Acts of Kindness

by Heather Barnett

  ‘Mmm,’ Lauren agreed. ‘Thank you, Bella. It’s lovely. The hummus too.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear you say that.’ Zoe flopped back in her chair with a self-satisfied air. ‘I made it. It’s bloody good, isn’t it? Surprisingly simple to make. Just a bit of brown paste and some whatsit peas.’

  ‘I doubt Lauren would be surprised that it’s simple. You’ve managed to pick on Acorn Consulting’s star baker to give your cookery tips to, Zoe. Unlucky.’

  ‘Ah, but savoury dishes aren’t my strong suit. That’s more Ben’s field.’

  ‘Ben’s?’ Bella’s cheeks warmed from more than the red wine as a new idea trotted into her consciousness. ‘He’s er… he’s cooked for you, has he?’

  ‘Yes, a couple of times.’

  The warm glow of the alcohol began to ebb. Why hadn’t she thought of that possibility before? What an idiot. That would explain why they were so often together, in The Royal Oak for instance. Memories started flooding in now of times when Ben had called Lauren out of the office, or she’d seen them murmuring together away from the others.

  Lauren was speaking again and Bella tried to concentrate. ‘It’s not just me he’s cooked for,’ she explained, ‘it’s the whole team. On team-building evenings.’ She dolloped a spoonful of hummus onto her plate and ripped off a piece of flatbread, oblivious to the dramatic swoop of emotions she’d evoked in Bella. Bella tried not to look at Zoe, who she suspected would have been more observant, despite the wine.

  ‘We sometimes have team cook-offs,’ Lauren continued, after swallowing a mouthful, ‘on our annual team trips. I expect we’ll do it this time.’ She turned to Zoe. ‘Our team and a few others are going over to the US office for some meetings.’ To Bella, she added, ‘You should suggest this recipe. Ben’d love it, he’s into Moroccan food. Mind you, I expect he’d love anything you did.’

  The muscles in Bella’s throat constricted as she tried to think of a subtle way to encourage Lauren to expand.

  Zoe had no such muscular handicaps. ‘D’you reckon he fancies Bella, then?’

  Lauren brushed a stray crumb of flatbread off her cheek with the back of a hummusy hand. Her eyes flickered towards Bella then back to Zoe. ‘I’d say he’s got a soft spot for her. Mind you, so’s Oscar – another guy in our team. But then she is stunning.’ She said it matter-of-factly, as if she was saying she is female, or she is five feet nine.

  Zoe reached out a hand to stroke Bella’s cheek as she said to Lauren, ‘Don’t tell her things like that, she’ll only become an even bigger pain in the arse.’

  ‘Oh, fuck off,’ was the most cutting and clever thing Bella could think of to say.

  Zoe shoved her plate out of the way and leaned forward on the table, arms crossed, watching Lauren as she shovelled more food into her tiny frame. ‘Come on, then. You can’t stop there. What makes you think Ben’s into our Bella?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Nothing specific, I guess. I catch him looking at her sometimes, you know, in a way he wouldn’t look at me, for example.’

  ‘That could mean he can’t stand her,’ Zoe pointed out.

  ‘Thanks, Zoe,’ muttered Bella.

  Lauren laughed. ‘No, I’m pretty sure that’s not what those looks mean. Ben’s hard to read though, who knows?’

  ‘Sounds like there are lots of mysteries in your office,’ Zoe said as Bella went into the kitchen to get dessert.

  Bella wanted to hear more about Ben, but was scared of betraying too much interest. Plus, the still-sober part of her brain reminded her sternly, she had a job to do. She hadn’t even mentioned James’s name so far.

  ‘How about you, Lauren, anyone you like at work?’ Bella asked as she returned with bowls of lemon sorbet. ‘Or anywhere else for that matter?’

  Lauren nodded. ‘There is, but I don’t get to see him much.’

  Just in the back rooms of pubs and at middle-aged drinks parties, Bella thought, but she was temporarily silenced by an attack of brain freeze.

  ‘Why don’t you get to see him?’ Zoe asked.

  ‘He works in one of our other offices.’

  Zoe was nodding. ‘Dong listance relationship.’ She paused, brows furrowed, as if replaying the sentence in her head. Seeming satisfied that it was beyond reproach, she continued. ‘Bloody hard. I’ve done it. What’s his name?’

  ‘James.’

  Bella nearly spat sorbet all over the table. She hadn’t expected Lauren to be open about it. It couldn’t have gone better if Bella had briefed Zoe beforehand – in all likelihood it would have gone much worse. Zoe’s acting skills weren’t up to much.

  ‘Whereabouts does he live then?’ Zoe’s interrogation continued.

  ‘He’s based over in the US, at our North American head office. We met on a team-building event.’ Her eyes sparkled as she looked over at Bella. ‘He’ll be there next week on our trip.’

  Bella’s wine-soaked brain tried to process this information. ‘But… Didn’t you see him last week? In the pub?’

  Lauren looked nonplussed. ‘No, what…’ Then the penny seemed to drop and she froze. When she spoke next, she sounded stilted. ‘Oh, no. Wrong James. Where’s your loo, Bella?’

  Bella directed her down the hall and she and Zoe started clearing the table. When Lauren came back, Zoe was clattering around in the kitchen, humming something unintelligible. Under cover of the sound of the dishwasher opening and cutlery being hurled into it, Bella asked, ‘Is it something to do with OAK? Is that why you don’t want to talk about James?’

  Lauren looked scared as she said, in the quietest of whispers, ‘Please drop it, Bella. Please, please, don’t mention it again.’

  Chapter Eight

  Passport, money, keys. Phone charger. Books. Heating and hot water off. Bins out. Bella ticked off her list. Everything seemed to be done.

  A car pulled up out front. She went over to the window and saw a pale blue Jaguar saloon. Bella had heard that this model had been chosen as the standard OAK fleet car based on research into what style and colour brought most happiness to the average person. OAK never missed an opportunity to brighten someone’s day.

  Downstairs the driver lifted her suitcase into the boot and Bella settled herself onto the cream leather of the back seat. It would take a couple of hours to get to the airport and she hoped the driver wasn’t chatty. She wanted to sit back, watch the countryside pass by, and think. Her decree absolute had come through on Thursday, turning the page on her marriage and Mark. She hadn’t heard from him in months now nor did she feel any desire to. This trip had come at just the right time. It might be for work, but it represented to her a celebration, jetting off somewhere hot and sunny to celebrate her freedom.

  Of course, ‘freedom’ was subjective. When she breezed home of an evening and pottered around the house doing what she wanted, when she wanted – then it felt like freedom. When she turned off the TV late at night and listened to the silence in the house, before getting into bed alone – then it didn’t. She missed companionship though, not Mark himself. Time and distance had sharpened the focus as far as he was concerned.

  ‘Alright in the back there?’ The voice was loud and cheerful, that of a natural extrovert. Her heart sank.

  ‘Fine, thanks.’ Perhaps if she kept her responses short, he’d get the hint.

  ‘Off somewhere nice?’

  Bella wasn’t sure if her destination was supposed to be a secret. Certainly, she knew its existence wasn’t marked on any map she’d seen. Google Maps showed a landmass in that area but gave it a different name to the one she’d been told, and topographically it looked different to what she’d been given to expect. The driver was an OAK employee so it shouldn’t harm to say, but she opted for a non-committal answer.

  ‘Mmm. Looking forward to it. S’going to be a long flight though, I might try and have a quick nap.’

  What Others Might Think of Her shook its shaggy head disapprovingly, but the driver gave her a thumbs up in the rear-view mirror.

  �
�You go right ahead, my love. Get your head down. Need to get your rest before a long-haul flight. Don’t mind me, I’m used to driving along in the peace and quiet, nothing better…’ He carried on in this vein for the next ten minutes, by which time Bella had indeed succumbed to the gentle rumble of the car as it flew along the motorway, and fallen asleep.

  On finding that she was sitting next to Ben on the plane, Bella wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or not. On the one hand, it would give her the chance to get to know him better, but on the other hand, no one looks or feels their best on a long-haul flight. Focus on the positives, she reproved herself. Here’s your chance to dazzle him with your charm.

  Two hours in and her charm was still waiting for its big moment to burst onto the stage. Ben had exchanged a few pleasantries with her, then opened up his laptop and worked in silence, earphones in. She wondered for a moment if she was expected to do the same, but across the aisle she could see people reading. She pulled her paperback out of her handbag, Thinking, Fast and Slow, whose premise was that people have to try to balance the fast, instinctive part of their brains with slower, more reflective thought processes.

  When she thought about OAK, her instinctive brain said something was wrong. It took the snippets of insubstantial information she had about Teddy Thatcher, Maggie’s paranoia and Lauren’s fear at the mention of James’s name and added it up to equal something worrying. Whereas the more logical, reasoning part of her brain took a step back and assessed the people involved, including Isadora, Ben and Lauren, on all the interactions she’d had with them. It calculated a low likelihood of a murder or a kidnapping going on at her place of work and decided there was a straightforward explanation for everything, which would come out in the end. Her instinct then shot back that nothing about OAK was straightforward. Her reasoning told it to shut up and be quiet, it needed to think.

  Smells of reheated food wafted down the aisle, making her stomach rumble. She’d been looking forward to this, she loved aeroplane food. The neat little foil-covered compartments, the clever space-saving arrangements, the array of titbits from crackers and cheese to a tiny pudding – everything seemed novel on a plane. When the attendant came to pass the trays across, Ben put his laptop away and they began to eat. Right, thought Bella. Now’s the time. Dazzle him with your scintillating conversation. Draw him out of himself. Shine, goddamnit.

  She couldn’t think of a thing to say.

  After they’d eaten for half a minute in silence, he said, ‘I know I’m in the minority, but I love aeroplane food.’

  She beamed. ‘Me too! I don’t know why people don’t like it.’

  ‘It’s something about the way they fit everything together. All these well-thought-out little portions.’

  Bella nodded. ‘Yes. Exactly.’

  They fell silent again. She sensed that he wasn’t uncomfortable with the silence, but all the same, she didn’t want to waste this opportunity. It was a bit of a leap of topic, but once she’d finished chewing a mouthful of macaroni cheese, she asked,

  ‘Have you always been at AC? A lifer, like Catherine?’

  A forkful of chicken halted on its way to his mouth. ‘Nope. I joined eight years ago.’ The chicken continued on its journey.

  He didn’t seem to welcome the topic but she couldn’t resist pressing for more information. ‘Where were you before?’

  ‘I worked for the government.’

  ‘Oh. Doing what?’

  ‘Intelligence.’

  Intelligence must mean spying. She concentrated on undoing her bottle of water without jabbing him in the side with her elbow. Bella imagined that most people, hearing that he worked in ‘intelligence’, went wide-eyed and made references to James Bond. She was determined not to betray any unusual level of interest and nodded as if he had said he used to work in retail.

  ‘Why the change to AC?’

  ‘I was recruited, like you. And it was at a time when I was looking for a change.’

  It was hard to read his face when they were sitting close together, side by side. She paused, hoping he would go on, and when he didn’t, she tried a different tack.

  ‘Mmm. I was in need of a change myself when AC got in touch.’

  He put down his knife and fork and looked at her. ‘I know, Bella. When AC recruits it uses all available information to research the candidate. They take a year or two over it. You’ve seen the observatories, you know how far our reach spreads.’ He let this sink in for a moment. ‘Only Catherine, Isadora and I have seen your file. It’s confidential. But we have to be sure we have the right person. And we knew we did with you. Remember the girl on the Tube having a panic attack? She was an agent. Your final test. We have to be sure the people we hire are intrinsically kind, as well as being qualified in all the other skills we need.’

  She hadn’t considered that the ‘file’ Isadora had referred to at her interview might be something huge and intrusive, filmed and written records built up over a period of years. What exactly did they know about her? What did Ben know? What private things had she done, thinking she was alone, that he had seen?

  ‘Bella.’ Ben was scrutinising her as these thoughts tumbled through her head.

  She was still thinking, recalling – all those painful conversations with Mark, all the ugliness, the despair of the break-up. Had they watched that? Ticked a box, given her a score?

  ‘Bella. We only evaluate what we feel morally justified in using. Nothing private will have been used, we assess things that any passer-by or work colleague could see. It just happens that we’ve got thousands of passers-by in the form of our observatories. If anything is captured by accident via in-home devices or mobile phones, it’s deleted by Catherine’s team before it can be included in the report.’

  ‘Catherine’s team? I thought you said—’

  ‘You’ve got to remember, there are millions of pieces of data to be trawled through. It takes a team to do that. But the information is cut up and spread across the team of analysts so it can’t be pieced together.’

  He shifted round in his seat, forcing her to look at him. ‘There are three important things you need to know, Bella. One, we’re all in the same boat. Every single person on board this plane, every single person who works for OAK, was recruited the same way. They were identified from superficial information as a potential fit and then monitored for, typically, a couple of years. Which leads me on to point two. Thousands of people are monitored as potential candidates, but only a few are chosen. That means that you’re exceptional. What we saw in you was better than all the others.’

  That gave her pause for thought. She hadn’t considered the possibility of there being other candidates for her job who’d been monitored and discarded in her favour.

  ‘The final point is that you have to be a grown-up about it, Bella. OAK is an enormous, highly secret, highly effective organisation. It works because we pick the best people and we can be confident they won’t let us down or betray our trust. It’s too important to take risks on. If that means we have to make people feel uncomfortable by checking that they’re trustworthy and they’re the best candidates, so be it. This isn’t some temping agency where we can take a punt on people.’

  The remains of her main course were cooling in the aluminium tray. Ben’s thigh was pressed against hers but she didn’t even register it. Whatever he said, whatever assurances he gave, they’d spied on her for two years. It was like finding out someone you thought was a casual acquaintance had been living on the other side of a two-way mirror in your bathroom. This was the worst place to get a piece of disturbing news.

  ‘Excuse me. I need to go to the toilet.’ She stumbled over him in her eagerness to get out and made her way down the aisle, steadying herself on the headrests as she went. She glanced at some of the faces as she passed through the plane. Had any of these people watched intimate scenes from her life on some hacked webcam?

  The toilet was empty, thank God – Bella pulled the door closed behind her, flip
ped down the seat and dropped onto it, head in hands. She felt sick, like she might cry, and mainly she felt like an idiot. She’d seen the puzzlement in Ben’s eyes – he thought she knew. Thought she’d been intelligent enough to put two and two together. Bella had been told there was a file on her right from the start. She knew what OAK could do – she should have worked it out. If she delved into the mess of emotions she was feeling at the moment, she had to admit that she was more upset by feeling stupid even than by discovering she’d been spied on.

  After she’d had time to calm down, Bella splashed some water on her face, took a deep breath and made her way back to her seat. The main body of the plane was hushed, lights dimmed. Here and there, insomniacs were picked out in individual reading lights or by the flickering blue screens in the headrests in front of them. A couple of people glanced up as she passed and she couldn’t help feeling a little sick. Did you watch me break up with Mark? Did you trawl through footage from my bathroom, my bedroom?

  Ben looked up as she approached. ‘How are you feeling?’

  She stepped back to allow him out of his seat, then slid past him.

  ‘I feel… a bit stupid. And a bit creeped out. But I’ll get over it.’

  He clicked his seat belt back into place, frowning. ‘I can understand the creeped out bit. But why you would feel stupid…’ he shook his head. ‘You know well enough, everything about OAK is a shock at first. A lot of data is collected – too much, maybe. No one but the most paranoid person would suspect what goes on.’

  She was awoken after an hour or so’s broken sleep by the sensation of the plane dipping its wing. All that was visible at first through the window was navy-blue water flecked with white. Then, as the plane wheeled round, she saw an island shaped like an oak leaf, outlined by a wide border of turquoise water and a thin strip of white beach. The stem was a long, narrow peninsula of land jutting out into the blue. Six bays, three on each side of the island, carved the land into the familiar shape, and a ridge of tree-clad mountains formed a slash of darker green along the length of the island.