The Fixer

The atrium lights at Forfax International were on the late setting, warming the marble and making the building look more welcoming than it was. Edward Wills knew that setting. He had walked out under it often enough, coat over his arm, already composing the last emails of the day in his head.

Tonight the glass doors admitted him as a visitor.

The man behind the security desk was not one of the regulars. He took Edward’s name as if he had never heard it, printed a badge that said GUEST, and pointed him towards the executive lifts as though Edward needed directions in a building he had worked in for six years.

Edward clipped the badge to his jacket and said nothing. He was too tense to waste a sentence on the insult of it.

The journey across London had been a rehearsal. Payton wanted something from him; that much had been clear from the call. Edward wanted something in return. He wanted some assurance that raising a concern inside the company would not be allowed to finish his career.

Coming in had seemed sensible when he left home. People in middle management were summoned to unpleasant conversations every week. They sat down. They listened. They argued about settlements and references and confidentiality agreements. Then they went home on the same train.

He was frightened, but he had spent the journey telling himself it was the ordinary kind of fright. Losing his job. Ruining his references. Watching a future interviewer decide that employing him was more trouble than it was worth.

He had not been frightened of being physically hurt.

The twelfth floor was quieter than it ought to have been. Accounts usually kept a light on until seven. The corridor past European Operations was dark. He knew which offices should still have someone in them because, until three weeks ago, he had been one of those people.

Knowing the building so well did not reassure him. It made the empty rooms feel deliberate.

He had left his phone in the drawer at the flat, wiped first. The precaution had felt melodramatic when he did it. Now it felt inadequate. He was carrying nothing incriminating, and that did not reassure him either.

Payton Forfax’s executive assistant was at her desk outside the conference suite.

Eloise Bauer was the first familiar thing he had seen all evening. Petite, blonde, still working because something on her screen had evidently refused to wait until morning. She was ending a call as he came down the corridor, finishing a last exchange in German before lowering the phone from her ear.

When she recognised him, she nodded.

Some of the tension went out of Edward’s shoulders.

If Eloise was here, finishing an ordinary working day and speaking to someone in Hamburg or Munich, then perhaps he had frightened himself unnecessarily. This was still an office. She was still Payton’s PA. People did not get beaten up in conference rooms while Eloise Bauer sat twenty feet away booking tables and putting calls through.

“They’re in the east room,” she said.

Before she could get up, the man Edward half-recognised from the Hamburg office opened the door.

There were three men besides Payton. The Hamburg man, Meier perhaps, a name Edward had seen on circulation lists without ever attaching it to a face, and two others he did not recognise from any company chart. One of them had already taken a chair facing the door.

Payton stood when Edward entered.

That was the first thing that frightened him properly.

Payton did not ordinarily stand for people who had reported two levels below him.

“Edward. Thank you for coming in.”

It was the east conference room, the one with a view of nothing in particular and the painting of a harbour that Legal liked. The table had been cleared of the usual water jugs and branded pads. There was a carafe and several glasses.

There were no papers.

Edward sat because sitting was what one did in these rooms. The door closed behind him. He heard the catch.

“I won’t keep you long,” Payton said. He had not raised his voice in any meeting Edward could remember, and he did not raise it now. “There are a few points we need to tidy. You’ll understand why I’d rather do that here than by email.”

Edward understood the language. He had written versions of it himself.

The other men did not introduce themselves. Meier, if that was his name, folded his hands and looked at the harbour painting.

“You raised a concern,” Payton said. “Internally. That was appropriate. I would have preferred you to come to me first, but we needn’t dwell on procedure. What I need to know now is whether anything left the building with you.”

Edward had spent the last fortnight putting the facts into an order that would sound reasonable if he ever had to explain himself.

He had discovered payments that should not have existed. There had been pressure placed on people involved in overseas business, and arrangements he knew would not survive the interest of a regulator. He had reported what he found to the people whose job it was to receive such concerns.

That had been his first mistake, although he had not known it at the time.

He had also kept copies.

Payton knew about the report. Edward did not know whether he knew about the copies.

Then there was Kit Cassian.

Cassian was a journalist at the Daily Chronicle. He had telephoned Edward after a rumour had apparently reached him from somewhere else. Edward had answered. He had told himself afterwards that he had given the journalist nothing useful. He had said he could not comment. He had said it twice.

But Payton had reason to know a journalist was interested.

“I took nothing that wasn’t mine to take,” Edward said.

Payton smiled with the lower half of his face.

“That isn’t what I asked.”

One of the unknown men shifted in his chair. Edward felt the movement more than he saw it.

The door was eight feet behind his left shoulder.

He wanted to be on the other side of it.

“Where are the copies, Edward?”

“There aren’t any.”

“Whom have you spoken to?”

“No one who required speaking to.”

“The Daily Chronicle,” Payton said, as casually as if he were confirming a lunch reservation.

Edward kept his face still. He had practised doing that on the train.

“Kit Cassian.”

Edward’s throat tightened before he could stop it.

He knew immediately that Payton had seen the reaction.

After that the questions came with details Edward had not expected them to know. Dates. Extension numbers. A café near Blackfriars that Edward had not mentioned to anyone in this room.

They were not discussing severance.

They were not discussing an ordinary confidentiality problem.

Payton was trying to establish where the information had gone before deciding what to do about Edward.

Edward stood. His legs were less steady than he wanted them to be.

“I think we’re finished.”

The man who had been sitting facing the door stood as well. He did not lunge or threaten him. He simply stepped between Edward and the door.

Edward understood.

He was not being allowed to leave.

“Sit down,” Payton said.

Edward did not sit down.

The first blow came almost casually, a short strike to the side of his face.

For a second Edward was more shocked than hurt. His mind could not fit what had happened into the room around him. There was an expensive conference table. Corporate artwork. Recycled air. Payton Forfax standing three feet away in a shirt that had been pressed that morning.

Then the man hit him again, harder, and Edward stopped trying to make the two realities fit.

They did not beat him wildly. That would almost have been easier to understand.

They asked questions.

When they disliked an answer, they hit him.

Where were the copies?

Who had them?

What had he told Cassian?

Had he spoken to anyone else?

A solicitor?

The police?

A regulator?

Edward lied because the truth was the only thing he still possessed that they wanted.

They knew enough to catch him lying twice. That frightened him more than if they had known everything.

Payton never touched him.

When Edward’s mouth filled with blood, Payton lifted a hand and the man nearest him stepped back.

“Water,” Payton said.

Someone poured it.

Edward’s fingers left a bloody mark on the glass. Payton waited while he drank, or made enough of an attempt to satisfy him, and then asked the same question again in the same tone he used during quarterly reviews.

Meier said something in German. One of the other men answered, switching between German and French too quickly for Edward to follow properly.

Edward understood Kopien.

Copies.

He heard Cassian’s name.

He understood enough of the rest to think they were discussing what would happen once they were certain nobody else had the information.

The door opened.

Eloise stood there with a folder against her chest and her coat over one arm. She looked as though she had finished whatever had kept her late and had only come in to tell Payton she was leaving.

Twenty-four. Small. Blonde. Efficient. Generally pleasant.

The same woman who had nodded to him in the corridor twenty minutes earlier as if nothing unusual were happening.

At that moment she was the best thing Edward had ever seen.

She stopped.

The colour drained from her face.

She looked at Edward, at the blood around his mouth, at the man standing close enough to hit him again, then at Payton.

“Eloise,” Edward said.

He could not say everything he wanted to say.

Don’t leave.

Get help.

Call the police.

Please.

Payton was already moving towards her, already wearing the expression he used for problems that could still be described as misunderstandings.

“There’s been a disagreement,” he said. “Nothing you need to manage. I’ll speak to you in the morning.”

Eloise looked at Edward.

There was no disagreement that explained the blood on his face.

“He needs an ambulance.”

“It’s being handled.”

Meier said something quietly in German.

Eloise looked at him.

The movement was tiny, but Edward saw it. He had heard her speaking German twenty minutes earlier and thought nothing of it.

He did not think Payton had noticed.

“Don’t go,” Edward said.

The words came out weaker than he intended. There was blood in his mouth.

Payton put a hand near Eloise’s elbow. He did not grab her. From a distance it might even have looked courteous.

“Go home, Eloise. I’ll speak to you tomorrow.”

She hesitated.

Edward saw that she was frightened.

Payton repeated himself, more gently this time.

Eloise left.

Edward watched the door close behind her.

The catch sounded exactly the same as it had when he arrived.

Eloise did not run.

She walked down the corridor towards the lifts with the folder still pressed against her chest and her coat over her arm. She had already called the lift. Her thumb did not feel quite like hers when she pressed the button again.

She would not run inside the building.

Running would mean admitting that there was something to run from.

Edward’s face kept coming back to her in pieces. The blood around his mouth. The man standing beside him. Payton standing several feet away and doing nothing.

Her own name, said as if Edward expected her to save him.

Don’t go.

And the German.

Meier had not been speaking to her. He had been speaking to the other men because he had assumed she would not understand.

She had not caught everything.

She had understood enough.

They wanted to know where Edward’s copies were. They wanted to know whether he had given anything useful to the journalist. And once they were certain no one else had the information, they had been discussing what happened next.

It had not been a fight.

There had been no anger in that room. No loss of control. They had been asking Edward questions and hurting him when they did not like his answers.

It had been an interrogation.

The lift opened into the atrium. The late lights were still warming the marble. The security man glanced up at her and then back down.

Eloise crossed the atrium, pushed through the glass doors and reached the street before she began to shake.

She kept walking.

Standing still felt too much like waiting for someone from Forfax to come after her.

Her flat still smelled faintly of the toast she had burnt that morning. She put the folder on the kitchen table, ran the tap and washed her hands, although there was nothing on them.

There would be an explanation.

Forfax always had explanations. A difficult vendor. A misunderstanding. Someone behaving badly under pressure.

Payton would telephone tomorrow and tell her that Edward had become aggressive. Someone had tried to restrain him. The situation had got out of hand.

She could already imagine the language.

None of it would explain what she had seen.

None of it would explain Edward saying, “Don’t go.”

She had left him.

The guilt of that was immediate and uncomplicated. Edward had looked at her for help, and she had walked out of the room because Payton told her to.

She considered calling the police.

Then she tried to imagine what she would say.

Her employer had been standing in a conference room while another man assaulted a former employee. She had heard people speaking German. She had understood some of it. Then she had left.

She considered calling Payton. That instinct was almost automatic. Something had happened at work, therefore Payton needed to know.

Except Payton already knew.

He had been standing there.

She called Edward instead.

His phone rang through without an answer.

She tried again.

Nothing.

His professional profile was still online. The same photograph. The same cautious paragraph about operational oversight and cross-border compliance.

She had no idea where he was.

He could be at home. He could be in hospital. He could still be on the twelfth floor.

The last possibility made her put the phone down.

She made tea and did not drink it. At the window she watched a couple on the pavement below having a mild argument about a takeaway.

Then another thought occurred to her.

Payton knew her father was German.

He knew she spoke the language.

Or at least he ought to know.

What if he realised how much she had understood?

What if they thought she knew something?

She slept badly.

In the morning she dressed for work because getting dressed was easier than deciding what else to do. By the time she reached the corner of her street, however, one thing had become clear.

She could not work for Payton Forfax again.

She went into the office anyway.

She had no intention of disappearing and leaving someone else to discover an abandoned desk. She was frightened of Payton. She was not going to let that turn her into someone who vanished from a job without resigning from it.

She printed the letter at her own terminal before anyone could ask her to book a room or rearrange a diary.

At half past nine she took it into Payton’s office.

He read it standing up.

“You’re distressed,” he said. “That’s understandable. Take the rest of the week. We’ll talk on Monday.”

“No.”

He looked at her as if she had declined something trivial.

Then his manner changed. He became the Payton she knew: controlled, considerate, persuasive. The man who had hired her and had twice remembered her birthday without needing to be prompted.

“You’ve been excellent, Eloise. Trusted. Valued. If last night has made this floor uncomfortable, we can move you. A different brief. A different office, if that’s what you need. There would be a conversation about salary, of course.”

“No.”

Only then did he sit down.

“What exactly did you hear last night?”

She had practised her answer in the lift.

“People arguing,” she said. “I saw that Edward was hurt.”

She did not mention the German.

Payton nodded.

“Edward made an accusation he couldn’t support. He became agitated. One of our colleagues from Hamburg tried to keep the situation from becoming a scene. It was clumsy. I regret that you walked in on it.”

Eloise knew it was a lie.

She did not challenge him. There was nothing to gain by telling him what she knew.

“Is Edward all right?”

Payton looked briefly at her resignation letter before meeting her eyes again.

“Edward Wills is being dealt with.”

Eloise felt cold.

Not Edward is fine.

Not Edward went home.

Not even I don’t know.

Being dealt with.

She left the resignation letter on his desk.

Her things fitted into a cardboard box that had recently held printer paper. Nobody tried to stop her leaving.

She was not sure whether that reassured her.

The first agreement arrived two days later by courier.

Forfax International wished to be reassured regarding commercially sensitive information Eloise might have encountered during the course of her employment. There were clauses about discussion and disclosure, and others broad enough that she had to read them twice.

She sat at the kitchen table with a pen beside her and did not touch it.

She had already signed a confidentiality undertaking when she started at Forfax.

She wrote that in an email to the legal address on the covering letter.

This document went considerably further.

She would not be signing it.

A second version arrived on Friday.

This one offered money.

Enough money that refusing it felt briefly ridiculous.

Then she thought about why they were offering it.

If she accepted payment in return for silence about what she had seen, her silence would no longer simply be something she had chosen. It would be something Forfax had bought.

She refused again.

Payton telephoned on Monday evening.

She nearly let it ring out. Then she answered because she was tired of behaving as though she were the person who had something to hide.

“I don’t understand your position,” he said.

He sounded genuinely puzzled.

“Are you planning to go to the press?”

“No.”

“The police?”

“No.”

“Do you intend to discuss what happened?”

“No.”

“Then why won’t you sign?”

Eloise looked at the second agreement. It was still in its envelope on the table.

“Because deciding not to say anything is my choice.”

There was a pause.

“And signing this changes that how?”

“Because then it’s yours.”

He did not understand.

Or perhaps he understood perfectly and simply did not think the distinction should matter to her.

He increased the amount of money.

Eloise said no again.

“I’m not signing away my right to change my mind.”

This time the silence was different.

She realised immediately what she had just told him.

She might change her mind.

She might decide to speak to the police. She might decide to tell somebody what she had seen. She had no intention of doing either now, but she had just told Payton that she refused to promise she never would.

“I’ll have them send another draft,” he said.

“You can send whatever you like.”

She ended the call.

For a moment she remained at the kitchen table, looking at the phone.

Then she closed the laptop she had opened in case Payton asked her to look at a clause and pushed the agreement further away.

She thought she was finished with Forfax International.