‘It sticks,’ said the young girl behind the desk, stating the obvious.
Steven showed his ID and asked if he might speak to someone in charge.
‘Mr Finlay’s out and Mr Taylor’s at his brother’s funeral,’ replied the girl.
‘Someone else perhaps?’ ventured Steven, wondering why so many firms put an idiot at the interface between themselves and the public.
‘Can you give me some idea what it’s about?’ asked the girl.
‘Did you know Miss Danby, who worked here?’
‘Not well. She worked in computers.’
‘Then how about someone in computers?’ he suggested.
‘I could try Mrs Black — she works in computers,’ said the girl. She posed it as a question and Steven nodded. He looked about him while she made the call. Tinsel had been hung on the plain yellow walls. It fell in vertical strips at intervals of a metre or so. A single smiling reindeer galloped above posters advertising the firm’s latest books, pride of place going to A Molecular Understanding of Protein Interactions and A European View of American Corporate Law.
‘A couple of blockbusters there,’ said Steven when the girl had finished on the phone. She looked at him blankly, then said, ‘Mrs Black will see you. She’s on the floor above, in room 112.’
Mrs Black turned out be an extremely attractive fair-haired woman in her mid-thirties wearing a white blouse over a navy-blue pencil skirt. She got up from her desk and offered her hand when Steven entered. ‘Hilary Black. What can I do for you, Dr Dunbar?’ she asked in a friendly and pleasantly cultured voice.
‘I’m not sure,’ admitted Steven. ‘I’m trying to build up a picture of Ann Danby’s life so I’m doing the rounds, speaking to people who knew her. I take it that would include you?’
‘She was our systems manager.’
‘And you are?’
‘I’m now our systems manager; I was Ann’s assistant.’
‘I see. Did you know her well?’
‘She was extremely good at her job.’
‘That isn’t quite what I asked.’
‘We had the occasional after-work drink together, a pizza once in a while, that sort of thing, colleagues rather than friends.’
Steven nodded and asked, ‘How would you describe her?’
Hilary Black sat back in her chair and took a deep breath. ‘Pleasant, responsible, reliable, intelligent, discreet…’
‘Lonely?’
‘Lonely? No, I don’t think so. Ann wasn’t lonely. Loneliness suggests a state that’s forced on one. That wasn’t the case with Ann. People liked her. She kept them at a distance through her own choice.’
‘What did you think when you heard that she’d taken her own life?’
‘I was shocked. We all were.’
‘How about surprised?’
‘Yes… that too,’ agreed Hilary but less surely.
‘You hesitated.’
‘Ann had something on her mind, something that had been getting her down for at least a month before she died. She hid it from most people, simply because she was used to hiding most things from people, but working together I could tell that she was worried or depressed about something, though she wouldn’t say what.’
‘You asked her?’
‘Yes. I wanted to help but she wouldn’t let me. That was Ann, I’m afraid. But now I come to think of it, I remember thinking at one point that she had got over it. It was one day during the week before she died because she came in that day and was all smiles again. But it only lasted the one day.’
‘You can’t remember what day that was, can you?’ asked Steven.
‘Give me a moment.’ Hilary opened her desk diary and flicked through the pages before tracing her forefinger slowly down one of them. ‘It would have been a Thursday,’ she said. ‘Thursday the eighteenth of November.’
‘Thank you,’ said Steven. Thursday, 18 November, was the day that had been marked in Ann’s appointments diary as the day she was due to meet V — for the last time, as it turned out.
‘Mean anything?’ asked Hilary.
‘Not on its own.’ Steven smiled. ‘But the pieces are building. Did Ann have a boyfriend?’
‘Not that she ever admitted to.’
‘That’s an odd reply.’
‘All right, no, she didn’t have a boyfriend,’ said Hilary.
‘But she did?’ ventured Steven.
Hilary conceded with a smile. ‘Maybe she did. I had my suspicions. I think he was probably married.’
‘I don’t suppose she ever let slip a name?’
‘I thought she did once but then she covered it up so well that I sort of dismissed it as my imagination.’
‘Go on.’
‘I was telling her about an interview I’d seen on television with Michael Heseltine. John Humphrys was asking him about the Millennium Dome and she said something like, “Wotsisname says that’s a load of rubbish about urban regeneration,” and I said, “Who’s Wotsisname?” She sort of blushed and said, “Oh just someone I was talking to.” I know what you’re going to ask now but I don’t think I can remember the name. It was just a passing moment.’
‘If I were to tell you that his name begins with V?’ said Steven.
‘Yes,’ agreed Hilary, her eyes lighting up. ‘I remember now. It was Victor.’
EIGHT
‘You haven’t said why you want to build up a picture of Ann,’ said Hilary. ‘I take it it’s her illness rather than her suicide that you’re interested in?’
Steven agreed that it was.
‘It’s incredible, the papers are saying it was Ebola.’
‘It’s not that.’
‘But something just as bad?’
Steven nodded. ‘Could be.’
‘But how would someone like Ann get something like that? She wasn’t exactly a jet-setter. I only knew her to go abroad once, and that was a few years ago.’
‘That’s what I have to find out,’ said Steven.
‘And you think that this man, Victor, might have something to do with it?’
‘I have to explore every avenue, as they say,’ said Steven. ‘Tell me, were you aware that Ann went hill-walking?’
Hilary looked blank. ‘No, did she? That’s news to me. She didn’t strike me as the sort.’
Steven felt that he’d just made progress. If the hill-walking had been kept secret, it was probably something that Ann had done with Victor. ‘Do you think I could see where she worked?’ he asked.
‘Of course. I decided not to move in there, so you’re in luck. Her office hasn’t been touched.’
Steven was shown into an office three doors along the corridor. It felt cold and unwelcoming, like a disused cellar.
‘Brrr, the janitor’s turned the heating off in here,’ said Hilary as she clicked on the lights. ‘Maybe I should just leave you to it?’
Steven was left standing alone in the office that had been Ann Danby’s. It was large, square and high-ceilinged, like all the other rooms. It reminded him of a primary school classroom of yesteryear. It had two tall windows that looked out on to a brick wall less than twenty feet away. Steven walked over and looked down at the cobbled lane below, and saw litter blowing about in the breeze and the lights of the early-evening traffic on the main road at the end providing intermittent illumination. He sighed at the thought of working in such a place, sat down at the desk and switched on Ann’s desk lamp. The yellow pool of light was a welcome island in a sea of gloom.
Steven found the same meticulous attention to detail in Ann’s office as he had found in her flat. Each project she had worked on had its own box file on the shelves above her computer, and the first page in each gave details of where on the computer the master files were stored and where back-up files could be found. She had recently been working on the design of a new payroll system for the company, and the amount of detail listed suggested that Hilary Black would have little trouble in carrying on where Ann had left off. A second project had been concerned with providing computer-generated graphics for the illustrations for a book on Italian Renaissance architecture, which was due to be published by the firm in the late spring.