When She Was Bad(42)

‘So tell me, Charlie, how you envisage a possible long-term contract might work,’ Margaret said in her peculiarly masculine voice. ‘I haven’t got long so you have twenty minutes to convince me to hire you rather than any of the other agencies.’

Charlie launched into his prepared pitch, but he hadn’t been speaking long before he started to feel strange twinges in his lower abdomen. He tried to ignore them, but within minutes they’d worsened and now his stomach was cramping intermittently in painful spasms. Sweat broke out on his forehead, and his skin felt clammy under his shirt. He battled on with his pitch, but now, oh God, he needed the loo.

‘Charlie, are you still there?’

A sudden sharp pain had caused him to stop mid-sentence and Margaret Hoffman didn’t sound too impressed.

‘Yes, sorry. Where was I?’ His eyes scanned the printout in front of him, trying to regain his train of thought.

‘You were telling me about your post-hiring assessment strategy?’

He started to explain his system for following up on appointments he’d made. Suddenly a horrible loud gurgling sound erupted from his insides. Sarah’s head whipped around, her mouth open, her eyebrows raised in shock. Charlie’s voice again dried up as his stomach spasmed with pain. Horror flooded through him as he realized what was about to happen.

‘Sorry,’ he gasped into the receiver, and then he dropped the phone and bolted for the door that led to the lobby where the toilets were.

When he emerged some twenty minutes later, his face pasty, but his gut slightly calmer, Amira was waiting outside.

‘Sarah emailed me to tell me to come and find you. She was worried about you, but doesn’t dare leave her desk. You look like shit – no offence. What happened to you?’

‘I don’t know. It just came out of nowhere. I’ve been trying to work it out while I’ve been in there glued to the toilet. Do you know, I think there was something in that coffee.’

‘Don’t be daft – how could there be? Anyway, we’ve all been drinking that coffee today and no one else has been affected.’

‘Well, the sugar then. It tasted disgusting. Do you know, I think someone must have put something on it – some kind of laxative maybe.’

‘Oh, come on. Why would anyone do that?’

Charlie put his hands on his belly, feeling the stirrings of something deep inside there.

‘I don’t know.’ He shook his head. ‘All I know is I was completely fine, and then I drank the coffee which tasted really odd, and then I was on the phone and all of a sudden . . . Oh God.’

He was remembering Margaret Hoffman and how he’d cut her off mid-conversation. What would happen now? He couldn’t imagine her giving the contract to someone whose stomach erupted mid-sentence as if the creature in Alien was tearing out of it. And tonight – no way was he going to be able to make it out for dinner. And he didn’t think Stefan was the type to volunteer to come round and hold his hair back while he hunched over a toilet bowl – or worse.

As if in sympathy with his thoughts, his stomach started to make a low groaning noise.

‘I’ve got to—’

Amira pushed him back through the door of the toilet before he could finish what he was going to say. He made it into the cubicle just in time, which was probably the one good thing to happen to him that day.





22

Anne



As well as lecturing at the university and advising in legal cases, I also have private clients, some of whom I’ve been treating for years. Not so many new ones these days admittedly, but there was a period when I couldn’t get enough. I was hungry to expand my knowledge and my reputation. During that time I dealt with some harrowing cases. There was a man who’d been sexually abused by a teacher from the age of six and suffered permanent and ongoing physiological damage, and a young woman who’d drowned her own baby in the bath because a voice told her that was the only way he’d be safe from her. There was a teenager who hadn’t spoken in the three years since her father stabbed her mother in front of her, yet cut words and phrases into her skin.

Some cases made me question everything I thought I knew about human relationships; others made me go home at night and stare at my own reflection in the mirror, asking, ‘Could you?’ ‘Would you?’ Then I’d hug Shannon wordlessly till she got fed up and wriggled free. But nothing ever came as close to totally derailing me as that day in late summer when I stood at the top of a flight of basement stairs in an anonymous suburban house while a large cop in low-slung pants flicked on a light switch.

‘Quite something, ain’t it?’ asked Sergeant Cavanagh, making his way down the steps so that Professor Ed Kowalsky and I could properly take in the scene in that basement.