I swing by my desk to collect my Tupperware carrier before joining everyone, eager to share my latest culinary creations with the team. I haven’t told anyone that it’s my birthday today yet, but I might.
I make my way across the newsroom toward them, and stop briefly when I see a woman I don’t recognize. She has her back to me, with two small children dressed in matching outfits by her side. I notice the cute cupcakes my colleagues are already eating. Not homemade—like mine—but shop-bought and expensive-looking. Then I return my attention to the woman handing them out. I stare at her bright red hair, framing her pretty face with a bob so sharp it could have been cut with a laser. When she turns and smiles in my direction it feels like a slap.
Someone passes me a glass of warm prosecco, and I see the drinks trolley that management always orders from catering whenever a member of staff leaves. It happens a lot in this business. The Thin Controller taps his glass with an overgrown fingernail, then he starts to speak, strange-sounding words tumbling out of his crumb-covered lips.
“We can’t wait to welcome you back…”
It’s the only sentence my ears manage to translate. I stare at Cat Jones, the woman who presented the program before I did, standing there with her trademark red hair, and two beautiful little girls. I feel physically sick.
“… and our thanks to Anna, of course, for taking the helm while you were away.”
Eyes are turned and glasses are raised in my direction. My hands start to tremble and I hope my face is doing a better job of hiding my feelings.
“It was on the roster, I’m so sorry, we all thought you knew.”
The producer standing next to me whispers the words but I’m unable to form a reply.
The Thin Controller apologizes too, afterward. He sits in his office, while I stand, and stares at his hands while he speaks, as though the words he is struggling to find might be written on his sweaty fingers. He thanks me, and tells me that I’ve done a great job filling in for the last …
“Two years,” I say, when he doesn’t appear to know or understand how long it has been.
He shrugs as though it were nothing.
“It is her job, I’m afraid. She has a contract. We can’t sack people for having a baby, not even when they have two!”
He laughs.
I don’t.
“When does she come back?” I ask.
A frown folds itself onto the vast space that is his forehead.
“She comes back tomorrow. It’s all on the…” I watch as he tries and fails to find a substitute for the word “roster,” like anything beginning with the letter R. “… it’s all on the woster, has been for some time. You’re back on the correspondent desk, but don’t worry, you can still fill in for her, and present the program during school holidays, Christmas and Easter, that sort of thing. We all think you did a tewwific job. Here’s your new contract.”
I stare down at the crisp white sheets of A4 paper, covered in carefully constructed words from a faceless HR employee. My eyes only seem able to focus on one line:
News Correspondent: Anna Andrews.
As I step out of his office, I see her again: my replacement. Although I suppose the truth is that I was only ever hers. It’s a terrible thing to admit, even to myself, but as I look at Cat Jones with her perfect hair and perfect children, standing there chatting and laughing with my team, I wish she was dead.
Him
Detective Chief Inspector Jack Harper
Tuesday 05:15
The sound of my phone buzzing wakes me from the kind of dream I don’t wish to be woken from. One in which I am not a fortysomething-year-old man, living in a house with a mortgage I can’t afford, a toddler I can’t keep up with, and a woman who is not my wife but nags me anyway. A better man would have got his shit together by now, instead of sleepwalking through a loaned-out life.
I squint at my phone in the darkness and see that it is Tuesday. It is also stupidly early, so I’m relieved that the text doesn’t appear to have woken anyone else. Sleep deprivation tends to have terrible consequences in this house, though not for me—I’ve always been a bit of a night owl. I shouldn’t feel excitement about what I read on the screen, but I do. The truth is, since I left London, my job has been as dull as a nun’s underwear drawer.
I’m head of the Major Crime Team here, which sounds exciting, but I’m based in deepest, darkest Surrey now, which isn’t. Blackdown is a quintessential English village less than two hours from the capital, and petty crime and the occasional burglary tend to be as “major” as it gets. The village is hidden from the outside world by a sentinel of trees. The ancient forest seems to have trapped Blackdown—and its inhabitants—in the past, as well as permanent shadow. But its chocolate-box beauty could never be denied. Blackdown is filled with an abundance of thatched cottages, white picket fences, an above-average number of elderly residents, and a below-average crime rate. It’s the kind of place people come to die, and somewhere I never thought I’d find myself living.