Trust No One by Alex Walters Read Free Book Online Page A

to be deflected now. ‘Otherwise some of the pages will be printed upside down. Right?’
    A glimmer of light shone in Darren’s eyes. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘You don’t want pages to be upside down.’
    She unfolded the sheet and spread it carefully in front of him. ‘OK,’ she said slowly, ‘so, now turn that sheet over and tell me what’s wrong with it.’
    She had expected him to turn the sheet over left to right, or possibly right to left. Instead, he grasped the sheet carefully between his finger and thumb and turned it over top to bottom. He stared at the upright print in front of him, and then looked up at her, his eyes bright with welling tears. ‘I’m sorry, miss,’ he said at last. ‘I can’t see anything wrong with it.’
    She could think of nothing to say. She peered over Darren’s shoulder through the glass partition that separated her office from the rest of the print room. Her assistant Joe was busily working at the large reprographic machine, his eyes determinedly fixed away from their direction.
    â€˜Tell you what, Darren,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you speak to Joe? Get him to show you how it should be done.’
    Darren nodded, his face brightening at the prospect of escape. ‘Thanks, miss. I will.’ He rose, almost falling over the chair in his eagerness to leave the office.
    â€˜Marie,’ she said through gritted teeth, as the office door closed behind him. ‘It’s Marie. Fucking Marie.’
    She shouldn’t drag it out. She should sack him now before it was too late, before he’d been working there long enough to have employment protection. She should sack him before she was tempted to kill him. She wasn’t a social worker. She was a businesswoman.
    Except, of course, that she wasn’t. That was the whole trouble. She was only pretending to be a businesswoman. Doing a pretty good job of it, some would say, managing to expand the business in the face of a recession. But still only playing.
    And if she was only playing, she might as well help out someone like Darren along the way. She knew Darren’s type from her early days as a policewoman. Disadvantaged. In Darren’s case, disadvantaged in virtually every possible way – socially, parentally, intellectually, physically. Without even the gumption to get himself into trouble. But that wouldn’t stop someone else getting him into it. Someone a bit smarter, more confident, more streetwise. Which narrowed it down to almost anyone else in the world. Someone would take advantage of Darren, exploit him for their own purposes, set him up, and leave him swinging gently in the wind when things went wrong.
    Maybe she could delay all that by a year or two if she kept him employed here. The only risk was that she might end up murdering him herself in the meantime. Particularly on a day like today. After everything that had happened.
    She was distracted by the buzz of her mobile phone on the desk. A text, apparently a routine domestic message: Running a bit late. See you 6.30. Just to remind her, in case she might have forgotten, today of all days, that all this – the business, the print shop, Darren and the rest – wasn’t really what it was all about.
    She rose casually and fumbled in her jacket pocket for the other mobile phone. Not the one she’d used hours before, in her hopeless call to the emergency services. The customized one that was left switched off until she needed it. She switched it on now.
    She dialled the familiar number and then, with the usual mild embarrassment, went through the authorization process – another anodyne code phrase. Salter’s voice, at the end of the line, gave the appropriate coded response.
    â€˜Good to hear your voice, sis.’ Salter’s little joke. They were supposed to converse as if in some non-intimate relationship. At some point, Salter had decided that he