‘Come on through,’ she called into the intercom, and pressed the green key to open the gate. Before Paula passed out of sight, she scoured her face for hints as to her state of mind. Rachel didn’t scare easily, but something about the supernaturally calm way Paula had reacted to the whole business of finding out that two of her colleagues were being considered for her job had creeped her out. The woman hadn’t once come to her to ask questions or demand explanations, but instead had stayed at her desk, placidly working through her usual caseload while it was Amira and Charlie who’d raged behind her door, insisting she call Mark Hamilton down to hear their complaints.
‘Neither of you said “no”,’ Rachel had told them in the end. ‘It’s not the fact that I was offering you Paula’s job while she was still in it that offended you, it’s the fact you’ve now discovered you were not the only ones in the running. This is about your hurt pride and nothing more.’
That had shut them up.
But Paula’s strange closed-up silence, the way she’d ignored Rachel in the office as if she wasn’t even there . . . that was something else and it made her feel uneasy. As she ran up the flight of stairs leading from the basement kitchen to the front door, Rachel found herself hoping that one of the others would hurry up and arrive soon so she’d spend as little time alone with Paula as possible.
She was relieved to open the door and see Ewan slipping through the still-open gate behind Paula’s shoulder. She continued to count on him as an ally despite the atmosphere at the weekend. She’d been wrong to flirt with Will so blatantly. Ewan had felt humiliated, she knew that. Toyed with. But surely she was entitled to a little harmless flirtation after being so humiliatingly dumped by Ronan? She would just have to work on Ewan to win him back. Though he didn’t yet have the intelligence or maturity for a promotion, his ambition made him a valuable asset to her department.
As long as she played him properly.
But first there was the issue of Paula, standing here on her doorstep, gazing at her with unnervingly empty eyes.
‘Hello,’ said her deputy in her usual flat voice, giving nothing away. ‘I wasn’t sure this was it.’
Usually guests were more effusive on their first visit to the house. Ewan was more enthusiastic.
‘Oh wow. This is incredible,’ he said, entering the hallway and eyeing the two tall arched windows over the stairwell, which perfectly framed the two mature sycamores in the back garden, their branches silhouetted against the pale, washed-out blue of the early-winter sky. Rachel was relieved to see that all hint of the weekend’s sulkiness seemed to have dissipated. Ewan gazed around him – taking in the sculpture of a woman’s back carved out of white marble on the windowsill, and the original Peter Blake print opposite the front door – with a guilelessness that touched her. He was still such a boy, really.
‘Oi. Hands off. I’ll be checking your pockets when you leave.’
It was supposed to be a joke, but she realized instantly from the way his face darkened that she had wounded him. But just as she prepared to apologize, the buzzer sounded again and the others arrived, all in one clump as if they’d arranged to meet up beforehand. The idea that they might not have wanted to risk being the first and having to be alone with her was surprisingly hurtful. Rachel knew leadership was never going to be conducive to popularity, but still she was not a monster. She had little time for most of them, but Amira and Charlie she had thought, in other circumstances, might have been friends.
She ushered her team – a misnomer if ever there was one – down to the kitchen. She’d wondered about taking them up to the living room but decided against it. Though like the rest of the house it was decorated in clean whites, the perfect symmetry of the windows and the grand height of the room lent it a formality she worried would be counter-productive. The basement kitchen, running the full width of the house, with its wall of concertina glass doors that gave on to the newly dug-out patio with the Italian flagstones they’d had to have craned over the house, was less intimidating.
Rachel knew she’d gone too far.
When Mark Hamilton had first approached her about Gill Marsh’s job, he’d made it clear he was looking for a radical overhaul of the department. He wanted someone to come in and ‘play hardball’, he’d said. She remembered that because of the way he’d over-emphasized those two words as if he’d been rehearsing them. She’d been flattered to be headhunted, plus she hadn’t been altogether reluctant to leave her last position after the unpleasant business with her second-in-command. Although that hadn’t been her fault. The woman had a history of mental illness she’d kept hidden from the company. It had been upsetting though. Watching someone have a nervous breakdown right in front of your eyes. And afterwards the woman’s husband had made things very uncomfortable, sending emails to staff members directly accusing her of all sorts of ridiculous and libellous things. The emails had been anonymous, so there could be no legal repercussions, but everyone had known it was him. Rachel wondered what he was doing now with all his rage and vitriol. Perhaps he’d started emailing the staff in her current job. She wouldn’t be surprised.