“The coffee woman,” he said.
The doors opened. He put his hand against them and let me go first.
“I’d like to claim I didn’t recognise you. But I did. I have a good memory for faces and a better one for coats.”
“I offered to pay for it.”
“You offered me forty pounds.” He pressed the button for the ground floor. “I don’t need forty pounds.”
The lift went down. He watched the numbers.
“I’m going to need an operations director,” he said. “Someone who knows the estate and can hold a room. The post doesn’t exist yet. It would, by June, and it would come with a car and a salary that would make your husband sit down.”
“I’m not married.”
“Then it would make you sit down.” The doors opened onto the lobby and he held them again. “Present the review as it stands. Don’t go hunting for reasons to disagree with the numbers. If the conclusions hold, come and see me Monday.”
“And if I disagree with them?”
“Then you’ll be a regional manager with a lot of opinions.” He let the doors go. “Friday, Priya. Don’t be late.”
The page was dry by the time I got home. Coffee dries stiff, like paper that has been ironed with sugar in it, and the corner had shrunk so the sheet sat crooked on the kitchen table.
I read it under the overhead light with a cup of tea I didn’t drink.
Six branches. Ashfield was third on the list. Two of the others I would have closed myself, slowly, with a plan and a conversation with the staff first. Ashfield I would not have closed at all. It has been taking money for three years running. I compile those figures myself, every month, and I had the March set in my bag: up nine per cent on the year, best in the region, and the tills busy on a Tuesday afternoon.
At the bottom, in the footer, was a date. 12 March.
I got my phone out and scrolled back through my email until I found it. The trust’s note to managers, sent 16 April, subject line Appointment of Chief Executive. Five weeks. Somebody had printed a closure schedule five weeks before the staff were told Gideon Marsh existed.
There was writing in the margin. Not printer’s ink. Blue-black biro, small and level, running up the side of the table where a hand had steadied the page.
Ashfield: M out by Q3, P to sign.
I sat down. Then I stood up. Then I sat down again and read the line a fourth time, out loud, quietly, in my own kitchen, the way you say a thing to hear whether it is true.
M is a common letter. P is a common letter. There are three Ps in the regional directory, counting me.
But Marek has run Ashfield since before I could work a till, and he was the one who taught me to count a float and never to trust a stock figure I hadn’t walked myself.
I folded the page along its own wet creases, put it in the drawer under the takeaway menus, and did not call him that night.
That was the first thing I got wrong.
I took the page to Lena Whitcombe the next morning, and she looked at it for a long time. Longer than a person looks at something they have never seen.
Finance sits on the cold side of the third floor, where the radiators tick all day and give off nothing. Lena had two screens going and a cardigan over the back of her chair. I laid the sheet on her desk, coffee side up.
“This is a draft,” she said.
“It’s dated the twelfth of March.”
“Footers get reused. Somebody opens last year’s template and the date comes with it. You’ve been here eleven years. You know what our paperwork looks like when it’s live.”
She pushed it back towards me with one finger, and she pushed it by the dry corner.
There was a stack of the same cream paper in her printer tray. She saw me see it, and her hand came down flat on the stack, the way you quiet a dog.
“Was there a closure list before Gideon arrived?”
“No.” Fast. Faster than the question. “The review was commissioned in April. I sat on the panel that appointed him. If a list like that existed I would have been in the room when it was drawn up.”
