Altered Life

by Keith Dixon

CHAPTER TWENTY

  HE WAS SHORT AND wiry, with grey hair and sallow skin that suggested he saw the insides of too many offices. He was formally dressed in a dark suit and tie, though his shoes were scuffed. A limp handkerchief dripped out of his breast pocket. He stuck out a stubby hand, which I shook. I looked around for Evans but he’d gone.

  ‘OK, let’s go,’ I said to O’Donovan, then watched as he took me at my word, turned and sped off towards the consultancy division, his short legs pumping hard. I took off after him. He led me past the desks where I’d met Betty and Eddie Hampshire, and further into a large open-plan area where rows of desks dotted with computers were separated by waist-high partitions covered in blue felt. The space was eerily quiet compared to the hubbub in the other end of the office. It had the feel of a secluded airport chapel removed from the perils waiting on the tarmac outside.

  O’Donovan guided me to a table between two shelving units that faced each other, creating a private space that seemed to act as an informal meeting area. The table was served by three tall chairs that looked like modern sculpture—stainless steel tubes and pale polished wood. We hauled ourselves on to the chairs and sat facing each other. I took out my notebook, which he noticed with a small smile before he began to speak.

  No one took him seriously. Mal knew that. They thought he came in early to wring brownie points from Rory—but the fact was, he needed the time to think. Time by himself. Away from Vera and the kids and the TV and the dogs ... time when he could gather his thoughts and make sure he knew what he was doing.

  So that he didn’t cock up again.

  He’d only done it once. Four years ago. Made a right bollocks of a proposal so that Brands actually made a loss on the job. To get the project finished, he’d had to work almost twice as many days as they’d proposed, which meant they made no profit. What’s more, it threw his timetable out so he wasn’t available for the other jobs he was scheduled to pick up. It was a simple sum but Mal had screwed up. He’d told Rory it wouldn’t happen again. Worse, he’d told himself the same thing.

  That’s why he was in early that morning and every other morning that he wasn’t actually out delivering. An advantage was that he got one of the parking slots at the front, which he liked. Could get a quick exit then. He usually arrived the same time as Carol and they’d go up in the lift together. He had to be careful now because he’d done his knee in playing Sunday morning football—the doctor told him to rest it as much as possible, so six flights of stairs were out of the question. This morning, Betty walked in with Carol and came up with them in the lift too, staring ahead with her usual concentration and saying nothing.

  He’d realised a long time ago that he liked this routine. The life of a consultant wasn’t geared around routine. It wasn’t nine to five and it often wasn’t Monday to Friday. So he liked it when he had a spell driving into the office and sitting at a desk doing paperwork. And he was beginning to realise that he didn’t like consultancy anyway. He’d grown more cynical about it over the years. It seemed to him that he’d spent a good part of his adult life working with companies training people who didn’t want to be trained in skills they had no use for at times that were inconvenient and at a cost far beyond what it was worth. Brands wasn’t a small company any more—they had more money, glossy brochures, a web-site and a big loan from some gullible rich people. But he was doing the same thing now that he’d been doing five years ago. Talking about how people work together. Using ideas that weren’t original and might not even have been true. The way it worked was that some academics in America did research and came up with a few concepts that they put into four-box models that were easy to draw on a flip chart. Then consultants and trainers in the UK nicked the ideas and said that what held good for American workers was good for British ones too—and European ones, if it came to that. There was a part of Mal that didn’t trust this process and thought it was bogus.

  In Mal’s eyes, management should have been easy: treat people like individual human beings, talk to them and explain what was happening in the company, ask for their opinion when things were going to change, and don’t think that because you were a manager you were better than they were.

  That morning, when they got to the top floor, Carol used her swipe card to let them in and Betty went ballistic immediately. There were lights on in the office, which was criminal in her eyes. She was always sending out snotty e-mails reminding people to shut the doors and turn the lights out when they left at the end of the day, or if they were in at the weekend. It was all money being wasted as far as she was concerned. So when she saw the lights she started swearing and cussing and Carol gave Mal one of her raised-eyebrow looks and went to find the relevant light switches. Betty stormed off to the kitchen to put her sandwiches in the fridge and Mal went after her to make a drink, part of his usual morning drill.

  He was putting coffee in his cup when he heard a kind of shouting noise from Carol in the main office. He and Betty looked at each other, then went out. Carol was walking backwards out of one of the small offices. Mal guessed she’d been doing her tidy drone thing and was turning lights off one by one. But he saw straight away that this was something serious. There was something out of kilter in the room, something not normal. What’s more, Carol had her hand to her mouth and had gone white. She was making strange whimpering noises. Betty was standing beside him now; he felt her push him in the back, telling him to Go on, see what was up. But this was the kind of situation he didn’t like. It meant he was going to be in the middle of something important, something with consequences. So he didn’t want the responsibility of being the next person to go in that room. He wanted his routine. He wanted everything to go back to normal. And even while he was wanting that, he knew deep down that everything had already changed.

  I said to him, ‘You any idea who would want to murder Rory?’

  He looked away, through the windows, and said nothing for half a minute. ‘I’ve thought a lot about that. I read somewhere that most murders are spur of the moment. Someone loses their rag and the next thing you know they’re standing over a bloody corpse with a meat cleaver in their hand.’ When he spoke he had a lilting Liverpool accent that coloured his phrasing as though he were suffering from catarrh. ‘This doesn’t look like that. It’s more premeditated. Thought through. Makes me think it was someone with a grudge going back a long time. I reckon someone was sending a message.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. But not anybody who works here. God knows there was plenty to get mad about with Rory, but if one of us had done it, he would have been found with his head stuffed under the lid of the photocopier with a waste-bin stuffed up his arse. Sorry to speak ill of the dead. And me a Catholic.’

  ‘He could be tough to get on with.’

  ‘Basically, he kept changing his mind. Then he convinced himself he’d let us all into the secret, and it was our fault for making a bollocks of it.’

  ‘This a regular thing?’

  ‘The longer you worked here, the worse it got. It was like when you started, you were his darling, but he gradually got bored with you, to the point where he couldn’t even look you in the eye.’

  ‘Did you ever go through that?’

  He gave a small laugh. ‘About once a year. I got used to it. It’s the others, though. I’ve lost count of the consultants who left. Some just wouldn’t put up with it. They buggered off. Know what I mean? Just wouldn’t put up with it.’

  I wrote this down in my notebook. I told him Laura had mentioned what he’d seen on Rory’s laptop: “Who’s the daddy now?”

  ‘Yeah,’ Mal said. ‘Took me a minute to make sense of it because you don’t usually see writing that big on a screen.’

  ‘Any idea what it means?’

  ‘Not a clue. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I saw it and I’ve still got no idea.’

  ‘You said something wasn’t right in the room,’ I said. ‘Was that it, or was there more?’

  �
�There was something else. Glad you asked. This is what I wanted to tell you.’

  ‘Now’s your chance.’

  He gave me a quick grin. ‘The police have been putting out stories,’ he said. ‘They’ve been telling everyone the office was locked up tight. No ins or outs. But it’s not true. See that door over there?’

  He pointed to a grey fire door that had a metal release bar running across its middle.

  ‘When I come out of the kitchen with Betty, that’s standing ajar. Just two inches. Took me a minute to catch it, but I knew something wasn’t quite right.’

  ‘You’ve got a good sixth sense.’

  He shrugged. ‘When you come in every morning you get an idea of what the place should look like. I reckon that’s how the murderer got in. Either someone left it open, or he forced it somehow. Comes in, does the dirty, walks out.’

  ‘Where does it go to?’

  ‘Small door on the side of the building. Nobody’s going to see you early in the morning. Anyone could wander in or out. Absolutely anybody.’