Graham and Edward wandered into the seminar room with their freshly poured cups of tea steaming gently in their hands. Graham was complaining: “and that new buyer – whatshisname, you know, the black one – had the audacity to suggest that the packaging that we’ve just spent six months on didn’t look good on the shelves! I told him straight it’s your bloody people you want to talk to! That’s your logo and brand colours on that packaging, not ours! Bloody cheek.”
Edward took a sip of his tea and murmured approvingly: “Buyers of the world, unite! You have nothing to loose but your logos.”
“Good morning, gentlemen!”, said Ekantika’s voice from the back of the room.
The two men turned to see where the voice had come from. Ekantika was sitting on a chair in the back corner of the room, with her laptop open. She closed it, put it on the table and stood up, all in one motion.
“Good morning, Candida!”, said Graham cheerfully oblivious of Ekantika’s scowl, “Are you ready to handle the both of us at once?”
Ekantika ignored Edward’s smurk.
“My name is E-kan-ti-ka! And yours is Gra-ham, I think?”, Ekantika enunciated in her best English.
“And my name is Ed-ward!”, Edward chimed, enjoying the fun.
Graham sat down behind one of the tables in the U, looked at his watch and inquired, “Shouldn’t we be starting now?”
Ekantika put on her controlling voice as she reached the front of the room. “Absolutely, it’s important to keep to the agreed timing, especially at the start! Do you know where the others are?”
Edward looked around at the empty seats and said: “Yes, I suppose we need some bums to put on these seats. I did see Jenny at breakfast.”
"Excuse me, you haven't seen an old brown leather bound book anywhere have you?", Shari asked the waiter as she started her breakfast of grapefruit and toast at a table in the corner, which had not been used by the previous breakfast goers.
"I can't say I have", replied Alex briefly, looking up from his clearing away, "but I'll ask the others when I get to the kitchen to see if anybody has found it.” Alex continued tidying away; he was very pleased with the results of ‘his’ redesigned dining room. Bernard had taken some persuasion to adopt his idea of a central buffet. It was his idea to combine storage and serving surfaces made of the local stone, reconstituted and polished, to form a Chinese puzzle effect of eight interlocking stones at different heights. The rough finished beech doors and drawers added to the contrast of the natural stone and wood with the eight high tech LED lights hanging at different levels over the serving surfaces.
He looked up as he finished wiping the surfaces to see Jenny bustling through the door.
“I’m looking for Martin”, she said breathlessly, “you haven’t seen him, have you?”
“I haven’t seen him for breakfast”, replied Alex, “but he often skips eating in the morning. I’ll ask in the kitchen!” He turned to push the loaded trolley through the swing doors to the kitchen. “Maybe I should open a lost and found counter”, he said over his shoulder with a big smile.
His head reappeared before the doors stopped flapping. “Forget the found”, he smiled, “no book and no Martin!”
Jenny peered over the stone buffet to make sure she had Alex’s attention. “Can you tell him I’m looking for him urgently, please? I need him to pick up our Indian contingent on the eleven thirty train.”
She moved off towards the door to the hallway when Alex had nodded his agreement and turned back into the kitchen to relay the message.
As she walked through the hall on her way to the seminar room, Jenny heard Lizzie’s voice coming from the bar. She stopped and put her head around the door. There was Lizzie in deep conversation on the phone. Jenny held up her wrist and tapped it to attract Lizzie’s attention.
Shari turned away from the door of the dining room and back to her unfinished breakfast as she heard the two women leave the bar. She sat down and reflected on the conversation she had just overheard.
Jenny gratefully breathed in the cool spring air, trying to collect her thoughts around the events of the morning as she and Lizzy went down the steps into the yard.
Between the original objective of the workshop, missing Indians and Lizzie gone ballistic, Jenny was no longer sure how she was going to fulfil any of the promises made around this workshop. The most recent promise to Lizzie was the most delicate, she concluded, as her mind raced backwards and forwards.
The seminar room was located on the opposite side of the yard to the hall. The steps from the hall down to the yard did not reflect the pomp of the grand entrance steps on the outside of the hall. The stone of the back steps had been worn down by years of hobnail boots. Leading down to the flagstones of the yard, the back steps introduced the functionality of the rest of the old foursquare farm. The flagstones themselves had been the source of some research during the renovation. Finding such large, natural pieces of sandstone to replace the missing ones had proved difficult.
Unusually, the bricks of the interior walls surrounding the yard were the same as the exterior red bricks. This gave a feeling of gravity and importance to the old farmyard, which other, similar buildings did not share. The windows overlooking the yard had been replaced during the renovation five years ago but the wood used in the new double-glazed windows had been successfully modelled on the original designs.
On the right of the yard, walking towards the old barn, were the double doors of the garages, originally sized to take the old horse-drawn haywains. These days, they provided ample access for the two Land Rover Defenders. On the opposite side of the yard, equally worn steps provided access to the kitchen, the office and the former bakery.
The old barn in the northeast corner of the square had been the centre of the renovator’s creative energy. Originally designed as a two-level barn for hay above and animals below, the resulting feeling of space and calm had been achieved by removing most of the rotten floor of the hay barn to expose the soaring beams of the roof.
A small mezzanine was all that was left of the original hay floor, now forming a small balcony opening onto the space below. With a maximum capacity of nearly one hundred seated people, the large space was often split into two or three smaller work areas using folding screens. The windows on the south side had been enlarged to let more light into the space and this together with the glass-arched door, replacing the old barn door, meant that Seminar Room Two enjoyed a cathedral-like feel to its space.
“At last!” said Ekantika, as she saw the two women enter the lobby of the Seminar Room, “we’ve already lost more than an hour on our schedule! We really must get started!”
“This is not going well, Jenny!”, Graham chimed in, “your strategy session is late and half the participants are missing! This is never going to work! I told you the Indians were useless.”
Jenny was used to his taunting, he never missed an opportunity to score points. And now, she didn’t have the patience to deal with it. “The Indians will be here at eleven fifty, so we should be able to get in a session before lunch and if we shorten lunch, then we can pick up some time for the afternoon.”
“What?” exclaimed Ekantika, “that means I’ve got to reschedule my whole day? Oh dear… this is really difficult. We should work later into the evening to pick up the time, rather than shorten lunch.”
Graham turned to Edward, who was leaning in the doorway of the lobby, saying: “I told you the Indians would sabotage this and that Jenny’s idea would never work. I’m going to call the factory to hear what the painters have decided for the new colour scheme.”
Lizzie looked aghast. “Wait a minute!” she exclaimed as Graham moved off, “Jenny, what are you doing? We have to tell them about Bernard Lawler and the danger we’re in! We need to leave!”
“Great Lizzie!” said Edward, “a treasure hunt – with danger zones – just what we need to pass the time!” He pushed himself off the wall with a flourish and with two large strides he started out the door. “What’s the first clue?”
Lizzie, seeing the movement, looked up, nodded her head and put up her hand to have Jenny wait. She finished the phone call in a floury of love-you’s and turned to Jenny.
“That was Rob”, said Lizzie anxiously. Lizzie continued in a gush of words: “This Bernard Lawler has got a serious record! He worked for Branching Pharma in the early nineties and was involved in the illegal drug testing in Africa!”
Jenny replied rapidly: “Of course everyone knows Bernard worked in pharma back then, loads of people did!”
“But Rob has dug up evidence that shows that this Bernard Lawler was involved at the heart of the scandal as a senior manager!”
Jenny sensed that Lizzie was working herself into a state and she decided not to get into the content.
“Lizzie!”, said Jenny firmly, taking the other women’s hand in hers, “I can feel that this is really important for you, …”
“No! No!”, shrieked Lizzie, pulling her hand back, “You can’t hush me up any more! This man, Lawler, is dangerous! Why are you ignoring this? Rob says we should leave! As soon as possible!”
“I’m not ignoring it! But I can’t believe Bernard is like that. I’ve know him for …”
Lizzie cut across her shrieking: “Fuck! No, Jenny! How well do you actually know this guy? He stinks and you’re sticking up for him? No way!”
“Oh, and you’re buying Rob’s story, made to sell newspapers? You know how much crap gets written!
“Rob is an honest journalist!”, Lizzie snapped back, tears starting to form.
Jenny realised the argument had got out of hand and sensed Lizzie’s frustration and fear. She stepped back and took a breath. With a sympathetic nod of the head, she said, in a much calmer, positive voice: “Lizzie, let’s find out what’s going on. First, let’s tell the men and see what they think we should do next!”
Lizzie was almost shaking with the emotion of the moment; so much so, that Jenny felt there was more at stake than just the discovery of Bernard’s past. Lizzie’s voice croaked with strain: “Okay, but I’m not shutting up about this bloke! We are in serious trouble!”
Unwilling to continue the argument, Jenny did not respond to Lizzie’s claim. Instead, she said in an unemotional way: “Come on, let’s go and find the men.” She led the way out of the bar, into the hall down the steps to the yard.
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This is the seventh chapter from the Book of Ma'Chi
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