Claire Moss - Then You Were Gone

A few weeks after that, Jazzy’s redundancy was confirmed. He had started looking round for something else as soon as the redundancy was mooted as a possibility, but the task seemed overwhelming. His job at the bank had been the only proper, grown-up job he had ever had. He had liked working there and he had been good at his job, but nevertheless that did not leave him with much confidence that he would be equally successful anywhere else. He and Petra could live pretty comfortably on her salary for the foreseeable future, and she was keen that he didn’t rush into anything. ‘Wait,’ she kept telling him, ‘find something that really feels right.’ But after a few months, the novelty of being at home all day, of getting up when he wanted, going to the pub or the shops or the library in the middle of the day, cooking elaborate meals for Petra that they would eat together when she finally got home, usually well after seven in the evening, began to wear off. The longer Jazzy was out of work, the more impossible seemed the task of not only finding another job, but actually doing the job once he had found it. He was beginning to doubt himself, to suspect that the strengths and abilities he had taken for granted in his old job may have deserted him altogether. Petra noticed it, of course, and Simone noticed it too, the pair of them fussing over him, encouraging and cajoling and transparently leaving print-outs of job ads all over the house. But Mack noticed it too, and he was the only one who offered any kind of concrete solution.

‘We could do with someone at Anastasia,’ he had said, ‘to look after the IT side of things. We need a decent website, we might start selling direct online too if we can make it pay. All the files need computerising too. Nothing too taxing, but we’d pay pretty well and you’d be as good as your own boss.’ Jazzy knew a charity hand-out when it was shoved under his nose, but by this time Petra was pregnant with Rory. They were due to get married in the summer. Petra taking anything more than the minimum maternity leave was out of the question, financially speaking, but even so the fact that they would need an extra income was now unarguable.

He had agreed to take on all of Anastasia’s IT-related work on a temporary basis until he found something more suited to his strengths, or at least that was what he told himself. In fact, once he had started working there, he had realised that he might find the light workload, flexible hours and pretty reasonable hourly rate hard to let go of. This was particularly true once Rory was born; the perks of earning a full-time wage, albeit a pretty modest one, for what was very much a part-time job, suited him and Petra very well. The thought of both of them leading the long-hours corporate lifestyle that her job forced her into was enough to keep him from browsing the job ads in too much depth.

Jazzy shivered in the morning chill and pulled his scarf up to his chin as he fumbled with the office building’s keypad, hastily shoving the crumpled letter into his pocket. Could it be that Mack was paying a heavy price for his keenness to take the easy option when Keith proffered it? And could it be that he, Jazzy, may have to do the same?

Jazzy had not expected anybody else to be in the office yet. If the place was fully staffed, there was only ever him, Mack and Keith, and Mack was away on sales calls more than half the time, while Keith tended to leave the office side of things to the other two. Keith took care of the import/export part of the business, wheeling and dealing with Russian tailors and Latvian freight companies, and the unspoken deal was that as long as the goods and the money kept flowing, neither side of the business would ask too many questions of the other. But as Jazzy approached the office from the communal stairwell, he noticed a light in the office Jazzy and Mack shared.

‘Hello?’ he called out as he unlocked the door and turned on the lights in what they called, in a rather grandiose manner, the reception area.

‘In here.’ It was Keith.

Keith was rising from Mack’s desk as Jazzy entered the room. He could tell from the whirring of the computer’s fan that it had only just been switched off.

‘Everything OK?’ Jazzy asked.

‘Yeah, yeah, fine.’ Keith was dressed like an archetypal middle-aged businessman on his day off – perfectly ironed slacks, a V-necked mint green jumper over a checked shirt, and beige loafers. ‘Just called in to catch up on a few emails. Our internet at home’s on the blink.’

‘Right. Bit of a way to come isn’t it?’

Keith held Jazzy’s gaze for quite a lot longer than normal people found comfortable, then drew his neck back in such a way that Jazzy could not help but construe it as a gesture of aggression. ‘Had some other stuff to do up this way, didn’t I? My brother-in-law wants me to look at a car with him over at Palmers Green, thought I may as well pop in here first. Not a problem is it?’

Jazzy shook his head. No matter how many times he swore to himself not to allow Keith to intimidate him, the guy always somehow managed it. ‘No, course not.’ He could hear himself estuarising his accent, blunting the cultured vowels. He hated himself for doing it, but he could not stop himself.

‘Anyway, I’m off now, soon be out of your hair. Young Joe not here today?’ Keith always called Mack by his first name, even though to Jazzy’s knowledge no one else outside his immediate family did so.

‘Er, no. Actually…’ Jazzy thought about what Mack had said in his letter. He was reluctant to disobey his friend’s wishes, but if something was wrong with Mack, then Keith was probably his best hope of getting to the bottom of it. He decided to hedge around the subject as best he could. ‘I was actually expecting him back by now. You’ve not heard from him have you?’

Keith’s face was expressionless, his mouth narrow. ‘No. Not a sausage.’ Keith picked up his phone in its leather case and put it in his trouser pocket. He winked at Jazzy. ‘Probably found himself some young lovely while he was away, taking a little bit of French leave, you know our Joe. Got to go. See you.’

As Keith walked out of the office, Jazzy looked at the bulge in the man’s pocket where his phone was. It was a smart phone, about as smart as phones got. Surely he must be able to check his emails on that?

He was surprised to find himself shaky after seeing Keith, his heart hammering as he switched on the coffee machine. Was Mack’s paranoia contagious? And what exactly had Mack meant when he had asked Jazzy not to talk to Keith? Was it because Mack was afraid of Keith? Or because Mack had done something that he did not want Keith to find out about?

Not knowing where else to start, Jazzy sat at Mack’s computer and booted it up. The chair was still warm from where Keith had been sitting in it, and, knowing he was being ridiculous but doing it anyway, Jazzy got up and swapped it for his own cool and unsullied chair. Once the machine was running, he clicked around until he got to a list of which programs had most recently been accessed. There was, he soon realised, nothing to find. All the recent file history, all the internet browsing history, all the cookies, all the temporary files were all gone. All the basic software the machine had come with was still there, but other than that there was no sign that anyone had ever used this machine. Apart from Keith, just now.

Jazzy looked at his watch. He was in earlier than usual this morning; he had been eager to get to the office and check for any sign of Mack. Could it be that Keith came in to the office every morning and sat at Mack’s computer doing… What exactly had he been doing? Something that he then immediately deleted all trace of.

Jazzy sat back for a moment and rubbed his eyes. He knew that Mack’s PC was full of stuff – every contact with every client, every letter, email, logs of every telephone call. He used the machine for Twitter, Facebook, buying his metrosexual over-priced clothes. And now all that had vanished too. Someone had erased it all – either Mack or Keith. He thought back to the last time Mack had been in the office, at the beginning of the previous week. He had left in a hurry, slightly before his usual clocking-off time, and he had only been at his desk a few minutes before he left. He would barely have had time to log on, never mind delete every last trace of himself. Which left Keith. And Keith was old. Old, and also the type of person who withdrew all his cash at the beginning of the week because he didn’t like spending money via a little plastic card. Keith could send an email or a text and seemed to manage to use his phone to get the football results, but he didn’t seem like he would be confident enough to wipe out Mack’s digital footprint all by himself. But Jazzy had spent his adult life worshipping computers the way others worshipped a deity. And he knew that computers did not lie. Somebody had done it, and it was almost certainly Keith.