When She Was Bad (12 page)

‘I know. Paula says it got so embarrassing, even Gill made an excuse to leave.’

‘Do you think there’s actually something wrong with her?’ he wondered. ‘Like some sort of mental illness where you can’t judge social situations properly?’

‘Don’t try to make excuses for her.’

‘No, really. Maybe it’s not her fault. Maybe she has Asperger’s or something. Or maybe she really is possessed by the Devil like that email said.’

Charlie was talking about a disturbing message that both he and Paula had received from a weird email address made up of seemingly random letters and numbers.
Rachel Masters is an evil bitch. She destroys people.
They’d discussed showing the email to HR or Mark Hamilton or even Rachel herself – but in the end Paula had decided they should delete it. Malicious gossip, she’d called it. Sarah knew she was probably right, but when Charlie had forwarded the email to her, it had left her shaken.

‘Anyway,’ Charlie went on, ‘no doubt we’ll find out soon enough what she’s really like. You’ve heard the latest plan, I take it?’

Sarah’s already leaden heart grew still heavier inside her.

‘Don’t tell me.’

But Charlie was already visibly perking up at the prospect of sharing whatever it was that was coming and he paid her protests no heed when he shrilled: ‘A team-bonding weekend!’

‘Oh dear God, please tell me you’re joking.’

‘No. It’s management’s grand new idea.’

‘I don’t believe it. Surely Rachel won’t agree to it?’

‘Don’t think she has much choice. We’re all going – edict from above. Come on, Sarah, it’ll be fun. Up at dawn to run five times around the grounds dressed as cartoon characters with our legs tied together, then back for room inspections and then all into the hall to reveal our innermost fears through the medium of interpretive dance. Can’t wait.’

Back at her desk, Sarah tried to dispel the dread that had crept over her at Charlie’s news by focusing on the day ahead. She had a whiteboard on her desk where she wrote down on a Friday afternoon all her appointments and important calls for the following week so that when she came in on Monday morning, she knew exactly what she had to do. She frowned at the cramped black writing. The anxiety over Gill’s leaving do had meant she’d been in a rush when drawing up the lists at the end of the last week and some of the entries were barely legible. Luckily this afternoon’s meeting with White & Co was clear – 3 p.m. – which was just as well because they’d changed the arrangements so many times she’d completely lost track of them. If they weren’t her biggest client she’d have made a fuss, but as it was she’d bent over backwards and rearranged her schedule to accommodate them each time they rang to say they couldn’t make it. Sarah was proud of the relationship she’d built up over the years with the biggest brewery in the country. The deputy director now asked for her by name. It would probably be her single biggest bargaining tool when it came to arguing her worth with Rachel Masters.

The brewery headquarters was in Milton Keynes so, as usual, the meeting was to be held in a private room in an upmarket gastropub in West London which was the flagship pub for the chain. Even allowing a full forty minutes for the journey, it still left her three hours to get on with the rest of today’s to-do list. She’d refuse to think about the team-building weekend, or that other thing that was like a cheesewire around the chest every time it flitted into her mind. Sarah worked through lunch, which wasn’t unusual these days. She’d already primed Paula that she would be out most of the afternoon, and she knew Paula had let Rachel know. After the débâcle of the shopping trip for Gill’s present on Friday, no one was taking any chances when it came to being considered late.

At two, she discreetly unhooked her bag from the back of her chair and made her way into the toilets. The face that looked back at her from the mirror in the brightly lit room was the grey colour of old grout and she quickly extracted a small red make-up case from the depths of her bag and began applying foundation and then something from a small tube she’d ordered online on impulse after seeing it advertised in a Sunday supplement as a miracle product. It was supposed to give her cheeks a dewy sheen but Sarah couldn’t help thinking it made her look as if she was permanently in a light sweat. Kevin Bromsgrove, the brewery’s deputy director, was old school and set a lot of store in appearance, so she knew it was worth making the effort. By the time she swiped open the door of the main office, she was feeling almost human. She’d used the green eyeshadow that set off her red hair and for once she hadn’t ended up looking like she had two three-day-old black eyes.

Seeing Rachel Masters standing by her desk with a face like thunder burst her buoyant mood like an overblown balloon.

‘What the hell is going on?’ Rachel’s sculpted face was distorted by anger.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I’ve just had Kevin Bromsgrove on the phone. Apparently you were due in Notting Hill twenty minutes ago.’

‘No, you’re wrong. Our meeting was for three o’clock. Look.’ She pointed to her whiteboard, and was mortified to see how much her finger shook.

‘You’ve obviously written it down wrong. What’s the matter with you? This is one of our best clients.’

Sarah felt sick. She was cold all over.

‘I wouldn’t have made a mistake. I know I copied it exactly from my notebook. I was really careful because there had been so many changes. Look, I’ll show you.’

She snatched up her weekly desk organizer and started leafing through it frantically.

‘Here,’ she said, landing on the page for the previous week. ‘It clearly says . . . Oh.’

Kevin Bromsgrove, 2 p.m.

In her mind she saw herself writing it down and confirming it three times with Bromsgrove’s secretary on the phone. Then later, standing at her whiteboard with the notebook open in front of her, copying down the time. Double checking. Triple checking. She didn’t make mistakes like this.

‘I’ll go right now. I can be there in twenty-five minutes—’

‘It’s too late. He’s gone.’

Rachel wasn’t so much saying the words as spitting them out like apple pips.

Sarah felt like Joe or Sam when caught out in some naughtiness, all wobbly bottom lip and frozen-faced fear. When Rachel had stalked off back to her office, Sarah slumped into her desk and put her head in her shaking hands. No one approached her.

19
Anne

After the shock of the pristine kitchen with its chilling feeding rota stuck to the fridge – that ‘L’ written against Monday and Friday, evidence of Laurie’s forced involvement – Ed Kowalsky and I stayed close by each other. I was glad he was there, as if his glasses and his corduroy pants and his rubber-soled suede shoes could somehow mitigate against the sheet of paper on the fridge and the sourness of the air and those regimented supplies in the cupboards and Noelle Egan’s dead eyes.

‘Shall we go upstairs?’ asked Sergeant Cavanagh as if we were prospective buyers and he was showing us around.

By the time we’d reached the upstairs landing, he was already wheezing. He paused at the top, leaning heavily on the post.

‘You guys help yourselves. I’ll be right here. Kid’s bedroom kinda creeps me out, to be honest.’

There was a tight feeling in my chest as I walked into the first room, so it was a relief to find it contained mostly office equipment. There was a large desk along one wall, its surface completely clear of clutter. A leather swivel chair was neatly tucked underneath. On the wall directly in front of the desk was a framed needlepoint sampler which read
The price of greatness is responsibility
with Winston Churchill’s name in smaller letters underneath.

‘Guess this guy Egan really rated himself.’ Ed was trying to lighten the atmosphere but he sounded false and unconvincing.

‘You’re assuming this is his office? It could just as easily be hers.’

I was playing devil’s advocate, of course. We both knew this was Peter Egan’s lair. Though I’d tried to avoid the news, I’d have to have been living on another planet not to have heard about his obsession with tidiness, how the sheets had to be changed every day, how he was fascinated by war and collected medals from dead soldiers that he bought on eBay or at private auction and which the police had found in special leather-bound display cases. Though conspicuously empty, the sterile room felt oppressive with his presence. I thought back to those close-together eyes, that paper-cut smile . . . and shivered.

Next door was the master bedroom. The bed was narrow for a double and of course meticulously made up: the coverlet, with its fussy little green and yellow flowers, was perfectly smooth, the matching pillows neatly aligned. I wondered which side was which. I tried to imagine the couple in the photograph I’d seen downstairs lying next to each other knowing what they’d done, knowing what each was capable of. Did they ever talk about it, I wondered. Did they ever express remorse, regret, ever wonder how they’d ended up in this situation? Did they ever wake in the night with guilt gnawing away at their insides and turn to face each other and ask themselves who it was they’d married, who they’d become? Did they lose sleep, knowing what was down there in the basement?

I knew the answer.

‘Check out the closet,’ called Sergeant Cavanagh from the landing.

Ed cautiously opened up the double doors of the white wardrobe that took up half of the far wall. The two of us took a sharp intake of breath as the contents were revealed.

‘Wow. These two really were something else,’ said Ed.

The rail was hung with clothes. On the left-hand side were six or seven suits all in different shades of grey, the same number of white shirts. On the right were brightly coloured women’s dresses and blouses. All the hangers were facing the same way. And each and every item of clothing was wrapped in an individual clear plastic cover.

‘Like Howard fucking Hughes, huh? Am I right?’ Sergeant Cavanagh was standing in the doorway watching. His bulk blocked up the only exit, making the already stuffy bedroom feel doubly claustrophobic. I could feel the sweat breaking out under my arms and when I moved, the thin material of my skirt clung unpleasantly to the back of my thighs. I glanced again at that immaculately smooth bed with its puffed-up pillows where once Noelle and Peter Egan would have laid their heads down and slept despite everything they’d done.

‘Excuse me.’ I pushed past Sergeant Cavanagh so abruptly he almost overbalanced.

‘You sure you’re OK, Anne?’ Ed said in a concerned tone, following me out of the room.

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

The third doorway off the landing was closed.

‘That’s the kiddie’s room,’ said Sergeant Cavanagh. ‘Don’t worry, there’s nothing real bad in there. It’s just a feeling I got when I went in there. You got kids, Doc?’

To my great surprise I found he was looking at me. Instantly my face burned, and I knew I was blushing.

‘Me? No. That is to say, not yet.’

When I look at that younger self across the divide of decades, I want to cry. Either that or scoop her up and run with her and hide her away where nothing can get to her, none of the things that will eventually turn her into me. Back then, I really thought it was all ahead of me. I always had career ambitions – Harvard, Yale, Stanford. I thought I’d take my pick. But more than work, I thought the rest of it was there for the taking too – husband, a fleet of dimpled children, to be plucked from a shelf whenever I felt like it. Where does it go, that assumption of options? Did my nerve fail because the options dried up, or was it the other way around? Was it when I realized Johnny wasn’t, after all, going to rescue me from myself? When I knew there would be no more children after Shannon? I no longer know. All I do know is that when the overweight detective in the low-slung pants asked me if I had kids, I was embarrassed. I was working on the most important case of my life and I thought I’d be reduced if I exposed myself like that, my personal aspirations and assumptions, the soft underbelly of me.

‘Well, see, I’m a father,’ Sergeant Cavanagh went on. ‘I have a daughter the same age as this kid, and a son the same age as the brother. You know what I’m saying? I go in that bedroom and it gets me thinking about my own kids and all of a sudden my heart is thumping and my blood pressure is going through the roof and I’m full of rage and sadness and it’s not good for me. I need to avoid that kinda stress. When you’re a parent it’s like you wear your heart on the outside of your body. Case like this comes along and you gotta protect yourself from it. You’ll learn that soon enough, Doc.’

So he stayed on the landing, while we nudged our way into the room, and I could feel instantly what he meant about the sadness. It was in the neatly made bed and in the three dolls on the shelf next to it, each stored in its original packaging. It was in the framed photograph on the wall, a smaller version of the one in the living room downstairs. It was in the three pairs of tiny shoes neatly lined up under the bed.

I thought back to my own childhood bedroom. One time when I was eight my mother had sent me to stay with her parents overnight and by the time I came back she’d painted a giant rainbow across one wall. It wasn’t perfect and some of the colours were fat while others were disproportionately narrow, but I loved it. My father had raised his eyebrows when he saw it and muttered something about resale value, but to me it was perfect. That was before my father died and before I realized that some of my mother’s enthusiasm was vodka-sponsored, and way before all her enthusiasm drowned completely in a 42 per cent proof bottle.

When you’re eight years old you think life will be full of big acts of love, but looking back now I don’t think anything really came close to that rainbow ever again. Not until Shannon came along anyway.

‘There’s so little personality in here,’ said Ed Kowalsky, and once again I knew he was thinking about his own kids’ bedrooms at home. Since we’d got to the house, he’d dropped his authoritative, teeth-flashing persona and in its place was a diffident man who seemed to have shrunk physically.