[At the offices of a Sunday Newspaper in London]

The Editor had called one of his reporters in to see him.

“Kim, very well done for your last story it went down very well. The reader feedback was very positive.”

“Thanks Sandy. It was touch and go for a bit but I got to the bottom of it in the end.”

Sandy Wynn, the Editor smiled back at his reporter.

“Are you ready for a new assignment?”

“As I’ll ever be? What is it all about?”

Sandy leaned back in his chair with the tips of the fingers of both hands touching.

“We have reason to believe that an engineering company in Kings Lynn is doing something very crooked. Money Laundering, shipping drugs or something else, we are not sure. We’d like you to go up there and get a job with them. The assistant to the MD is taking maternity leave. We have arranged for you to rent a flat in the town for the duration. You have an interview at ten next Tuesday.”

Kim tried hard not to look disappointed. This was hardly an assignment worth of her status as the leading investigative reporter on the paper. As the only one left it still felt rather beneath her but a nice easy in and out job would do nicely after the last story had nearly gone horribly wrong.

“Why do we think that they are doing wrong? What evidence do we have so far? What if I don’t get the job?”

Sandy pushed a buff folder over the desk towards Kim.

“It is all in there but to summarise, less than two years ago, the company was losing money hand over fist. Then it was taken over by some offshore company that so far, we can’t trace who owns it. That is rather suspicious in its own right. As I said, they were in danger of going bust. After the takeover, they installed this former Cambridge Academic as boss and well, the company is not losing money but making a good wedge. This Academic has no experience running a business. After he left Cambridge, he went to work for a Formula 1 racing team in Milton Keynes or some place around there. His role was of a Mathematician. How can he run a business so well if… Well, it all sounds rather fishy to me and also to the powers that be if you get my meaning.”

The editor smiled.
“As for getting the job, you know what you need to say and how to act in these situations. You are very good at getting people to come around to your way of thinking.”

“Interesting. On the surface, he is totally unsuited to be MD let alone turn the company around and make shed loads of dosh and we want to know why and how he is doing it?”
said Kim.

“Yeah, that just about sums it up.”

Then he looked at Kim with sad eyes.

“You really went through the wringer with your last case. This should be an easy way to get it, get the lowdown and write a report. Two weeks max I think and we should have the MD’s head on a platter for the Bank Holiday Edition. I’ve already reserved the front page for you.”

Kim thought for a moment.
“If I can’t get the story that quickly? What then? What if they see through me? After all how many people suddenly decide to quit the golden paved streets of London for some town in the back of beyond of Norfolk?”

“You know the form with puff pieces like this. Make it up so that is seems real.”

“What about him? His family?”

“Who cares really? It is all about the ratings my dear, the ratings.”

Sandy picked up new file. That told Kim that the interview was over. She picked up the folder he’d given her. Then she left the editors office and returned to her desk.

She sat thinking for quite a while. The folder lay unopened on her desk. Something didn’t add up. She’d never been told this blatantly to make up a story before. She wondered if this is what respectable journalism had become in the latter part of the second decade of the twenty-first century. For half a second, she wondered if the universities had started teaching ‘Hit Piece Journalism 101’ in the five years since she’d left.

With a sigh of resignation, she opened the folder and began to read. There wasn’t a lot of detail inside. Much of what she read just confirmed what had already been explained to her. There were a few sheets of information about the company and what it made along with a table showing the published results of the company for the past five years. All in all, there wasn’t much data at all to be going on with. The change in financial fortunes were there in front of her in black and white. Perhaps it was down to nefarious dealings or perhaps for once in a blue moon, there was nothing bad with the company at all and that all it needed was a change in leadership? She realised that didn’t know much at all at that point.

Kim started a new folder on her laptop and then began to research the company and if possible the people behind it.

A quick search of the Companies House records revealed that the company was not quoted on any exchange. This confirmed what her Editor had said. That also meant that the amount of financial information that has to be reported is quite small. That meant that a lot of guesses had been made in the preparation of the table. From past experiences, she knew that they could just as well be right as wrong.

A few hours more work and Kim realised that the financial data that she’d been given was almost totally wrong. Something wasn’t right with the data and the reporter in her told her to put all that to one side for later. By the end of the day, she was determined to get to the bottom of the story good or bad. There was an itch that needed to be scratched.

She went home to prepare to go away on assignment with that itch getting a bit bigger the more that she thought about the job.

[the following Tuesday in Kings Lynn]

After a lot of dithering about what to wear which for Kim was very unusual, she decided on a pair of black trousers and matching jacket with a light-yellow top underneath. A pair of black flats and she was done.

By the time she reached her car, she regretted wearing those shoes as they were brand new and were already rubbing her heel. She looked at her watch.

“Shit,” she muttered to herself.
There was no time to go back and change them. She carried on hoping that she could get through the next few hours without them hurting her heel too much.

Right on time, she arrived at the factory where the company was based. She mentally smiled as she was able to park in a ‘visitors’ spot that had just been vacated. The rest of the car park was pretty full. To her this was a sign of a place of work not where evil deeds were being carried out. Then she thought, ‘perhaps it was all an elaborate hoax and indeed all sorts of nefarious and therefore illegal operations were being carried out inside at that very moment’?

With a hopefully not too plastic smile on her face, she went into reception.

“Hello, my name is Kim Greene. I have an interview at ten?”

“Oh yes Ms Greene. We are expecting you,” said the receptionist.

Kim looked around the reception area. Nothing looked out of place yet apparently something was going on here since the current Managing Director and his backers had bought the company for what looked like a pittance as it was supposedly on the verge of bankruptcy and turned it around in financial terms quite dramatically.

She’d read the briefing notes countless times before heading to Kings Lynn from London. There were a lot of lingering doubts about what she was getting into in Kim’s mind. This was not the sort of story that she normally covered but put those to the back of her mind given the frankly harrowing time she’d had with her last story. She reasoned that perhaps she needed a simple, in, get the story and out again operation but even as she told herself that, she knew that it wasn’t right. There was a lot more to this story than the notes revealed. It was up to her to expose it for the world to judge.

Even so, she felt that there wasn’t much of a story let alone one for the front page on a future edition of the paper. But, once again, she had to look at both sides of the coin. The word ‘Hoax’ came into her mind once more. If this was a den of iniquity, then this façade would be the perfect cover for their operations.

Any further musings had to be curtailed because she was called into the office of the Managing Director, Brian West.

“Please take a seat Ms Green,” said the MD as he closed the door behind Kim.

“Thanks,” replied Kim hoping to sound a bit nervous.

Her first impression was if this man was a master criminal then she was a Monkey’s Aunt. Then her second thought was that appearances could be deceptive.

[half an hour later]
“I have one last question for you. Why are you leaving London? The best salary we can offer is considerably lower than your current position at Chelsea and Fulham Vintners.”

“I’m a country girl at heart and London is just so noisy, busy and the pollution is pretty awful so I’m looking at getting out before I get stuck and unable to move away. Jobs that aren’t in the tourist industry are few and far between where I grew up in Cornwall so this seemed like a good as place as any to see what life was like outside the Capital.”

Brian West smiled and nodded his head.

“I don’t think I have any more questions Kim. Do you have any of your own?”

Kim paused for a second or so before asking.

“I was wondering about the dress code? If I came to work here, it would be useful to know things like that before I arrive for my first day.”

Brian West smiled at her.

“Certainly,” he replied and opened a folder that was sitting on his desk.

As he handed Kim a single sheet of paper he commented.
“Here you go. It is pretty simple really. It is all the work of the staff not the management. It is also from before my time in the hot seat, as well. It was working well so there really was no need to change it when I took over the running of the company.”

The last part of his statement startled Kim. She’d never encountered a policy like that before.

She glanced at the sheet. It all seemed fairly sensible.

She folded the sheet in two and put it into her handbag.

“How long before I can expect to hear about the job?” she asked.

Brian smiled.

“How about now? When can you start?”

Again, Kim was startled by his directness.

“Eh?”

“I said earlier that I don’t like sit on the fence when it comes to making decisions. I’ve made one. I like what you have said and how you have presented yourself which are far better than the other candidates… Can you start either Friday or on Monday or do you need some more time to consider the position?”

As he said those words, he pushed an envelope across the desk towards Kim.

“The full job offer is inside. It says pretty well everything we have discussed so there should not be any surprises.”

Kim was shocked by his directness. She’d never had a job interview like it.

“Can I think about it for a day or so?”

Brian smiled.

“Naturally but don’t leave it too long. But, as I said, when I decide to make changes, I generally like to execute them quickly and smoothly.”

Kim smiled and stood up.

“I won’t. I’ll let you know by close of business tomorrow.”

“That will be perfect,” replied Brian as he put out his hand.

Kim was momentarily startled.

She shook his hand. It was firm but not overly so.

“Until tomorrow then?” said Brian.

“Yes.”

---

Kim returned to the small one-bedroom flat that had been rented for her by the paper and sat thinking for quite a while. She ignored at least six calls to her phone and even more text messages.

In the end, she switched the cursed thing off and after putting on her coat and grabbing her bag, she left the flat and walked the half mile or so to the Railway Station and bought a ticket to London and luckily, she was just in time to get the next service to Kings Cross.

Upon arrival in London, Kim went straight into the Newspaper Offices and after a bit of badgering, she got a few minutes with her Editor, Sandy Wilson.

‘Hi Sandy,” said Kim trying to sound cheerful and positive as she was ushered into his office.

“Don’t you ever answer your phone? Or look at your messages?”

“Not last night I didn’t. I was trying to think and piece things together. I did have a job interview to go to today if you remember?”

“Oh good. Does that mean that you have the story already?”

“No, I don’t and there may well not be one. Either way, it is far too early to say. I spent less than an hour in the plant and only in the offices at that.”

“Don’t give me that. There is always a story. If we are short of a few things then we just invent them.”

“That’s just it, Sandy. There is at this point in time no story and we have to consider that there never was and that the turnaround was just good business.”

“Gone over to the dark side already?”

“No! I have not gone over to the dark side as you put it. I’ve met the MD, Brian West and he struck me as a pretty honest direct sort of person.”

“Honest? Really. That’s a load of crap and you know it. No businessman is truly honest. Well, none of those who run decent sized businesses or turn around a company that lost a cool five million into a profit of nearly ten million in under two years. No way. He’s crooked and I want his head on our front page and soon.”

“I’m trying to look at both sides of the situation which is what a proper reporter does or have you forgotten the rules of objectivity now that you are in charge?”

“Kim… Objectivity in the British Press died the day people like Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch and the like took over the media.”

Kim shook her head.

“If you do invent even one word and add it to my story then I don’t want my by-line anywhere near it. Understand?”

“Yeah, yeah,” remarked Sandy.

“I’m just trying… I’m trying to understand why this man? This Company? Have they done something to you? You never gave me the full details of what made you decide to target this what could turn out to be a perfectly innocuous company. Well, what about it?”

Sandy looked hard at Kim.

He sighed.

“Very well. This does not leave the building understand?”

“Ok.”

Sandy got up from his desk and went to a locked filing cabinet. After unlocking it, he opened the bottom drawer and pulled out a green folder.

“I want this back within the hour. Understand!”

“I understand,” replied Kim.

“No giving it to my secretary either. You are to bring it back before four thirty. After that I’ll be in meetings to plan the supplement for the week after next.”

“Ok boss. Message understood.”

Kim took the folder to her desk and after getting a Coffee and a Chocolate bar which would have to do as a poor substitute for a very late Lunch, she began to read the documents that it contained. The reasons for the investigation soon became clear. Now she knew why it was on the hit list but didn’t think that it was justified or ethical.

As the word ‘ethical’ crossed her mind, she shuddered and remembered Sandy’s word of just a few minutes before.

What little ethics existed in British Journalism had pretty well gone the way of the Dodo by the time of Robert Maxwell. Rupert Murdoch and his ilk had just finished off the job of burying it for good. Now it was dog eat dog and papers did the bidding of their owners in ways that even Lord Beaverbrook would have found distasteful. Most of the daily papers were in her opinion very right wing. It was left to a few Sunday only papers to carry the flag for investigative journalism but this story seemed to possibly sound the death knell for even what little was left.

After a second read of the folder, it didn’t take very long for Kim realise that the reason for her investigation went far beyond what had been told to her at the outset or even what was in the documents in front of her. There were clearly several other actors in play here but at that point in time, she had no idea who they were.

She was troubled by the fact that it was obvious that there was a lot more to this than even what the papers in the folder were saying. What they said all made perfect sense but as had been hammered into her as an undergraduate, there are always at least two sides to every story. None of those other sides had made themselves known at that point in time.

Her initial research into the company in Kings Lynn had told her a certain amount about them and how they worked. The information in the folder had added to it but only slightly. It was full of inferences rather than real hard facts. It was the sources of those inferences that intrigued her. They were noticeable by their redaction. They were there but the originals had been redacted with a black marker and she was looking at a copy. She felt that there was someone else pulling the strings both at the paper and possibly at the company in Kings Lynn. One thing was clear and that those strings were being pulled by different people.

She sat back at her desk and thought for a while. She remembered what one of her University Lecturers saying about building a story. He used the saying ‘Every Picture Tells a Story’. He went on to say that it could be re-written as ‘every identifiable source has a reason to be identified’ and also ‘a reason to not to be identified’. In other words, ‘every picture has many sides and just as many ways of looking at it’. He recent story had been successful because she looked at it in a different way from others.

A picture of the story was starting to form in her mind and at that point in time, it was most certainly not the one that the paper wanted.

On her way back to her Editors office to return the folder, she visited the Ladies toilet. As far as she knew, there were no security camera’s in there. Once she was sitting in a cubicle, she used her phone and photographed every piece of documentation that was in the folder. Then she uploaded it to her private cloud service before deleting every image from the phone. If someone at the paper was hiding something then Kim wanted to cover her backside in the event of things going pear-shaped.

“Thanks for the folder,” Kim said to Sandy Wilson a few minutes later.

“Did it answer your questions?”

“Sort of… There are still lots to find out which is why I need to get back to Norfolk and accept the job offer.”

Sandy just smiled.

“Don’t let me delay you any longer. Don’t forget to report in every other day. Remember Kim, the clock is ticking and there is an empty front page with your name on it.”

“I won’t,” replied Kim as she forced a smile onto her face.

For the first time since Sandy had taken over as Editor, Kim felt rather unclean after the encounter with him. The fairly slow train journey back to Kings Lynn allowed all sorts of thoughts and feelings to pass through her mind and body. This was something that she’d never experienced before on an assignment.

As the train slowed for its final stop in Kings Lynn, she was in no doubt that there was more to this than met the eye. She laughed at herself. She’d lost count of the number of times just that day that she’d said those very words to herself.

Quite what that was had piqued her interest she wasn’t entirely sure but it was more than enough for the time being.

[to be continued]