Turns out he was immune so there was no need. He slunk back in 2027, once he was certain he was safe and had had a nice break in his summerhouse up at Loch Lomond. I’ve been trying to get rid of him ever since. Leah told me on my first day here that he was the roadblock, but thanks to his deletion of e-mails and Leah’s ruthless “management” of her inbox “because a full inbox makes me nervous,” I was stuck between paranoia and suspicion.
Enter an excellent forensic IT recovery specialist and here we are.
“Raymond, thanks for coming in to meet me,” I say, all sweetness and light.
“How can I help you?” He has nervous sweat on his upper lip but he’s trying to stay calm. Does he know that I know? I decide to go for it.
“It was you who made the decision to ignore my warning to Leah, to HPS.” I practically hiss the words. Years of pent-up fury and rage quickly dissolve the calm I had hoped to maintain.
“I have no idea what idea you’re talking about.”
I quote the e-mail. “‘A stark raving lunatic who is trying to waste the limited resources and time of this institution. Not to mention my patience.’” His face becomes satisfyingly pale. “God forbid your patience was tested, Raymond.”
He’s blushing furiously, moving around in his chair. “I could never have known.”
“You could have investigated. You could have tried. You didn’t do anything, you dismissed me because of what, because I was a woman?”
He scoffs and my loathing for him intensifies. “Everything’s sexism with you ladies.”
“You’re fired, Raymond.”
“You can’t do that.” Ah, the confidence of the mediocre white man.
“I can and I have. Your employment was terminated this morning. You’ll need to go to HR on your way out to collect some papers. You won’t receive a reference unless you want the reference to say, ‘This man was partially at fault for the Plague and the near extinction of the human race.’” Even as I say it, I know I’m being unfair but it feels so good to blame someone.
Raymond’s mouth is flapping open, giving me an unpleasantly good view of his molars. “That’s an outrageous thing to say.”
“We’ll have to agree to disagree on that. Good-bye, Raymond. I look forward to never seeing you again.”
He slams the door on his way out in a final display of petty aggression. I had imagined leaving my office triumphantly but as silence settles I remember that I’m the boss. Four days a week I sit in this office and everyone outside the door is careful around me. I’m so thankful I insisted on keeping up two days a week in A and E. It keeps me sane.
I wonder if the Board of Health Protection Scotland considered the possibility I would use my time in the job to be vindictive. I suspect not. I know they didn’t really want to hire me, but the health minister told them my successes were making Scotland look bad. Every time I discovered something—the Plague, Patient Zero’s history, worked with Sadie and Kenneth to identify the origin of the virus—I showed how incompetent the Scottish establishment was being. They decided the best thing to do was to bring me inside it, hence the bloody irony of me—HPS’s most vociferous critic—now being its director. My personal assistant, Millie, took notes in the meeting and told me everything when I asked her to fill me in on what she knew about office gossip. I didn’t intend for her to reveal the details of confidential meetings, but here we are.
I thought firing Raymond would make me feel better but it hasn’t. I feel awful. I thought I’d feel vindicated, alive, ready to move on. I thought I’d feel more comfortable knowing that that awful, dismissive, incompetent man couldn’t repeat his mistakes in this organization. It seems like such an easy solution and then, once it’s done, you realize how empty an action it actually is. Maybe, I have found out too late, that when you have someone to blame everything feels easier. But what happens when you’ve held them responsible and nothing’s really changed? What then?