Stop at Nothing

by Tammy Cohen

  She looked like a thirty-five-year-old child.

  I sat down on the sofa opposite and pulled my black cross-body bag on to my lap, feeling around inside for my phone. I’d been rummaging for a few seconds before I remembered it was in the pocket.

  Ingrid Blackwood gazed on impassively.

  Now I had to remember how to set it to record. Every movement felt clumsy and inept in front of this wraithlike child-woman.

  The publicist stretched a tight smile across her face and glanced pointedly at her own phone, as if checking the time.

  As I’d guessed, Ingrid Blackwood wasn’t the most forthcoming interviewee. Mind you, I didn’t suppose I’d be terribly expansive if I was answering more or less the same set of questions for the tenth or eleventh time that day, each time trying to bring the conversation round to the boring film you were promoting while knowing that the other person was doing everything they could to lead you in a different direction, hoping you’d let something slip you didn’t really want the world to know.

  I dutifully asked her about the current film, to ease into the interview and placate the publicist, at the same time trying to tease out more interesting quotes, pulling at every tiny thread in her answers, horribly mindful of the ticking clock. Just as I detected a slight lowering of her guard, there came a knock at the door.

  The publicist frowned and rose to answer while I pressed my lips together in annoyance, trying to calculate how long I had left.

  ‘So sorry,’ said a hard-faced woman in a dark jacket with a subtle hotel-logo badge. ‘There’s a call for Tessa Hopwood. Urgent, apparently.’

  I was so shocked it took a few seconds to realize that she meant me.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Why wouldn’t they phone my mobile?’

  I picked up my phone, which was still recording. Might someone have been trying to call me while I was recording the interview with Ingrid Blackwood? Immediately, the possibilities started scrolling through my head. It must be the magazine. Who else knew I was here? But why would they be trying to get hold of me so urgently? Was it something to do with Emma or Rosie? Had something happened to my parents?

  ‘I didn’t think you’d want the call to be put through to the room,’ the woman was saying to the publicist. ‘It’s not terribly private.’

  I got to my feet.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, my mouth suddenly dry. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can.’

  I followed the hard-faced woman from the room, trying not to notice Ingrid Blackwood’s subtly raised eyebrow as she exchanged a look with the publicist.

  ‘Did the person say what it was about?’ I asked the receptionist on the way down the stairs.

  She shrugged.

  ‘My colleague took the call,’ she said. ‘But he’s been called away.’

  On the main desk in the reception area an old-fashioned phone receiver lay on its side next to its cradle. I picked it up and took a deep breath before speaking, nerves pricking at my skin like tiny needles.

  ‘Hello?’

  There was a thick silence, but not the clean void when there’s no connection.

  ‘Hello?’ I repeated.

  Again, there was nothing.

  The receptionist surveyed me coolly. She had neat stud earrings in the shape of butterflies and my gaze fixed on them while I waited for someone to speak.

  Eventually, I replaced the receiver, feeling churned up and anxious.

  ‘Did your colleague say if the caller was a man or a woman?’ I asked. The receptionist shook her head.

  I took out my own phone and called the magazine while I headed back towards the suite where the interview was taking place.

  ‘Skye? Did anyone try to call me from the office?’

  ‘Hang on.’

  There was a clunking noise and then I heard the intern’s voice, sounding further away. ‘Has anyone been trying to get hold of Tessa?’

  A woman’s voice answered in the background. ‘Isn’t she supposed to be doing an interview?’

  It sounded like Natalie.

  I took the stairs two at a time and burst back into the interview room.

  ‘So sorry,’ I said, preparing to sit back down where I’d been sitting before. ‘I have no idea what that was about.’

  The publicist made a face, pulling her mouth down at each corner.

  ‘The thing is, Tessa,’ she said, ‘we’re on a really strict schedule. Otherwise, it’s too tiring for Ingrid. I’m sure you understand.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, not understanding at all.

  ‘And with you starting late and everything, I’m afraid you’ve run out of time. Sorry!’

  She stretched out the last word as if it had several e’s on the end. Sorr-eeeeeee.

  ‘But I’ve only asked a couple of questions. I haven’t got nearly enough for a cover piece.’

  The publicist threw a fleeting glance at Ingrid Blackwood and I realized, with building panic, that this must be something they’d agreed between themselves before I’d even returned to the room.

  ‘Like I say, I’m very sorry,’ the publicist said.

  Ingrid Blackwood held out her limp hand for me to shake again and, before I quite knew what was happening, the publicist was herding me out of the door of the suite and back down the stairs to reception, where the next two journalists were waiting to take their turn.

  ‘Apologies for keeping you,’ she told them pointedly.

  On the way back to the office I listened on my headphones to the recording of the interview, desperately hoping there’d be something I’d missed. Something that would immediately jump out as a great cover line or at least something I could be fairly sure the other thirty or so interviewers wouldn’t have got. But to my growing dismay, I realized there was nothing.

  When I got back to the office, hot and sticky and eaten up with worry, I tried to sneak back to my seat, but Natalie came bounding out of her office.

  ‘Well?’ she said, beaming. ‘Did you get something juicy? Tell all.’

  I felt the heat surge into my cheeks.

  ‘The thing is, they hardly gave me any time.’

  ‘Still, you must have got something, surely?’ Natalie’s smile had faded a few notches by this point.

  ‘A little,’ I lied. ‘But not much. She talked a bit about the film.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And that’s about it.’

  Now Natalie was stone-faced, holding out her hand.

  ‘I’d like to have a quick listen, if that’s okay.’

  It wasn’t a question.

  I handed over my phone, my movements dull and heavy. Natalie put in the headphones and listened in silence for a few moments. Then:

  ‘Is that it?’

  I nodded.

  ‘There was a call. I thought it was the office so I—’

  ‘Four or five comments about the fucking film? For a cover story? Oh fuck. This is a monumental fuck-up. I’m going to have to put in some calls, see if there’s any way we can get another shot at this. Maybe squeeze in at the end of the day.’

  I looked up at Natalie, full of relief at the lifeline she was throwing me. A second chance. That’s all I needed.

  ‘Thanks, Natalie. I promise I won’t mess it up this time.’

  But Natalie wasn’t even looking at me. Her attention was focused behind me, on Edie, the deputy features editor.

  ‘Edie, I want you to spend the rest of the day reading up on everything to do with Ingrid Blackwood, and I want you teed up, ready to go, if we get the nod.’

  She turned back to me, her own phone already wedged between her shoulder and her ear.

  ‘Look, Tessa. You ballsed up. There’s no other way of saying it. This interview has taken months to set up and I can’t afford to take any more risks. I thought you’d be a safe pair of hands.’

  Then she broke off, as whoever she’d called picked up.

  ‘Isabella? It’s Natalie Dawson. Look, this is slightly awks, but we’ve got a bit of a
situation.’

  She turned pointedly away and I slunk out of her office, humiliation blazing on my face.

  I sat down at my desk without meeting anyone’s eyes. I was still finding it hard to believe what had just happened, how things could have gone so horribly, sickeningly wrong.

  28

  After the Ingrid Blackwood debacle I debated not going in to finish my stint on Silk magazine, but I couldn’t risk being labelled unreliable and alienating the few magazine contacts I still had. I felt useless. Worse, I felt I’d let everyone down.

  In the end, Edie, the deputy features editor, had done the interview that Ingrid Blackwood’s publicist had tacked on to the end of the day as a personal favour to Natalie. She’d turned up at the office the next morning, phone in hand like a conquering hero.

  ‘Didn’t you think she was just such a lovely person, though?’ she asked me. ‘So down to earth. She ended up giving me loads of extra time. We just clicked. Isn’t it fab when that happens?’

  When I’d left the office on the Friday afternoon, Natalie had called me in.

  ‘Thanks for all your hard work, Tessa,’ she’d said, with a smile that stopped somewhere around her cheekbones. ‘Now you can go back to semi-retired bliss.’

  I’d known then that my days of working in a magazine office were done.

  Back home, I’d gone over and over the mystery of the strange phone call. Someone had known I was going to be at that hotel at that time, but all the people I’d asked – Kath, Mari, Em, Rosie, even Phil – had denied any knowledge of it.

  The mad thing was I couldn’t shake off the idea that it was Stephens, that he’d somehow found out where I was and staged an emergency call to sabotage my interview.

  And yes, I knew I was paranoid. Which wasn’t surprising. After his angry I won’t forget message when he’d been kicked off his football team, I was hardly sleeping at all at night now. Every noise outside, every pipe gurgling, or branch scratching against next door’s roof, brought me shooting upright, convinced he was out there, watching me.

  Watching Em.

  One night I kept hearing footsteps on the roof over my head and leapt to my feet, sure Stephens had somehow managed to scale the drainpipe and was preparing to come down through one of the upstairs windows. I ended up fetching a broom from the kitchen, gaffer-taping my phone to the handle and pressing the video button to record, leaning out of my bedroom window to hold it up to the roof. But when I watched the footage back I could see that a television aerial had fallen over and was hanging down by its cable, rolling to and fro across the slate tiles whenever the wind picked up.

  On the Wednesday after my disastrous week at Silk, Frances rang. She’d been thinking about me, she said. Wondering how the date with Nick had gone in the end, and how I’d got on at the magazine office.

  I was touched by her concern. Despite the busy life she projected on Facebook and Instagram, I had the feeling Frances was lonely. When you got to my age, there was a temptation to attribute to attractive younger people an inbuilt shield of invulnerability. In reality, I was all too aware of the wretchedness of being a carer to someone you loved, watching them grow weaker in front of your eyes. And her best friend moving away must have left a void in her life.

  Frances was at work but suggested meeting that evening in the pub where we’d met before. I’d noticed before that she seemed much happier talking in person than over the phone. I knew some people were just like that, preferring to see expressions, and body language, connecting in a visual way that was impossible down a phone line.

  ‘I feel bad keeping you away from your mother,’ I told her. ‘You know I’m happy to come to you, if that’s easier.’

  But Frances assured me she was happy for an excuse to be out.

  ‘Mum is going through a really good patch at the moment,’ she told me that evening, when we were both settled into a table at the back of the pub. ‘Her MS is very up and down. Some days she can’t get out of bed unaided, and other days you wouldn’t know there was anything wrong with her at all. But she never complains. She has a huge heart.’

  ‘She’s like you, then.’

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘Don’t do yourself down. Not many people would have put themselves in danger by helping Em. Look at the ones who drove past without stopping. And you didn’t have to keep in touch with her afterwards. Don’t shake your head, I know Emma offloads on to you things she believes she can’t say to me, and I just want you to know I’m really grateful.’

  Frances’s eyes got quite shiny then, as if she was fighting back tears.

  ‘Thank you for saying that, Tessa. But you know I just did what anyone would have done. And Emma is such a lovely girl. You’re obviously a great mother.’

  I frowned.

  ‘I don’t think you’d say that if you knew the full story. I’ve made some huge mistakes with my girls.’

  ‘Yes, but you always loved them. That’s the key.’ She paused. Then: ‘Have you heard about the cloth-monkey experiment?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘We learned about it at school in psychology. Basically, this American scientist bred baby monkeys in a lab, taking them away from their mothers when they were tiny. Then he made two surrogate mothers, one out of bare wire and one out of a frame covered with cloth. And the telling thing was that, even though the wire-framed mother was the one holding a bottle with food, it was the soft mother that the monkeys clung to. The need for a mother’s comfort is so instinctive, isn’t it? So deeply ingrained.’ Her amber-flecked eyes gazed into mine so intently I had to look away.

  Finally, we got on to the subject that was preoccupying me. I explained what had happened at work. The humiliating interview with Ingrid Blackwood, the mystery phone call that had eaten into my allocated time.

  ‘I know it’s crazy, but I keep thinking about the timing of it and wondering if Stephens is mixed up in it all.’

  Frances gazed at me levelly and I took a long sip of my sparkling water and tried to loosen the knot of unease that was growing tighter the longer she took to respond.

  ‘Maybe you’re not so crazy,’ she said eventually. ‘Do you know what spyware is, Tessa?’

  This, I was not expecting.

  ‘Isn’t it some kind of software jealous husbands and wives put on their spouse’s computer to keep tabs on them?’

  ‘Exactly. Except you don’t have to physically access the computer. You can send some programs remotely via a link in an email. If the other person opens it, pfff, you’re in.’

  ‘What do you mean, you’re in?’

  ‘I mean you can see everything the other person is doing on their computer – what websites they’re visiting, what documents they’re printing. And, obviously, their emails too.’

  I stared at her. What she was talking about was so beyond the realms of my reality. Frances worked in that field – data, computers, tech – so she’d know all about it. But for someone like me, it seemed like a different world.

  ‘But surely that’s James Bond stuff.’

  ‘Not at all. It happens all the time. Some unethical businesses even do it to try to track consumer behaviour and then sell the information on to other companies so they can tailor their advertising towards the things people are specifically interested in. Stephens has already managed to send you one email via your website – the photograph of your house. How do you know he hasn’t done it again?’

  ‘But I would have seen. I don’t get many messages at all via my website, maybe two or three a week. And I haven’t had … oh.’

  I stopped short, remembering the message I’d had a couple of weeks before from a journalism undergraduate who’d said how much she enjoyed reading my work and then used the ‘I know it’s a cheek but would you mind reading this feature I just wrote’ line. Normally, I’d have just dashed off a one- or two-line reply explaining I was on a deadline and wishing her the best. But I was curious, and the message had been so complimentary I’d clicked on the attachment
and was confused to find some garbled, nonsensical text like you get when your computer can’t read that particular format. There was a link there too, which I’d also clicked, thinking it might open up the feature in a different format, but again I hadn’t been able to make head nor tail of it. I’d sent a curt email back, telling her to resend in a different format but hadn’t heard anything more and had forgotten all about it.

  After I related this to Frances, her expression grew serious.

  ‘Sounds like you’ve been had, Tessa. Look, do you want me to come round and take a look? I’ll be able to tell straight away if there’s any malware or spyware on there and, if there is, I can clean it up for you.’

  I nodded, numbly. It was only slowly dawning on me what this could mean. Stephens had read the emails I’d sent to Natalie at work, and to Ingrid Blackwood’s publicist. As well as the ones to Kath and Mari. He knew what a big deal that interview was for me. And he knew where it was and when.

  It’s no exaggeration to say I felt violated. The thought of his meaty fingers pawing through my innermost thoughts, of him knowing what I was going to do ahead of time, being one step in front of me in my own life. Reading my Twitter posts, my Facebook messages, the silly jokes I sometimes sent to Em in the middle of the day. It was unthinkable.

  Frances saw my distress and leaned forward to put a hand on my arm.

  ‘I’m working from home tomorrow. I’ll come over in the morning and we’ll sort all this out. In the meantime, make a new email account and access it only from your phone or your desktop. Just to be on the safe side. And start keeping a record of everything – times, dates. You’ll need it all written down to get the police to take notice.’

  I stared at her, open-mouthed.

  ‘I can’t go to the police and say, Oh, by the way, someone rang me at a London hotel and didn’t leave a name, but I believe it’s actually James Stephens spying on my every move through my computer. They’ll think I’m crazy – well, even crazier than they think I am already.’