Page 59 of Murder on Cold Street
“I remind you one last time, Mr. White, that you speak to your employer. You serve at my pleasure, sir, not the other way round.”
Mr. White laughed, the sound full of derision and impatience. “And what would you do without me? I am an indispensable member of this firm. You are but a woman who doesn’t know her place.”
For so long she had feared this, open enmity, open confrontation, an irreversible rupture. Yet now that it was at last here, she found that she didn’t fear it anymore. No, she wanted it. More than anyone else in the room, more than the belligerent Mr. White could even imagine. “You are wrong, Mr. White. I do know my place. My place is here, at the head of this table, whereas your place... is no longer at Cousins.”
Silence, then an eruption of startled speech, men turning to one another around the table to make sure their ears hadn’t deceived them.
Alice turned slightly. “Mrs. Watson, kindly have your men escort Mr. White out.”
She did not raise her voice, yet it carried, silencing the men.
Mr. White pounded a meaty fist on the table. “You can’t do this, you harpy!”
After what she had been through with Inspector Brighton, Mr. White’s insult barely registered. She regarded him coldly. “Let me repeat: You serve at my pleasure, Mr. White, and I have decided that for your insubordination and other derelictions of duty,including but not limited to the failure to conduct a company-wide audit in more than five years, you have proved that you have neither my nor Cousins’s best interest at heart. Your employment has been terminated. Mrs. Watson’s men will show you out.”
“If he goes, then I go, too!” roared a man by the name of Kingford as he rose. He was one of Cousins’s lead engineers—and an entrenched member of Mr. Sullivan’s clique.
“Mrs. Treadles, this is not how we do things here!” cried Mr. Pollard, the leader of the old guard.
Aha, the old fox was at last out of his hole, happy to let his rival be sacked before he piped up to garner some advantages for himself.
“Mr. Pollard, this is indeed not how we do things here. Since when did it become acceptable for a mere manager to be openly hostile and disparaging to the owner of the enterprise—and expect to keep his position? Since when did it become acceptable for a man not to do his work, offer a myriad of excuses, and hide evidence that might show that indeed his work has been shoddy? And since when did it become acceptable for those entrusted with the well-being of this company to condone such conduct, to speak up not at its proliferation, but only when one of its worst perpetrators has been shown the door—and then only to defend said perpetrator?”
Mr. Pollard, who had not expected such a direct offensive, flapped his lips a few times. “Mrs. Treadles, why, your father would not have acted this way!”
“And would anyone here have acted as he hadtomy father?”
“But—but that’s because your father wouldn’t have wanted you here,” said the wily old fox.
An insidious answer that pierced her straight through the heart. It would always hurt, at least a little, that her father had excluded her from Cousins and that it would never have come to her had Barnaby not died childless. But that was between a daughter and her father’s memory.
“I happen to believe that my father would have been greatlyangered by the way I have been treated,” she said firmly. “My father, however, is not here to settle this dispute. And therefore,Iam the arbiter of how things are done at this great enterprise.”
She looked around the table, meeting each and every gaze. “Gentlemen, this is a good time to join the exodus. For too long I have tolerated ill conduct in and out of this room. No more. If your loyalty is more to Mr. White and Mr. Kingford than to Cousins, leave now. I will not keep any here who do not know their places.”
A deathly silence.
Mr. Pollard blinked. Two men, Mr. Ferguson the chief accountant and Mr. Adams the lead cashier, pushed back their chairs and rose. Mr. Hadley, another lead engineer, almost lifted his behind off his chair, but then went no farther.
Alice leaned back in her chair. “You mustn’t hesitate, gentlemen. You must let your convictions guide you. Were you to stay, I would take it to mean that you have understood that mine is the only tenure here guaranteed by law.”
“Mrs. Treadles, this is no way to speak to the men,” protested Mr. Pollard, this time with a hint of real fear in his voice. “You will suffer a catastrophic loss of talent.”
Her stomach twisted with the exact same fear, but she could not back down now. She would not. “Talent is replaceable, Mr. Pollard. A man might be invaluable to his loved ones, but on a battlefield the war continues even when the general falls. Someone else will take the responsibility. Someone else will do the work—often surprisingly well. And that new person would be more grateful, too, for having been given the opportunity.”
She looked around again. “Does anyone else wish to leave?”
No one said—or did—anything.
Alice turned to the men Mrs. Watson had brought. “Gentlemen, you may escort Messrs. White, Kingford, Ferguson, and Adams from the premises.”
“Not so unceremoniously!” moaned Mr. Pollard.
Alice stared at him. “These men will have their wages and their belongings sent to them. I note again, Mr. Pollard, that you showed no concern formydignity when it was being trampled upon, but are now fretting over the dignity of the men who did the trampling most enthusiastically. Am I going to face such inequitable applications of your solicitude on a regular basis in the future?”
“I... why... that is... no, Mrs. Treadles, you will not.”
“Thank you, Mr. Pollard,” she said coldly.
