60
Saturday, 5 May 2012
Marian Williams filed documents, signed forms and slipped them into internal envelopes until her desk was clear. Being off in the week had set her back; at the weekend she could work uninterrupted. She did not like to leave work pending. She began each day with a clean slate. She smiled grimly at the phrase; it made her think of Stella. Stella, it seemed, got everywhere.
She had saved the best task until last. She tapped Barlow’s details into the database. She started with vehicle registrations dating from eighteen when he probably passed his driving test.
When computers were introduced to the station in the early 1990s, Marian Williams might have been expected not to get on with them. But she was efficient, and others were mindful to respect her exacting systems. The ‘Crime Reporting Information System’ was one of many technological challenges. Some staff took early retirement to avoid it altogether, while others, through a mix of carelessness and obduracy, undermined CRIS with minor errors. Marian hunted these down and corrected them. She grew to know it intimately and, awed by its capability, developed a fierce attachment to it. She posed questions. It gave her answers. It never let her down. The answer it gave Marian now was one that she had dreaded one day finding out.
After a time she gathered herself and printed out the result, noting, as she always did, the last time she had printed a response from the database. It made no sense. She never printed in the mornings and never while the cleaners were in the building.
She picked up the receiver and punched in the number of the woman who was supposed to be a friend.
‘Is that Stella Darnell?’
The conversation was short. She folded the printout and dropped it in her handbag. She had one more call to make.
The administrator whom everyone knew as Marian Williams put on her coat and slung her bag over her chest like a satchel, a precaution against theft. She trotted out of the station. Before meeting Stella, she would stop at the model shop in Hammersmith Station, orange was an unusual colour, but the man stocked everything, he would not let her down.