heard Manny talk about women: she has heard his dirty laughs and his whispered jokes and the slap of the palm of his hand in a congratulatory high-five. She knows men like Manny, who need sex and power like most people need bread and water. Even his name is a distillation of masculinity. She wonders, occasionally, whether Manny is a nickname, given to him by an admiring coterie of young men in acknowledgement of his sexual prowess. Or perhaps it genuinely was the name his parents gave him and the way he turned out was a fateful coincidence. ‘Nominative determinism’, they called it. She’d heard a discussion about it on the breakfast radio after a man called Mr Diamond had been forced to step down from his position as head of a failing bank, only to be replaced by a colleague called Mr Rich. She smiles at the thought of this.
‘Now that’s what I like to see!’ Manny reaches into the refrigerated shelves and hands Beatrice a carton of lychee juice. ‘A lovely smile on a beautiful woman.’
He winks. She rolls her eyes, accepts the juice and takes her seat at the computer.
‘Hey, Beatrice, one day you’ll realise we’re meant to be together.’
‘Yes, Manny. And one day pigs will take to the sky with wings.’
He guffaws then disappears into a back room to turn up the radio. A thumping reggae beat rings out just as Manny re-emerges and starts to dance, swaying his hips suggestively, eyes half-closed as he clasps an imaginary partner to him. An unlit joint is tucked behind his ear. She can’t help but laugh. Yet she tilts the screen ever so slightly away from the counter so Manny can’t see what she’s doing. There are elements of her life that Beatrice knows it would be wiser to keep private. Howard Pink, for instance. That was something she wanted to do on her own.
She logs on to the computer, double-clicking on the internet icon. She types ‘Sir Howard Pink’ into the Google search bar. Rapidly and methodically, she clicks through the relevant documents, assimilating information. It feels good to be using her brain again. She finds out that Sir Howard had started in business at the age of fifteen, selling clothes from a market stall. At twenty-one, he’d bought his first shop. By thirty, he was a millionaire. By thirty-five, after an aggressive corporate takeover, he had bought out the Paradiso Group of clothing shops. He was routinely in the top fifty of the Sunday Times Rich List, with an estimated fortune of £3.3 billion. He has a reputation for throwing lavish theme parties, which turns up a number of unexpected images: Sir Howard in an Hawaiian shirt and grass skirt on his fiftieth birthday, celebrated on a private Greek island with six hundred of his closest friends (and a performance by Stevie Wonder); Sir Howard laughing riotously while dressed up as a medieval pope; Sir Howard sporting a giant sombrero accompanied by an unsmiling blonde woman in a nurse’s outfit. Then there was all the stuff about his daughter, Ada, who had gone missing at the age of nineteen in mysterious circumstances. Beatrice skims over these stories. They aren’t what she needs to focus on. Everyone has sadness in their lives. It does not elicit her sympathy.
After twenty minutes or so, she has all the information she needs, including an email address for the chief executive’s office at Paradiso. She opens up a new Microsoft Word file. The screen fills with a blank white page, like a fresh sheet pulled tight on a hotel bed.
‘Dear Sir Howard,’ she writes in Arial 12-point. The animated paperclip pops up in the corner of the screen. ‘You look like you’re writing a letter,’ a speech bubble says. ‘Would you like some help?’ Beatrice scowls. No, she thinks, I don’t need anyone’s help. Not any more. This, I’m doing for me. She takes a deep breath, then types: ‘You won’t remember me but we met in Room 423 of the Hotel Rotunda in Mayfair.’
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