a mug in his hand. He hit a button on the keyboard as she came through the door, and the screen darkened. Then he swivelled round in his chair. ‘Roz,’ he said. His voice was neutral. She and Luke were wary with each other these days.
‘Hi. Thanks for getting everything set up.’ For all his insouciance, Luke was efficient.
He didn’t respond to that, but just said, ‘You want to run through the slides?’
‘Are they all set up like we had them yesterday?’ He nodded and put his mug down on the desk. He was wearing jeans and trainers. That was going to go down a bomb with Joanna. She wondered if he ever thought about compromising, just a bit, to keep Joanna happy. ‘Just show me the first one, the one we changed.’
He tapped instructions into the machine, and she looked at the slide showing the group’s income projections for the first two years. It looked impressive now that the European money that Joanna had managed to get against all the odds was highlighted. It was impressive. ‘That’s great,’ she said.
Luke was still looking at the screen. ‘We need a group logo,’ he said.
Roz gave him a quick look. Luke had no time for concepts like corporate identity, mission statements, quality procedures, the kind of management speak that Joanna was so keen on. His face was expressionless. She matched his air of bland imperturbability. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, perhaps you could design one.’
Luke’s mouth twitched as she caught his eye, and then they were both laughing. ‘Thanks, Luke,’ she said again, meaning it. She knew that everything for the meeting would work without a hitch. He’d have made sure. ‘I’ll see you later.’ She checked her watch as she headed back towards Joanna’s room to see if she had arrived yet.
Eight forty-five. Joanna should definitely be here. She began to feel worried. It wasn’t like Joanna to be late, especially not for something as important as this meeting. She felt the tension in her stomach and made herself relax. She headed back along the corridor, through the swing doors. She paused by Gemma’s door, then unlocked it and looked in. It was empty, the desk clinically neat, the in- and out-trays empty. A pattern drifted across the monitor. The screensaver. The computer had been left on. It should have been switched off. Joanna would go spare if she saw it. Anyone could get access to Gemma’s data with the machine on and unattended like that. She shut it down and looked at her watch again. It was eight-fifty. She and Joanna were supposed to get together at nine and run through the agenda, checking for last-minute hitches. Peter Cauldwell would be looking out for a chance to put the knife in. The meeting started at nine-thirty. She felt an unaccustomed panic grip her.
Damn! She took a couple of deep breaths. She ignored the sinking feeling in her stomach, and pulled her mind back from rehearsing disasters. There was no point in worrying about something going wrong, because nothing would go wrong. Joanna would be here. If there were any problems, she would have let Roz know. Repeating this as a kind of mantra, she made herself relax.
The air sparkled with frost. Out beyond the university, out to the west of the city, the Peak District was bathed in the light of the winter sun. Along the top of Stanage Edge, grey millstone grit against the dark peat and the dead bracken, ice glinted, making the ground treacherous. Ladybirds were suspended in the ice, red and black, a frozen glimpse of summer. The road cut across the edge, went past the dams at Ladybower and Derwent, and began the climb to the pass over the hills. The heights of Kinder Scout and Bleaklow looked almost mellow in the light, their deceptive tops inviting the casual walker to wander just that bit too far, just that bit too high.
The traffic was slow on the road to the Snake Pass. It was an uneasy combination of business traffic coming from the west side of Sheffield and leisure travellers who wanted to meander, enjoy the scenery, park and sometimes walk. As the road climbed higher, the traffic became lighter as the landscape became more bleak, the hills more threatening. Walkers who had come to climb Bleaklow from Doctor’s Gate noticed a car pulled off the road into the culvert. An old Fiesta, red, rather battered. Maybe it belonged to an enthusiastic walker, out on the tops early.
Hull, Friday, 8.00 a.m.
The clouds were low and dark, with the threat of rain or snow. The traffic was heavier now, as the rush hour began to build up. The Blenheim Hotel was at the cheaper end of the market, one of a row of Edwardian terraces, converted from residential use years ago. The hotel was a Tardis, small and narrow on the outside, endless and labyrinthine inside. Every door led to another door. Every staircase led to another staircase. The corridors got no daylight, and the lighting was dim. This may have been accidental, or it may have been for reasons of economy, but it was fortuitous. The dim lighting concealed, to a certain degree, the worn, stained carpet, the places on the walls where the paint was cracked or dirty, where the paper was starting to peel. The cleaner was already at work as the last visitors were finishing breakfast in the downstairs room that doubled as a bar. The smell of beer and cigarettes greeted the breakfasters as they came down the narrow flight of stairs from the entrance hall, following the signs that said ‘dining room’. The stairs were too narrow to be a regular flight, were probably the remainder of the back stairs from the days when the hotel had been a private house, from the days when the area had been prosperous, residential and middle class.
Some of the breakfasters had undoubtedly spent the evening before in this room, leaning against the bar or fighting their way through the crowds, and the smell of the beer triggered queasy memories.
Rows of individual cereal packets stood on the bar, with jugs of very orange orange juice. The waitress came to the table and took the orders that arrived in the form of pink bacon, flabby on the plate with a slightly rancid smell, translucent eggs, sausages that oozed as the knife went in. The smell of frying temporarily overlaid the smell of beer and tobacco.
Mary’s husband had phoned in. She’d been in an accident the night before. ‘Been drinking, I shouldn’t wonder,’ Mrs Fry had said to Anna. ‘You’ll have to manage on your own for this morning.’ Her voice was impatient. Anna always managed. She was young, and when you needed work the way she needed work, you managed. Mrs Fry knew that. So now Anna was working on her own, and already the old witch was hassling her, saying she wasn’t fast enough, the rooms weren’t going to be done in time, she’d have to speed up. She muttered Mrs Fry’s litany to herself – ‘Haven’t you got any further, Anna? Hurry it up, Anna!’ – as she worked her way along the passage. She was at the second back staircase now. There were three rooms in this part of the hotel – a different part from the one containing the bar and restaurant. This was at the back of the house and opened on to a garden, more a yard, where the bins were stored, where a few shrubs fought against the litter that was thrown down from the alley that ran behind the terrace. She picked up the cylinder cleaner and carried it down the narrow stairs, knocking it against the walls as she went. There was always the sour smell of damp down here, faint but unmistakable.
The first room was a shambles. Anna screwed her face up. The damp was overlain by a smell of stale alcohol and cigarettes, sweat and old perfume. An empty bottle – whisky – was on the floor by the wastebasket, and a glass with a cigarette end dissolving in the bottom was on the floor by the bed. The ashtray was full. There was a used condom on the bedside table. She pulled new gloves out of the pocket of her overalls. She brought her own gloves these days. Mrs Fry always said, ‘Oh yes,’ when Anna said that she needed new gloves, but somehow the supplies were never replenished often enough. She switched on the bathroom light. Better to know the worst.
She dumped the used sheets and towels on to the floor of the corridor. She couldn’t get the laundry cart down the narrow stairs. She would have to gather the pile up in her arms and carry it. She looked at the towels and made a grimace of distaste. The second room was better. Its damp
