The Girl from Heavytree Farm

Chapter Six: A bad penny

CHAPTER SIX 

After dinner at a local restaurant, they retired to George's first floor office\/ reception room to discuss their progress on the case. George had, it turned out, not found out anything productive from the councillors he had visited that afternoon. They knew the names of Bridges & Westbury, builder and architect, but they could not, or would not, say anything more about how they had come to undertake so many council projects. 

Raymond, meanwhile, had discovered that Bridges & Westbury were well known among the frequenters of the Eagle, who regarded their work as a mug's game. Anyone foolish enough to take up employment with them could be certain that he would not be paid, or if he was paid he would be underpaid, he would be expected to work all hours, and his personal safety was no concern of the company. If anything were go amiss, he and his family would be the losers - not the company. In fact, in the case of one notorious accident when a worker and the equipment he was using had been buried in a trench that collapsed (due to the sides not being properly lined with wooden shuttering to support them) the company had reclaimed the cost of the lost equipment from the dead man's family. 

Leon had got into the company's head office and had distracted the office clerks for long enough to get his hands into the filing cabinets. He was quite vague as to how he had done this, but Digby later told Mirabelle that Leon had instructed him and Dennis to start a fight in the street and then had run into the office, pretending to be a passer-by in a panic, and asked the clerks to come out into the street and stop the fight. They had rushed out to join in the fun, leaving Leon enough time to look in the filing cabinets and extract a few likely-looking documents. By the time that the clerks returned, covered in dust from joining in the fight, Leon had vanished. 

Leon had extracted the company minute book from the previous year (the current one would have been missed too quickly), a file of correspondence between Bridges & Westbury and Westminster Metropolitan City Council, and a draft of the previous year's accounts. These indicated that the company was in constant negotiation with the Council officers, with references to 'normal rates' and 'usual expectations', and - when Raymond sat down with the minute book and compared it to the list of contracts which the Council had advertised - Bridges & Westbury regularly stated in their minute book that they had obtained contracts which had not even been advertised for tender. 

The annual accounts showed costs of tendering for contracts, but not what these comprised. Leon suspected that Bridges & Westbury were making payments to a Council official or officials in order to get contracts at favourable rates, but to prove it the Triangle Agency needed to see the bank accounts and cheque books. The annual accounts also set him off on another tack: Bridges & Westbury held large areas of prime real estate in the city of Westminster, which they had purchased and which they obviously wanted to develop. To judge from the Triangle Agency's records of planning applications (culled from the local newspaper), they were given preferential treatment on their applications, which were apparently approved by the Council without going through the normal legal processes. This meant, as Raymond pointed out, that their housing plans did not receive the proper scrutiny, and weren't checked for safety or compliance with regulations. 

'So they borrow from the bank to buy land, build on it and sell the properties quickly, then repay the bank, borrow some more and invest in more land,' said Leon. 'The bigger their investments become, the more they have to build and the quicker they have to sell, so the more they cut costs and the less attention they pay to the safety of their workers.' 

'I wonder who buys these properties,' George mused. 'Being well located and relatively cheap, they must be a good investment for the would-be landlord. I shall contact Bridges & Westbury and ask them what they have for sale. Do you have the name of their agent, Leon?'