22
Plausible Deniability

Q: What’s the difference between an egg and a wank?

A: You can beat an egg.

Tanya walks past and floats a single sheet of paper into my in-tray. It’s a circular about restricting noncommercial use of the Internet within the office. There is a satsuma on my desk and I tear open its skin. The smell of Christmas billows up out of the fruit.

I hit Reply.

I have a long meeting on Saturday morning between nine o’clock and twelve thirty with Murray and Cohen in one of the small conference rooms on the sixth floor. With the exception of George on security duty downstairs, the office is completely deserted. Even the canteen is closed.

I am the last to arrive and the only one of us not wearing a suit. Cohen remarks on this immediately and Murray reminds me about ‘company policy’ as we sit down at the start of the meeting. Another black mark against my name. Cohen, of course, looks trim and showered, elegantly attired in a bespoke navy herringbone: you could take him anywhere, the little fucker.

His attitude towards me throughout the meeting is spiteful and manipulative. At one point he presses me for details about a research project which he knows I have yet to begin working on. When I can’t give a full answer, a shadow of irritation falls across Murray’s face and he coughs lightly, writing something down. They are both sitting opposite me at the conference table so that the relationship between us takes on the characteristics of an interrogation. My mind is slipped and weak: I woke up late and missed breakfast, and I have a gathering nervousness about the handover tonight which parries clear thinking. Cohen, by contrast, is sharp as a pin: he listens with faked over-attentiveness to Murray’s every word, nodding vigorously in agreement and taking detailed minutes on his laptop with neat little punches of the keyboard. If Murray cracks a joke, Cohen laughs. If Murray wants a cup of coffee, Cohen fetches it for him. The whole affair is sickening. By lunchtime my gut feels hollow and my mood is one of blank anger.

I eat alone in a pub on Hewett Street, haddock and chips with plastic sachets of tartare sauce. There’s a man next door to my table reading FHM, one of those glossy magazines for men who don’t have the guts to buy porn. A bikini-clad actress beams out from the cover, all cleavage and flat tummy. There’ll be a suggestive interview inside about what she looks for in a guy, next to a Q&A health page answering readers’ queries on penis size and bad breath.

Cohen has had a sandwich (prepared at home) at his desk, washed down with a carton of low-sugar Ribena. ‘I had some e-mailing to catch up on,’ he tells me as I come back into the office, ‘a query from a law firm in Ashgabat.’ I sit down at Piers’s desk and flick through a copy of the Wall Street Journal.

‘Where’s Murray?’

‘He’s had to go home. Family crisis. Jemma’s fallen off a swing.’

‘Who’s Jemma?’

‘His youngest daughter.’

This could make it more difficult to print the price sets from my computer.

‘So what are we supposed to do?’ I ask him.

‘You can go, if you like.’

This is exactly Cohen’s style: probing, arch, ambiguous. The remark is designed to test me. Will I work through the afternoon, or take the opportunity presented by Murray’s sudden departure to clock off early? Cohen won’t make a move until he knows what I intend to do. If I stay in the office, he’ll stay too. If I leave, he will remain another half-hour and then pack up. He can never be anything other than the last man to go home at night.

My best option is to leave now, have a cup of coffee, and return to the office in two hours. By then Cohen will almost certainly have gone. He’s clinical and industrious, but he likes his weekends as much as the next man. I can then pretend to do an hour’s work at my desk - for the benefit of the security cameras - during which I can print out the price sets on the laserjet. That way I’ll still be on time for the seven-thirty handover.

‘I might go,’ I tell him firmly.

‘Really?’ he says, disappointment in his voice.

‘Lots to do. I want to go shopping in the West End, get myself some new clothes.’

‘Fine.’

He isn’t interested in any excuses.

‘So I’ll see you on Monday.’

‘Monday.’

Three blocks away I order a macchiato and a chocolate wafer in a decent Italian cafe where there’s a pretty waitress and a fuzzy TV bolted to the wall. I haven’t been in here before; my usual place was closed. The BBC are replaying highlights from Euro 96 - a Czech player saluting the crowd after chipping Peter Schmeichel, Alan Shearer reeling away from the goal with his right hand raised in triumph. Simpler pleasures. My neck starts to hurt from craning up at the screen, so I turn to the copy of The Times that I brought with me to pass the time until four o’clock. I read it almost cover to cover: op-eds, news, arts, sports, even the columns I usually hate where an overpaid hack tells you about their children going off to nursery school, or what brand of olive oil they’re using this week. I drink two more coffees, lattes this time, and then make my way back to the office.

George is still on security duty as I come in through the revolving doors.

‘Forget something, did we?’

George has just come back from holiday. He looks sunburned and overfed.

‘You won’t believe this,’ I tell him, all casual and relaxed. ‘I got all the way home, made myself a nice cup of tea and was just settling down to watch Grandstand when I remembered I had some letters to finish by Monday morning. I’d forgotten all about them, and my notes are here in the office. So I had to get on the Tube and come all the way back.’

‘That’s too bad,’ says George, rearranging a bunch of keys on his desk. ‘And on a weekend an’ all.’

I walk past him towards the lifts, clutching my security pass in the sweat of my palm. I have to wait for some time for a lift to arrive, pacing up and down on the cold marble floor. George ignores me: he is reading today’s Mirror next to the flickering monochrome of five closed-circuit televisions. The crackle of his newspaper provides the only noise in the reception area. Then a lift chimes open and I ride it to the fifth floor.

The coffees have started to kick in: I am fidgety without being any more alert. If I can see that Cohen is still working at his desk, through the glass which separates our section from the lift area, I will leave the building for another hour. If Cohen has gone home, as I expect he has, I can proceed. Pan-piped music issues from a speaker above my head.

I emerge slowly from the lift as the doors glide open, immediately looking through the window partition in the direction of Cohen’s desk. My view is partially obscured by a rubber plant. I carry on towards the door of the office, still looking around for any sign of him.

Keep moving. The cameras are watching. Don’t loiter.

The team area appears to be clear. No sign of Cohen. His briefcase has gone and his desk has been tidied the way he leaves it night after night: neat piles, immaculate in-trays, a squared-up keyboard with the mouse flush along one side. It’s all about control with Cohen, never letting anything slip. Even his Post-It notes are stuck down in exacting straight lines.

I sit down at my desk and disturb the screen saver with a single touch on the space bar. Why is this suddenly so hard? I had not expected it to be as difficult as this. There is no risk, no chance of trouble, and yet I feel somehow incapable, lost in an immense space surveyed by invisible eyes. Even the simple process of keying in my password feels unlawful. I should have done this yesterday, not now, should have let the print-out get lost in the constant traffic and buzz of office life. To do this alone on a Saturday afternoon looks all wrong.

So I wait. As a smokescreen I type e-mails that I don’t need to send and fetch reference books which I flick through ostentatiously at my desk. I go to the gents, fetch coffee from the machine, drink water at the fountain, overdoing every aspect of normal everyday behaviour for the benefit of anyone who might be watching. I do this for the best part of an hour. It is unthinkable that George is watching with any great attentiveness, and yet I go through with the absurd routine. I am held back not by cowardice, or by a change of heart, but by the simple panic of being caught.

Finally, at around five o’clock, I resolve to do what I came here to do. I sit at the computer and load the file. Three clicks of the mouse and the document opens up on the screen.

There are four A4 pages constituting about thirty seconds of normal printing time. The Print dialogue box prompts me - Best, Normal or Draft? Greyscale or Black & White? Number of copies? I go for the default setting and press Return.

The file spools over to the printer, but it takes longer than usual to emerge from the laserjet. I busy myself with other tasks, trying not to look distracted by the yawning gap of time. I pour myself a plastic cup of water at the fountain, but my nervousness is all-consuming: when the fax machine on the facing wall beeps with an incoming message, the shock of it spills a small amount of the water as I am bringing it up to my mouth.

Why was I not more prepared for this? They’ve trained you. It’s nothing. Be logical.

I look down at the printer, willing it to work, and, finally, the first page discharges, smooth and easy. Then the second. I look closely at the two sheets of paper and the printing quality is good: no smudges or run-overs. The third page follows. I try to read some of the words as it comes out upside-down, neck twisted round, but I am too disoriented to make any sense of it. Then I stand over the printer, waiting for the fourth and final sheet.

It isn’t coming out.

I wait, but there’s no sign of it. The printer must have run out of paper.

The drawer is stuck and I have to give it a sharp tug before it opens, but there is still a half-inch of A4 paper lying inside the machine. I slam it shut, but this has no effect: it is as if every piece of hardware in the building has suddenly shut down.

There must be a bad connection somewhere, or a fault with the main computer.

And I am on the point of crouching down, ready to trace leads and check power cables, when I hear his voice.

‘What’s this?’

Cohen is absolutely beside me, shoulder to shoulder. Not looking at me, but down at the printer. I breathe in hard and cannot disguise the sound of it, a startled gasp of air as my face flushes red. His breath smells of menthol.

Cohen has picked up the three sheets from the printer tray and started reading them.

‘What do you want these for?’

If you ever get caught, they told me, don’t answer the question. Deflect and deny until you know that you can get clear.

Think. Think.

‘You gave me a shock,’ I tell him, mustering a half-laugh, in the hope that this will explain my blushing. ‘I thought you’d gone home.’

‘I was on the sixth floor,’ Cohen says coolly. ‘Library.’

I didn’t hear the lift. He must have used the staircase. I look down at his shoes, silent suede loafers.

‘What do you want this for?’

‘The commercial price sets?’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘The price sets.’ He holds up the first page and flaps it in my face.

‘I needed a copy at home.’

‘Why?’

‘Why not? So I can get on top of my work. So I can see the long-term picture.’

Don’t go on too long. The bad liar always embellishes.

Cohen nods and mutters ‘Oh.’

I look back at the printer, trying to avoid his eyes.

‘So what happened to shopping in the West End? Got to get myself some new clothes, you said.’

‘I had some letters to finish by Monday. Forgot.’

‘And this, of course,’ he says archly, passing me the sheets of paper.

Cohen knows that something is not right here.

The fourth and final page has emerged into the printer tray without my realizing it. I bend over to scoop it out and tap the pages into a neat pile, stapling them in the top left-hand corner. Cohen walks back to his desk and takes a pen out of a drawer.

‘I’m going now,’ he says.

‘Me too. I’m all done.’

‘Better switch off your computer, then,’ he says, housing the pen in his jacket pocket.

‘Yes.’

I move around to my desk and sleep the system. It folds into a slow screen saver, coloured shapes in space disappearing into a vast black hole. He is already halfway to the exit when he says:

‘Couldn’t you have written your letters at home?’

‘What?’

Pretending not to have heard him buys me the time to think of a reason.

‘I said couldn’t you have done the letters at home?’

‘No. I had all my notes here.’

‘I see. Bye then.’

‘See you, Harry.’

He turns the corner and disappears, taking the stairs all the way to the ground floor. I continue to sit at my desk, wanting to clutch my head in my hands and sink to the floor. After all the planning and the preparation it seems extraordinary to me that something should have gone wrong so quickly.

I put the documents into my briefcase, place the letters beside the franking machine, shut off the lights in the office and take the lift to the foyer. The blur of aftermath makes it impossible to think at all clearly. I leave the Abnex building without speaking to George and disappear out on to Broadgate. It’s five-thirty.

Some things become clear as I walk around.

I may have over-reacted. What did Cohen really see? He saw Milius, the new boy, doing some printing. No more, no less. He saw letters on my desk, cold cups of coffee, the outward signs of an afternoon’s work. Nothing untoward about that. Nothing to make him suspect sharp practice.

What do I know about Cohen? That he is guileful and malevolent. That he is the sort of person to sneak up on a colleague in a deserted office on a weekend afternoon and get a kick out of giving him a fright. Cohen feels simultaneously threatened by what I am capable of and contemptuous of what I represent. He’s just another Nik, snuffing out his insecurity by making others feel uneasy.

But he will be watching me that much more closely from now on. It was my first mistake, the only thing to have gone wrong so far.

Why didn’t I see him coming?