Chapter 4
CHAPTER
FOUR
Mapp and Green was a TARDIS of a place: all marble and modernity and oversized palms in pots standing around looking confused about whether they were real or not.
The offices inhabited a run of three posh townhouses on a little cobbled square – wonky window panes and brick frontages that didn’t match, right in the middle of the turn-around muddle of the old City.
Except, the whole place, including the irregular chim-chim-iney roofline, was theatre.
Behind the frontage, they’d knitted together a grid of steel and glass so solid they’d been able to take down every original internal wall and run a lift up the core of the new single building they’d snuck in on the footprint of the three that used to be there.
Dead clever really. Nothing about the outside told you what was going on inside at all.
And I was never going to see it again if anyone found out Simon had decided to get all extracurricular with Richard bloody Whittaker.
“We’ve got a problem, babes.” Sev Duman’s high pitched voice squash-balled off the walls, echoing out into a string of incomprehensible whale noises as she cut across the lobby in the half-dark of not-quite morning.
I groaned under my breath, already mapping signs, angling myself into Simon’s sightline to loop him in, as he split his focus between me and her.
The five-foot-four bottle-blonde with an undercut quiff of curls was infamously no-nonsense. If she said there was a problem, it was nuclear. As if this disaster of a morning could get any worse.
Her black patent Doc Martens squeaked against the high-shine tiles with every step closer, shrieking like a pair of angry mice trapped in an echo-chamber, making Simon grimace.
Normally he didn’t need me for one-on-one chats, but this place threw everything off.
The way he turned to beam at her, though, you’d never tell.
“Aside from Richard messing up again? Don’t worry, I’m on it. There’s no story if we can convince the general public it’s not him at all.”
“Except, it’s my film reel, isn’t it, genius?” Tension pitched her voice higher. “And identical camera angles. Buck stops with me as far as Mel’s concerned. Unless I figure out who leaked the bloody thing, it looks like I left the camera filming on purpose.”
Sev had been the only camera person on site the day we’d all gone down to Heybourne. News flash: his and mine weren’t the only careers this footage would total. A blank sort of worry slackened Simon’s face as I caught up interpreting her, but as quick as it came, the worry was gone.
“Sev, Mel loves you.” Reassuring voice. Forearm touch. Kindly smile. “She’d never accuse you of that. How’s Jo by the way?”
“In bed. Asleep. Where I should be.” She jabbed the call button for the lift a dozen times in quick succession. “And I know what you’re doing. Stop changing the subject. You can call your sister yourself, you know?”
He held his hands up. “I’m not changing the subject. Which floor?”
“Mel’s waiting in the boardroom.”
Simon slipped a finger into the collar of his shirt and tugged. “How lovely.”
An over-sweet waft from the energy drink Sev was clutching hit me with a J?gerbomb trauma flashback as she settled in against the side of the lift. Staring at Simon, she drummed her knuckles against the wall like a woodpecker on bennies.
“Now would be a really good time if you had something you wanted to tell me, because you should know Jo is plotting your slow and painful murder if you’ve been thick enough to try getting back at that pillock with my camera and some chancer in my editing team willing to take back-handers off you.... ”
“Oh my god,” I blurted. “Are you accusing him of a bit of late night international vengeance porn?”
“No?” Sev blinked at me like she’d forgotten I existed. “He’s practically family. Of course I’m not!”
Simon sucked his teeth with a chastising clack. “Sev, stop talking to Ben please. He’s working.”
“Sorry, course he is.”
Embarrassment lit my face hot. Good interpreters shut up and let everyone else do the interacting. This was not a three-way conversation. I was not on a break. Even if I signed at the same time as talking, I wasn’t here to join in. Where had my boundaries gone?
“So…” Sev’s face contorted, awkwardness rolling in all over again.
“Someone did a really amateur job trying to wipe the sound, and they left half the layers in.” She tugged the longer bit of her hair at the front where it wasn’t close cropped to the sides like mine.
“Not that I think you’re a vengeful harpy, babes, but it is incriminating… ”
“Incriminating?” Simon’s eyebrows notched upwards in outraged offence. “How would it be in my interests to sabotage my client’s engagement to his pregnant fiancée? I’m supposed to be protecting his reputation, not trashing it.”
“Yeah, but he’s not just a client, is he?”
I breathed slow, letting each sentence rearrange itself, shaping Sev’s phrasing into BSL like the words weren’t even touching me.
But my insides desiccated at the confirmation.
Sev knew how things were between them. Mistake my arse – Richard and Simon had history.
And at this rate, by the time dawn hit properly, my useless pining heart would be scattered across the floor in little square chunks like the glass of the passenger window that time we found a brick on the front seat of Matt’s Corsa.
Agreeing to be here was a mistake.
“Sev, I know you’ve shacked up with my sister and life is one long stream of hearts and roses for you—”
“Oh you can piss right off.”
“—but hear me when I say I have never wanted to marry that man.” A confusing sort of amusement coloured Simon’s declaration. My heart flip-flopped. I knew he wasn’t so much of a bad judge of character he actually liked the guy.
“Simon, they ditched you.”
“They did not.” Incredulous laugh. Soft bright eyes. “They decided to move into a more committed life stage, and I didn’t want in. Frankly I’m glad to be out of it. It’s far too much work being on all the time.”
“Being on all the time? Babes.”
The lift juddered to a stop at the top of the building, but Sev blocked the exit, legs wide, boots stopping the doors closing. And I tried not to have a claustrophobic meltdown about how much I wanted out.
Simon sighed wearily. “You know I have no interest in relationships.”
Well, shit. The fantasy of me and Simon ever happening disintegrated like an overly tea-soaked biscuit plopping into the bottom of my mug before I got to take a bite.
He wasn’t going to change his mind for me when he hadn’t for a pair of bloody millionaires.
I sagged against the wall of the lift. What was I even doing here?
Simon shot Sev an exasperated look, thin-lipped, wide-eyed and irritated. “Were you raking through my personal life in front of my interpreter for shits and giggles, or was there something relevant to the current situation?”
Oh for the power to disappear at will. I was only supposed to be here for the meeting. He wouldn’t be sharing any of this if it was us two having a chat. Because we didn’t bloody well have chats.
Sev grimaced. “I’m not dragging this all up for fun. Listen–”
She whipped her phone out, bipping up the volume obnoxiously loud and my whole body seized.
Oh sweet Jesus. Simon must have had the sound off in the taxi. I wanted to block my ears. One hundred and eighty seconds was a whole lot of sweaty bollock-smacking. Closeted public-school millionaires in polyamorous relationships Did It Better than deeply obsessed and available employees.
I should bumper-sticker that so I never forgot. Get it tattooed across my forehead.
“Ben, you don’t have to interpret this.”
Thank Christ.
The fleshy rhythm peaked, and—
“Shit!” I flinched. A nauseating warbled screech of feedback shrilled off the close-set elevator walls, melting my fillings right out of my head. Simon yanked his hearing aids out, wincing.
Sev killed the video, plunging us back to blissful, echoing silence.
“See?”
His hearing aids didn’t play up often, but their feedback whine was unmistakable. Oh god. He was cooked.
“I’d forgotten that happened.” The glimmer in his features dulled out like a torch battery failing. “Shit.”
Frowning, Simon slotted each earpiece back in carefully, eyes going soft focus like he wasn’t really here. And then he closed his eyes completely.
My breath felt like the last puff of smoke from a candle. I didn’t want to be here. He had no corner for me to help him fight. Everything was ashes. We were screwed.
He sucked in a deep breath like he’d broken the surface of the sea, shaking it all off, coming up for air. “Okay.” He held a hand out. “I can work this. Did you tell Mel about someone trying to wipe the sound?”
“No.” Sev folded her arms across her chest. “I’m not about to hang you out to dry, am I?”
“Excellent. And with that out of the way, it’s just a mysterious, annoying noise.”
“Simon, you’re literally on screen.”
He shrugged. “My face isn’t. Mel doesn’t know it’s me.”
A disbelieving laugh barked out of my throat. Sev’s eyes bulged like an electrocuted canary.
“Do you seriously think you can bullshit your way out of this?”
She might be marrying his sister, but she can’t have known Simon all that well. Me? I would bet my life he thought he could. Simon Azie got away with everything. And I really wanted to see him try.