‘Hi everyone, so sorry to be late, my last meeting ran way over . . .’ Katherine says apologetically, not even stopping to take off her coat, as that guy, the bespectacled, besuited one who’s forever banging on about percentage points is straight over to her, bringing her up to speed on what’s happened since she left.
Philip, on the other hand, acts like a late arrival at a cocktail party.
‘Well, hello there!’ he grins broadly at the room, with an eye that lingers on Jess’s slim frame just a degree too long.
Don’t think I don’t notice, Philip, because I do.
‘Brought some reinforcements for the troops,’ he says. ‘Gotta have a carb hit at this hour of the afternoon, don’t you?’
A few of the team thank him and wander over to help themselves to pastries and Danishes, except for Jess, who stays resolutely at her desk, face buried in her computer.
But Philip is straight over to her.
‘Can’t tempt you?’ he says, waving the tray under her nose. ‘Some seriously hot-looking buns here.’
Oh Christ, I think, overhearing everything. Did he really just come out with a line like that, and right in front of his wife?
Jess looks up at him, teasingly playing with the ends of her long, scraggy red hair.
‘I’m sugar-free right now,’ she says. ‘So can you please just stop trying to tempt me? In work?’
‘So how about if I leave something here for you in case you change your mind after work?’ Philip smirks back at her.
He’s talking about cakes and yet he’s not talking about cakes, and it’s vomit-inducing and he’s doing it all right under his wife’s nose, I think furiously. In her office, where she works.
I will bury him. I will really fucking make him suffer for this.
Meanwhile, a memory surfaces right at the very back of my mind. Inconvenient and unwanted, just like always.
‘Why wasn’t Dad there today, Mum?’
‘I’m sure he was just working late again, love,’ Mum had replied tightly. ‘We all have to work, you know how it is.’
‘But he missed my school Christmas concert.’
I’d been playing the piano at the show, the youngest in the whole school who’d been chosen to perform. I’d spent weeks practising, I’d memorised every single note of ‘Oh Holy Night’ and even sang along to it too. My whole school had clapped, my headmistress called me a little prodigy, and I’d never felt so happy and proud.
‘Never mind,’ Mum had said. ‘I’m sure he’ll be there next time you play.’
To this day, I can still recall, in ultra-HD, the muffled row I heard my parents having later on that night, when they thought I was tucked up in bed and fast asleep.
‘What kind of an arsehole lets a six-year-old girl down, Charlie?’ Mum had said, loud enough that her voice carried up the stairs. ‘You couldn’t even do that much for her? And now you can’t even come up with a decent excuse as to where you’ve been all night?’
‘Will you shut up nagging me?’ Dad had snarled back. ‘I said I was covering for one of the lads in work, and that’s where I was. Call Micko if you don’t believe me.’
‘Do you know what, Charlie? I might do just that. The stink of perfume off you! Do you think I’m stupid, or what? The way you keep sneaking off to make phone calls at night? The way you’re never here anymore? All that dosh gone out of our joint account?’
‘You’re paranoid . . . would you listen to yourself . . .’
‘Don’t you dare attempt to twist this around so it’s my fault!’
I mentally discipline myself not to go any further. Instead, I stand tall and remind myself of exactly why I’ve gone into this business in the first place. To right wrongs. To bring justice to anyone who has ever felt they’ve been shafted. And to sort out every single bloody cheater who as much as dares to cross my path. So Philip Sisk had better watch out, hadn’t he?
Chapter Thirteen
Harriet
‘I saw your post online.’
‘Oh. You did?’
‘You’re back in town?’
‘Yes. Just. I mean, only since last night.’
‘So I just thought I’d call to say . . . well . . . welcome home, really.’
‘Thank you. That’s . . . kind of you.’
‘And how was Africa? Kenya, wasn’t it?’
‘Well . . . it was . . .’ Harriet fumbles about for the right words. She could have said ‘fulfilling’. She could have said ‘humbling’. Instead, she comes out with, ‘I’m covered in mosquito bites and still not over the desperate bout of diarrhoea I got on the way home.’
But she could swear she can hear him smiling.
‘I’m awfully glad I called,’ he says, sounding warmer now. More like himself.
‘Really?’
‘You know I am. It’s always lovely to hear your voice. It’s been such a dreadfully long time, hasn’t it?’
A pause – an awkward one. It worries Harriet a bit, because she and Freddie never used to run out of things to say to each other. Never.
‘So . . . how have you been?’
‘So how are things with you?’ he asks, at exactly the same time.
They both snigger nervously, and that seems to break the ice a bit more.
‘Oh God, this is really weird, isn’t it?’ he says. For the first time, Harriet notices that it’s noisy wherever he’s calling her from. Where is he anyway, the airport, she wonders?
‘This is beyond weird.’
‘I mean, you and me . . .’
‘Used to be able to chat all night!’
‘How are your family?’ he asks politely, but then Freddie was unfailingly polite. Well brought up, as Harriet’s mother would have said.
‘Good.’ She doesn’t know what else to say. So she fills the dead air with what is effectively white noise. ‘Mam’s at a veterinary conference in New York this week, and Dad went with her for the freebie trip.’
‘And they’re both well?’
‘Oh, in great form! Mam finally got to do surgery for kneecap dislocation on a three-year-old Labrador just a few weeks ago. Medial patella luxation, you call it. Dream come true for her – she’s wanted to do an operation like that for years. She’s the envy of the whole local vet community.’
‘And walking normally again?’ he asks, over the swelling background noise.
‘Mammy always walked great, thanks very much.’
‘No, I meant the Labrador.’
‘Oh,’ says Harriet, cursing herself. ‘Yeah. Grand, thanks.’
‘And your father?’
‘He got a nice bit of news too. His gooseberry jam got second runner-up at the Summer Farmers’ Market last month, and now he’s thinking of selling it online under some artisan-y name. He reckons people will pay double if you slap the label “organic” on anything these days.’
Mother of God, she thinks. Did those words really come out of her mouth? A Labrador’s kneecap and gooseberry jam?
‘Wonderful, that’s wonderful to hear,’ Freddie says automatically, as the background noise wherever he is intensifies. It sounds wild and windy, like he’s on the tarmac of a runway; but then you could never be too sure with Freddie, either of where he was, or of what was going on in his life. Once he’d called her from Maui where he’d been sent on Connair business, but she’d completely misheard, and could have sworn he was calling her from Mallow.
‘And your brothers are well too, I hope? Jack and Terry?’
The twins are the only members of Harriet’s family who Freddie has actually met. When Harriet had first introduced Freddie to the twins, miracle of miracles, they’d all actually cracked along together a storm. Freddie had grown up an only child, reared by his grandparents in a house that sounded terrifying, more like a palace, really, and he seemed to enjoy the loose banter and all the slagging and teasing that went on in a normal, functional family.
‘Everyone is grand, thanks,’ Harriet says, no
t really wanting to get into the fact that Jack and Terry are planning a big double wedding.
Weddings. Marriage. Not a great topic to get on to with the man who’s broken your heart.
Silence; just the wind whooshing down the phone line. Harriet knows better than to ask about Freddie’s own parents; his father had passed away years ago, drugs and booze had got the better of him, irony of ironies, while on his way to a spiritual retreat in Red Feather Lakes, Colorado, where he was planning to dry out. And one of the big pluses of volunteering in Kenya for the past year for Harriet was that she had no Wi-Fi. Which meant she wasn’t even tempted to look at the US-based reality TV show which Freddie’s mother now guest-starred in, along with her new husband and their two teenage daughters, who’d all become YouTube sensations and who were never off all the gossipy magazine covers these days.
‘Where to, sir?’ she could have sworn she heard a driver asking Freddie in the background. Harriet doesn’t know how to fill the pause, so there are whole chasms left unsaid.
How’s your girlfriend, she could have said.
Are you still happy with her? Is she still making you happy?
Is she still studying to be a medical consultant? While probably discovering a cure for cancer, and catwalk modelling in her spare time, by the skinny-arse look of her?
She didn’t though.
‘The signal is terrible here—’ Freddie has just begun to say. ‘I’ll call you back . . . that OK?’
But then the phone goes dead before she can answer. Of course he isn’t going to ring her back, Harriet thinks dejectedly. He could be anywhere, for one thing. In Singapore or Bali or Rio de Janeiro. He might even be with her, for all she knows.
And what does she think she is doing anyway, letting him back into her life again? Yes, Freddie was nice to her, of course he was nice to her, but then Freddie was nice to everyone. Freddie was nice to the man who came to zap bugs in their family mansion, and the driver who seems to be at his beck and call twenty-four/seven. Freddie is unfailingly polite. It means nothing. It means less than nothing.
Overwhelmed with sadness, Harriet automatically does what she always does; she goes to pick up the phone to her very best friend.
But then puts it straight back down again. Sure what’s the point?
Chapter Fourteen
Meg
The TV studio is packed and buzzing. Everywhere you look, crew are faffing around with running orders and clipboards, as the camera crew expertly manoeuvre three hulking cameras and studio monitors into position.
Daniel Rourke, the PrimeNews host, is sitting importantly behind a huge oak desk flicking through a batch of cue cards and radiating gravitas, as the election candidates are positioned nervously at podiums on either side of him, evenly spaced out along the studio set. The backdrop is Dublin city illuminated at night, and it all looks very intimidating and highbrow.
Tensions are running high. The candidates know a biggie like this so close to polling day is make or break for them, and the nerves are palpable.
Meanwhile, Katherine is bundled into a huddle with both myself and Jess, getting all the last-minute tips and pointers she can possibly cram in. The only person notable by his absence is Philip, who’s apparently staying home to ‘work on his online consultancy business’.
Hope he enjoys it while it lasts, I think but of course, say nothing out loud.
‘Well? How do I look?’ Katherine asks, for about the fourth time.
‘Utterly fabulous!’ says Jess sycophantically. ‘You look fresh and well-rested, and your outfit is bang on-trend without being ostentatious.’
‘You need more work, actually,’ I tell her, at exactly the same time.
Katherine’s head swivels around to me, as the hassled-looking floor manager taps at his watch and almost yells time.
‘Places everyone, please! Two minutes till we’re live!’
‘I’d lose the pussy bow for a start,’ I tell her crisply, ‘it makes you look like Margaret Thatcher, which is never a good thing. And who did that to your hair? It’s too stiff and lacquered, puts years on you. May I?’ I ask, stepping forward, whipping the bow scarf off from around Katherine’s neck, then running my fingers through her bouffant hair and scrunching away at the rock-hardness of the hairspray till it begins to look softer and less terrifying.
‘Better?’ Katherine asks, peppering with nerves.
‘Ten years gone off you, instantly,’ I reassure her. ‘Now you look more approachable. Nicer. The kind of representative I’d feel comfortable picking up the phone to.’
‘Good to know someone around here will tell me the truth,’ Katherine says, with a sidelong glance at Jess.
Then I escort her over the mound of cables and wires that are strewn all across the studio floor and into her position behind the podium, as Jess glares daggers at me.
‘Sorry,’ Katherine mutters under her breath. ‘Some digs are just too hard to resist.’
A sound technician comes over to Katherine and is just checking her radio mike, when there’s a voice from directly behind.
‘Wait up a second! I’m here, and I have it!’
I swivel around to see that guy, whatshisname from the constituency office. Tall fella, dark hair, wears glasses. He’s out of breath and panting, like he’s sprinted all the way here.
‘Talk about cutting it fine,’ Katherine chides him, taking the papers and casting a quick glance down at them. Then, softening a little, she adds, ‘Thank you.’
‘No cabs to be had,’ he says, gasping for air. ‘Anyway, I rewrote your opening address to camera, so now we’re kicking right off with your internet safety proposals for kids – that’s a key message, so we need to hammer it in there first, because that’s what voters at home will remember.’
‘But what about the autocue for my summation?’ says Katherine, starting to panic, as a floor manager waves at her to get into position behind the podium, along with the other five candidates.
‘Already fed into it,’ this guy says, finally having caught his breath. ‘What, do you think I’d just shove you out on live TV with an unprepared opening monologue? Come on, this isn’t my first rodeo.’
‘Places, people, please, we’re about to go live!’ the floor manager barks, as Katherine stands in position, along with the others.
The familiar theme tune to PrimeNews booms out on the studio floor as the lights beam up to their fullest and brightest. I automatically move to the shadows at the back of the studio, where I’m well out of everyone’s way, but still close enough to hear Katherine’s performance. I’m also close, but not too close, to where Jess sits alone on an empty chair, utterly absorbed by her phone.
‘Hello, good evening and welcome,’ the booming, authoritative voice of Daniel Rourke comes bouncing off the walls, as the studio goes scarily still and silent.
This is Daniel Rourke’s arena now; he has one of those voices that when he speaks, you listen. He’s the kind of heavyweight news anchor and veteran griller of politicians that government ministers quake in fear at; a broadcaster whose silver-haired authority makes those in public office respect and fear him in equal measure. When Princess Diana died, people were so shocked, they said they only really believed it was true when Daniel Rourke told them so, live on PrimeNews.
So just imagine what he’d say and do with Katherine live on air if her private life ever blows up in public, I think, almost able to hear him grilling her. ‘But wasn’t your partner’s infidelity a huge source of distraction to you, as a serving Senator and member of government?’ – exactly the kind of question that a man would never be asked, I fume quietly. Katherine’s team would spin it, of course, and who knew? There’d doubtlessly be public sympathy for her, given that she’s completely blameless in the matter.
And still, and still. These are exactly the kinds of things that distract voters and distort your message so close to an election. Katherine’s instinct is absolutely on the money: Jess has to be airbrushed out of the pictur
e and the affair has to end, good and fast, so the fallout can be dealt with – after she’s won the election.
‘I have with me the five leading candidates for the upcoming elections,’ Daniel Rourke is saying, ‘but only one of them is going home with the job. So who will it be? Up to you, the voting public, when polls open.
‘Tonight, here’s how it’s going to work,’ Daniel says smoothly, as the camera cuts into tight close-ups of the five candidates, all of whom have fake smiles plastered onto their sweaty faces. ‘Each candidate will open with a direct address to you at home, for three minutes precisely. Then, it’s gloves off and may the best man – or woman – win. Right then, to begin, we’ll go to the representative for the south-east constituency, Councillor Toby Callaghan . . .’
‘Somebody should have put a dab of powder on Callaghan’s face before he went on camera,’ whispers that guy, the one who’d just dashed in with a rewritten opening speech for Katherine. ‘Look at him, he’s sweating more than Nixon ever did. Makes him look shifty. Like he’s got something to be nervous about.’
But I’m distracted and only half listening to him.
Toby Callaghan. A European minister based in Brussels who’s had a stellar career spanning several decades and who now has his eye on a seat in the Senate. A big shot. In this election, the man to beat. For God’s sake, all you have to do is take a look at the size of the entourage he has with him tonight; whereas Katherine just has two people with her – three if you count whatshisname. Callaghan has a team of half a dozen stringing along after him.
‘Ehh . . . hello? Earth to Meg?’
Whatshisname is still trying to catch my attention, but I’m too busy scanning the back of the room, assessing exactly who’s there with Callaghan, weighing things up, gauging the lie of the land. Doing my thing, in other words.
I get the spark of an idea, consider it, then decide. Maybe, I think. Just maybe. It’s a very, very long shot, but with the clock ticking to the election, it’s still worth a try.
The Fixer Page 10