Pest Control

Art by Dulcie Power

Dominic held a plastic cup six inches above the ground. He was still.
The mouse was backed into a corner, hidden behind a plant pot and caught between two intersecting panels of wood at the far end of the garden. It had nowhere to run. It all came down to this. Eventually, it always came down to this.
               Dominic slowed his breathing. He had become overexcited. Four months earlier he’d gained approval from the local council to extend the back of his garden into the empty fields which sat behind it. The mice had been a problem ever since then. He’d been warned of this by the surveyor who had come round to assess the impact of his extension, and potential destruction to the habitat of the mice had been one of the major reasons that the planning request had initially been rejected. But Dominic had persisted. They were just mice, he’d argued. Basically nothing, in the grand scheme of things. The council had disagreed with his arguments, but the envelope of cash that he’d slipped to the second surveyor had changed things considerably. The mice had moved on, his official report had read. And they were bad mice anyway, he’d said. Prone to trafficking illness to other wildlife. The extension would be a net-positive for everyone involved. The other mice would probably appreciate it.
               And so, the field was dug out, the fenceposts moved, and fresh lawn placed. Dominic liked his garden simple, and neat. Flat green grass, watered daily, and a border of potted plants. Those were mostly tulips, a favourite of his mother, planted to provide an infinite supply of presents for visits to her home. Unfortunately, he hadn’t known that a favourite pastime of mice was digging up the bulbs of tulips before they bloomed, and so far, not even one had reached its potential under his care.
               So Dominic killed the mice. He’d laid traps, he’d concreted holes, and he’d set out poison pellets. The mice didn’t know better, and they weren’t suspicious of the free food that they now found lying around in their former home. They were losing a war they didn’t realise they were in. For twelve weeks, Dominic woke up with hatred in his heart, and for twelve weeks he found a smile brought to his face by the sight of little mice, lay on their backs, their own hearts cold and still.
               As far as Dominic could tell, this was the last mouse. The tulips had begun to flourish in the past couple of weeks. He didn’t even really need to kill this one. He’d stopped using the poison, and the traps had all been thrown away, mice still attached. For this last one, he would just use a cup. Something inside him said that this was the correct way to do things. It was a mark of respect for the last mouse standing. He’d earned the dignity of mercy.
               Dominic slowly slid the plant pot to one side, watching that gap close as he covered the other side with the cup. The mouse had a choice now: stay where it was, or make a run for it, directly into the waiting plastic. For Dominic, it was just a matter of time. And he was a patient man.
               Thirty-five minutes later, the mouse appeared. Cautiously, taking tentative steps, it approached the cup, and entered. Dominic had slowed his breathing down to a sub-normal pace. He’d barely noticed the minutes passing by.
               As the mouse made its way deeper into the cup, Dominic slowly tipped it back, trapping the animal at the bottom of a waterless well. It panicked for a moment, jumping and scraping at the sides, then was still - fully exerted, and accepting of its new circumstances. Dominic felt a jolt of excitement at his catch. He stood in the garden for a long time, smiling down into the cup. The mouse looked back at him, not smiling, not doing anything really. Just existing. Dominic tried to imagine that its eyes were conveying hatred, or rage, but in reality, he knew there was nothing there. It was just a mouse in a cup. He didn’t really know what to do with it. The traps and the poison had taken this moment out of his hands in the past, and although he had obviously chosen both of those previous methods of execution himself, he had felt distant to the killing. Anything that happened now would feel personal, and intimate. He was entirely in control. The initial plan upon grabbing the cup was to let the mouse live – take it elsewhere, far away from his house, or even just deeper into the field. But now he had the mouse, he looked at it and he worried. He worried about what could happen if he let it live. What if it went away and had lots of mice children, and brought them back here to the garden? What if it was a lady mouse, and it was already pregnant, ready to spill newer, smaller problems all over the grass near his home?
               His phone rang. Still holding the cup, he answered it. It was the front desk at work, passing on the message that they needed final approval on a project. He told them he’d be there soon, and he laughed that he was just finishing up with the mouse problem that he’d told them about months before. They laughed too. See you soon then. Yes, see you soon.
               Dominic ended the call and put his phone away. He looked around the garden. His little empire. Plain, tidy, tulips blossoming nicely. Nothing was out of place, and everything was how he had imagined it. He tilted the cup at an angle and the mouse slid out into his waiting palm. He held it there for a moment, and it didn’t try to run. He could see its little heart beating rapidly in its chest. It was big-eyed, and very pretty. Its brown fur reminded him of the hair of his first childhood crush: Sarah. It had never worked out. He slowly closed his fist until he felt a crunch against his palm. He threw it over the fence. He had to go to work.

2

               Dominic’s parking spot had been taken again. Bradley’s Audi again. It was a deliberate retaliation for telling him earlier in the month that it was too flashy a car for their line of business, too much of an invitation for unwanted questions. Bradley hadn’t liked that, so now Dominic was left to park on the far end of the carpark, amongst all the insurance claims handlers and recruitment agents who they shared the building with. He would speak to Malcolm about this. Before he did anything else, he would speak to Malcolm about this. Before he left work today, he would speak to Malcolm.
               The building was unremarkable. The clock on the front didn’t work, and it chimed at random hours throughout the day. It was chiming now, as Dominic climbed the stairs and entered the building, nodding and mouthing a greeting to the building manager, Gary, engrossed in a Netflix show behind his desk, unbothered by the comings of goings of who he assumed to be your average wage-slave yuppies. He raised a hand in acknowledgment, and Dominic beeped himself into the elevator.
               He got off on the fifth floor, which was sandwiched between two vacant offices, above and below, which his company also owned. They acted as a buffer of sorts, and so far it had worked, more or less. One time a delivery driver had accidentally stepped out onto the fifth, his finger having slipped on the keypad without him noticing, but he had been quickly redirected to the 8th by Kelsey from the front desk, proud owner of the kindest face you could imagine seeing upon exiting a lift. She was mid-fifties, red-headed, and had a smile that could melt steel. Dominic waved to her now, and she welcomed him with a flirtatious compliment, the kind that was in touching distance of being inappropriate without actually reaching it. Dominic blushed, as he did every time that she pushed that particular button of his. She loved flustering him – loved flustering all of the young men who worked there. She didn’t know what they did exactly, through the closed double doors to her left, but she knew that whatever it was made them powerful people, and she got a thrill out of extracting a bit of that power each day.
               As usual, Dominic’s card took a few swipes, but eventually he was able to enter the office. The room was open plan, dark, and more or less everyone was currently crowded around three big screens in the centre. They looked over their shoulders as he entered, and he heard a few mutterings of dissent regarding his lateness. This was common, and would never go above mutterings.
               ‘Okay, I’m here, run it start to finish.’
               On the central screen a video player was reopened, and a video reverted to the beginning. The opening frame was that of a dark staircase in a family home. The stairs were carpeted in dark red, and the flash of the recording camera showed a line of family portraits on the left-side wall as they ascended upwards. The camera lingered on a large photo at the head of the stairs, showing two parents and four children. One of the children wasn’t playing along with the photoshoot, frowning at the photographer. The family didn’t look like anyone, but also looked like they could be anyone. Middle-class, white, perhaps American, but maybe French. Average people with blonde hair and warm smiles. The video continued, and whoever was filming entered a bedroom. Pink walls, a rainbow painted across one of them. A woman lay face down, dead, in the middle of the room, and a man in paramilitary gear stood over her, his foot on her head and the stock of an AK47 resting on her back. He looked calm, and he smoked a cigarette. On the bed, a small girl was being held in place in the lap of another soldierly man, her screams muffled by one large hand across her mouth. The man was laughing like he was playing with a younger sibling. Both men expressed joy at the arrival of the cameraman, and the one holding the little girl let her go. Instead of trying to escape, she ran to the woman on the floor, pushing the killer’s foot off of her mother’s head with both hands. She screamed, and cried, and begged her mother to wake up, speaking in accented English. For ten seconds this remained the scene, then the barrel of the rifle came into frame again, and the girl was killed, shot in the head, collapsing on top of her mother.
               The video ended, and everyone turned to look at Dominic. He waited in the silence, knowing it would build a tension inside each of them that would make the positive feedback feel even better.
               “Well, it’s good. Good work. The frowning kid in the photo is a nice touch-”
               “That was my idea!” said Bradley. Dominic suppressed a groan.
               “-but there’s a few things that need changing. Firstly, our men are too brown. We’re going for Kurdish, remember? The shooter looks like Black Panther. So just wheel back that gradient by like thirty percent or something.” They all laughed at his joke, and one of the engineers span back around to his desk, opening the prompt and making some edits. Within thirty seconds of him pressing enter, the man with the gun was back on the screen, looking much paler.
               “Okay, that’s good. Also, change the rainbow on the wall to something else. We don’t want to distract people with conversations about queers. Make it something more specific, maybe a branded mural sort of thing? Darcy, you look online and see if there’s anything we can model it off of. Oh and, big one, his AK, the charging handle is on the wrong side. Come on guys. You gotta be looking for this stuff.”
               “Oh come on, once it’s compressed and sent out, there’s no way anyone would have spotted that,” said Bradley, “It’s going to be blurry as shit. We don’t need to change it!”
               Bradley had a point, but today wasn’t the day for him to be making it.
               “Change it. Also, the girl, put her in a Minecraft t-shirt.”
               Several people in the room responded with excitement to this idea, and several others laughed. It was a good detail, and it was the kind of thing that separated Dominic and made him the supervisor.
               He went to his desk and logged in. Eight unread emails. He sighed deeply. Four were about mandatory training sessions he had to complete before next week, one was an invite to the office’s Fantasy Football league, one was a company wide acknowledgement of the money raised by a recent charity walk, and two were from Malcolm.
               SOLID WORK. The subject of the first filled Dominic with pride. Learn from this. The subject of the second made him want to throw up. He clicked on the first. It was a link to a BBC news article, published a day earlier, covering the Manchester Met’s fumbled investigation into the suicide of a journalist three weeks prior. At the top of the page was an embedded video that was immediately familiar to Dominic, showing apparent CCTV footage of said journalist stumbling home through the streets of Manchester, crying and drunk. Dominic smiled to himself. He could open the second email at a later date. He felt good right now.
               He clicked on one of the training emails. A twenty-minute course about recognising signs of modern slavery in the workplace. Twenty minutes was nothing. He opened the course player and zoned out, thinking of the tulips and the mouse.
               Ten minutes later the team called him over. They’d made his requested changes, and after watching the whole video through once again, and after checking the faces of the men against the mugshots he’d been sent three days earlier, he gave his team the thumbs up to compress the video to within an inch of its life and leak it out to their various connections. The in-person thumbs up acted as an official sign off within the team, as Dominic was reluctant to put his name to anything on paper. Every time he did the thumbs up, he felt very powerful.

3

               Four weeks later, it was the office Christmas party. The company held it in August for reasons that Dominic had once known but had now forgotten. This year they were doing axe throwing and karaoke. There was strictly no work talk on the Christmas social, but staff who were in the know often enjoyed finding subtle ways to prod at the truth in front of those who were outside of the know. An example of this was Bradley singing Sympathy for the Devil on karaoke, a decision that aroused a volley of semi-stifled laughs when the track title appeared on the screen. As he hit the chorus for the second time, Dominic was returning from the bathroom, and in the corridor outside of the rented room, he was intercepted by a grinning Kelsey.
               “You haven’t sang yet!” she shouted. It was loud in the corridor, but not that loud.
               “Ah, it’s um, not really my thing Kelsey. I thought that was obvious.”
               “No, no, no. Axe throwing wasn’t really your thing. That was obvious. But karaoke is easy. You can be shit. It doesn’t matter. I’d still enjoy watching you.” She was very close to him now, and speaking more softly above the din. Dominic’s heart was racing. He felt like the mouse.
               “You should sing instead! You’d be much better.”
               Kelsey frowned up at him, “I have sung. Twice! Were you not watching me?” She adopted a mock sad face, like a child’s, looking up at him. He hadn’t noticed before because she was always sat behind a desk, but he was a quite bit taller than her. He struggled to keep his eyes on her eyes.
               “No I did watch, you were great. But I just think you should sing again. I want to watch you again is what I mean.”
               “Dominic. Sing one song for your good friend Kelsey, and you can watch whatever you like.”
               He realised how drunk she was now. He could see it in her eyes. There was the usual delight at his growing discomfort, but there was also a second thing that went further. She knew it could go further. And as that thought appeared in his mind, it dawned on him too, that it could definitely go further, and that tonight, it very well might.

               Dominic sang Every Breath You Take, and muffled laughs were drowned out by the whooping of Kelsey. She didn’t take her eyes off of him for the entire runtime of the song, and it gave him a confidence he hadn’t felt before. On the way to the next bar, they split off down an alley, kissing and pawing at each other. Within five minutes they were in an Uber back to Dominic’s house, and within thirty minutes they were in his bed. Once there, his newfound confidence melted away. He sheepishly explained his lack of experience as Kelsey fumbled with his belt. She brushed it off, promising to look after him.
               In the morning, Dominic awoke heavy-headed and happy. Kelsey was already dressed, rooting around on the floor for a sock or some other such thing. He sat up, grinning, and asked her if she had somewhere to get to. She ignored him, checked her phone, then left the room silently. Dominic was confused. He threw on some joggers and followed her down the stairs. He watched quietly as she slid an un-socked foot into a thigh-high boot, trying to formulate a question in his mind that didn’t sound pathetic. Kelsey slipped on her other boot, fully socked, and opened the front door. As she stepped out, she turned around and regarded him for the first time.
               “You’re a sick fuck.”
               She left the door open.

               Dominic spent the rest of the day in bed, agonising. He had grown up anxious, but he’d never felt anything like this before. He simply couldn’t remember what had happened. Distractions didn’t help. TV didn’t help. Fresh air didn’t help. He decided in the afternoon to drink again, if only to numb the feeling. All that he had to drink was a bottle of Lambrini that his mum had bought him four years earlier for his birthday. He drank it, and he threw up, but then he remembered. Not details, very little detail at all, but after he and Kelsey had had sex, they’d lay in bed together, talking. And Kelsey had asked him things, and he had responded honestly, and she had become very upset. He just…no matter what he did, he could not remember what he’d told her. He hit his head against the wall. He slapped himself in the face. It just wasn’t there. It caused him physical pain to be unable to remember. He felt like he was plunging his entire body head-first, ankle deep into freezing waters, reaching around for something to grab onto and pull to the surface, but his hands found nothing. It could be the end of his career. It could be the end of everyone’s career in the office. Depending on what exactly he’d said, this could be an international incident. He would certainly go to prison.
               In the evening, as the sun began to set, he lay out on the grass of his back garden. He stared at the sky and tried not to throw up again. He could smell the tulips, and they gave him a small comfort. He would sleep here tonight, he decided. Tomorrow he would decide what to do. For now, he was here, in the grass.
               He felt ever so small. Like he was basically nothing.

4

               On Monday, Dominic drove to work with shaky hands. He was beeped at four times, and it was only a fifteen-minute journey. The roads seemed narrower than they had on Friday. The other cars, faster.
               His space in the carpark was free, and it shocked him so much that the sweat momentarily stopped pouring down his back. He realised with a quiet sigh that it just meant he had even less time between parking, and being in the elevator, and then seeing Kelsey. It was inevitable. He just had to face it like a man.
               Inside, he ignored the building manager, who was all too happy to ignore him back. As he stepped into the elevator, he reached for the keypad and his finger slipped. Four. He corrected and hit five as well. The box hummed into life, and his stomach lurched as it ascended. He checked his phone one last time. He had sent Kelsey a text the night before, asking her what he had told her, and apologising for what had happened. Still no reply.
               The doors opened to the empty floor and Dominic considered getting out, staying there all day instead. It was a wide-open space, unfurnished and unlit. There would be rats, he was sure of that, but he could ignore rats. He could live to ignore rats. Maybe he could stay there forever. He began to imagine fabricating a small shelter in the corner, hidden away in a blind spot from the cameras. But as quickly as the idea was born, it was killed, as the elevator doors closed once again.
               Dominic had involuntarily closed his eyes as he reached floor five, and was shocked when an unfamiliar voice asked him what he was doing. He opened them to see that the voice wasn’t unfamiliar at all. It was Darcy, looking pissed off and confused behind the desk. Kelsey’s desk.
               “Uhh, what are you doing? Where’s Kelsey?” he tried to keep his voice even. Non-chalant.
               “Kelsey’s gone. Notice handed in on Saturday. I’ve been asked to cover just for today, which, by the way, it hasn’t gone unnoticed that I’m the only woman in our team and I’ve immediately been asked to do reception work as soon as it came up. So I’ll be expecting overtime pay for this.”
               Dominic looked at her blankly. Kelsey’s gone. Is this good news or bad news. Right now it felt like good news, but he had a feeling it could be extremely bad news.
               “Yeah, I mean. Yeah sure, I’ll speak to Malcolm.”
               Darcy flashed a fake smile at him, squeaked out a singsong thank you. She was getting the hang of reception work very quickly. Dominic beeped himself into the office and a few faces span around to regard him. There was muffled laughter and a shushing from others. He didn’t know how to play it, so he just went to his desk, sat down, and logged in.
               Zero new emails. No sacking. No HR warning. Nothing. He breathed a sigh of relief and put his head on the desk. His laptop suddenly made a sharp BING! that sent a shiver up his spine. He opened his eyes and looked up at the screen. A Microsoft Teams message from Malcolm:
               I don’t know what kind of fucked up shit you did to that girl on Friday night, and frankly I don’t want to know, but find a replacement. Fast. Darcy has an off-putting demeanour.
               Dominic replied in a neutral manner, promising to have a new receptionist by the end of the week. Inside he was torn. It was on him now. If he’d given sensitive information to Kelsey on Friday, and she’d chosen not to mention it in her resignation, that could mean that she was intending to go to the police, or the press, or Twitter. It was now on him to let Malcolm know of the possibility that she might have said sensitive information. If she did, they could do something about it. They could be proactive.
               Dominic opened his phone, texted Kelsey the word ‘please’, then decided that if she didn’t reply by the end of the day, he would tell Malcolm. It was his only option, and it made him want to die.

               Throughout the day, Dominic was approached several times by members of his team who could barely control their giggles as they asked him if he’d had a good weekend. He would ignore their prying and ask what they needed, and they would invariably bring forward some kind of low-level query that really didn’t require his level of authorisation. He soon realised they were scouting for information. He knew they all had a group chat on Teams without him, and his imagination was doing a pretty good job of filling in the blanks of what they were saying in it, using the regular outbursts of spontaneous laughter across the office as indicators.
               At lunch he crossed the room and spotted on a carelessly unguarded laptop screen a crudely produced AI image of Kelsey with her breasts out. He was glad they were focussing on her and not him. In normal circumstances he would be obligated to fill out an entry on the disciplinary tracker and forward it to HR after seeing something like that. But today all he could think about what was how inaccurate the portrayal of her body had been. He pretended he didn’t see and ate his lunch. Tuna and mayonnaise. He checked his phone and saw no reply. The door to the office kitchen swung open and Dominic instinctively flipped his phone over on the table, causing a smile from the entering Bradley.
               “Oi oi, here he is. Big lad. Enjoy your parking spot this morning Dom?”
               Dominic was mid-bite and confused. Swallowing, he said, “What do you mean?”
               “Your spot. I left it for you today. Thought you deserved it after the weekend you’ve had.” Bradley winked at Dominic as he grabbed a protein smoothie from the fridge and started shaking it, heading back to the door. Once there, he turned around again.
               “She’s good, isn’t she?” he winked again, then left the room.
               Dominic sat there, startled and frozen. This day needed to end.

5

               Five arrived, and Dominic sat reading and re-reading his carefully crafted email to Malcolm. He was sweating from each individual finger as he clicked to send it off. Within a few minutes, he heard the BING! of Teams again. A message from Malcolm:
               Well fuck. Okay, it’ll be dealt with Dominic, don’t worry. I’m sure it’s all fine, and you’d be surprised how often it happens. Or maybe you wouldn’t be – risks of the job. In any case, you’ve got nothing to worry about at all. Have a good evening!
               Dominic could have cried from relief. In fact, he was quite sure that he would on the drive home. He suddenly felt exhausted. As he typed a thankful reply, all of the tension of the past three days began to sink out of his fingers, into the keyboard, and away into wires and waves of the internet. Malcolm was a good man, and they’d known each other for years: of course he would look after him. Of course this happened all the time. Christ, he’d been so upset over nothing.
               He got up, packed his bag, and left, whistling in the elevator on the way down. The drive home felt closer to five minutes than fifteen, and he seemed to hit every green light on the way. Once home, he jogged through the house to the garden and stood looking at the spot where he’d laid down to sleep two days earlier. The grass was still slightly flattened and there was a bowl there that he’d intended to use for vomit. The garden looked different today. Even more beautiful than usual. Even tidier. He walked the perimeter of the grass and surveyed the tulips, picking out a handful. They were his best bunch yet. As he stood up to leave, he noticed a slight rustling. Crouching down again, he pulled back one of the plant pots and saw a mouse. It looked up at him, making no attempt to escape, and Dominic saw no fear in its eyes. It looked happy, and calm. He smiled at the mouse and moved the plant pot back into position.
               On the drive over to where his mother lived, tulips on the passenger seat, he wondered about the mouse. He thought about catching it, domesticating it, building a little den for it to play in. Once he arrived at the home, he turned off the engine and sat in the car for a moment, opening YouTube and searching for videos of mice playing. The mice in the videos were mostly brown, and some silvery white, but he saw one that was red, with fur the same colour as Kelsey’s hair, and he was suddenly captivated by the idea of owning a mouse like that.
               As he watched a video of the red haired little mouse playing on a wheel, his phone vibrated, and a text message came through at the top of the screen from the real Kelsey:

               ur a mouse murderer u weird fuck

               Dominic read the message, then frowned, half-smiling to himself. That was it. That was all it had ever been. The fucking mouse. He’d told her about his mouse problem while drunk and she’d been too soft to handle it. He began laughing, manically, his head against the steering wheel.
               What a day, he thought. What a day this has been.

               Pushing open the door to his mother’s room, Dominic’s smile couldn’t be wider. He greeted her as always, presenting the tulips and giving her a hug, before replacing old flowers with the new, setting them in a vase by the window. As always, Dominic’s mother looked at him, her eyes open and moving, but seeing very little, understanding even less. When she’d first become like this, Dominic had stayed away for a while. Though they’d argued before, the newfound silence had been too off-putting. Now, a year on, he liked the silence. They didn’t argue anymore, so he could imagine her proud, instead of concerned. When he looked into her vacant grey eyes, he could imagine any emotion he wanted, anything he needed in that given moment.
               He pulled over an armchair from the corner of the room. It was fake leather, and the arms were bare from where he’d picked and peeled at it for so many hours. Sometimes he would sit there all night, reading out news stories from across the world, explaining how he’d orchestrated certain elements of them, showing her videos on his phone. She moved her head sometimes, usually due to an itch, and he would pretend that she was nodding along, curious and enthusiastic. He liked to joke that she was one of the most knowledgeable people on earth when it came to counter-intelligence and misinformation. He estimated she’d be worth billions in a kidnapping. She knew all about ongoings at the Russian border, and collaborations with Mossad, and the delicate situation in Venezuela. She’d seen videos no one else had seen and been read briefings that no one else had heard. But tonight, Dominic wanted to tell her about something more important.
               “Mum…I’ve met someone. A girl.”
               He waited a moment. This was usually the moment in a mother/son relationship where the mother might squeal in delight, or roll her eyes, or embrace her boy. In this case, Dominic was curious to see whether sheer shock could cut through years of illness and debilitation and bring his mum back into the room, if even for a split second. She didn’t move, and didn’t speak of course, nor squeal, but he detected something in her eyes. Elation.
               The door opened behind Dominic, and he wiped at his own eyes, drying tears he hadn’t previously been aware of, preparing himself for polite conversation with one of the nice nurses he’d come to know. They usually tried to avoid him, to provide him with some privacy, he thought. Turning in his chair, he began to raise a polite hand in greeting, but instead froze in confusion. There was a man in the doorway, early fifties, white, almost no hair on his head except two tufts on either side. He’d not have looked out of place in front of a class of teenagers, or behind a desk at NatWest. He had the kind of face where a genuine smile would curl his lips downwards. He wasn’t smiling.
               “Can I help you?”
               As the question left his mouth, Dominic found himself altering the intonation to make it sound less annoyed and more surprised. He didn’t want to offend his mother’s guest.
               In response, the man reached into his long grey coat and produced a small black pistol fitted with a large suppressor. He calmly raised it, level with Dominic’s head, then pulled the trigger. Suddenly bathed in the brains of her only son, the old woman in the bed didn’t react – didn’t scream, didn’t cry, didn’t move to wipe the blood from her eyelids. She allowed it to drip, only watching. Silently watching. Knowing as much as the tulips. The man locked the door behind him and approached her, clicking his fingers in front of her face, slapping her with a gloved hand. Her head came to rest facing the window, and she stared at the flowers, ignoring the man entirely. He sighed, brushing hair from her face, and apologised quietly. He saw no forgiveness in her eyes. Crossing the room to the window, he drew the curtains, then brought the vase of tulips to the bedside table. The old woman’s eyes followed them the whole way.

6

               Bradley pulled into a parking spot. On the wall in front of him, spray-painted in large white letters, was his full name. Above it, crossed out in red, was Dominic’s. Malcolm had assured him that they would get around to fixing that by the end of the week. Next Wednesday at the latest. Gary was on holiday, drinking watered down cocktails on one of the cheaper Spanish islands, and he was the only one with access to the building’s pressure washer.
               To his dismay, Bradley found that much of the excitement of parking in a designated spot was diminished by the fact that he now actually belonged there. He imagined that this would be the first and last time that he would find himself missing Dominic.
               Upstairs, there was a new face on reception. Young and adorable. Almost annoyingly so. She stood up to greet Bradley as he came out of the elevator, and for some reason that he couldn’t quite put his finger on, it really pissed him off. In fact, he knew immediately that he didn’t like her at all. Sure, he would still try to fuck her at the first opportunity, but as she shook his hand and introduced herself as Lia, “with an ia”, he felt a strange rage in his veins. Instead of expressing this outwardly, he let his fingers linger on her wrist as she disengaged from the greeting. As her smile stopped, his began.
               The office erupted into cheers and applause when he entered. Malcolm had told him to arrive fifteen minutes late for this reason. Someone popped champagne, and I’ve Gotta Feeling started playing from a Bluetooth speaker on someone’s desk. Bradley smiled, and waved, and bowed, and pretended to be humble and grateful. He was torn emotionally on this front, as he knew that the team did sincerely like him, and obviously much preferred him to Dominic, but he’d like to have gained promotion through pure merit, as opposed to the inheritance of empty boots. In any case, he allowed himself to be lifted onto the shoulders of James and Ryan, and gladly accepted an overflowing glass of champagne, thrust towards him by a disembodied hand.
               After thirty minutes of celebrations, Bradley calmed down the room, slapping backs and shaking hands, thanking them for their enthusiasm. His suit was covered in glitter, and the entrails of several party poppers dangled down across his face as he took position in front of the three main monitors, grinning.
               “Well, that’s one way to get a promotion, eh?”
               The room erupted into laughter.
               “Seriously though, thank you all for such a warm welcome this morning, I’m sure you know  that I’m delighted to work with you guys every day. You make coming into the office such a pleasure. Even if the coffee is shit, it’s the people that make a job worthwhile, and I couldn’t ask for better people to lead, hopefully for many, many years, and with a much less abrupt retirement. I think Malcolm mentioned something about official drinks on Friday night? So if you’re around then, we’ll get over to Slug and take advantage of that two-for-one.”
               They cheered, and there was a loud bang - another party popper. No one had flinched.
               “But for now, we’ve still got some work to do. I was told you guys got started on something yesterday, James?”
               James sat down heavily in his chair and moved over to a desk, logging in and pulling up a video player on the big screen. He pressed play, and as the video loaded, someone asked if anyone had popcorn.
               On the screen, the video began. It showed camera phone footage, recorded by a phone propped up on a dresser. Two people were having sex on a bed, the man behind the woman. It was dim, but the man was skinny and frail, and the woman looked larger. Suddenly the lights were switched on, and it became clear that the man was Dominic, and the woman was Kelsey. They stopped having sex, surprised by the lights. A man came into frame, tall and black, holding a silenced pistol, pointing it at the two lovers. Kelsey was screaming, pulling the bed sheets over herself, and Dominic fell off of the bed trying to cover his underwhelming erection. The man with the gun killed Kelsey first, pressing the barrel into her screaming mouth and pulling the trigger, then he strode over to a cowering Dominic and executed him too, one bullet through the forehead. The man rooted through the bedside table drawer for a moment, then left.
               As the video came to an end, the audience held bated breath, and all eyes were on Bradley. He stood with his back to them, taking his time, choosing his next words carefully. Eventually, he turned.
               “That was beautiful. Just, one thing: our killer? Make him…let’s make him Chinese”
               They all cheered, covering Bradley in prosecco.

On a nearby speaker, the Black Eyed Peas began to play once again.