A HAZY SHADE OF WINTER

by Simon Bestwick

  It was only later on, when the bins were being emptied, that by pure chance the offending missive fell out on to the carpet. I quickly snatched it up and pocketed it; if I’d endured so much of a tongue-lashing on its account, I was determined to read it and find out what was so bad about it.

  But it was a busy afternoon, and I wasn’t stupid enough to try and read it with Pete sniffing around. So I waited until I got home to my bachelor flat, then opened it and had a look.

  It was simple and straightforward, but I could see at once why Pete had been so annoyed. The letter informed Pete Ogden, Sales and Development Manager for —— Insurance Brokers, that the writer found his sexual advances and suggestions to be most unwelcome and unpleasant, and requested that he cease and desist them at once. It was signed ‘Caroline Barstowe’.

  I frowned. I didn’t recognise the name, but the letter clearly indicated the unwelcome advances, or harassment, or whatever you called it, were taking place at work.

  Odd, I thought. Most odd.

  However, the affair was far from over. The next morning, I checked Pete’s post assiduously, but despite this, I was summoned furiously into his office a few minutes later for another shouted tirade.

  It transpired that a second letter had been received, though this time not by Pete but by one of the company directors. This one asserted that the harassment the writer had been subjected to by Pete Ogden (Sales and Development, etc.) had continued, notwithstanding written notification to him that his advances were unwelcome, and so, therefore, the writer felt she had no option other than to make an official complaint under the personal harassment policy.

  It was signed, once more, ‘Caroline Barstowe’.

  Pete went ballistic, accusing me again. I assured him that I’d had nothing to do with it. Fortunately for me, this letter would have had to go through a different secretary to reach its destination, a formidable, no-nonsense veteran by the name of Irene. Only a man tired of living would have accused her of lying, and she was quite adamant that I hadn’t been near Gareth’s office—Gareth was the director in question—while Gareth was quite firm that there’d been no letters on his desk until she brought them in. All of which brought us no nearer to answering the question of who was writing the letters and how they were getting there, but did convince Gareth—if not Pete—that it was none of my doing.

  Pete was even more than usually obnoxious to me for the rest of the day. Looking back, I think he was trying to convince himself that I was somehow responsible for the letters (despite my ignorance of who Caroline Barstowe was), because he had an inkling of something else, something that could not, must not, be true.

  That afternoon, though—forewarned being forearmed—I found the opportunity to speak to Irene and ask her who, exactly, Caroline Barstowe was. Judging from both Pete’s reaction and Gareth’s, I concluded that her significance went further than just a name on a letter. Irene’s nod confirmed my guess.

  ‘Well, then?’ I asked. We were in the small nook where the coats were stashed, that also served as the location of the tea-urn. Irene, a tall thin woman in her fifties, with dark hair and a decent sense of humour (and nice enough as long as you steered clear of politics; she was, in such matters, somewhere to the right of Hermann Goering) glanced to and fro to make sure no one was listening before confiding in me.

  ‘She was on the phoneline,’ she said, nodding towards the desks of sales consultants with their headsets taking calls. ‘Only with us a couple of months. Nice girl, but a bit—well, very . . .’ She waggled her fingers vaguely beside her head.

  ‘A bit tapped in the head, sort of thing?’ I ventured.

  ‘Well . . . maybe not that bad. A bit high-strung, I suppose you’d call it. Well, she was getting a bit what’s-the-word . . . how’s-your-father. . . .’ Irene was prone to such phrasings. ‘On edge, I suppose you’d say. Snappish, sort of thing. Financial worries, I think it was . . .’ Irene glanced around again.

  I’d already got the impression that the topic of Carloine Barstowe was something of a taboo in the office, but of course gossip is to an office what blood is to a vampire. ‘Well, anyway. . . she went home one night and didn’t come back again. We thought she’d just walked out—it’s not unknown—but then we heard a couple of days later that she was dead. Killed herself. Slit her wrists in the bathtub.’

  That night, I had to work late on some important documents for Pete. He needed them first thing the next morning. They were pretty extensive, and so I found myself working on them long after even the phoneline staff had packed up and gone to bed at nine o’clock.

  The office was eerily quiet by this time of night. The only noise came from beside Irene’s desk, where a cabinet stood beside the fax machine. All the computers in the building were hooked into it, so that it looked like a huge sea-anenome clinging to the wall, with grey and lurid yellow tentacles hanging limply down. Now and again it let out a click, or a bleep. Otherwise there was only a thick, smothering silence, clinging like a low-descending bank of smoke.

  I was exhausted, drinking gallons of black coffee in an effort to stay awake. I was ready to drop, but I knew that Pete wanted the paperwork first thing tomorrow and that if it wasn’t ready there’d be hell to pay. If I didn’t like it, I could always quit, after all.

  A wave of depression swamped me, and I felt my face sag as though the muscles were turning to rubber and lead. The worst of it was, of course, that the more Pete told me I was useless (which he did, regularly) the more I began to believe him. It made the prospect of leaving the firm in search of work elsewhere (especially when the months before getting the job had been so unsuccessful) less and less appealing, because I couldn’t afford to leave.

  Time ticked on by, but the work was, slowly but surely, getting itself done. Ten o’clock came and went, then eleven. Finally I had the paperwork completed, a few minutes before midnight. Wearily, I stacked and sorted it into some semblance of order, and pulled on my coat. That was when I heard it.

  First there was a click, then a sort of whirring sound, rising up into a high-pitched hum. I recognised it, having heard it a hundred times; the sound of a computer powering up.

  Blinking, I looked around. There was no one else in the office, so who . . .?

  I looked across the tables where the phoneline staff sat and saw the power-light blinking on one of them. Slowly, unwillingly, I pushed myself towards it.

  The computer’s screen was off. I stood there looking at the machine. Somehow the console’s power switch had been pushed.

  I reached out and pushed it. The hum fell apart into a rattling sigh and died away.

  I shook my head and turned to go.

  Click. Whirr. Hum.

  I stopped in my tracks and turned around. The power light was on again.

  Some sort of weird fault with the switch? Someone’s bizarre idea of a practical joke? Dave Stoner, the company’s computer whizz, was known for a quirky sense of humour.

  I reached my hand out again, more hesitantly this time, and pushed the button again. It clicked off and the computer fell silent once more.

  I’d barely drawn back my hand when there was another click and the button pushed itself inwards, almost as if being sucked back into the console. The power light glowed anew. Whirr. Hum.

  I reached out again. But this time I pushed a different button. This time I switched on the computer’s monitor screen, and it lit up slowly.

  A file was open. It was the standard file for a general purpose letter. The addressee was the company’s managing director. I’ll give you two guesses who the letter purported to be from.

  It was a long letter, and this one outlined the exact nature of Pete Ogden’s ‘unwelcome advances’ in what could only be called nauseating detail. You don’t need to know them. You can probably guess pretty well, in fact. Reading between the lines, I saw much in Caroline Barstowe that I recognised, always assuming that there was any truth or accuracy in the account—I still hadn’t ruled out Dave Stoner as
being responsible. Financially burdened and, by the sound if it, insecure, uncertain of herself. I felt, even through my scepticism, a sense of kinship to the dead woman.

  You poor kid, I thought.

  The story she told (Caroline Barstowe? Or Dave Stoner? Or some other, unknown practical joker?) was a familiar one. Pete had never missed an opportunity to pester or insinuate, and always, either spoken or unspoken, there had been the same old threats a bully like him would always resort to: Tell anyone and it’s your word against mine. I could make life very hard for you. Leave if you don’t like it, but you’ll never work in Manchester again.

  ‘. . . and so,’ the letter concluded, ‘I find I must seriously consider my position with this company unless some action is taken to remedy this state of affairs. I have enjoyed my time with this company and do not wish to leave . . .’

  Leave. Jesus. An image pulsed into my mind’s eye: a bathtub whose waters had turned the colour of Vimto, an arm as white and pale as lard, the deep dark gulf of a gash marring the pale skin. Bloodless now, because it had bled dry. As though I was watching someone else’s film, my vision edged up the arm. I glimpsed a shoulder, a breast, dark hair billowing in the water like smoke——

  Then the horrible little spell broke, and I was looking at the monitor screen again. The menu came up, and the little glowing bar of the cursor scooted down it to the ‘print’ function. With a whirr, the printer in the corner came to life.

  I turned to look at it, and as I did there was a faint noise behind me, half rolling, half grinding. I turned back. The top drawer of the desk behind me stood open, and an envelope lay on the desk top.

  Whirr. I looked back at the printer. It was quiet again, and as I stepped towards it I saw the little screen on top of it read PRINTING COMPLETE. But there was no sheet of paper on the out tray.

  Roll. Grind.

  I looked back at the desk. The top drawer was closed. The table top was bare. As I watched, the computer’s file menu blinked out again, and it logged itself out. Then with a pop, the power button pushed itself out, and the whirr faded to a rattle again, dying to a sigh that made me shiver in the quiet of the office.

  Sure enough, there was another of those letters the next day, and Pete Ogden went ballistic once again. When the storm had finally abated, I decided to speak to Dave Stoner in private.

  I hadn’t mentioned the past night’s events so far, not wanting to land Dave in hot water. I liked the guy, and I hated Pete, and if Dave was putting the wind up him, well, then, all to the good. But I did draw the line at being put in the firing line by Dave’s clowning around, however good the cause. Besides, why would Dave do something like that? He didn’t think much of Pete, true (did anyone?), but he took it in his stride. This would qualify as a disciplinary offence, not to mention irresponsible in putting others in a position where they were apt to be blamed, neither of which sounded in keeping with Dave’s personality and general character.

  So I sought him out at lunch time, carefully and unobtrusively, and told him what I’d seen. Dave stared at me and shook his head. He was a tall, well-built man of about forty, with black hair and a bushy black moustache, both dusted lightly with grey, and a deep dark voice enriched with the small Hamlet cigars he favoured.

  ‘That can’t have happened,’ he said simply, but unwillingly. We got on, after all, and he didn’t want to call me a liar.

  ‘It did,’ I said. ‘Dave, I saw it.’

  He scratched his chin. ‘The only way one of the computers could be doing that is if someone had put some kind of gadget inside, remote control or something like that. And how could they do that without my noticing?’

  I hadn’t mentioned the drawer opening and closing, or the appearing and disappearing envelope. I decided I could put those down to my imagination. Or something. Anything.

  In the end, I persuaded Dave to dismantle the offending computer on a pretext. Nothing out of the ordinary was found. No remote controls, no nothing.

  ‘Is there any way of finding out if the computer was used last night?’ I pleaded desperately. Dave nodded.

  ‘Each member of staff has his or her own password. No one else knows it but me.’

  He logged into his own terminal and called up the figures for last night. There was my password, ‘Pinkfloyd’ (I was a big fan of the group), and another, for the computer which had been so impossibly in use the night before. ‘Rubicon’.

  ‘Whose password is that?’ I asked. When Dave didn’t answer I looked over at him. He was staring at the screen, and his face was chalk white.

  ‘Dave? Whose——?’

  He turned his eyes in my direction. When he spoke, his voice was a hoarse whisper, a shadow of what it had once been.

  ‘Can’t you guess?’ he said.

  After work, we went to one of the quieter pubs in the area, largely unfrequented by the staff from the brokers. Each of us sat down with a large brandy in front of him. It was one of those old-fashioned pubs still popular in some of the North of England’s shadier nooks, and a log fire roared in one corner. We sat near it and soaked up all the warmth that it could give.

  ‘What the hell do we do now?’ I asked finally.

  Dave shrugged and spread his hands; the fingers trembled. ‘What can we do? Do you want to go and tell Pete Ogden that he’s getting threatening letters from a ghost?’

  ‘Threatening?’

  ‘Well . . . libellous?’

  ‘Are they?’ I asked. ‘Libellous, I mean. Do you think . . .?’

  ‘That Pete might have done what the letters are saying he did?’ Dave sipped his brandy. Well, ‘sip’ maybe isn’t the term; ‘gulp’ might be closer. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I’m biased. I don’t like the guy.’

  ‘Does anyone?’

  ‘Truth. But I actively hate him.’

  ‘Does that mean you think he did it?’

  ‘You do, don’t you?’

  Dave was silent for a while. Then he took another swallow of brandy, more moderate, savouring the taste. ‘A couple of times, she broke down crying at her desk. She was always quiet, pale, very thin; you hardly noticed her. Very nervous, all the time, very.’ He finished his brandy and looked at me. His eyes were dark and haunted. ‘I never knew, Tony. Never.’

  Did you want to? I wondered, but I didn’t say it. Dave said it as a plea; he said it and meant: ‘If I’d known, I’d have done something.’ Most others in the office would have said it and meant: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’

  ‘So what do we say?’ I wondered. ‘Anything?’

  ‘What do you think she wants him to do?’ Dave asked.

  ‘Confess, maybe,’ I replied. ‘Who knows?’

  Our eyes met over the table and the brandy, and in that moment we were conspirators together. ‘Not much we can say, is there?’ he said.

  ‘Not much at all,’ I agreed.

  And so nothing was said. We went home to our respective beds.

  There remains very little more to tell.

  Pete Ogden did not come to work the following day. Nor would he on any other, but we were not to know that, not at first. But when I was sorting through his post that morning, I felt the blood drain from my face and my stomach tighten as I saw a letter, in a company envelope, among the pile. Slowly and unwillingly I slit it and unfolded the single sheet of company stationery inside.

  It took only a second or two to read.

  Dear Sirs,

  I am deeply disappointed by your unwillingness to act in the matter of Peter Ogden and myself. Circumstances therefore impel me to leave the company, and to take matters into my own hands.

  Yours,

  Caroline Barstowe

  Pete’s wife, Diane, rang a few minutes later, in near hysterics. She hadn’t seen her husband since the previous night, apparently. He had been staying up late all week, drinking heavily.

  The previous night he had begun to rave and rant, to scream abuse almost hysterically. ‘Get away from my kid, you bitch!’ Dian
e had been terrified enough by this unwarranted violence, but even more so when she realised it wasn’t her he was screaming at . . . although there was no other woman in the house. None that she could see, anyway.

  Pete’s ragings had grown worse and worse. At one point Diane had tried to ring the police, or perhaps the ambulance. He’d torn the cord out of the wall and she’d fled with Neil Frederick to the bedroom, barring the door with the bed and no doubt feeling rather like Shelley Duval in The Shining.

  Eventually she’d fallen asleep. She’d woken hours later, to find Pete gone. And his car. In the kitchen, the knife drawer had been ripped out; its contents were strewn across the tiled floor. Two large steak knives, a carving knife, and a small sharp paring-knife were all missing.

  The police found Pete Ogden a few hours later. His abandoned car was parked by the river, somewhere out in the Cheshire countryside, near a thick copse of sycamore, silver birch, and cemetery-black yew trees. A search of the copse turned up Pete’s body, crumpled into a thicket of rust-stained bracken. The missing knives, clotted and crusted, lay nearby.

  I learned later that his last act, before he slit his own throat, had been to emasculate himself.

  It was a nasty business, but while everyone’s heart went out to Diane and the baby (henpecking rumours notwithstanding), few if any tears were shed for Pete Ogden. He just wasn’t that kind of guy.

  I quit the insurance brokerage a couple of weeks later and did a series of odd jobs before starting a teacher-training course in the autumn. I stayed in touch with Dave Stoner for a while. He was a little more affected by the whole business than me, feeling a sense of responsibility for both Caroline Barstowe’s death and Pete’s, but eventually seemed to see the one as cancelling out the other.