There was nothing left to hold us in the flat. I rejected Jimmy’s suggestion that I take a few more things with me back to my father’s. It would have felt too much like stealing.
Once back in the car, I felt I had to say something to break the awful cloud that had descended between us.
‘Even though I’ve seen what I’ve seen, even now none of it seems real.’ I waved my hand in the direction of the Victorian building. ‘Logically I can see the proof before me, I have to accept that, but in my mind, in my heart, it still all seems completely and utterly wrong.’
Jimmy also seemed to make a deliberate effort to shake off the suffocating shroud we were under.
‘Don’t worry. You can’t expect it all to come back at once. Let’s go and get a bite to eat and then we’ll check out the magazine where you work. Perhaps we’ll find something there which will give us some answers.’
He had no idea how prophetic his words would turn out to be.
Thankfully Jimmy had suggested we telephone the magazine in advance to warn them we were coming, which was just as well as the place was enormous and we’d never have found our way unaided to the section where I worked. We walked across an ice-rink-shiny reception floor to a large curved desk, behind which sat several receptionists. Everyone around us seemed incredibly smartly dressed and well put together, and while the clothes I was wearing definitely weren’t out of place, I certainly felt that I was.
I lost major points in poise, when I forgot the name of the person we were meeting and had to hunt in my handbag for the piece of paper I’d written it down on.
‘Miss Rachel Wiltshire to see Mrs Louise Kendall,’ provided Jimmy smoothly, whilst I was still scrabbling with an indecent lack of reverence within the cavernous Gucci bag. ‘She is expecting us.’
We were instructed to take a seat on an impossibly low red leather settee situated directly opposite the bank of lifts. I fidgeted nervously as we waited to be met, half rising each time the lift doors slid open and a woman came out. This was ridiculous. The building was vast and there was a constant stream of people flowing out into the reception area. My boss could be any one of them.
In fact it was fifteen more minutes before a woman no more than ten years older than me came walking swiftly over to us clad in a designer suit and unbelievably impractical heels.
‘Rachel!’ she cried out when she was halfway across the foyer. I got to my feet and held out my hand. This she ignored and swooped in like a hawk to air-kiss the space beside my head, enveloping me in a haze of expensive perfume.
‘How are you, you poor old thing? We’ve been so worried.’
Something in her voice made me seriously doubt that. She’d wasted no time on further greetings and had already pivoted on her killer heels and was making her way back over to the lifts. As she had completely ignored Jimmy up to that point, I thought it only polite to offer an introduction.
‘Mrs Kendall, this is an old friend of mine, Jimmy Boyd. He’s brought me into London today to see if anything here might jog my memory.’
She turned to flash the briefest of smiles at the man beside me, but it was only her mouth that moved, none of it reached her eyes. I’d already seen the top-to-toe appraisal she had raked over him when we had risen to greet her. I only hoped Jimmy hadn’t noticed it too.
‘Not Mrs Kendall, just Louise,’ she corrected as she jabbed a perfectly manicured finger on the lift call button. ‘Your darling young man Matt called on Monday and explained all about the dreadful mugging. How terrible that must have been. And they got your beautiful ring?’ Her eye dropped to my left hand as if to verify it was really gone. ‘What a tragedy.’
As we followed her into the lift I couldn’t help but feel it was losing my diamond that my boss deemed more tragic rather than any physical peril I’d been in. There was something about her that reminded me of Cathy, or how Cathy could turn out to be in another ten years or so.
We exited the lift on the ninth floor and Louise was instantly accosted by a junior member of staff dashing down the corridor carrying a sheaf of papers. As she stopped to sort out the crisis, Jimmy and I both took a polite step backwards and surveyed our surroundings. We were in a large open-plan office, brightly lit by long neon tube lighting. There were innumerable desks to both sides of the lift, divided up into work stations by blue felt-covered partitions. It looked like one of those experimental things you see in laboratories: the ones that rats run around in.
‘Nice woman, your boss,’ commented Jimmy, whispering low into my ear so he couldn’t be overheard. ‘Very sincere.’