sheet carefully between his finger and thumb and turned it over top to bottom. He stared at the upright print in front of him, and then looked up at her, his eyes bright with welling tears. ‘I’m sorry, miss,’ he said at last. ‘I can’t see anything wrong with it.’
She could think of nothing to say. She peered over Darren’s shoulder through the glass partition that separated her office from the rest of the print room. Her assistant Joe was busily working at the large reprographic machine, his eyes determinedly fixed away from their direction.
‘Tell you what, Darren,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you speak to Joe? Get him to show you how it should be done.’
Darren nodded, his face brightening at the prospect of escape. ‘Thanks, miss. I will.’ He rose, almost falling over the chair in his eagerness to leave the office.
‘Marie,’ she said through gritted teeth, as the office door closed behind him. ‘It’s Marie. Fucking Marie.’
She shouldn’t drag it out. She should sack him now before it was too late, before he’d been working there long enough to have employment protection. She should sack him before she was tempted to kill him. She wasn’t a social worker. She was a businesswoman.
Except, of course, that she wasn’t. That was the whole trouble. She was only pretending to be a businesswoman. Doing a pretty good job of it, some would say, managing to expand the business in the face of a recession. But still only playing.
And if she was only playing, she might as well help out someone like Darren along the way. She knew Darren’s type from her early days as a policewoman. Disadvantaged. In Darren’s case, disadvantaged in virtually every possible way – socially, parentally, intellectually, physically. Without even the gumption to get himself into trouble. But that wouldn’t stop someone else getting him into it. Someone a bit smarter, more confident, more streetwise. Which narrowed it down to almost anyone else in the world. Someone would take advantage of Darren, exploit him for their own purposes, set him up, and leave him swinging gently in the wind when things went wrong.
Maybe she could delay all that by a year or two if she kept him employed here. The only risk was that she might end up murdering him herself in the meantime. Particularly on a day like today. After everything that had happened.
She was distracted by the buzz of her mobile phone on the desk. A text, apparently a routine domestic message: Running a bit late. See you 6.30. Just to remind her, in case she might have forgotten, today of all days, that all this – the business, the print shop, Darren and the rest – wasn’t really what it was all about.
She rose casually and fumbled in her jacket pocket for the other mobile phone. Not the one she’d used hours before, in her hopeless call to the emergency services. The customized one that was left switched off until she needed it. She switched it on now.
She dialled the familiar number and then, with the usual mild embarrassment, went through the authorization process – another anodyne code phrase. Salter’s voice, at the end of the line, gave the appropriate coded response.
‘Good to hear your voice, sis.’ Salter’s little joke. They were supposed to converse as if in some non-intimate relationship. At some point, Salter had decided that he was going to be her brother. Somehow, even as cover, that felt intrusive, but there was little she could do about it now.
‘Hello there, Hugh,’ she said. Strictly speaking, she wasn’t supposed to use his real forename, but she’d done so as soon as he’d started to call her ‘sis’. With any luck, it would help the other side track the bugger down more easily.
‘Afraid it’s bad news, sis.’
She felt an empty feeling in the pit of her stomach. Up to now, she’d been living on hope, clutching at the pitifully thin straws she’d tried to conjure up in the dark hours of the morning. Waiting on a miracle. She hadn’t dared return to Jake’s flat, or even try his phone line. Partly because now she couldn’t risk being linked to whatever might have happened there. But mainly because she knew, in her heart, that there would be no reply.
‘We’ve had a death in the family,’ Salter went on. ‘Thought you ought to know.’
‘A death?’ She held her breath for a moment, trying to keep her voice steady. ‘Whose death?’
‘It’s J, I’m afraid,’ Salter said. She could read nothing into his tone. ‘Out of the blue.’
Quite suddenly, she’d run out of words. She held the phone away from her face, breathing deeply, trying to hold herself together. ‘I don’t understand, Hugh,’ she said finally. ‘What do you mean?’
‘What I say, sis. Poor old J’s dead. Dead as the proverbial fucking doornail, I’m afraid.’
She bit back her first response, feeling bile at the back of her throat. There was a note in his voice she’d never heard before, something that leaked through the veneer of cynicism.
She spoke slowly, trying to keep her voice steady. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Hugh, stop playing games. What’s happened?’
‘What I say, sis. J’s dead. Taken in the night. Unexpectedly. Not an easy death, from what I understand. He suffered before the end.’
She lowered herself slowly back down on her office chair, not entirely trusting her legs to support her. Her mind suddenly felt clear, as if she’d been dragged somewhere beyond emotion. ‘Suffered?’
‘Yeah, it’s a bastard. A real bastard. Even that bugger didn’t deserve it.’
She could feel herself clamming up, just wanting to get away from all this. This conversation. This job. This fucking life.
‘Yeah, it’s a bastard, Hugh. So is there anything you want me to do about it?’
There was another pause. ‘He was one of yours, wasn’t he, sis?’
She held her breath again, concentrating, trying to ensure that she gave nothing away. ‘I put his name forward, Hugh, that’s all. Nobody forced him to be an informant.’
‘No, suppose not, sis. Sad to see him go.’ There was no obvious sincerity in his tone. ‘Leaves us in a bloody hole as well. Anything you can do to help will be much appreciated, I’m sure.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind, Hugh.’ She cut off the call, aware she was in danger of losing control. She didn’t know what her next reaction would have been – grief at Jake’s death, at the fucking manner of his demise. Tears at her own guilt and impotence. Blind fury at Salter’s smug irony. Whichever, it wouldn’t have been pretty. Now, she sat in silence, staring through the glass partition to where Joe was still patiently taking Darren through the intricacies of the reprographics machine.
It wasn’t her fault. Yes, she’d been the one who’d suggested Jake as a possible informant. But, like she’d said, no one had compelled him to go along with it. He’d had his own reasons. She knew he’d wanted out, that he was sick of the endless brown-nosing to Kerridge and Boyle and their crowd. That was the saddest thing – that Jake probably really thought he was doing a public duty by grassing up Boyle.
She’d known that. She’d judged it just right, known that when they came along with the offer he’d be ripe for the picking. That was what the job was about: spotting the talent. And it didn’t always go right. Sometimes there were casualties.
And sometimes the casualties were lovers.
She knew that at any moment Joe or Darren would glance in this direction and that, when they did, she had to appear normal. A businesswoman struggling with nothing more traumatic than keeping this bloody enterprise afloat in the face of a howling recession.
Calmer now, her mind focused on the image she wanted to project, she opened the office door. Joe nodded and walked across to her, leaving Darren fumbling, apparently aimlessly, with the controls of the machine.
‘Kid’s bloody useless,’ he murmured under his breath. ‘You know that, don’t you? We should cut our losses and sack him before it’s too late.’
‘He’s just a boy, Joe. Give him a chance.’
Joe shrugged. ‘You’re the boss. But you can be too soft, you know?’
‘Take it from me, Joe,’ she said, ‘that’s not one of my failings.’
