“Welcome to the company Kim,” said Brian as Kim walked into the building the following Friday Morning.

Kim was a little startled to see the Managing Director, Brian West sitting at the reception desk.

He saw her the look of bewilderment on her face.

“Our usual receptionist Joanne, is at the Dentists. She should be back in an hour or so and Lesley is on holiday today. Her eldest son is competing in an athletics event in Birmingham this weekend. So… here I am. At least I’m here to greet you in person,” said Brian smiling.

“Oh! I get it. Having to fill in for others is part and parcel of working for a smallish company.”

“Exactly.”
“Now that you are here, I can begin by going over your duties in detail as my assistant. Lesley will be back on Monday so you can start the handover from her. I’ll miss her but as the business has grown, I need someone as an assistant who is not tied down by a family.”

“You are not sacking her, are you?” asked Kim remembering something about a pregnancy in her briefing notes.

Brian smiled.

“Oh no. Far from it. I helped her get a job at a company in Sheringham, for after she has had her baby. It is a lot nearer to her home and offers flexible hours so everyone wins.”

What Brian had said was, if true totally against the description she’d read of how he ran the business in the documentation provided by the paper. Those few simple words if true had really swung the pendulum of ‘story/no story’ well over to the ‘no story’ side. Either way, someone somewhere was not telling the truth.

“I understand. I would not feel right in replacing someone like that.”

“I totally agree. It isn’t fair all round but you can ask her yourself on Monday when she is handing over to you about how she feels about leaving.”

Then Brian added,

“Why don’t you go on through into the main office and hang up your coat. Lesley has had a desk setup for you for the duration of the handover. She left a load of documents for you before she left last night. It is mostly Health and Safety stuff I’m afraid, but they need to be read and one copy signed for our records. You will soon discover that Hinder and Stop rules are a bugbear we all have to live with. A necessary evil of Industry I’m afraid.”

“Oh, and the coffee pot is full, or it was an hour ago if you want some.”
Kim smiled.

“Can I bring you one?”

“Not for a while. I’m trying to limit my caffeine intake a bit. I’ll have one at lunchtime though.”

Kim wandered into the office where she’d be working. A second desk had been added since her last visit. After hanging up her coat she sat down and picked up a folder that was lying on the desk.

She started reading a document but her mind was not on it even 1%. All the information that had been fed to her said that Brian West was really a tyrant who treated his staff badly and would do anything to appear to make money from the operation.

So far, Kim had to accept that this was not the case. Far from it. More like totally the opposite.

After a bit of effort, she went back to reading the documents. Most of it was exceedingly boring but as Brian had said, she needed to sign one of the two copies. She read that she needed to put on protective glasses and footwear if she went onto the shop floor during normal business hours and that all injuries at work, even the most minor ones need to be logged. It was all pretty standard stuff.

Kim had been in the office for almost two hours before Brian appeared with Joanne.

“How was visit to the dentists?” asked Kim.

“Not bad but I hate going. At least it was just the Hygienist this time.”

“Yeah. The Dentists in one of my least favourite places to visit even on a good day,” echoed Kim.

With the introductions over, Joanne grabbed a cup of Coffee and headed back to reception.

“Joanne does a lot of the typing of letters for me. I’m a bit old school in that department I’m afraid. I find it quicker to dictate them than to type them myself. I’m not the world’s greatest when it comes to keyboard with more than one finger,” admitted Brian.

“Sometimes it is better to write something and then review it later. You find all sorts of errors in documents that way,” replied Kim.

Brian smiled.
“Yeah. That way of working has saved me a few major foopahs in the past.”

“I’ve read all the HR documents and signed them,” said Kim changing the subject.

“It is always good to get them out of the way sooner rather than later. I’ll get the production schedules and we can go over them before lunch. We have a major new product line coming on stream in a few months and we have to manage the change-over from the old to the new. It is in effect a totally new area of business for us and involves a lot of technology that is new to many people here.”

This was news to Kim. Once again, the background information she’d received before starting on the assignment was nowhere near being accurate enough.

At the end of her first day, Kim went home to her flat in the town even more convinced that she was on a wild goose chase.

The feeling of a wild goose chase deepened almost every day the following week.

The charges of product plagiarism and possible money laundering seemed totally farcical. So were the claims about mistreating the employees. She’d spent almost half a day in the R&D department and unless her eyes were deceiving her they were developing a new leading-edge system right there in front of her. As for the money side of things although, she wasn’t a forensic accountant everything tallied at least for the previous three months. Everyone in the company were highly motivated and their increase in productivity was right there in the figures for all to see.

She reported by email to her editor every other day but by the end of the week, she was running out of new things to say.

Kim emailed off a full weekly report to her editor late Friday evening. She’d written it at least ten times before she finally sent it with a final flourish.
The words ‘wild goose chase’ appeared several times in the early drafts of her report. Later revisions used a less direct form of saying the same thing.

She wasn’t sure how it would be received in London but it was done and she had decided that she would stand by what she’d written after all, it was the truth. She fully expected to be pulled off the story over the weekend.

What she wasn’t expecting was a phone call at 01:23 the next morning. Kim knew this because her phone was on the bedside cabinet right next to a LED Clock.

“Hello?”

“Oh, hello Sandy. Do you know what time it is?”

“Yes. I wrote it after all. What I wrote was the truth. This whole thing is a load of shit. Someone is out to stitch someone up for reasons other than wrongdoing. That’s the conclusion I’ve come to so far.”

Sandy went ballistic. He let rip down the phone.

“Are you done?” asked Kim when he’d run out of steam.

“No, I won’t retract it. How many exposes have I done for the Paper? And how many were based on lies? Don’t bother answering. The answer is none. I have some integrity. That’s my by-line and I don’t intend to deviate from that now. People see my name on a piece they know that it is the truth. You have backed me up in the past so why not now?”

“Yeah, pressure from above? Who exactly above Henk or is that beyond your pay grade?”

“No, I can’t make it on Monday. I’m going to Germany with Mr West on business and I won’t be back until late.”

“Why? Well, we are meeting with one of the company’s biggest customers to discuss a huge increase in orders. I need to go so that I can hopefully get to the bottom of which of the competitors wants the knife put into this company. That good enough for you?”

“I said I would not be back until late on Monday. Our flight does not land until just before ten in the evening.”

“We are flying into Norwich Airport from Schiphol. Changing my flights to use London City or Heathrow would be very suspicious if not impossible. Then there is the small fact that I won’t be taking my car to the Airport. Let’s make it Wednesday. I’ll come into the office and you can read me the riot act in person although I’m just doing my job to the best of my ability.”

“No Sandy I’m not coming down to London this weekend. I’m going to a wedding tomorrow… sorry this afternoon in Edinburgh.”
She looked at the clock and did a mental sigh.

“Speaking of which, I really do need to get back to sleep. I have a train to catch from Peterborough just after eight. That means leaving here just after six thirty.”

“Sorry Sandy. Goodnight.”

Kim hung up the phone and immediately switched it into ‘flight mode’ and tried to get back to sleep. It didn’t worry her one little bit that she’d lied to her boss. There was no wedding in Edinburgh or anywhere else that she was going to attend. She just wanted time to think.

Further sleep proved elusive for Kim and not long after dawn she gave up and got out of bed. Once she was dressed she left her home and went for a drive in her car.

There wasn’t much traffic at that early hour and she found herself on the coast road heading towards Hunstanton. She felt her body give a little shiver when she saw the sign telling her that she’d arrived in the seaside town. She had memories of several family outings to the place as a young child. All she could remember was how cold the place was even on a very hot day. She recalled playing on the beach as a child fully dressed in the middle of August. Then she remembered going for a paddle and lasting less than a minute because the water was so cold. Those thoughts caused her to shudder. That was the last holiday they’d had before… before her father had died.

With one final shudder at the memories, she carried on around the coast towards Cromer. Almost immediately, she felt warmer. As she was passing through one small coastal village, she saw a man wheeling a barrow of mussels across the road. This piqued her interest so she stopped.

There was a small shop attached to the building. Kim headed towards it only to find that it was shut.

This prompted her to look at her watch. That was her ‘Doh!’ moment of the day. She got back into her car and looked at the clock on the dashboard. It was telling her that it was just a few minutes after seven. That explained the lack of traffic and movement of people in general.

Kim sat in her car and began to cry.

She felt so out of her depth here. It was obvious now that there were powerful forces and people involved with this whole thing. It had been staring her right in the face for days but the reaction of her editor to her report proved to her that the outcome of her work was already decided and nothing she could say or do would alter that.

It hurt her to think that she’d fallen right into this virtual trap hook line and sinker.

What hurt her even more was that she had absolutely no idea about how to not only get out of it and to make sure that none of the people she’d been working with for the last week didn’t get hurt.

Eventually, Kim got herself back into some sort of near normal state. The rumbling of her stomach told her that she had missed breakfast so she went in search of a Café.

A few miles along the coast she saw some signs advertising a Craft Market in the small town of Burnham Market. There would be somewhere to get something to eat there so with renewed determination, she headed for the market.

A delicious cup of coffee and a large bacon sandwich proved just the job and Kim wandered around the market in a much better frame of mind. She even bought a few things. A bit of retail therapy really helped her get her mind into some sort of order.

It was after midday by the time she reached her flat in Kings Lynn. There were fifteen missed calls and a similar number of messages on her phone. Normally, she would have dealt with them there and then but today, she decided that they could wait.

After a quick wash and brush of her hair, she left her home and went out. Unlike her dawn wandering along the coast, this time she was on a mission.
During her breakfast in Burnham Market, she had decided to come clean to her boss, Brian West. She knew that he lived with his two children in the small village of Rougham, which was about ten miles to the east of Kings Lynn. She wasn’t sure where he lived but she hoped that she’d see his car parked outside the house.

After a bit of searching and getting lost in the narrow Norfolk lanes, Kim found Brian’s home. Kim parked her car in the drive behind his and got out. After taking a deep breath and composing herself, she walked up to the front door and rang the bell. She heard it ring from somewhere inside the house. Kim waited for a bit but no one came to answer the door. As she waited, she realised that she could hear laughter coming from behind the house so before she chickened out she walked around to the rear of the cottage.

She saw Brian and stopped dead in her tracks. Kim realised that this was not the Brian she worked with. Here he was at home and with his children. He was attending to a Barbeque. Then. This was a totally different person to the one she’d spent hours if not days with over the past week.

At the same moment Brian saw her. He smiled and waved for her to come into the garden.

Any hope of escaping was gone so she walked over to where he was cooking the food. Kim was totally unsure about what to do next. All the plans that she’d gone over in her mind disappeared in a puff of smoke the moment she saw him.

“Hello Kim,” said Brian without a care in the world.
“Hungry?”

Kim was dumbstruck. She was totally lost for words.

She nodded her head.

“Good. Let’s get us both something to eat and then we can talk. I guess that is why you are here isn’t it?”

Once again, Kim was lost for words. All she could do was nod her head.
[to be continued]