Chris Simms - Killing the Beasts

Tom clicked on Directory Enquiries and typed in the surname and initial. Forty-eight hits came up for the Greater Manchester area. He printed the list off, grabbed three cans of full-fat Coke from the fridge in the kitchen, then returned to his desk and picked up the phone. A succession of bewildered-sounding old ladies with broken English, dead phone lines and answer machines greeted most of his calls.

By 12.30 he'd had enough. His headache had been washed away and his sugar levels restored by the Coke, but now he was starving. Standing up, he glanced round the room, noticing how flat the atmosphere was. Everyone's head was bowed as they settled down for another week on the meaningless hamster wheel that was work. Knowing that it was weak of him to keep relying on his company credit card to bolster morale, he stood up and asked the room if anyone wanted a sandwich from town — he was doing a run to First Taste. As he expected, there was a flurry of activity, Ges being the first to order. While he went through his routine of being undecided about what to choose, his free hand had crept across his desk and on to his considerable paunch. Tom scribbled down, 'Ges — Indian starter selection with chutneys, club sandwich, dessert (strawberry cheesecake).'

'Oh, I don't know,' said Ges. 'The Indian starter selection with chutneys and a club sandwich, I suppose.'

Tom pretended to write it down, then Ges added, almost as an afterthought, 'And the lemon and lime cheesecake.'

Tom crossed out 'strawberry' and scrawled 'L amp;L' above it. 'Gemma?'

A girl of about twenty-three with wiry ginger hair glanced round her screen. 'Smoked salmon with low fat cream cheese on brown, thanks.' Due to get married at the end of the summer, she had been slimming mercilessly for months.

Tom looked towards a blonde woman at the next workstation to Gemma's as she struggled over the unfamiliar menu. 'Julie, a jellied eel?' Sent up from the London office as temporary help in the run-up to the Commonwealth Games, Julie's southern accent and feisty attitude had been a welcome jolt to the office. Tom had noticed Creepy George staring at her on several occasions.

'I'll go for the Thai ginger chicken on whole grain and a bag of those salt'n'vinegar organic crisps, cheers.'

'Ed?'

When getting his Coke earlier on, Tom had seen Ed's sandwiches in the fridge. He knew his colleague would now have been thrown into confusion. Were the sandwiches going to be on the company or should he eat his own and save some money?

Tom put him out of his misery. 'Don't worry. I'll get them on expenses. We're way over target this month.'

They all smiled while Ed looked relieved and said, 'Beef with horseradish on a white roll, please.'

Even though he knew the offer would be refused, Tom called over to the corner out of politeness. 'George?'

The mass of black hair rose slowly from behind the barricade. 'No, thanks.' He lowered himself back into his seat.

'OK,' said Tom, sitting back down and pressing a speed-dial button on his phone. He read out the sandwich order and said he'd be over in about twenty minutes. Down in reception he grabbed the keys for the pool car and set off back towards the centre of town.

Three quarters of an hour later he walked back into the office, unzipped the cooler bag, put the tray on the table in the middle of the room and popped the lid. 'Lunch,' he announced, grabbing his All Day Breakfast baguette and bag of crisps.

Creepy George manoeuvred the digital camera into the small gap between two of his monitors. A cable ran from the back of the camera into the Apple Mac on his right. The monitor's screen filled with the view of his colleagues crowding round the table. George tilted the camera up slightly, then focused in on Julie's face. No one heard the faint click as he took a picture.

George disconnected the camera, placed it in his top drawer and turned his eyes to the image captured on his screen. Her mouth was open, eyes half closed in mid-blink. The tip of his tongue flicked across his upper lip — her expression was far better than he dared hope for.

Closing in, he used Photoshop to cut round the edge of her face and neck, then dropped her decapitated head on to his desktop and dragged the rest of her body into the trash bin on the corner of his screen. Next he brought up the image he'd downloaded from comatosex.com the afternoon before. The woman lay on the flowery carpet of some anonymous living room, the edge of a faux velvet settee encroaching in the top right-hand corner of the photo. Face slack, she lay with arms and legs akimbo, like a corpse photographed on the street of some war-ravaged city.

Clicking on Julie's forehead, he dragged her face over the unconscious woman's. George's expression darkened with frustration; the scale was out and the lighting and backgrounds didn't match. It would take hours of manipulation on the Apple Mac to make the image even remotely convincing. Sighing, he saved it into his special file that needed a codeword before it would open. Once everyone else had gone home he would retrieve it and begin his work.

May 2002

The following Monday Tom got the call from head office in London. With all the rush of chasing business before the Games began, he'd failed to notice how much Ian was away from the office. Now it turned out his meetings were with a prospective employer — 'The Giant Poster People', their biggest competitor. The conflict of interest meant Ian had to leave It's A Wrap immediately.

The director from the London office asked him to pop down to Ian's office and make sure that he wasn't in. Shocked, Tom did as he was told. It was obvious Ian had been in over the weekend; all of his personal effects had disappeared, even down to the 'Head Honcho' placard from the door. Tom went over to the filing cabinets. The keys were all in the locks. He pulled drawers open and looked over the clients' files inside. They all seemed in order. He sat down at Ian's bare desk and had a quick peek in the drawers: a couple of biros and Post-it pads. He'd even taken hole punches, staplers and the big calculator with built-in clock and alarm. Tom picked up the phone and let the London office know that Ian was well and truly gone.

Next he was put through to the IT department and asked to turn on his former boss's PC. Once it was booted up, the person at the other end of the phone gave him Ian's logging on details, Tom wincing as he had to type the word 'WINNER' into the password field. He was asked if the computer's desktop appeared especially empty, as if things had been deleted. Tom thought that nothing looked amiss. An inner box then appeared on the screen, asking him if he would let jim.morrel@itsawrap.info remotely access the computer. The person asked him to click on the 'Yes' button and as soon as he did the cursor began to move of its own accord with bewildering speed. The IT specialist shot through Ian's directory, opening up files and asking Tom if everything appeared in order. As far as he could tell, it seemed to be. The cursor carried on its quest, taking Tom deep into the machine's hard drive, rummaging through deleted files while the voice in the phone's earpiece supplied an emotionless commentary. The only stuff Ian had wiped was of a personal nature — emails to his wife, downloads from BBC Sport on anything to do with Chelsea football club and bookings for hotels round Manchester with lastminute.com.

Finally the voice said nothing to do with any clients appeared to have been deleted, though an unusually large number of files had been accessed over the course of the previous week. He was passed back to one of the directors. After a bit of a talk that included the phrases 'rudderless ship', 'crucial period', 'man with local expertise' and 'exceeding targets', Tom was offered Ian's old job.