Page 12 of Read My Lips

Right now I was supposed to be covered in sweat and other bodily fluids, trying to sleep on an unfamiliar mattress while I figured out how to avoid sticking around for eggs and bacon. Not helping Simon retcon his sexcapades into non-existence. What a bastard for even asking me this.

Down the far end of the street, a bus materialized at the traffic lights. Simon followed my gaze. All I had to do was stand up and stick my hand out, and I’d be away from this disaster.

Simon brushed imaginary creases from his suit, as controlled and perfect as ever.

“You know what? Go home. I should never have got you involved. I’m being deeply selfish. It’ll work out.”

Fuck his smooth act. It wasn’t going to just work out. His career was about to get cremated, and my employment status would be incinerated right along with it whether I was there or not. And if I got on that bus, he had no reason to ever want to see me again. I’d be the shit who left him to drown.

“Oh shut up,” I grouched. “I’m not going home.”

CHAPTER

FOUR

Mapp and Green was a TARDIS of a place: all marble and modernity and oversized palms in pots standing around looking confused about whether they were real or not. The offices inhabited a run of three posh townhouses on a little cobbled square – wonky window panes and brick frontages that didn’t match, right in the middle of the turn-around muddle of the old City.

Except, the whole place, including the irregular chim-chim-iney roofline, was theatre. Behind the frontage, they’d knitted together a grid of steel and glass so solid they’d been able to take down every original internal wall and run a lift up the core of the new single building they’d snuck in on the footprint of the three that used to be there. Dead clever really. Nothing about the outside told you what was going on inside at all.

And I was never going to see it again if anyone found out Simon had decided to get all extracurricular with Richard bloody Whittaker.

“We’ve got a problem, babes.” Sev Duman’s high pitched voice squash-balled off the walls, echoing out into a string of incomprehensible whale noises as she cut across the lobby in the half-dark of not-quite morning. I groaned under my breath, already mapping signs, angling myself into Simon’s sightline to loop him in, as he split his focus between me and her.

The five-foot-four bottle-blonde with an undercut quiff of curls was infamously no-nonsense. If she said there was a problem, it was nuclear. As if this disaster of a morning could get any worse.

Her black patent Doc Martens squeaked against the high-shine tiles with every step closer, shrieking like a pair of angry mice trapped in an echo-chamber, making Simon grimace. Normally he didn’t need me for one-on-one chats, but this place threw everything off. The way he turned to beam at her, though, you’d never tell.

“Aside from Richard messing up again? Don’t worry, I’m on it. There’s no story if we can convince the general public it’s not him at all.”

“Except, it’s my film reel, isn’t it, genius?” Tension pitched her voice higher. “And identical camera angles. Buck stops with me as far as Mel’s concerned. Unless I figure out who leaked the bloody thing, it looks like I left the camera filming on purpose.”

Sev had been the only camera person on site the day we’d all gone down to Heybourne. News flash: his and mine weren’t the only careers this footage would total. A blank sort of worry slackened Simon’s face as I caught up interpreting her, but as quick as it came, the worry was gone.

“Sev, Mel loves you.” Reassuring voice. Forearm touch. Kindly smile. “She’d never accuse you of that. How’s Jo by the way?”

“In bed. Asleep. Where I should be.” She jabbed the call button for the lift a dozen times in quick succession. “And I know what you’re doing. Stop changing the subject. You can call your sister yourself, you know?”

He held his hands up. “I’m not changing the subject. Which floor?”

“Mel’s waiting in the boardroom.”

Simon slipped a finger into the collar of his shirt and tugged. “How lovely.”

An over-sweet waft from the energy drink Sev was clutching hit me with a Jägerbomb trauma flashback as she settled in against the side of the lift. Staring at Simon, she drummed her knuckles against the wall like a woodpecker on bennies.

“Now would be a really good time if you had something you wanted to tell me, because you should know Jo is plotting your slow and painful murder if you’ve been thick enough to try getting back at that pillock with my camera and some chancer in my editing team willing to take back-handers off you....”

“Oh my god,” I blurted. “Are you accusing him of a bit of late night international vengeance porn?”

“No?” Sev blinked at me like she’d forgotten I existed. “He’s practically family. Of course I’m not!”

Simon sucked his teeth with a chastising clack. “Sev, stop talking to Ben please. He’s working.”

“Sorry, course he is.”

Embarrassment lit my face hot. Good interpreters shut up and let everyone else do the interacting. This was not a three-way conversation. I was not on a break. Even if I signed at the same time as talking, I wasn’t here to join in. Where had my boundaries gone?

“So…” Sev’s face contorted, awkwardness rolling in all over again. “Someone did a really amateur job trying to wipe the sound, and they left half the layers in.” She tugged the longer bit of her hair at the front where it wasn’t close cropped to the sides like mine. “Not that I think you’re a vengeful harpy, babes, but it is incriminating…”