Steve removes a hand from Trouble’s head and gets an admonishing look. He switches his phone off. He always cries after a call with Amy. He doesn’t know why, but he’s learned to accept it. As the tears come, Trouble stretches a paw up to Steve’s chest. Probably hungry.
6
Felicity Woollaston knows she should move to a new office, what with all the money coming in now. But she likes it here. Two rooms above a travel agent on Letchworth Garden City High Street. It suits her. Quiet, no passing traffic. No clients eager to hop on a train and experience that bustling Letchworth lifestyle. Just Felicity, a fish tank, and Classic FM.
She should also get staff, she knows that too, but who could she trust? In the current situation? Her setup has been the same for nearly forty years now. Just Felicity herself, taking care of her clients, and Felicity, using a slightly different voice, as her own receptionist. In truth, she’d never been busy enough to need staff, or rich enough to pay them. Two things that have both changed in the last two years, for reasons she has yet to entirely fathom.
She looks out of her window onto Letchworth High Street. A man rides a mobility scooter into the WHSmith opposite; a teenager on a lunch break smokes a cigarette on a bandstand; and a man in a suit—let’s assume an estate agent—is leaning on an open car door, talking on a mobile phone. To his wife? To a buyer? Difficult to tell, but, either way, she can see that he is lying.
She had been ready to retire until all these new clients came along. She has never actually met any of them; that’s not how this new deal seems to work. It’s been explained to her a hundred times, but Felicity is still used to the old ways, the personal touch. If a client is in panto, say, Felicity is there on the first night, front and center. Flowers delivered to the dressing room. If a client is opening a local leisure center, Felicity is there, local press in tow. Felicity’s clients don’t work all that much, and so, when they do, the least she can do is support them. They used to work a lot: Sue Chambers would do bits of TV, Alan Baxter did the breakfast show on Chiltern FM, Malcolm Carnegie would do after-dinner speaking at rugby clubs. But not so much these days. Sue’s hip means she can’t travel, Alan had got in trouble for a post about Adolf Hitler on Facebook, and Malcolm Carnegie died at a service station. She still has the odd local radio DJ, as well as Miriam (who had been a regular on Bergerac for two series) and a disgraced ventriloquist; but, in all honesty, Felicity had been on the verge of admitting defeat until the woman in the trouser suit had rung her buzzer.
Forty years in the business. Not bad. Never been rich but never gone hungry. A couple of young clients who moved agencies when they made it big (no hard feelings, these things happen), a couple of youngsters who could have gone all the way but didn’t. The usual. But she was older now. She came into work because the alternative was to stay at home, and she preferred the phone not ringing in the office to the phone not ringing at home. Preferred having no work to having no family.
So the woman who had visited, green trouser suit, from Whistles, in Felicity’s estimation, had caught her on a very good day. While they were having a nice cup of tea—Felicity had had to nip out to buy some milk—the woman had explained to Felicity about the world of “influencers” and “brand management.” Felicity had nodded politely and pretended to understand, and tried to drop a few names of people she had known at the BBC, telling a story about once having nearly represented Angela Rippon, at which the woman nodded just as politely. It had seemed that the conversation was heading nowhere until the woman offered her all that money, and, before you knew it, Felicity Woollaston Associates had become Vivid Viral Media Agency. Bills and invoices with lots of different company names started to arrive, and Felicity bundled them up every Friday and took them to the post office to forward on. One of her favorite tasks of the week, because the post office is next to a nice coffee shop.
Felicity wasn’t ever quite sure of her role in the whole business, but she was assured that her name and reputation still meant a great deal in the industry, and the partnership had really begun to flourish. Every month Felicity would find a sum of money in her bank account that was most agreeable, enough for everything she needed, and she didn’t seem to have to do very much to earn it.
She opens an email, from a Bonnie Gregor, apparently a “home inspiration influencer.” Usually she just forwards the emails on to a contact address, but sometimes she reads them. Bonnie is twenty-five, has two kids, Maxie and Mimi, lovely names, and 14K followers on Instagram. She seems very nice—spelling leaves a little to be desired, but Felicity is flexible enough to know that doesn’t really matter these days. Maybe her new bosses will like Bonnie? So few emails are actually sent to her that at least she can be helpful by forwarding this one.
She wishes, she supposes, that she had someone to talk to about all this, but her accountant died ten years ago, her husband five years ago, and most of her contemporaries are out of the business now. She tried to read up on “influencers”—you must always do your due diligence—but it seemed a different world from the one she had understood. She even googled “Vivid Viral Media Agency,” her own new company, and nothing seemed to come up except for her own postal and email addresses. Which was a funny way of doing business, but times change, don’t they?
So she potters along. She has just booked Sue Chambers to do a talking head on a clip show called Britain’s Favourite Biscuits, which Sue could record on Zoom at home. Felicity will be by her side to ensure the technology works. She has also just booked Alan Baxter for a slot on something called GB News, and they were happy to send a car, although Felicity had been unable to argue them up from a Prius. Alan won’t love that, but a car is a car.
So, outwardly, things haven’t changed. It’s just the money, the odd bit of post, and the free gifts being sent to the office.
Even now she sees, stacked along the far wall of her office, crates and crates of XPlump Collagen Lip Gel, Bomb Squad Protein Balls, and, making the entire wall glow an unearthly purple color, a new delivery this week from a company called Krusher Energy Drink.
What names these products have. What a business she now finds herself in.
Felicity wonders, briefly, if she should be asking a few more questions about it all, before turning her mind, instead, to which Boots Meal Deal she is going to have for her lunch.
7
Steve Wheeler still reads about murder, of course he does. Just as a retired center-forward still looks at the football scores on a Saturday afternoon. Takes a professional interest, with his feet up. Likes to imagine he could still do the job if called upon, but is glad no one is ever going to call on him. He doesn’t watch a lot of the true-crime programs, because he knows the pain and sadness of murder, and, also, he can always work out who did it in the first episode. But, sure, the odd thing catches his eye now and again; he’s not made of stone.
This one, Andrew Fairbanks is the name of the guy, jumped out at him from Friday’s paper because he was killed in South Carolina, and that’s where Amy is. That, and the fact that the guy was shot, drowned, and attacked by sharks. Steve knows from experience that the box on the death certificate won’t be big enough to fit all that in.
But Andrew Fairbanks is someone else’s business, and, right now, Steve has his own business to attend to.
It was indeed the daughter who had been stealing from the shop, as Steve knew from the moment he took the job. Mollie Bright is her name, and her eyes are currently filling with tears.
“I would never, never steal from my mum,” says Mollie. “Never.”
“And yet here you are, on camera, stealing from your mum,” says Steve, showing the girl the footage from his hidden camera.
The girl watches the footage and tries to think of a way around it. “I was borrowing it.”
“That’s fair,” says Steve. “When are you planning to give it back?”
“Soon,” says the girl.
Steve nods. “Three hundred quid, give or take. Over the last month.”
“I know,” says the girl.
He might ask Amy about the murder when they next chat. He can’t just talk about new postmen, can he? Rosie D’Antonio sounds like a nice easy job. Amy deserves one.
He knows Amy can handle herself—he once saw her knock out an MMA fighter with a single punch at a Christmas party—but he also knows the things that can go wrong. Steve worries that Amy will be killed; Amy worries that Steve doesn’t eat properly. Steve worries that Amy and Adam don’t see enough of each other; Amy worries that Steve is lonely. There is a healthy equivalence of concern, and, also, they make each other laugh.
He looks at Mollie, tears in the corners of her eyes.
“Saving up for something?” he asks her.
Mollie shakes her head.
“Bought something?” Steve asks.
The girl shakes her head again.
“Given it to someone?” The girl does not answer, but, this time, does not shake her head. There we go.
“A boy?” asks Steve. “Or girl?”
Mollie looks away, thinking. She looks back at Steve, then she motions to the floor.
“Is that your dog?”
Steve looks at the dog. He’d half forgotten he was there. “No, some campers lost him. I have to give him back. You want to stroke him? He seems friendly.”
