a superb impromptu stretcher. One suited woman peered at Bernie from behind her wire-rimmed spectacles, then glanced down at his paint-splattered overalls.
‘Just keep an eye on the office, will you. Don’t touch anything. I’ll send someone up to – to –’
‘Oh, please hurry,’ snorted Ms Hargreaves, easing herself onto the trolley. ‘I don’t think I can hang on very much longer. I want to push –’
Seconds later there was an unpleasant wet sound and a great tidal wave of steaming liquid swamped the pile of manila folders on the trolley. The boy looked as if he might faint. Manfully, one woman braced herself behind the handles of the trolley and guided it and Ms Hargreaves back out into the corridor. She glared furiously at the boy.
‘Get a grip, Hemmingway; it’s all perfectly natural. Run downstairs and keep an eye out for the ambulance.’
After they vanished through the swing doors Bernie blew his lips out thoughtfully and stepped back into Ms Hargreaves’ office. Keep an eye on things they’d said. He pushed the door to and lit a cigarette in spite of the little notice on Ms Hargreaves’ desk thanking him not to. The clock ticked; the computer hummed. He ran his fingers idly across the contents of the in-tray. Shouldn’t be long before someone showed up, always assuming they’d remembered to tell anyone he was there. Bernie sighed and looked around the spartan interior of the little office before glancing out of the window.
Below him, outside the main doors, Ms Hargreaves was struggling to get off the trolley while the two women were doing their level best to ensure she stayed on it. The boy was throwing up into a bin, while from somewhere in the distance Bernie could just make out the wail of an ambulance siren. He puffed again, lowering himself into the swivel chair.
Despite Bernie’s initial apprehension and the distinct sense that he was walking into an ambush, the ample Ms Hargreaves had barely given Bernie a second look when he’d opened her office door first thing that morning and waved the paint pot in her direction. She had grunted on and off for most of the morning, but not at him.
Bernie put his feet up on her desk, thinking that he should be painting, really – as the boy had so rightly pointed out, it was almost lunchtime. He stubbed out his roll-up in Ms Hargreaves’ pot-pourri and glanced without much interest at the computer screen. Probably a requisition order for park benches and paving slabs.
The screen swirled with random dots until he moved the mouse. Instantly it cleared and an animated cartoon character ran across it on what appeared to be some sort of title page. Below the little bearded sprite the text read:
‘RUN STILTSKIN…?’
The words flashed enticingly. Bernie glanced over his shoulder into the empty office. Why the hell not? Who would ever know? Maybe he could top her best score.
He’d had a nice little PC until the bailiffs had been round to repossess it. Bernie clicked the mouse and the picture on the screen unfolded like an origami flower to an altogether more official-looking document. He leant closer to read the closely spaced lines of text and then grinned with pure delight. Maybe there was a God after all.
Very, very slowly, Bernie Fielding unpeeled himself from Ms Hargreaves’ ergonomically designed vinyl chair and closed the door of her office. He took the bentwood coat stand from against the wall and wedged it tight up under the door handle.
‘Bingo,’ he whispered as he sat down again, and typed his full name, address, and date of birth into the spaces provided.
Downstairs in another part of the building, Nick Lucas took a seat and the cup of coffee the woman offered him. He smiled his thanks. She nodded and screwed her mouth up into a little moue of professional pleasantness that may or may not have been a smile, Nick really wasn’t certain and didn’t intend pushing to find out. She had jet-black hair, pulled back like curtains off her angular face, and looked as if she had been constructed from white chamois leather stretched tight over a wire coat-hanger.
‘Now,’ said the woman in a soft Scots accent, turning the computer screen so that he couldn’t see what she was typing, ‘it’s all very simple. We will be getting your new details through any minute…oh, here they come.’
Beside her, a printer spluttered into life and started to dart back and forth across a roll of white paper.
Nick coughed nervously and took a sip of coffee. It tasted like sweet tar. ‘I’m still not sure about this, Ms Crow…’ he began. To say that the name suited her was going way beyond stating the obvious. ‘I know that you said that it would all be fine, but I –’
Before he could spill his fears and anxieties out all over the grey institutional carpet, Ms Crow nailed him with her icy blue stare, strangling his confidence into an unmanly falsetto, and then rolled her eyes and pursed her lips again. ‘I’m sorry? Did you say something?’ she growled.
Nick swallowed hard. ‘I’m worried about this – I mean, will I be safe? With this Stiltskin thing; will I be all right?’
Her face rearranged itself back into what passed for a smile. ‘We’ve been through all this before, Mr Lucas, our witness relocation plan is extremely secure. We operate one of the premier services in the world. Our record speaks for itself. A complete new identity at the press of a button.’ She pressed a button on her keyboard to emphasise the point.
‘Just don’t audition for Blind Date, and I’d steer well clear of Big Brother if I were you,’ said a distinguished-looking, thick-set man stepping into the office. He sounded cheerful in a brisk nononsense way.
Nick got to his feet. ‘And you are?’
‘Coleman, Danny Coleman. Senior liaison officer on the Stiltskin team. You’re high priority, Mr Lucas; trust me, you’ll be just fine. Ms Crow here is my assistant. My right-hand woman. I don’t know what we’d do without her.’ He smiled, and extended a hand to take Nick’s. ‘From now on, whatever you want, whatever you need, I’m your man.’
Nick noticed that the smile on Coleman’s face only warmed his mouth; his marble grey eyes remained resolutely cool. Nevertheless, Nick shook the man’s hand firmly and then said, ‘I’m still really not sure about all this.’
‘Everyone feels the same way,’ Coleman said. ‘Don’t you worry, believe me, it’ll be just fine.’
Ms Crow got up from the keyboard to let Coleman take her place. Nick tried to look relaxed but knew he was failing miserably.
‘So who am I now?’ he tried with forced good humour.
Coleman looked up from the screen. ‘Just hang on a mo’, we’ll have to wait for this to finish the run.’ He glanced up at his assistant who was hovering by the door like a prim, Viyella-wrapped bird. ‘Ms Crow, if you’d like to go into the other office and get someone to transfer all this stuff onto Mr Lucas’s new documents, please?’
She screwed up her face again and left.
‘New documents?’ said Nick haltingly.
Coleman nodded. ‘Uh huh. It’s very simple – all the same documents you’ve got now only they’ll be in your new name. Passport, driver’s licence, national insurance number, credit cards, bank accounts. We can do them all from here but we’ll need some photos before we take you to your new address. You haven’t had any photos taken yet, have you?’
Nick shook his head.
‘Okay, well that won’t take too long, and it says here that you’re divorced; I’ll just buzz through and make sure they knock you up a decree absolute while they’re at it.’ Coleman grinned, the warmth once again only reaching the equator of his rotund features: his eyes stayed ice cold. ‘Never know when you might need it – and besides, a damned sight cheaper than the real thing, eh? As I said, if you have any problems all you have to do is phone in. It’s our job to see that the transition goes nice and smoothly. It normally doesn’t take our clients too long to adapt. Obviously these things aren’t always as simple as we’d like, but we’ve got all kind of