The Burning (16 page)

Chapter Six

M
AEVE

‘I just can’t believe it. Of all the people. I just – I can’t – I’m sorry …’

From all the gulping and handwaving I could tell that Jess Barker was about to break down again. I leaned forward to prod a box of tissues in her direction with the end of my pen and suppressed a sigh. It wasn’t that I was unsympathetic – far from it, her grief was obviously genuine. But all I had heard so far was that Rebecca had been ‘A brilliant colleague. Just brilliant. She made everyone happy when she was in the office, you know?’ I did know. I had heard it from all of Rebecca’s colleagues at Ventnor Chase, the PR company that had been her place of work for four years, which occupied the shell of a Georgian townhouse in Mayfair. And none of them had been able to tell me why she’d left the expensively furnished office four months earlier and never come back. I had heard stories about her wanting to start up her own company, vague mutterings about a desire to go travelling, or a new job lined up in New York. No one had known the specifics. Anton Ventnor was the only one who might have known what had really happened, and he was unavailable, his secretary informed me. Out of the country. Geneva, she thought, but he was scheduled to head for Vilnius the following day. No, she didn’t know when he would be back. Yes, she would ask him to get in touch.

‘No one is out of reach these days,’ I had pointed out to her. ‘You can get through to him in five seconds if you feel like it. I bet he has a BlackBerry. Or an iPhone. Something that works internationally.’

Mr Ventnor, it seemed, did not. Mr Ventnor liked to concentrate on whatever he was doing. Mr Ventnor was frequently absent from the office, and when he was, he phoned in once a day for a ten-minute update on what was going on. She would mention my request for an interview when he called in the following day. I would have to be patient and wait for him to get in touch with me.

I did not feel like being patient, obviously. I had requisitioned the personnel files and found them blandly uninformative about why Rebecca had suddenly left a job that, by all accounts, she had loved – a job that she had been born to do, according to more than one colleague. And no one would tell me what had prompted it. My last chance was sitting opposite me, her mascara dissolving beneath wet blue eyes.

‘Do you think you might be ready to carry on?’

Jess, who had been Rebecca’s assistant, whom I had saved for last anticipating that she would tell me the real story, blew her nose loudly. She looked at me beseechingly over the tissue. ‘Yes, of course. I’m so sorry.’

‘Not to worry. Take your time. I understand that it’s difficult. Did you work with her for a long time?’

She nodded. ‘Almost a year.’

I estimated that Jess was about twenty-two; a year to her probably seemed like a long time.

‘Would you say that you knew her well?’

‘Absolutely. She used to talk to me about everything. She was completely open – just wanted to share things with me. I used to make her a cup of tea when she got into the office every morning and she’d get me to sit down and chat about what I’d done the night before and what she’d done and what sort of journey we’d had going home or coming in and what we were wearing – you know. Just chat.’

It sounded like hell to me, but then I wasn’t designed to work in an office like that.

‘So presumably you would know why she decided to leave Ventnor Chase.’ I almost held my breath as I waited for her reply.
Oh, come on. Someone must know
something.

The light coming through the window behind her made a halo of her hair, fair corkscrew curls that stood out from her head, and of course she was ethereally pretty in spite of the runny nose and red eyes. But for me, the thing that made her truly angelic was the fact that she took roughly two seconds to overcome any reticence her employer might have expected. She sat up and started to fiddle with the tissue, tears forgotten, intent on sharing what was obviously going to be prime gossip.

‘Well, I probably shouldn’t say this, but things had got a little bit – you know. Strange.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I think Rebecca was on drugs.’ She mouthed the last two words rather than saying them out loud.

‘What makes you think that?’

‘She started to miss work. She didn’t turn up to events that she was supposed to be running – she didn’t even phone to say she wasn’t going to make it. I had to make excuses for her, but I couldn’t pretend she’d been to things when she hadn’t. When Mr Ventnor found out, he went mad.’

‘And Mr Chase? What did he think?’

‘There is no Mr Chase,’ Jess said with a dimple. ‘Mr Ventnor thought it sounded better to have two names.’

Which explained why Ventnor’s sour-faced stuck-up PA hadn’t been able to give me a number for Mr Chase. It did not explain why she hadn’t told me that he only existed on the office stationery. I added another black mark beside her name on my hit list.

‘So Rebecca had become unreliable. When did that start?’

‘About six months ago. But it was getting worse. And she was never in the office – she’d miss three days in a row and then come in as if nothing had happened. And she’d lost loads of weight; she was starting to get wrinkles around her eyes – you know, here,’ Jess said, helpfully indicating the area she meant on her own very smooth, very perfect face. ‘I was really worried about her, actually, because she was starting to look gaunt and it made me realise that you really do have to chose between your figure and your face when you get to that age.’

‘She was twenty-eight,’ I found myself saying in an injured tone. My age, as it happened.

‘Well, exactly.’ There was a pause as Jess blinked at me. So twenty-eight was over the hill. I was beginning to feel self-conscious. Fortunately, Rebecca’s assistant didn’t need any prompting now that she had got started.

‘It was little things, you know? Like she hadn’t had her roots done for a while. And she came in one day with a ladder in her tights and hadn’t even noticed.’

‘That’s hardly conclusive,’ I objected. ‘Anyone could ladder their tights and not notice. And if she was busy – setting up her own company, maybe – she might not have had time to get her hair done.’

Jess was shaking her head. ‘No way. Rebecca was always perfect. “Appearance matters.” That’s what she always said to me. I used to schedule all of her appointments for treatments. She had a massage every week, and a facial every fortnight. She had a mani-pedi on Tuesdays at lunchtime. She got her hair cut every six weeks and coloured every month. But in the end she just stopped turning up for the appointments. It used to be that she always had a spare outfit in case she spilt anything on what she was wearing – she couldn’t stand to look messy. She was the same about her office. She could find her way around her desk in the dark, she always said, because she had a place for everything.’

I made a note of that, amused that Rebecca had been able to keep things tidy at work when according to Louise her flat had been the opposite of neat. But people were often very different at work.

Jess went on, ‘She always looked pulled together, as if she had everything under control, you know? Which was ironic, because she was totally bulimic.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘She completely kept it a secret. No one would have known except me, and that was only because my desk is beside the toilet and I could hear her in there – I know, best desk in the office, lucky me. I used to get her lunch and whatever it was, I’d just be thinking, we’ll be seeing
that
again before too long. I mean, she was human. She wanted to look a certain way and I guess it was the easiest way to do it. And she was managing to keep it together.’ She stopped and ran both hands through her hair, shaking it out, before she continued. ‘It was only a few months ago that things just started to slip. She wasn’t herself. And she wasn’t trying to set up her own business; that’s horseshit.’

I must have looked surprised because Jess blushed and covered her mouth.

‘Sorry. I shouldn’t swear. But it is. There was no way she would have wanted to leave. She loved it here, and she got on really well with Mr Ventnor. She used to go into his office and sit on his desk and just talk to him. No one else ever did that. It was like she wasn’t remotely intimidated by him.’

‘Should she have been?’

‘Yeah,’ Jess said, round-eyed. ‘He’s fucking scary. Sorry. I mean––’

‘It’s OK,’ I said quickly. ‘Go on. She loved her job and she wasn’t planning to leave, but things were getting a bit out of control. That still doesn’t mean she was on drugs. She might have been stressed. Or depressed.’

‘Oh, she was probably stressed, but that was because she was overdrawn,’ Jess said with a matter-of-fact flip of her hand. ‘She was totally broke, she told me. And it was definitely drugs. One time, I went into her office to see if she was OK before I left for the day, and she had a mirror on her desk with white powder on it and I was like, hello, obviously coke, but I didn’t
say
anything and she didn’t either. She just put a file down on top of the mirror and pretended she was reading it. She didn’t have to hide it. I wouldn’t have minded.’ She must have noticed the look I was giving her. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t have tried it myself. I know it’s illegal. It’s just – well, it wasn’t that much of a shock, that’s all. I’d thought she was probably doing something like that.’

‘Do you think Mr Ventnor found out about the drugs?’

She shrugged. ‘Maybe. But I think it was more that he was concerned about the company’s reputation. Reputation is all we’ve got. That’s what Rebecca used to say – you know, before. She had started to be unreliable, and the clients were noticing, and it was like, why keep her around if she’s not able to do the job, you know? Better to let her go and find someone to take her place, even though she was just amazing at what she did and if you ask me they never found the right person to take over from her – I mean, they shared out her clients and they hired someone to replace her, but she’s not even close to being like Rebecca was.’

‘Is that your ambition? To be like Rebecca?’

‘Not now, obviously. But before, yeah. Why not?’

Because being perfect ate her up and spat her out. Because she’d lost her job when her drug addiction had taken over her life. Because her fridge had been almost empty and her life had been chaotic. And all that was before she had died an appalling death. I settled for saying, ‘I can think of better role models.’

‘Well, I can’t. She was brilliant. She was a fantastic boss and like I said, she was great at her job.’

‘Was she sorry to leave?’

‘Gutted.’

‘Bitter?’

‘Not at all. That wouldn’t have been like her. The closest she came to being bitter was when she came into the office with a friend the weekend after she got fired and tidied out her desk. I’d offered to help, but Rebecca wouldn’t let me. They had a laugh, she said. They even had a Chinese takeaway – Rebecca left me a note apologising for the mess, because the cartons were still stacked in her office when I came into work on the Monday. And she paid for it on her company credit card. She said Mr Ventnor owed her a good meal.’

‘Who was the friend?’ I asked. ‘Did she say?’

‘I’m trying to remember.’ She bit her lip, staring at the ceiling as if inspiration might come from above. ‘It’s gone. No one I’d ever met.’

‘Do you know if she was in a relationship? I mean, was there anyone special in her life?’

‘Oh my God, so-o-o many men. She was always getting flowers delivered to the office and guys would call all the time asking to speak to her. She could have been out on a date every night of the week, but she wasn’t interested in most of them. Sometimes she met up with them anyway, just for the sake of a night out. She said it was a good way to try out bars and restaurants. And she always had the escape route planned. She’d go to the loo, then text me and get me to phone her up as if there was some emergency at work so she could leave. There was one time that her phone couldn’t get a signal in the bar because it was in a basement – she said she’d have chewed her own leg off to get away from her date, so she was properly pissed off. After that, she got in the habit of telling me where she was going and who she was meeting. If I didn’t hear from her by nine o’clock, I was supposed to ring the place anyway, just in case. She said she could tell in the first minute if she was wasting her time or not – like, first impressions were so important to her. And even though she went out with some really sweet guys, she never met anyone that she wanted to date properly. But I got the feeling that was because she’d already met The One, but it hadn’t worked out which was totally tragic. She had this boyfriend for ages, and when they broke up …’ Jess bit her bottom lip and rolled her eyes, managing to convey a whole sorry break-up saga with one facial expression.

‘Do you recall the boyfriend’s name?’

‘Something beginning with G. Gordon. Guy. No. That wasn’t it. Guh-guh-guh …’ she snapped her fingers. ‘Gil. I can’t remember his second name, I’m afraid, but I’ve probably got it written down somewhere. I don’t know why they split up; she said he’d basically turned evil on her.’

‘How do you mean, evil?’

She shrugged one shoulder. ‘She never really said. But she warned me about men, and trusting them. She was really bitter after they broke up, I thought. She found it hard to let anyone else in. And if you ask me, that break-up was when things started to go off the rails for her.’

His charm had been lost on me, but I could see how a man like that might make quite an impression. With a sigh, I turned over a new page in my notebook. ‘Do you have any idea who Rebecca dated after she and Gil broke up – and the ones she turned down?’

‘I can try and remember,’ she said dubiously. ‘I mean, it’s not as if I kept a proper record of her private life. Just work.’ She patted the brightly coloured spiral-bound pad that lay on the table in front of her, a sparkly pen clipped to the cover. ‘I write everything down. Everything. But I don’t delete emails – our email system archives everything – it would still have lots of her emails to me and …’ She looked a tad embarrassed. ‘There’s probably a fair few emails from men too. She used to forward them to me if they made her laugh – like if one of the guys was particularly pathetic about begging her to see him, or cross about being dumped. I can let you have copies of any that I find.’