Chapter 4

OK, I thought, the next morning, even before I'd properly woken up, so Ruth had decided to come on to me. Beautifully done - by a beautiful woman - but not exactly subtle. I mean, if I let my ego off the leash for a second I could have been flattered. No heterosexual male could have failed to be, really, but, equally, no hardened cynic could have failed to detect the slight odour of lurking rat. Ruth thought that I was attractive, witty and a borderline genius? Well, so do I, actually. Problem was that no other woman I'd ever met had formed anything like the same impression - well, not for more than a week or so, at any rate - and that set the alarm bells ringing. And reminded me of the basics of the situation: Such as the fact that her father had been playing silly buggers, with her active involvement, screwing my company and my 'reputation' so he could make some sort of killing from the remains. And looked at from that perspective, getting involved with the woman - however numerous its other attractions - was simply a Bad Idea.

I hoped, as I began to get coffee together, that I'd handled the situation reasonably well, rejected the 'offer' with sufficient grace not to have caused further problems in the future. And, as the caffeine kicked in, began to wonder. If Ruth had been trying to buy me off - or, even, just to distract me - then the gambit had failed.

So what would she - or they - try next?

When I got into the office - delayed by a signal failure at Seven Sisters, this time - I found it miraculously clean. OK, so the downstairs workshop was beginning to accumulate cobwebs - there was still no sign of Tim - but upstairs was a vision of corporate efficiency. Not only had all traces of the previous days wreckage and detritus disappeared - I noticed that, touchingly, my Original Model had been returned to its shelf and that some effort had been made to straighten it out - but the place had been vacuumed, perhaps even dusted. Hell, there was even fresh coffee in the pot and - god help us all - flowers in a couple of vases on a desk and a windowsill.

So not a miracle at all, then, I thought, collapsing into a chair and wondering where Maggie - whose doing all this must have been - might actually be. Not that she could have been gone long - the coffee was hot and a quick glance at the e-mails revealed that everything more than twenty minutes old had been read and, mostly replied to. Which also meant that M had been in for a fair while and already dealt with a shit load of stuff that I'd been dreading even looking at ... and now had gone out.

It was a near Marie Celeste situation, I felt, maybe even a Sherlockian three pipe problem. Except it wasn't. While I was still pissing about with literary allusions, Mag herself returned, bearing a bag of bacon rolls from the café down the road.

"I saw the tube was fucked on the web," she said, simply, "so I thought you might appreciate these."

And I began to appreciate, too, just what a nice woman I'd been working with for so long...

Coffee and dead animals consumed, we turned our attentions properly to work. It was surprisingly easy. I had thought that it might be a tad embarrassing telling M about my night's adventures, and I wasn't exactly looking forward to asking about hers, but ... no problems.

In fact, Maggie had found Tim easily enough, sitting in one of his local bars, clearly on the outside of a substantial quantity of alcohol, and had had some sort of conversation. Which must have been a bit of a challenge - T hardly being a brilliant talker at the best of time, when drunk he's ... Anyway, M had persisted at least long enough to establish that he was feeling a bit guilty about his role in recent events, having caught at least some of the shit that had been flying around almost as a sort of collateral damage. Well, I always told him that smart phones had their downsides - and, I supposed, even the excess alcohol could be seen as a vaguely positive sign.

The conclusion, however, was that Tim was still more or less on board, if we wanted him - I hadn't thought of it in those terms before - but was clearly not going to be making an appearance today owing to what was presumably a pretty awesome hangover. I didn't ask just where he was doing his recovery - at his own place or Maggie's, I mean. It just didn't seem ... appropriate.

Maggie herself, of course, was right back on board, as demonstrated by the cleaning and the flowers, though she did admit that she'd resolved to chuck it in when things between Tim and her had become difficult - were they ever easy, I wondered? - then thought better of the decision when things had started to get messy. Basic human loyalty, I think you'd probably have to describe it as, or maybe just yet another reason why she was such a remarkable human being. Anyway, she'd decided to stay and see if she could help, for which I was truly grateful. As I was, bizarrely enough, for the news that Tim could also be back around. Bloke might be a prize pillock and his recent behaviour would be grounds for sacking him several times over, but ... well, the famous generator might be 'my idea', but a lot of the technical details that made it work were indubitably Tim's. Also, of course, we'd started this together, and it seemed right, somehow, to see it through together as the two of us - or, of course, I thought, looking at Maggie, as the three of us.