The Seventh Email

The first anonymous email arrived on a grey Monday in March. It was addressed to the whole marketing team and 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 very morning, nearly laughed out loud. Nobody replied, and nobody admitted to anything, although she noticed that the head of finance studied his screen with unusual intensity.

The second email came a week later, and the third a week after that. Each was brief, courteous and uncomfortably accurate: a better template for reports, a warning about a client with a record of paying late, a proposal 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 been reading everybody’s files?

Clara resolved to find out. The sender’s address was merely a random string of letters, so she tried something simpler: she kept a list of everything the emails seemed to know. By the sixth email a pattern had emerged. The writer was familiar with problems that went back five years, not just five months, and invariably used the same peculiar expression: “with the benefit of hindsight”.

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

At five o’clock Clara pushed open the heavy door. An old man in a cardigan sat 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 simply wanted to find out whether anyone was listening.”

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