Chapter 17
‘So, what do I say at the door?’ Jo was on the phone to Bella getting the story straight before she turned up at Wolff-Meyer and risked giving anything away.
‘Oh, Jo, hello,’ Bella gushed with quite unusual enthusiasm, ‘I’m so glad you got my message.
I could really do with an assistant tonight, there’s much more work to do here than I was expecting.
There’s corruption cropping up all over the interface and we’ll be running test drives all night long at this rate.
’ Ah, this talk was obviously being made for the benefit of someone else in the room with her.
Or, who knows, maybe someone else on the line?
‘There won’t be any problem getting into the building, I’m assured,’ Bella added. ‘Security have been told to expect Jo Dundas with ID, obviously’ – something of a little growl on ‘obviously’ – ‘and they’ll bring you up to where I’m working.’
‘Right, that’s fine. You’ve caught me on my way out, I’m afraid. Shall I just come like this? Or is there time for me to go home and change?’
There was a pause as Bella digested this. Of course, Jo was supposed to have known she would be here tonight.
‘I’d rather you just came straight over, but I suppose it depends what you’re wearing, Jo.’
‘A pink dress and heels,’ Jo replied. ‘I’m not even wearing the heels any more because they’re such damn agony.’
‘A pink dress and heels?’ There was something so trilly about Bella’s voice that there had to be someone else in the room listening. ‘Will we allow that, Mr Mortimer? Yes, Jo – a pink dress and heels will be fine.’
Mr Mortimer? Jo wondered who he was. Bella wasn’t bringing anyone. He had to be from Wolff-Meyer. Maybe they were going to have a babysitter all night long. Maybe their plan to snoop round the computer system wouldn’t work out at all.
When Jo arrived at the drug company’s glittering headquarters, she was escorted smoothly through reception and down one of the many long marble-floored corridors, then up in a glass elevator to the computer-packed nerve centre, where Bella was already ensconced.
‘Hello, nice to see you, glad you could make it at such short notice,’ were Bella’s words of greeting. Once the security guard was out of earshot, Jo asked: ‘What about Mr Mortimer, is he still around?’
‘No, no. We’re all alone.’
‘Look at you,’ Jo smiled at her friend. ‘And I worried that I was overdressed for this job.’
‘I had a meeting thing before I came here,’ Bella told her.
‘Aha.’
There she was, the woman determined to take the corporate-computer-systems world by storm, in her latest ‘my career is going stellar’ purchase: a pale blue-grey tightly nipped-in suit.
Vivienne Westwood? Yves St Laurent? Something astronomical anyway.
Complicated lilac heels, three inches high, completed the look, along with the two other items of career-girl slick: vibrant red, I’m-here-for-business lipstick and a white blouse so well pressed you could hurt yourself on the edges.
The handiwork, surely, of Helinka, the world’s most fabulous nanny-slash-housekeeper.
Bella ran a hand through her thick brown bob, one of those soft, on-the-shoulder rumpled ones that only very expensive hairdressers can cut, undid the buttons of her jacket and flung her high-heeled feet up onto the desktop.
‘It’s Desperate Housewives meets Mission Impossible,’ Jo couldn’t resist.
‘OK, here’s the plan,’ Bella began, ignoring the teasing.
‘Most of the virus checking and software updating is going on over here,’ she gestured to two large screens grouped on her left.
‘It’s mainly automatic, it’ll alert me when anything needs to be supervised.
So over here’ – this meant the two computers on her right – ‘we can start looking around. We can run searches for key words, we might be able to find a log of meetings, minutes of issues discussed, that sort of thing. ‘But I warn you it’s going to take ages because the system is on total go-slow because of the check-up in progress. So, you might as well pull up a chair beside me and I bet you’d like some of my supper. ’
With this, Bella unzipped the large, insulated bag at her feet and began putting metal tins up on the desktop, then two proper plates, cutlery and glasses.
‘What is all this?’ Jo asked, amazed at her friend’s forethought.
‘This is Helinka’s idea of a meal for one. Maybe she thinks I’m pregnant – or maybe she’s hoping to get me pregnant, so she has a baby to look after as well as my boys and my household and my hob.’
Bella began to take the lids off the dishes and the tins, releasing appetising aromas into the room. There was even a half-bottle of red, which had been carefully uncorked and then had the cork pushed back in.
‘I have died and gone to heaven,’ Jo said as she leaned over one of the dishes and inhaled. ‘I’m starving, I’ve had one roe deer canapé since lunch.’
‘Well now you can have bortsch, latkes, blinis with smoked salmon, red cabbage casserole, lamb stew with dumplings – just your standard Eastern European evening fare.’
‘This is unbelievable.’ Jo settled down into the chair beside Bella and began to help herself to some of the food. ‘I can’t believe you have a nanny who cleans your house to palace standard and cooks you amazing takeaway dinners. That is just so unfair.’
‘The children go to school and nursery, you know, Helinka needs something to fill her day,’ Bella reminded her, spooning creamy pale purple perfection into her mouth.
‘I know, but this is gorgeous. And she’s such a brilliant cleaner.
I totally hate you. How dare you have all the things that every woman wants?
My cleaner can’t be trusted not to use the toilet cloth to wipe down the cooker and last week she cleaned the bathroom with an entire bottle of ￡25 shampoo. ’
Bella snorted at this: ‘Get a new one then.’
‘Bottle of shampoo?’
‘No, cleaner!’
‘You say that – but how do I know a new one won’t be worse? And anyway, I like Angelica as a person. She’s having a hard time. Her son’s in borstal, she’s being moved out of her flat by the council…’
‘Oh God. Get a new one,’ Bella interrupted. ‘Helinka might know someone. If you’re really lucky, she might know someone like herself: fifty-five years old, fantastic cook, wonderful house-cleaner, grandmother of fifteen, sends half her pay home to her family in Serbia every month.’
‘Is Helinka legal?’ Jo had to ask.
‘Of course she’s legal,’ Bella tried not to splutter. ‘I pay every penny of her taxes. Out of my net income, thank you very much, chancellor of the bloody exchequer. Do you know, if she was my groom, I could put her entirely through the books as a business expense?’
‘Bastards,’ Jo spoke through a mouthful of stew and dumpling. It was delicious, best thing she’d tasted in weeks.
Bella was making a start on the tiny blinis.
‘And are you pregnant?’ Jo asked. ‘Because if you are, I think I should be at least one of the first to know.’
At this, Bella began to laugh: ‘Oh my God, no. Three children! Do you think I’m insane?
! You know I did do that thing… that probably everyone does at least once.
Where I thought to myself “oh, three… three would be nice… a little baby again… it would be so lovely”, and I dropped the contraception for a month only to snap out of it in horror.
Three!!! What am I thinking?! Have I gone stark, raving mad?
Total panic until my period arrived. You’ve done that too, haven’t you? ’
‘No. I’ve never done that. I don’t recall having sex at all with Simon once Nettie was born. If I did, I’ve obviously blanked it out,’ Jo said.
‘Poor old you.’
‘And no, two is plenty,’ Jo added, in between mouthfuls. If she did very occasionally have just the slightest of pangs when she saw some chubby new baby wrapped up in a buggy, she certainly wasn’t going to admit to it.
‘Why is everything in tins, by the way?’ Jo asked.
‘I never eat or drink out of plastic. It gives you cancer, makes your breasts go lumpy or something.’ Bella turned to Jo: ‘I read it in your paper… in fact, you wrote it!’
‘Oh yes. But don’t believe everything you read in the papers,’ she joked.
‘I don’t… but I generally believe you.’
‘Why is that?’
‘I dunno, maybe it’s the fact you do genuinely seem to have a conscience.’
‘Oh, that. It’s such a pain.’
‘Look,’ Bella leaned forwards and pointed to the screen, ‘here’s our chance to make a little search. What words do you think we should look for?’
‘Er, well, whooping cough – or its proper name, pertussis?’
‘Any refinements on that? The word pertussis might give us the kind of archive it will take all night to download.’
‘Erm… pertussis outbreak? Yes. Let’s see what comes up for pertussis outbreak.’
‘Anything else? We can fit a few words in.’
‘I know, give me a sec.’ Jo began to unpack the file from her bag.
‘Let’s put in the name of the first whooping cough victim, because, who knows, maybe they held a meeting about it.
We should also put in “Quintet trials” so we can find out what sort of data they have on that.
Also, there’s this funny message I got…’
She retrieved the anonymous email with the name of the London hospital pathology lab that had puzzled her so much.
Although she’d phoned all the medical contacts she could think of, only one had been able to shed a little further light on it, informing her that the hospital had one of the oldest pathology departments in the country and there were samples stored there dating from as far back as the 1800s.
‘OK,’ Bella began typing:
pertussis outbreak
Quintet trials
Katie Theroux
and
London and Middlesex Pathology Dept
‘And we’ll confine the date to the last few months or so and “search”…’
Bella hit the final key with a flourish as the screen on her left began to flash.
‘Oh, just a minute, something over here needs attention.’ She typed for several seconds, then the screen cleared.