Free Untimely Graves by Marjorie Eccles Page B

instructions through a haze of cigarette smoke, being issued with invoice pads and replenishing cleaning kits from the bulk supply cartons lying around the room and spilling out to line the passage to the back door. Not knowing what to do, Cleo stood hesitantly to one side until Val, looking up and running a hand through her hair, saw her, smiled and told her to make herself comfortable and she’d be with her in a minute.
    She found a chair and tried to squeeze herself out of the way, ordering herself to remember that this was going to be fun , resolutely squashing her doubts that she’d be in any way suitable for the job. Too late for that, she was committed, but if she couldn’t actually enjoy the work, at least she would be earning some money, not only to pay her parents the modest rent they were asking for Phoebe’s house, but also to live on.
    Gradually the room emptied and she was able to inspect her surroundings properly. There wasn’t much to look at, other than Val’s desk, occupied by a small PC surrounded by a sea of papers, and a stack of filing cabinets to one side. After a while, her eyes were drawn to the wall above the fireplace, still papered in a psychedelic 1970s wallpaper, where an A4 sheet of the firm’s headed notepaper was pinned. Underneath the heading, ‘MAID TO ORDER’, was an accomplished sketch in black felt tip of a saucy French maid wearing a very short skirt and a suggestive wink.
Ring Fifi, maid to order, it said, and gave a telephone number. Underneath, somebody had scrawled, ‘We should be so lucky!’
    ‘Don’t take any notice of that,’ Val said, seeing her smiling at it when the rest of the women had gone. ‘It’s only someone thinking they’re being funny,’ she added, nodding towards the corner, not seeming in the least put out by it.
    ‘I’ve been trying to get her to accept it as the firm’s logo but she won’t listen,’ said the languid person to whom she’d obviously been referring, a youth of about seventeen or eighteen, who was smoking and lounging in a chair tipped on its back legs, his feet propped up against the wall.
    He was seriously weird. Ear-rings and an eyebrow stud and cropped-off dyed carroty hair were par for the course, but that was only the start. It wasn’t only that he was as thin as a broomstick, either, with the pale eyes and complexion that go with ginger hair, not to mention ears that stuck out like batwings. A deep scar ran across his forehead and lifted one side of his face, so that his features looked somehow uncoordinated, as though one half was saying one thing and one another.
    ‘This is Tone, Tony Gilchrist,’ Val said, ‘Cleo Atkins.’
    ‘Hi, Cleo.’ It sounded as though the simple effort of getting the words out had exhausted him.
    ‘You’ll be working together, with Sue – that’s Sue Thomas – when she gets here. She’s your team leader,’ Val added, glancing at her watch, looking worried, while Cleo was trying to believe that, appearances to the contrary, Tone might well be a whizz with a squeezy mop, for all she knew. ‘I hope she isn’t going to let me down. She’s usually so reliable. Well, let’s get you sorted, Cleo, before she comes.’
    She tossed Cleo a black sweatshirt with MO monogrammed on it in red, and a pair of black jogging pants, the uniform she must wear every time she went to a job. ‘That way, people know who you are,’ Val said, seeming confident that it was enough for the people who employed them to accept without question this evidence of any lack of evil intent. She was shown to a little washroom where she could change.
    As she emerged, Val was throwing open a window, though it was another clear, piercingly sharp, blowy March morning and the wind immediately began to blow the papers on her desk
about. ‘Oh, close the bloomin’ thing again, Tone, will you?’ she said resignedly, chasing papers, wrinkling her nose. ‘I don’t allow smoking on the job, so they all get as much in as