Looking Good Dead

not have a garden any more?
    He stared out of his second-floor window through the pouring rain at the windows across the road. Conduit Street was narrow, and the tall buildings made it feel like a gully. Even on a sunny day his office was in permanent shade.

    Glancing down he could see the lunchtime stream of people, the sea of umbrellas and the line of cars, taxis and vans waiting to cross the lights at the intersection with Bond Street. In particular he watched a new maroon Bentley Continental. Ever since they had first come out he had hankered after one, but at this moment the gulf separating him from something so expensive seemed as big as the gulf that separated a snail on his garden fence from Mars.
    He disconsolately munched his sandwich of tuna and sweetcorn on rye bread. He wasn’t crazy about the combination of tuna and sweetcorn, and he disliked the sharp caraway seeds in rye, but this morning he had woken up more determined than he had been in a long while to eat more healthily – and this stuff was supposed to be low fat, low everything. He would have preferred his usual bacon and egg, or cheddar and pickle any day. It was Kellie, in bed last night playfully prodding his stomach and calling him ‘Tubs’, that had been the final straw.
    He glanced at the first page of the trade magazine Promotions and Incentives and saw that one of his competitors, whose business was booming, was preparing for a stock market flotation. What was their secret? he wondered. What the hell had they done so right that he had done so wrong?
    He took another bite, and watched the techie, Chris Webb, a tall, laconic forty-year-old with floppy hair and a solitary earring, who he called in for all his computer problems – and who treated him like a retarded child – prodding around with a screwdriver in the entrails of his Mac laptop. Every few moments Tom looked over at the blank screen, hoping against hope it would spring back to life.
    And thinking about what he had seen last night.
    He had not been able to get the image of the girl being stabbed out of his mind, and it had given him such a vivid nightmare he had woken screaming at three in the morning. It must have been a movie or a movie trailer of some kind.
    But it had seemed somehow so damned real.
    ‘Your data’s gone, mate, I’m afraid,’ Chris Webb said, irritatingly cheerily.
    ‘Yes, that’s what I told you,’ Tom said. ‘I need you to retrieve it.’
    As the techie busied himself with the machine again, Tom, feelinglost without his computer and unable to concentrate on the magazine, stared at the displays of some of his company’s products, thinking they were all looking a bit tired, had been there too long, needed sharpening up.
    He studied the Team Jaguar glass showcase, displaying an anorak, baseball cap, polo shirt, ballpoint pen, key fob, driving gloves, tie and headsquare, all in the Jaguar livery. There were some newer designs they had produced which should be in there, he thought. Then he turned his attention to another display – of mouse pads, pens, calculators and umbrellas all bearing the Weetabix logo. That needed bringing up to date also.
    Olivia, his secretary, an attractive twenty-something who lurched from one man-crisis to the next, came into the room holding a Pret A Manger bag, mobile phone pressed to her ear in deep conversation. Behind her empty desk sat his best salesman, Peter Chard, in one of his trademark sharp suits, his hair slick, a doppelgänger for the actor Leonardo DiCaprio, engrossed in a motoring magazine and forking his way through a pot noodle. At the desk next to him sat Hong Kong-born Simon Wong, a quiet, ambitious thirty-year-old, busy filling out an order form. It was a new client and a decent-sized order; some small cheer, Tom thought.
    A phone started ringing. Olivia, still engrossed on her mobile, seemed oblivious to it. Peter and Simon didn’t seem to hear it either. Maggie was out of the office at lunch.
    ‘SOMEONE ANSWER THE FUCKING PHONE!’ Tom shouted.
    His secretary raised an apologetic arm and strode over to her desk.
    ‘So talk me through exactly what happened again,’ Chris Webb said, sounding exasperated as if he were addressing the class imbecile.
    Both salesmen looked at Tom.
    ‘I opened my computer on the train this morning and it wouldn’t boot up. It was dead,’ he said.
    ‘It’s booting up fine,’ the techie said. ‘But there’s no data, is there? That’s why you’re not getting