Where the Rain Gets In Read Online Free

smiled and smoothed down the
hair on his scalp.
    “Oh well,” said Katie, “give the punters
what they want, eh?”
    “What you have to say isn’t always what
they want.”
    “They love it,” said Katie, “and you
know they do.”
    Katie could feel Charlie’s eyes on her
as she walked over to the lift. She guessed he shook his head each day at the
waste – Charlie wasn’t alone in presuming that Katie was a lesbian, but if that
was what it took then that was fine by Katie. She recognised a couple of the
people waiting for the lift, but she didn’t know anyone to speak to. Her office
was on the fourth floor, a huge expanse of space that covered an entire floor
of the building. Open plan desk arrangements fanned out from the central lift
shaft with private offices lining the outer walls. It wasn’t exactly a trading
floor, more like somebody’s idea of one.
    Katie walked the length of the room to
her office, and called out her good mornings to the few colleagues already at
their desks. She knew she looked like Sigourney Weaver in the film Working
Girl – all business and ready for the day, striding across the floor – but
only because Carmel, her assistant, her Melanie Griffith, wouldn’t ever let her
forget it.
    “Good morning, Ms. Boney-Ass,” said
Carmel. She switched off her mobile and dropped it into her bag.
    “Good morning, Carmel,” said Katie, and
smiled. “How’s the world of Mergers and Acquisitions? Was that Harrison Ford
you were just speaking to?”
    “You might laugh,” said Carmel, “but one
day you’ll find it’s this girl sat in that office of yours, and not that sorry
bag of bones you call a behind.”
    “Harrison might like my bottom.”
    “No,” said Carmel, “he’s going to want
something to get a hold of, something to sink his teeth into – and I think I’m
just his type.”
    “Steady girl,” laughed Katie, “steady.”
     
    The call from Mike came through at three
minutes past nine, as though he considered nine o’clock the acceptable time to
ring. Katie took no calls before ten-thirty unless Carmel considered it
absolutely necessary. Add on the three minutes of Carmel refusing to put Mike
through, and you have three minutes into some people’s working day – but not
that many people anymore. Katie looked from the phone to the clock and lifted
the receiver.
    “Carmel?”
    “I’m sorry, Katie,” said Carmel, “but he
won’t go away.”
    “Who is it?”
    “That’s just it, he won’t say; he just
keeps repeating that it’s imperative he talks only to you. He says he’s a close
personal friend.” The conviction drained out of Carmel’s voice. “He’s very
nice,” she added as an afterthought.
    Katie smiled. It was obviously absurd to
Carmel that Katie should have a close personal friend.
    “What do you think,” she asked. “Should
I take the call?”
    “I think he’d better wait like all the
others,” said Carmel.
    “Niceness just doesn’t cut it, really,
does it?”
    “It does no harm,” said Carmel, “but
it’s not enough to get put through to you. I’ll ask him to call back later.”
    Katie replaced the receiver and returned
to her newspaper. She’d established this right – to read through the papers
each morning before actually doing what was recognisably her job – only by
being year after year the best performing account manager in the company. She
was disdainful of her colleagues’ cursory glance at the newspapers; they only
looked at the business pages, as though this justified the wasted time. She had
no patience with anyone who claimed to read the paper each day, when –
surprise, surprise – if she referred to something she'd seen, it was always
that one particular article they hadn’t read. So much so that Katie
occasionally asked certain colleagues if they’d seen such-and-such a piece,
just out of bloody-mindedness, and guess what? The results were not encouraging.
Katie’s record stood for itself – if she