A Corpse Called Bob

by Benedict Brown

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  I stopped in front of him and leaned in close so that my face was nearly up against his. “That’s how you got away with it for so long, isn’t it Jack? No one would take you for a gangster in a million years. International drug dealing? Not our Jack. Murder? Not a chance. Old Jack Campbell with his silly animal videos and his knitted sweaters? Security Jack, who could always be relied on to sign for a parcel and have a chat over a nice cup of tea?” I was shouting now, really screaming in his face to get him to spill. “Surely it wasn’t Jack.”

  “You’ve got it all wrong,” he finally snapped. “Yes, Bob was blackmailing me but he spent everything I gave him ordering off us anyway. It was no skin off my nose.”

  “Oh, okay. So you think we’re going to believe that the self-confessed drug dealer in our midst let the man who’d crossed him get off scot-free and that there’s another deranged criminal lurking in the office?”

  “It’s the truth!” Jack gave back just as good as he was getting. “I’m not really a drug dealer. I’m only doing it for a bit of extra cash. Do you have any idea what sort of pension I’ll get from this place when they kick me out?”

  “Oh, poor Jack. Tell that to the families of the addicts you’ve been selling to.”

  “It’s not as if I’ve been slinging heroin. We only sell weed and coke.”

  “I’m tired of listening to your excuses.”

  D.I. Irons moved towards him but Jack wasn’t finished. “If it wasn’t us, someone else would be doing it. Plus all the packaging we use is recycled, we only deal to local addresses to reduce our carbon footprint and we support our local post office. We’re an ethical business and, I promise, I had nothing to do with Bob’s death.”

  Jack looked desperate, his eyes bloodshot, his whiskers suddenly greyer; he’d aged ten years in two minutes. I actually felt sorry for him. I mean, his criminal enterprise aside, I’d always liked the guy.

  “I know you didn’t, Jack. And so do the police. You see, I had to give my colleague D.I. Irons some of the details so that she’d agree to this meeting. The only reason she’s letting me talk to you is because she knows that, when I finish speaking, she’s going to make her arrests.”

  I walked back to my place and sat down in the black leather swivel chair. I’d moved way past the point of subtlety so decided to keep going. I put my feet up on the table and my hands together meditatively. “The problem is that we’ve already ruled out five people in this room and I certainly didn’t kill Bob.” Wendy still looked sceptical on that point. “Which only leaves one person. A man, in fact, with no concrete alibi. A man who adored Robert Thomas and would have done anything for him. A man with vicious streak who could be just as malicious and vindictive as his mentor.” I swivelled in my chair to point at Will. “A man sitting right over there.”

  Despite my impressive theatrics, there was no reaction from my audience. I guess they were smart enough to take five from six and come up with a slimy yuppie in a grey suit.

  Will didn’t look quite so calm anymore and his anger surged out of him. “You said it yourself, I couldn’t have taken the hard drives. There’s no way I killed Bob.”

  “We’ll come to that in time but first, tell me, have you ever seen this before?” I held up a train ticket, which I’d scribbled out a note on and shoved in a plastic freezer bag from my kitchen. D.I. Irons refused to bring the real one. “It’s dated from the day Bob died and, in neat black capitals on the back it says, ‘Okay, let’s do it. Tonight at eight. B.’ When I found it in Bob’s coat after he died, I assumed he’d written it and never had the chance to hand it over. But I was wrong, wasn’t I, Billy?”

  This time there were a couple of gasps from our colleagues as they realised that I was homing in on my suspect. Will raised his eyebrows but kept his Doberman mouth tightly closed.

  “Billy and Bob had become good friends. They hung out at the Boxpark, watched football matches over a beer and hatched plots to annoy Ramesh together. They even liked to come to the office sometimes and muck around up here. Isn’t that right, Will?”

  “Fine, you’re right.” He looked down at his nails like he had far more important things to be doing than sitting there. “It’s hardly a secret.”

  “No, that’s not the secret, but there’s worse to come. At first it was great fun. You looked up to Bob and he trusted you. He even told you about his diagnosis.”

  Will was getting nervous, his hands shaking, his eyes flitting about.

  “But then, you and Bob started to argue. You told us it was nothing. Just friends having a row, but there was more to it than that. He wanted you to do something that you didn’t think was right. He pushed and manipulated you until you went along with his plans. What was it? The memorial service? The two of you organised the whole thing, but you’re not so emotionally bankrupt that you couldn’t see what an impact it would have on his family after he was gone. Bob didn’t give a damn what his wife and kids felt, so long as he could have one last dig at Ramesh and David and all of his pet enemies.”

  Will was rocking fractionally back and forth now, in time with his jangling nerves.

  “In the end, you gave in. Or at least, that was the plan. You came up here to see him but nothing was good enough for Bob. He thought up savage new ideas for how to punish all those that had crossed him. You didn’t want to go along with it but he broke you down, didn’t he? He beat you up with his words, bent you to his will. He defeated you and you promised to go along with his plans on one condition; that he removed the CCTV footage of your humiliation.”

  Ramesh looked across at me, surprised at this unexpected fork in the story.

  Suddenly resolute, Will locked his gaze onto mine. “That’s right.”

  “But that was just an excuse, wasn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “Why would anyone have bothered looking at the footage from that specific time if something terrible hadn’t occurred just after? With the hard drives removed, you knew that you could turn the tables. You hit Bob across the head with the champagne he’d been downing. It wasn’t supposed to be hard, just a warning maybe, but you lost your temper and really belted him. There was blood, he was unconscious and you panicked. You knew that, if he woke up, he’d report you to the police and you would lose everything. Business lunches with the boys, smart suits, fancy holidays on the Italian Riviera. So you took the knife from his desk and you cut the life from him.”

  I wielded the biro one last time and slit my own stomach open like a shamed samurai. “To cover your tracks, you programmed the air conditioning to blast on full power for a couple of hours to mess up the coroner’s estimated time of death. Then, finally, you plunged the letter opener into Bob’s back to make it seem as if his murder was a crime of passion.

  “With that simple action, you shifted the blame onto Bob’s enemies. Everyone in the office would say Will couldn’t possibly have done it, he was Bob’s best friend. Helped along by your own accusations, we thought of Ramesh and Jack and his other enemies but not Will Gibbons.”

  “You’re talking rubbish.” As Will’s anger flared, Brabazon took a step closer.

  “You played the devoted friend to the man you’d murdered.”

  “Enough.”

  “You lied to the police, who quickly found the building security footage of you leaving while Bob was apparently still alive. They didn’t think you could be the killer anyway because you’d never have got into the server room. You lied to your colleagues, inventing an alibi that no one could prove or disprove with a mystery woman who didn’t exist.”

  “It’s not a crime to prank a bunch of idiots.” With his typical arrogance still controlling every movement, his eyes flicked away to the view out of the window.

  “Admit what you did.”

  “Watch your mouth.”

  All eyes were on Will and, in three quick steps, I was right beside him. I spun him round in his chair so that we were face to face. “You killed Bob Tho
mas.”

  “No.”

  “You killed your best friend.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You murdered him!”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Will’s eyes were locked on mine, but he gave nothing away. There was no trace of guilt. He was no longer shaking and no tears came to his eyes. He wasn’t going to break.

  As I stood there, gripping the armrests tight, the room was practically silent. There was a soft rustle of clothes as Jack shuffled about in his seat and, at the door, I heard one of the uniformed officers’ radios crackle and her chunky soles scrape against one another.

  I stood up straight and looked around the room. “I’m sorry for putting you through all that.” I took a deep breath for the first time in what felt like days and allowed the tension to drain out of me. “You see, I had to imagine all these different possibilities before I could be sure of what happened on the night Bob died.”

  “Wait, is Will the killer or not?” Trying to make sense of what he’d just heard, Ramesh’s gaze was bouncing around the room like a squash ball.

  “Stop messing with us,” Wendy said. “You’re sick you are. Playing with people’s feelings. It’s not right.”

  Jack was the angriest of the lot, pointing across the room at me and spitting the words out. “She hasn’t got a clue who the murderer is. She was hoping one of us would confess.”

  I slammed my fist down on the table. It hurt more than I was expecting. “Don’t be so high and mighty. Every one of you has lied at some point to cover your backs. If you’d told the truth in the first place, none of this would’ve been necessary.”

  I looked over at D.I. Irons who gave an infinitesimal nod. Still standing very straight against the wall behind Jack and Amara, she seemed content just to observe. David was in the corner by the door, there in a supervisory role, but leaving the hard work to me.

  Typical boss.

  “You see, when we started our investigation, I made a mistake. I focussed on the wrong people. I was so fixated on identifying the murderer, I forgot about Bob himself. In my head, he was a cartoon monster that everyone would be glad to get rid of. I didn’t think about the person he really was.”

  I wandered back to my place at the head of the table but remained standing. “Bob was a bully, yes. But he was also clever. He’d come up through the company from the lowest level; starting work as a junior office boy, back when such jobs existed. Mr Porter saw something in him that he thought deserved kindling and promoted him through the ranks.

  “But Bob’s success went to his head. He took pleasure in his newfound power. He tortured his subordinates and treated every woman at this firm like we were his possessions. When he took it too far and assaulted an intern, Mr Porter had to deal with it.”

  I was pleased to see that Jack showed no sign of knowing what I was talking about. For all that I had to reveal that morning, there were still a few secrets I wanted to keep. “I can only imagine how little Bob must have cared for the poor girl he tried to rape in his office. And I can’t begin to describe the anger that subsequently drove him. He knew that he’d used up all his favours with Porter, but seeing first David and then Amara promoted above him, pushed him over the edge.”

  I paused, looked at my audience. The grilling I’d previously delivered had turned into a business presentation and they’d all got too comfortable. It was time to turn the screw. For the final time, I started walking around the table. I went slowly, gradually ratcheting up the tension as I delivered the last chapter of the story.

  “He threatened to sue the company and began the proceedings that would cause poor Amara so much suffering. It must have been terrible to be put through that by someone you’d previously called a friend.” I tried to look cheerful and Amara reflected back a weak smile of her own. “Even when Mr Porter caved in and made him deputy director, the initial slight was too much for Bob to forgive.

  “Another thing that I’d failed to consider was just how hard done by he could be. He wallowed in rejection and, when he found out he had cancer, it was just something else for him to feel sorry about. He dismissed the idea of treatment, not caring in the least what his wife and children might want. If anything, it gave him fuel for his pity and the revenge he now so desperately desired.”

  As I crossed from one side of the room to the other, I passed in and out of my colleagues’ vision. Their eyes clicked onto me like magnets whenever I was in view.

  “Bob set out to make working at P&P the nightmare that he now found it to be. He upped the ferocity of his invectives, became crueller and more bigoted. Staring down certain death, he was convinced that he could get away with whatever he wanted, so he taunted his colleagues over each fresh indiscretion. He left notes around the office, boasting of petty barbarities and, like a rotten child who no one pays attention to, he came to crave our contempt even more than our approval.”

  I caught Will’s eyes as I walked past. He looked different, calmer. He’d lost the arrogance and aggression that normally boiled beneath his paper-thin exterior.

  “It wasn’t enough. Nothing Bob did gave him the satisfaction he sought, so he looked for new ways to shock and upset. His crimes escalated. He raised the bar of his own depravity and his hunger for the extreme increased. He lied, insulted, screwed and stole, but it’s taken me until now to make out a pattern to his behaviour. Sometime at the end of last year, without fear of repercussions, Bob wrote down all the things he wanted to do in the world. It was a bad bucket list for his final months on earth. Each item on it was directed at one of us, but he was doing it for himself.”

  Her smile long gone, Amara let out a short, sharp breath. Sitting opposite her, Ramesh looked just as upset, but I knew that he wanted me to keep going.

  “I’ve never seen the list but I know what was on it. He bullied Ramesh, fought and then blackmailed Jack, humiliated Amara, stole from Wendy and lied to his family. I could find examples of almost every sin and debauchery, every type of malice and indulgence to attribute to him. But there was a single missing entry that told me everything I needed to know.

  “It took me a long time to realise that there wasn’t just one mystery to solve, there were two. Bob’s death and mine. His occurred in his office two weeks ago, and mine was foiled in the street last Thursday by blind luck. Bob thought he could get away with murder, so it’s hardly surprising that he tried to do just that. I don’t know why I was the lucky staff member who he wanted dead. But I know that he ordered the hit.”

  Finally, a proper, everyone-at-once, full-on gasp of surprise. Even D.I. Brabazon looked impressed.

  “The same day that he died, Bob found an assassin online. Just one hour before he was murdered, he wrote an e-mail to say that his dark wish list was complete. Adultery, theft, greed, cruelty, dishonesty and finally murder. Bob ticked them off one by one and might have lived long enough to see his plan completed if he hadn’t got cocky. You see, Bob wasn’t just smart and vindictive, he was a show off. He hungered for the thrill of an audience or else all his achievements would be empty. He needed someone to be shocked by the depravity he’d stoop to. Someone to live on as a witness after he’d gone; someone pure to corrupt.”

  I came to a stop at the end of the table closest to the door. Knowing that my story was almost at an end, David stepped forward to stand alongside me. Without looking at him, our hands fell together naturally.

  “Bob pictured himself dying in a hospital bed as the shockwaves from his terrible deeds reverberated through the town, but there was something he hadn’t planned for. They say that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing and the opposite must also be true. In the end it was a good man who stopped Bob Thomas.”

  My loyal, kind-hearted boyfriend kissed me on the cheek, walked over to the constables and put his hands out.

  “Bob loved to cause us pain but none of us here suffered the way David did. He watched Bob’s crimes go unpunished, saw them increase in sav
agery and vindictiveness and he tried to put things right. David tried to convince Bob to stop and Bob loved it. He found great joy in taunting his superior. He told him the things he had done and promised that there was worse to look forward to until, finally, David could take no more.”

  Every pair of eyes in the room were on the murderer. I knew what they were thinking, because I’d had the very same thoughts. He was supposed to be the good one. And just like me, they were trying to work out if perhaps, somehow, he still was.

  “I don’t know exactly what happened on the night of the murder, but I think I can fill in the gaps. David had an early dinner with his elderly Aunt. But, as Auntie Val proudly told me when we met, she never put much stock in clocks and watches and wouldn’t have noticed a shift from their normal dinner time.

  “After they’d eaten their takeaway, David went back to the office and in through the fire escape, so as not to be observed as he crept inside. Bob didn’t know he was coming, didn’t know anyone was there to watch the last great cruelty to Will but he probably didn’t care. When Bob returned to his office, he found his boss sitting at his desk. Determined to put the odious man in his place, David threatened to reveal every last dark secret but Bob just laughed at him.”

  The female P.C. had secured the handcuffs and D.I. Brabazon came to stand by their detainee. Around the table, no one made a sound. Ramesh’s eyes were as wide as frisbees as he processed the final revelations that even he didn’t know. Amara was drained of life, Jack still disgruntled at his own misfortune. Wendy’s expression had turned to stone, but Will kept that peaceful look on his face, oddly zen in the midst of all that darkness.

  “Mocking and conceited, Bob poured himself one final drink and offered the bottle to David who used it as best he could. It was a split-second decision, a moment of madness which would trigger several more. David killed the man who had been tormenting him with the boasts of his own wickedness. Bob Thomas was a thief, a potential rapist and very nearly a murderer but he’s gone now. His list will never be completed, his despicable desires never entirely fulfilled and he won’t hurt anyone ever again.”