With another digital ding the lift stopped at the ground floor and I stumbled out into the street. I would once more board the tram in my completely out of place little blue dress. Rude kids would say rude things and old people would avoid eye contact as I stared out at the blur of streetlamps and kebab shops we were shuttling past. I was actually quite looking forward to the good old cry I’d have when I got home to my cold pizza, but then I noticed someone I knew.
My boss David was walking past the station, thirty metres in front of me. I kept in the shadows in case he turned round – stupid of course as no one could miss a large weirdo in a sparkly mini-dress stalking after them. He continued on down the road before turning into a supermarket.
Trust David to shop at Waitrose.
I walked slowly past the entrance to make sure he wouldn’t be able to see me, before doubling back and going into the shop. It was full of besuited commuters returning late from the office or post-work drinks in the capital. I passed a middle-aged man with an avocado in each hand. His eyes were glazed over and he looked like he’d just finished a stint of audience participation at a Fairfield Halls hypnotist show.
I cut through the cereal aisle, past countless hovering night-ghouls on their last stop before home, before finding David surrounded by glass bottles. He looked as dumbstruck by the selection as anyone else there and, without my strategy to always go for the on-offer £4.99 option with the fanciest label, he was out of his depth. I stopped just in time to avoid walking right into his line of sight and hid at the end of the aisle to watch.
I was tempted to text Ramesh but didn’t want to let David out of my sight now that I was on his trail. What I hoped to learn by watching him choose a bottle of wine wasn’t clear to me. The fact was though that, as our boss, he’d be the most difficult of our potential murderers to get close to.
He took down a tall, thin bottle from the top shelf – clearly a pricy choice – and weighed it in his hand as if this would reveal its true value. He did the same with another option then attempted to make a selection. I was so caught up studying his intense, serious expression as his eyes flicked between the bottles, that I failed to notice how completely visible my head was.
“Izzy?” he said, catching sight of me peering around from the end of the aisle like a tall woman following her boss around a supermarket.
I pretended to be very interested in the display I was standing next to.
“Izzy,” he said again.
“Oh, David.” I looked his way. “I didn’t see you.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Just picking up a little something.” I grabbed a bottle from the shelf before realising it was strawberry flavoured, tongue-tingling lubricant. “Grrrr, always be prepared!” Hoping it would make me seem more normal, I took a pack of condoms too.
“Are you off somewhere nice?” He looked a little worried about me.
“No, no. I was just heading home to bed actually.”
“Good idea.” His brow knitted closer together.
“Yeah, I should probably be off.” I flapped my purchases in the air in front of his face.
“Sure. Have a great weekend.”
I walked down to the tills to queue up. Rather annoyingly, David arrived about twenty seconds later with his bottle of wine.
“Is that all?” the old French woman at the till asked me. She had a scowl on her face like she thought I should be stoned to death.
“Yep. No food for me. Just medium-size condoms and Very Berry fizzy lubricant.”
“Twelve pounds sixty.”
“And this,” David said, placing the bottle of wine next to my items.
“Really, David, on your salary you should be able to afford your own booze.”
“No, it’s my treat.” He stuck his credit card into the machine. “I won’t let it be said that I never do anything for my employees.”
“Ooh, contraceptives and sex aids.” My bottle of red at Le Sheek had clearly gone to my head. I was using my completely inappropriate, saucy voice. “You do know how to treat a girl.”
He watched me with a look of concern as I failed to open a plastic carrier bag. This drew a scornful glare from the shop assistant. The unnecessary use of the world’s resources was clearly a greater sin in her eyes than the fornication she imagined I was about to engage in.
When we got outside, I tried to think of a non-weird way to say goodbye. Nothing came to mind.
“Izzy, will you join me for a drink? There’s a pub round the corner where you can actually hear each other talk. It’s almost pleasant.”
I started laughing and couldn’t stop. I didn’t think for a second that he was serious until I caught the disappointed look on his face and realised my mistake.
“Is it because I’m your boss? I can always fire you if it makes you more comfortable?” He smiled. I think this was a joke.
Instead of accepting the invitation, I burst into another fit of laughter. I couldn’t get a single human word out.
For goodness sake, Izzy. Stop acting like you’ve been huffing nitrous oxide and say yes!
“Another night maybe?”
Still guffawing like a moron, I managed to almost compose myself. “Yeah, I’d like that.”
I was having a seriously difficult time understanding what was going on. Had my inappropriately flirty comments just got me a date?
He was smiling again and so I smiled too and we held each other’s gaze. It was insanely romantic and totally unlike the normal end-of-evening interactions I have with men in which they either spear their faces into mine or completely fail to come up with an excuse for why they have to be leaving so quickly.
“I’ll call you.”
There was a bit more smiling, some backing away without turning, then finally we’d disengaged. He went off on his way home and I walked to the tram stop. So what if there were mouthy teens everywhere and old people who looked like shell-shocked soldiers? There was even a bloke with a beard being sick into a Poundstretcher carrier bag, but none of it bothered me.
Tarquil could push right off. I had the promise of a date with an extremely nice bloke, who already knew how gangly I was. A date with a man who was neither half the size of me, nor – to my knowledge – a collector of ladies’ wigs.
At least I think that’s what he meant. It had to be, right? Unless I’d got the wrong end of the stick and he was just worried about me as I swanned around Croydon in my ridiculously short dress with my lube and condoms like a woman in a sandwich board, advertising a free sex buffet.
I suddenly didn’t feel so confident.
Chapter Nine
Monday morning rushed round once more, complete with insistent alarm clocks and a sleepy-eyed trek to work.
“I can’t believe it!” Ramesh was excited. “He totally asked you out, that randy fox. If it was me, I’d have gone with him right then.”
“And you wonder why people think you’re gay.”
We were sitting in East Croydon station, sipping milky coffees with plenty of caramel, chocolate topping and marshmallows to hide the coffee taste that we weren’t ready to handle. The world was thundering past us in a long black raincoat.
“It was a great opportunity. If he’d taken you back to his place, you could have poked through his stuff. Maybe he’s left the bloody clothes there or maybe Bob was blackmailing him and you could have found the letters, or… or… no, that’s all I’ve got.”
“I’m not going to sleep with every suspect to find out if they’re guilty.”
“Fine, just the men.”
“You know, I’m not entirely sure he was asking me out. Maybe he wanted to take me somewhere to get help.”
“Or maybe you’ve finally found a man who’s got a thing for really clumsy women.”
My coffee finished, I gnawed on the paper cup. “There had to be one out there somewhere. Who knew he was under my nose the whole time? Anyway, what did you do this weekend?”
“Oh, I watched the firs
t three seasons of Poirot and skyped Patricia. I’m not enjoying this long-distance thing.” Ramesh’s girlfriend is doing a Masters for a year in Edinburgh. “I thought we could cope with it but it’s much tougher than I’d expected. I’m lonely and there’s no one to stop me eating Pot Noodles all the time.”
“Poor baby. But more importantly, did Poirot teach you anything useful?”
“Not really. One episode made me wonder if you’d killed Bob and another made me think I might have done it. For a while I considered growing a moustache too, but by my twentieth hour of watching I was basically losing my mind. It’s starting to seem that an intimate knowledge of Agatha Christie plots might not be enough to crack this case wide open.”
“You’re probably right. Lucky for us I’ve come up with a plan.”
“Oooh, a plan!” He sat up straight and crushed his empty coffee cup in his hand in a surprisingly aggressive fashion. “That sounds much better than waiting for someone to confess.”
“Be quiet and listen. There are video camera type things in the office, right?” I didn’t wait for his answer, I knew full well he had one after the drama of his am-dram audition tape. “I never understood why Poirot doesn’t just tell his suspects one by one that he knows they’re guilty and see how they react.”
“How d’you mean?”
“At the end of the book the killer always fesses up so why doesn’t he just tell them at the beginning that he thinks they did it to see whether they spill. He wastes so much time investigating. All we have to do is send messages around the office saying we’ve got proof who killed Bob and maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“You want to confront the suspects, even David?”
“No, not David, or Amara either. If they found out we were nosing about they would probably fire us?”
“Okay, but why do we need a webcam?”
“Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. Just set it up tomorrow in the empty office on the seventh floor and do exactly as I instruct.”
When we arrived at work, I gave Ramesh his instructions and then got down to the important job of actually doing a bit of my job. I figured I couldn’t go much longer without someone noticing how little I was getting done, so I dutifully processed a whole batch of new contacts. It was as mind numbingly interesting as always, but gave me time to think through the various implications and complications of dating my boss.
First, I had to consider the fact that the attentive, rather charming man who was no doubt heels under head besotted with me was also a suspect in the crime I was attempting to investigate. At the same time, I wasn’t getting any younger and my mother wasn’t complaining about me being single any less, so even the hint of a boyfriend would make my home life a lot easier.
The one thing that worried me was the possibility that he actually was the murderer and was checking that I hadn’t discovered his secret. Even then, I couldn’t really see a downside to the situation. Either we would go out, fall in love and I’d find fame as an internationally adored poet – a sort of modern-day, Lord Byron – so that we could both leave P&P forever, or I’d find the evidence to prove he was a savage killer and, on the back of that success, launch my own private detective agency. Unless I was overlooking any significant issues it was surely a win-win.
I needed something to keep my mind off David for a while so I went to talk to Jack during the coffee break. He was holed up in his cupboard by the door into the office, watching funny videos on his computer.
“Oi, Izzy. Have you seen this one?” He tilted his screen my way to show me a bunch of baby pandas tumbling over one another.
I admit, we spent the next three minutes laughing our heads off at the funny little animals before I remembered what I’d gone there to talk about.
“So, don’t the security doors here keep a record of who came in and when?” I asked. “Couldn’t we work out who the murderer was from the time stamps on the doors?”
His face was instantly serious and he peered about to see if anyone was listening. “Your mate Ramesh is more likely to know about that than me, but from what I understand, the system was too old and there was no off-site backup. When the killer took the hard drives, all that data went with him.”
Or her, I thought. It’s the twenty-first century, Jack. Women can be killers too.
“What about the video cameras in the rest of the building? Wouldn’t they tell us who was still here when Bob was killed?”
He paused for a moment and looked as if he suddenly didn’t trust me. “The police were wondering just the same thing. My mate Len in the basement tells me that they looked through the tapes and everyone but Bob left before nine.”
“Wouldn’t take much to wedge a door open and get back in through the fire exit though,” I said and immediately wished that I hadn’t.
Jack was still eyeing me suspiciously. “Reckon you’re a bit of a Sherlock Holmes, do ya?”
I prefer Monsieur Poirot actually, I wisely kept to myself.
“I do love me a good mystery.” I employed my super ditzy voice. I find it surprisingly effective at making men think I’m not very clever and that they have no need to worry about little old me. Some women use their sexual wiles to get what they want, I pretend to be a moron.
His moustache perked up and he returned to his computer to show me a video of a baby goat going down a slide. I knew I wouldn’t be getting anything more out of him so I laughed along and got back to my desk as soon I could.
Between bouts of data analysis – i.e. correcting missing capital letters and the like – I had the chance to stake out David. I didn’t gather any incriminating evidence on him, but I did confirm my suspicions that he was tongue-bitingly handsome. David had clean nails, good manners and wore nice clothes. He was pretty much my dream man and it was suddenly shocking to me that I’d never fallen bonkers in love with him until now.
Get it together, Izzy. This man could be a cold-blooded murderer.
Mind your own business, brain.
Just the sight of him put me into a hopeless, dribbly state. Admittedly, when he arrived, he didn’t notice me at my desk and when he went to speak to Wendy he was obviously busy but, a bit later on, when he went to get a coffee, he was almost definitely looking in my direction.
“‘Oh, hi there,’” I whispered, as I watched him talking to Amara by the photocopier. “‘Hi, David. How are you?’ ‘I’m having trouble concentrating on my work though because I can’t stop thinking about Izzy.’ ‘Oh, that’s understandable, she’s hot stuff.’ ‘Tell me about it.’ ‘Oh, yeah. If I was a man, I would be all over that–’”
“What are you doing?”
It was Wendy. She must have snuck up on me to break into my fantasy conversation. It could have been worse. I don’t think she’d heard any details.
“My job,” I said snootily and pretended to be hard at work.
“You’re so weird.”
“No, you are.”
She’d startled me and I didn’t have time to think up a comeback beyond primary school level. Fixing me with her slightly frazzled eyes, she handed me a manila folder.
She was about to walk away but then held herself there, as if she was fighting against a strong wind.
“I’m sorry, all right?” Her words came out as little more than a throaty mumble.
“Pardon?”
“I said, I’m sorry.” She coughed rather wetly. “For thinking you’d killed Bob. I’m sorry I told everyone it was you.”
“Oh.” I wasn’t ready for this. “Thanks.”
She turned to escape and that day’s off-brown cardigan swished round after her, but I wasn’t finished.
“Wendy, I don’t suppose you could do me a favour?”
“What favour?”
I smiled slyly. “I’ll let you know when the time’s right.”
She looked terrified. “Then, no. If you’re going to be weird about it, obviously not.”
Inside the paper file she’d delivered was some work for me
to be getting on with and a yellow note in David’s handwriting saying, “Some work for you to be getting on with.” More horrifying than the fact that he hadn’t seen fit to include a single X or O, was the dawning realisation that the work was not data to be analysed but data to be entered.
I was furious. Though hardly different in any respect, data entry was way below my job description. I was an established assistant data analyst’s assistant with over four years’ experience at Porter & Porter, not some unpaid intern to be fobbed off with nothing work. Obviously I didn’t really care and was only angry because I couldn’t interpret any hidden message of love in David’s nine-word note but, for a moment, I strongly considered talking to my union rep about this blatant undervaluing of my talents.
I spent the rest of the day mopily entering the incomprehensible figures. I typed slowly and loudly, like an old person on a free computer training course in a rural library. Whenever David popped out of his office I tried to glare at him, but he barely looked my way. At lunch not even my chicken tikka and mint mayonnaise filled demi-baguette or Ramesh’s new idea for his Downton Abbey erotic fan fiction could cheer me up.
It was odd that, only a few days after Bob’s death, talk seemed to have moved on to other things. The chatter in the breakroom was once more centred on sport, last night’s TV and Will’s latest lucky lady.
That guy was massively overcompensating for something. He sat at his usual table with his band of luxury idiots scoffing down Waitrose sushi like he thought he was king of the world.
“Bla bla bla, girls.”
“Bla bla bla, football.”
“Blahhhhh, eyebrow sculpting.”
This is only a rough approximation of their conversation but I think you get the gist. The whole of the boys club were there, cut off from the rest of us with their jeering and borderline sexist behaviour. Ramesh had persuaded Amara to forgo her usual out-of-office lunch excursion to sit with us and was asking ridiculously leading questions.
A Corpse Called Bob Page 7
