Flashpoint (3 page)

“I’m gratified that you grant me that much.”

“But have you considered this point? The total number of apprentice members at that date was under fifty.”

“Forty-seven to be precise.”

“Right. So even if every one of them had voted against amalgamation, it would not have negatived the resolution.”

“And you think that is the view the Court would take?”

There was something here that I didn’t understand. Jonas was not only playing his cards close to his chest, he was playing them as though he had a couple of aces up his sleeve. I said, in a tone that I made intentionally provocative, “I think you’ll find that I’m right about that.”

“Then of course, that settles it,” said Jonas. “When an official, occupying an important position in the Law Society, comes to a considered conclusion, there is no more to be said about the matter. Except, of course,” he added, “that it is absolutely immaterial. I am no longer concerned with what took place at that particular meeting. I am interested in certain events which took place – or possibly I should say, which did
not
take place – before it and after it. If you would care to cast an eye over these few papers–” He walked across to the safe, and extracted a folder. I was relieved to see that it was a slim one. “You will then be able to give me your considered opinion on a much more important topic. Should Mr William Dylan still be at liberty, or should he be serving a short, but salutary term of imprisonment?”

The train back to Waterloo, moving against the commuter tide, was slow and almost empty. I was glad of the chance of undisturbed thought. I was trying to make some sense out of what Jonas had told me.

When I got back to the Society Laurence Fairbrass had gone home. He always slipped away quickly when a Test Match was being played. He liked to see as much as he could of the last hour’s play on television. As soon as stumps had been drawn I rang him up. He was in a good mood. The England bowlers had been tying up the opposition’s tail.

He said, “It sounds to me like just another silly-Killey. It’s impossible to tell without seeing the figures.”

“He gave me copies of the accounts.”

“I’ll look at them in the morning – I shouldn’t lose any sleep over it, if I were you.”

“Actually, I don’t see why we should worry about it at all,” I said. “It’s nothing to do with us.”

I said the same thing the next morning, while Laurence examined the photostats I had brought back with me.

“What are this lot?”

“They’re the accounts of ACAT for the six years before the amalgamation.”

“ACAT was Dylan’s Union, wasn’t it?”

“Dylan’s Union is a good description of it. It was a tiny affair. Never more than six hundred members. He was Secretary, Treasurer and Convenor of the shop stewards.”

“I can’t read the signature on the certificate.”

“Jonas says it was an old boy called Mason. He had been a Union member before he retired.”

“A qualified accountant?”

“Good heavens no. Nothing like that.”

Laurence said, “Hmph,” and started to read. He spent half his working life studying accounts and could read a balance sheet as easily as you or I can read any ordinary fairy story.

He said, “These seem perfectly straightforward. Member’s subscription three pound ten per annum. It doesn’t seem a lot.”

“Actually it was slightly above the national average at the time.”

Laurence looked at me over his glasses and said, “And how would you know that?”

“I looked it up.”

“I thought you said this was nothing to do with us.”

I hadn’t any real answer to that. Laurence was doing sums with a pencil on his blotter. He said, “Income from subscriptions, say £2,150. Rents from property £950. What would those be?”

“Some old buffer died and left them a block of shops and offices. The Union used one of the offices as its headquarters. That’s why you won’t find any figure for rent in the Income and Expenditure account.”

“Outgoings – lighting, heating, rates, insurance, postage, secretarial and audit expenses, representation at congresses, shop stewards’ expenses – just under two thousand pounds a year. They didn’t waste money, did they?”

“They seem to have run the whole thing on a shoestring,” I said. “They were regularly saving over a thousand a year. It all went into the Provident Fund. It was pretty healthy when they joined MGM. You can see the figure in the last account, £10,980.”

“What
are
these accounts? I mean, who was accounting to whom?”

“Dylan, as Treasurer, had to account to his own Trustees once a year for the money in his hands.”

“Not to the Registrar?”

“No. They weren’t a registered Union. They didn’t have to make an annual return.”

“So these are nothing more than private accounts, circulated inside the family and audited by a member of the family.”

“That’s correct.”

“And Killey says these accounts were fudged?”

“Not a bit of it. They were a bit amateurish, but perfectly accurate as far as they went.”

“Then what
is
he saying?”

“To understand that you have to look at MGM’s annual return. The amalgamation took place in the autumn. The Instrument of Amalgamation was dated October 10th. On this occasion MGM had to split the annual return – you see?”

“I can see that,” said Laurence. “They show their own assets separately. They had to do that, I expect, to reconcile them with the previous year’s return. And then they show what they took over from ACAT. I imagine in subsequent returns the assets were amalgamated?”

“Right.”

“I still don’t see the rabbit.”

“It’s the Provident Fund. In ACAT’s June account it was shown as £10,980. In the handover it’s down to £10,450. The difference is shown as amalgamation expenses.”

“Not unreasonable, surely? Solicitors and accountants involved. It could easily have cost £530.”

“There are two points about that,” I said. “The first is that ACAT was quite regularly saving about a hundred pounds a month. Between June and October they ought to have been four hundred pounds richer, not five hundred poorer. The other is that ACAT didn’t have any amalgamation expenses.”

“They didn’t?”

“MGM paid them all. It was in the agreement. Not many people knew it, but Killey did, because he drafted the agreement himself.”

“Didn’t someone question this at the time?”

“It wouldn’t have been easy to spot,” I said. “You have to have three separate bits of information. The private June account of ACAT, which only the Trustees saw, the annual return of MGM, which went to the Registrar
and
a copy of the amalgamation agreement. I don’t know who saw that. Probably only the lawyers. It’s taken Jonas himself all this time to spot the nigger in the woodpile. All the time that he’s wasted beefing about irregularities in voting procedure he could have been making a much more serious allegation against Dylan. Peculation of Union funds.”

Laurence wasn’t listening to me. He was reading the papers again, considering the figures, puzzling out their significance, weighing probability against improbability, truth against falsehood.

In the end he said, “It’s plausible, but I don’t think it’ll hold water. There are too many unknown factors. For instance, ACAT had been losing members each year. Not many, but the numbers were dropping. Probably that’s one reason they were keen to join up with MGM. When the news of the amalgamation got about they could easily have lost more. During the four months between June and October they could have been running at a loss.”

“There’s nothing to show it either way,” I agreed. “I suppose one could find out, if the records still existed.”

“Another thing, you know very well that when one party undertakes to pay the costs of a transaction it never means every penny. It means direct and necessary costs. Dylan could have had a lot of running about to do. Days, and even weeks in Sheffield. MGM wouldn’t have paid for all that.”

“Certainly,” I said, “and they could have given a farewell dinner to the outgoing Trustees. There are lots of possible explanations. All Killey is saying is that, on the face of the accounts, several hundred pounds have gone spare, and it’s up to Dylan to explain just where and how they went.”

“Why Dylan in particular?”

“Because he was Treasurer and because he had a sole signature on the current account. If any money was extracted, he was the person to do it. And there was something else. He was pretty hard up at the time.”

“How do you know?”

“Killey says so. He says that at least one of the local solicitors had a writ out against him. It was a debt to a builder for over two hundred pounds. And it was paid off just after the amalgamation. And he thought Dylan had a number of other debts – all of which were paid off at the same time. It didn’t bother anyone. The impression was that when MGM took him on as Assistant Secretary they made him a loan, on fairly generous terms, to get his creditors off his neck.”

“Which they could have done.”

“Which,” I agreed, “they could have done.”

“But you don’t believe it?”

“I don’t know what to believe,” I said unhappily. “Jonas hates Will Dylan so much that anything he says about him is suspect. If we heard the other side of the story the whole accusation could easily evaporate into nothing.”

“By Hot Air, out of Spite,” said Laurence. “It’s not a horse I’d back myself.”

“I think he means business this time.”

“He meant business last time.”

“Last time there was nothing he could do about it. The only person who can go to the Court and complain that the rules have been broken is a member of the Union. And Jonas wasn’t.”

“What about the Registrar?”

“The Registrar has no power to ensure that a Union keeps its own rules.”

“Who says so?”

“Mr Cyril Grunfeld in
Modern Trade Union Law.
”

“I can see we shall have to make you our expert on Trade Unions,” said Laurence sourly. He thought about it for a bit and savaged his spectacles some more. He got through a pair a year.

“What you’re saying is that as this is a criminal offence he can open the bowling himself?”

“All he has to do is to apply to a magistrate for a summons.”

“And persuade him to grant it. He mightn’t find that so easy.”

“Agreed. But just think of the publicity when he tries.”

Laurence thought about it, and said, “This will have to go up to Tom.”

Tom Buller sent for me later that morning. Tom is Secretary General of the Law Society, which means that he is the man who runs it. In theory the top brass is the Council, but they’re all working solicitors and they turn up when they can. He is there the whole time.

It’s a tricky job. The Society is liable to be shot at from three different directions at once. By the public, who think that solicitors charge too much; by the politicians who like to get a few cheap votes by pandering to this view, particularly towards election time; and by the solicitors themselves who think the Society isn’t doing enough to stand up to the public and the politicians. Tom has been at the helm long enough to develop an inbuilt radar warning of rocks ahead.

He said, “I understand you went to see Jonas Killey yesterday. He’s got some complaint about this man Dylan. Can you explain what it is?”

I did my best. Every time I repeated it, it seemed less plausible.

“And he wants us to help him?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Didn’t he come to us about it before?”

“It was the same man, but not the same complaint. Last time, it was a question of the rights and wrongs of the voting at a Union meeting. This time it goes a lot further. He’s suggesting that Dylan embezzled Union funds.”

“If he thinks a criminal offence has been committed, he should go to the police. If they won’t help him, he can swear out an information himself.”

“Yes.”

“Then why are we bothering about it? What’s it got to do with us?”

You have to be careful with Tom when he asks you a question like that. Sometimes he likes you to play everything straight down the middle. But every now and then, when you follow that line, you’re accused of being stuffy and civil service minded. You can’t win.

I said, “He’s a solicitor, and it looks to me as if he’s going to make a thundering ass of himself. If we could head him off, it would be a good thing for the profession as a whole.”

Tom thought about this, moving his lower jaw as though he was chewing my words into small pieces and getting ready to spit them out. He said, “Law and politics. Oysters and whisky. Both very acceptable on their own. But mix them and you’ll get nothing but a sour stomach.”

After that he was silent for so long that I thought it was the end of the matter, and started to shuffle my papers together. Tom said, “If somebody had to read the Riot Act to him, who’d be the best person? He wouldn’t listen to you–”

I agreed hastily.

“And if I did it, it would bring the Society into it officially, which is the last thing I want. Laurence tells me you’ve got a brother-in-law in Fleet Street who might be able to have a word with Dylan.”

“I’m having lunch with him today.”

“And what are you hoping to achieve? Except,” he added unkindly, “a good lunch at the expense of the Society.”

I explained what we had in mind.

Tom said, “It might have worked before this embezzlement thing came up. I don’t think it’s going to work now. However, it’s worth trying. If there is going to be an olive branch it’s got to come from Dylan’s side. That’s clear.”

“Do you think,” I said, “that Jonas might listen to Edward Lambard?”

“Lambard,” said Tom. “Yes. That’s not a bad idea at all. In fact, it’s the most sensible thing you’ve said yet.”

I looked gratified. Edward Lambard had been a member of the Council for twenty years. When his turn came for President he had passed the chair, being too busy to give up a whole year’s practice. This had meant, incidentally, that he had also passed up the knighthood which went with the job. It hadn’t worried him, but it must have been pain and grief to his lady wife. I knew that Tom thought a lot of him.