Disengaged

Home > Other > Disengaged > Page 10
Disengaged Page 10

by Mischa Hiller


  Since establishing that the technical director was her real target, it was disappointing to learn that he was not going to be that easy, and since the key-logger was useless on a laptop, she needed more time and more of her skills. Logging the partner provided some compensation. She’d put it on yesterday while he was still in the office, looking out of the window as he talked on the phone. She’d taken his mail into his office and it had taken five seconds to connect the logger between his keyboard and computer. At least it might yield some information about who they were dealing with, if nothing else, and it would all be added to the sum of knowledge back home; any information about tech companies doing business with Israel was worth noting. In the meantime, she sat at the secretary’s desk and trawled her computer for anything interesting, all the while thinking about how she could get access to the laptop Julian Fisher was at that very moment peering intently into.

  Mojgan also felt pleased about how she’d handled the black woman whose desk she now sat at. She’d been lucky with her unsecured network, but even password-protected it wouldn’t have taken that long to hack it with the software on her netbook.

  She’d never had a proper face-to-face conversation with a black person before, not where it hadn’t been with a domestic servant. Three days was all she’d asked of her, and all agreed with no violence, or even the threat of violence. That didn’t stop her keeping a wary eye on the door, half expecting the woman to walk through it accompanied by the police, having had a crisis of conscience. Judging by her apartment the woman lived alone, and when she’d gained access to her computer through her wireless connection her diary showed no imminent visits arranged, nor was there anything in her calendar apart from a regular fitness class.

  The woman’s access to the Internet had been too tempting to Mojgan, who – after gleaning what she’d needed to convince the woman to stay at home – had used it to access a secure and encrypted email service she and Farsheed sometimes used for personal communications. She’d left a message for him on the website. He would have to log on to see it, but she was confident that he would at some point, when he got the chance. It was not a work-related form of communication (she never gave him any information that he needed for work using that system), it was simply to let him know how much she missed his physical presence by borrowing the words of the poet Hafez, whom she found less crude than Rumi when it came to describing things of an intimate nature. She knew it would make him smile, her reluctance to call things as they were, but she enjoyed finding ways to describe their lovemaking without calling it what he called it.

  Another tingle, but cut short by yet another guy coming up to her with some form, the fourth this morning. They were not subtle, these young men, but they were too shy to make conversation and she took the forms with a smile and placed them in a tray marked ‘IN’. The group of six men and two women hunched over the screens looked no different to the ones back home, even down to the headphones and unhealthy snacks they seemed to survive on. One of the programmers, a Middle-Eastern-looking boy with long hair tied back and a wispy beard, came up to her. She half-expected a form, but he was empty handed.

  ‘Let me know if they are bothering you,’ he said, tilting his head towards his workmates.

  She’d come across this pretend ‘I’ll protect you from other men’ concern before, beloved of young men like this, who laughably proclaimed that she was ‘like a sister’ to them. She smiled politely and shook her head. ‘No, they are no trouble.’

  ‘I’m Nizar,’ he said. He had clean hair and a genuine smile.

  ‘Salma,’ she said.

  ‘Salma? Where is that from?’

  ‘Turkey,’ she said, gambling on the fact that he wasn’t Turkish himself.

  ‘Ah. I’m from Syria, originally.’

  She nodded non-committally, not wanting to get into a discussion with an Arab about Syria and what was happening there. She knew that her government supported the regime against the so-called rebels; Farsheed’s department had even sent someone there to advise on enhancements to software that the government internal security agency used to monitor Internet traffic. There was a chance this guy was sympathetic to the terrorists there.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘If you would like to join some of us for lunch, we sometimes go to the greasy spoon down the road.’ He scratched his fledgling beard. ‘Not just the boys, the girls too.’

  ‘Thanks. But I have much work to do here,’ she said, wondering why anyone would want to eat somewhere that was called a greasy spoon. Then she remembered that this Nizar had been in the technical director’s office earlier, going over something on his computer, and might be in a position to throw some light on what he was up to. Best not to shut him out completely. She relaxed a bit in her chair and looked up at him, allowing a little warmth into her smile. ‘I’ll see how I am doing later. It was nice of you to ask,’ she said.

  He seemed satisfied with this and walked back to his seat. Mojgan went back on to the office manager’s computer and continued trying to find as much information as she could relating to the two directors: salaries, home addresses, contact lists, meetings scheduled over the last four weeks. She created a new word-processing document in which she pasted what she believed to be the most useful bits of information. She caught Nizar looking at her from across the room, but he looked away quickly when she did and she concentrated on her task, thinking of Farsheed. A thought, accompanied by the sensation at the base of her neck: Julian Fisher and she were on the same local area network. It could be possible to connect to the circuit board remotely via his laptop, but then the tools she would need to see what was on it were on her netbook, not on the office manager’s PC. Perhaps a cable from her netbook, hidden in her bag, discreetly connected to the back of the PC? Think of Farsheed, she told herself; of how proud he’d be that she had shown such resourcefulness.

  At the end of her encrypted missive to him she had added a line from Hafez which read, ‘Good poetry makes a beautiful naked woman materialize from words.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  ‘Parking near Naomi’s building with a bunch of flowers on the passenger seat beside him at the end of day two of her absence, Julian wasn’t so sure it had been a good idea to come. What would he say to her? Maybe he was making too big a deal of it; he was coming to check on her, that’s all. As her boss, he was concerned – surely that was appropriate? The fact that he’d heard back from the employment agency and there was some confusion about whether anyone had booked a temp (once again they were going to get back to him) had also been a factor. What Boris had said about having ‘eyes on you’ had been another. Perhaps those two things amounted to little more than paranoia. However, Nizar had come into his office and mentioned, by the by, that Salma, apart from being ‘pretty hot’ was also ‘pretty mysterious’ because if she was Turkish then he, Nizar, was Pakistani. Julian had dismissed him at the time (he thought of Nizar as English – his origins hadn’t really interested him) but then it had played on his mind and he had tried not to stare at the woman for the rest of the afternoon, waiting for her to leave before he did. Maybe she was Boris’s eyes in Hadfish.

  He’d called Naomi as he went to his car and when she hadn’t answered he’d decided on a whim to come and visit her, reckoning on a quick ten minutes before he went home to tell Sheila whatever he was going to tell her, which he still hadn’t worked out. Maybe this was a kind of displacement activity. When paying for the flowers he’d found the spa hotel card that Rami had given him at dinner with Cassie, and had a vague idea that he could pre-empt any discussion by proposing a weekend there when all this was over.

  He rang Naomi’s doorbell. The intercom remained silent so he rang it again. He listened at the speaker below the buzzers and turned away, only to see Naomi coming around the corner with a carton of milk. She hesitated when she saw him, then continued. It was a long ten seconds for her to reach him.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she said, looking at the flowers then back at him.
/>
  ‘I thought you were off sick?’ He had been holding the flowers with both hands but let them hang, petals down, by his thigh. If he could have dropped them without her noticing, he would have.

  ‘Oh, Julian, I’m sorry.’ Her face crumpled and he instinctively reached out for her.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  She tried to open the door but couldn’t see where to put the key through her tears. He took them from her and got them inside.

  In her flat he took the milk from her and went into the small kitchen where he put the kettle on and found a vase for the flowers, which he placed on the coffee table in the living room. Naomi had disappeared into the bedroom.

  ‘I’m making some tea,’ he shouted into the open door. When he returned with two delicately handled mugs she was on the sofa, red-eyed but dry-cheeked. ‘I don’t think you take sugar,’ he said, offering her a mug and sitting down opposite.

  ‘They’re lovely. The flowers. Thank you.’

  ‘OK, Naomi, do you want to tell me what’s going on?’ She lost her tentative smile and moved her gaze from the flowers to him.

  ‘I’ve been under a lot of stress lately. Personal stuff … Health issues.’ She paused and picked at the flowers; they were a mix of things Julian couldn’t begin to name.

  ‘You don’t have to talk about it, Naomi.’

  ‘No, it’s OK.’ She looked over his shoulder then into her tea. ‘I’ve been diagnosed with clinical depression. Most days I’m OK, but some days are difficult …’ She started to tear up and Julian leant across the table and patted her hand.

  ‘I’m sorry, I had no idea, I mean, you always seem so … Why didn’t you say something? We would have given you some time off, you know that.’

  She blew her nose and nodded. ‘There’s so much stigma attached. You know, people are thinking “why doesn’t she just pull herself together”, or “sort yourself out”. Plus, I don’t really want to stay at home on my own, it just makes things worse. I love the job, looking after you. And Rami, of course.’

  ‘But what about family or a … friend? I mean, isn’t there someone you can go and stay with?’

  ‘My boys have got toddlers – they don’t want a depressed, middle-aged woman living with them. And no, there’s no fella.’

  Julian doubted that she’d even told them about her depression but he wasn’t about to get into her relationship with her family. He was no counsellor. ‘Are you getting any help? I mean, professional help.’

  ‘You mean a shrink?’

  ‘Well, there’s no shame in it,’ he said, but held back from telling her was going to see one himself. It wasn’t, after all, any of her business.

  ‘I’ve got antidepressants from my doctor. Still too early to know if they’re working.’

  ‘OK, listen, take as much time as you need. The temp seems to know her stuff.’

  ‘Oh, good. I was worried about her. She hasn’t … done anything, then?’ she asked in all seriousness.

  ‘No, of course not, don’t worry about her, just concentrate on yourself.’

  They drank their tea and Julian looked around the room. She’d tried to make it nice but it was poky at best. He tried to imagine himself living here as a bachelor but the idea of living without Sheila made him panicky. It can’t be doing Naomi any good to be cooped up here alone. He had an idea, a way he could help. He fished in his pocket for the hotel business card; Rami had said it was amazing – the treatments alone were bliss. If it was good enough for Rami and Cassie, it was good enough for Naomi, especially if she was getting some one-on-one attention.

  ‘Maybe a change of scene would help.’

  ‘I go and sit in the park down the road.’

  ‘No. I mean you need to get out of here for a few days. I’m going to suggest this hotel and spa in Covent Garden.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No buts. It’s on the company, Naomi, just for two or three nights over the weekend. They give us a special rate,’ he said, lying.

  ‘Still, it’ll be expensive.’

  Julian stood up, feeling determined. ‘I insist. They have treatments and stuff like that. You’ll be pampered.’

  He could see that she was considering it. ‘OK. But I’ll pay for the treatments.’

  Naomi was silent on the journey over and he hadn’t pushed her to make conversation, instead automatically putting the radio on to catch the news, only to hear of an explosion in a cinema in Manchester, unknown casualties, the speculation being, inevitably, that it was a terrorist attack. There were also car bombs in Iraq with seventy-three dead, six children killed in Afghanistan after a US bombing raid and the escalating sectarian nature of the civil war in Syria, which had now spread into Lebanon. It was a river of bad news and Julian switched it off before they started the endless conjecture about who might have carried out the Manchester attack if it were a bombing.

  ‘It’s coming home,’ Naomi said quietly, looking out of the window, and he didn’t ask her to elucidate as trying to park in Covent Garden needed his full attention. Ten minutes later and they were entering the small lobby of what looked, on the outside, like a residential house. Julian had called ahead to book a room as Naomi was packing (all they had was a double) and he wanted to go in and pay in advance so she didn’t see how much it was. She stood diplomatically to one side as he made the transaction, looking at the leaflet with the available treatments, and Julian wondered whether the receptionist thought they were a couple. Not that it bothered him; Naomi was attractive enough that he wouldn’t mind being mistaken for her lover. Conscious of the fact that Sheila was expecting him, he snuck a look at his watch: twenty minutes ago was when he’d been due. He walked Naomi up to the room and watched, smiling, as she politely oohed and aahed at the tasteful decor and quality finish, talking about whether she should have a refloxology or aromatherapy session. Desperate to leave, he hovered at the door, but without any warning she started to sob. It was an instantaneous thing. He had no choice but to go and put his arm around her. She leant in to him, letting it all out like a collapsing dam. Her perfume was pleasantly familiar. Since it was awkward standing up due to their difference in height, he guided her backwards a couple of steps to the bed where they both sat down. He held her like that for a while.

  ‘It’s your kindness,’ she mumbled. ‘It’s too much.’ She leant in to him some more and he kept holding on.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Arranging to meet outside South Kensington Tube station at this time of day was a mistake, thought Sheila, as a combination of commuters swarming the entrance, desperate to get home and out of the their sticky work clothes, and confused tourists milling about looking for the right way to the Natural History Museum did not make for an easy place to find someone, especially when she didn’t know what the private investigator she was meeting looked like. Cassie had assured her that he would recognize her based on Cassie’s description. Cassie had been unforthcoming on the matter of what the man had to tell her, saying she didn’t know anything herself and that he insisted on talking to her directly. This Sheila took to mean bad news, and after talking to Cassie yesterday evening she would happily have confronted Jules as soon as he’d come home, although she had nothing really to confront him with. She could have just asked him, but then he’d want to know, not unreasonably, why she thought he was seeing someone else, and when she pointed out his behaviour as a reason, he would no doubt put it down to the pressures of work.

  It was all academic anyway because she’d fallen asleep on the sofa waiting for Jules to come home, an empty bottle of wine beside her, and woke covered with a blanket which he must have draped over her. He’d been very late again, and she’d stopped bothering with dinner the night after she’d gone in to work and he’d promised to come home early and talk. She looked at the Evening Standard headline on the placard outside the station. The story of the terrorist explosion in the Manchester cinema had been retracted; it had turned out to be a leaky gas line leading to a staff kitchen.
A minor backlash against some individual Muslims in the street and the firebombing of a mosque had happened in the meantime. Those things couldn’t be retracted.

  ‘Mrs Fisher?’

  She turned to see a squat bald man in a grey suit standing before her, a whole head shorter, his pate sweaty, probably from the Tube, and he dabbed at it with a tissue as he waited for her to acknowledge him.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, looking at his broken nose. She couldn’t be bothered to correct both his fallacious assumptions: that she was married to Julian and had taken his name. Perhaps only married people hired private investigators. She wondered what sort of professional would take on a job of watching someone’s husband hired by, not the wife, but some friend of hers. Didn’t he need permission from the spouse?

  He put the tissue away and stuck out a damp hand. ‘Rupert. There’s a café just round the corner. Shall we?’ Without waiting for an answer he set off, and she followed, nervously eyeing the briefcase swinging from his stocky arm.

  When they were ensconced opposite each other and had ordered coffee he swung the briefcase on to his knees and clicked it open.

  ‘This is never easy,’ he said, taking a large white manila envelope from inside the case. ‘Not for me, not for the client.’

  Sheila’s heart skipped in her chest.

  ‘Just tell me the worst,’ she managed to whisper. Rupert waited until the waiter had put down their coffees then leant forward, even though there was nobody in the place since it regrettably didn’t sell alcohol and was really the wrong time to be having coffee. Why hadn’t she insisted on meeting in a pub?

 

‹ Prev