The Trap for the Manager

The board in my cupboard-office underwent a full overhaul on Sunday evening: I took down every card devoted purely to Nigel — the coats, the phones, the sprains, the mysterious noises — filed them away in a folder marked "personal, not relevant to the case," and rehung everything else around a single central name: Bartholomew Grimshaw.

"Investigation board two point oh," Poppy announced, surveying my handiwork with the professional appraisal she usually reserved for judging my latest endeavours. "I'll grant you, it looks a great deal more credible than 'recipe wall.'"

The board now held: a copy of the estimate from the residents' meeting (£300 per flat for "urgent roof repair"), the receipt scrap from the bin (real contractor cost — £4,200, declared to residents — £9,000), a printout of the scant information available on "Northgate Holdings," and, right in the centre, a simple question in large letters: "HOW DO WE PROVE IT?"

"We've got a torn receipt and some suspicions," Poppy said, articulating the problem that had been nagging at me all weekend. "That's not enough for the police. We need a confession. We need Grimshaw himself, saying out loud what we already know."

It was at exactly that point, just as we'd hit a wall, that Mrs Higgins knocked at the door — carrying that same shapeless knitting under her arm, which, I should note, had by now acquired something distantly resembling a scarf, though I wouldn't have staked my confidence on the claim.

"Dave, dear, I forgot to give you your post," she began, then, catching sight of the board through the half-open door, stopped dead, her face lighting with genuine delight. "Goodness me. Is this an actual investigation?"

We had to explain everything all over again — considerably faster this time, as it turned out, because Mrs Higgins, it emerged, had long harboured her own suspicions about the inflated estimates, but had never quite dared voice them, worried she'd come across as "just another disgruntled old gossip."

"You know," she said, once we'd finished, "Mr Grimshaw meets people in the back room of the Jolly Milkman every week. I see his car parked there on Tuesdays, round the back, so no one notices."

Poppy and I exchanged a look with the identical realisation that Mrs Higgins had just independently confirmed the exact same information Nigel, without knowing it himself, had gotten from Marlon two weeks earlier.

"Mrs Higgins," I said slowly, feeling a plan take shape in my head that was, at once, ridiculous and, it seemed, the only one available to us, "what if we arranged for Mr Grimshaw to confess to something incriminating himself, in his own words — and we recorded it?"

She beamed with the enthusiasm of someone who, for the first time in twenty-three years of concierge service, had been offered not just the chance to watch the building, but to genuinely change something in it.

"I'm in," she said firmly. "What do we need to do?"

The plan we drew up over the following two hours was, frankly, amateurish by any reasonable measure, but it had one real advantage: it exploited the one genuine weakness we'd observed in Grimshaw — his pride, and his habit of shielding every financial manoeuvre behind references to "official inspections," which, from everything we'd seen, he never actually bothered to verify.

Mrs Higgins would ring him, posing as a representative of an invented "borough property management oversight office," and inform him of a surprise inspection of the building's estimates scheduled for Thursday, warning that an "inspector" — who would, of course, be me, in a suit borrowed from Nigel under the plausible pretext of a "job interview" — would arrive for a "preliminary discussion" at his office beforehand, to go over the details ahead of the official visit.

"This is ridiculously risky," Poppy noted, cleaning an old dictaphone she'd dug out of her grandmother's desk drawer specifically for the occasion. "If he calls to verify the number…"

"He won't," Mrs Higgins assured us, with the confidence of a woman who'd spent twenty-three years studying human psychology through the lens of complaints about leaking taps. "Men like Grimshaw never double-check authority. They either grovel to it, or they hide behind it. He won't doubt it for a second."

She turned out to be right. The phone call on Monday went off flawlessly — Mrs Higgins, to my genuine admiration, delivered such a convincing impression of a stern bureaucrat that I very nearly believed in the existence of the borough property management oversight office myself — and Grimshaw, according to her account, agreed immediately to the "preliminary discussion" on Thursday, clearly hoping to make a good impression before the official inspection.

Thursday arrived faster than I would have liked, given the amount of anxiety that had accumulated in my system by that point. Nigel's suit, for what it's worth, didn't fit me perfectly — it was a couple of centimetres too narrow across the shoulders — but there was no alternative: Poppy flatly refused to explain where we'd get a "respectable inspector's suit" overnight, and asking Nigel himself for a loan of his clothes to help take down a man he himself, it seemed, had already been investigating for entirely separate reasons struck me as both logical and oddly awkward at the same time.

"Sure you can handle this?" Poppy asked, straightening my tie outside Grimshaw's office, tucking the dictaphone into my inner jacket pocket with the same care you'd reserve for hiding something everything else depends on.

"No," I admitted honestly. "But it seems like our only shot at getting anything substantial."

Grimshaw received me in his office with the same velvety courtesy I remembered from the residents' meeting — a firm handshake, an offer of tea, which I declined, afraid my shaking hands would give me away before any careless word could — and the first ten minutes of conversation went, remarkably, smoothly: I, doing my best impression of the bureaucrats I'd seen in films, asked general questions about estimate procedures, and he answered with the same smooth confidence he answered everything with.

The turning point came when I, following the script Poppy and I had worked out, casually dropped the name "Northgate Holdings," remarking that "the inspection is interested in how asset management is structured through subsidiary organisations."

Grimshaw's expression changed instantly — the velvety mask cracking for the first time in the entire conversation.

"Who gave you that name?" he asked sharply, all his previous smoothness gone without a trace.

"It's standard procedure," I said, feeling my heart thumping somewhere up near my throat.

"Standard procedure," he repeated, with a sudden, chilling coldness in his voice. "Interesting thing. I rang the borough council this morning, purely as a formality. Turns out they've never heard of any surprise property management oversight inspection."

The floor seemed to tilt slightly beneath my feet.

"So who the hell are you?" Grimshaw asked, rising from behind his desk with the deliberate slowness of a man accustomed to letting menace in his voice do the work of any physical action, and pressing the intercom button. "Barry. Come in here, would you. We've got a guest who's lost his way."

From the reception area, through the door, I could hear Poppy — bless her presence of mind — instantly reacting to the shift in the conversation's tone, launching into a loud, overplayed phone call to her "office," in which, beneath the bureaucratic patter, I caught the coded phrase we'd agreed on beforehand for exactly this kind of situation: "Yes, I'm on site, everything's going to plan, but it looks like the weather's turning faster than expected."

The weather, of course, was a figure of speech. The reality, though, was deteriorating quickly enough without any figures of speech: Barry loomed over me with the ominous stillness usually reserved by bouncers for people whose explanations don't satisfy them, while Grimshaw, rounding the desk, positioned himself squarely between me and the only door leading out to freedom.

"We can do this the easy way," he said quietly, "or the hard way. You tell me who you're working for, who else knows about Northgate, and perhaps we can avoid any unnecessary unpleasantness for you personally."

I honestly had no idea, in that moment, what to say. All of Poppy's carefully prepared cover stories about the "borough inspection" had crumbled to dust in the face of a direct question from a man whose patience was, quite clearly, running out, and I would probably have stammered out something catastrophically unconvincing, if the office door hadn't burst open at exactly that instant.