trying to make the place clean, restore order, do her job. She pulled the towel off the rack, felt wetness on her hands, let it fall to the floor. There was something floating in the toilet. She flushed it, and again, and again. Her eyes jumped frantically from towel rail, to basin, to tooth glasses, to the bath…No! She stared at the floor, concentrated on the pattern of cracks on the tiles.
There was something on the floor between the lavatory pan and the bath. A piece of paper, no, a card, like a business card, stuck to the wet floor, something that could have fallen out of the pocket of someone sitting there, sitting next to the bath, maybe talking to the person who was having a shower, who was…the sound of the water as she creeps through the bushes… There was a stench of burning in her nostrils. Her stomach heaved. Litter on the floor. Mechanically, she reached down, picked up the card and looked at it.
Then she was back in the bedroom, her legs shaking, holding on to the door, the walls, anything to help her get out of there. She had to find someone, she had to get help, she had to…had to…
She had to think.
She opened the vacuum cleaner and took out the bag she’d put in before she’d cleaned the room. The old bag was full to bursting, but she managed to get it back in without tearing it or spilling too much of the contents. She refolded the new bag and pushed it down into her overall pockets. Her hands were shaking. She scooped up the bedding and the towels and carried them to where the laundry basket was waiting at the top of the basement stairs. She listened. The distant sound of traffic. Footsteps along the corridor overhead. Quick. She had to be quick.
She pulled out some of the bedding and shoved her load down into the bottom of the basket. She piled the dirty linen on top, keeping back a set of sheets and towels. Back down the stairs. She dumped the linen on to the floor where the sheets she had moved had been minutes before. Shut the door or leave it open? Her bag and coat were in the back kitchen. She dithered for a moment, then stepped back into the room, closing the door behind her. She went over to the French windows and pushed down the bar. She wouldn’t be able to close it behind her. Then she was in the yard, past the bins, along the road to the next yard, past another set of bins to the back door. She pushed it open. No one. She grabbed her coat and her shopping bag, and, not waiting to change into her outdoor shoes, hurried down the road towards the bus stop. She flagged down the first bus that came along, and didn’t relax until it was around the corner and heading along the main road.
The woman’s face formed itself in her mind. And Krisha’s doll, smashed on the floor. Soldiers’ toys. The air seemed to smell of old burning. Got to run, got to run.
Despite its importance, Roz found the meeting tedious. She was interested in the research side of their work, and though the funding was crucial, she didn’t share Joanna’s taste for the politics and the dealing that the money side generated. She suppressed a yawn and glanced across at Luke, who was leaning back in his chair, his eyes veiled, occasionally jotting something on the notepad in front of him. He looked distracted as well. Roz watched Joanna do her stuff, outlining the financial and the research projections for the team, putting forward her staffing proposals, neatly turning away from anything that strayed into areas where the picture was less rosy. Joanna was good. She was better than good. No one, watching her now, would believe the state of tension she had been in before the meeting started. She had arrived at five to nine, held up because she had been round to pick Gemma up – something they had agreed on Wednesday, apparently, so that Gemma could brief Joanna on the outcome of her trip to Manchester before the main meeting started. Only Gemma hadn’t answered her door, and Joanna had wasted time trying to rouse her before she had concluded that Gemma must not be there.
Roz frowned. It wasn’t like Gemma to be unreliable. What was worse, she hadn’t phoned but had sent an e-mail some time the previous evening. Joanna had found it when she checked her mail before the meeting to see if any last-minute changes or apologies had arrived.
Please accept my apologies for tomorrow’s meeting. The car has broken down and I will have to stay in Manchester tonight. I will contact you as soon as I get back to Sheffield.
Gemma
Joanna had gone thermonuclear. Then she had put it all away for later consideration and taken Roz briskly through the meeting strategies.
Roz let the voice of the representative from the university grants committee fade into a background drone as she studied the other delegates. There was Peter Cauldwell, Joanna’s nominal line manager, who was watching her with a sceptical smile. Whatever Joanna proposed, Cauldwell would oppose. He and Joanna had clashed too many times in the past to be a good team now. One of Joanna’s more urgent plans was to take her group out of Cauldwell’s sphere of influence as soon as she could. There was the grants committee representative. He was the one who could stop Joanna now, today, if she failed to convince him. There was the representative from the Academic Board, whose support was crucial in these early stages, and there was a representative from the vice-chancellor’s office. As Luke had said the other day, ‘All the university brass out to watch Grey nail Cauldwell’s scrotum to the table.’ She caught his eye across the table, and felt a childish impulse to laugh.
Peter Cauldwell was speaking now, his voice that of modulated reason as he explained why Joanna’s plan for autonomy for the Law and Language Group was a waste of time and of valuable resources. ‘There are small departments all over the country who pick up the forensic work,’ he said. ‘And there are a few private firms. We’re an academic institution. We need to use this money’ – the grant money Joanna had managed to get for the group – ‘to build on the research we’ve carried out so far. I’ve no desire to end our forensic work, but I think we can accommodate it within our existing structures.’
Joanna smiled, and Roz again caught Luke’s eye. Under the guise of shifting his position, he ran his finger across his throat. Joanna began running her presentation slides, talking briefly to each one as she did so, demonstrating the amount of money and support she had managed to attract in the last six months. Her charts had been put together so that the income Cauldwell’s group attracted overall was also shown, apparently incidental to the figures that Joanna wanted the meeting to study. Her small team had, according to the chart she was using, attracted more grant-based and commercial funding than Cauldwell’s much larger team had managed in a year. Roz knew that these figures didn’t show the true picture. Peter Cauldwell’s group had been involved with a long-term project that was coming to an end, and the new grants that were coming in were either not yet available or were quietly sidelined into different compartments to ensure that the staffing and equipment budgets were properly supported. Cauldwell, like all good heads of department, was a genius at stretching the funding he got to the maximum. But on paper, his figures looked bad, and Joanna knew it.
By one, it was all over. Roz, headed back towards her office, was waylaid by Joanna who was looking pleased. As she had every right to, Roz thought. Joanna’s main problem now was likely to be a knife in the back. She remembered Cauldwell’s sour face. He wasn’t going to forgive Joanna – forgive any of them – soon.
‘It went well. I think I’ve put paid to Cauldwell’s hash,’ Joanna said cheerfully. ‘We’ll get our extra staffing now, or I’ll know why.’ She looked into the distance, calculating. ‘We’ll need more space. This is just the start.’ Her eyes focused sharply on Roz. ‘What about Gemma?’ she said.
Roz was used to Joanna’s abrupt subject switches. She wondered why Joanna should expect her to know any more about Gemma’s absence than Joanna herself
