by Ali Knight
‘Check he’s OK!’ Sarah shouted, standing up.
Sarah is my sensible friend, she’s punctual and unflappable. She has also bothered to do a first-aid course and if she was alarmed I thought maybe I had better be too. ‘John?’ I leaned over and touched his face. Nothing. I shook his shoulder, hearing chairs scrape as people stood and craned. ‘John!’ I said much louder.
‘Is he really hurt?’ asked Ellen, back from the dead now.
I stared at John and heard Jessie scream above me. ‘Is that blood?’ Behind John’s head a dark red smear had appeared.
‘John?’ I shook his shoulder again. He didn’t move. ‘Oh my God.’ I crouched down next to him, the blood looked shiny and fresh. On an impulse I felt his neck as someone gasped above me. ‘Call an ambulance!’ I looked up at the circle of heads above me as someone passed me a mobile. I punched in 999 and then stopped, my finger on the green connect button. I had heard a snigger. I looked round at John, flat out on the floor with a huge grin on his face, a big green tongue stuck out at me and a bottle of tomato ketchup in his hand. I punched him on the arm as the room erupted in hysteria. ‘You bastard!’ I really was angry, I had been genuinely scared for him. John has no limits, he’s always taking things that little bit further than I find comfortable.
‘She felt his neck! She felt for a pulse!’
‘Call an ambulance! Call an ambulance!’ mimicked Lex.
‘Imagine if she had really dialled!’
‘I didn’t think that tomato-ketchup gag would work, but it was phenomenal!’ added Phil, full of admiration.
John was still on the floor, wiping Heinz off his hair with a napkin. ‘So come on, who was it?’ he said to me.
‘What?’
‘Who murdered me?’
I had forgotten about the silly game, awkward feelings of being the butt of all their jokes swirling round inside me. ‘Oh I don’t know,’ I said, keen for it all to be over. ‘It’s Sarah,’ but she shook her head.
‘It’s interesting how our allegiance is with the murderer and not Kate, the detective,’ Phil said, pulling the lemon tart towards him and hunting for a knife. ‘By colluding with the killer, we’re also setting up someone who’s innocent.’
‘Oh, Eggy, he had you good and proper!’ Paul said, wiping away tears of laughter. ‘So you’re two down.’
I stared at Paul, but a loud noise on my left made me jump and look away. When I turned back Phil grabbed his throat and said, ‘I’m dead, but I assure you I haven’t been poisoned by this delicious pudding.’
‘Three down,’ said Paul.
‘So, Kate, who did it?’ asked Ben.
‘Come on, choose me, you know you want to,’ pleaded Paul. He was right, I thought it was him. But he knew I thought it was him and he was expecting me to pick him. So I tried to double bluff him. ‘It’s . . . Lex.’
‘Oh, Eggy!’ Paul reached in delight for my face across the table and tried to snog me.
‘Kaaate!’ Lex threw his two twenties in the air. ‘Didn’t you see him chuck that fork on the floor to distract you? Are you blind?’
‘You did really well, Kate,’ said Jessie, stroking my arm.
Paul took a sip of champagne, holding out his hand for Lex’s money. ‘You only win at this game because other people let you, Eggy.’ And then amid the roar and chatter of our friends he winked at me. I doubt anyone else saw such a small gesture between the two of us. It was a celebration of his cleverness, an admission that he could outwit me and that I loved him for it, because which wife doesn’t love success in her husband?
Paul was not wrong. When we closed the door on the last person that night we had sex right there against the hallway wall, a hurried, intense and physical fucking. After eight years together he brought me to one of the most intense orgasms I’ve ever had.
I stand in that same spot now looking at Paul’s cricket bat in the stand. The green cotton winds its way up the thick handle. I imagine it in my capable hands, held like a baseball bat, whistling fast through the air towards the back of his head. Paul knew I would lie to the police, he knew I would cover for him and he never even had to ask me. His fake drunken ramblings led me down a path where I colluded all on my own. My husband has played me, but this time the stake is not forty quid, it is much, much higher than that.
19
In the early hours I break into Paul’s office. I leave at 2.00 a.m., closing the front door without a sound. Our bedroom is at the back of the house so he can’t hear the car pulling away. I take his set of office keys that he keeps in the study and park down the side alley. I am wearing dark clothes and a torch is shoved in my trouser waistband. I know the alarm code because I have occasionally done research from this office and small details like this are the kinds of things I know about Paul. He may be smarter than me but I have a very good memory for literal things. I don’t forget.
Paul’s office is an old bath factory in a cobbled mews, with full-height metal windows and a wooden floor that’s attractively grooved. You can almost imagine labourers with sinewy arms and strong shoulders dragging the heavy cast iron across the floor to be taken to the city’s upmarket addresses on horses lined up outside. The desks Paul and Lex ‘sourced’ (‘bought’ lends a pedestrian ordinariness to the task, which Lex in particular feels he’s above) are from an abandoned university library. They sit under industrial-looking lights that hang down from the high ceiling. There is a table-football game in the corner by the kitchen, beers in the fridge. The reception area is decorated with flowers and a garish wallpaper of reeds and kingfishers, and someone very pretty usually sits behind the stylish 1940s desk. It’s the kind of place where if you’re not having fun you’re made to feel ashamed.
Once I’ve punched in the code and unlocked the door, it is pitch black inside. I daren’t turn on any lights, so I grope forward pointing the torch at the floor. Paul’s desk commands a corner site partially shielded by a large plant with delicate leaves. He has never had a private office, which is no surprise for someone who can’t bear to be alone, and TV production is an open-plan kind of business. I sit down in his chair and let my eyes grow accustomed to the dark. I have strolled through this office many times to meet Paul before evening events in town. I have taken the eyes that tracked me, the faces that assessed me as the boss’s wife, in my stride. I used to perch on the edge of Paul’s desk and drink a beer while I waited for him to finish up, though recently there’s been a pair of old cinema seats near by and it seems inappropriate not to use them.
I let the torchlight pass over every object on the desk. I pull the Rolodex towards me (Sergei is so efficient he keeps a paper copy of Paul’s contacts) and insert my nail as close as I can to G. I end up in the Fs: Film Council, Florists (Maynard’s), Forman Kate, Graham Melody. This last card has been written by Paul. How ironic. He’s slipped his lover right in next to me. I pull it sharply from the roll, and tuck it into my bra.
I open the drawers of his desk and try to hunt through the chaos of pens, staplers and contracts on Forwood’s distinctive pale blue company paper. Back when Paul and Lex were starting out and there were just the two of them in one small room in town Paul used to seek my opinion on far more than he does now; we had a lengthy discussion about the colour of Forwood’s paper, we dithered between Old Vellum, Parchment and Milk Blue. Milk Blue won.
Get on with it, I tell myself sharply; don’t get distracted. I want to find this thing Melody never signed. There is a postcard from Jessie on the desk. One of her paintings propped up against the computer screen. I sit in Paul’s office chair, my toes just reach the planking below. From this position he can see the whole office, lord of his kingdom, and watch what’s happening in the mews outside. Astrid’s desk is at right angles to his in the middle of the room. She faces Lex, who she works for, but is in profile from here. She’s got an orchid next to her intray; a Bach Flower Remedy for stress and a tube of expensive hand cream standing on its lid. Her drawers are locked. She’s the keeper of Lex’s
secrets. Did she ever field Melody’s calls to Paul? Hold the phone to her pert breasts and mouth at Paul ‘it’s her’, putting her through with a knowing glance?
I suddenly think of my dad and Barbara, cooped up in that boxy 1960s office building, Monday mornings more delightful than they should be as their desire for each other began to cut my mum out, their passion growing against the backdrop of the car park and the dual carriageway. We may now have pricier clothes, trendier interiors and better-quality lunches, but the dynamics of office life remain stubbornly unchanged from one generation to the next. Relationships are just as likely to grow over the laptop as they did over the telex machine. Unexpectedly my eyes fill with tears.
I can’t find the key to Astrid’s drawers so I hunt for something to break them open with. Lex’s desk is the other side of the room near the window. It’s lighter here so I turn the torch off, dig around again. Among his papers I find his gym membership, some Valium tablets, several photographs of him with celebrities, a biography of Don Simpson subtitled The Hollywood Culture of Excess, but nothing else.
I move on to John’s desk near the toilets. From here he sees the back of most people’s heads. It’s obsessively neat and ordered, the notepad blank and the lid back on the pen. There is an unopened bottle of Evian on the desk so John can ‘hydrate’. Being thirsty is so last century. No personal effects fill his workspace, give any hint of the larger-than-life character Paul insists he used to be. Years of therapy, of NA and AA meetings to keep order and discipline in a life nearly unhinged by addiction have stripped him of colour. It’s as if his personality and experiences are now bleached to grey without the chemical enhancers. A sports bag is zipped up and placed under the desk. A lighter is parallel with the keyboard, smoking is the only vice he still allows himself, and he does a lot of that. John Forman, Paul’s older brother, carried along in the wake of his younger one’s success.
His drawers are not locked but hold nothing interesting, so I bend down on the chair and undo the sports bag. Alongside the Adidas socks and Calvin Klein T-shirt is a Non-Disclosure Agreement between Forwood and Melody Graham. As far as I can make out, reading between the lines of all the legal caveats it seems she had a series idea she wanted to discuss with Forwood. She’s signed it. It’s dated six months ago. I’m reading it when a crack explodes in the darkness. Someone is in the room with me.
I drop from the chair to the ground. The back of John’s desk reaches all the way to the floor in the mid-century style, creating a cubbyhole between his drawers where his chair fits. I crawl into it, hugging my knees to my chest. I want to make myself as small as possible, I have no stomach for a fight. The floorboards groan with the weight of a body passing over them, the footsteps move very close, their weight and confidence sound like they belong to a man. I see torchlight jerking on the back wall and careering off at an angle. He’s turning towards the window, inches from me. Silence.
Fear drips down my back and I’m reminded of the summer when Lynda caught a fieldmouse in our caravan and we watched it cower in the bottom of a Corn Flakes box. When I ran my finger along its spine it flinched, its chest panting triple quick. I feel as trapped and helpless as that fieldmouse now, my fate in someone else’s hands as I have no excuse at all as to why I am under a piece of furniture in an office I don’t work in in the middle of the night. I wish with a pang of bitter regret that Paul had never woken me that Monday, that he had sobbed and moaned alone, that my peace of mind had never been betrayed.
I carefully poke my head out when I hear the bumping of a chair near the window. The figure crosses to a conference room on my far right so I crawl around the side of John’s desk. The front door is visible about ten desks away. After we’d manhandled that fieldmouse and made exclamatory noises for a bit Lynda put the Corn Flakes box in the field by a tree and we waited for the creature to make its instinctive run for life. It never did, the poor thing was paralysed with terror. The conference door swings shut with a squeak and I see a dark silhouette heading away from me towards the toilets. I assume the crouch of a sprinter on her blocks, the glass entrance door hovers before me in the gloom, I know it opens outwards. Lynda eventually grew tired of looking at the clashing red and green colours of the crowing Kellogg’s rooster and with a yell and a running kick knocked the box high in the air as I screamed and hightailed it back to the caravan. I didn’t look back. I don’t want to be that fieldmouse now, passively awaiting its fate.
I’m at the third desk when I hear his grunt of surprise and the sound of him chasing me. He’s shouting but I have eyes only for the freedom door that’s rapidly enlarging before me. I slam into it with both hands and feel a sharp pain in my wrists as the unyielding door bounces me back almost to the floor. My cheek is slammed to the wood and the breath sucked out of me as the figure lands on top of me. The door wasn’t unlocked. My heroic dash for liberty has ended before it really began.
‘Are you alone? Are you alone?’ He pushes my face into the floor and yanks my arms behind me. It’s very painful and I would protest if I wasn’t winded, but I’m incapable of answering his shouted commands and he’s not making any sense anyway, there’s a crackling radio obscuring his words. I sense cold metal on my wrists and he pulls me round and shines the torch full in my eyes. I still haven’t seen his face. ‘What’s your name!’ The room is suddenly frozen for a second in bright light and I see a woman standing over the man on top of me before we are all plunged back into blackness for another second before the lights come fully on. ‘Check the back!’ he points as the woman runs for the toilets. ‘I couldn’t find the bloody light switch!’ He strains on his knees to check where she’s going. ‘Poncey architects!’ he adds before turning back to me. ‘You,’ his voice is hard and emphatic, ‘are in so much trouble.’ He pulls me roughly to my feet and I gasp at the pain in my wrists. It’s me in handcuffs, not Paul. I almost nod in agreement with him. I really am in so much trouble.
The policeman is called Sergeant Ian Mackenzie and he is pissed off. He seemed pumped and excited in Paul’s office, as if this were all he had hoped his career choice would be: physically clearing the streets of burglars and driving the dirt back to the station in his patrol car. But four hours later what he thought was a straightforward breaking-and-entering charge is turning into anything but. He’s being manipulated by an astonishingly clever lawyer and I am doing my level best to keep my mouth from dropping open in slack-jawed awe at his verbal and mental prowess. The lawyer is my brother-in-law, John, and, at this moment, my saviour. When Mackenzie gave me my phone call I stared blankly at the ten digits. I could think of only two numbers: my mum’s (instantly discounted) and Paul’s. Despite my sour anger with him, I am tied to him still. He didn’t sound asleep when I called, or particularly surprised when I said I had been arrested. Maybe there’s nothing that’ll surprise him now. ‘Leave it with me,’ he said as if I were a client with a cheque-pending query. Forty minutes later John arrived. Night work obviously suits him as he looks brighter and less grey than he does in the sunshine. For the first time I see the genes that he shares with his brother in his high forehead and strong jaw. Mackenzie and I stare at him in fascination.
‘To clarify, Mrs Forman used a key to enter the property, and turned off the alarm using the code that she knows,’ says John, glowering at Mackenzie and then me as if we are imbeciles. I nod, eyes on the table. Mackenzie shoves his hands in his pockets in irritation. ‘I see no evidence of breaking and entering.’
‘We got a call from—’
‘From who?’
‘The man rang off before we could establish who it was, saying there was a robbery in progress.’
‘We may all be thankful for civic-minded members of the public but on the available evidence that is a misinterpretation of events.’
Mackenzie groans. ‘She was hiding under a desk in the dark with a torch on her!’
‘Not surprisingly, considering someone had just broken down the door in the middle of the night.’ Mackenzie
tuts. ‘What material from this office did she have on her?’ John asks.
‘That’s no defence and you know it!’
‘What had she taken from the offices?’
He pauses. ‘Nothing.’ I feel Melody’s card against my bra strap.
‘May I say—’
‘You are not required to say anything,’ John interrupts me sharply. He doesn’t want defeat snatched from victory.
Mackenzie stares at me with open hostility and I can’t hold his gaze. The last time anyone looked at me in that way was a teacher at school. I’ve always been on the right side, moved through life without conflict. I like to please. ‘I’m phoning your husband, let’s see what he has to say.’ He leaves, banging the door.
‘There are cameras in here, Kate, just in case you didn’t realise.’ He looks up at the ceiling. ‘They’ve got microphones.’ He smiles, but I know what he’s saying. Keep your cool, we’ll deal with this when we get outside.
‘What happens now?’
‘We wait. There’s a lot of waiting around in a police station.’ He digs in his pocket for some chewing gum. ‘It’s much harder for everybody now that no one’s allowed to smoke,’ he adds. I take the next tablet off the little paper-wrapped stack.
A little while later Mackenzie returns, that unflinching gaze upon me again. ‘He says you’re an insomniac. That you often do things in the middle of the night, that you’d probably mislaid something you needed and wondered if you’d left it in the office the last time you visited.’ His voice is sarcastic, he certainly doesn’t believe a word of it. ‘It’s all so convenient, Mrs Forman, so watertight, eh?’
‘If you have no charge for this woman, you must release her.’ John pushes back his chair, a signal that it’s all over.
Mackenzie’s hands are out of his pockets and are twitching by his sides. I’m not sure if he wants to deck me or John, probably both. A lot of the kids I went to school with were the children of policemen. I remember those dads as strict and sarcastic, just like Mackenzie, with voices that could suddenly turn very loud if we ever dared touch a lounge stereo or leaf through a beloved record collection. He hates me.