by Keith Dixon
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
THE SUN WAS SETTING as I turned into Brands’ car park. The watery light had strengthened during the course of the day and a honeyed glow softened the edges of the red-brick office. I was struck by the contrast between this world of sophisticated urban wealth and the environment that I came from. My father wouldn’t have been able to hold a conversation with the confident, educated, experienced people that worked for Brands, though his sense of right and wrong, his ability to take the measure of a man, and his determination to provide for my mother and me, whatever it took, gave him enough sophistication in my eyes.
When I entered the office, I could see Laura through the full-length glass windows of one of the small meeting rooms. She was standing and talking animatedly towards a tele-conference machine that stood on a low table. I moved away and waited for her to finish.
Mal O’Donovan walked by and winked at me. I called his name and caught up with him.
‘What’s up?’ he said.
‘If I were a consultant,’ I said, ‘and I’d just started working for Brands, what would you expect me to know?’
He was taken aback. ‘How do you mean?’
‘What would I be asked to do? How do you go about things when you’re training people? There must be some basic stuff that you use, some presentation material or handbooks or something. Every consultant I’ve ever known has got their own hobby-horse, some method that they swear by.’
His face took on a cunning look. ‘Ah, the big secret,’ he said. ‘The magic bullet. Wait here a sec.’
He walked off and came back a minute later with a slim paperback book. He gave it to me like an offering, both hands outstretched.
‘Handle with care,’ he said. ‘The holy grail for consultants who work in the behaviour business. I’d say everyone who works here has used this some time or another. We always build it into our programmes. It’s easy to understand and makes sense to people straight away. We like things that are easy for people to understand—makes our jobs easier. Know what I mean?’
‘I’ll handle it carefully.’
‘Don’t worry about it. We’ve got dozens of copies.’ He backed off with a cheery wave.
I looked at the book. It was a slim Penguin paperback called Games People Play by someone called Eric Berne.
When I looked back at Laura, she was standing against one of the windows, wide eyed and gesturing with a hand for me to join her. Before I reached the door, she opened it and put a finger to her lips. A dull voice without any inflection was coming from the conference device.
‘ … and I know you’ve got the police involved, but that was to be expected. I don’t expect any more from dull little creatures like you, actually, without the resources to try something different. Are you listening, Laura?’
She stepped to the table and bent down to the machine. ‘I’m here. Tell me what you want and go away.’
She turned her face up to me and her eyes were round with fear and a kind of supplication. She glanced at the machine and shook her head at me, as though she knew I was about to say something.
‘What I want, Laura, you can’t give me. It’s the satisfaction of having that little shit dead, for one. Everything after that is gravy, including this touching conversation. You can’t believe how much I wanted him to suffer, and in fact he didn’t. It was over much too quickly. So I’ve still got issues, as our American friends call them. Unresolved feelings of anger and resentment. And I guess you’re the standing target at the moment. Bad luck.’
The voice was male and it was muffled, as though his mouth was half-hidden behind a gag or a cloth. It also sounded as though it had been treated, moving up and down in pitch and volume as though passing through an electronic device.
‘If there’s nothing I can do,’ Laura said, ‘then I guess there’s no point us having this conversation, is there?’
‘Oh I disagree there,’ the voice said. ‘I need to impress on you the urgency of my situation. You see I know that you have someone on the case, as they say. I think I need to convince you that it’s not a good idea. Listen.’
There was silence for a moment, then a scrabbling sound close to the microphone. The man’s treated voice came back. ‘This is what waits for you, Laura.’
Then came a sound that was hard to make sense of at first. It started in a high register, a high-pitched note of intense, piercing shrillness that was difficult to place. The speaker in the room couldn’t handle the prolonged intensity, warping it and edging it with white noise. Only when the unmistakeable sound of a sobbing breath interrupted the shriek was it evident that the noise was a cry – an awful, human, shattered screech of pain. It shut off abruptly as the man yanked Tara away from the telephone mouthpiece.
‘There you are,’ he said. ‘Don’t say you weren’t warned.’
Then the line went dead.
Laura collapsed on one of the two armchairs in the small room and put a hand to her eyes. I stood next to her and put a hand on her shoulder. We stayed like that for nearly five minutes, until I felt her breathing calm down.
‘What did he say?’ I asked.
She looked up at me, her eyes rimmed with red, her lower lip trembling.
‘He terrified me, Sam. He said we were playing a dangerous game. He said we should butt out. He mentioned you personally. He said he’d wanted Rory to suffer, and he wants Rory’s family to suffer, and he wants the company to suffer. But if we got in the way he’d make us suffer too. You and me.’
I nodded. ‘He had a lot to say for himself. He’s obviously deranged.’
She sighed deeply. ‘Poor Tara. What’s he going to do with her?
I didn’t answer. Nothing I said would be good.
She stood up and looked at me. ‘I don’t know what to do. Should we tell Howard?’
‘At the moment we do nothing. We definitely don’t tell Howard—if this caller knows about me then he’s getting information from somewhere. We shouldn’t rattle his cage more than necessary. Besides, I don’t see what Howard could do. There was nothing in the phone call that you could identify? Nothing in the background, nothing in the man’s tone of voice or his vocabulary?’
She shook her head. ‘I’m frightened to death, Sam.’
‘Well that’s good. It means you’re unpredictable and potentially dangerous. My old dad used to say shit or get off the pot. This man’s still on the pot. I think Howard was right. He’s warming up.’
‘And did you ever listen to your old dad?’
‘Not as often as I should have done.’
I calmed her down by telling her what Micky Turbot had said about the swipe cards. She listened intently and then raised her eyebrows. Although the lighting was harsh in the small room, it only emphasized the angularity of her cheekbones.
‘So you’ve been all the way up to Warrington and think you have to report in,’ she said. ‘Even though it’s less than three hours since we spoke. You don’t have to prove yourself to me, Sam. You don’t have to let me know when you’ve got a clue—if that’s what this is.’
‘The office is on my way home. No extra charge for the house call.’
Half an hour later we left the room. Laura stopped suddenly to reach round behind me to turn off the light switch on the door frame, brushing an arm against me as she did so. Again her perfume tantalised my senses. An emotion that was almost physical stirred inside me, so strong that I had to hold on to the door handle. I was briefly ashamed of myself for the feelings I had, given the emotions that Laura must have been feeling.
Not that you would notice. She had gathered herself and seemed to have recaptured the icy calm that I’d seen before. She strode back towards her desk, talking over her shoulder. ‘I still don’t think this swipe card information is enough evidence. I don’t know what it proves. If anything, it just makes things more difficult.’
‘It proves that whoever was in here with Rory when he was murdered was either let in by him, or had a swipe card. My money is on him already having
a card. Then he has the element of surprise. So the question is, where did he get it?’
‘People have quit the company, they don’t always return their cards. You know how these things are.’
I stopped. ‘No, I don’t. How are they? If someone leaves, don’t you make sure they return their card? And when they do, what happens to the cards—are they left lying around in the office for anyone to steal?’
‘You don’t seem to have a very high regard for our professionalism.’ There were pink spots on her cheeks.
‘I need some help here. You know a lot about management consultancy, doesn’t mean you’re whiz-kids with security. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I wouldn’t trust you to look after my comb.’
We were out in the main office by now. Laura looked around and grew flustered. ‘The people we deal with are decent people. That goes for everyone—employees, clients, everyone.’
‘Everyone steals a pencil when they need one.’
‘I don’t want to argue with you, Sam.’
‘Then just say I’m right. Security’s been lax around here. It takes a murder and a kidnapping to wake you up. How can I find out what’s going on with the swipe cards?’
She looked away, breathing deeply. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know who looks after them now Finch has gone.’
Two other people sat in this part of the office—a young woman with long crinkled hair and a deep tan, and a middle-aged man with a vague resemblance to Dustin Hoffman; both of them were deeply engrossed in their computer monitors. I stepped closer and reached out a hand to touch her arm. She looked up at me from under her pale lashes.
‘I know you’re scared,’ I said. ‘But being angry with me won’t help.’
‘Maybe not, but it feels good.’
‘Depends on which side of the desk you’re sitting.’
