were still. She pulled her briefcase off the back seat and locked the car door.
She checked her watch. Seven-thirty. Plenty of time. She ran the arrangements for the meeting through her mind. Roz was the senior research assistant for the Law and Language Group, a small, recently established team in the university, headed by Joanna Grey. When Roz had come to Sheffield a year ago, she had joined the linguistics department, hoping to pursue her research into interviewing techniques. Joanna, ambitious and dynamic, had encouraged her to develop her skills in computer modelling and analysis of language and had then guided her into the field of forensic linguistics, an expanding area that looked at all aspects of language in its legal context.
As she settled in to the new department, Roz had realized that Joanna was carefully building a team. Roz had done her early research into the subtexts of interviews, the meanings that lay below the surface of candidates’ responses in these situations, and Gemma Wishart, a recent Joanna appointee, specialized in the English of Eastern European speakers.
Joanna had staged her coup with care. She had got the support of her current Head of Department, Peter Cauldwell, for two grant applications, one to analyse police interview tapes with a view to designing training material and software, and the other to develop systems of analysis that would identify the regional and national origins of asylum seekers. At the same time, she had pursued her aim to set up an independent research group with the various boards and committees within the university who were, at this time, all for the idea of self-funding groups.
Once she had got her money, Joanna had made her bid for freedom and set up the Law and Language Group as an independent research team. She had a year to prove that the group could be an income-generating unit. The grant money kept them afloat, and they also kept up the routine legal work that had come Joanna’s way for years: the document analysis, the analysis of witness statements, the retrieval of documents from computers, work with audio and video tape.
Today’s meeting was the first of a series with the people who could, if they withdrew their support, put an end to the project tomorrow. Everything had to run with the smoothness, efficiency and effectiveness of a well-written piece of programming. These were the money people. They didn’t want to know about philosophies of pure research, or the abstractions that the true research scientist could chase for months and years. They wanted to know that Joanna and her team could deliver.
Joanna’s timetable had run into an unavoidable snarl-up. She had had a meeting the day before, and was relying on Roz to get everything organized. ‘I’ll be in well before nine,’ she’d said, before she left. ‘I’ll pick Gemma up on my way in. Just make sure everything’s set up.’ Roz could feel the slight adrenaline tension of responsibility as she pushed through the main doors. The porter greeted her as the doors closed behind her. ‘Morning, Dr Bishop.’
She nodded, a bit abstracted. ‘Morning, Dave.’ The familiar smell of the university closed round her. She usually climbed the stairs to her department – her concession to keeping fit – but this morning she was wearing her meeting gear, and her shoes weren’t designed for stair-climbing. She ignored the lift and stepped on to the platform of the endlessly moving paternoster elevator, drawn by its regular clunk, clunk. She was carried up past the blank wall between the ground floor and the mezzanine, the floor numbers appearing on the wall above her head, gliding past her and opening up on to the lobbies which then sank away under her feet as she was carried higher and higher.
She stepped off the moving platform as it reached her floor, timing her exit with the expertise of one familiar with its regular use. The department was silent apart from the distant whirr of a floor polisher as the cleaners wound up their early-morning routine. The corridors were dark, their shadowed length interrupted by swing doors. She unlocked the door of her office, dumped her bag and got out the folder of material that she and Joanna had prepared for the meeting. She sorted out her notes for the presentation, read through them and ran the details of the morning through her mind, making sure that she had covered everything. Success, as Joanna kept telling her, was not just a matter of showing the right action and the right figures; it was a matter of presenting yourself as a success. This was why Joanna’s suit came from Mulberry; this was why she had dipped into her own pocket to buy the porcelain coffee cups, the good coffee.
Roz looked at her watch. Nearly eight o’clock. She needed to check the meeting room, make sure that Luke had done his bit and all the equipment was set up and working, and she needed to make sure that coffee had been ordered and would arrive on time. She locked the door of her office behind her, her mind running through and through the things she needed to do. The corridor where they were based ran round the lift shaft and the stairwell. It was empty, the lights dim and the office doors locked. She paused as she left her own office, looking at the sign on the door: DR ROSALIND BISHOP, RESEARCH ASSISTANT. Next door, Joanna’s office: DR JOANNA GREY, HEAD OF DIVISION. Then the double doors with the exit to the stairway before the turn. Joanna had been very clear about the arrangement of the rooms. She and Roz next door to each other on one arm of the L, forming what she called her executive corridor, establishing, she explained, just that important physical distance between the two of them and Gemma, their post-doctoral research officer, Luke, the technician, and the new research assistants, whoever they may be. Roz had regretted that loyalty to Joanna had stopped her from passing that one on to Luke. He would have enjoyed it.
Someone was on the corridor ahead of her, walking away from her, but the lights were off and it was too dark to make out any detail. It was too tall for Joanna. Whoever it was disappeared round the corner towards Gemma’s room. She pushed the second set of doors open. Either her eyes were playing tricks and it was Joanna – or possibly Gemma, she amended – or else it was someone who shouldn’t be in the section at this time.
The corridor was empty by the time she was round the corner. Whoever it was must have gone round the next corner heading back towards the lifts. She shrugged, dismissing the matter. She was standing outside the door of Gemma’s room now. She looked at the piece of paper tacked on to the wood: DR GEMMA WISHART. She frowned. Gemma’s contract ran for a full year. What would it cost the department to keep its signs up to date? Though there were the new research assistants coming, and Joanna had plans to put one of them in the same room as Gemma. Perhaps she planned anonymous labelling for the door – RESEARCH ASSISTANTS. She went on down the corridor.
Next to Gemma’s room was the meeting room. Roz unlocked the door and looked in. Everything was set up. The blinds were angled to keep the morning sun off the screen, the tables were together with the right number of chairs – a small detail but it was the details that Joanna would have her eye on, that gave the sense of efficiency she wanted the group to project – and the overhead projector stood ready by Joanna’s chair at the head of the table. She pressed the switch and a square of light appeared dead centre on the screen. Luke must have stayed late last night and set the room up.
She checked her watch again. It was nearly ten past eight. Joanna should have been in by now. They’d agreed to get together before the meeting and go over some of the main points. She was outside the computer room now, the end of Joanna’s domain. Roz always called the computer room ‘Luke’s room’, because it was where he was based – where he had been based before he’d been transferred to Joanna’s newly formed group – and where he was usually to be found. There wasn’t space for a separate technicians’ room. Joanna wasn’t happy with the proprietorial attitude Luke took towards this space. She had talked to Roz about her plans to base the new research assistants in here for some of the time, to take away his exclusivity. Luke was the only member of the team Joanna hadn’t chosen herself and she made no secret of the fact that she didn’t like him, and wouldn’t be sorry if he left. ‘I want people with first-class minds,’ she had said to Roz once. Luke, with his 2.1, apparently didn’t come into this category, no matter how good a software engineer he was. Joanna had her blind spots.
She pushed the door open, and the fragrance of coffee drifted into
