who had a tendency to launch into a tirade listing every error made by Tompkins in the last twenty years whenever something went wrong.
As she dialled the number, she gazed about the office and let out a slow and deliberate calming breath. It was hard to feel gloomy for long in an office where a one-legged parachuting Action Man dangled from the ceiling over the filing cabinet, and Igglepiggle was rogering Shaun the Sheep on top of the water cooler.
By lunchtime, Lucy had managed to persuade a driver to return to TopToys to sort out the water pistol crisis, issued a product recall for the faulty vanity cases and arranged for the missing dinosaurs to be couriered out.
Jess was impressed.
‘I bet you didn’t even get a thank you from Adam. Why he couldn’t sort out the problems himself, I don’t know. He’s supposed to be the sales office manager.’
Jess was upstairs pretending to query an invoice, but in reality wanted to snatch five minutes with her best friend, their fair heads ducked below the partition to avoid detection.
‘He’s not so bad,’ said Lucy. After the short-tempered boss at her previous job, who regularly launched his telephone across the room when things got stressful, Adam was a welcome relief.
‘Honestly, he can’t even manage his trousers, never mind a sales team.’ Jess glanced across at the two inches of fluorescent socks that highlighted how short his trousers were as he completed another circuit of the office and approached them. Rumbled, Jess stood up and tried to look businesslike, shuffling through the folders she had in her hand and pretending to tick things off.
‘Ah, the Terrible Twins…’
‘Having the same colour hair hardly makes us the female version of Jedward.’ There was a pause as Jess considered the implications of this. ‘And if you start calling us Juicy, I swear I’ll stamp on each and every one of your newly sharpened pencils.’
Adam threw an anxious glance at his pencil pot and then pulled his shoulders back. ‘Jessica Ridley. Riddle me this and riddle me that.’ He put his hands on his hips, like an unamused teacher. ‘What exactly are you doing upstairs in sales anyway? Haven’t you got numbers to add up and…divide by four, or something?’ He tried to avert his eyes from Jess’s slender legs, but the short, cotton skirt she was wearing made it difficult. ‘Back to accounts please and save the socialising until after work. My ladies are very busy.’ There was a muffled cough from Connor, often overlooked because his desk was tucked around the corner of the L-shaped office, and a definite squaring of the shoulders from Jess.
‘Actually, I was compiling a spreadsheet analysis of our fiscal input and was sent upstairs to access some computerised data from Lucy as she knows our CDAs. But if you’ve got five minutes, perhaps I can run it by you?’
‘Well, erm, I’m quite busy and Lucy is probably the best person, as you say. I think she has a handle on the CDAs, but make it quick. With Sonjit off today we are a man down.’
One of the younger sales girls called Adam over and he immediately lost all interest in nomadic accounting staff.
‘So, what exactly are CDAs?’ Lucy queried.
Jess shrugged. ‘He deserved it for ogling my legs again.’
‘I thought the whole point of a short skirt was for men to admire your legs?’ Lucy hadn’t worn anything above the knee since her year eleven gym skirt. ‘I’m not sure you can be picky about who gives you the appreciative glances.’
‘It’s part of my arsenal to lure the young, wealthy, single men.’
‘Like Dashing Daniel?’
‘Just give me a little more time, hon.’ She gathered up her manila folders, tapped the wobbly head of the bright orange alien balanced precariously on the edge of Lucy’s desk and gave her friend a cheeky wink. ‘Definite work in progress.’
‘Can I help you?’ Lucy asked as she peered around the door.
It was rather late for house calls, but she answered the knock because a confused Brenda had called very late one evening the previous week, thinking it was early morning and clutching a bundle of borrowed Regency romances. Lucy was relieved to discover this visit was not from her disorientated friend, although was unsettled to discover the formally dressed man from number twenty-four on her front steps.
‘Cat,’ he said.
‘Pardon?’ Had her new neighbour really barked a solitary word at her?
‘That damn cat from the other day is hiding in the utility and my eyes are swelling up faster than popcorn in a sodding microwave.’
‘The removal van stray? Oh, I was wondering what happened to it.’ She’d kept an eye out for it the previous night, periodically sticking her head out the back door and calling ‘cat’, but it hadn’t reappeared.
‘It’s backed itself between the washing machine and the tumble dryer and I don’t know how to get it out, short of shooting it and pulling the corpse free with the end of the broom.’
Lucy narrowed her eyes and hoped this was just his dry sense of humour.
‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I can’t take it on and wouldn’t know what to do with it if I did.’
Never allowed pets as children, Lucy and Emily had made do with a stuffed Scooby-Doo (great at the sit command – rubbish at fetch). Their mother wasn’t one for the mess and inconvenience that invariably came with animals: stray clumps of hair, unhygienic food bowls and muddy paw prints on her immaculate white tiled kitchen floor. But there was something about cats that appealed to Lucy. They were independent yet loving. They didn’t demand much apart from a lap and they didn’t judge you on your silly comments or untidy nature.
‘Fine, but it’s the third time I’ve caught it in my house and I’m losing patience, so I’m going with the shooting option…’ He shrugged his wide shoulders. Was he joking? And could she live with herself if he wasn’t?
‘Okay, I’ll find my shoes and come over,’ she sighed.
‘Right,’ he said.
‘You’re welcome,’ Lucy mumbled under her breath as he walked out through her front gate.
A few minutes later Lucy was at his front door. After some clumping and huffing, it swung open and he stood back for her to enter. When she realised she wasn’t going to get a word out of him, she stepped inside and followed him down the long hallway.
As he strode away, the musky scent of Paco Rabanne lingered long enough to make her head turn like a hungry Bisto kid. Cross with her nose for leading her mind astray, she tried to peek through the open doors as she followed him without being obvious. There was nothing dotted about; no ornaments, no photographs, no personal objects whatsoever. What little furniture there was looked brand new and insubstantial. Goodness knows why it had taken the removers most of the day. Perhaps he hadn’t finished unpacking yet, although there weren’t any boxes lying about.
‘Through here,’ the slightly
