by Philip Cox
‘You know the couple upstairs - Smith and Moffat - have gone?’ said Chin.
‘Yes, I know. Mrs da Costa told me.’
‘Well,’ Chin continued. ‘I’m trying to get new tenants as soon as possible, but I have to go up to Liverpool for a few days - until the weekend. Can I give you a key to the flat, so you can show round any prospective tenants?’
‘Yes, but I am at work all day, you know.’
‘I know, I know, but they probably will be too. Only for a few days, please.’
Tom sighed. This was all he needed. ‘Oh yes, all right,’ he agreed.
‘Much obliged,’ Chin said, passing Tom a Yale key. ‘I’ll give my wife your number. Then if anybody calls in response to the ad...’
Tom nodded and put the key into his back pocket. ‘No problem,’ he said resignedly.
‘I owe you one,’ Chin called out as he hurried to the silver Vectra double parked on the other side of the road.
‘Maybe a discount on the rent,’ Tom called out.
Chin just waved from the Vectra and drove off. Obviously he hadn’t heard Tom.
Tom set off for work. Fifteen minutes’ walk later, after a stop off for a Daily Mail, he arrived at the library. He was on the office rota for the enquiries desk that day, far more interesting than managing those infernal self-service kiosks. He made sure his mobile was securely attached to his belt. He checked the charge level: yes, four bars. No word yet from Amy. He sat down, logged on his workstation, and waited for the first enquiry.
He jumped when a text message arrived. Slightly flustered, he fumbled to get the phone, and saw that the message was from Jane.
Hi tom, jst chckin u r ok? Jane
He quickly sent a reply to the effect that he was okay, and that he was at work, but hoped she and Sully were okay too.
The text from Amy arrived five minutes later.
4got 2 say tnx 4 bein gentleman lst nite x
Smiling, he replied: And thank you for being a lady. Later.
*****
Amy sent that text as she was riding up the escalator at the tube station. It wasn’t until she was sitting on the tube train that she realised how out of character she had been last night. She barely knew Tom, yet she invited him to stay over and share her bed, trusting him not to try anything on. Which he didn’t.
She had done something similar a few years back. Having only moved into her flat a few weeks earlier, she had had a flat warming party for a dozen or so friends and fellow students from the college she was attending. When the party finished around two, one of the students, a spotty little nerd in thick glasses, was too drunk to even walk home, so she let him sleep on the sofa. Four o’clock and she awoke to find him fast asleep next to her. Against her better judgement, and because he was fast asleep and she was dog tired, she decided to do nothing about it. At five thirty, she was awakened by him pawing at her. Still slightly under the influence of what she had been drinking the night before, she went along with it. He was finished by five thirty-five. She instantly regretted it, and vowed never to let herself get into that position again. That vow had gone out of the window; as had the one never to travel on the tube again. It would have taken her over two hours by bus, with three changes.
Tom had restored her faith in chivalry; there were decent men out there.
*****
Having felt quite calm on her journey into work, Amy started to become a little nervous as she rode the lift up to the fifteenth floor. Two of her workmates were in the lift with her; they were both chatting animatedly about something that was on television the night before. Some police drama, Amy gathered; God, if only they knew.
The doors slid open at floor fifteen. The two other girls said goodbye to each other: one went to the left, to the canteen; the other walked with Amy to the ladies’ room.
‘Oh, well, here we go again,’ she said to Amy as they both took their coats off.
‘Another day, another dollar,’ Amy responded.
They both went to the bank of lockers, and each put their bags into their lockers. It was a rule at the firm that female staff kept their bags in these lockers. Amy could see no reason for this; the men kept their wallets in their jackets which they hung over their chairs. Perhaps it was difficult to trip over a wallet.
‘Jesus Christ,’ muttered Claire, the other girl as she tried to push her bag into the already full locker. ‘Why can’t they make these bleeding things bigger? Or at least get us two?’
Amy smiled at Claire as she squeezed her bag in and pushed the door shut.
‘Don’t mind me,’ Claire said, as she went over to her desk. ‘This place gets to me sometimes.’
‘Yeah, me too,’ Amy agreed, looking at the bank of lockers. There was something that caught her eye about them. She counted: the bank was four lockers high, and two, four, six, eight along. That meant thirty-two: but there can’t be thirty-two women working here. The guys don’t use them. She shrugged, and walked over to her desk and logged on.
She had just enough time to get logged on and check for any emails when she heard her name being called out across the office. It was Gerald.
‘You ready for the team meeting, Miss Spicer?’ came Gerald’s sarcastic voice.
She looked up. ‘Coming,’ she called out, starting to get her folders together.
‘Let’s hope your reading skills have improved today,’ he retorted, laughing, and looking to a colleague to share the joke.
‘They have,’ Amy replied, giving Gerald a V sign behind her PC screen. She gathered up the folders, and threaded her way through the desks to the meeting room. All her team assembled in the room and sat down around the conference table, Gerald taking pride of place at the top of the table.
As they were about to start, there was a knock on the frosted glass door, and Carol, Sebastian Fleming’s PA, came in.
‘Sorry to interrupt your meeting, Gerald,’ she said. ‘Mr Fleming wants to see Amy Spicer. Now.’
Gerald looked at Carol, then over to Amy, then shrugged. ‘Sure. No problem,’ he said, and then to Amy, ‘Go on, then.’
Amy stood up. She smiled at Carol and followed her. Now she was more than a little nervous. She could feel her hands shaking as she followed Carol down the corridor. As they got to the management suite, Carol said, ‘Mr Fleming is on the phone right now. Have a seat over there.’ She pointed to a leather sofa opposite her desk. Fleming’s office door was shut. She perched uneasily on the corner of the sofa, her hands resting on her lap. She held them together to stop them shaking. Why did he want to see her? Was it about their meeting in the archive room yesterday? Or about her break-in last night? It was like being back at school, and waiting to see the headmistress.
‘Do you know what he wants?’ she asked Carol, her mouth dry.
‘Sorry, dear; no idea,’ said Carol, picking up a file and walking to Fleming’s office. She knocked on his door and went in. As she opened the door to go in, from where she was sitting, Amy could see part way into Fleming’s office. She could not see Fleming himself but the two chairs which stood the other side of his desk. She could see Ashley Merchant in her normal tweedy business suit, but the other figure.
It was not somebody she immediately recognised, but he seemed familiar. Dressed in a conservative dark suit, nothing out of the ordinary there, but there was something different about him...
It was his hair. It was white. Not grey, or silver, but white. In fact it reminded her of a pet rabbit she had when she was a little girl. Her mother called it an albino rabbit. It had strange red eyes too.
She realised now why the figure had seemed familiar. When she met up with Tom in Hyde Park at the weekend, Tom disappeared into the gents for a minute. She went to stand by a tree the other side of the path and could see the toilet block from where she was standing. She remembered seeing a man - a man with a shock of white hair - follow Tom into the gents. In fact, they bumped into each other in the doorway.
This was one almighty big coincidence:
this strange looking man happened to be in Hyde Park at the same time as them; now he happens to be sitting in Mr Fleming’s office.
She suddenly had a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach. She had no choice: she stood up to go. She paused: her bag! She had her locker key attached to the key fob on her belt. She walked away, backwards at first, her eyes on Fleming’s door and Carol’s desk.
She had got a dozen or two steps when Carol came out of Fleming’s office, closing the door behind.
‘Mr Fleming won’t - Amy, where are you going?’ she asked, as she noticed Amy was leaving.
‘Just - just going to the ladies’,’ Amy stammered, backing away further.
‘But you can’t keep Mr Fleming wait-’ Carol started to say.
Amy didn’t wait to let Carol finish her sentence. She turned and ran along the corridor and round the corner to the bank of lockers. As she ran, she grabbed the key to her locker. Her hands were shaking as she put the key into the lock, and it took two or three attempts.
‘Spicer? What are you doing?’
She looked round and saw Gerald standing by the partition which separated the locker area from the work desks. Not replying, she took out her bag, pulled her coat off its peg, and ran back down the corridor, with the sound of Gerald calling out her name.
To get to the lifts she had to run past the corridor leading to Fleming’s office. As she did so, she caught sight of Fleming’s door open, with Fleming standing in the doorway. Behind him stood Merchant and the albino. Carol was walking down the corridor after her.
‘Miss Spicer,’ Carol called out. ‘Come back at once. You can’t -’
Amy ran to the lifts and pressed the call button. There was no way she could wait: the indicators said one lift was on the seventh floor, the other on the sixteenth. But she had no time. She turned and ran to the stairs. As she did so, the lift door opened. Thank God! She rushed back to the lift and stabbed at the ‘G’ button. The doors slid shut; just as they closed, she could see the albino come into the main corridor and run to the lift. He was just too late. The doors had closed, but Amy was still able to see the expression on his face: one of hatred and fury. Who was this guy?
Breathless and resisting the urge to sob, Amy prayed that the lift would not stop any more on the way down. It didn’t.
Once it reached the ground floor, Amy ran out into the building lobby. She pushed through the turnstile and out through the glass doors into the open air.
The cold hit her as soon as she got outside. Fighting against the icy wind, Amy ran across the square to the tube station. She turned and looked one more time at her office building, looking for the albino, but saw no-one following her. Nevertheless, she hurried down the escalators to the subterranean platform below.
Chapter Twenty-One
Sully Beecham was also at work that day, also wishing he was someplace else. He worked for a major High Street bank and his job had the grand title of Area Insurance Sales Manager. This meant he managed a team of five District Insurance Sales Managers, who in turn managed teams of five or six Insurance Consultants. These consultants were based in one or maybe two branches of the bank and sold insurance policies to customers. This differed from what was in their job descriptions, namely advising customers in respect of their insurance so these customers could purchase the most appropriate policy.
This was the reason for the meeting Sully and his five fellow Area Managers had been summoned to attend. The bank had already incurred a multi-million pound fine for miss-selling insurance policies, and had been forced by the bank regulator to set aside over three billion pounds for compensation to customers who had been inappropriately sold a policy. However, mystery shopper analysis had shown that some consultants were still not following the new rules.
The meeting was being chaired by Sully’s manager, a middle-aged, short, tubby man named Cecil Holland. Sully and most of his colleagues had little time for Holland; he was recruited from outside the industry and had, they felt, absolutely no experience or knowledge of the field in which he was working.
Holland was on his feet making a PowerPoint presentation on the insurance sales figures for each of the six Areas. He was using a little red laser pointer to highlight various aspects of the current slides.
‘Now we come to the penetration rate for each of your areas,’ Holland droned on. ‘The penetration rate being the number of policies your people have sold as a percentage of the number of customer interviews they have carried out. I have put the rates on the slide, but of course you all know the rate for your own individual areas of responsibility.’
Sully raised his eyes to the ceiling and looked across the table at one of his fellows, who was doing the same thing.
‘Now you can see that there is a considerable contrast between the highest rate, which is eighty-two percent and the lowest, which is merely forty-one percent.’
One of the attendees shifted awkwardly in his seat; no prizes for guessing who’s at forty-one, thought Sully.
‘Before we ask the managers with the lowest two rates to explain what is going on in their areas, maybe Mr Beecham could enlighten us on how he is achieving such a high figure. And achieving it in a compliant manner too, I trust.’
The whole room looked in Sully’s direction. Sully had his eyes fixed on the A4 notepad in front of him. One of the attendees coughed.
‘Sullivan,’ Holland prompted.
The room was silent, all eyes fixed on Sully.
‘Sullivan - are you still with us?’ repeated Holland, louder this time.
‘Sully,’ whispered the colleague next to him, nudging his arm.
Sully sat up with a jolt. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘My mind was elsewhere for a moment.’
‘Glad to see you’re awake now, Sullivan,’ snapped Holland. ‘Perhaps you’d care to share with us what your teams are doing. To achieve an eighty-two percent penetration, in case you missed that bit.’
‘Oh, yes; right,’ said Sully, getting himself together, and beginning an off the cuff report.
After Sully had explained what his teams were doing, Holland adjourned the meeting for a fifteen minute coffee break. Sully and several of the others headed straight for the gents.
‘Thought you had fallen asleep there,’ laughed Jim Fanning, one of the others, as he stood at the urinal next to the one Sully was using.
It took Sully a second or two to figure out what Fanning meant. ‘Oh, yeah. I was miles away.’
‘Hopefully somewhere more interesting than Holland’s penetration rates,’ laughed Fanning, zipping up and walking over to the wash basin. ‘Not that that could be too difficult.’
‘No, not really,’ Sully laughed as he began washing his hands.
‘See you later,’ Fanning said drying his hands and leaving Sully alone.
‘See you,’ Sully murmured, absent-mindedly.
In front of the three hand basins was a large mirror, which the office cleaner had failed to give attention to for at least a week, going by the numerous smears and splash marks. Resting his hands on the side of his basin, Sully stared at his reflection, into his own eyes. He had had very little sleep in the last couple of weeks, and it showed. The rims of his eyes were red, and his eye sockets were dark and hollow. He looked pale and wan. His hair, normally shiny and well-shampooed, was slightly unkempt and greasy, something which Jane had commented on once or twice.
He thought back to the last time he was here for a meeting. It was two, maybe three weeks ago - Sully had lost all track of time - and everything was going so well for him. His team was performing well, and he was expecting to see a tangible benefit of that when he was paid next, he had a great home life with Jane. And a great sex life. A beautiful smart home, regular eating out, and wonderful holidays - he had been skiing only a month or so back. Then it all went wrong.
*****
He had got out of the meeting just after six. Normally he would have been unhappy at this, as he would have faced a ninety minute drive to get back ho
me. But tonight was different: Jane had been invited to a friend’s hen night, and so he agreed to go out for a meal and a drink with some of his colleagues. They spent until seven thirty in The Moorhen, a small corner pub next door to the bank branch where the meeting had been held, then adjourned to a nearby Chinese restaurant for a meal. They all left the restaurant about eleven-thirty.
Sully and Jane exchanged a couple of text messages during the evening: just to check that the other one was okay and to wish them a good evening. There was no reason, therefore, to hear from her again until he got home. As he was walking across the car park where he had left his Astra, his phone rang. He could see it was Jane.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Everything all right? How’s the party going?’
‘What time will you be home?’ Jane asked, not answering his questions.
‘I’m just getting back to the car now, so I should be back about half twelve. Is everything all right?’
Jane said nothing.
‘Jane - are you all right? What’s up?’
‘If you’re on your way home now, I’ll tell you when you get in.’
Sully was becoming concerned. ‘Jane - what it is?’
‘It’ll keep. Tell you when you get in.’
Sully was about to argue but Jane had hung up.
Perplexed and worried, he climbed into the Astra and sped out of the car park. Traffic was very light at this time of night. He was never one to pay much heed to speed limits, tonight even less so, and arrived at home at a quarter past midnight. He hurried from the car to the block entrance, and ran up the stairs two or three at a time. Once inside their flat, he found Jane sitting quietly in an armchair. The television was off and she was sitting in silence. She was holding a tumbler of what looked like whisky. She was staring blankly in front of her, but looked up at Sully when he came in.
‘What’s up?’ he said, rushing over and kneeling down in front of her.
‘You were right. Something’s happened.’
‘What? What’s happened?’
