Later, he swore they’d used a condom.
“My foot’s gone to sleep can you just…”
“Ow! You just head-butted me with your chin!”
“Sorry it was…”
Later, thinking about it, he couldn’t work out why he would have brought a condom down to the beach, since the idea of having sex in the wind and on the shingle seemed so fundamentally absurd.
“Dani? Are you okay? Dani?”
“Could you just hold me a while?”
“Um yeah I suppose if it’s…”
“And not talk. You can do that, right?”
“Uh-hum.”
“Good. Thanks.”
In his dreams
in his past
in the present
the man called Theo sleeps a rare, clawless sleep.
Chapter 9
Two days after Dani Cumali and the man called Theo had coffee in a teacher’s café, Theo cycled to work with a plan in his mind and a twist in his stomach that made him wonder if he was actually physically ill.
He went via Battersea Bridge, because the queues for the tolls were usually faster there. He would never have the credit rating to enter Pimlico by LondonArts as anything other than a tourist of course, but his Criminal Audit Office ID got him waved through with a merry “Have a good day, sir!” and being on a bicycle he was even allowed to cut through some of the quieter streets where the Company men lived, so long as he didn’t ding his bell.
The Criminal Audit Office was based in Victoria. Once they’d had an office in Whitehall, but it had been redeveloped for corporate headquarters, so they’d been pushed out to Canary Wharf. Then Canary Wharf had become too expensive, so they’d been dragged to Willesden and for a while Theo had thought about quitting his job rather than the hour-and-forty-minute commute on the train, head down and body swaying in carriages where once there had been seats before the train company judged them inefficient.
Thankfully the minister of civic responsibility had grown annoyed at having to go to Willesden for meetings, and they handled enough high-value white-collar crime for the managers and directors and their well-paid lawyers to grumble and mope about the commute, so back to Victoria they went, to an office abandoned when foreign aid was shut down.
Now they were on the fifth floor of an oil spill of a building. Black plastic windows reflected odd smears of green and pink against the sun. Dark grey walls turned darker with the diesel fumes of the coaches that queued up outside. An embarrassed sign printed on a browning piece of A4 paper and sellotaped to the door declared CRIMINAL AUDIT OFFICE. PLEASE SHOW ID.
A wooden board by the security gate stated that the security situation was Black 2. Theo had never known what Black 2 meant, and it had never been anything else, except for once, on a Wednesday, when it was Blue, and the security man had tonsillitis.
The lift, as it climbed to the fifth floor, rattled and bumped against the shaft. Sometimes you heard bits falling: a bolt or a piece of chain, vanishing down into an unknown abyss below, but whatever the component was it clearly wasn’t that important. Theo took the stairs.
The fifth-floor walls were faded grey, with a tideline of black dirt above the radiators from those lost times when they’d worked. Here and there new plaques of laminated plastic offered inspirational advice for the employees who laboured within.
Theo wasn’t sure who’d come up with these statements. For a little while, after they’d first been put up, they’d made him angry, especially as the coffee machine had been broken for four months and hadn’t been fixed for budgetary reasons. But as the years went by, anger had faded. Most things faded, given time.
The office was technically open-plan, but hackers had once got into the webcams and filmed the lurid details of negotiations between the CAO and a stockbroker-turned-TV-personality to reduce his indemnity for sexual assault and battery down from £2.2 million to a mere £71,000. Since then all webcams in key offices had been covered with Blu Tack, and tacit acceptance given for pale-blue dividing boards to go up between the desks.
Theo’s lair was in the furthest, darkest corner. He’d had a window and everything for a while, but then someone who was making good numbers on murder cases managed to convince Edward that he had seasonal affective disorder and needed Theo’s seat. When it emerged that Theo had moved without even a quibble, another officer had stepped forward and suggested that she’d work so much better away from the high-frequency hum of the printers, and when again Theo had moved without complaint, it became open season. Six months and five desk moves later, he was between the toilets and the photocopier, cultivating a small bloom of orange mushrooms behind his waste-paper bin, and content to be ignored.
His file stated that his career progression was “steady.” His performance was “consistent,” closure rate “satisfactory” and average negotiated indemnity “a positive reflection of current guidelines.” Once he’d been rated “very good” and lived in fear for nearly six months that this might lead to people paying attention to him. Thankfully, no one did, and he managed to return his performance to a more genteel average before his next review came round.
He hung his jacket over the back of his chair, put his satchel down by his left foot, turned on the computer, waited with hands in his lap for it to boot up, and at 9 a.m. precisely started working.
Chapter 10
A sexual harassment suit. “For fuck’s sake I just said she was hot I mean what has the world come to when you say someone’s hot and that gets you in with the courts it’s just political correctness gone…” £750, plus £35 photocopying fees.
A seventeen-year-old girl tried to change the cheques her grandmother was sending her, adding zeroes to the end—she didn’t even bother to use the correct kind of biro, her corrections were in black against her grandmother’s blue it was just so…
£6421, dropping to £5100 if her grandmother was willing to lower the charges. To Theo’s surprise, the grandmother was not, and the girl went to the patty line.
A group of drug dealers. The police had found most of it but not enough, not nearly enough. They were going to pay the indemnity and have cash in hand, but what were you to do?
£52,190, and the lawyer laughed when Theo told him, as if he’d just heard an old joke his dirty uncle used to tell at Christmas, and the money was in the Audit Office’s clearing account within twenty minutes, transferred from a bank somewhere in the Maldives.
Corporate manslaughter. Ninety-three people dead after carbon monoxide leaks from faulty boilers. The safety test on the boilers had been rushed through, signed off without proper inspection, a hint of bribery perhaps, cutting corners, it was…
In many ways, exactly what Theo needed.
At 4.55 p.m. Theo Miller leaves his desk, rushes to Edward Witt’s office with a USB stick, so sorry to bother you, it’s this corporate manslaughter case, I’ve finished doing the audit on it but if you look you’ll see the accused is a Company subsidiary and I know we’ve got a policy on not necessarily…
“How much did you find them liable for?”
“Twenty-two point three million.”