Free Concealment by Rose Edmunds Page A

reason to disappear. She vanished last Friday, taking none of her things with her. We’ve explored all the obvious avenues and drawn a blank. Now we need help from you, the public.’
    When fetching ice for a second gin, I checked my iPhone on the kitchen counter and discovered two missed calls and three messages. One was from Charles Goodchild, hoping Isabelle’s absence wouldn’t slow up the sale process. What a narcissistic twat—I would call him in the morning, if he was lucky. The other two were both from journalists—I guessed they’d got my name from Carmody.
    I ignored the journalists, assuming someone else in the firm had dealt with them, until I heard the News at Ten. They specifically mentioned that Pearson Malone had so far made no comment, in suggestive tones implying that we didn’t care or might conceivably be somehow involved ourselves.
    I called the twenty-four-seven hotline to the firm’s Media Relations team, hoping they would have everything in hand. But a recorded message provided a selection of alternative contacts, depending on your department. I was supposed to call Smithies.
    I steeled myself and dialled his mobile. Voicemail. Keen to exhaust all avenues, I called his home number.
    A woman, his wife I supposed, answered. She claimed, pleasantly and plausibly, that he wasn’t around, but the pompous droning of his voice in the background nailed the lie. She offered to pass on the message “when he got back”.
    Now what?
    Pearson Malone’s attitude to media exposure verged on phobic. They had such a big name that any coverage, except for their own orchestrated PR blitzes, was unlikely to enhance it. Consequently the firm had established an elaborate protocol for media contact, which required the authorisation of either Media Relations or a designated senior partner. Nowhere did it mention what action to take when you’d exhausted the official channels, but the underlying principle seemed clear enough—if in doubt do nothing.
    I would have left it there, had the BBC woman not called back.
    Danielle was unmoved by my bleating about Pearson Malone procedures, and knew how to turn the screws to secure the quote she wanted.
    ‘I’m
so
surprised no one from the firm has commented yet,’ she said. ‘If you made a quick statement it would kill all the speculation dead.’
    ‘
What
speculation?’
    ‘About
why
you guys haven’t released a statement.’
    ‘No comment,’ I replied.
    ‘Oh dear, that doesn’t sound good. If we were forced to tell everyone you
refused
to comment…’
    She left the implications hanging like an axe ready to fall.
    ‘You
are
a partner of the firm after all, and Isabelle’s boss.’
    I wavered. Failure to follow firm’s procedures was risky, but equally I might be criticised for not being resourceful enough if Pearson Malone came out of this looking bad.
    What use was an emergency hotline which led to a dead end? Why did bosses who tried to micromanage the minutiae of your working day always leave you in the doo-doo when you really needed them? What was the point of being a partner in a global firm if you had no freedom to act? But this internal maelstrom was senseless—I had to decide.
    We were all at a loss to explain Isabelle’s disappearance, I said. She was a happy, popular and talented team member, whose professionalism and dedication to duty made her sudden departure all the more baffling. Her team were all frantically worried, and we urged her to make contact, whatever the reason she’d left.
    No one would have guessed from this bland, impromptu little piece just how much I detested the smug bitch. And who could legitimately object? After all, I’d followed the time-honoured tradition of venerating the vanished. Isabelle was a paragon of virtue, a princess in terrible danger, and the media were lapping up the story. I prayed to a non-existent God that I’d made the correct decision. Pearson Malone kept a record of non-compliance issues, which they