeds United on Saturday afternoons. I began to understand, for the first time, why my mother still adored him after more than twenty years of marriage.

  I met Rosemary about four years later at a ball given to launch the Leeds Music Festival. Not a natural habitat for me, but as Cooper’s had taken a full-page advertisement in the program, and Brigadier Kershaw, the high sheriff of the county and chairman of the ball committee, had invited us to join him as his guests, I had no choice but to dress up in my seldom-worn dinner jacket and accompany my parents to the ball.

  I was placed on Table 17, next to a Miss Kershaw, who turned out to be the high sheriff’s daughter. She was elegantly dressed in a strapless blue gown that emphasized her comely figure, and had a mop of red hair and a smile that made me feel we had been friends for years. She told me over something described on the menu as “avocado with dill” that she had just finished studying English at Durham University and wasn’t quite sure what she was going to do with her life.

  “I don’t want to be a teacher,” she said. “And I’m certainly not cut out to be a secretary.” We chatted through the second and third courses, ignoring the people seated on either side of us. After coffee she dragged me onto the dance floor, where she continued to explain the problems of contemplating any form of work while her diary was so packed with social engagements.

  I felt rather flattered that the high sheriff’s daughter should show the slightest interest in me, and to be honest I didn’t take it seriously when at the end of the evening, she whispered in my ear, “Let’s keep in touch.”

  But a couple of days later she rang and invited me to join her and her parents for lunch that Sunday at their house in the country. “And then perhaps we could play a little tennis afterwards. You do play tennis, I suppose?”

  I drove over to Church Fenton on Sunday and found that the Kershaws’ residence was exactly what I would have expected—large and decaying, which, come to think of it, wasn’t a bad description of Rosemary’s father as well. But he seemed a nice enough chap. Her mother, however, wasn’t quite so easy to please. She originated from somewhere in Hampshire, and was unable to mask her feeling that, although I might be good for the occasional charitable donation, I was not quite the sort of person with whom she expected to be sharing her Sunday lunch. Rosemary ignored the odd barbed comment from her and continued to chat to me about my work.

  As it rained all afternoon, we never got round to playing tennis, so Rosemary used the time to seduce me in the little pavilion behind the court. At first I was nervous about making love to the high sheriff’s daughter, but I soon got used to the idea. However, as the weeks passed, I began to wonder if I was anything more to her than a “truck driver fantasy.” Until, that is, she started to talk about marriage. Mrs. Kershaw was unable to hide her disgust at the very idea of someone like me becoming her son-in-law, but her opinion turned out to be irrelevant, as Rosemary remained implacable on the subject. We were married eighteen months later.

  Over two hundred guests attended the rather grand county wedding in the parish church of St. Mary’s. But I confess that when I turned to watch Rosemary progressing up the aisle, my only thoughts were of my first wedding ceremony.

  For a couple of years Rosemary made every effort to be a good wife. She took an interest in the company, learned the names of all the employees, even became friendly with the wives of some of the senior executives. But, as I worked all the hours God sent, I fear I may not always have given her as much attention as she needed. You see, Rosemary yearned for a life that was made up of regular visits to the Grand Theater for Opera North, followed by dinner parties with her county friends that would run into the early hours, while I preferred to work on weekends and to be tucked up in bed before eleven on most nights. For Rosemary, I wasn’t turning out to be the husband in the title of the Oscar Wilde play she had recently taken me to—and it didn’t help that I had fallen asleep during the second act.

  After four years without producing any offspring—not that Rosemary wasn’t very energetic in bed—we began to drift our separate ways. If she started having affairs (and I certainly did, when I could find the time), she was discreet about them. And then she met Jeremy Alexander.

  It must have been about six weeks after the seminar in Bristol that I had occasion to phone Jeremy and seek his adv
ice. I wanted to close a deal with a French cheese company to transport its wares to British supermarkets. The previous year I had made a large loss on a similar enterprise with a German beer company, and I couldn’t afford to make the same mistake again.

  “Send me all the details,” Jeremy had said. “I’ll look over the paperwork on the weekend and call you on Monday morning.”

  He was as good as his word, and when he phoned, he mentioned that he had to be in York that Thursday to brief a client and suggested we get together the following day to go over the contract. I agreed, and we spent most of that Friday closeted in the Cooper’s boardroom checking over every dot and comma of the contract. It was a pleasure to watch such a professional at work, even if Jeremy did occasionally display an irritating habit of drumming his fingers on the table when I hadn’t immediately understood what he was getting at.

  Jeremy, it turned out, had already talked to the French company’s in-house lawyer in Toulouse about any reservations he might have. He assured me that, although Monsieur Sisley spoke no English, he had made him fully aware of our anxieties. I remember being struck by his use of the word “our.”

  After we had turned the last page of the contract, I realized that everyone else in the building had left for the weekend, so I suggested to Jeremy that he might like to join Rosemary and me for dinner. He checked his watch, considered the offer for a moment, and then said, “Thank you, that’s very kind of you. Could you drop me back at the Queen’s Hotel so I can get changed?”

  Rosemary, however, was not pleased to be told at the last minute that I had invited a complete stranger to dinner without warning her, even though I assured her that she would like him.

  Jeremy rang our front doorbell a few minutes after eight. When I introduced him to Rosemary, he bowed slightly and kissed her hand. After that, they didn’t take their eyes off each other all evening. Only a blind man could have missed what was likely to happen next, and although I might not have been blind, I certainly turned a blind eye.