Two Rings
Alcántara House, sixth floor
June worked on a floor her father used to walk through on his way to a different lift. It was open plan now, and grey, and had the kind of carpet that takes the sound out of footsteps, so people arrived at your desk without you hearing them come.
Beckmann came at the end of the day, which was how he did things he wanted to seem casual.
“You’re on the Hallow account now,” he said. “Effective Monday. Pella’s leaving.”
“That’s a step up.”
“It’s a step somewhere.” He put his hands in his pockets. “It’s a good account and it’s a quiet account. People notice quiet.”
June waited.
“There’s still press about your family,” Beckmann said. “Not much. Every so often. Nobody here minds, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
“It’s just useful, in a year like this one, if the name comes up in the same sentence as work.” He tapped the edge of her desk with his knuckle, a thing he’d probably been told made him seem warm. “You’re doing well. I’d like you to keep doing well.”
“Thank you,” June said, and smiled the way she’d been smiling at men like Beckmann since she was a girl, and waited until the lift doors closed before she stopped.
Beckmann was Dutch and did the whole floor in English, which everybody said was for the international side and everybody knew was for himself.
She was in a building her father used to run. On the sixth floor of it, in a chair somebody else had chosen.
That was fine. She had decided a long time ago that it was fine.
What Alcántara Group actually did, and what everybody on this floor did all day, was keep other people’s goods and move them about.
Warehouses. Lorries. Three long leases on the right bank of the river. A customer signed for years at a time, put their whole season through an Alcántara shed, and paid by the pallet.
Which meant there was only one thing in the building worth stealing, and it was not a machine or a formula. It was a page: what each customer paid, and the month their contract ran out.
June had learned that at a dinner table when she was small, from a man explaining to another man why he never brought files home.
It had been a bad two years before the photograph. Every time a contract came up for renewal, Kestrel Freight bid for it and won, and won by a margin that was slightly too neat, and by the second winter people in the depots had a word for that.
Leaking.
So when the newspaper ran the picture, nobody needed to prove what her father and Anton Reyes had said to each other in that car park.
The shareholders read it as a chairman arranging his own way out. The men in the depots read it as the reason their shed was going to close. And every customer with pallets in an Alcántara warehouse read it as their own rate card sitting on somebody else’s desk.
Three of them gave notice inside a fortnight. The share price went with them.
Eleven days after the article the board asked for a resignation, and got one.
As for the money: almost everything her father had was Alcántara stock, because that is how chairmen are paid. By the time it came to June it was worth a fraction of what it had been on the Monday of that week.
There was no settlement. Men who resign under a photograph do not get settlements.
What was left went on a year of her mother’s illness, and then on death duties, twice.
The house had sold the week her mother died. June had a salary and a rented flat near the park with nothing on the walls.
She was, in the plainest terms, an employee of the company her family used to run, on a floor where a man called Beckmann could tell her that people notice quiet.
Theo came when the floor was almost empty, and stood at the end of her desk holding a small paper bag as if he’d been asked to carry it for someone else.
“You don’t answer your buzzer,” he said.
“It doesn’t work. I’ve told them. They send a man who agrees with me and then leaves.”
“That’s the whole of modern life.” He put the bag down between the keyboard and the phone. “This is yours.”
June looked at it.
“It’s not mine.”
“It was bought for you.”
“And I gave it back, Theo, which is the correct thing to do, and you took it, which was also correct. We got through that conversation without either of us saying anything unforgivable.” She pushed the bag an inch away from her. “I’d rather not have it a second time.”
“It sat in a drawer for a year.” Theo pulled out the chair from the empty desk opposite and sat down in it backwards. “My mother found it and asked me what I was planning to do with it, and I didn’t have an answer, and that’s when I realised the drawer was a decision.”
“So you’re making it my drawer.”
“I’m making it yours. You can put it in a river.”
June laughed, and was surprised by it, and was quiet after.
She didn’t open the bag. She could feel the shape of it through the paper, and it was a great deal smaller than she remembered.
“How are you,” Theo said.
“Fine.”
He sat back and let the word sit on the desk between them.
“June.”
“Busy. Beckmann’s moving me onto Hallow. It’s more money and less noise and I’d be an idiot not to take it.” She turned her father’s ring around her thumb. “And I’m aware that saying that out loud means I’m trying to convince myself. That’s it. That’s the news.”
“What are you doing in the evenings?”
“Sleeping badly.”
He looked at her for a second too long.
“All right,” he said, and stood, and pushed the chair back in the way people do when they’ve decided not to ask a second time. “For what it’s worth, if you ever want anything from my side of things, you only have to say it once. Anything at all. I do mean anything.”
“Noted.”
“I’m serious.”
June looked up at him properly for the first time since he’d come in.
“I know you are. That’s why I said noted instead of something clever.”
After he’d gone she sat with the paper bag in front of her and did not open it. Then she put it in the drawer of her own desk, which she understood perfectly well was the same act she’d just made fun of him for.
Two rings now. One she couldn’t take off, one she wouldn’t put on.
Wren came up after the cleaners, with a folder under her arm.
She hadn’t come through reception. June didn’t ask how.
“You could have emailed it,” June said.
“No.” Wren stayed on her feet.
“Right.” June cleared the corner of the desk. “No, you’re right. Sorry.”
Wren put the folder down and opened it and turned it round so it faced June, and stood beside the chair rather than sitting in it.
The printout was a list. Times, employee IDs, what had been opened and for how long. It was the access history on Diego Alcántara’s private calendar, and it went back years, and June had wanted it for so long that for a second she couldn’t make her eyes read it properly.
“Start there,” Wren said, and put her finger on the page.
June started there.
The entries ran on in that flat way records do. The same handful of IDs, week after week. An assistant. A scheduler. A man in facilities who opened everything, because he opened everything.
Then the week the article ran.
Then nothing.
Not a gap in the calendar. A gap in the record of who had looked at it. A stretch where the log simply stopped and started again on the other side, clean, like a road with no lamps.
“That’s not a system fault,” June said.
“No.”
Wren’s finger was still on the page, holding the place.
“Could it be one?”
“It could be, if the whole file was damaged. It isn’t. Everything either side is fine.” Wren’s voice went into the register she used for machines, level and slightly faster. “Somebody removed rows. You have to have a reason to know how, and you have to have a reason to want to, and the second one is harder to come by than the first.”
June sat back.
“How many people could do it?”
Wren answered without having to think, which told June she had already thought.
“In the building? Nine. More, if you count the ones who’ve left.”
“You’re one of the nine.”
It came out before June had decided to say it, and she heard how it sounded on the way out.
“Yes,” Wren said.
She said it the way she said everything, without weight.
And June felt something go through her that she did not want to look at directly. There had not been one single second — not in the car park, not on the phone, not now — when she had wondered about Wren.
She had wondered about everyone. She had made a list and put people on it who used to come to her house for dinner.
“I’m sorry,” June said. “That wasn’t a question. That was me thinking out loud badly.”
Wren’s hand went flat on the page, over the gap in the log.
“It was a question.”
“It was, and it was a stupid one, and you can tell me to leave it.”
Wren looked at the window instead of at her.
“Wasn’t going to tell you anything.”
They were quiet for a while. Outside, the lights on the tower crane over the new build changed from red to white.
“There’s a second thing,” June said.
“Okay.”
The okay came so fast that June had to stop and start again.
“You should hear the whole of it first.”
“You said that last time.”
June looked up. Wren was looking at the window, not at her.
“The logs tell me who looked,” June said. “They don’t tell me where he actually went. That’s in the drive books — the paper ones your dad keeps. One a year, one a car.” She kept her voice where it was. “I’ve got the last one and there are pages missing out of it. So I need to see the others. And I know exactly what I’m asking, and I want to say out loud that I know.”
Wren didn’t move.
“They’re in the flat,” she said.
“Yes.”
Wren said the next part evenly, the way you read out a fault so nobody can argue with it.
“You want me to go through my father’s things.”
“I want to know where my father was on a Saturday,” June said. “Those turn out to be the same sentence, and I’m not going to pretend they aren’t.”
The tower crane light changed again. Somewhere below, a door shut.
“Okay,” Wren said.
June had a whole second half prepared. She had built it in the car. The part where she said you can say no and I’ll never mention it again. The part that let Wren out.
It sat in her chest with nowhere to go.
“You didn’t ask why,” she said.
“You’ll tell me when it’s true.”
Wren reached to close the folder, and June reached at the same time to keep it open, and their hands came down together on the paper.
Neither of them moved.
Wren had long fingers. June had never registered that before, or had registered it a thousand times without ever putting it into a thought — long fingers, short flat nails cut down almost to nothing, a knuckle that didn’t sit quite level with the others.
There was a scar across it, white and thin. June knew where that had come from. They’d been jumping the fence at the bottom of the Alcántara garden all summer, over and back, over and back, and one afternoon the whole panel had gone down under them and taken part of Wren’s hand with it.
She’d got up first. She’d checked that June was all right before she’d looked at her own hand.
She held on a second longer than she needed to. Then a second longer than that.
“Sorry,” she said, and let go.
“It’s fine.”
“I’ve got it. You can leave it with me.”
“Sure,” Wren said, and picked up her bag, and was at the door before June realised she hadn’t asked her a single thing about her mother.