Brian Freemantle - The Namedropper

Jordan started work again early the following day, first reentering the available golden goose of Appleton and Drake and again, from the already dated currency trades, spreading $10,500 in transfers between his five Appleton bank accounts. Next he got into his own law firm’s computer to leapfrog into Daniel Beckwith’s personal station, staying there long enough to read the exchanges about himself between Beckwith and Lesley Corbin in London, and then between Beckwith and Reid in Raleigh. He was intrigued to read Lesley’s early opinion of him as ‘arrogant although knocked off his feet being caught with his pants around his ankles, a position in which it is always difficult to remain upright’, and the correspondence between her and the American lawyer questioning the income possible from professional gambling. It was Lesley, too, who had first suggested he would need repeated instructions on how to conduct himself in court to avoid antagonizing a judge or jury. She’d again used the word ‘arrogant’.

Jordan’s need for court training was referred to once more in the correspondence between Beckwith and Reid. Of more interest to Jordan was the email discussion between the two American lawyers about potential damage awards, with one suggestion from Reid that if there were individual judgements against Jordan on each listed claim, the total adjudication could go as high as twelve million dollars. Reid’s qualification – ‘in reality I can’t see it reaching half that figure if all awards go against him’ – didn’t do anything to reassure Jordan.

Neither did Beckwith’s response. ‘A sum in either of those amounts would inevitably attract national if not international publicity,’ Beckwith had written. ‘And from what we already know from our preliminary enquiries, both the Appleton and Bellamy families have a recognized social and financial standing on the east coast, which is an added publicity attraction. My client is anxious to avoid publicity, as you tell me your client is, which makes it imperative we establish as soon as possible who the judge is going to be. If it is someone who enjoys notoriety – as I remember several did from the time of my practising in Raleigh – there might be a difficulty in you successfully arguing for a closed hearing. We need to liaise closely on this point.’

Jordan was curious that there had been no exchange between the two men following the Raleigh conference, quickly correcting his impatience with the self-reminder of how recent it had been. Whenever it came – and for as long as he required it in the future – he had this permanently open window into their every thought: into every thought of anyone with whom he found himself entangled.

Except Alyce, he corrected himself sharply. Her lawyer would have been the obvious pathway but nowhere in the man’s computer address book could Jordan locate any email exchanges between Reid and Alyce, and so successful and unobstructed had his entry been into all the other computer systems that there was a blip of positive disappointment at his not being able to worm his way into the last of his targets.

He’d been wrong about all his suspicions of Alyce, Jordan acknowledged not even having to force the unfamiliar honesty. He’d been wrong about believing she might in some way be complicit with her husband in trying to get money from him, wrong in imagining that she would have exposed him to the sexual complaint with which she’d been infected, and wrong to have made his hostility so blatantly obvious towards her during the Raleigh encounter. Objectively, continuing the honesty, Jordan accepted that he had been as much the cause of Alyce’s misfortune as she was guilty of being his. Judging from what he had just read of Appleton’s efforts to uncover Alyce’s infidelity to compensate for his own, if he had not so deliberately set out to seduce her, Appleton would have wasted even more money having her pursued by the inappropriately named Watchdog.

Fully aware of the contradictions and inconsistencies there were in the vocation he followed, Jordan would have been the last to claim that he suffered a conscience from his actions and certainly didn’t consider that conscience was part of what he was feeling now. But there was at least a genuine regret at behaving as he had towards her in Raleigh. Maybe, he thought, there would be other opportunities to apologize.

There had been several times in the past, working as successfully in America as he had in England, when Jordan had actually considered relocating permanently to the United States. Everything he needed to adopt and take advantage of a new identity was so much more easily and publicly accessible in the States, if a person knew how and where to look – which Jordan did. Upon application the essential and identity-proving Social Security number was readily available; so essential that it was more often than not printed as a guaranteed payee authenticity, along with full addresses, upon personal cheques, which was why he had included Appleton’s on all five accounts he’d opened in the trader’s name. As he knew from the legal exchanges, it was on Appleton’s bank record. Determined upon avoiding any conceivable error on this very particular occasion he confirmed it as he accessed all the social register entries in Boston through the public library reference books and the archives of the Boston Globe. Through this he learned the Appleton family history from the Boston tax rebellion, that was the incendiary to the War of Independence, to the marriage of Alfred Appleton’s parents, from the records of which he double-checked the family name of the commodity dealer’s mother. From the same sources he got the names of the man’s prep schools prior to Harvard, into which he phished to learn that pre-college as well as at Harvard Appleton had been considered dilatory and disinterested in anything other than sailing. Through the Harvard records Jordan discovered three police references to drunken driving offences, none with conclusions, all presumably minimized into cautions due to his family money and influence.

It was while he was scrolling through the final Harvard records, cross-referencing dates wherever possible, that Jordan began to be troubled by an inconsistency that he could not immediately isolate, but which remained in his mind as he forced himself on. It was not until he had downloaded everything on to hard copy and was cross-referencing from all his various sources that it became obvious to him, although the basic mystery remained even more tantalizing.

Jordan realized that he had assembled virtually enough information about Alfred Jerome Appleton to write the man’s biography. But, missing from any publicly available source Jordan had so far accessed was what Appleton had done in the three years after his Harvard graduation.

How, where and doing what had Appleton spent that time? Jordan wondered.

And wondered further how much it would benefit him to find out. Which he would, Jordan thought, adding this to his list of determinations. And then he thought that Alyce would probably know.

But there again, she might not, Jordan accepted. He would still have liked to ask her in the hope she could provide a short cut to the information, but didn’t think he could – or should – so soon after the lawyers’ warning in Raleigh against he and Alyce meeting alone, to which she might not have agreed anyway. And there was the problem of providing a reason for asking the question, although that was not insurmountable.

Instead – after his early morning and now regularly timed raid upon Appleton and Drake’s easily available gold mine – Jordan escaped the entombment of the previous two days in his hotel room to take up the search in his preferred way of working by walking the corridors of the reference section of the New York public library, beginning in its Milstein genealogical division. At first it appeared to be a good route. Because the library is the largest sourced library in the world the history of the Appleton family of Boston was far more extensive than any he had been able to access from his laptop, particularly the details of Appleton’s sailing prowess, which was recorded with several indexed newspaper and yachting magazine reports. Jordan logged each and, when he had completed primary source searches, worked his way steadily through the miscrofiched copies of thirty-five different publications.