The Spare Afternoon at Holbrook Partners
The smell hit her first. Ground coffee, the good kind, and underneath it the particular staleness of carpet that had absorbed decades of worry. Priya Nair stood at the reception desk of Holbrook Partners on the fourth floor of a Victorian conversion in Bishopsgate, and noted that the rubber plant in the corner had not been watered in some time. Its lowest leaves had curled inward, dry at the edges. Nobody had noticed, or nobody had cared enough to act.
She had been sent to conduct a routine supplier audit. Three days, she’d been told. The files would be ready. The contact was a man named Gerald Fitch.
Gerald Fitch was not ready. He met her at the lift with a handshake that was slightly too firm and a smile that arrived a fraction too late.
“Miss Nair. We weren’t expecting you until tomorrow.”
“Wednesday,” she said. “I confirmed Wednesday in writing.”
“Of course.” He touched the knot of his tie. “Of course you did.”
The office he gave her was barely a room. A glass partition with a frosted stripe across the middle separated it from the open floor. She could see shapes moving on the other side, blurred and unhurried. The files were stacked on a table that rocked slightly on one short leg. She folded a business card and wedged it underneath before she sat down.
The files were immaculate. That was the first thing she noticed. Every receipt was flat. Every page was in order. She had audited enough companies to know that real filing had wrinkles, coffee rings, the odd handwritten note in the margin. These files had been tidied recently and thoroughly.
She worked through the afternoon while the building settled around her, radiators ticking, the low murmur of a telephone conversation somewhere beyond the partition. By four o’clock she had reached the catering supplier invoices. Twelve months of quarterly payments to a firm called Rencastle Foods Ltd, based at 14 Croft Passage, EC2.
She paused. She ate lunch on Croft Passage most Tuesdays. There was a sandwich counter, a charity shop, and a barber. She could picture the full length of it without effort. Fourteen would fall approximately where the barber stood.
She wrote the address on a notepad in pencil and moved on.
Gerald Fitch appeared at half five with a cup of tea she hadn’t asked for. The mug had a chip on the rim.
“Finding everything in order?” he said.
“Making good progress.” She accepted the tea and set it down without drinking it. “One question, actually. Rencastle Foods. Do you have a contact name there?”
Something happened in the space between his eyebrows. Very brief. A small compression, smoothed away almost instantly.
“Oliver Rencastle,” he said. “The director. Reliable chap. Why?”
“Just checking my notes. Thank you, Gerald.”
He left. She looked at the address again.
The following morning she arrived before Gerald and used the twenty minutes of solitude to cross-reference the company registration number printed on the invoices. Rencastle Foods Ltd had been incorporated nineteen months ago. The registered address was a mail forwarding service in Colchester. The sole director was listed as Oliver James Rencastle. The company had filed no accounts. It had no VAT number. It had supplied Holbrook Partners with an average of twelve thousand pounds’ worth of catering services every quarter for sixteen months.
She set her pen down on the table very carefully.
Gerald Fitch arrived at eight forty-seven smelling of aftershave and the Underground. She let him pour himself a coffee, let him exchange pleasantries with two colleagues, let him settle into his chair on the other side of the frosted stripe. Then she walked out to his desk.
“I need the delivery records for Rencastle,” she said. “Signed receipts for every order.”
The colour left his face in a way that reminded her of a window going dark.
“Those would be with the office manager,” he said.
“Wonderful. Let’s go and ask her together.”
There were no delivery records. The office manager, a composed woman named Sandra, confirmed that catering was arranged through a different supplier entirely, had been for years, a firm out of Bermondsey. She pronounced the name Rencastle with the mild puzzlement of someone encountering a foreign word.
Gerald Fitch sat down in the nearest chair. He clasped his hands between his knees.
Priya returned to her glass-walled room. She rang her director at the firm. She used short sentences and precise figures. She did not speculate. When she finished, she closed the file, straightened the edges, and placed it on the rocking table, which promptly shifted a fraction to the left.
She went to the kitchen and found, to her mild surprise, that there was a watering can under the sink. She filled it and carried it to the reception area.
The rubber plant took a long time to absorb the water. She waited until the soil had darkened all the way through, until it stopped looking thirsty, until it looked like something that might yet recover.
Behind her the lift doors opened. Two people in lanyards stepped out. They moved with the particular quiet efficiency of people who had been called in suddenly and knew exactly what they were there to do.
Gerald Fitch appeared in the doorway of the open floor. He looked at the watering can. He looked at Priya. He straightened his tie for the last time.
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