Felix Francis: Crisis

I’d done a year of Latin at school but, clearly, not enough.

I typed the words into an online translator and it spat out: ‘You want to change to something more exciting?’

On a whim, I called the number.

‘Can you come to our offices for an assessment?’ asked a female voice immediately without so much as a ‘hello’.

‘Certainly,’ I replied. ‘When?’

‘As soon as possible,’ said the voice.

‘Where?’ I asked.

‘That is your assessment. Don’t call this number again or you will have failed.’ She had then hung up, leaving me baffled but intrigued.

I remember having sat staring at the phone in my hand, quite expecting it to ring as the woman called me back. But she didn’t. It remained silent. There had been no name offered, not even the name of the firm. The voice hadn’t even asked for my name.

Was it a scam? Or was someone just playing silly buggers?

Or was it actually for real?

But where did I start? There were over ten thousand law firms in the UK, almost half of them in London alone. Did I go through the Legal Directory looking for a telephone number to match? But this number seemed to be just for the advert, not the one for the firm’s switchboard.

I entered it into Google but, predictably, it gave no clue to the number itself... but it did provide some pointers. By inserting only the first seven digits, the search results showed various entities including a string of foreign embassies, a medical practice and several restaurants. All were in the London SW1 postcode area, and most in subsection SW1X.

I googled SW1X — Knightsbridge and Belgravia — the smartest parts of west London, but both with thousands of addresses.

Hopeless.

I had sat at my desk idly staring out the window at the people hurrying up and down Totnes High Street in the rain rather than getting on with my work, wondering what sort of idiot would place such a stupid advert.

But it made me determined to find out.

So I called the office of the Law Society Gazette and asked for the classified-ad department.

Sorry, they said, they were not at liberty to give out the details of who had placed the advert, data protection and all that. Indeed the man I spoke to seemed quite amused by my request, as if it was not the first time someone had asked him the same thing.

Then I searched on my computer for law firms in London SW1X and made a list. There were just eight of them.

Things were looking up.

Next I compared the telephone number in the advert to those of the eight firms. None were identical but three had the same initial seven digits, even if the last four were all significantly different.

Now I felt I was really getting somewhere.

I again called the Law Society Gazette and asked to be put through to their finance department.

‘How can I help?’ asked a female voice.

‘I’m chasing an invoice for an advert placed in your jobs section,’ I said.

‘For which firm?’ asked the woman.

‘It could be one of three,’ I said. ‘We act as a recruiting agent for a number of firms.’ I gave her the name of one of the firms on my short list.

‘Sorry,’ she said after a few seconds. ‘No record of that one.’

I gave her the name of the second firm.

‘Ah, yes,’ she said, raising my hopes. ‘They advertised with us two years ago for a legal secretary. Is that the one?’

‘Is there nothing more recent from them?’ I asked, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice.

I could hear her tapping on her keyboard.

‘No, nothing,’ she said.

I gave her the third name.

‘Sorry. Nothing from them either.’

‘How odd,’ I said. ‘I’m sure it was one of our firms in the SW1X postcode. Could you please check again?’

‘SW1X, you say?’ I could hear her tapping the postcode into her system.

‘We only have one other record of an invoice going to an address in SW1X, but that wasn’t to a law firm.’

‘When was the invoice sent?’ I asked quickly.

‘Last week. It’s for the current edition. But it was sent to an individual rather than a firm.’

‘Could you tell me the individual’s name?’ I asked in my most enticing tone. ‘It must have been a mistake.’

‘I can’t,’ she said, sounding almost apologetic. ‘Mistake or not, it’s against our rules.’

‘Could you give me the full postcode then?’ I asked. ‘I can work out which firm it was from that.’

She hesitated, obviously debating with herself whether that was also against the rules. She decided it wasn’t.

‘SW1X 8JU.’

‘Right, thanks,’ I said, jotting it down. ‘I’ll get on and check.’

I disconnected, smiling. Surely that was it.

But the postcode didn’t match any of the eight law firms I had on my list.

Hence, two days later, I had found myself walking up and down Motcomb Street in Belgravia, a road of designer shops, art galleries and fashionable restaurants, wondering which of the unlikely twenty-eight addresses that shared the postcode SW1X 8JU was the one I wanted, assuming that it was one of those addresses anyway.

None of them looked remotely like a legal firm and there were no helpful brass plaques on any of the doors, so I went into each of the shops, galleries and restaurants to ask the staff if they knew of any law offices in the vicinity or anyone who might have placed an advert in the Law Society Gazette . None did. But it at least eliminated half of the addresses on my list.

Most of the buildings in the street were fine examples of Georgian architecture, three storeys high with intricate wrought-iron railings surrounding balconies on the upper floors. They had originally been built as single-family homes but each had long since been converted into a self-contained retail space on the ground floor with accommodation above accessed through a narrow front door squeezed alongside the shop and opening directly onto the pavement.

I looked up at the high windows, trying to see someone sitting at a desk or to spot some other clue that would indicate a place of work rather than a residence, but the angle from street level meant that mostly all I could see was the reflection of the sky.

In the end I resorted to simply knocking on the front doors or ringing the doorbells and seeing who was in.

By the time I got to the last one, I was beginning to be disheartened. At eight of the fourteen properties there had been no reply, while at five others the occupants obviously had no idea what I was on about when I told them that I’d arrived for my assessment.

‘Get lost,’ a man shouted at one property. ‘I’m not buying anything.’

At another, the door was opened on a security chain by an elderly woman. ‘Are you from the council?’ she asked through the crack.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘I’m here for my assessment.’

‘I’m the one who needs assessing,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you’re not from the council?’

I explained that I was absolutely certain I wasn’t from the council, and she was clearly not pleased at having come all the way down the stairs to open the front door for no good reason — ‘not in my condition’.

So, when I pressed the cheap plastic bell on the very last door, I was thinking more about the times of the trains from Paddington back to Totnes than anything else.

The door was grey with grime. I imagined it had once been white or cream but time had not been kind to the paintwork, which was flaking off badly at the top. The small brass-surround letterbox was corroded green, and the central doorknob had several screws missing such that it hung precariously to the wood.

‘Yes?’ asked a voice through the tiny speaker situated above the bell push.