the ball into her court. She took a deep breath—bother the man for making her nervous. ‘I want my job back,’ she said bluntly—oh, grief, she hadn’t rehearsed it this way. She saw a trace of ice chill his eyes, and guessed she wasn’t going the right way to get it. ‘Please,’ she added, as an afterthought.
Last Friday, in this room, she had thought—very briefly—that the man opposite had marginally cracked his face a touch, as if she’d amused him. His mouth tweaked again, but it was so fleeting, she was again certain she was mistaken. In any case, she didn’t care to be laughed at.
‘So?’ he enquired curtly.
So? She stared at him from puzzled and deeply blue eyes. ‘Oh!’ It suddenly clicked.
Though before she could get her wits together and rush into her story Thomson Wakefield, as if thinking her particularly dense, enlightened her. ‘So why should I give you your job back?’
Yancie didn’t care to be thought dense either. ‘Because I need it,’ she answered, which she realised was not the answer he wanted. Therefore, before she started to lie her head off, she managed to find a smile, which had much the same effect on him as any of her other smiles—precisely none—and bucked her ideas up. ‘Obviously you want to know what I was doing driving where I shouldn’t have been a week ago last Thursday,’ she said prettily.
He was unimpressed, but his glance to his watch, as if to say if she didn’t soon spit it out he’d be making that suspension permanent, prodded her to get on with it. ‘It might be an idea,’ he suggested, and Yancie was certain she heard sarcasm there.
It was the annoyance she felt with him, his sarcasm, and his barely concealed impatience that he could look at his watch, which gave her the kick start she needed. ‘I really can’t think why I didn’t tell you the truth before,’ she lied. ‘Other than, of course, I knew I was in the wrong, and…’ she tried another smile—zilch! ‘…nobody likes to be in the wrong.’ Silence. ‘But, the plain truth of the matter is, I went to see my sister.’
‘Your sister?’
She might well have said ‘cousin’ since she did have those, but had no sister. But Yancie was ever conscious of her connection with her board member half-cousin, Greville, and, fearing she might trip herself up if she started talking ‘cousins’, she’d thought it better to invent a sister. In her view if she was going to have to tell a lie anyway she might as well make it a good one.
‘My sister had been to stay with me for a few days, with her toddler daughter—er—Miranda. Anyhow,’ Yancie rushed on, suddenly starting to feel extremely uncomfortable at lying—though still feeling unable to tell the truth and bring Wilf into it. ‘Anyhow, my n-niece has this soft toy, a lion, called Leo. She’s devoted to Leo, but no sooner had they arrived back at their home, early, very early on Thursday morning, than my sister was ringing me to say they’d just discovered Miranda had left Leo behind, and was inconsolable without him.’ Yancie, most of her lying out of the way, looked directly at Thomson Wakefield. She smiled; he didn’t. ‘You know how children are.’
He surveyed her coolly. ‘I don’t have any.’
‘Well—er—I’m sure your wife would know…’
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