The Headhunters

Starbucks on North Street, Chichester, was frantic as usual. It was always a haven for mothers with fractious children but on Saturdays entire families with shopping and strollers rearranged the seating and turned the narrow walkway into an obstacle course. Mercifully, the staff turned up the music to drown the sound of infants. But the coffee tasted right and the eats were fresh so where else would you go? While Jo got in line Gemma used her one-time hockey skills to shimmy to the far end and bag two of the much-sought-after purple armchairs, almost knocking over the elderly couple who had just got up from them.

‘So?’ Jo asked when they were seated with their cappuccinos.

‘What?’

‘How would you do it? What lurid little fantasies have been whirring in that head of yours?’

‘Kill my boss, you mean?’ Gemma was shouting to be heard above a Robbie Williams track. ‘With something extremely slow-acting. I’d definitely want to clock that stupid smile being wiped off his face when he sees what’s coming to him. I could force-feed him marshmallows.’

Jo took a moment to think and laughed.

‘Or drown him in golden syrup,’ Gemma said, her weird mental process churning away now.

Jo joined in the game. ‘Sit him in a jacuzzi until he passes out. They say it’s dangerous to overdo it.’

‘You’ve got the idea. A non-stop massage by a team of gorgeous Polynesian girls until he’s rubbed to nothing.’

‘I can’t top that. You’ve obviously given this some thought.’

‘It keeps me going.’

‘What exactly is your job? You’ve never told me.’

‘I’m his PA. In the office next door, guarding the inner sanctum. Anyone wants to see old sweetie-pie, they have to get past me, the battleaxe. I take the phone calls, open the mail, tell the staff he’s in a meeting when he isn’t. Anything unpopular, I break it to everyone else. The result is I have no friends at work. They see me coming and they think extra duties at best.’

‘What’s the work?’

‘Printing. Everything from parish magazines to pizza vouchers. It’s massive and hi-tech. Well, the machinery is, not the staff. We’re small and plodding. The old printing skills have been replaced by laser technology. A halfwit could do it. And a halfwit is running it.’

‘Your nice Mr Cartwright?’

‘You want the measure of the man? This is something that happened this week. Some political agent ordered some election literature, the stuff that gets pushed through your door. We printed his leaflet and there was a typo in the headline. It read, “‘My Erection in Your Hands Again.”’

Jo almost choked on her blueberry muffin. ‘Gemma, that’s priceless!’

‘Our client didn’t think so. His people delivered two hundred before someone noticed.’

‘Love it.’

‘Yes, but who took the rap? Muggins, as always. Our charming Mr Cartwright never picks up his phone. “Tell him I’m out, my dear,” he said when I tried to transfer the rabid caller. “And remind him politely that he must have been sent the proof to check and passed it. But as a gesture of good faith we’ll reprint the entire batch.” So it all comes down to me. And that isn’t the end of it. I have to find the wretched printer who cocked up and tell him he’s in deep shit and had better stay late and redo the job and deliver it himself.’

‘I’m getting the picture now. Your Mr C is a delegator.’

‘Some sort of reptile, for sure.’

‘I don’t think you heard me.’

As likely as not she did. Her brain had its own anarchic way of working. She was already planning a better fate for Mr Cartwright. ‘I wonder if he’s allergic to anything. You can kill someone with a single peanut.’

‘That wouldn’t be slow, would it?’

‘You’re right. No pleasure looking at that. Forget the peanut. Here’s a neat one. We tell him he’s been selected for one of those reality programmes on TV and it’s going to be rigged so that he wins a million. All he has to do is a filmed sky-dive, and then, of course, when he tries to open the parachute . . . ’

‘That isn’t a slow death either.’

‘But it’s on film, sweetie. I can watch it again a million times and in slo-mo if I wish.’

This whole conversation was off the wall and not meant to be treated as real, but you’d be a party pooper to say so. Instead, Jo prolonged it by injecting some logic. ‘All these ideas have a fatal flaw. You’re going to be left with a dead body and they’ll do a post mortem and trace it back to you.’

‘The Polynesian girls?’

‘If we’re not in fantasy land, Gemma, the Polynesian girls won’t massage everything away. At some point he’s going to expire and they won’t want to massage a corpse.’

The mouth turned down at the edges. ‘You’re saying I’m stuck with Denis bloody Cartwright, aren’t you?’

‘Unless you want a life sentence, yes.’

‘He isn’t worth that.’ Gemma’s eyes gleamed as yet another idea came to her. ‘How about getting
him
a life sentence?’

‘What—stitch him up?’

‘Worth thinking about. It would get him off my back, wouldn’t it? It’s the sort of lingering fate I was talking about. I could visit him in prison and gloat.’

‘How would you do it—stitch him up, I mean? You’d need a body.’

‘Trust you to throw a spanner in the works.’

‘And if he’s as charming as you say, the jury might give him the benefit of the doubt.’

Gemma sighed. ‘Dead right. He’d charm their socks off.’

‘THE WOMAN sounds mental,’ Rick said when Jo told him. Rick was her latest bloke. He ticked most of the boxes: confident, clever and gorgeous to look at, with sun-bleached hair and blowtorch blue eyes, but there’s always a drawback. The drawback was Sally, a so-called ‘older woman’ Rick had met when he did a survey on the big house she bought in Bosham. He insisted on seeing this Sally every Sunday for a roast lunch—and Jo didn’t like to think what happened after lunch. She wasn’t thrilled with the arrangement, but she had the feeling it wouldn’t be wise to interfere—yet.

‘She wasn’t totally serious. We were being silly, dreaming up ways to kill this freeloading boss of hers, but it was obvious she’s thought about it quite a lot, so there’s a little bit of intent behind the joking.’

‘Waste of space, is he, this Mr Cartwright?’

‘A complete nerd, according to Gemma. I haven’t seen him, but I’ve met his sort before. They ooze charm and get what they want without ever doing a hand’s turn.’

‘He can’t be clueless if he’s managing a print business.’

‘It gets managed no thanks to him, Gemma says.’

‘Is he married?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘The thing is,’ Rick said, ‘scarcely anyone is alone in the world. You rub Cartwright out and then you find there’s a wife and six kids, or a little old mother. If he’s as charming as we’re led to believe he’s going to leave behind a bunch of friends desperate to find out what happened to their dear old buddy.’

‘Good thing she isn’t serious,’ Jo said.

‘How did you meet this Gemma?’

‘In yoga. She and I are the ones who couldn’t lie on our backs without laughing. We had a giggle about it in the break and decided to leave at the same time. I haven’t known her long. Don’t know much about her.’

‘Except she’d like to murder her scumbag boss.’

‘Her na-eeeeece scumbag boss.’

‘I’ve always thought the right way to go about it is to make them disappear,’ Rick said. ‘Without a corpse the police are buggered.’

‘Easier said than done.’

‘There are plenty of ways.’

‘Such as?’

‘Lost at sea is one.’

‘What—push him overboard?’

‘Preferably with a ton weight attached. The sea idea isn’t perfect, though. I’ll give you that.’ He raised his finger. ‘Here’s a better method. I remember reading about a woman who was kidnapped back in the sixties. It went on for weeks. She was the wife of some rich guy in the newspaper industry. In the end, after several attempts to set up a ransom arrangement, they arrested two brothers, but the poor woman was never found. These kidnappers had a farm, you see, and the police reckoned she must have been fed to the animals. Pigs are supposed to eat everything—skin, bones, the lot.’

‘Ugh!’ Just like a man, making the whole thing grotesque. At least Gemma’s zany ideas had been redeemed by humour. ‘I’m going to change the subject. Where shall we go this evening? Fancy Portsmouth for a change?’

‘Is that, like, a joke?’ he said. They’d gone clubbing in Portsmouth’s Gun Wharf for the past two Saturdays.

‘Name someplace else, then.’

AFTER FOUR frames, she was getting nowhere in the bowling. She should have guessed Rick would be good at it. He’d already scored two strikes and was way ahead on the screen. She didn’t mind really. It wouldn’t be long before he offered hands-on advice how to pick the right ball and improve her action: the game within a game that girls play to win.

From infancy Jo had been burdened with high expectations. As the only child of a domineering mother, she’d been pushed to excel, whether in music, producing a sound on the violin like triplets being born; dance, in the fifth row back, extreme left, where they could grab her from the wings when she tripped; or skating, with an apparent mission to bring down everyone else on the ice. At school she’d been average, so her mother had arranged for private tuition to bring out her hidden talents. All it had brought was a mental breakdown, a gap year with a meaning all its own. Instead of university she’d gone to an undemanding, stress-free job at a garden centre. She’d left home (the best thing she ever did) and got to enjoy her work and feel like a human being again.

While Rick was waiting for the ball to return, she spotted a familiar figure just two lanes away: Gemma, looking the total athlete in stretch jeans and stripy top that revealed a flash of scarlet bra straps. The way she released the ball and immediately flapped her hand in disappointment showed she was used to winning at this game.

‘Your go,’ Rick said. He’d cleared the pins again.

‘See that girl with the ponytail? She’s the one I was telling you about, wants to murder her boss. Shall I tell her we’re here?’

‘We’re in the middle of a game.’

‘If she looks this way I’ll wave. You’ll like her. She’s fun.’

‘Okay, but let’s get on with it.’

She took her turn, not thinking about the aim, and struck down all ten—her first time ever.

‘Hey—how did you manage that?’ Rick asked.

Next time up, her next ball slipped to the side and disappeared down the back without a score. She heard her name being called.

Gemma was waving.

‘Meet you after for a bevvy,’ Jo called back.

Suggestions like that, made with the best of intentions, sometimes have unplanned results. Not long after, they were in Chicago Rock knocking back spritzers and eyeing up the possibility of grabbing a table as soon as some other people left.

‘Jake will give them one of his looks and they’ll get up and leave, no problem,’ Gemma said. She pointed a thumb at her bowling companion, who’d had to dip his head when he came through the door. Dressed entirely in black, Jake could have stepped out of an old Hammer horror movie. There was no question that his eyes were scary. With his pale face and twisted mouth he would have seen off Dr Phibes, no problem.

Rick was getting on fine with Gemma—a touch too fine, Jo thought—praising her bowling skills and saying she must have played the game before. There was no ‘How did you manage that?’ Strange. He hadn’t seen much of her play unless he’d been taking stock of her before Jo had pointed her out.

Jo tried talking to big Jake and found he was no conversationalist. Besides, he was working his influence on the people at the window table. His stare was making them increasingly ready to leave.

‘So do you like dancing?’ Rick asked Gemma.

‘Why—are you guys going somewhere later?’ she said.

‘Nothing planned. I was just thinking you move so well you have to be a dancer.’

‘Bit of a Sherlock Holmes, isn’t he?’ Jo couldn’t stop herself saying. ‘We’ll get you a pipe and deerstalker, my love.’ It sounded more sarcastic than she meant. She didn’t want Gemma thinking she was jealous.

‘We could all go clubbing,’ Rick said.

‘Me and Jake haven’t talked about what we’d do,’ Gemma said. ‘D’you want to go clubbing, Jake?’

Clubbing seals would be more to Jake’s taste, Jo thought.

Without looking away from the people by the window he said, ‘Whatever you want.’

‘Jongleurs?’ Rick said.

Jo couldn’t believe her ears. This was the same guy who’d bellyached about another evening in Portsmouth. Now he was pushing to go there. True, there wasn’t much in Chichester, but Jongleurs was scarcely a novel experience.

‘Cool,’ Gemma said. ‘Shall we drink up and get on the road?’

‘Hold on, I’m sure those people are about to leave,’ Jo said. ‘It’s early, anyway. Let’s sit down for a bit now we’ve got a chance.’

The other party moved out with some backward glances at Jake. He was too large and scary to take on. His knee rubbed against Jo’s under the table and it wasn’t because he was getting frisky, just that a leg the size of his had nowhere to go. She was opposite him and would have got the full force of the stare except that he was focusing somewhere over her head. I do believe the poor guy is shy, she thought, getting all maternal.

‘Are you from round here?’ she asked him.

He shook his head, still without eye contact.

‘Jake’s a Cornish lad,’ Gemma said for him. ‘Would you believe there’s a place called Bugle down there?’

‘Get away.’ Rick held an invisible bugle to his mouth and sounded a fanfare.

Jo tried again. ‘So what brought you to Chichester, Jake?’

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