by Daniel Hurst
Scrolling through a couple of emails on my computer, I wonder how late I am going to have to be here tonight. Evan will be at home now, as he will have been for some time, and I expect he will be frustrated about us not spending the evening together once again. I check my phone to see if he has texted me, but he hasn’t. He already knows where I am and what I’m doing.
I’m working like a dog.
But hopefully not for too much longer.
I’m just about to put my phone back into my handbag when I decide to give the nursing home a quick call to see how my father is getting on. It’s been a week since he moved in there, and I have visited him almost every day to make sure he is settling in, but I won’t be able to get there today because of what I need to do here. It’s that thought that makes me even more determined to go ahead with my risky plan because if I can oust Michael and make my life a lot easier, I know I will have more free time to spend with my family rather than being here drowning in a sea of paperwork.
I hold my phone to my ear and glance towards Michael’s office as I wait for the call to connect.
‘Sunnydale Nursing Home. Alexa speaking.’
‘Hi, Alexa. It’s Imogen Stone. I’m just calling to see how my father, William, is getting on.’
‘Oh, hi, Imogen.’
I detect a slight hint of weariness in Alexa’s voice, and I’m not sure if it is just because she is tired after a long shift or because I have called the home every day since my father was sent there to check on him, and she is growing tired of it. Whichever it is, she is professional enough to tell me what I need to know without letting fatigue or frustration get in the way.
‘William is fine. He was asking about you earlier, though.’
‘I’m so sorry. I’ve been snowed under at work lately. But tell him I will be there tomorrow. Okay?’
‘Of course.’
‘Call me if he needs me. Or if anything happens. Anything at all.’
‘We will.’
‘I mean it. My phone is always on. Day or night.’
‘Got it.’
Alexa is finding it more difficult to keep the strain out of her voice now, so I should probably let her go and get on with her job instead of taking up her time trying to assuage the guilt I feel about not visiting Dad today.
‘Okay, thank you. Have a good evening.’
I end the call and put my phone back into my handbag, all the while feeling terrible about the thought of my dear old father sitting in that home, wondering if I am ever going to come and see him again. Of course I will see him; it’s just difficult at the moment trying to balance my work life around my private life. But hopefully not for too much longer.
Glancing towards Michael’s office again, I’m thrilled to see him putting his jacket on and picking up his briefcase.
He’s leaving.
I do my best to make it look like I’m intensely focused on something on my screen as he walks out of his office, appearing concentrated on work when really all I am concentrating on is knowing that his car has left the car park.
In my peripheral vision, I am able to see him making his way towards the exit, but just before he leaves, he suddenly stops and turns back, now heading in my direction.
My heart rate increases as he gets closer to my desk, and I’m half expecting him to slam the camera down in front of me and tell me that the game is up before firing me and giving me even more financial problems than I already have. But then I see the files in his hands and realise what he is doing because he has done this many times before.
He is coming to give me even more work.
‘Thanks for working late. Sorry to pile more on you, but I really could do with these being finished for the morning. There’s a good girl.’
He drops the files on my desk and gives me a wink before turning and swaggering towards the exits, no doubt getting off on the thought that I am watching him leave with an intense anger behind my eyes.
I say nothing as he goes because I want it to seem like I have nothing to come back with. No defence. No hope. No strategy. But I do. I just need him to leave before I can implement it.
It’s a relief to see him walk through the door and hear his footsteps descending on the staircase on the other side of it. I wait a few more seconds before making my way over to one of the windows and peering out at the car park, where I see the headlights of his car go on before he drives away.
I’m finally alone. The office to myself.
Now it’s time to get to work.
Without wasting a second, I hurry into Michael’s office and take a seat at his desk before placing my hands on his keyboard and letting out a deep breath. What I am about to do is very risky, but you know what they say: high risk, high reward.
Just before I type, I take out the Post-it note from my pocket on which I have written Michael’s password, not because I haven’t already committed it to memory but because I want to make certain that I don’t make a mistake as I enter it.
Taking my time, I type in the combination of letters, numbers and symbols and then hold my finger over the ENTER key, aware that this is the moment of truth.
Then I press it, grimacing as I do because I’m almost expecting some kind of alarm to go off as if the I.T. department can possibly have a way of knowing when somebody else is using another person’s password. But their technological powers aren’t that good, and there is no alarm, nor is there any error message on screen telling me that the password is incorrect. All there is before my eyes is the whirling circle on the computer that I recognise whenever I sign into my own desktop.
It means I am logging on.
It means I am in.
20
The clock has struck nine, and I’m still at the office, sitting at Michael’s desk and browsing through his personal files. I was hoping that I would be out of here by now, but that was dependent on me finding something on here that I could use against him, and so far, that isn’t the case. After a search for the incriminating evidence that he holds on me bore no fruit, I turned my attention to looking for any wrongdoing on his part. I suppose I was hoping to see evidence that he had acted fraudulently or dishonestly in his daily business, which I could have used against him to counteract the things he uses against me. But annoyingly, it seems like Michael is actually playing by the rules. Every transaction he has approved, every client he has brought into the bank and every email he has sent, all look legitimate and above board. I guess it was wishful thinking that I would be able to bring him down in a similar way to how he always threatens to bring me down. I guess he has seen in his experience with me how bad things can get when a person breaks the rules, so perhaps that is why he has made sure to stay on the right side of the law even though he is in a position to abuse his power if he wished.
But just because he hasn’t done anything wrong, it doesn’t mean that I can’t make it look like he has.
It was two years ago when I acted immorally and illegally for my personal gain, and I have regretted it ever since, as well as vowing that it would never happen again. But now I am about to do it again, only this time it is not on my behalf.
It is on my boss’s.
They say everybody makes mistakes, and that might be true, but it doesn’t mean people are always allowed to get away with them. That is certainly the case at a bank, where one incorrect entry can see a customer lose hundreds of thousands of pounds in error, and one big mistake can see a loyal employee have his contract terminated. There isn’t much that would be worse for a bank than if a disgruntled customer went to the press and revealed how an employee had made a mistake that resulted in them losing all their money. Who would ever have the trust to place a deposit with that bank after that? So all I need to do now is make it look like Michael has made a mistake and incorrectly inputted the wrong amount, and his fate will be sealed. I don’t have to worry about any customers losing money because they always get it back thanks to the financial regulators. It’s the bank that will suffer in t
he way of fines, and it’s those fines that the board members will not take kindly to. Once Michael’s ‘mistake’ is uncovered, then his dismissal will be a formality because people like him should not be making ‘mistakes’ like this, and banks as big as this one cannot afford to be paying out fines on behalf of their employees’ mix-ups.
All I need to do is start ‘editing’.
To do that, I need to change certain lines in the report that he sends to finance every month, but do so in such a way that I leave enough breadcrumbs behind so somebody else here can figure out what he has done wrong. I don’t want to make it too obvious, just the opposite, in fact. I want to make it look like this is something he has missed and potentially something that could happen again, as well create paranoia in head office that this might have happened before. That way, there will be no doubt in anybody’s mind that dismissing him is the only suitable option.
I keep my concentration as I work my way through the spreadsheet, looking for any lines where I can sprinkle my magic and incriminate Michael without being too outrageous. But it will be detected because this report goes through finance, and from what I know about those guys, they don’t miss a thing.
It’s almost another hour’s work before I feel satisfied that I have accomplished what I set out to do. All the lights have gone off in the office outside Michael’s windows because nobody has activated them for a while, but they will turn on in a second when I walk out, having finished my work for the evening. All I have to do now is log off and get the hell out of here and let all my hard work play out over its natural course. I’m not exactly sure how long it will take the finance team to discover the discrepancies in Michael’s report. It could be a week. It could be a month. But I will remain patient and composed in that time, knowing that however long it takes, the clock is now ticking down on Michael’s stranglehold over me and this entire office.
I’m just about to sign out of Michael’s desktop when I suddenly see all the automatic lights come on in the open-plan part of the office.
That means somebody is coming in.
I react instinctively, turning off the computer screen in front of me, sliding out of Michael’s chair and hiding under his desk, praying that whoever is coming in here is not going to come into this office and catch me under here. If they do, then the game is over, and it will be me losing everything rather than the man I am trying to frame.
Several tense seconds pass as I sit on the carpet under the desk and listen for signs of movement in the office. I have no idea who it is out there, but I’m just hoping that it’s somebody who came back because they left something on their desk and not somebody who is planning on working here this evening. If it’s the latter, then I could be stuck hiding under this desk all night.
My hiding place might be a good one to avoid being seen, but it also comes with the negative side effect of it being a bad place for me to see anything either. The only way I’m going to know if the person has left the office is by peeping out and checking.
I decide to give it a few more minutes before plucking up the courage to crawl out from under the desk and peer around the side of it in the direction of the open-plan area.
The lights are still on out there, but I can’t see anybody. Have they gone? Possibly, but I can’t be sure. They could just be in the kitchen or the toilet, and I don’t want to assume I’m safe until I know for certain that there is no chance of me getting caught in here.
Then I see him. Coming out of the kitchen and headed right towards me.
It’s the owner of the office I am currently hiding in.
It’s Michael.
I duck back under the desk and hold my breath as I hear him enter the room, his shoes moving across the carpet and the gentle hum of a tune escaping his lips. He sounds like he is in a good mood, but he certainly won’t be if he discovers me lurking in here after he had apparently left for the night.
I daren’t move a muscle as I listen to him on the other side of the desk with my eyes boring down on the patch of carpet in front of me, the patch that I am praying will not be occupied by Michael’s feet any second now. If so, then it will mean he is standing at his desk, and then he will only be inches away from my hiding place.
I have no idea how many seconds pass, but each one feels like hours as I wait to find out if I am going to be discovered and pulled out of here by the scruff of my neck. It’s not just my entire plan that hinges on the next few seconds but my entire future too because, knowing Michael, he could be so angry at finding me here that he could just fire me on the spot.
But miraculously, I hear the humming moving away, and I figure that means he is leaving. I can’t be sure though, so that’s why I give it another five minutes before leaving my hiding place, in which time the automatic lights out there have turned off again in the main office, and I feel confident that I really am alone again now.
Getting back to my feet, I dust myself down before finishing logging off Michael’s desktop, grateful that I had a chance to turn the screen off before he came in or else he would surely have known something was wrong. Then all I have to do is remove the camera from the plant near his keyboard, which is still where I left it, making me feel even more confident that Michael never noticed it and my plan has been a successful one.
It’s a relief to be out of his office and back at my own a few seconds later, and I waste no time in packing up my things and getting the hell out of this place. It’s very late now, so late that it won’t be long until I’m back here again in the morning, but at least things will be very different when I return. Unlike all the other days I have come here and had to endure Michael’s constant victories over me, now he is the one standing on the brink of defeat. He doesn’t know it yet, but his fate has already been sealed. One day soon, his ‘mistake’ will be discovered, and then he will be forced to pack up his belongings, log off for the final time, and make the long walk out of this office with his head down in shame. I will be watching him when that happens, and I will be enjoying every single second of it.
He will be gone.
I will be free.
And we will be equal.
At least that was the plan.
21
It’s been two weeks since I infiltrated Michael’s computer files and made it look like he had done something he shouldn’t have done. But so far, there have been no repercussions from that. All I can assume is that the ‘mistake’ in his financial reports haven’t been discovered by the bank’s accountants yet because he is still coming to work and making my life a misery. But it’s just a matter of time. There is no way the finance team will fail to pick up on what I did, and when they do, all hell will break loose. There will be confidential emails being sent to the New York office, as well as panicked phone calls, all of them raising the alarm and letting the senior managers across the Atlantic know that trouble is afoot in the UK branch. Then Michael will be called into a hastily arranged meeting to explain how he could have possibly been so stupid as to make problematic errors with client funds, and despite his protestations of innocence, the evidence will be damning.
Then he will be relieved of his duties, probably suspended at first pending the investigation because they will owe him that, but those numbers don’t lie. If his mistakes got out to the public, then all trust would be lost in the bank, and no board member will take kindly to that.
Goodbye, Michael.
Hello, a brighter future.
But as the saying goes, a watched kettle never boils, so I’m not going to spend all my time sitting around waiting for my plan to pay off. I have to carry on as normal, and that means going to work, being a good wife and of course visiting my father.
I’m at the nursing home now, making my way towards Dad’s room with a few of his favourite snacks and a copy of today’s edition of the Financial Times because he still likes to read it just like he did every morning when he was at the bank. I’ve never been a big reader of it, but Dad swears by this newspaper as if it i
s his Bible, which as a worker in the banking industry, I suppose it was.
‘Hi, Dad,’ I say as I enter his room and see him sitting in his armchair, watching the television. It’s a nice day outside, but the curtains are shut in here, and I worry that it’s not a good sign that he is shutting out the sunlight in favour of sitting in the dark. But when I ask him about opening them, he tells me why he has done it.
‘I can’t see a bloody thing on this screen with that sun beaming in.’
I laugh at his grumpy observation and decide to leave the curtains closed, at least until his show has finished.
‘What are you watching?’ I ask him as I sit down on the edge of his bed and move an empty plastic cup away.
‘The news,’ he tells me, although it definitely isn’t the news. It looks like an old episode of Columbo, but I don’t say anything. He seems to be enjoying it, whatever he thinks it is.
‘I’ve brought you some bits,’ I say as I rummage in my bag and take out the snacks and newspaper.
‘You didn’t need to. Your mother has brought me enough.’
He sticks a thumb in the direction of the table in the corner, upon which I see the snacks and newspaper I brought him yesterday.
‘Well, you can never have too many snacks,’ I tell him as I close the bag, not worrying too much about the fact he thought Mum had been bringing him things instead of me.
We sit and watch TV for a moment, and I’m just enjoying being with him because it’s not always this peaceful. Two days ago, Dad refused to see me because he thought I was keeping him from Mum by putting him in this home. It was horrible to see him so distressed, but it is, unfortunately, becoming more of a regular occurrence as his illness progresses. But there are lighter moments, like yesterday when Evan and I were sitting out on the terrace with him watching the sunset, and he told us how the beautiful view reminded him of the time he made love to one of his first girlfriends in the countryside many years ago. That’s the thing with conditions like Dad’s; that filter between what is appropriate to say and what isn’t gets whittled away, leading to all sorts of unpredictable things coming out of his mouth, and we can’t help but laugh at many of them.
