by Alice Castle
Beth felt a little stung. She was doing her best. Granted, she probably wasn’t a natural at the role of receptionist, as she generally felt quite prickly towards new people and she definitely loathed the switchboard, but that didn’t seem to matter as hardly anything at all seemed to go on in this office. They hadn’t had a single visitor so far, and precious few calls either.
‘Well, I’m doing my best. But yes, he’s locked it. Is there a spare key anywhere, do you know?’
There was a pause. Beth couldn’t quite hear the cogs whirring in Nina’s brain, but she could tell that a lot of concentrated thought was going on. ‘Nah. No idea, mate,’ said Nina eventually.
Beth let go of her breath, disappointed.
‘But you’re there, on the spot, Beth. And I bet you’re not exactly rushed off your feet. You’ll just have to search for it. Oops, looks like Wilf’s knocked over the Coke, got to go…’
Beth didn’t have time to say that Ben was only allowed Coke on Friday nights, as a treat. Just as well, probably. She could just imagine the sort of snort Nina would emit at this news, and also, she did want Ben to have some fun while she was tied up with this almost-certainly doomed quest.
Putting the phone down, Beth scanned the empty office. The chairs, the coffee table, the expanse of carpet, were all still pristine despite Ben and Wilf’s efforts yesterday. This office wasn’t very promising, as far as providing potential hiding places went. And it was quite possible that there was only one key to Potter’s office, and it was on him now, wherever he’d gone. Short of stalking him to his secret meeting and then mugging him, she might never get her hands on it.
On the other hand, maybe, like the teeny cashbox keys, office keys came in pairs. It made a sort of sense. She tried to think of the keys at work at Wyatt’s. Were they supplied singly? But it was all a bit different at the school. The buildings were ancient and venerable, and all the offices had served spells as other things in their time. She and her archives were now in the Geography building, but when the school had been smaller, a century ago, her block had housed the whole of the lower school. It was probably only the Headmaster’s office that had never been tinkered with, as the years added to the roll of pupils and the inexorable upward glide of the school.
The office doors here, though, were Johnny-come-lately things, cheaply made of veneered MDF in a factory, and there were identical specimens up and down the country. It seemed quite likely that, for a new lock on a new door, there would be at least two keys given as standard. She pushed herself back from the counter, her swivel chair gliding smoothly on the beige seagrass, then stood up and looked around. There was nowhere in the loo to hide a key, unless it was in the toilet brush container – an idea that made her feel quite sick. She took a quick peek, long enough to confirm her suspicion that Nina’s duties included those of office cleaner, and that she didn’t like this side of her job very much. That left the kitchen/cupboard area.
It didn’t seem promising. Apart from the kettle, which she did squint into but which was void apart from a few interesting rock formations growing from south east London’s notoriously high limescale content, there was only the Lilliputian fridge. It stored a brace of squat plastic containers of milk – an organic skimmed, which she was willing to bet was Potter’s; and a full fat from Lidl, which had Nina’s name all over it, in spirit if not in deed. She even checked the wincy little freezer compartment, which had an ice cube tray growing a furry beard of icicles, but nothing else.
The cleaning materials were dusty, comprising some dried-up sponges and cloths that looked as though they might crumble at her touch – she raised an eyebrow here at Nina. Then there was only the mug cupboard, above the kettle, still to check. Beth wasn’t hopeful. And it was high up. Well, high for her but fine for most people, she thought a little crossly.
She could reach the bottom shelf easily enough. There was no key in the box of tea bags, and nothing else there but expensive mugs which matched the seagrass matting, which she recognised from the cushion shop in the Village. She was willing to bet they were Letty’s contribution to the ambiance. There were also a couple of plain glasses and a lonely egg cup. How that had made it in there – and why – seemed the biggest mystery she was likely to stumble upon today, unless her luck changed. But there was another shelf to go.
She dragged her chair over from the counter, and positioned it in front of the cupboard, gingerly stepping onto it and relaxing a little when it didn’t immediately career across the carpet. She leaned forward to scrutinise the contents of the top shelf – another, larger collection of cups, more glasses, and a milk jug that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a charity shop. There was plenty of dust here, as well – no surprise, by now. It looked as though Letty had been shipping mugs that she didn’t like out of her house. There were a few Pantone colour mugs, and some Penguin classic covers, A Room with a View, The Body in the Library, Pride and Prejudice. She obviously wasn’t a big reader. There was also one, clearly daubed by her children when they were a lot younger, unless they were remarkably ungifted artistically. It hailed from one of the ceramic cafes nearby, where you could pay for your children to decorate a plain china object, which would then be fired and glazed at terrific expense.
Beth remembered a few trips there with Katie. The results, from Ben’s paintbrush, were really horrible. She’d given one mud-brown model of a rabbit to her mother, who had promptly broken it – accidentally on purpose, she was sure. Beth couldn’t really blame her. Letty’s kids had at least managed a wobbly ‘Dad’, written in red, on this fine example, which for some reason had been put back upside down. It was really a bit sad it had ended up here, amongst the unused flotsam of the office cupboard, thought Beth sentimentally, reaching up for the handle and sliding the mug forward to have a closer look. But there was something in it, grating against the shelf and the mug as she pulled it forward. She lifted it. Sure enough, where the mug had been, there was the silvery gleam of a key.
She thought immediately of Simpkin, the cat in Beatrix Potter’s The Tailor of Gloucester, one of her favourite stories as a child. She’d adored the watercolour of the embroidered waistcoat, worked so exquisitely in cherry-coloured silk – and been horrified by Simpkin’s habit of hiding such industrious, supremely talented mice under teacups, a sort of impromptu porcelain larder, to come back and eat later.
So, Potter was a sort of Simpkin, was he? Beth wondered if he shared any other qualities with the cat who, as well as being murderous, was spiteful, too – but ultimately redeemed himself. But she was wasting time. She grabbed the key and hopped down from the chair, which lurched at the last moment like a rodeo beast making a terrifying bid for freedom. The key’s hiding place was so close to the door itself that she could see it made a lot of sense, particularly for an absurdly tall person.
Holding her breath, she shoved the key into the lock, and turned it – hearing a satisfying click. Which was rapidly followed by the much less satisfying sound of the street door bell jangling. With fumbling hands, she re-locked the door, then realised too late that, since her chair had lurched away from the cupboard, she couldn’t nip back up and replace the key.
She was throwing herself back behind her own desk, key palmed in her hand, when Potter breezed past her with a quick ‘Hello!’ and an even quicker on-off smile. She hoped he was a bit less insincere with his clients, otherwise the business really would go to pot.
Thank goodness, he must have the second key to the office on his own keyring, as he bypassed the kitchenette and in a moment had surreptitiously opened his door, perhaps not wanting Beth to know he trusted her so little that he’d locked it earlier.
Five minutes later, he stuck his head round the door. ‘Er, um…’
‘Beth,’ she reminded him, her turn this time to do the fake smile bit. He definitely knew her name, unless he had the worst memory on the planet. But maybe he was just embarrassed at knowing her circumstances? She probably had as good a degree as he did, yet here she
was, doing his bidding. Even if it was just for a few days, it was an ignominious position to be in. Especially as there was something a little tacky about him. She could see his gold cufflinks gleaming from here as he leaned out.
‘Yes, yes, um, could you rustle us both up some tea? I don’t think there’s any coffee, is there?’
She gritted her teeth. There was no way to refuse and, in any case, after the last few minutes she could do with one herself, if not a double brandy. Besides, it gave her the perfect opportunity to replace the key. She wondered why he’d asked about coffee, surely he knew there was no coffee machine? Or did he seriously expect her to magic one up from her bag, like Mary Poppins? She tutted.
Potter, coming out while the kettle was boiling, seemed surprised to see her standing on her chair, but she hastily put the Dad mug back over the key and turned round clutching the small milk jug, which she then made a big show of filling with the organic milk – a completely unnecessary palaver, in her view, but he wasn’t to know that she never bothered at home. She hoped he wouldn’t catch on that she’d been sniffing about in close proximity to his spare key. With any luck, he’d put it there months ago and by now had semi-forgotten his clever hiding place.
‘Oh, Beth, I just had some invoices I wanted typing up… do you do that sort of thing?’
Beth thought rapidly. Well, she had a laptop with a Word programme on her desk, so yes, she had the capability. But she was willing to bet he did too. Maybe this was part of her duties, though? Nina hadn’t mentioned it, but then it was hardly going to be rocket salad, as she’d said. Also, it could be a way to get to know the workings of the business better.
‘Yep, no problem. I’ll bring my notebook through, shall I?’
‘If you would,’ said Potter, more sure of himself now she’d conceded the point.
Beth scanned the desk for a notebook. There wasn’t one. She hunted through the drawers, clogged up with blockbusting fiction, then finally gave up and fished a few sheets of A4 out of the printer, trotting to Potter’s office with these bunched in one hand, and a red biro in the other. It didn’t look quite as polished as the full Miss Moneypenny shorthand-notebook-and-pencil that he seemed to be expecting, but it would be fine for jotting things down. She breezed in and took a quick look around Potter’s office.
After all her efforts to get in earlier, it was disappointingly bland, though it was much larger than she’d expected and extended back further than she’d imagined. There even seemed to be a small outside area beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows at the end of the room, but they were shrouded with opaque blinds, so it was hard to be sure. There was more of the same seagrass flooring everywhere, a large desk in a blond wood that dominated the room, and a promising bank of filing cabinets on the other wall which, Beth suspected, she ought to get rifling through as soon as she could.
Everything was extremely beige, and Beth wondered if this was down to Letty. She seemed such a stylish woman, with all her layers camouflaging what Beth was beginning to suspect was quite a tough core – the floaty disguising the flinty. Surely she could have been a bit more imaginative? Then she caught sight of a print, facing Potter’s desk – a large Rothko. An orange square, suspended in space, with a smaller yellow lozenge beneath, the colours hazy. Beth turned away from it.
‘You like Rothko?’ she said, taking the seat in front of Potter’s desk. It was an upright chair, comfortable but very solid, not as padded as Potter’s throne-like tan leather number. She bet his had all kinds of clever levers you could pull to get the best lumbar support. It was the chair equivalent of, if not quite a Porsche, at least one of the lovely, shiny Audis in the Village showroom.
Potter looked blank, until Beth gestured to the picture on the wall.
‘Oh that. Yes, very cheery.’
Beth hid her astonishment as best she could. Anyone who could sit opposite a Rothko and find it cheery was either a natural born optimist, had their eyes firmly shut, or was impervious to atmosphere.
‘Did Letty choose it?’
‘What? Erm, yes. That is, she got in a firm to do the refurbishment when I opened the office… um, shall we get on?’ Potter was transparently irritated by the art history quiz, and Beth couldn’t really blame him. She braced her wad of A4 on her knee, poised her pen, and looked up expectantly. Potter glanced at her, cleared his throat once or twice, then leaned back in his chair and started to declaim.
Three-quarters of an hour later, Beth was exhausted, the red biro was on the point of running out, and her A4 stack was covered, front and back, with scribbles that were going to be hell to decipher. Some people loved the sound of their own voices, but Potter was passionate about his in a way which Beth had rarely encountered before. If he could have married it and had children with it, then Letty would never have got a look-in.
On the plus side, if Beth ever managed to finish transcribing these endless reams of notes, then the filing cabinets – and she now saw why there were so many of them – must be stuffed full of more of the same. If there was something dodgy going on, then she was now willing to take a bet that Potter would have rambled on about it at enormous length, got someone else to type it for him, and was now storing it for posterity in his office. The wonder was that Nina herself hadn’t come across whatever it might be. The only explanation had to be that it was before her time. Maybe this was why her predecessor had been let go? Had she known too much?
Beth, now sitting back at her desk, had no sooner set up her first document, when he popped his head out of his office again. ‘How about another of those great teas, Beth?’
Luckily, she had her back to him, so he couldn’t see her ferocious expression. But she got up and switched the kettle on. It was almost a ‘what did your last slave die of?’ situation – except she knew full well that his last slave was alive and well, probably sniggering a little and chomping her way through a family bag of Quavers on her very comfy sofa right now with Beth’s own son, whose brain was at least halfway to total stagnation. On the other hand, he’d no doubt been having a lovely time.
She sighed and sloshed the boiling water over two more teabags. At least it would be time to go home soon, wouldn’t it? Please?
But many hours seemed to pass before Beth had knocked her notes into some semblance of sense, printed them up, presented them to Potter, and done the last of the washing up at the miniscule sink. As she stowed the cleaned and dried mugs back into place, ready for tomorrow, she glanced up at the Dad mug, now safely restored to exactly the spot she’d found it in. Tonight was not the night for exploring Potter’s office – she was exhausted. She’d just have to hope that he went out again tomorrow. At least, now she knew where the key was, she could jump right to it.
But as luck would have it, it was three full days until Potter left the office on an appointment again. Three full days during which Beth had brewed tea with a regularity that stumped even her own enthusiasm for the stuff, and three full days when she’d typed endless reports so rammed with legal jargon and abstruse bits of phraseology that negotiating them was like wiggling through a barbed wire fence. And they were also days in which she began to wonder exactly when all these meetings were supposed to have taken place.
All the reports were undated: once she’d taken down Potter’s endless burblings and neatly formatted and typed them, she printed out the reams of pages and gave them to him, placing them on his desk in a folder. And that was the last she saw of them.
Presumably, he then filed them himself. But where, how, and according to what system, she still had no idea. Worse still, she was now willing to bet that when Potter did finally step outside the office, she was only going to find that the filing cabinets were also locked.
Her hope was that the keys to the cabinets would be as easy to find as the office keys had been. After all, if Potter was locking up his office every time he left it while she was there, would he really need to be so careful with his cabinets? This wasn’t Fort Knox, this was Herne Hill. Anyone breaking i
n would be after his laptop, maybe the printer, car keys or house keys left lying around. They wouldn’t be interested in a billion tedious reports on legal meetings, would they?
That brought Beth back to the real puzzle – what these reports really represented. Was Potter working through some enormous backlog? He’d only been away from the office once during Beth’s brief tenure, and unless he’d had back-to-back encounters with clients every ten minutes during that absence, it was hard to see where all these details were coming from.
Beth had initially been a bit sceptical about Nina’s suspicions. And after the first day, she’d been wondering whether she’d just been roped in to give Nina a bit of a break from Potter and his indefatigable dictation. But the more she thought about it, the more the realisation grew. There definitely was something very odd going on at the solicitor’s. The annoying thing was that she still couldn’t quite work out what it was.
That evening, picking up Ben from Nina’s, was the first time that she wasn’t so exhausted that she’d just grabbed him and straggled back home. It seemed she was getting used to the frankly punishing routine of office life. That’s not to say she wasn’t tired. But tonight, she could still string a sentence together. The exhaustion wasn’t physical; most days she’d barely strayed from her swivel chair. It was more the strain of being constantly with another grown-up, even if his door was often closed, and on her best behaviour. No jokes, no fun, endless tea and dictation – it was weird. No doubt Nina was more successful in melding the job round her own strong personality. But Beth was only there for a short time. Her job was to fit in, observe, and – hopefully – get out in one piece.
She flopped down on Nina’s sofa, squashing up against Ben, who to her astonishment was reading a book. Then she saw to her horror, it was a lurid paperback. She grabbed it from him and scanned the blurb. ‘I’m not sure you should be reading this,’ she squeaked, conscious that, not having seen her boy all day, she didn’t want to come across as the fun-sucking parent. But on the other hand, nor did she want Ben immersing himself in a world of serial killers amassing piles of hapless women victims. To her relief, she eventually realised it was a re-issued Sherlock Holmes, with a cover from the recent TV series and a back page that made the hundred-year-old story sound more like a bodice-ripper than a three-pipe problem.
