The Glass Ceiling Read online

  Anabel Donald

  THE GLASS

  CEILING

  Contents

  Sunday 26 September

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Monday, 27 September

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Tuesday, 28 September

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Wednesday, 29 September

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Thursday, 30 September

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Friday, 1 October

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Saturday, 2 October

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Sunday, 3 October

  Chapter Thirty-One

  For Freddy Stockwell

  a remarkable father who has taught me nearly everything I know. And never mentioned a glass ceiling.

  Sunday 26 September

  Chapter One

  I don’t like formal upper-class English manners, and not just because I don’t have them. ‘Lovely, darling, wonderful, darling, thank you sooo much,’ and all the time, underneath, what they really think. It makes me feel patronized.

  On the other hand . . . manners can come in useful. Sometimes. For example, if you’ve just had one of the least successful sexual experiences of all time, with a man you particularly want to succeed with. Times like that.

  There we were. In bed, at Barty’s place. Two wine-glasses on two bedside tables. An empty bottle of Château Pointlessly Expensive, his side. A dazed-looking cheese-plant my side, its waxy leaves reeling under the impact of my wine, which I had been too cautious to drink. I didn’t want to make a fool of myself, did I?

  Big mistake. I should have.

  I should have drunk the wine and relaxed.

  Failing that, I should have faked it; sounded pleased, moved, thrilled. Shaken to my depths. Every woman’s done it, some time. I certainly have. I’m twenty-nine years old, and reasonably experienced. There’s always plenty of spare about if you work in television, particularly if you’re on location, and when I started out (probably because I had low physical self-esteem and a high sex-drive) I seldom said no. I’d developed two styles, over the years. I could have given him kittenish purrings culminating in the piercing scream of a pre-teen at a Michael Jackson concert, or the simpler, all-purpose ‘Mmm. Mmmmm. Mmmmm . . . Oh, God!’

  But I hadn’t. I’d lain there hoping to be excited and tried to be co-operative, like a friend helping to hang a picture straight. Up a bit, down a bit, to the right a bit, no, not quite, try that, so now here we were after an hour of nothing very much, staring at a moulded ceiling pooled in the overlapping beams of two Art Deco bedside lamps. I clutched the duvet under my chin and refused to imagine losing Barty.

  He’s an independent producer I work with, and in the last few tax years he’s provided over 60 per cent of my freelance income as a researcher. We’ve had a will-they-won’t-they relationship for a while now, partly because I wouldn’t risk mixing business with pleasure.

  I’d been right.

  One of the things about him that usually annoys me is his smoothness. But now I was counting on it. I wasn’t going to risk speaking first: I waited for clues from his dog-eared copy of the Bullshit Manual for old Etonians.

  ‘Very dear Alex,’ he said. ‘You’re more important to me than you can imagine. Didn’t you say you had an appointment at ten o’clock? It’s a quarter to ten now.’

  Got it. Simple. Say something positive but vague, then go and let the dust settle on our sexual egos. ‘You’re important to me too,’ I said, and got out of bed.

  ‘Shall I drive you?’

  ‘No, I’ll enjoy the walk,’ I said, and bolted. Pulled on my jeans, T-shirt and Doc Martens, stuffed my pants, bra and socks in my big squashy leather bag, babbled about my appointment, and went like a whippet for the stairs. I didn’t even say thank you for the wine. The cheese-plant could do that.

  Out in the street I gulped in the London air. Another big mistake. Humid, toxic September air I coughed for a while. The crucial thing was not to think. I covered my ears with my hands to block out the sneering voices inside my head, and said, ‘Rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb.’

  Then I looked at my watch. No watch. It was on the bedside table. I wasn’t going back. I was going to meet a client. Work. Work always helps.

  * * * * *

  By ten o’clock I’d half walked, half jogged the three-quarters of a mile up Ladbroke Grove, and I was standing under Westway, not far from my flat. Only about three streets away, but three significant streets: a headlong plunge down the urban scale, from marginally smart to inner-city deprived.

  It hadn’t rained for two days, but the huge dank concrete flyover above my head was still mustering greasy drops of London water (I hoped it was water), which were splatting at my feet. The traffic, only a few yards above me, was a constant rumbling roar that almost blanketed the voices from the takeaway West Indian food van on Ladbroke Grove.

  The Barty fiasco was bad enough. But even without it, standing here, I would have felt embarrassed, an intruder. The darker parts under Westway belong to the winos at night. Not the young homeless, on their way up to rescue at a Young People’s Drop-in Centre or down to a brief blaze of glory as sex objects followed by a dragging decline as drug addicts, but real, dyed-in-the-wool tramps, with their rotting filthy garments and bulging plastic bags and bottles of Thunderbird or cans of Special Brew. I was trespassing in someone’s front room. Or someone’s urinal. One muttering old wreck passed and accosted me.

  ‘Gissa quid for a cuppa tea.’

  I gave her a quid.

  She spat. ‘Can’t get much tea for that. Costa livin’.’

  I added another quid. She took it, spat again and moved on, pushing a clanking pram.

  It was five past ten. It had started to rain heavily, but at least I knew that was water. I’d wait for the Woman in the Balaclava Helmet until quarter past, and then go home.

  I didn’t think she was going to turn up. So far, she was only a voice on my answerphone, and I’d had some odd calls since I put up an advertisement locally.

  On balance, I’d regretted it. Not advertising: if you don’t advertise, you can’t get hired, and I was still trying to get my sideline, private detective work, off the ground. The location of the ad wasn’t bad either: in my neighbourhood sub-post office, just by where people stood in queues for hours for Child Benefit or pensions or stamps. They had plenty of time to look up at the signs, read them, set them to music, make anagrams out of them. Beside the Indian takeaway and the dodgy garage and the spaces saying ‘This space is available for advertising’, my ad looked tempting. It had my address and telephone number, and,

  ALEX TANNER

  PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR

  SPECIAL RATES FOR INTERESTING CASES

  The mistake was in the choice of the word ‘interesting’. Everyone thinks they’re an interesting case. Particularly the lunatics, and you get plenty of those in my corner of London. The advertisement had been up three weeks, and so far I’d got two real jobs out of it. One lasted half a day
: the other, two days. Apart from that, I’d had telephone calls from several nutters, and the Woman in the Balaclava Helmet was probably another of them.

  The trouble with answerphones is that you can’t argue.

  The message had been waiting that morning, early, when I got in from my run. About eight o’clock. I’d played it back often enough. I knew it by heart. I’d even put a new tape on the answering machine so I could keep the original message safe.

  ‘Alex Tanner? Private Investigator? I’m a client. Call me Ms X. I want to hire you. Meet me outside the Westway Senior Citizens’ Centre at ten o’clock tonight. I’ll be wearing a Balaclava helmet.’

  The voice had an Irish accent, but it was clearly put on. And not professionally, either. It moved hokily from Belfast to Dublin to Cork and back again. So the accent was assumed, and all I really knew was that it belonged to a woman, and not a very young or very old woman. A woman who wasn’t Irish or of Irish origin, with a moderate ear for accents, between the ages of eighteen and fifty-five. That really narrowed it down.

  Did I even expect her to turn up? Yes, I did. Or perhaps I just hoped she would. I like mysteries, fictional or real. I always have. Problem. Inquiry. Investigation. Audacity. Solution. Everything sorted by the last page. I don’t have any real-life heroes, but I have fictional ones. Like Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer and Spenser. Private eyes who walk the mean streets wearing the shining armour of a visionary cynicism, Arthurian knights out of time, where Avalon meets the streets of Los Angeles or Bay City. And a Woman in a Balaclava Helmet suggested a latter-day Avalon.

  But by ten-thirty, when I’d fended off two more winos, I had to admit there was no sign of the Holy Grail and my armour was soaked through. So I walked south up Ladbroke Grove for the three hundred yards that spanned the huge social gap between the winos and my property investment. I was going home, to Peter.

  Usually, I live alone and that’s the way I like it. I very seldom have guests. Guests, female, sleep when I want to hoover and hoover when I want to sleep. Guests, male, make me self-conscious. If they’re current lovers they should know me well enough not to stay. Otherwise I can’t walk about in the early morning as I usually do, with no clothes on, but have to behave like someone in a seventies movie who can’t get out of bed without trussing herself up in a king-size sheet and trailing it across the grubby carpet.

  Not that my flat’s dirty: it isn’t. If anything, I clean rather too much. It’s just that I live in London, where carpets and curtains go from new to grubby before the cheque that you bought them with clears.

  But I’d agreed to let Peter stay, for several good reasons.

  He was an ex-lover, so he knew the worst. I didn’t need to impress him.

  He’d offered to put up bookshelves in my spare room, free.

  I wanted to keep in with his father, who was my best contact in the Metropolitan Police.

  So when I got back to my flat, instead of walking into a people-free sanctuary, burying my face in a pillow and howling with the embarrassment of it all, I was going to have to be social.

  My flat’s the top two floors of the building. As I reached the top of the communal stairs I could hear the television, and Peter. ‘Get in there!’ he was shouting. ‘Rip his balls off!’

  A once-familiar domestic sound: Peter watching a rugby match. He’d been working on a documentary in Alaska for five months: he’d asked me to record the British Lions tour of Australia and New Zealand for him. Which I had, and was suffering through it. ‘You left-footed twat, my grandmother could have converted from there! Oh, hi, Alex.’ He snapped off the video.

  He was lying on the sofa, his big feet in their desert boots hanging off the end, pointedly. I’d bet he’d just moved his feet when he heard my key in the lock. I’m the only person allowed to put their boots up on my sofa, and he knows it.

  The living-room looked smaller with him in it. He’s not all that tall – about five-eight – but he’s broad and well-built and he has a big head with masses of curly chestnut hair and a redder beard. I hoped the beard wouldn’t be with us much longer; he’d grown it in Alaska, probably for warmth or convenience.

  ‘Client didn’t turn up?’ he said. He’d predicted she wouldn’t. I shook my head. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘There’s a parcel for you. Someone rang the doorbell and left it on the steps.’

  He waved a brown muscular arm towards the kitchen. ‘I left it on the table,’ he said. ‘Fetch us a beer, while you’re at it.’

  ‘We’re out of beer.’

  ‘No. I stocked up. Coors. In the fridge.’

  I like Coors, but it’s a luxury I won’t waste my own money on. He was being nice to me. He usually is: he likes women, and he likes me. We’ve known each other since I was eight and he was nine and he let me join his gang. He’d lived with his family on the same council estate in Fulham I’d partly grown up in.

  Come to that, I’m fond of him. I’ve almost forgiven him for dumping me for the blonde graduate BBC trainee, and that was ten years ago. Ten years rubs the edges off even the most catastrophic deprivation, and I’d seen it as that at the time. It had knocked my sexual confidence.

  About most things, I’m confident. Partly because I’m good at my job. Certainly good at my main job, and not so bad at my PI sideline, either. But I never expect to be desired, or loved. I always used to suppose most other people did. They certainly give that impression. Recently, I haven’t been so sure.

  Anyway, I didn’t moan at him about lying on the sofa, and went upstairs. I washed, changed into clean underclothes, dry jeans and sweatshirt. Then I fished the dirty underclothes from my bag and stuffed them into the laundry basket, put the lid firmly on the basket and stray memories of Barty’s bedroom, and left my boots dripping in the bath. Then I fetched two bottles of beer, some rubber gloves and the parcel, and sat in the armchair, leaving the sofa to him.

  I’d handled the parcel carefully, wrapping the rubber gloves round it, and I put them on before I opened it, so as not to smudge the fingerprints, supposing there were any, supposing it mattered. The parcel was actually a large envelope addressed to alex tanner, flat 2, in large print. There was a cardboard box inside, about eight inches by four by four. The box was fastened shut with Sellotape all the way round.

  I like small puzzles. I hefted the box in my hand before I opened it. It didn’t rattle. It wasn’t heavy, it wasn’t light.

  I took a swig of the beer, put the can down on an old envelope to protect the surface of my coffee table, and started to slit the Sellotape with a key.

  ‘What is it?’ said Peter.

  I lifted the lid off and nearly dropped the box. I’m not squeamish, particularly, but the beady eyes of the hamster met mine, or didn’t meet mine because his/hers were glazed and definitely dead. Dead things are frightening. Even small dead things, when you don’t expect them.

  ‘A hamster,’ I said.

  ‘Yer what?’ said Peter, heaving himself round so he could see for himself.

  ‘A dead hamster,’ I repeated. It looked pathetic, defenceless, its small pink paws curling appealingly.

  ‘What did it die of?’

  ‘Maybe it was bored to death by a one-eyed Haitian serial hamster killer singing highlights from the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber. How do I know?’

  ‘Is it injured?’

  ‘No, it’s dead. Passed on. Passed over. Gone to Jesus. Gone to the Big Wheel in the Sky.’

  ‘A know that,’ said Peter impatiently. ‘But is it damaged? Tortured?’

  ‘No.’ Its coat was smooth and rather beautiful.

  I went to the kitchen for a plastic bag. OK, it was only a hamster, but it was dead and that was worrying. Death is always worrying. I lifted it on to the plastic bag, not wincing at the contact of its soft coat because the rubber gloves blunted that. I can bear most things through rubber gloves.

  At the bottom of the box was an envelope. Inside, two hundred pounds in fifty-pound notes, and a letter. Not hand-written: produced
by a dot-matrix printer.

  Alex Tanner

  I am your client, the Womun in the

  Balaclava Helmet. I know what Wimmin

  really want.

  Leona Power XXX

  Melanie Slater

  Elspeth Driscoll

  Grace Macarthy

  I must smash the glass ceiling. Stop me if you can . . . please stop me.

  I held the note out to Peter, not letting him take it (fingerprints again). He read it, slowly, which is how he reads. ‘She can’t spell,’ he said. ‘She’s spelt “woman” wrong. Twice.’

  ‘That’s the feminist spelling. Womun singular, wimmin plural.’

  ‘She’s a nutcase, then.’

  I was annoyed. ‘Because she’s a feminist?’

  ‘Not just, though that too, I suppose. Mostly because she makes an appointment which she doesn’t keep and sends you a dead hamster.’

  I wasn’t going to waste time arguing feminism with Peter. He’s hopeless. Not only is he an amateur rugby player, but he’s also a television technician, a breed which has a canteen culture only marginally less primitive and ‘get out your danglers, darlin’ ’ than the police.

  He read the note again. ‘Leona Power I know. She’s the good-looking American feminist with tasty legs and big tits. Everyone knows Amazin’ Grace Macarthy, New Zealand’s answer to Germaine Greer. Who are the other two?’

  ‘Melanie Slater’s a Tory tabloid columnist. She used to be feminist and left-wing – ages ago. Then she saw the light, and now she’s all for Family Values and putting single parents in the workhouse. I interviewed her two years ago for a doco on Getting Women Back Into the Kitchen.’

  ‘What’s a workhouse?’

  ‘Never mind.’ I’d forgotten that Peter’s idea of history was an early Beatles album. ‘I’ve never heard of Elspeth Driscoll . . . It doesn’t even ring a bell.’

  ‘If you’ve met the Slater woman, maybe she sent this. Did you tell her you were a PI on the side?’

  ‘No. I wasn’t, then. And she wouldn’t have hired me anyway. I’m not her type, I told you. She thinks women should have hairstyles, high heels and husbands. Not cropped hair, DMs and career plans.’