Finally the door opened and Jared walked in, Siobhan following directly behind him. On her face was the identical expression I had seen on so many starlets accompanying him into his office; dazed, disbelieving, afraid to hope their dream was coming true, struggling to keep their spiking optimism under control. And just a little apprehensive.
Jared didn’t look at me as he passed. He didn’t need to tell me not to disturb him or to hold his calls. I was very well-trained, and I knew exactly what to do.
The door closed behind them. His office was practically soundproof. I had barely ever heard anything through the thick wenge wood walls, the door with rubber flanges that enabled it to close with only the faintest sigh and click.
I went through two more handfuls of disinfectant wipes.
Then the door flew open with such force that my heart slammed just as powerfully into my ribcage. Siobhan stood there, wearing only a small lace bralette on the upper half of her body. The top button of her jeans was unfastened. Her eyes were wild, the pupils hugely enlarged.
“He — he —” she stammered.
I was on my feet, running towards her in stockinged feet: Jared made his female employees wear high heels, but I had kicked them off as soon as I sat down. I caught her and pushed her back into his office, guiding her to one of the chairs in front of his huge desk. She was shaking like a birch tree in high winds.
Jared was collapsed across one arm of the sofa, face down, trousers and boxers down. The kidney-straining diet had been effective, I noticed; his bare buttocks were slim and toned. From the floor, I grabbed her sweater, the thin t-shirt she had been wearing underneath it, and shoved them at her, telling her to put them on and button her jeans. As she obeyed, clumsily fumbling to pull the clothes over her head, I dived for the used syringe on his desk. All I had to do was to substitute it; I had kept the one he’d used a couple of days ago, hidden at the back of a drawer, his fingerprints on it, and now I pulled that out, switching them over.
I was very fast. Siobhan wouldn’t have seen me; her head was buried in her black sweater, her arms struggling to find the sleeves. I dashed into my office and buried the syringe Jared had just used in the usual crumple of newspapers in my desk bin, which the cleaners were briefed to empty carefully.
I was back in his office as her head emerged from the neck of the sweater. She was in shock, I thought, her pupils still dilated, so pale that her freckles were even more visible than they had been an hour ago.
“Sit still,” I said to her, going round the desk, taking up his cellphone, dialling the direct line to our head of security, Caspar Petersen, the man who knew the precise location of every single Parador corpse. “It’ll be okay. I promise you, it’ll be okay. Everything’s going to work out fine.”
Petersen was there in five minutes. By that time I was sitting in the other desk chair, having drawn it next to Siobhan. I was holding her hands, murmuring quiet words of reassurance.
I had felt for Jared’s pulse. There wasn’t one.
Then a whole crowd of Parador employees whirled in like a tornado which picked us up and whisked us into the outer office, the head of HR cooing over us, asking us how we were. Siobhan was clinging to me, and I put my arm around her narrow waist. If I shook when I touched her now, like this, no one would know why.
Petersen was making phone calls to the Mayor, the state governor and Jared’s guy in the NYPD, a deputy chief. I heard the fridge open and close: one of Petersen’s henchmen emerged from the office, carrying a stack of boxes of loaded syringes, other medications, popper vials, and something on top wrapped in hand tissue. The used needle.
He was moving very gingerly, and I couldn’t blame him. A wave of relief hit me: I would never have to touch those things again. It was extraordinary that I hadn’t developed a phobia of injections myself. Through the open door, I saw two more of Petersen’s men wrestling Jared’s corpse off the sofa, dragging up his trousers: returning him to respectability, a film magnate tragically struck by an unexpected heart attack.
They brought us water. We drank it. A doctor summoned by Petersen examined Siobhan briefly and offered her some pills that she refused. Petersen and the head of PR told us we would be taken care of and not to worry. One of the henchmen guided us out of the building, and, with considerable irony, into Jared’s waiting limo and thence to his suite at the Plaza. There we were ensconced in unbelievable luxury high above the city as the storm broke a few blocks below us. We watched it on New York 1, the local channel, Jared’s body carried out of the Parador building, journalists shouting questions, the ambulance lights flashing bright, Jared’s partner delivering a brief, grim-faced statement about what a terrible loss Jared would be to the industry.
They said it was a heart attack, and they were quite right, though no autopsy was conducted, as nobody wanted there to be a record of what precisely had been in Jared’s body. I had seen them cover up plenty of scandals. I knew I was safe there. More precisely, he died of hyperkalemia, which, according to the New York Public Library computer in a particularly obscure Harlem branch, occurs when you already have weak kidneys and you inject yourself with a huge dose of potassium chloride, thinking that it’s your erection drug.
To be fair, the New York Public Library didn’t quite put it that way. But it did also tell me that potassium chloride is a generic drug and you can buy it in liquid form at any health shop, after I Googled ‘weak kidney die’ and it gave me the answer to my unspoken question.
I didn’t need to be told to wear a baseball cap and a faceful of makeup in the library and then at the Vitamin Shoppe, plus layers of clothes that made me look a lot bigger than I am. I had no intention of being spotted on CCTV. Nor did I need to be advised to pay in cash, not use my loyalty card, and remove all traces of potassium chloride and the packaging from my apartment after I filled that syringe and took it back to the office. I read a lot of mystery novels.
With Jared’s death, Parador was in a positive scramble to sanitise his memory, literally and metaphorically. Natalia sobbed on cue for the benefit of the paparazzi, her arms wrapped around the adorable twins. Everyone on the long list of employees and actresses who had signed non-disclosure agreements with Parador for lucrative settlements was contacted by lawyers and gently reminded that those agreements were just as valid whether Jared was alive or dead.
Siobhan and I, visited in our suite by the NYPD deputy chief, recounted how Jared had suddenly collapsed while talking to Siobhan about the part. Through the open doorway, I said, noticing his approving nod at this, I had heard her cry out, seen him clasp his chest and fall to the sofa.
She was superb at improvising. That was her RADA training, I suppose. I followed along, careful to add nothing to her story, simply agree. We had been heavily coached, of course, by the head of publicity and a media handler who were both present during the entirety of the pro-forma interview. The deputy chief left, expressing his sympathy to both of us and assuring us we would not be bothered again. The head of publicity told us to charge anything we wanted to the room, and not to leave it until they told us it was okay, and the media handler told us not to answer any call that wasn’t from Parador.
Jared’s partner rang Siobhan and told her that she could have her pick of roles on Parador’s upcoming roster of films.