The Seventh Email

The first anonymous email arrived on a grey Monday in March. It was addressed to the whole marketing team, and it contained a single sentence: “Meetings would be shorter if they started with the decision, not the background.” Clara, who had sat through three pointless meetings that morning, nearly laughed out loud. Nobody replied, and nobody admitted anything.

The second email came a week later, and the third a week after that. Each one was short, polite and uncomfortably accurate: a better template for reports, a warning about a client who always paid late, a suggestion to move the weekly call to Wednesday. Colleagues began to whisper by the coffee machine. Was it the new manager? The intern? Someone in IT who had read everybody’s files?

Clara decided to find out. The sender address was just a random string of letters, so she tried something simpler: she kept a list of what the emails knew. By the sixth email, a pattern had appeared. The writer knew about problems from the last five years, not just the last five months, and always used the same strange expression: “with the benefit of hindsight”.

The seventh email arrived on a Friday, and for the first time it was addressed to Clara alone. “You are the only one who noticed the pattern. Come to the archive room at five. Bring nothing.” She almost ignored it. The archive room was in the basement, and nobody had used it since the company went paperless.

At five o’clock, Clara pushed open the heavy door. An old man in a cardigan was sitting among the boxes with a thermos and a laptop older than the intern. “Mr Hale,” he said, smiling. “I founded this company, and I still have the password. I just wanted to see whether anyone was listening.”

Clara sat down on a box. “We were,” she said. “We just didn’t know it was you.” Mr Hale opened the thermos and poured two cups of tea. “Then let’s start with the eighth email,” he said. “This time, you can write it.”