My Clocking In System

Chapter 33: Matter

"Mr Flynn." Smooth. Warm. Nothing on the surface at all. "You’ve been out adventuring."

"Something like that."

"I hope the city treated you well."

She came round the desk. That was the thing about Naomi. She never let you talk to her across a barrier if she could help it. She always came round to your side, because people tell you more when there’s nothing between you, and she knew it.

"I won’t keep you. Only, when you have a moment. A quiet one. There’s a small administrative thing I’d like five minutes on." A little shrug. "Nothing urgent. The building keeps asking me questions I can’t answer, and I do so hate not having answers."

There it was.

Light as anything. A woman mentioning a chore.

The Knock went off in his chest like a struck bell.

She knows there’s nothing behind the company. She’s been to the registration. It led nowhere, the way it’s built to, and a thing that leads nowhere is exactly the thing a woman like Naomi cannot leave alone.

She’s not accusing me. She’s telling me she’s looking. And watching my face to see what it does.

Danny kept his face doing nothing.

He’d had a lifetime of practice keeping his face doing nothing on doorsteps while men decided what he was. It turned out to be the single most useful thing poverty ever gave him.

"Course," he said. "Whenever suits. I’m around."

"Are you, though."

She said it lightly. Smiling.

And it was the sharpest thing anyone had said to him since Jodie.

"That’s rather the question everyone’s asking. Whether you’re around."

A beat. Then she let him off it. Professional again. Because she’d made her point, and Naomi never made a point twice.

"I’ll find you when it’s quiet. Welcome home, Mr Flynn."

She went.

The bronze doors parted with a chime. Danny rode the lift up alone, and somewhere around the thirtieth floor he let out the breath he’d been holding since the lobby.

She was pulling the thread.

The company that led nowhere had done exactly its job. Led her nowhere. And the nowhere was the problem, because a real rich man has a paper trail and a mystery man has a hole where the trail should be, and Naomi Adeyemi had spent sixteen years learning to tell the difference.

She wasn’t going to the police. She wasn’t going to Priyanka.

She was going to come to him. Quiet. Five minutes. No barrier between them.

And she was going to watch his face.

And she was very, very good at reading faces.

So am I, now. That’s the one thing we’ve got in common, her and me. We both read people for a living.

Only I’ve got a phone that cheats.

The penthouse was exactly as he’d left it.

That was the strange part. Always.

Jodie’s flat had breathed while he was in it. The lamp. The machine. The coffee going cold. A place a person lived.

This place waited.

Beautiful and finished and holding its breath for him to come back and make it mean something.

Danny stood in the middle of three hundred square metres of the best address south of the river and had never in his life felt anything as loudly as he felt, right then, that he wanted to be back on a wall in Battersea eating a cold egg roll.

He put the kettle on.

He’d bought a kettle. Of all the things in the furnished palace they’d handed him, the one thing he’d gone out and bought with his own choosing was a cheap kettle for the enormous marble kitchen. Because the coffee machine frightened him, and a man should be able to make his own tea in his own house without reading a manual.

The phone lit on the island while it boiled.

[ Welcome back, host. ]

[ You have questions in your building now. ]

[ You felt one at the desk. There will be more. ]

[ This is the tax on the height. ]

[ You wanted the larger world. ]

[ It wants your name before it lets you in. ]

[ There is a door on Friday worth opening. ]

[ Say the word when you are ready to be looked at. ]

He read it twice.

Friday.

Mara’s word came back to him before he could stop it. The bored posh voice through a changing-room door.

Friday. Twelve thirty. Daddy’s club.

He didn’t know if it was the same door. He didn’t know if it mattered.

But the system had never once said a day out loud before. And it had said Friday. And somewhere below him on the thirty-ninth floor was a copper-red girl in gold hoops who’d said the same word into a phone she hated answering.

And with the word came the rest of her. Uninvited. The green costume coming toward him along the wet tile. The way she moved, all of her at once, nothing held still and nothing held back.

The full bounce of her tits against fabric that was barely coping with the job. The coconut. The laugh ringing off all that glass. The exact wet warm weight of her in his arms for one beat too long.

He put her out of his head.

He’d been in Jodie’s bed four hours ago. He wasn’t going to stand in a marble kitchen and think about someone else’s Friday.

Put it away, Danny.

He put it away.

"What’s on Friday," he said to the empty kitchen.

The gold line sat there a moment. Patient. It could afford to be.

[ A room you would once have been sent round the back of. ]

[ Bring the coat. Bring the face. ]

[ Leave the name at the door. ]

[ You do not have one they will like yet. ]

Click.

The kettle went off. Steam. The most expensive silence in London.

Danny made his tea in a cheap mug in a palace and stood at the glass and looked down at the whole grey sprawl of it.

The south bank, where a woman in his jumper was folding jumpers.

The estate, where his mum would come home that night to a letter she didn’t understand.

He knew what was in it. The gold line had shown him two words the night Kensington paid out: cleared in full. He hadn’t asked for it. She’d never know it was him. Both of those things mattered.

The streets full of doors that all had a number on them now. A price.

And he thought about Friday. And the room he’d once have been sent round the back of. And the fact that going in the front had never once, not one single time, been free.

Below him, thirty-nine floors down and one floor below that, the building went about its day. Full of people asking each other who the man in forty was.

Soon they’re going to find out something, he thought, standing there with his cheap tea.

The only question is whether it’s the thing I want them to find. Or the thing that’s actually true.

His phone buzzed.

He texted Jodie before he could think better of it.

survived the commute. thinking about that egg roll. and you. mostly you. slightly the egg roll

The three dots came up almost at once. She was meant to be working.

He liked that she wasn’t.

creep. get back to whatever it is you do that you won’t tell me about x

He looked at that one a long time.

yeah, he typed. whatever it is i do.

He didn’t send it.

He deleted it, and sent later x instead, and put the phone face down on the marble.

He drank his tea at the glass.

Forty floors down, Naomi Adeyemi ran the company name a third time, got nowhere a third time, and smiled. Nowhere was her favourite place to start.

One floor down, Mara Doyle lay on her bed with her phone held above her face, scrolled back to the grey dash, and started a fresh note under a heading she’d typed in capitals: THE FORTY PROBLEM.

And across the river, on a shop floor that smelled of steamed wool, Jodie Carter folded a jumper that wasn’t his, caught herself smiling at it, stopped, and smiled anyway.

Three women. Three questions. One lie holding all of it up.

Buzz.

The phone lit on the marble one last time.

[ One more thing, Danny. ]

[ Friday’s door has a guest list. ]

[ You are not the only name on it that matters. ]

He read it three times.

It didn’t say who.

It never said who.

***

End Of Volume One

Thank you for Reading.