A Room Swept White Read Free Page B

yeah, that was me.’
    ‘Bin it, whatever it is, and get in here, soon as you can.’ He cuts me off before I have a chance to reply.
    I swing my chair from side to side and watch him. At this point, surely, anyone halfway normal would glance across the courtyard to see if I was obeying orders, which I’m not: I’m not binning the card, I’m not leaping to my feet. All of which Laurie would see if he turned his head in my direction, but he doesn’t. Instead, he pulls at the open collar of his shirt as if he can’t breathe, and stares at his closed office door, waiting for me to walk through it. That’s what he wants to happen, and so he expects it to happen.
    I can’t take my eyes off him, though on the physical evidence alone, I really should be able to. As Tamsin once said, it’s all too easy to imagine him with a bolt through his neck. Laurie’s attractiveness has little to do with his looks and everything to do with his being a legend in human form. Imagine touching a legend. Imagine . . .
    I sigh, stand up, and bump into Tamsin on my way out of my office. She’s wearing a black polo-neck, a tiny white corduroy skirt, black tights and knee-high white boots. If something isn’t either white or black, Tamsin won’t wear it. She once wore a blue patterned dress to work, and felt insecure all day. The experiment was never repeated. ‘Laurie wants you,’ she tells me, looking nervous. ‘Now, he says. And Raffi wants me. I don’t like the atmosphere today. There’s something not right.’
    I hadn’t noticed. There are a lot of things I don’t notice when I’m in the office these days, and only one thing that I do.
    ‘I reckon it’s something to do with Helen Yardley’s death,’ says Tamsin. ‘I think she was murdered. No one’s told me anything, but two detectives came to see Laurie this morning. CID, not your regular bobbies.’
    ‘Murdered?’ Automatically, I feel guilty, then angry with myself. I didn’t kill her. She’s nothing to do with me; her death’s nothing to do with me.
    I met her once, a few months ago. I spoke to her briefly, made her a coffee. She’d come in to see Laurie and he’d done his usual trick of vanishing without trace, having confused Monday with Wednesday, or May with June – I can’t remember why he wasn’t there when he ought to have been. It’s an uncomfortable thought, that a woman I met and spoketo might have been murdered. At the time I thought it was strange to meet somebody who’d been in prison for murder, especially someone who looked and seemed so friendly and normal. ‘She’s just a woman called Helen,’ I thought, and for some reason it made me feel so awful that I had to leave the office immediately. I cried all the way home.
    Please let her death have nothing to do with why Laurie’s summoned me
.
    ‘Do you know anything about Sudoku?’ I call after Tamsin.
    She turns. ‘As much as I want to. Why?’
    ‘Does it involve numbers laid out in a square?’
    ‘Yeah, it’s like a crossword puzzle grid, except with numbers instead of letters. I think, anyway. Or maybe it’s an empty grid and you fill in the numbers. Ask someone who’s got swirly patterned carpets and a house that smells of air-freshener.’ She waves and heads for Raffi’s office, shouting over her shoulder, ‘And a doll with a skirt to cover up the spare loo roll.’
    Maya leans out of her office, holding the door frame with both hands as if hoping to block the strong smell of smoke with her body. ‘You know those knitted-doll bog-roll holders are highly collectable?’ she says. For the first time since I’ve known her, she doesn’t smile, try to hug or pat me or call me ‘honey’. I wonder if I’ve done something to offend her. Maya is Binary Star’s MD, though she prefers ‘head honcho’ – that’s her nickname for herself, always delivered with a giggle. In fact, she’s only third in the pecking order. Laurie, as Creative Director, is the supreme power in the