Looking Good Dead

10

In the narrow room that doubled as the London office and showroom of BryceRight Promotional Merchandise Limited, Tom Bryce sat gloomily at his desk, his shirtsleeves rolled up and his tie at half-mast. He was shivering and thinking about putting his jacket back on. Bloody English weather. Yesterday it had been almost unbearably hot, today it was freezing.

The place gave off the right image; it was a smart address, and although not big, the room was elegantly proportioned with large windows, and had the original stucco work on the ceiling. There was just enough space for desks for the five of them, a waiting area which was also the display area, and a tiny kitchenette behind a partition at the far end.

The company name had been Kellie’s idea. A tad corny he had thought at the time, but as she had pointed out it was a name people would easily remember. BryceRight supplied business gifts and promotional clothing to companies and clubs. Its product lines ranged from overprinted pens, calculators, mouse pads and executive desk toys, to T-shirts, baseball caps, sportswear and trophies.

After graduating from business school in Brighton, Tom had worked for one of the largest companies in the field, the Motivation Business, and then, a decade ago, supported by Kellie, had mortgaged himself up to the hilt and set up on his own. He had operated from his den and the two spare bedrooms in their home until shortly after Max was born, when he had accumulated enough capital to take on the lease at this prestigious, if cramped, address just off Bond Street, as well as a warehouse close to Brick Lane in east London.

For the first six years the business boomed. He was a natural salesman, his customers liked him, everything was rosy. Then 9/11 had happened and for two days the phone had not rung. And it never really seemed to have rung with any consistency since.

He employed four salesmen, two of whom were based here in London, one in the north of England and one in Scotland. Additionally his secretary, Olivia, was in this office, as well as his admin clerk, Maggie, who was in charge of customer liaison and product sourcing. He employed another four people at the warehouse, an order chaser, a quality control supervisor and two dispatch clerks. And that was where he had a lot of problems – probably from not being there enough himself.

BryceRight had a blue-chip customer base, with some of the largest household names as clients. They supplied Weetabix, Range Rover, Legal and General Insurance, Nestlé, Grants of St James’s, as well as many much smaller clients.

For the first few years he used to really enjoy coming into work, and he’d even relished the post-9/11 challenge for a time, but more recently with the latest economic downturn and ever-increasing competition his turnover had plunged to the point where he was no longer making enough money to cover his overheads. He was losing customers to the competition, existing customers were placing smaller orders, and just recently there had been a spate of fuck-ups which had lost him even more business.

The in-tray on his desk was stacked with bills, some more than ninety days old. Yet again at the end of this month it was going to be a tough balancing act between the receivables and the debts to ensure the wage cheques did not bounce. And there would be, as always, the Kellie spending factor in that equation, also.

She was smiling out from the silver frame on his desk, along with Max and Jessica, all three of them responding to something the photographer had said. It was a great photograph, in flattering soft focus, giving them a slightly dreamlike quality. Staring at her fondly, he hoped to God there were going to be no more unwelcome surprises from her for a while.

How could he break it to her if they had to sell the house and downsize. And to what? A flat? How could he tell Max and Jessica that they might not have a garden any more?

He stared out of his second-floor window through the pouring rain at the windows across the road. Conduit Street was narrow, and the tall buildings made it feel like a gully. Even on a sunny day his office was in permanent shade.

Glancing down he could see the lunchtime stream of people, the sea of umbrellas and the line of cars, taxis and vans waiting to cross the lights at the intersection with Bond Street. In particular he watched a new maroon Bentley Continental. Ever since they had first come out he had hankered after one, but at this moment the gulf separating him from something so expensive seemed as big as the gulf that separated a snail on his garden fence from Mars.

He disconsolately munched his sandwich of tuna and sweetcorn on rye bread. He wasn’t crazy about the combination of tuna and sweetcorn, and he disliked the sharp caraway seeds in rye, but this morning he had woken up more determined than he had been in a long while to eat more healthily – and this stuff was supposed to be low fat, low everything. He would have preferred his usual bacon and egg, or cheddar and pickle any day. It was Kellie, in bed last night playfully prodding his stomach and calling him ‘Tubs’, that had been the final straw.

He glanced at the first page of the trade magazine Promotions and Incentives and saw that one of his competitors, whose business was booming, was preparing for a stock market flotation. What was their secret? he wondered. What the hell had they done so right that he had done so wrong?

He took another bite, and watched the techie, Chris Webb, a tall, laconic forty-year-old with floppy hair and a solitary earring, who he called in for all his computer problems – and who treated him like a retarded child – prodding around with a screwdriver in the entrails of his Mac laptop. Every few moments Tom looked over at the blank screen, hoping against hope it would spring back to life.

And thinking about what he had seen last night.

He had not been able to get the image of the girl being stabbed out of his mind, and it had given him such a vivid nightmare he had woken screaming at three in the morning. It must have been a movie or a movie trailer of some kind.

But it had seemed somehow so damned real.

‘Your data’s gone, mate, I’m afraid,’ Chris Webb said, irritatingly cheerily.

‘Yes, that’s what I told you,’ Tom said. ‘I need you to retrieve it.’

As the techie busied himself with the machine again, Tom, feeling lost without his computer and unable to concentrate on the magazine, stared at the displays of some of his company’s products, thinking they were all looking a bit tired, had been there too long, needed sharpening up.

He studied the Team Jaguar glass showcase, displaying an anorak, baseball cap, polo shirt, ballpoint pen, key fob, driving gloves, tie and headsquare, all in the Jaguar livery. There were some newer designs they had produced which should be in there, he thought. Then he turned his attention to another display – of mouse pads, pens, calculators and umbrellas all bearing the Weetabix logo. That needed bringing up to date also.

Olivia, his secretary, an attractive twenty-something who lurched from one man-crisis to the next, came into the room holding a Pret A Manger bag, mobile phone pressed to her ear in deep conversation. Behind her empty desk sat his best salesman, Peter Chard, in one of his trademark sharp suits, his hair slick, a doppelgänger for the actor Leonardo DiCaprio, engrossed in a motoring magazine and forking his way through a pot noodle. At the desk next to him sat Hong Kong-born Simon Wong, a quiet, ambitious thirty-year-old, busy filling out an order form. It was a new client and a decent-sized order; some small cheer, Tom thought.

A phone started ringing. Olivia, still engrossed on her mobile, seemed oblivious to it. Peter and Simon didn’t seem to hear it either. Maggie was out of the office at lunch.

‘SOMEONE ANSWER THE FUCKING PHONE!’ Tom shouted.

His secretary raised an apologetic arm and strode over to her desk.

‘So talk me through exactly what happened again,’ Chris Webb said, sounding exasperated as if he were addressing the class imbecile.

Both salesmen looked at Tom.

‘I opened my computer on the train this morning and it wouldn’t boot up. It was dead,’ he said.

‘It’s booting up fine,’ the techie said. ‘But there’s no data, is there? That’s why you’re not getting anything up on the screen.’

Lowering his voice in an attempt to lose his audience, Tom said, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘There isn’t much to understand, mate. Your database is wiped clean.’

‘Not possible,’ Tom said. ‘I mean – I haven’t done anything.’

‘You’ve either had a virus or you’ve been hacked.’

‘I thought Macs don’t get viruses.’

‘You did what I told you, didn’t you – please tell me you did. You didn’t hook this up to the office server?’

‘No.’

‘Lucky for that – it would have trashed your entire database.’

‘So there’s a virus.’

‘You’ve got something in there. Nothing’s wrong with your hardware. I just can’t believe you were so stupid – putting in a CD you found on a train. Jesus, Tom!’

Tom glanced past him. The rest of his team seemed to have lost interest. ‘What do you mean, stupid? It’s a computer, right? That’s what it does. It’s got all the anti-virus software – which you installed. It plays CDs. It ought to be able to play any CD.’

Webb held up the CD. ‘I’ve had a read of this, away from any machine it could harm. It’s spyware – it will reconfigure your software and plant God knows what kind of stuff in your system. You found it on a train?’

‘Last night.’

‘Serves you right for not handing it in to Lost Property right away.’

Sometimes Tom couldn’t believe he actually paid this guy to help him. ‘Thanks a lot. I was trying to be helpful – thought I might find an address on it I could send it to.’

‘Yeah, well next time it happens send it to me and I’ll look at it for you. So, apart from this, have you opened up any attachments you didn’t recognize?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I never do – you warned me not to, years ago. Only the ones that come from people I know.’

‘Porn?’

‘Jokes, porn, the usual stuff.’

‘I suggest you wear a condom next time you surf the net.’

‘That’s not even funny.’

‘That wasn’t a joke. You’ve picked up a very nasty virus; it’s extremely aggressive. If you’d logged on to your office server this morning, you’d have wiped that clean, and all your colleagues’ computers as well. And the backup.’

‘Shit.’

‘Good word,’ Chris Webb said. ‘Couldn’t have put it better myself.’

‘So how do I get rid of it?’

‘By paying me a lot of money.’

‘Great.’

‘Or you can buy a new computer.’

‘You really know how to cheer someone up, don’t you?’

‘You want the facts, I’m giving them to you.’

‘I don’t understand. I thought Macs didn’t get viruses.’

‘They don’t very often. But there are some floating around. You might have just been unlucky. But most likely it’s from this CD. Of course there is another possibility.’ He looked around, found the mug of tea he had put down a while ago, and swigged some down.

‘And what’s that?’ Tom asked.

‘It might be someone who is pissed off with you.’ After a few moments, Webb added, ‘Flash tie you’re wearing.’

Tom glanced down; it was lavender with silver horses. Hermès. Kellie had recently bought it on the internet in some closing-down offer – her idea of economizing.

‘It’s for sale,’ he said.