Consent Read online

  Patrick had mentioned my company in the pub the night before. Having boarded a bus, he took a phone call about an appointment later in the day. I got close enough to hear, but the details were elusive. There was talk about types of boxes, and about times, but that could mean anything. I’d not been able to write down the phone number he’d given Frances. At one point in the call he spelled out his email, so I sent him a message.

  URGENT request was the subject line. Then, Hi there. I’m just emailing around for quotes on an urgent job that’s coming up in the next few days. Can you tell me what your rates are, and what your capacity is like?

  His phone pinged as the message arrived. I saw him type his answer.

  Sure, it said. Standard is 15 per small item same day within 20 miles. Fragile 30 per item. Longer distances or 50kg+ on request. What’s the job? We can handle any size.

  So he was in logistics. This was bad news. Of all the things he could have done, few would be harder to track. Online I found nothing about him. He had a not uncommon surname, which didn’t help.

  The bus took us through the centre of the city and out into the suburbs. Near the end of the line Patrick got off and led me into a busy road. Large houses with grand porticos and railings topped with paint-plumped spears stood on either side. They would have been fine family homes until the traffic came. Now they were split into flats, and the once-white stucco was looking powdery. You could tell the road was known to Patrick from the direct way he walked, without regard for pedestrian crossings. This being a weekday morning, you’d expect him to be busy, and when suddenly he hoisted himself into a van I was ready to watch him drive away. Instead he climbed back out with a plastic bag he’d found and headed down the steps of a basement flat. As I walked past I heard him whistling while he hunted for his keys.

  *

  Frances roams the house for hours, her mind churning, her hands hungry for work. She checks her emails, checks the news, changes her sheets. Her mother rings but she doesn’t answer. She sends Patrick a text to say sorry for the morning, and mentions that the police may call. At eleven she is hungry and eats a bowl of cereal and a box of pasta salad out of sequence. Afterwards she showers. Dressing, she sees that Patrick has replied. who is this? the message says. Frances, she writes back, perplexed. sorry wrong number don’t no a frances :-) Yet it is the number Patrick gave.

  Others will have seen her in the pub, of course. That’s not in question, given the spectacle she made. She remembers a tall barman with dark hair, and a yellow T-shirt deliberately small for him. He was about to serve her when she ran out to confront Will. He is sure to remember.

  Rattling in on the train she gets a text from Tim. He is telling her the news, in case she hadn’t heard. By text. That’s Tim. He reckons Will’s death supersedes the ban on them talking, and suggests they meet for lunch. She agrees.

  The Rising Sun is open when she gets there. Young staff slap mops around the floor and fill the fridges from the back. Windows are open and a breeze tries to drag away the beery air. It also drags in dabs of rain. There’s music on. Nobody is talking. They do not look up when Frances enters. A girl with many piercings and a streak of blue in her hair comes over when it is clear that no one else will.

  Can I help?

  Hi. I don’t know if you remember me? I was here last night.

  Sorry, I wasn’t working last night.

  No. Fine. It’s actually one of your colleagues I’m looking for. A tall thin guy with black hair. Do you know who I mean?

  Carsten?

  Possibly. I don’t know.

  It sounds like Carsten. He’s the deputy manager. Can I ask what this is about?

  Of course, yes. It’s a bit unusual, really. Nothing important. I just want to find someone I met here. Or I might want to, anyway. Can I talk to Carsten? Is he around?

  He might be in the office.

  She goes to check. Her incuriosity about the details is almost hurtful. Is it their different ages? Does Frances look too old to be imagined in an intrigue? Too old to be imagined altogether? She doesn’t think she’s aged much, but that’s probably how it starts, with younger people growing blind to your affairs.

  At length Carsten appears, and he is indeed the thin man that she remembers. She smiles.

  How can I help you?

  He could be anything from Swiss to Norwegian. Last night he’d been inaudible.

  Hi. I was in here yesterday with a friend. You served me, do you remember? You were going to serve me anyway.

  Carsten studies her.

  I was next in the queue but ran out before my turn. You saw me, then I came back and the man I was with got drinks.

  He takes a step back and inclines his head.

  We were sitting at that table right there. We were there all evening. I’d been here since before six, in office clothes. A dark suit with a white shirt. The guy, his name’s Patrick. Maybe you’ve seen him before? He’s quite big, tall, with a beard. Like a short beard, you know. Trimmed short.

  Glenn?

  Patrick. He has a leather jacket. He was wearing a leather jacket. Big guy. Young. Well, you know, probably in his mid-twenties.

  Slow at first, then resolutely, Carsten shakes his head.

  But we were here all night! Right in front of you. You must remember.

  I believe you. But it was busy, you know. We serve a lot of people. Things get kind of blurry.

  Try to remember. I ran off when you were about to get my drinks. I pushed people out of my way. I shouted at someone outside, then came back. I’d bought another drink earlier on, another gin and tonic.

  Yes, I remember someone running out. Maybe it was you, but I did not see you come back again. From me you bought your drink?

  No, I don’t think that was you. That was someone else, earlier. I don’t know who.

  It is easy to forget these things, you see.

  Yes, but the point is I was here afterwards, for most of the evening.

  Well, I was not. I came in only for the early shift.

  That doesn’t matter. You were about to serve me. It was definitely you. You caught my eye. It was only a minute later when I came back in.

  She wonders why she is not more memorable.

  Can I ask what this is about?

  Do you have CCTV here, anything like that?

  No. I don’t think so. Is it important?

  Can you really not remember me? Imagine I’m wearing a dark suit.

  She stands back from the bar so he can see her fully. She sits where she sat.

  This is the table. I was here all night until about eleven. Are you sure you don’t have CCTV? Go and check.

  Some of the others are becoming interested.

  I believe you, sure. I just can’t say I remember.

  *

  She is waiting in the nasty place Tim named. She’s shaken the water off her coat, although it’s only going to be rained on again afterwards, she knows, the way it’s looking, there’s that evenness about the sky and in the distribution of drops, settled rain you’d call it, the work of methodical clouds. She searches for Patrick delivery on her phone. Then Patrick logistics. Then Patrick fragile. Then Patrick van. Then other things, because losing hope is the next job on her list. In the end, of course, she believes, in this day and age, with social media and everything, and cameras everywhere, in the end, that he’ll be found. If she needs him. Because that’s the point here. Yes. That’s what she must not forget. This is only insurance. She’s not in actual trouble. It’s just alarming contemplating trouble on this scale. Obviously that’ll make you worry, and of course when you worry you’re full of anxious energy, so you want to do useful things, which makes what you do feel worth worrying about, whereas the big picture is you’re fine. She’s fine.

  Well it’s certainly pulling in business in the bad weather, this restaurant is, if it deserves the dignity of the name. One by one people are coming in and standing wiping their lenses, the people wearing glasses. Often they block the
doorway and have to be muttered aside, but still they stand and stare at the illustrated and illuminated menu boards, taking their time. It must be a tough choice. The place serves more or less all food. There are aromas of: scampi, chicken madras, prawn laksa, steak pie, pork generally. The closest she can get to a vegetable is cheese. She has water. She isn’t hungry. How funny to come in and buy a bottle of what she’s sheltering from. That is ironic. She takes her phone out of her bag and puts it back again. When she’s done here she should just go home and have a run, despite the rain. You sweat anyway. Then watch a movie or read her book.

  Hey!

  Tim sits next to her with an illicit grin, not even a gesture of the proper solemnness.

  Hi Tim.

  We’ve just had this long meeting with the top brass, everyone in the company. It took forever.

  It’s not Tim to say he’s sorry.

  Have you eaten? he says.

  I had something before I left.

  I’ll just be a minute.

  He makes his own inspection of the menus while he stands in line. Frances watches a little heatedly. She didn’t mind the first wait, but feels slighted by this encore. At last he comes back with a box of rice and a ladleful of something glistening.

  So how about all this? he says, eating. Poor old Will.

  It’s just awful.

  It is.

  How is everybody taking it?

  A mixture. I haven’t seen anyone really upset, but the whole atmosphere is weird. Kind of like the last day of term? No one’s getting any work done. They’re just wandering around and talking to each other about it. Then when someone arrives who hasn’t heard yet, there’s this rush to tell them and it all starts up again. How did you find out?

  Oh, I got a message this morning. Sounds like a good time for me to be at home, then?

  I suppose. It is terrible what happened, obviously, but it’s quite interesting to see the office like this.

  His poor children, and Sophie. I can’t decide if I should write to them. I’m trying not to think about what they’re going through, to be honest.

  At least Will won’t have suffered. I mean a train finishes you off like that. That’s why people do it.

  You think he chose this?

  Maybe. No one is quite saying it, but they want to hear what we think, you and me and Monica. You know, about how he was. A lot of people are asking where you are. I’ve just said you’re working at home since ComPex. That might have upset him, I suppose, losing that. You actually saw him last night, didn’t you? There was a bit of a scene? Some of the others said they heard shouting.

  Yes. There was a bit of a scene. I feel terrible about it now. I wasn’t happy about how he’s handling this email business. How he was handling it. God, that seems so trivial now.

  *

  I couldn’t sit still in the taxi back from Patrick’s. I’d shift my ankle to my knee, drop it down, jiggle, scratch, lean forwards. My thoughts did laps. There was ringing in my ears. I wanted the darkness and confinement of the van.

  Climbing in at last and putting the headphones on, I heard her soft sounds and felt better. Soon afterwards the front door opened. Frances was dressed casually today, in tight grey jeans and a blue coat. She looked wonderful, but her walk was tense. She vanished in the direction of the station. Hearing no further sounds I crossed the road and rang the bell as before, scanning the glass for any fleck of movement. Seeing none, I entered.

  The first recording device was stuck underneath the kitchen table, hidden by a drawer whose obduracy had a day earlier been comforting, but was now a headache. As I lay on my back trying to reach it with the data cable I realised I’d left the replacement batteries in the van. I swore. Without new batteries, some of the devices might not see out the afternoon, but I could not keep going back and forth across the road to fetch them. They would have to wait for next time.

  The second device was taped to the back of a high bookshelf in the sitting room, which meant removing the books in front of it, and doing this with the curtains open, because I did not dare get close to the windows. Again the data uploaded smoothly, I was glad to see.

  The third device I’d wedged into the space between smoke alarm and baseplate on the ceiling of the landing. I brought up a kitchen chair, but removing the alarm was a stretch, and afterwards I struggled to put it back. Something about the twisting action meant that I couldn’t apply enough upward pressure to get the threads to latch. Time and again I’d pull away thinking I’d done it, and the alarm would stay in my hand. A couple of times I nearly dropped it. Perhaps the day before I’d had a slightly higher chair. At last I went foraging. There had to be a ladder somewhere to reach the loft hatch, but I couldn’t find it. Instead I came back with a cushion of Stephanie’s, which I hoped would raise me just enough. I did not think to take account of its slipperiness on the wooden seat, however, and as a result when I stood on it and reached upwards the cushion shot back towards the room I’d fetched it from, sending me the other way. Exactly what happened then I don’t know. I imagine I clawed the air a bit, one foot still touching the chair and causing it to pitch sideways, landing my weight full on one corner along the angle of the leg. There was that wrench that wood makes, then it gave way. The bathroom door-jamb clipped me on the cheek as I tried to shield the smoke alarm on the way down.

  At this point I had two problems, besides pain. First, the alarm still had to be attached, for which I’d need another chair and the cushion again. I felt I would have the required height if I was careful, and indeed this time the alarm went in. The second problem was more difficult. As things stood, Stephanie and Frances would discover on their return that a chair of theirs had broken inexplicably. My first thought was to smuggle away the evidence, an absent chair seeming somehow less mysterious than a smashed one. Briefly I even believed that the housemates might forget how many chairs they had. They were ordinary chairs. Keeping two in the front room and three in the kitchen suggested a set of six already down by one, as well as some haziness over their distribution. Once the cushion and the new chair were put away, however, I decided I could neither take the chance of the chair being missed, nor of being seen carrying it. I therefore had two options: to mend it discreetly or to arrange it broken. Instinctively I preferred the second, which would be faster, though it had drawbacks. Did apparently sound wooden chairs, on rare occasions, spontaneously reject their own legs? Could I give it the appearance of having suffered from some stealthy but calamitous dry rot? The damage did not look like rot. Two support struts were out of their sockets and each stump where the leg had broken was a brush of splinters. I tried to artfully disarray the pieces on the kitchen floor in the manner of an accident. A bread machine sat on a high shelf above the table, evidently not much used, which might, when placed at the centre of the mess, be made to seem the author of it. But was the machine heavy enough? When I picked it up I didn’t think so. Plus there were worries about the angle of attack. To seem authentic, the machine would also need some damage. I momentarily considered pulling the whole shelf down, then chose mending. Clearly, even with time and the correct tools, I could not return the chair to its original condition, probably not even to robustness. Instead my idea was to attempt a repair solid enough to hold, but at the same time ready to collapse beneath whoever sat on it, thereby causing them an accident to mask my own. In fact, by reinserting the supports into their holes and enmeshing the pieces’ ends, this could be rigged up almost naturally. After some gentle malleting with a saucepan, the chair was even strong enough for me to sit on, gingerly. The break was high on the leg, so you had to lift the chair or crouch in order to see it. I myself was in this pose when a cat approached, purring, not a bit alarmed. I gave it a few strokes then hurried to my final device, a tiny video camera fixed behind a plastic grille that ventilated the chimney breast in Frances’s bedroom. At last with some relief I crossed the road, the sky low, dark spots appearing on the asphalt, and drove home with the wipers on.

 
; I think I planned to review my recordings later, after a nap. I knew that I was tired. These were early mornings and full days that I was living through and I’m telling you I was pretty much down to my body’s vapours. I was in that trembly hyperactive stage when you can’t pause or you’ll collapse. Whatever I planned, I know what I did. I watched the video immediately.

  A quiet beginning, Frances getting changed, her body slightly fisheyed by the camera, its decisions over these shoes, that blouse, round but plain. After she leaves the room there are three minutes, three programmed empty minutes while the camera waits for movement, and I waited too. You watch the clothes through the slightly open door of her wardrobe. You watch the clothes cooling on the floor. It’s yours, this time. Yours, not even borrowed or stolen. Then it’s what you knew was coming. Knew but had to check. A flick to darkness and a slot of light, then through it stagger the lovers. There’d been a hope, though not one you put weight on, of spying some resistance or reluctance in her, maybe a detectably grim resolve to get this done. Well that is dead now. This is more than willing, how she grasps at his clothes, and into them, and how she gives herself to be stripped. She must have been eager, given how fast they find their stride under the sheets. It’s been vilely clear for a while how eager he is. Now you can hear them. The camera has a microphone, though weak. You hear that she is the more vocally exuberant, as is customary. She counts out her satisfaction with his work, which by degrees removes the covers. Her face you can’t see. It will be somewhere underneath his shoulder cords. There are some licks of hair. His face, eyes closed, you have only a thin crescent of. Where he’s stuck her it’s just a great black mass. Mainly the rest is pulling hands and leg spasms and the bulbing of his buttocks in your lens.