A Room Swept White (3 page)

A grid, Tamsin said. There’s no grid here, so it can’t be a Sudoku puzzle, though the layout is grid-like. It’s as if the lines have been removed once the numbers were filled in.

‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ I tell Maya. I don’t bother to show her the card. She’s always gushingly friendly, particularly to lower-ranking Binary Star employees like me, but she has no interest in anyone but herself. She asks all the right questions – loudly, so that everyone hears how much she cares – but if you take the trouble to reply, she blinks at you blank-eyed, as if you’ve bored her into an upright coma. And I can tell from her frequent glances over her shoulder that she’s eager to get back to her burning cigarette, probably the tenth of the thirty she’ll get through today.

Sometimes when Laurie walks past her office, he shouts, ‘Lung cancer!’ The rest of us pretend to believe Maya’s story about having given up years ago. Legend has it that she once burst into tears and tried to pretend it wasn’t smoke billowing from her office but steam from a particularly hot cup of tea. None of us has ever actually seen her with a cigarette in her hand.

‘I’ve worked out how she does it,’ Tamsin said the other day. ‘She keeps the cig and the ashtray in the bottom drawer of her desk. When she wants a drag, she sticks her
whole
head
in the drawer . . .’ Seeing that I wasn’t taking her theory seriously, she said, ‘What? The lowest drawer’s twice the size of the other two – you could easily fit a human head in there. I dare you to sneak into her office and—’

‘Yeah, right,’ I cut her off. ‘I’m really going to commit career suicide by ransacking the MD’s desk.’

‘You’d totally get away with it,’ said Tamsin. ‘You’re her baby, remember? Maya’s got an underling fetish. She’s going to love you whatever you do.’

Once, without irony and in my presence, Maya referred to me as ‘the baby of the Binary Star family’. That was when I started to worry that she didn’t take me seriously as a producer. Now I know she doesn’t. ‘Who
cares
?’ Tamsin groans whenever I mention it. ‘Being taken seriously is seriously overrated.’

Maya quickly loses interest in me and withdraws into her smoky lair without so much as a ‘Bye, sugar!’ Suits me fine; I never asked to be the object of her frustrated maternal urges. I hurry down the corridor to Laurie’s office. I knock and walk in simultaneously, and catch him whizzing his model globe round on its axis with his right foot. He stops and blinks at me, as if he’s struggling to remember who I am. In his head, he’s probably already had whatever conversation he wanted to have with me, I’ve agreed to whatever he wanted me to agree to, and done it, and maybe I’ve even retired or died – maybe Laurie’s mind has transported him so far into the future that he no longer knows me. His brain works faster than most people’s.

‘Tamsin says Helen Yardley was murdered.’
Nice one, Fliss. Bring up the thing you least want to talk about, why don’t you
?

‘Someone shot her,’ Laurie says expressionlessly. He starts to manipulate the globe with his foot again, kicking it so that it goes faster.

‘I’m really sorry,’ I say. ‘It must make it even harder . . . Than if she’d died naturally, I mean. To cope with.’ As I’m speaking, I realise I have no idea how to pitch my condolences, towards what sort of loss. Laurie spoke to Helen Yardley every day, often more than once a day. I know how much JIPAC means to him but I’ve no idea whether he cared about Helen personally, whether he’s mourning her as a fellow campaigner or as something more than that.

‘She didn’t die naturally. She was thirty-eight.’ The anger in his eyes still hasn’t reached his voice. He sounds as if he’s reciting lines he’s memorised. ‘Whoever murdered her – he’s only partly responsible. A whole string of people killed her, Judith Duffy for one.’

I don’t know what to say, so I put the card down on his desk. ‘Someone sent me this. It came this morning in a matching envelope. No explanatory letter or note, no indication of who it’s from.’

‘The envelope also had numbers on it?’ Miraculously, Laurie seems interested.

‘No . . .’

‘You said “matching”.’

‘It looked expensive – cream-coloured and sort of ribbed, like the card. It was addressed to “Fliss Benson”, so it must be from someone who knows me.’

‘Why must it?’ Laurie demands.

‘They’d have written “Felicity” otherwise.’

He squints at me. ‘Is your name Felicity?’

It’s the name that goes on the credit sequence of every
programme I produce, the name Laurie will have seen on my CV and covering letter when I applied to Binary Star for a job. Seen and then forgotten. On a good day, Laurie makes me feel invisible; on a bad day, nonexistent.

I do what I always do when I’m in his office and there’s a possibility that I might get upset: I stare at the miniature solar system on his shelf and list the planets.
Mercury, Earth, Venus, Mars
. . .

Laurie picks up the card and mutters something inaudible as he aims it across his office at the bin in the far corner. It whizzes past my ear, narrowly missing me. ‘It’s junk,’ he says. ‘Some kind of marketing teaser, waste of a tree.’

‘But it’s handwritten,’ I say.

‘Forget it,’ Laurie barks. ‘I need to talk to you about something important.’ Then, as if noticing me for the first time, he grins and says, ‘You’re going to love me in a minute.’

I nearly drop to my knees in shock. Never before has he used the word ‘love’ in my presence. I can say that with absolute certainty. Tamsin and I have speculated about whether he’s heard of it, felt it – whether he recognises its existence.

You’re going to love me in a minute
. I assume he’s not using the word ‘love’ in the physical sense. I imagine us having sex on his desk, Laurie utterly oblivious to the large window through which everyone whose office is on the other side of the courtyard can see us, me anxious about the lack of privacy but too scared of upsetting him to protest . . .
No. Stop this nonsense
. I shut down the thought before it takes hold, afraid I might laugh or scream, and be called upon to explain myself.

‘How do you fancy being rich?’ Laurie asks me.

Part of the reason I find talking to Laurie so exhausting is that I never know the right answer. There’s always a right one and a wrong one – he’s very black and white – but he gives you no clues and he’s disturbingly unpredictable about everything apart from what he calls ‘the cot-death mothers witch-hunt’. On that, his views are fixed, but on nothing else. It must be something to do with his brilliant, original mind, and it makes life hellishly hard for anyone who’s secretly trying to please him by second-guessing what he’d like them to say while at the same time wanting to look as if they’re just being themselves, acting with a hundred per cent integrity and to hell with what anyone else might think. Actually, that’s unlikely to be a significant constituency of people, come to think of it. It’s probably just me.

‘I’d like to be well-off,’ I say eventually. ‘I don’t know about rich. There’s only so much money I’d need – a lot more than I’ve got now, but less than . . . you know . . .’ I’m talking rubbish because I’m unprepared. I’ve never given it a second’s thought. I live in a dark, low-ceilinged one-bedroom basement flat in Kilburn, underneath people who have sound-amplifying wooden floors in every room because to lay a carpet anywhere would threaten their upper-middle-class identity, and who seem to spend most evenings jumping around their living room on pogo-sticks, if the noise they make is anything to go by. I have no outside space whatsoever, though I have an excellent view of the pogo-jumpers’ immaculate lawn and assortment of rose-bushes, and I can’t afford the damp-proofing my flat has urgently needed since I bought it four years ago. Funnily enough, wealth isn’t something I dwell on.

‘I suppose I’d like to be rich-
ish
,’ I say. ‘As long as I wasn’t getting my money from anything dodgy, like people-smuggling.’
I play back my answer in my head, hoping it made me sound ambitious but principled.

‘What if you could do my job and earn what I earn?’ Laurie asks.

‘I couldn’t do what you—’

‘You can. You will. I’m leaving the company. From Monday, you’re me: Creative Director and Executive Producer. I’m on a hundred and forty a year here. From Monday, that’s what you’ll be on.’

‘What
? Laurie, I—’

‘Maybe not officially from Monday, so you might have to wait for the pay-rise, but effectively from Monday . . .’

‘Laurie, slow down!’ I’ve never shouted an order at him before. ‘Sorry,’ I mumble. In my shock, I forgot for a second who he is and who I am. Laurie Nattrass doesn’t get yelled at by the likes of me.
From Monday, you’re me
. It must be a joke. Or he’s confused. Someone as confusing as he is could easily be confused. ‘This makes no sense,’ I say. Me, Creative Director of Binary Star? I’m the lowest paid producer in the company. Tamsin, as Laurie’s research assistant, earns significantly more than I do. I make programmes that no one but me has any respect for, about warring neighbours and malfunctioning gastric bands – subjects that interest not only me but also millions of viewers, which is why I don’t care that I’m regarded by my colleagues as the light relief amid all the purveyors of earnest political documentaries. Raffi refers to my work as ‘fluff stuff’.

This has got to be a joke. A trap. Am I supposed to say, ‘Ooh, yes, please,’ then look like an idiot when Laurie falls about laughing? ‘What’s going on?’ I snap.

He sighs heavily. ‘I’m going to Hammerhead. They’ve made
me an offer I can’t refuse, a bit like the offer I’m making you. Not that it’s about the money. It’s time I moved on.’

‘But . . . you can’t leave,’ I say, feeling hollow at the thought. ‘What about the film?’ He wouldn’t go without finishing it; there’s no way on earth. Even someone as hard to fathom as Laurie leaves the odd clue here and there as to what makes him tick. Unless the clues I’ve picked up have been planted by someone determined to mislead me – and it’s hard to see how that could happen, since most of them came from Laurie’s own mouth – then what makes him tick at a rate of a hundred and twenty seconds to the minute rather than the usual sixty is the film he’s making about three cot-death murder cases: Helen Yardley, Sarah Jaggard and Rachel Hines.

Everyone at Binary Star calls it ‘the film’, as if it’s the only one the company need concern itself with, the only one we’re making or are ever likely to make. Laurie’s been working on it since the dawn of time. He insists that it has to be perfect, and keeps changing his mind about the best way to structure it. It’s going to be two hours long, and the BBC has told Laurie he can take his pick of the slots, which is unheard of. Or rather, it’s unheard of for everyone but Laurie Nattrass, who is a deity in the world of television. If he wanted to make a five-hour film that knocked out both the
News at Six
and the
News at Ten
, the BBC higher-ups would probably lick his boots and say, ‘Yes, Master.’

‘You’re going to make the film,’ he tells me with the confidence of someone who has visited the future and knows what happens in it. ‘I’ve emailed everyone involved to say you’re taking over from me.’

No. He can’t do this.

‘I’ve given them your contact details, work and home . . .’

I want nothing to do with it. I
can’t
have anything to do with it. I open my mouth to protest, then remember that Laurie doesn’t know my . . . well, it’s something no one here knows. I refuse to think of it as a secret and I won’t allow myself to feel guilty. I’ve done nothing wrong. This cannot be a punishment.

‘You’ll have Maya and Raffi’s full support.’ Laurie stands up, walks over to the tower of box files by the wall. ‘All the information you need’s in these. Don’t bother moving them to your office. From Monday, this’ll be your office.’

‘Laurie . . .’

‘You’ll work on the film and nothing else. Don’t let anything get in your way, least of all the filth. I’ll be at Hammerhead, but I’ll make myself available to you whenever . . .’

‘Laurie, stop! The filth? You mean the police? Tamsin said you spoke to them this morning . . .’

‘They wanted to know when I’d last seen Helen. If she had any enemies. “How about the entire fucking judicial system, not to mention you lot,” I said.’ Before I have a chance to remind him that Helen’s murder convictions were overturned in the court of appeal by that same judicial system, he says, ‘They asked about the film. I told them you’d be exec-ing it as of Monday.’

‘You told them before you asked me?’ My voice comes out as a high-pitched squeak. My stomach twists, sending prickles of nausea up to my throat. For a few seconds, I daren’t open my mouth. ‘You emailed everyone and told them I’m . . . When? When did you do that? Who’s everyone?’ I dig my fingernails into the palms of my hands, feeling horribly out of control. This wasn’t supposed to happen; it’s all wrong.

Laurie taps the top box file. ‘All the names and contacts
you need are in here. I haven’t got time to go through it all with you, but most of it’s self-explanatory. Any more detectives come sniffing around, you’re making a documentary about a doctor determined to pervert the course of justice, and three women whose lives she did her best to destroy. Nothing to do with the investigation into Helen’s death. They can’t stop you.’