‘They need a safe pair of hands,’ she’d said when she handed in her notice at her old company. ‘Someone to steer them back to health.’
Mark himself had been running things since Rachel had been gone, in conjunction with Paula Hibbs. It hadn’t escaped Julia’s notice that Paula had failed to meet her eyes when she shook hands this morning. She looked so hot and flustered. What on earth was she thinking of, wearing all those layers on a day like today? The woman hadn’t exactly been welcoming. She couldn’t possibly have imagined she might be offered the job herself, could she?
But while Julia hadn’t been freaked out before starting the job, she had to admit she’d had a few moments since arriving this morning. In her experience, when you took over someone’s position there was nearly always a lingering sense of the previous incumbent. Even if there was no nameplate still on the door or mini-pack of tissues in the top drawer, there was usually a faint imprint of someone else’s presence – the particular height of the office chair, the list of extension numbers stuck to the telephone written in a sloping hand, not her own, and in blue ink rather than her own preferred black.
Even though six months had passed since the terrible thing that happened to Rachel Masters, Julia fancied she got a whiff, just every now and then, of a musky, smoky perfume of the kind she’d never use. There was also a coat hanger on a hook on the back of the door that Julia kept being drawn to, imagining one of Rachel’s neat fitted jackets hanging there, or a soft cashmere coat. She’d never actually met her predecessor, but obviously she’d read so much about her she almost felt like she had.
The knock on the door gave Julia a start.
‘Sorry to bother you.’
The woman who walked in was early thirties, long dark hair, big-boned. Julia’s eyes flicked to the notebook where she’d scribbled down the names of her new team. Amira. It must be.
Julia beamed at her and got a weak smile in return. Not so much a smile, in fact, as a muscle twitch at the side of her mouth. The assessment reviews in her personnel file had described her as ‘bright’ and ‘outgoing’. But Amira’s face was blank and smooth as if something elemental had rubbed it free of expression.
‘I just wanted to remind you I’ve got the afternoon off. We’re moving.’
‘That’s exciting. Where to?’
‘Back in with my mum.’
‘Oh. Maybe not so exciting then.’
Julia was encouraging confidences, but Amira clearly didn’t want to elaborate. Still Julia persevered.
‘While you’re in here, perhaps you can help me sort out who everyone is. That pregnant lady over there is Sarah, right?’
Amira’s eyes followed the direction of Julia’s nod to a woman standing by the printer absently rubbing her very obvious bump. Julia had already decided that when Sarah went off on maternity leave, she’d bring Naomi in to cover for her. Reinforcements, that’s what she needed. A friendly face out there on the main floor would make all the difference.
But Amira was frowning.
‘No. That’s Sarah.’ She gestured to a desk at the side where a heavily pregnant pink-faced, red-haired woman was shifting around in her chair as if trying to get comfortable. Now the penny dropped. Julia turned back to the figure by the printer.
‘Ah, so that must be . . .’
‘Yes, Chloe.’
Julia felt a secret thrill of excitement. So this was the girl at the centre of all the media speculation. Chloe was sticking to her story that the father of her unborn baby was a foreign student with whom she’d had a one-night stand, but that hadn’t stopped the rumours. Only last week, Julia had seen a photo of her in a magazine with the headline: LOVE CHILD FOR SAUNA KILLER?
She looked so young standing there on her own. So vulnerable. Julia felt the first stirrings of protectiveness towards her new, beleaguered team. She was known in the industry as someone who was fiercely loyal to her staff. No doubt that was part of the reason Mark Hamilton had brought her in.
After Amira had gone, Julia was thoughtful. She had expected that her new staff might be nervous, maybe even a bit hostile. But this polite guardedness was something she hadn’t anticipated. Still, she’d win them over gradually. She just needed to get to know them a bit, to find out what made them tick. Maybe she’d move her desk out on to the main floor. Or take them all out to the pub or out for a meal. Alcohol was the quickest way of breaking down barriers, she’d found.
She logged on to her computer, following the instructions the gangly young man from IT had scrawled on a Post-it and stuck to her monitor. Then she put the company postcode into a local search engine and looked up neighbouring restaurants. She picked up her phone and dialled.