The dishwasher was full. Merida looked around the office. Half a dozen of her colleagues were sat at their laptops, each with a cup of tea or coffee steaming on their desks. They must have sourced their cups from somewhere. Yet, somehow, the washer was still nearly full of clean dishes, as if each and every one of them had opened the door, cherry-picked their favourite mug, and closed the door again without bothering to put up the rest. When she rolled in at 9:30am, late by The Intrepid’s standards, she was always left holding the proverbial bag. She was close to snapping and printing a sign requesting this basic courtesy from her colleagues, if putting up passive aggressive office signs wasn’t such a mom thing to do. So, completely aware of the rich irony of the situation, she grumbled silently and did what needed to be done, because she knew nobody else would, just like her mother.
As always, Zee appeared out of nowhere. Merida immediately noted he didn’t look his usual perfect self. His suit jacket was wrinkled and his eyes looked dry, his normally full lips squeezed tightly together as he brushed past. Merida perked up, preparing for the sight of Laura in the wave of lieutenants that always followed Zee’s passing by. She waited, and waited, but nobody came.
“You!”
Merida’s head snapped in the direction of Wint’s office, as did every other writer’s in the room. However, Zee’s long, brown, manicured finger was only pointed towards one of them, and Merida was the chosen one.
Zee Chakramurthy had never spoken to Merida before. If she had to guess, Zee had never even noticed her existence. And now, she had his full, undivided attention. Warily, Merida closed the dishwasher door leaving it still half-unloaded and approached Zee with caution, as she would a wild animal.
“You’re Bill’s assistant, right?”
“No, Mr. Chakramurthy. I’m a writer, — a social media writer, for the news team. I report to Mr. Webster. My name is —”
“Where is he?”
Merida made an exaggerated “I don’t know” shrug, raising her eyebrows as if to say, “your guess is as good as mine.” She had in fact wondered about the same thing when she walked in and saw Wint’s office was empty. Usually he would beat her to the office, especially on Mondays, when she had a tendency to snooze in.
“Could you please find him for me?”, Zee said. His politeness masked the undercurrent of tension in his voice poorly.
“Is — uh, is Mr. Webster in trouble?” Merida closed her eyes. What a stupid, stupid question.
Although the answer was “No”, it looked to Merida as if Zee had to think before he answered.
09:42 > hey, r u ok?
09:42 > zee is here looking for u, he looks PISSED
09:43 > call me?
09:48 > tried calling again. please call me back?
10:11 > heeeeeellllllooooooooooooo
10:11 > are you on your way?
10:45 > zee is on the prowl
10:46 > i can see you have a meeting at 11
10:46 > if u r not here by 11 i'll call the police
11:01 > pick up your phone, wint
11:18 > fuck, i'm coming over
Abubakar dropped Merida off directly in front of Wint’s house. It was 11:55. The young Senegalese had made good time through the city. Five stars, despite the hammy flirting the driver had attempted on the way over. Normally an Uber driver’s advances were the furthest thing she wanted — and why were they always male, why hadn’t a single cute Uberess ever tried to get with her? — but sometimes when she was stressed out, even the unwanted kind of attention soothed her anxiety.
The tree-lined street looked barren in the rain. The maples had turned yellow and dropped all but the few most stubborn of their leaves, the rest covering the walkway with a shiny, slippery cover of mostly rotten leaf matter. The bush that normally obscured the view into the Winter-Webster residence at No 31. had shed its cover, and gave any passer-by a view through to the bare yard through its spiky branches.
Merida opened the gate to Wint’s yard and hopped a puddle to get to his stoop. She rang the bell of the bright green door at the front of the white-plaster facade of the Georgian townhouse. She had been here once before, in the summer, for a happy-hour afterparty. It hadn’t been a party as much as it had been hard drinking, leading to her passing out on Wint’s couch, further followed by a hangover equal parts moral and physical. Now, in the brightness askew light of the winter day, the house seemed completely ordinary on the outside. Inside, she had no idea. Nobody answered the door.
She walked over to the window and peered into her boss’s front room. The place was a total mess, there were papers scattered all over the floor. Had Wint gone on a weekend bender and finally lost his mind? If before she’d been worried for his job, now she was worried for his… life? The thought sounded dramatic, even by Merida’s standards.
She shot Wint a text message and pressed her ear against the cold, rainwater-splashed window glass to listen if she could hear his phone beeping inside. She couldn’t. She did, however, remember something from the last time she’d been here, when she had slipped out of his house through the back in the morning to avoid having to face her boss’s disappointment.
She walked back out to the street and circled to the end of the block. There was a narrow passage in between the back yards of the houses on each side of the block. She stepped into the brown rained-upon grass, her white sneakers sinking into mud with a slurp. Great! Hopping as quickly and lightly on her toes as she could, she counted the gaps between the fences until she reached the fifth one. The wooden fences were taller than her, but not prohibitively so. She grabbed top of the fence, climbed up with her muddy feet slipping on the vertical surface as she walked her feet up, and with one final pull hoisted herself over the fence. She hoped it was the right one, and that on the other side of the fence there wouldn’t be anything sharp — or wet.
Her wishes were granted on the first two counts, but denied on the third. She landed with a splash into a deep puddle, her shoes and socks soaking through instantly with freezing cold water. She let out a yelp as she sprang out of the puddle and onto the wooden deck.
She placed her hands against the kitchen window to block the reflection. She pressed her head in between her hands, and her breath immediately fogged over the glass. Despite that, she could see into the kitchen. On the table, there was a laptop and an empty tumbler glass. No signs of life. Merida was ready to give up, but then she looked at the lake of freezing cold water that separated her from the fence she had climbed over.
She decided she’d investigate further. She slid off her backpack and rummaged in the hidden inside compartment until she found what she was looking for.
The lock was picked in less than a minute. Locks like this one were a social construct. The door it was supposed to have kept shut was flimsy and half made out panes of glass: if you wanted in, you could enter in various ways, either by kicking in the door, breaking the glass, or if you didn’t want to have to explain to your boss why you had demolished their back door, picking the essentially decorative lock.
“Hullo?” she yelled into the house, to ensure she wouldn’t catch Wint unawares, or worst case, undressed. She tried brushing her shoes on the doormat, but finding the pursuit fruitless, slipped off her shoes and stepped in, leaving behind moist sock marks on the wooden floor.
Nobody was in, but the mess in the living room was even more shocking than it had looked from the outside. Something was terribly, terribly wrong. Merida could feel her throat constrain with fear, anxiety, or both. She had only been joking about calling the police, but maybe that’s exactly what she would have to do.
She returned to the kitchen to retrieve her wet shoes, when she noticed the laptop on the table. It looked like the possible last known whereabouts of Wint Webster. She sat herself in front of the computer and powered it on by holding the button at the top of the keyboard. The old PC whirred on into a password prompt. It started up too quickly to have been a cold boot. It must have just hibernated, which meant that if she could get through the prompt, she could find out what Wint had been up to.
The login name for the session was “wint”. It wasn’t an Intrepid account. Dang! At least she knew the password for that! She thought back to all the hacking scenes in films and television shows, where either the hacker was a computer wizard who could bypass even the most sophisticated security measures, or in most cases, they simply guessed their victims’ password. These scenes had always struck Merida as clichés, but what did she have to lose? She thought about her boss, and realised that despite working under William Winter-Webster for two years, she didn’t really know anything about him. His favourite sports team? His favourite sport, even? His mother’s name? It was hopeless! Disappointed, she smashed the keyboard, her palm landing on the Enter button.
The login screen disappeared, giving way to a file explorer window. An empty password? Really? Merida didn’t even know that was possible. But then again, she had never used… what was this? Windows 95? She tabbed through open programs. Email: no suspicious recently read or sent emails, as far as she could see. Messenger: never used, probably just configured to boot at start. Internet Explorer: An Intrepid article — an old one, written by Wint. She browsed through the article for clues to the state of mind his boss before he’d gone AWOL. Then, about twelve paragraphs in, the bomb dropped.
She opened the Windows menu. The last search term in the bottom left corner of the window read: wallet.dat. Holy shit! Had he found it?
At that moment she heard rustling from the front room of the house. Wint must have returned home. If he was a Bitcoin millionaire — Merida hadn’t yet had time to calculate the exact sum — maybe he could let her have a little slice? She rushed to the hallway, and stopped at the door.
The only thing she recognised about the young, strange man standing at the doorway staring right back at her was what he was wearing: the ugly marsala-red peacoat draped across the man’s shoulders belonged to Wint Webster.
Merida broke the silent stand-off.
“Who are you?”, she asked with the indignation of the mistress of the house, the role she had decided to play in snap judgement.
“I, I work for Mr. Webster”, said the young man.
“No you don’t”, replied Merida defiantly. Playing all her cards up front was not necessarily the best move, but she was too discombobulated to be strategic.
“Yes I do.”
“No — you don’t. I work for Mr. Webster, and I’ve never seen you in my life.” Merida noticed the suitcase the man had pulled in behind him. “What’s in there?”
Before the man had a chance to answer, Merida’s mind had already jumped to the worst possible conclusion. If the man was wearing Wint’s coat, that meant Wint no longer needed his coat, which meant that Wint — Wint was in the suitcase! Her eyes widened and she looked for something to defend herself with. There was nothing around, except a cordless telephone. She picked up the phone and pointed it at the man like a knife: “Stay back, or I’ll… I’ll call the police.”
Nonplussed, the young man looked at the one-woman show Merida was putting on for him. He stood the suitcase up on the floor and pushed in its extensible handle. Merida looked at the suitcase on the floor. It was a compact cabin-sized model. It was highly unlikely that even a motivated murderer could squeeze Wint in there.
“Who are you, really?” Merida asked, still pointing the phone receiver’s antenna at the ginger boy.
“Don’t shoot”, he said disarmingly and raised his hands. “I’m just a messenger.”