Dark Avenging Angel (6 page)

When I returned to my desk, someone had placed a fresh-cream strawberry tart on my desk. I looked around. All the telephone-sales staff were on the phones. Most of the reps were out on calls. Just Rick remained.

He caught my eye, smiled and said, “Enjoy.”

Such a simple gesture. I mouthed
thank you
. If he’d declared a truce, although I had no idea why, maybe Steve would too.

I was in the process of wiping my hands on a tissue, after finishing the delicious tart, when Rick sauntered over to my desk.

“Stuart was out of order. We all know that. You’ve only been here five minutes. The trouble is, his garden comes first. We don’t know how he gets away with it.”

“His
garden
?”

“He bought a new house recently. His home’s newly built, so the garden needs landscaping. That’s his hobby. So, any fine day, you can expect him to be conspicuous by his absence, but, of course, if you should need to drop any papers off for his immediate signature, you’d know exactly where to find him.”

“If I knew his address. Which I don’t.”

Rick smiled. “I do.” He thrust a small, folded piece of paper at me. “Keep it handy, and next time he does a runner, see if you can’t catch him out.”

I smiled and tucked it away. “Thanks, Rick. I appreciate it.”

“Well, it’s my way of saying sorry for taking it out on you for missing out on your job. The truth is, I’ve never worked for a woman before. And I did think the job should have gone to Steve or me.”

I sighed. “Actually, I think you’re probably right. I don’t know why he offered it to me.”

“And then got you to lie for him. Oh yes, we all know. One little phone call to the
Yorkshire Chronicle
and your secret was out. Don’t worry about it. We all think it reflects badly on Stuart, not you. In case you hadn’t noticed, he’s not popular around here. Too much brownnosing the senior management and not enough hard graft. His day will come, though. I’m determined on that.”

Stuart emerged from his office.

Rick went back to his desk.

“Building bridges?” Stuart asked. He smiled as if nothing happened. I didn’t return the gesture.

“Something like that,” I said, and his smile faded.

“Have you had any thoughts on staff training? I want you to put a schedule together and let me have it by tomorrow morning. Okay?”

“It’s four thirty,” I said.

“So? Do you have a problem with deadlines, Carly?”

“No, of course not, but if I’m to do the job properly, I need to start by analyzing the staff’s individual and collective training needs. I’ve done that with the telephone-sales staff, so I’m pretty clear on where I’m going with them, but I need to complete my dual visits with the field-sales team before I can put their program together.”

“Tomorrow morning. Nine thirty. My office.”

Stuart left. By the addition of his coat and briefcase, he was going home. An hour early, as usual.

I turned to Rick. “Did you hear that?”

He nodded and came over dragging a chair.

“I’m okay with the telesales staff,” I said, “but it’s the reps…”

Rick smiled. “I’ll give you some tips. How much of this will work is a bit debatable. All the reps are older than you and have worked here years, so they won’t be that receptive to the new kid on the block teaching her grandmother to suck eggs, but you could include the usual stuff. Overcoming objections, closing the sale. That should do it.”

“Lots of role plays.”

Rick rolled his eyes. “Go on, torture them, why don’t you? All right, if you must.” He grinned, showing even, white teeth.

I felt a little stirring in my stomach. Rick Stryzko was a good-looking guy.

Between us, we’d mapped out a reasonable series of six training sessions for the reps, when they started to drift back in. Steve was one of the last. He seemed surprised to see Rick and me sitting together, chatting and laughing. Curiosity must have got the better of him because he came over.

“What are you two so happy about?”

“Getting one up on Stuart,” Rick said. “We haven’t done it yet, but we’re working on it.”

“About time he got what he deserves. Lazy git,” Steve said.

That evening, I worked until ten thirty, putting together the training plans for the telephone and field-sales teams. In the pre-home-computer world of 1979, typing accurately meant typing slowly, for me at least. Even still, there were one or two occasions I had to resort to the Liquid Paper correction fluid.

Finally, exhausted and relatively happy with my evening’s work, I slid my typed sheets into my document case and went to bed.

“It’s rushed. And it’s not what I wanted.”

I blinked. “I only had last night to do it.”

“You’ve been here four weeks. I expected more.”

“I didn’t know you wanted it so quickly.”

“What have you been doing all this time?”

“Getting to know the staff. The procedures. Trying to learn about display advertising without letting on I’d never worked with it before. I’ve also been concentrating on the telephone-sales staff as they seemed to be the less experienced team. I’ve been doing some side-by-side monitoring and training with the newer ones and generally getting a grip on how things are done here.”

He listened and nodded, and my mouth dried up. I wished I had a glass of water handy. Finally, I started coughing.

He ignored it. He tapped the sheets I had given him. “Typing’s not your greatest strength either, is it? In fact, I’m beginning to wonder what is.”

I stopped coughing and the silence between us grew heavy.

He sighed. “I wanted detail here. You say you will run a session on ten methods of closing a sale, but you haven’t specified how you’ll do it. Or when.”

“With such short notice, I haven’t had chance to run it by the team.”

“
Tell
them.”

“Sorry?”

“Give them a date. They’ll have to free up their schedules. Make it, say, three weeks from now. That should give you enough time to write up the lesson plan, training notes and any handouts.”

On top of the rest of my workload. But I agreed that was plenty of time.

“In fact, that can be your first session and I will sit in on it. Do the version for the telesales staff first. But I want to see the lesson plan and your notes. Better let me have those in ten days, so there’s plenty of time for you to make any corrections I need you to make. Agreed?”

I nodded. I clenched my fists and gritted my teeth, but I nodded. And then I worried.

Chapter Seven

I never went out. Whom would I go with, anyway? Work took up all my attention and energy, so that when I got home, I carried on, whether it was making notes for training sessions or thinking about them. I’d fix a small salad—a few lettuce leaves, half a tomato, a slice of thin ham. I daren’t eat any more. I was still too fat.

My worries invaded my dreams. Recurring nightmares in which I was alone, lost, searching for something. Always outside, on a deserted highway. I had no idea what I had lost or how I had got there, or even where it was, but, night after night, it seemed, I visited the same place.

In my dreams, I emerged on a dusty road. The sun beat down on me. All around me, crickets chirped—the sound almost deafening. I looked down at my dusty sandals, bare legs, dirty white shorts as if I had been rolling in sand, which, given the state of the roads and the barren countryside, was entirely possible.

A feeling of dread crept over me. I knew I had to get off the road and find my way back to…where? The hotel. I had to get back to the others in the hotel.

Who were they? Work colleagues? Friends? I had no idea.

I walked on and still those crickets chirped. Thousands of them filled the still air. The lightest of breezes fanned the sweat on my forehead.

I came to a crossroads, but the signs were too dirty and too high up to read. To the left, the dusty road petered out over a hill. To the right, it seemed to stretch for miles of nothing but arid land.

Behind me, I heard a rumbling. I turned and saw a dark-brown, swirling cloud moving fast. I had to get away from it.

That’s when I always woke up. In a sweat. Breathing hard.

Then, one night, I didn’t.

I carried straight on, running away from the cloud. The rumbling faded and soon I came to a fork in the road. To the right, lay the outskirts of a Spanish-looking town. White villas glinted in the sunlight.

I turned down that road and suddenly I was in the hotel. People milled about in the reception area. No one took any notice of me. I wandered down corridors, with no clue where I was going.

I opened a door and entered a large, brightly lit ballroom, full of people enjoying drinks. A lavish party was in full flow. Jewels glinted in tiaras. Men chatted in tuxedoes. Laughter echoed around the lemon-and-white walls. Glasses clinked. Chandeliers twinkled.

I felt out of place in my dirty white shorts and bare legs. I put a hand to my hair and found it tangled and mussed, as if I’d been caught in a gale. But the air had been practically still.

No one seemed to care. Judging by their smiles and greetings, they knew me, but I didn’t recognize a single one.

“Here, let me buy you a drink.” A tall man with slicked-back, glossy hair handed me a glass of champagne.

“Thank you,” I said and sniffed it. It smelled of nothing. I tasted it. Nothing. A typical dream drink.

He spoke with a pleasant European accent I couldn’t place at first. “Now we shall dance.” A band struck up. Where it came from, I had no idea.

We whirled and twirled to the strains of “The Blue Danube”. As I don’t dance, I amazed myself with my perfect waltz.

“You look familiar,” I said. “I don’t know why.”

He laughed and said something in a language I recognized but didn’t understand. Italian.

All eyes were on us as he lifted me up, twirled me around and set me down. A round of applause echoed around the room. I caught sight of my reflection in a floor-length, gilt-edged mirror and gasped. I never looked like that.

I’d been transformed. My hair was expertly styled in a classic chignon. Diamonds glittered at my throat. My gown was pure-white, flowing Grecian style.

The man whispered in my ear, “You can have anything you want.
Everything.
”

Night after night, I dreamed this scene. It always ended there, or on a variation of that.

Sometimes, instead of the ballroom, he would come to me and hand me a plate of delicious-looking food in the dining room, which was laid out as a massive buffet. Always a glass of champagne. I would pick up a dainty salmon vol-au-vent, bite into it and taste nothing. Just as with the drink.

The man always looked identical and seemed familiar. Not just because I kept dreaming about him, but because my dream self knew him, even if I didn’t. Oddly, he bore more than a passing resemblance to a singer whose music I would come to admire. But I didn’t know of that artist then. He only came to fame in the mid-1980s.

This recurring dream disturbed me more and more as the days went on. Too many contrasts. A feeling of fear and loneliness at the beginning, culminating in a weird, inexplicable euphoria at the end.

During the day I tried to put it out of my mind. I mostly succeeded too.

Each day at work became a battleground. I never knew what new traps Stuart was going to lay for me.

“I really need some training,” I said most days, hoping one day the message would get through. “Is there anything I should be doing that I’m not doing now?”

“No,” he would say. “Carry on.”

But apart from formulating and delivering the staff-training programs, I really had no idea what I should be doing to manage the department.

As a result, I tended to lean more heavily on Rick and Steve, who had now become almost friends. It didn’t go unnoticed by some.

“They’re after your job. You need to be careful,” Jane said. “If you don’t mind a little friendly advice, I’d say you need to assert yourself more. Keep a little distance.”

I knew she meant well and I nodded and thanked her. But I had no idea how to follow her advice. This fish wasn’t just out of water; it was flapping about on the beach, lost and disoriented.

The day of the dreaded first group-training session came all too quickly. I had begun to get on quite well with the telephone-sales staff. At least with them, I had landed in familiar territory. Many of them had received only minimal induction training and the art of professional selling was new to them.

They chatted as they settled themselves down at chairs and desks in the training room. The sun had been shining through the windows on this warm June day and the heat would have sent even the liveliest of them to sleep. I opened windows and some of the girls followed my lead. Now, with a pleasant through draft, we were ready to begin.

The door opened and Stuart strode in.

The girls clammed up.

He took his seat at the back of the room.

I had my flip charts prepared, my notes rehearsed and in front of me, in case I got lost for whatever reason. The material was familiar; I had delivered elements of this session many times at the
Chronicle
.

I moved around the room and involved each of them at one point or another. I even involved Stuart, although I only did that once, as his frown told me I’d made a mistake there.

I got them performing role-plays, initially with me as the customer and then in pairs, while I circulated the room, listening, making notes. Then I held a final session where we ironed out some common answers to objections frequently raised by customers.

As I concluded, they gave me a round of applause. Unexpected, but gratifying. There had been laughter, participation, and a number of them made a point of telling me not only that they had enjoyed it, but also that they felt they had learned something they could immediately put into practice.

“That was brilliant, Carly.”

“I really enjoyed that.”

“I can use that. It feels really natural. Thanks, Carly.”

It couldn’t have gone better and I felt exhilarated at their newfound enthusiasm. Had I turned a corner here?

“Carly, can I see you in my office, please?” Stuart wasn’t smiling, but surely he couldn’t be angry with me this time, could he?

“Close the door. Sit down.”

A hand of fear clutched at my gut. Now what?

He steepled his fingers and rested his elbows on the desk.

“I’m not sure what I witnessed there, but that is not how I expect you to deliver a training session.”

I stared at him. “Pardon?”

“You move around far too much. You should stay in front of the class and sit down so you can refer to your notes easily. I can see I’ll need to show you.” He sighed. “I really thought training was something you could do, but now I see I was wrong. I had high hopes for you, Carly, but they seem to have been sorely misplaced. You may have reminded me of Fizz initially, but any resemblance to her was clearly coincidental.”

I couldn’t find any words. I swallowed. Had we been in the same session? Was this because I had called on him at one point? And why the constant harking back to this woman, Fizz? Right now, I was sick of the sound of her name.

The silence lengthened.

Finally, I trusted myself to speak. “This is the way I was trained at the
Chronicle
. We found that training was much more effective if we made sure everyone enjoyed it, and people remember more when they learn by practicing, rather than just being lectured.”

Stuart laid his hands flat on the desk. “That’s not the way I want it done here. In future, I expect to see you sitting behind a desk at the front of the room. Clear?”

I said nothing. I stood and marched out of his office. I didn’t slam the door, but I didn’t close it too quietly either. This didn’t go unnoticed by one of the telephone-sales staff.

“I just want to thank you for that training we just had,” she said. “I really enjoyed it. Much more than
his
sessions.” She nodded towards Stuart’s office, where he sat, head bent, reading some papers. “He just sits there, going on and on. And he never opens a window. I fell asleep once and he didn’t even notice. I’d have fallen off my chair if Hazel hadn’t nudged me and woken me up.”

“Thanks, I appreciate that.”

She smiled and one of her colleagues let out a whoop.

“I just sold this customer a series. I did what you said, Carly—instead of asking him if he wanted to advertise, I asked him whether he wanted to promote his gas fires or his cookers. He’s advertising his cookers for a whole month. I’ve been trying to get him to do that forever. I’ll get my bonus now!”

Stuart opened the door of his office. “Well done, Sandra,” he said and avoided my eyes.

My angel showed me a vision that night. And I wished to God she hadn’t.

I had been watching TV. More accurately, TV had been playing in the background while inside my head, thoughts whirled and I seethed. My anger against Stuart welled up, and now I wanted to hurt him.

As that thought struck me, my angel moved out of the shadows and stood in the center of the room. Her cloak still covered her slim form and the hood shielded much of her face. But, tonight, my angel appeared different. A half smile played around her dark lips and she lifted her arms. The cloak fell away and, for the first time, revealed the bloodless ivory of her skin.

I gasped as her hood fell back and a mass of pure-white hair tumbled to her shoulders. Now I saw her face as I had never seen it before. Bone-white, unnaturally high, chiseled cheekbones. Her lips, blacker than any lipstick. And her eyes. How could I have missed the clustering darkness that swirled within them in ever-darker shades of black? Power surged from those eyes. Power that penetrated my skin, and smelled of long-dead bodies.

I recoiled, my hand over my nose. Fear surged through my body. She was revealing herself to me, as she really was, for the first time.

A memory. Christine and the other girls running away terrified. This must have been what they saw.

I shrank back in my chair. I didn’t know her anymore. Maybe I had never known her. The thought chilled me.

“Who are you?” My voice was no more than a nervous whisper.

She lowered her arms and the cloak fell back over them. But her hair still cascaded over her shoulders, a waterfall of pure, gleaming white.

I will show you.

In one deft move, she threw off her cloak and stood before me, almost translucent. Her rail-thin body was draped in a black, diaphanous silk shroud of a gown that stretched below her ankles and concealed her feet. As her gown shimmered it pulsed with a rainbow of light.

Figures emerged as if etched on her body. Bodies that writhed and squirmed, their faces contorted in fear and pain. Horrified, I realized these had once been human but were no more. I stared as the skin on their entangled arms and legs melted away to leave blanched bones that rattled as their screams grew louder, more intense. Ear splitting.

I curled myself into a ball, my head between my knees. I clasped them tightly. I tried in vain to block out the awful sound. Surely my neighbors would hear and come banging on the door.

But no one came.

The noise stopped. I hesitated, hardly daring to move. I uncurled myself and gazed around the empty room.

Had I imagined it? I had long since accepted the supernatural being that was my dark angel. But now I had to accept there was far more to her than I could have guessed in my wildest dreams—or nightmares, come to that. And what I learned sent tentacles of fear clutching at my spine.

I needed a drink, and a bottle of wine stood open, ready for me in the kitchen. I crossed the floor exactly where my angel had stood. Beneath my bare feet the carpet felt damp, as if someone had tipped a glass of water over it. I bent down and touched the floor, then brought my fingers to my nose. They smelled of nothing. The rest of the carpet felt dry. Just that one patch where she had stood.

God knows how hard I tried to make sense of what happened in that room. I couldn’t get the screaming of those tormented souls out of my mind. The memory of the rattling of their bones set my teeth on edge. I had no name to call this entity that had been part of my life for so long.

And until tonight, I had never seen a glimpse of her arms. Her hands, yes, when she held the ledger, but, then, with the sleeves of the cloak so long and voluminous, I saw little more than her fingers. To discover the whole unearthly whiteness of her shocked me. But more than that, the images she had shown me…

So anyone I consigned to her ledger would suffer the fate of those tortured souls. That had to be it. My father was already listed in her book of vengeance. One day he too would suffer the fate of so many before him. Did Stuart Campbell deserve this?