When She Was Bad (13 page)

‘What does it tell you, Anne, that this little girl was able to so subliminate all traces of herself?’

‘That she has learned how to suppress her true nature?’

‘Or maybe she has learned how to adapt?’

We stood for a moment looking around and I think we were both relieved when Sergeant Cavanagh asked if we’d seen enough.

‘Right, folks,’ he said, as we followed his lumbering frame back down the stairs. ‘Are you ready for the
pièce de résistance
?’

He pronounced
pièce
as if it was an acronym: ‘PS’.

At the back of the hallway, under the stairs, was a doorway. I’d noticed it on the way in, but had studiously avoided thinking about it. As Sergeant Cavanagh turned the handle, I fought back an overwhelming urge to yell, ‘Stop!’ Suddenly, it felt too much. I knew that by going through that doorway I’d be crossing a rubicon. Despite my training and my ambition and my curiosity, I wasn’t ready. I didn’t want to see what human beings are capable of doing to each other, or of enduring. But Sergeant Cavanagh was already squeezing himself through the narrow doorway.

‘This woulda been kept locked at all times. See how heavy that door is? It’s reinforced with steel on the inside.’

We were in a cramped store-room lined with shelves which housed all manner of household items – various tools, an iron, tins of used paint, a stack of lightbulbs in their boxes. Multi-packs of washing powder. As you’d expect, everything was neatly arranged with different shelves for different categories of stuff, all with their labels facing out. At the end of the room was what looked at first glance like a wall with yet more shelves. Only when Sergeant Cavanagh reached up under a shelf in the top left corner and slid open a bolt did I realize that the whole wall was actually another door. To the left of it was a plastic bottle on a small purpose-built shelf. As the burly cop reached down, with obvious effort, to slide open another bolt at the bottom of the door, I peered closely at the label on the bottle. Antiseptic handwash. Something way down in the pit of my stomach lurched to the side.

We all stepped back as the door swung open, revealing steps going downwards into what appeared to be a fathomless black hole. Even Sergeant Cavanagh was silenced by the wave of damp, stale air that rose to greet us and the overpowering smell of something decaying under rotten floorboards. The only light came from the three vented bricks I’d seen from the outside which were ahead and to the left, the air vents covered over with a thick sheet of clear safety glass.

‘There’s a switch around here somewhere,’ said Cavanagh eventually, feeling around on the wall to the left of the staircase. There was a clicking noise and suddenly the whole scene was illuminated in a brutal white light. I instinctively closed my eyes, and when I opened them again the world tilted and it has never been straight since.

20
Chloe

It was Wednesday morning and Ewan had been ignoring her for the best part of two days now. Not quite ignoring her but doing that thing where you smile but let your eyes slide off a person as if they’re made of soap and address your comments in a bright, shiny voice to a point by their shoulder.

Chloe was beside herself.

She’d always been secure in her own attractiveness to the type of man she wanted to be attractive to. After spending the night of Gill’s leaving do squashed together with Ewan in his narrow, frankly rather rank-smelling bed, she’d noticed he seemed subdued the next morning, but put it down to a hangover. Her own head had felt like her skull was shrink-wrapping itself over her bruised brain.

So she tried not to read anything into the way Ewan hadn’t bothered to get up, simply calling out, ‘Bye, babe,’ leaving her to let herself out, or the fact that he hadn’t asked her what she was doing for the rest of the weekend. And when he didn’t call or text that day, she reasoned he was still shaking off the night before. She was happy to snuggle with her mum on the sofa in her onesie, watching non-stop telly and listening to her dad shouting at the football in the next room and remembering with a warm thrill in the bottom of her stomach the things they’d done on Ewan’s unwashed sheets the night before.

But by Sunday afternoon she was getting irritable. Something small and rodenty was scrabbling at her insides as if it wanted to get out. She made excuses – a string of them that she threaded together like a daisy chain. He was so busy. He didn’t want to look too eager. He was sitting staring at his phone waiting for her to ring.

At 8 p.m. she sent him a text. By that time she’d agonized over it for hours, rewriting it again and again on a Post-it pad. Even so, her finger hovered over the send button. She’d aimed for casual – joking about her monumental hangover and enquiring about the state of his head. Directly after sending it, she experienced a moment of paralysing regret. She should have held out longer; she’d played her hand too early. She thrust her phone under a cushion on the sofa and tried to concentrate on the television screen where an actor with nineteenth-century clothes and twenty-first-century stubble was smouldering on a hillside – which made her think of Ewan and the dangerous, alien feel of his biceps under her fingers. She snatched up her phone again to check she hadn’t missed an incoming message beep.

Finally, twenty-five minutes and seventeen snatched glances later, she received a text.

Yeh was not feelin 2 clever yesterday but better today tnx. See you tomoz.

The rush of euphoria that greeted the arrival of the message fizzled into flatness. She’d been hoping, she now realized, that her message would kickstart an evening of intimate text exchanges, the kind where you wear a private half-smile as you compose your messages and a full-on one when you read the replies. But this wasn’t the kind of text that encouraged a response. It was impersonal and throwaway.

It made her feel like
she’d
been thrown away.

All that night, she’d had a lump lodged in her throat and in her dreams she ran endlessly from unspecified dangers, her breath torn in ragged strips from her throat. She went to work the next morning with puffy eyes and a hardened heart. Then, miraculously, Ewan was attentive again. He’d brought her in a croissant in a brown paper bag and picked a crumb of it out of her hair with gentle fingers. When he went to the kitchen he came back with a cup of coffee for her, and even though he’d put sugar in it, forgetting she didn’t take any, and even though there was a trickle of coffee sludge down the outside, she drank it just because of his fingers spooning in the sugar and his hands wrapped around the mug.

‘You’re looking altogether too well for someone in the state you were in on Friday night,’ he said when he brought the coffee to her desk.

‘That’s due to my fast metabolism.’

She glanced up to see if he was smiling, and then had to look away in case she burst with pride when she saw that he was.

Only after he’d gone to sit down did she question fleetingly this seeming change of heart. It was almost extravagant in its total reversal of the weekend’s silence, as if he was doing it to make a point. If they’d been somewhere other than at work she might even have suspected him of putting on a show to make someone jealous, but they were in the office and it was Monday morning and Ewan had looked at her with eyes that had flecks of amber in them which caught the sun as it slanted through the slatted blinds.

Happiness poured over her as she laboured through all the dreary Monday-morning tasks that Rachel had assigned her in a long, bullet-pointed list she’d printed out and left lying on Chloe’s keyboard for her to find when she came in. She was conscious of Ewan mere yards away, but she concentrated on her screen, content just to know he was there. An email popped up.

Lunch?

She’d smiled to herself but didn’t reply immediately, already secure enough in her beloved status to take him for granted. Her pampered past had bought her the sense of entitlement that allowed her to do that. They’d gone to the sandwich shop around the corner, Chloe trying not to check to see if Rachel was clocking them out as they left. She’d had a grilled panini and regretted it when she bit into it and melted mozzarella dribbled down her chin. They’d been for lunch here loads of times in the past but now she felt self-conscious, sure the other customers could feel the electricity in the air.

Then, without warning, Ewan had gone all quiet on her, eating his chicken wrap with a kind of taciturn intensity that made her talk far too much to compensate. On the way back to the office, she thought he might take her hand and made sure it was fully accessible, hanging down invitingly on the side nearest to him, but then he’d taken his phone out so both his hands were occupied and she’d withdrawn hers, putting it up to scratch her nose as if there’d never been any other plan.

‘Fancy a drink after work?’ She’d been rehearsing the words in her head all the way back to the office, but even so, hearing them said out loud came as a shock.

‘Sure.’

It wasn’t the enthusiastic ‘I thought you’d never ask’ she’d been hoping for but it wasn’t a ‘no’ either and she’d gone back to her desk feeling buoyant, though her heart sank at the prospect of an afternoon of invoicing, still the air around her desk had thrummed with possibility.

Halfway through that Monday afternoon, just at the point where Chloe was contemplating heading to the kitchen to make tea in the hope that Ewan would follow her, the door to Rachel’s office had swung open.

‘Ewan. A word.’

That day, Rachel was wearing a sky-blue silk blouse tucked into a slim charcoal skirt, with high-heeled dark grey suede shoes with straps that went around her narrow ankles. Chloe felt suddenly shabby in the khaki top and brown skinny trousers and brown suede boots she’d agonized over before leaving for work.

The slatted blinds in Rachel’s glass office were closed so Chloe couldn’t see what was going on inside. There was something quite chilling about those blank white windows like giant backs turned to her. She went to the kitchen anyway, hoping that by the time the kettle boiled, Ewan would be out and he’d sneak in to join her and fill her in on what Rachel Masters had wanted. Perhaps he’d do one of his impressions like he used to do of Gill. But when she slid back behind her desk a few minutes later, Rachel’s door was still shut.

By the time Ewan had finally emerged, Chloe was on the phone and she missed seeing his expression. She tried to catch his eye as he sat down, but he was already concentrating on his computer screen. She saw a little muscle twitch in the side of his jaw and it reminded her of Friday night in his narrow bed and something turned to warm liquid inside her.

She tapped in an email.

Well?

From the corner of her eye she saw him click his mouse and then frown briefly at the screen before clicking it again. If he’d read her email, he didn’t respond.

When 5.30 came around, Sarah was first to leave as usual, trying to gather her things as discreetly as possible. Did she really think she was fooling anyone by leaving her coat off until she got out of the office doors? Gradually the others also got up to go until only Chloe and Ewan remained. And Rachel Masters.

Finally Chloe cracked. She stood and picked up her jacket and phone, lingering as if her attention was caught by something on the screen, hoping Ewan would turn around. When he didn’t, she took her things over to his desk.

‘Guess you’re too busy for a drink then?’

Before looking at Chloe he glanced over to Rachel’s office where the blinds were still down.

‘Sorry,’ he shrugged, drumming his pen on the desk.

Still Chloe hesitated, knowing she should leave but unable to tear herself away.

‘Is everything OK?’

Again that flick of a glance in Rachel Masters’s direction.

‘Look, she gave me a bollocking, all right? She didn’t mention your name but she asked me if I wanted to get ahead in this business, because having a fling with a co-worker was a sure way of stopping my career in its tracks. And she’s got a point, you know. It’s a mug’s game, isn’t it, getting involved with someone you work with? Well, isn’t it?’

His eyes had locked on to hers as if pleading with her to agree.

Chloe had smiled her default smile and nodded her head, up down up down up down, but really her mind had stopped working when he’d said that word. Fling. That’s how he saw their night together. She’d been thinking of box-sets with a blanket over their laps and mini-breaks to Rome or Berlin and making love in front of an open fire or on a deserted beach with the sun reflecting gold in those amber flecks in his eyes . . . and he’d been thinking ‘fling’.

Since then they’d hardly communicated at all, avoiding each other’s eyes and making sure they didn’t cross paths in the kitchen. And now it was Wednesday and her jaw ached from forcing a smile and there was an unfamiliar hard, metallic taste in her mouth, and when she looked at Rachel Masters’s office she experienced a rush of something so shockingly intense, she didn’t even dare try to analyse it but swallowed it with a gulp. She felt it burn as it went down.

21
Charlie

Charlie had come to believe himself an outsider to love. Not that he was incapable of it, or immune to it. Not at all. He was an incurable romantic, as many inveterate cynics often are. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe love was possible because he absolutely did, but rather that he didn’t believe it was possible
for him
. So he was doomed to live in a permanent state of quiet unfulfilment. And then he met Stefan.

Stefan had smooth olive skin that shone where the light hit it. His face was all planes and hollows in soft woody shades like beech and walnut, and when he smiled it was like the sun coming out so you just wanted to make him smile again and keep on smiling and never stop. But only for you. And that was the problem with Stefan. It was never really only for Charlie.

Stefan was one of those people who knew everyone. He had over two thousand friends on Facebook. His phone was always buzzing with incoming texts, Instagram messages, tweets, voicemails that started ‘Hey, babe . . .’ He was eleven years younger than Charlie, and it showed in the way social media came as naturally to him as breathing. Ten days after their first meeting, his profile was still up on Grindr though he swore he wasn’t active on there any more, but Charlie didn’t believe him.