Майкл Ридпат - Fatal Error

‘You faxed it to Mel?’

‘She said she’d take a quick look and come back to me.’

‘Waste of time.’

‘We’ll see,’ I said, feeling the irritation rising again and successfully controlling it.

It wasn’t a waste of time. Mel called back late that afternoon, ‘You were right,’ she said. ‘I think there are some real problems with that document. It would do fine for a small business with only a couple of shareholders. But for something that’s going to grow into a venture-funded company, it’s a disaster.’

‘Oh. You mean it’s not scalable,’ I said, remembering some Owenspeak.

She laughed. ‘Precisely,’ she said. ‘I see you’ve learned the lingo.’

‘Some of it. Is it something we can change later on, when we get a bit more money?’

‘You could, but it would be messy. Much better to start off with a proper structure.’

‘Could you draw up a better one?’

‘Certainly. I’d have to see the other company documents. And I’d probably have to charge you.’

‘What do you think about working with Guy?’ I asked as quietly as I could.

There was silence for quite a time. In the end she spoke. ‘You are,’ she said.

‘That’s true.’

‘And are you happy with it?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘OK. If it’s good enough for you, it’s good enough for me.’

‘All right. Let me talk to him. I’ll call you back in a couple of minutes.’

‘Now that’s what I call a short decision time,’ Mel said.

I hung up and turned to Guy.

‘I heard most of that,’ he said.

‘Our shareholders’ agreement stinks.’

‘Says Mel?’

‘Says Mel.’

‘Do you believe her?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you think we should do?’

‘I think we should get rid of the other lot and hire her.’

Guy snorted. ‘But it’s Mel, for God’s sake! She’s an airhead. Everybody knows that.’

‘She was pretty bright at school, I seem to remember. She just acted like an airhead.’

‘Well, she fooled me.’

‘Obviously.’

Guy sighed. ‘Are you sure about this?’

I nodded.

We were a team. Shareholders’ agreements were more my thing than his thing. Suddenly it was very important to me that he showed he understood that.

He paused. Thought. Then smiled.

‘Call her.’

Guy finally pinned Torsten down. He flew to Hamburg for a late-afternoon meeting that would slip into a night out. All part of the plan.

I met him at City Airport the next morning. I spotted him coming through Arrivals. He looked tired after the previous evening’s excesses, but he was grinning.

‘He said yes?’

‘Not quite, but close enough.’

‘What do you mean “not quite”? Did he say yes or didn’t he?’

‘Calm down, Davo. Everything’s cool. He likes the deal. He likes it a lot. But he’d be investing money from the family trusts. And that means his father has to agree.’

‘How likely is that?’

‘Torsten says he’ll have no trouble.’

‘I hope Torsten is right. How much are we talking about?’

‘Five million Deutschmarks.’

‘That’ll do.’ Five million marks was just under two million quid. Not quite as much as we had hoped for, but enough to get us going. ‘That’ll do very well.’

Guy’s smile broadened. ‘Shall we see if we can get a bottle of champagne somewhere in this airport?’

Now it looked like the money was on the way, Guy was anxious to gear up. I wasn’t so sure. I remembered Torsten from school. He was flaky then and he was probably flaky now. But Guy’s view was that that was a risk we would have to take. And if Torsten didn’t come through we might still have some luck with the half-dozen venture capitalists who now had our business plan.

Guy persuaded me. I knew I had to change my whole attitude to risk. At this stage in Ninetyminutes’ life, we had to take risks, not avoid them.

We started recruiting. We wanted a head of merchandising to set up the on-line retailing. Owen and Gaz each needed help. We were also looking for an office to put everyone in. There wasn’t room for Gaz in the flat in Wapping, so he was working from Hemel Hempstead and communicating with us by e-mail. This was asking for trouble, especially once our team grew bigger. So the office search began.

Mel came through with a new shareholders’ agreement and some amendments to our articles of association. She decided to deliver them in person to the flat in Wapping. I was surprised when I opened the door for her to see that she had dyed her hair blonde. She also wasn’t quite as severely dressed as she had been when I had bumped into her at First Tuesday.

‘Very nice,’ I said, wondering whether the new look was for Guy’s benefit.

‘Thank you. I knew I had to do something, but I couldn’t quite face going to your lengths.’

‘It’s due for another trim soon,’ I said, running my fingers through my hair, which was now almost half an inch long.

‘Hello, Guy,’ she said quietly as she entered the living-room-cum-office.

‘Mel! Great to see you! Davo says you’re just the lawyer we need. And we get a personal delivery service.’ He rushed over and kissed both her cheeks. She glowed.

‘I make it a point to see my clients face-to-face.’

‘Good. I’d show you around the office, but this is it. That’s Owen over there. Wave to the nice lady, Owen.’

Owen raised a hand while not moving his eyes from the screen.

‘Here you are, David,’ Mel said, taking an envelope out of her briefcase. ‘I think you’ll find these an improvement on the old documents.’ I took them.

‘Do you want a cup of tea or something?’ I asked.

Mel hesitated, glanced at Guy and then looked at her watch. ‘No, I’ve got a meeting in the West End. I’d better be off now.’

‘I thought you said she’d gone grey,’ Guy said as Mel shut the door.

‘That was last week.’

‘You were right about her chest.’

‘I thought you said you’d given up women?’

‘Yeah, but it’s only Mel. That was a bit odd. It’s a long way to come just to stay for two minutes. She could have sent the papers by courier.’

‘Mm,’ I said.

‘Never mind. As long as she’s a good lawyer.’

She was. The new documents all made perfect sense to me. Since Torsten hadn’t signed the original papers yet I had the new ones couriered to Hamburg. Guy wasn’t concerned by the lack of communication from Torsten, but I nagged him into chasing him up. We needed to know for sure that the cash was there before we moved into a new office and put more people on the payroll. Guy had no success. Torsten was out of town until the following week.

We had some luck with recruitment. The media were beginning to notice the dot-com wave and people wanted to ride it. Gaz brought on board a young sports journalist called Neil from a regional newspaper in the Midlands. Owen somehow found someone whom he would deign to work with, Sanjay, a football-mad programmer. We signed up Amy Kessler to be Head of Merchandising. She was a friend of a friend of Guy’s, an American MBA who had worked for Adidas in Germany for a couple of years. She seemed frighteningly competent.

Guy and I realized we had too many chiefs and no Indians, and so I gave my old secretary at Gurney Kroheim a call. Actually, she wasn’t exactly my secretary, she was more of a general dogsbody for about eight people. She was an Australian woman called Michelle. I had been impressed with her attention to detail and her cheerfulness. Although we weren’t friends, I had always been careful to treat her with respect, something that most of my colleagues in the new Leipziger Gurney Kroheim hadn’t done. When I told her what we were looking for at ninetyminutes.com she jumped at the chance, even though it meant a significant cut in salary.