Brian Freemantle - The Namedropper

‘Hi!’ greeted Walter Harding, emerging through the foliage.

‘Hi!’said Alyce.

Shit! thought Jordan.

When they came to be delivered Jordan’s initial reaction to the verdicts was that of an anti-climax – despite, even, his total exoneration – because that was how he regarded the conclusion of the previous afternoon at the Bellamy house, anxious at its end to quickly leave a place which, until Harding’s intrusion, he’d hoped desperately not to leave that night. Hopefully not for many nights. So occupied still was he by that disappointment that at the opening of the court proceedings Jordan actually had to force his concentration upon Pullinger’s summation and guidance to the jury, which strictly obeyed Pullinger’s insistence on the priority of its required judgements.

This meant Appleton’s criminal conversation claim against him was the first to be dealt with and totally dismissed. Immediately following the verdict, Pullinger ordered that Appleton should pay three quarters of Jordan’s total costs for initiating such a flagrantly insupportable action, in part for which he held Bartle responsible for providing the inept legal advice. The jury found against Leanne Jefferies but again following Pullinger’s instructions limited the award against her to $50,000 in Alyce’s favour. They also found in Alyce’s favour on her cross petition against Appleton.

After discharging the jury Pullinger declared he had considered a bench order alleging perjury against Appleton but held back from doing so in the event of the man appealing upon the grounds he’d offered the previous day. He definitely intended an enquiry into alleged perjury against Mark Chapman and to carry out his already indicated decision to report both venere-alogists to their respective Massachusettes licensing authorities for professional misconduct. On the same grounds he was going to report David Bartle and Peter Wolfson to both the North Carolina and New York State bar associations.

‘In addition to which,’ Pullinger told the two attorneys, whom he’d ordered to stand before him, ‘I shall refuse ever again to have either of you appear before me on any legal matter, which I shall make clear to both bar associations I have nominated. I further order, upon the possibility of both or either of your clients being held in contempt of my court, against making comments or assisting in any way the media, either electronic or print, beyond what this court provides about any of the defendants or claimants in these proceedings. I want your assurance, which will be recorded by the court stenographer, that you fully and completely understand the order I have just issued.’

One by one the two attorneys, Appleton and finally Leanne Jefferies, acknowledged that they understood.

‘This hearing, the most disgraceful ever presented before me, is now closed,’ Pullinger concluded.

Reid’s office was judged both inadequate and inappropriate for the celebration and at a loss for an alternative they went back to the all too familiar hotel where a hurriedly arranged private room was hired and food and drink ordered while Alyce telephoned her mother to relay the news and Jordan returned to his suite to make an earlier-than-usual computer check that there had been no movement upon the existing shortfall enquiries, nor any new challenges. As an afterthought as he was actually leaving his suite, Jordan quickly dialled Lesley Corbin in London, who said she’d never had any doubt of the outcome and whom Jordan didn’t believe.

Jordan was back in his anti-climax depression when he got to the celebration, by which time Walter Harding had arrived and Alyce had passed on the court verdict. Also there were the DDK enquiry team who had never been called upon as well as some support staff from Reid’s office.

Harding approached Jordan the moment he entered the room and said, ‘Didn’t I tell you this was exactly as it would turn out!’

‘You certainly did,’ agreed Jordan. As well as a lot of other I-can-predict bullshit by which he’d become so irritated the previous afternoon that he’d switched off any attention to the man’s constant outpourings.

‘How’s it feel?’ demanded Harding.

‘I’m not sure it’s settled in.’ Jordan wished Alyce would break away form Reid so that he could excuse himself from the hospital administrator.

‘It was obviously nonsense from the beginning,’ insisted the man. ‘I guess you’re now going back to reality and England, where everything and everybody is normal?’

He’d never ever lived in reality, thought Jordan. Always the opposite, the unreality of living – being – somebody else, with somebody else’s name and persona. He said, ‘I’m not sure that’s an apt description, either.’ He saw Alyce had moved away from her lawyer and immediately excused himself to join her.

Alyce said at once, ‘I didn’t realize Pullinger was delaying the media release until tomorrow.’

‘Neither did I.’

‘By which time I shall be back at the house, beyond any camera lens.’

‘Is that what you’re going to do?’

‘There’s no better place to hide.’

‘For how long?’

‘For as long as I choose, although the judge put a pretty effective lid on it becoming a long-running saga, didn’t he?’

‘So what after you come out of retreat?’ pressed Jordan.

She smiled at the expression. ‘Regain my life. I’ve already arranged to get my place back on the board of the Bellamy Foundation.’

‘As well as?’

‘That’s as far as, for the moment,’ said Alyce. ‘There was something you were going to say, just before Walter arrived at the house yesterday?’

‘Maybe later,’ said Jordan. ‘Not now.’

‘Call me.’

Jordan tried the moment he got into his Carlyle suite the following morning, before even bothering to unpack after a delayed New York arrival from Raleigh. At the Bellamy North Carolina estate, Stephen – after having established who Jordan was – told him Alyce wasn’t there and that he didn’t know when she would be returning; she hadn’t given a date or a location, although he didn’t think it was Manhattan. Jordan told the butler where he was – even stipulating his suite number – and to pass on a message for Alyce to call if she made contact. And did the same when, despite the butler’s doubt that Alyce was in New York, he got the answering service at her West 84th Street apartment.

During the returning flight Jordan had scoured as many newspapers as were available at Raleigh airport. Both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal’s coverage was relegated to deep into the inside pages, boosted beyond the strictly limited factual release from Pullinger’s court by photographs of both Appleton and Alyce and the inevitable historical background of both families. Jordan was named only once, without either a photograph or an indication, even, of his English nationality. There was nothing in any international edition of any English newspaper collected for him by the hotel’s customer service department. He’d alerted Lesley Corbin during his earlier call from Raleigh and when he telephoned again she confirmed there was no reference either to the case or to him personally in any of that morning’s London editions. Neither had there been on any national British television or radio bulletin or any Internet news source she’d accessed.

‘Why should there have been?’ she asked him, rhetorically. ‘You were found not guilty of any involvement in the case.’

Jordan waited until after he’d unpacked before mounting his daily monitor of the Appleton and Drake computers. There was a further challenge, again from a Manhattan broker, to a shortfall on another of the earliest copper trades he’d raided, and evident growing alarm in the continuing email conversations between the two earlier questioned metal traders at their inability to discover the cause of their individual problems through any of the personal enquiries they had so far conducted. One, Colin Nutbeam, complained of not being able to look any further or differently than he already had and his colleague, George Sutcliffe, agreed that if they didn’t identify the cause of the disparities in the next twenty-four hours there was no alternative but to officially report it to their respective financial supervisors. From the now extensive communications between the originally challenged John Popple and his financial controller there were gaps indicating either personal interviews or internal telephone conversations, culminating the previous day in the latest email from the fiscal manager, not to Popple but to Alfred Appleton, asking for the earliest possible meeting upon his return from Raleigh to discuss an apparently inexplicable financial discrepancy in an onwardly traded pork belly future. In an attempt to trace the error before the requested meeting, the controller intended conducting an audit of every buy and sell contract in which Popple had been involved in the preceding six months. Until the matter was resolved it was suggested that a specific accounting be made of every buy and sell trade in which Popple had engaged.