I swallow, my mouth dry, wondering what idea I’ve had.
‘She was telling me,’ Bella continues, ‘that she’s noticed how most of the aesthetic clinics round here just focus on the usual – Botox, fillers, IPL – but Tabby said she’d heard from a few customers that they’d love it if we also offered some beautician services.’
Caroline’s gaze bores into my soul and I find myself waxing lyrical about a brain wave I never had. ‘A pedicure with your fillers, lash extensions alongside IPL… that sort of thing. I was thinking, if we bundled up the procedures, we could give discounts, really make it attractive to our clients.’ I smile, selling it with shiny teeth, jazz hands at the ready.
Caroline grips the skin at the top of her nose and closes her eyes. I dart a look at Bella and mouth a thank you. She shakes her head quickly and it’s then that I realise this was her big idea. She’d spoken about something she was excited to run by Caroline the other day – this must have been it, and she’s using it to save me. She should be using it to get a promotion! I feel terrible but, at the same time, I need this job. I’m not sure I could cope with interviews and job hunting, with telling Rick I’ve been fired, with failure in my professional life as well as my personal.
‘Fine,’ Caroline retorts. ‘But this is the condition,’ she snaps, pausing. ‘Annabella, you’ve been asking for an assistant for a while.’
‘But…’ Annabella protests unsuccessfully, Caroline bulldozing her way through the conversation.
‘Well, here she is. She’s not very experienced but you seem to believe in her. Let’s hope you’re right to.’ Caroline turns to me. ‘Understood?’
With that, they both leave to start the working day. Caroline will be in the office for another hour or so, then leave early to ‘work from home’. Bella’s first patient will arrive imminently, and I’ll have to get through the day without an electronic schedule because Caroline’s frozen me out of the system. I put in a call to the external IT department, leave a message, then tug the cardboard box Caroline had packed for me out from beneath the reception desk, its bottom scraping across the floor, too heavy to lift. I begin putting my things back in their places, but end up throwing away most of it, a worrying amount of nothing but worthless junk from years of being sat in the same seat.
By midday, I’m hunting for things to do – still logged out of my computer – the day’s patients slow and steady, a quiet weekday, the kind of day I long for when it’s Saturday afternoon and there’s barely time to breathe. I sort through the office post next, swiping my palm across my face, still reeling from what happened earlier, wondering how I’ll ever face Caroline again. I’d have to start looking for a new job, what Bella had done for me had given me a lifeline, sure, but Caroline didn’t want me here and that was the bottom line. I pick up the first envelope addressed to the surgery and edge my index finger into the top of the triangular fold.
Job application: Dr Alex Daniels.
We get a couple of these a week. Mostly they’re sent in over email but the ones that are posted are usually of a higher quality. I’ll find a smart covering letter and a sharp CV inside, then I’ll pass it up to Caroline and let her deal with it. But something about this application gives me pause. The photo.
An olive-skinned, green-eyed man beams from the corner of the wedges of paper, his perfect proportions distorted by the paperclip pinned over his face. It’s not a headshot, but a selfie, and I glow with the fact that I’d applied here with a selfie, too. I read through his CV, devouring the contents – a medical degree from the University of Toronto, a specialisation in plastic surgery from somewhere in Paris, a keen traveller whose life has brought him, right here, to London.
A mobile number glistens beneath his sign off and, before I know it, I’ve committed another fireable offence, his digits added to the contacts in my phone. If Caroline finds out about this, I’m dead.
Annabella
Now
Chad had left me alone in the pub with a final bill and sorry eyes, though I’m sure if I’d squinted I’d have seen the dollar signs in his pupils – he’d taken me for a ride and I was supposed to be grateful.
First the police, now him. His parting shot was to ask me out for dinner – he told me he’d been wanting to do it for a while, that part of the reason for him terminating our contract was so we could start dating.
‘I can’t ignore this spark between us any longer…’
‘Well,’ I’d replied, angling a pointed look at his wedding ring. ‘I certainly can.’
The truth was, I’d given up on dating since Tabby went missing. Her disappearance had isolated me, sent me back into the cocoon I’d inhabited before she’d come along and pulled me out of it. I’d stopped connecting with people, their questions, their problems, their lives. I just didn’t have the energy to care about anyone else the way I still cared about her.
Tabby had meant so much to me that when she vanished, I think part of me did too.
I push a soggy bag of broccoli into the microwave – the last thing left in the fridge – contemplating how I’ll deal with the forever fact that I’ve failed my friend. Coming up to five years gone, and not a single step forward.
I must start over, begin a new life, forgive myself. I begin to close the dozens of webpages I’d kept open in relation to Tabby’s case, the blue from my computer illuminating my face, the night sky twinkling through the dark kitchen windows, when an email catches my attention.
Subject: Tabitha Rice.
Dear Annabella,
I hope this finds you well. I am getting in touch with you about Tabitha Rice, your missing colleague/friend. I have followed her story over the years with interest. In fact, I was part of the team at the London Times who first reported on it. I have been putting together information on her case for the past year and I plan to launch a true-crime podcast about it. I hope it will lead to new evidence and that we might be able to help figure out what happened to her.
I’ve been digging through early media coverage and wanted to talk to you about the allegations you made against Rick Priestley in the early days.
Please contact me if you’d like to be involved. I’d be grateful for any input you’re happy to make.
Do write back or call me on the number below.
Yours sincerely,
Kay Robero+447516177089
My eyes choke over the words. Another lifeline. But this one’s different, this is public, this is the media. In the past I’d deemed it too risky, too uncertain. I search Kay’s name in Google, my brain wired, long past bedtime, and retrieve a cavern of information about her illustrious career in journalism, articles pinging back with headlines such as London’s rising star … Journalist of the year… I realise I’ve read her pieces before, all of them, dozens of times, in the weeks after Tabby went missing. Her website tells me she left traditional journalism a year ago, citing a desire to work on a new project, a true-crime podcast series that she hoped to release this year. I scan my eyes over the headshots accompanying Kay’s biography: fierce and unsmiling, plain and untouched. Kay is the kind of person who demands to be taken seriously, who doesn’t want anyone to make the mistake of complimenting her looks before her capabilities. I learn from her website that she’s part Nigerian, part Spanish, educated in Scotland, and that she’d sent a serial rapist to jail last year after she dug up a raft of new evidence against him. I begin to get excited – Kay could really reinvigorate this case. I scrape my hair from my face into a ponytail as I think about it. Perhaps it makes sense to get involved, especially if someone revered is behind this investigation, someone who’d been there from the beginning, someone with an automatic fan base and considerable resources.