A Corpse Called Bob

by Benedict Brown

  There before me were all of Ramesh’s personal files. There were plenty that I had no interest in even opening (admin stuff for his Cher forum, love letters to his girlfriend Patricia – yuck!) and his fan-fiction novellas would have taken me months to get through. But hidden away at the bottom of a tree of empty folders was one called “Private Hurts.”

  Having spent my adolescence learning to put up with the names and insults that were hurled my way by every bitchy girl and slimy bloke I came across, I’d escaped through escapism. I’d retreated into detective fiction and police procedurals and I didn’t let cruel words from cruel people ever get to me.

  I’d always assumed that Ramesh was the same, but the haul of evidence I found on his computer said otherwise. There were videos, word documents, audio excerpts and photos documenting the impact of Bob’s bullying over the years.

  I put my headphones in and clicked on All Honesty.mkv, the first video in the list of files. It showed my friend talking into his webcam, his honey brown cheeks running with tears. He’d never spoken about livestreaming his innermost thoughts and it was surprisingly painful for me to come across a whole part of his life that I knew nothing about.

  “I’m here again to talk about workplace bullying.” He looked down at his hands like Lady Macbeth searching for blood. “I know in my last video I said that I was going to put an end to what’s been happening… Well I was weak.”

  He was sitting in his bedroom. The decoration behind him was simple, modern, minimal – to contrast with the complicated man whose long, curly fringe hid his face from the camera. It must have been a live screengrab as hearts and frowny faces occasionally floated up across the footage from the users who were watching.

  “I build up all these plans for how to deal with my boss, but when it comes down to it, I always wimp out.” Deep breath and then he looked straight into the camera for the first time. “The things he does cut right through me and I end up hating myself for not standing up to him. I’ve thought about leaving the company but that would mean he’d won. He doesn’t even have to say anything to me these days. Just being near him paralyses me.”

  All of a sudden, Ramesh sat up on his bed. He tipped his shoulders back and looked into the lens with unexpected intensity. “I wish he was dead. And I’m not just saying that. I wish I had the guts to cut his tongue out for all the things he’s said to me.”

  My throat constricted in on itself. My heart was yelling in my ears.

  “If I was any kind of man, I’d take a knife and gut him in front of the whole office.”

  The video was like a signed statement of Ramesh’s guilt. Worst of all was that it had only been recorded a few days before Bob’s death. What jury wouldn’t deem this treasure trove of videos, semi-fictionalised short stories and bad poetry to be evidence of my friend’s obsession with the man he’d murdered?

  His carbonised stare on the screen in front of me was like a dagger as I ran through the facts in my head.

  Ramesh had no alibi. He had a big grudge against Bob and was one of only five people who could have accessed the server room to destroy the CCTV video. The fact that he knew better than anyone else how to remove the security footage was a bit of a smoking gun too. To my knowledge, none of the other suspects had the technological background he had.

  “I’m going to do something about the way he treats me once and for all,” the pixelated Ramesh whispered angrily through my headphones. “This time I mean it.”

  My phone buzzed to break me out of my video trance.

  Fancy a cuppa?

  Chapter Twelve

  I ran to the ladies’ to sting my face with cold water.

  I had to slow down. Ramesh Khatri was just about the kindest person I’d ever met. Nothing I’d found proved definitively that he was guilty. Wanting your boss dead wasn’t the same thing as actually murdering him. He wasn’t a killer, or at least I hoped he wasn’t because we had a lunch date.

  Of course, if he was guilty and I hadn’t told the police everything I knew, I could get in trouble. It sounded unlikely but then this whole situation was crazy in the first place. And besides, Miss Marple always seems to know who the killer is from the beginning and yet she waits for the most dramatic moment to reveal it, even if it means three other people get murdered first.

  “Izzy, are you all right?” Amara appeared from one of the stalls and came to stand next to me.

  I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but I love Amara. She makes me feel grown up because she’s so grown up. Sadly, the worried look she wore right then only made me feel more worried.

  “Yeah, fine.” Even paler and more ghostly than normal, I grabbed a paper towel to dry my dripping wet face. “Actually I’m lying. I feel dreadful.”

  “I’m so sorry, Izzy.” Why had Bob been my supervisor for the last four years? Why couldn’t it have been lovely Amara. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “Honestly, I’m fine.” I tried to keep my voice under control. “Just got a lot of stuff going on at the moment.”

  “Tell you what, why don’t we go for a drink sometime? Out of the office, I mean.”

  I subsequently lost control of my voice. “Urrrr… I… aggggg, are you sure?”

  She smiled, all mature and professional as ever. “Of course I am. I’d be happy to lend an ear.”

  I couldn’t believe my luck. “Tomorrow after work?”

  She paused, perhaps to check my pupils weren’t too dilated. “Tomorrow, sure. We can go to the pub down by the station.” Public place, plenty of people around; very clever of her.

  “Great.” Though still reeling from the shock of identifying my best friend as a likely murderer, at least I’d have the chance to quiz Amara on what she knew about it.

  And maybe we’ll become best friends!

  There was an awkward moment as she shuffled round me to wash her hands and I hung around waiting for her to finish. When she was gone, I went back to staring at myself in the mirror.

  Call it mindfulness or the power of quiet thought but, after about thirty seconds standing there, I knew just what I had to do. Until someone presented me with the video tape of Ramesh cutting up Bob, I couldn’t accept that he was the killer. The only way I was going to know for sure what had happened was by continuing our investigation. I’d give myself forty-eight hours and, if I couldn’t prove Ramesh’s innocence by then, I’d hand everything I had on him over to the police.

  I sent him a message from the toilet before going back to my desk.

  No tea for me, mate. I’ve got a murder to solve.

  By the time lunch came round, I’d checked that there were no fruit knives left in the breakroom, drawn up plan of the crime scene and drunk about six hot chocolates. Like a proper detective!

  At one, I met up with Ramesh by the server room, which was hidden away behind the photocopiers. We were always sneaking off there to get away from our lovely colleagues, so no one looked twice at us. I was a bit wary going into a small, dark space with a man who was probably a murderer. But then, who was I to judge? I once stole a bar of Dairy Milk from a WH Smith. Ramesh had his reasons to kill Bob just like twelve-year-old Izzy really needed that chocolate. I couldn’t see either of us repeating our crimes.

  “Did you keep the message vague like I told you?” I sat down in front of his workstation, with my Moroccan salad and mango juice, to wait for the action. I always told people that I brought food from home because I cared about healthy eating. In truth it was because my mum still made me a packed lunch.

  “I wrote, We know what happened with Bob.” He put a scary voice on for the message bit. “Go to the seventh floor at this time if you don’t want anyone to find out…”

  “And you’re sure it’s anonymous?” I tossed a carrot baton in my mouth. “There’s no way anyone can trace them.”

  Ramesh managed to look both mysterious and cocky. “I sent them through a free online SMS service, used a VPN and did it all from your mate Suzie’s computer.”

>   I had no idea what he was saying but it sounded impressive.

  On the screen in front of us was a live feed from the vacated premises of CodeBox a startup that had recently finished up. Beyond a black swivel chair in the centre of the image, we could see an identical office space to our own, cut up by abandoned cubicles.

  At 1:05, Wendy appeared.

  “What do you want in return for not talking?” Plonking herself down on the chair, her black and white hairdo was stacked up even higher than normal. She was clearly in an adventurous mood as her cardigan was a light salmon colour and her skirt bore tiny palm tree icons.

  Ramesh pushed a button to cut our microphone. “Oops. I thought she’d just spill her guts out. What do we say now?”

  I wasn’t so easily fazed and turned it back on. “We want the truth. If you tell us how it happened, we’ll keep it to ourselves.” There was an echo at the other end as my heavily disguised voice came back to us. I sounded like a gloomy alien.

  She ran the nail of her thumb along the tips of her fingers as she looked into the webcam that Ramesh had hooked up to an old P&P laptop. “Yeah, all right. Me and Bob did it a couple of times.”

  My accomplice and I stared at each other with the exact same expression on our faces because neither of us could believe what we’d just heard.

  Ramesh apparently felt the need to check. “Just to be clear. When you say ‘did it,’ you are talking about doing it?”

  I gave him a slap for being an idiot. Wendy didn’t seem to notice.

  “That’s right. I thought you knew that already.”

  I attempted to smooth things over. “We did. And now we have it on tape.” Ramesh gave me an over the top wink so I continued. “What we want to know is when it started and why it finished.”

  “I bet that cow Pauline in accounts told you, didn’t she? I knew I couldn’t trust ‘er.”

  “Concentrate. Our patience will only last so long. If you don’t tell us what we want to know, I’m sure the police would be interested in talking to you.”

  She sat up straighter in the chair, like a schoolchild scared of her teacher. “I didn’t kill ‘im if that’s what you think.”

  “Concentrate.” My moody Martian voice had got all serious. Ramesh put his hand up for a silent high five.

  “All right.” She huffed out a breath like she wished she was smoking a cigarette. “It started at the office Christmas party. Bob was really wild that night. He must have been drinking because he challenged Jack to a fight and ended up running around the office topless screaming, ‘Nothing can kill me. I’m invincible!’”

  “We know all that.” Ramesh was copying my resolute tone. “Everyone knows that. Tell us what happened next.”

  Wendy shuffled her ample bottom around in her seat. “I ended up taking ‘im downstairs to get a taxi because no one else wanted anything to do with ‘im. Before we could find one though, he grabbed hold of me. There we were, out in the street, kissing like kids. It’s not every day something like that happens to me. Before I knew it, we were back at mine with our shoes and socks off, about to tumble into bed.”

  She cast her eyes to the ceiling and chuckled like she wasn’t currently being blackmailed. “Course, we’d only got about quarter of the way through when he was sick all over my leopard-skin bedspread. He cleaned it up and apologised. He actually seemed quite sad about it, but then he headed home and nothing went on between us for about a month.

  “The second time it happened, he actually called me up and invited me out. I knew he was married and everything but that was none of my business. He took me to dinner, quite a fancy place down on Purley Way. We had tagliatelle and–”

  She was starting to ramble so I decided to rein her in. “Concentrate.”

  “All right, all right.” She rolled her eyes at the camera. “After dinner we went back to mine again and before he got frisky, he asked me all about the flat and my stamp collection and what I did in my free time. I thought he was just being attentive, but, when I woke up the next morning, he’d gone and so had my Two Penny Blue from 1840.” She paused for a moment then explained. “That’s a stamp.”

  “Why did he take a stamp?” Ramesh got in ahead of me again.

  Wendy looked put out. Well, a bit more put out than she normally did. “It was unused, first plate pressing with its original gum.” She spoke as if everything she was saying was incredibly obvious. “I paid eight grand for it.”

  “For a stamp!?” It was lucky Ramesh wasn’t drinking his coffee at that moment or he would have spat it all over the computer. “Was it for sending letters to the moon?”

  “It was mint condition, an absolute bargain. Course, I never slept with Bob again after that. I have my standards you know. But I have to say, he was a very sensitive lover. For a big man he certainly knew–”

  “Urmmm, thank you.” I really didn’t need the details.

  “The next time I saw ‘im I gave ‘im hell, I can tell you. He said he’d taken it without thinking, but when I asked for it, he said he didn’t have it no more. Said he’d lost it. I’ve tried to get my money back ever since. Told ‘im I’d call the police if he didn’t sort it out by the summer.”

  My turn for a question. “So why didn’t you tell them all this after Bob was killed?”

  Her habitual frown scrunched up tighter. “And have ‘em finger me as the murderer? Not likely, mate.” She yawned and stretched out one arm. “Now if there’s nothing else you want me for, there’s a yoghurt with my name on it in the breakroom fridge.”

  When we didn’t reply, she stood up with a huff and disappeared from our screen as if the whole thing was just another meeting or a personal performance review.

  “I reckon she did it.” Ramesh’s assertion immediately made me think that he was trying to shift the blame. “Eight thousand pounds is a pretty big reason to do someone in if you ask me. Maybe she killed him to get the money back. Or maybe it was a classic broken heart. She was in love with Bob and couldn’t stand the rejection.”

  I didn’t reply. I was enjoying Mum’s salad and the chance to put my thoughts in order before Jack came to see us. He turned up at 1:20 as instructed. His bushy red eyebrows were twitching nervously and his moustache was all pursed together, ready for whatever he’d come to say.

  “Yes, it’s true that Bob and I never got along. And yes, it came to blows once, but I didn’t kill him.” He’d pushed the chair out of the way and stood pointing into the webcam. “He thought he had some dirt on me, but he was the one doing coke in the office at all hours. And how many times did he turn up wasted to meetings?

  “The truth is that Bob was a thug. He was handsy with the girls in the office and treated the rest of us like scum. Worst of all though, he had a putrid core that would spill out whenever he was angry. I wasn’t the one who turned his lights out, but he deserved what he got and that’s all I’m going to say on the matter.”

  There was power to his words that I’d never imagined from Jack and with that, he was gone. Off to sit in his cupboard to sign for parcels and watch baby giraffe videos on his computer.

  “Well, that was easy.” Ramesh opened a bag of Cinema Style popcorn and began to hoover up the contents.

  “I never imagined Bob as a coke fiend. Didn’t seem his style.” I continued picking at my salad. “Though that might explain his anger issues. Hey, maybe that’s why he was so short-tempered in his e-mails this year. Perhaps he was an addict.”

  “Goes to show that you can never really know a person.” He threw a piece of popcorn in the air but missed badly when he tried to catch it in his mouth.

  How true, I thought but I stuck to the subject at hand.

  “What do you reckon Jack meant by ‘dirt’? We need to know what Bob had on him.”

  “Maybe he was stealing office supplies.”

  I thought about what else it could be. “I suppose so. Hardly worth killing someone over though. Do you reckon he could have done it?”

  “Totally,” he
said between handfuls. “I’m coming round to the idea that every single one of them killed him.”

  “Everyone but Amara, right? In Christie’s stories, practically all the suspects have a good reason to want the victim dead, but we haven’t found anything on Amara. I don’t see her murdering Bob just because he got the same promotion as her, no matter how much of a baby he was about it.”

  Ramesh raised one finger like he’d had a great idea. “Maybe she was in love with Bob then found out about him and Wendy!”

  I wasn’t impressed. “Really? Young, pretty, happily married Amara was in love with horrid old Bob? Do you think that women all over the office were dropping their knickers for him?”

  He went back to eating his popcorn because he didn’t have an answer. It wasn’t long before our final interviewee showed up.

  “What do you want?” Will sat down in the repositioned chair. He was wearing that half-vulnerable expression I’d seen on him the day Bob died and a neatly tailored suit with a light-green shirt. He seemed to have a different coloured shirt each day but his suits were always silver and snugly fitted.

  “We want to know the truth.” Winking over at me, Ramesh sounded unconvincing even through the voice disguiser, which he’d now set to angry phantom mode.

  Will smiled and his sheen of pure smugness returned. “You must be kidding.” He full on laughed at us. “What were you expecting? That I’d come up here and confess to my terrible crime? I’d have to be pretty stupid to fall for that.”

  Sh…ugar. It wasn’t going to plan. I turned the mic on to see what would come out of my mouth. “We know you argued with Bob in the weeks before he died. Tell us what it was about and we won’t have to talk to the police.” My heart was beating in double time. I was beginning to see what a mistake this whole thing could become.