When She Was Bad(60)

‘Hope that wasn’t too traumatic for you, Paula,’ said Rachel, coming over to hover nearby. ‘Probably felt a lot more dangerous than it was.’

Paula couldn’t believe she’d heard right. Was Rachel seriously dismissing what had just happened as nothing more than a slight mishap?

Back on the ground, Sarah came rushing over.

‘You poor thing. Are you OK?’

Paula remembered suddenly about the pregnancy bombshell Sarah had dropped on them all just a short time before. Could there be a part of her that was enjoying the diversion Paula had created?

‘I could have died,’ she said, her voice wobbling. But even as she said it, she was looking up at the wire and noticing how much lower to the ground it looked from here than it had when she was up there. The distance between the towers, which, when she was stuck in the middle had seemed endless, was just a few metres. Nothing at all really. Yet the danger had felt so real.

Will had now made it down too and was talking to his assistant Katie in a low, urgent voice.

‘Sorry about that, guys,’ he said. ‘We’ve never had a safety rope fail before. The clasp seems to have come undone but Katie has had a look at it and can’t understand how it happened. It wasn’t worn out at all. In fact, they’re all pretty new. And we had another team on here earlier today using the same equipment and it was all fine.’

‘Where is all the equipment kept?’ Charlie asked. ‘Could it have got mixed up with other older stock?’

Will shook his head.

‘It’s exactly the same equipment as we used earlier. It was all still set up from before. There’s just no reason for it to have happened.’

‘Maybe if you employed some more experienced staff?’ said Mark Hamilton, sternly glancing meaningfully over at Will’s baby-faced assistant.

‘Katie’s done this many, many times. It wasn’t her—’ Bur Mark cut him off: ‘As it happens, there was a happy ending, but it could have been a very different story.’

‘Oh come on,’ said Rachel, glancing over at Will, who was looking distinctly uncomfortable. ‘It wasn’t really that bad. Paula was never really in danger. It’s hardly like we had her scaling the Shard or anything.’

Paula stole a glance at Mark, waiting for him to leap to her defence and was shocked to see him break into a smile, as if what had happened to her was some sort of in-joke.

‘I tell you something,’ said Will, who’d regained his air of relaxed bonhomie. ‘In terms of team-bonding, that was truly excellent stuff. You all pulled together, rallied around Paula, supported her. Mark and I couldn’t have planned it much better ourselves. In fact, how do you know we didn’t plan it ourselves?’

He glanced around the group, eyebrows waggling. There were a few giggles.

A savage wave of heat swept over Paula, rising from her feet upwards until she felt as if her whole body was on fire.

Her skin burned with shame.





26

Amira



‘Do you think someone did it deliberately?’

Amira would have laughed if Paula hadn’t looked like she was blinking away tears. She’d been taken aback when the older woman had knocked on her hotel-room door just a few moments ago asking for a ‘chat’. She and Paula had always got on well enough – at least until Rachel practically offered her Paula’s job and it all became awkward – but they’d never been intimate. Now Paula was slumped like a bag of boiled rice in the armchair by the window, asking her if someone could have deliberately tampered with her safety cord.

‘Blimey, not you as well.’

Paula blinked at her, not understanding.

‘Charlie was convinced someone had poisoned him the other day,’ Amira explained. ‘Hey, have you two been at the skunk again?’

‘Skunk?’ Paula looked more confused than ever and Amira stifled an impatient sigh.

‘Skunk. You know – weed. Gives you paranoid delusions.’

‘Oh. Right. Yes. Funny.’

Amira felt a pang of guilt. Paula was entitled to feel paranoid – her boss was trying to get rid of her. Maybe not by dropping her off a rope bridge but scheming behind her back to replace her was just as soul-destroying.

‘You look nice,’ Paula said now, as if to compound Amira’s guilt. The automatic reply ‘so do you’ died on Amira’s lips as she surveyed the outfit her companion had selected for the evening’s dinner activities: the familiar voluminous beige tunic over baggy black trousers. Low-heeled black court shoes of a type that were last in style in the early eighties and a shapeless black cardigan completed the look.

‘You’re so lucky,’ Paula continued. ‘You can wear anything with your colouring. Which one of your parents do you take after?’