The Lazarus Vault Read Free

her? She looked into his face, the handsome lines etched deep into the skin, and thought she saw the curl of a smile. Bastard.
    ‘Money isn’t the only way to escape,’ was all she said.
    Blanchard nodded, rocking in his high-backed chair. ‘The poverty of ideas, no?’
    ‘Something like that.’
    ‘But ideas have their own poverty. The ivory tower of academia is an echo chamber, a hall of mirrors. You look at theworld through glass and eventually all you see is yourself. Would that satisfy you?’
    You aren’t safe here
. The policeman’s words suddenly came back to her.
    ‘Academia’s where I am,’ she said firmly. ‘I’m very flattered you’ve asked me here, but I’ve got three and a half years to go and I’m fully committed to the doctorate. I’m afraid there’s absolutely no way I could give it up at the moment.’
    She’d rehearsed it on the bus, knowing the moment would come and wanting to get the tone right. Don’t give offence, but don’t leave a scrap of doubt. Like telling your date you had no intention of going home with him.
    Blanchard heard her out and looked bored.
    ‘You have worked in banking once before?’
    It took her a moment to realise what he meant. The memory was so distant. ‘Just a summer job. Very different to this.’ Twelve hours a week in the local ex-building society, brown carpets and pebble-dash walls. The only old money there was pensioners drawing their benefits.
    ‘What attracted you?’
    Ellie blinked. ‘I’m sorry?’
    ‘To that job. Why not a bar, or a clothes shop – the jobs young women do?’
    ‘I thought I should see the other side of the coin.’
    I wanted to see where the money came from. To handle it. To be close to it. Just once, to have enough.
She’d been poor all her life and hated it. The desperation in her mother’s eyes when she came home from the night shift, her terror every time there was a knock at the door. More than once, a sudden departure from a house she’d just started to feel happy in, bundled into a car at night with their few possessions. The injustice of seeing other kids at school coming in with clothesand phones and laptops they’d been given by their parents, while she bought her uniforms second-hand. At university the phones and laptops had turned into cars and flats, while Ellie lived above a kebab shop, sweated over her books late into the night to the smell of chip fat, and filled her spare hours earning minimum wage wherever she could find it.
    ‘Let me tell you a little about our pay policy,’ said Blanchard. ‘Because we’re a small firm, we know we have to offer more than our rivals.’ He picked up the silver knife and wiped threads of tobacco off the blade. ‘Fortunately, we have deep pockets. As a starting salary, we will offer seventy-five thousand pounds, plus you can expect a bonus that would increase that by about ten to fifteen per cent. As you become more senior, that percentage grows.’
    Ellie’s mouth hung open. She didn’t care if Blanchard saw it. Had he really said seventy-five thousand pounds? The grant for her doctorate was eight thousand, and that was more than she’d ever had to live on in her life. People she’d known at university who’d gone to the top London law firms weren’t earning nearly that much. She knew, because she’d heard them bragging about it for months.
    ‘We know London is a difficult place to live,’ Blanchard was saying, ‘so we try to help the transition. For the first year you work here, you can live in the company flat. The Barbican, the thirty-eighth floor. The views are stunning.’
    Ellie nodded thoughtfully.
Seventy-five thousand pounds.
    ‘Naturally, we provide all the tools you need for the job. A laptop, the latest mobile phone, if that matters to you. A clothing allowance.’
    Unconsciously, Ellie rubbed the cheap fabric of her skirt and imagined herself in some of the clothes she’d seen in the shop windows.
    ‘We don’t provide a car, because you