“I really didn’t draw any comparison between those emails when John Ryan started to stick his nose into our office every couple of days. He gave us some bull about the infamous animosity that existed between Sales and Purchasing. And he claimed that he wanted to pour oil on troubled waters. Actually he did calm things down a hell of lot. You know, Sales were always complaining that we were buying too expensively, not that us girls could do much about that; that’s nearly always down to the negotiators.
“Anyway he started popping in almost every day and it took a long time before I realised that he spent rather a lot of time at my desk talking to me. One of the other girls noticed actually and then they all said that John…. Well they said that he had the hot’s for me.”
“I see, so what did you do about that? You never mentioned it to me.”
“Kevin, I know it was a long time ago, but do you remember what happened the last time I told you that someone was trying to chat me up?”
“Oh well come on, we were young then and we hadn’t been married all that long.”
“And we had to traipse the streets of Benidorm at eleven o’clock at night looking for another hotel.”
“Oh well, I never meant to hit him that hard!”
“But he turned out to be the hotel owner’s son, didn’t he? So we got our marching orders.”
“Yeah well Trudy, but a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. Damn, who said that, was it John Wayne?” I said trying to make light of the incident.
“I don’t know and I don’t care, but I had no intention of seeing my husband in court and possibly losing my job just because John Ryan fancied his chances. I knew I could handle him anyway.”
“Yeah so I gather from what happened on Friday night.”
“I’ll come to that later, the silly sod let the cat out of the bag on the dance floor and I just overreacted.”
“What did he say?”
“In a minute Kevin, let’s take this all in order, if I may. Once I realise that John was trying the old come on. Well I was polite and told him no, in no uncertain terms. But his reaction was to come-on heavier and then one of the other girls told me that she thought he’d pressured a girl in Advertising into going to bed with him.”
“Well I thought, right mate, you’re the sort to play dirty then I’ll beat you at your own game. But I needed the sod to proposition me in the office and I needed evidence that he had.”
“So what did you do?”
“Well, you remember that little voice recorder of yours that you thought you’d lost?”
“Yeah, I bought a new one.”
“Well you didn’t loose it, I borrowed it; but I couldn’t tell you what for, for obvious reasons. You left it in the desk draw, I thought it was just a toy and you hardly used it. But you spotted it was missing after just a couple of days.”
“Ah well, I like to play with my toys.”
“Yeah anyway, I’d been trying to catch the sod out and get a recording of him making me some kind of an indecent proposal for weeks, but then… Hold up a minute; you said Mark was an old friend of yours, and Peter Philips and you play golf together sometimes. Those bloody students with the cameras were all down to you, weren’t they?”
“I was just watching that some more of my property didn’t get stolen.” I was forced to admit.
“I should brain you, but it’s nice to know you cared. You realise that John Ryan thought his wife was behind them don’t you. Brought a complete halt to any chance I had of catching him out in the office, he turned almost paranoid.”
“So what happened on Friday night then?”
“Raspberries!”
“Pardon?”
“Well, do you remember a certain trip a couple of years ago when you were away for a fortnight and I came up to spend the weekend with you.”