A Room Swept White Read Online Free Page A

that.
    ‘She didn’t die naturally. She was thirty-eight.’ The anger in his eyes still hasn’t reached his voice. He sounds as if he’s reciting lines he’s memorised. ‘Whoever murdered her – he’s only partly responsible. A whole string of people killed her, Judith Duffy for one.’
    I don’t know what to say, so I put the card down on his desk. ‘Someone sent me this. It came this morning in a matching envelope. No explanatory letter or note, no indication of who it’s from.’
    ‘The envelope also had numbers on it?’ Miraculously, Laurie seems interested.
    ‘No . . .’
    ‘You said “matching”.’
    ‘It looked expensive – cream-coloured and sort of ribbed, like the card. It was addressed to “Fliss Benson”, so it must be from someone who knows me.’
    ‘Why must it?’ Laurie demands.
    ‘They’d have written “Felicity” otherwise.’
    He squints at me. ‘Is your name Felicity?’
    It’s the name that goes on the credit sequence of everyprogramme I produce, the name Laurie will have seen on my CV and covering letter when I applied to Binary Star for a job. Seen and then forgotten. On a good day, Laurie makes me feel invisible; on a bad day, nonexistent.
    I do what I always do when I’m in his office and there’s a possibility that I might get upset: I stare at the miniature solar system on his shelf and list the planets.
Mercury, Earth, Venus, Mars
. . .
    Laurie picks up the card and mutters something inaudible as he aims it across his office at the bin in the far corner. It whizzes past my ear, narrowly missing me. ‘It’s junk,’ he says. ‘Some kind of marketing teaser, waste of a tree.’
    ‘But it’s handwritten,’ I say.
    ‘Forget it,’ Laurie barks. ‘I need to talk to you about something important.’ Then, as if noticing me for the first time, he grins and says, ‘You’re going to love me in a minute.’
    I nearly drop to my knees in shock. Never before has he used the word ‘love’ in my presence. I can say that with absolute certainty. Tamsin and I have speculated about whether he’s heard of it, felt it – whether he recognises its existence.
    You’re going to love me in a minute
. I assume he’s not using the word ‘love’ in the physical sense. I imagine us having sex on his desk, Laurie utterly oblivious to the large window through which everyone whose office is on the other side of the courtyard can see us, me anxious about the lack of privacy but too scared of upsetting him to protest . . .
No. Stop this nonsense
. I shut down the thought before it takes hold, afraid I might laugh or scream, and be called upon to explain myself.
    ‘How do you fancy being rich?’ Laurie asks me.

    Part of the reason I find talking to Laurie so exhausting is that I never know the right answer. There’s always a right one and a wrong one – he’s very black and white – but he gives you no clues and he’s disturbingly unpredictable about everything apart from what he calls ‘the cot-death mothers witch-hunt’. On that, his views are fixed, but on nothing else. It must be something to do with his brilliant, original mind, and it makes life hellishly hard for anyone who’s secretly trying to please him by second-guessing what he’d like them to say while at the same time wanting to look as if they’re just being themselves, acting with a hundred per cent integrity and to hell with what anyone else might think. Actually, that’s unlikely to be a significant constituency of people, come to think of it. It’s probably just me.
    ‘I’d like to be well-off,’ I say eventually. ‘I don’t know about rich. There’s only so much money I’d need – a lot more than I’ve got now, but less than . . . you know . . .’ I’m talking rubbish because I’m unprepared. I’ve never given it a second’s thought. I live in a dark, low-ceilinged one-bedroom basement flat in Kilburn, underneath people who have sound-amplifying wooden floors in every room because to