‘She’s got morning sickness and refused a drink at some do last week and apparently someone guessed.’
‘Megan didn’t have to say it was true? Or tell people you were the dad, did she? Fuck, Dan, is this why you only told me this weekend?’
‘She said she panicked, it came tumbling out. I was going to talk to you about how we handled it here … fuck.’
‘Know something about your mistress, and soon-to-be mother of your child, Dan? She’s a fucking lying bitch,’ Laurie said.
As she spoke, she felt a tap on her shoulder, and turned. The pasty pale, grinning face of Darren Dooley was in front of her.
‘Alright, brief? Want me to sort her out for you?’
Trudging back to the office from court that afternoon was the longest walk. Darren Dooley pleaded guilty and got off with community service and a suspended sentence. By contrast to Laurie’s gloom, he was cock-a-hoop.
Coming second in a happiness contest with a boy who’d thumped a newsagent in a row over a resealable pouch of mini Wispas, what even was life? Laurie offered him a wan smile as they parted.
‘Don’t rough up any more pensioners, from now on. OK?’
Laurie had never felt the truth of the idea of work being a comfort before, and many people wouldn’t have found hers a comfort. But she was good at her job, and it always felt like an absorbing, necessary thing to be doing.
And she had high standing at Salter & Rowson. Laurie was not only talented, she was diligent, and never rested on her laurels. Usually it was the plodders who were hard working and careful, and the naturally gifted who did an Icarus. Not Laurie. She quickly learned that the scariness of standing in front of magistrates was directly proportional to how thoroughly you’d done your homework. She was often up against worse-for-wear posh lads for the prosecution, almost proud of winging it, using cut-glass vowels like a scythe. Well, Laurie thought it was way more rock’n’roll to know your case back to front and wipe the floor with them.
‘Your Honour, I think you’ll find that, IN FACT …’ was the most overused phrase in her work vocabulary.
Mr Salter didn’t build an empire without being able to spot talent, and he had seen something in Laurie from the start.
‘You have that rare adaptability,’ he’d said at a Christmas do of years past. ‘You’re able to speak authoritatively in court and yet stay approachable with clients. Nor do you let the more ribald of your colleagues get a rise out of you, and without ever stooping to their level. You’re a one-woman masterclass in how to handle this job.’
Bharat had mimed two fingers down his throat behind Salter’s back, segueing into an audacious blow job mime that only Bharat would risk, an inch from his boss.
Whenever Dan admired her dedication in this way, she’d joke that as a woman of colour in a man’s world you had to work three times as hard to be thought of as half as good. A joke, except it was true. And she’d never got into trouble, she never fell over at the Christmas do.
Laurie also never asked for anything, perks or pay rises. Some male colleagues muttered that this was the key reason for her popularity with the bosses. But Dan getting ahead had been the win for both of them. Laurie had coached him and supported him and urged him on to get his departmental headship. She felt vaguely daft about that now, as a self-sufficient woman – it had never occurred to her that he might leave her, and she should be looking for advancement for her own sake. She’d not exploited her professional potential because her fulfilment was in her personal life.
Though in honesty, as much as Laurie knew Salter & Rowson thought the world of her, she still doubted they wanted the ethnic bird in board meetings. Dan used to joke that you wouldn’t mistake them for a Benetton poster.
God, she missed him. Or, a version of him that was now consigned to history.
When she reached Salter’s, the oldest of the receptionists, Jan, came racing out from behind her desk to put an arm around Laurie, to tut and coo: ‘Are you alright, love?’
‘Yes, thanks. Totally fine.’
‘But no, are you alright?’
Laurie had to find a way to peel her off without seeming ungrateful, although Jan only wanted to get close enough to make a rudimentary assessment of her alrightness, to inform the next hour’s speculation.
The other three receptionists stared at her, owlishly. Laurie shrugged Jan off as gently as she could and stumped up the stairs, considering that any further statement on how she was completely chill with her life partner now procreating with some ginger slagbag at Rawlings was only likely to make them suspect the opposite.
Partly what was fuelling the fascination was the unlikeliness of her and Dan being caught up in this. The Boring Smug Marrieds, the butter wouldn’t melts, the ordinary ones, the basics. The schadenfreude could power a wind farm.
Upstairs was barely better.
Michael saw her from a distance, beyond the transparent separation of the criminal department, and came dashing out on to the landing, while Laurie internally screamed: NO, DON’T. They’d worked together for a long time in criminal, Michael also at her level. He’d always made it clear he esteemed Laurie, treated her as one of the few sane voices.
Whenever Laurie walked into the lion’s den that was the main criminal department, she’d learned to deal with any playful laddish verbals that were thrown her way with wit and unshockability, putting antagonists in their place. She’d mastered navigating the locker room without compromising herself, and she was held in a degree of special respect for it. Michael was foremost among her fans, he’d made a friend of her.
Once, at drinks in the pub after work, when a secretary was wondering aloud how a presentable man like him wasn’t taken (Michael was handsome, in a forbidding, Rochestery way) he’d said: ‘Laurie Watkinson’s gone, so why bother? No one else will do’ and thrown a knowing smile her way. She’d not much minded, more surprised to have his approval than anything: Michael was mostly bone dry and pitiless. Now she’d been stripped of her protected Mrs Dan status, she didn’t know quite how to deal with him.
‘Are you OK?’ Michael said, squeezing her shoulder.
‘I’m fine, honestly,’ Laurie said, uncomfortable at the physical contact but without a way to stop it that didn’t seem rude.
‘I’m gobsmacked, I have to say,’ Michael said, hot paw still gripping her, giving her an intense, unwavering look that said: confide in me, I am on your side.
‘It is what it is,’ Laurie said, with a brave soldier’s smile, hoping if she repeated enough meaningless banalities, she could eventually kill everyone’s interest with boredom. Death by cliché.
‘Was he … was this going on while you were still together? It must’ve been. God. What a thing.’
Great, Michael, tactful. Laurie could already see how it was going to go; lots of prurient fishing, somehow made acceptable by first offering extravagant condolences. Claiming to care about someone or something, Laurie saw, could be highly manipulative. It was a way of ascribing yourself rights.
‘I’m fine, honestly,’ she said, ducking out of his line of sight as she pulled away towards her office.
Back at her desk, she saw Bharat was out, which was unfortunate as he’d have offered her protection and distraction. Diana said, after a tense silence which she spent near-audibly scheming how to raise it: ‘If you need to talk, Laurie, we’re here for you.’