A Twist of the Knife

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She liked him on Facebook. He liked her back. Actually, he liked her a lot.

He liked her smile. He liked her photograph. She was the right age for him — late twenties, he guessed. An age when people started to mature and know what they wanted. She had a serene air about her, and a friendly smile that suggested she could be fun, a bit of a sport, maybe very sexy. But at the same time he could sense a slight hunger in her eyes. As if she was looking for something she had not yet found. He liked her name too. Teresa Saunders.

He wanted to be her friend. Very badly. Oh yes. You are one stunning girl. We could definitely hit it off. Me, I could be that guy you are looking for. Really I could!

He clicked to see more photographs, but all he got was the message: No photos to show.

Damn, he thought, she had her privacy settings high. He sent a request to be Teresa Saunders’ friend. Then he waited. Twenty minutes later, it was past midnight and there was no response. He had to be up early for an important client presentation: the launch of a new food brand, a vitamin-packed, cholesterol-busting super-porridge that would be all the breakfast you ever needed. So he logged off and went to bed.

Teresa came to him during the night in a dream. Her long, wavy hair, the colour of winter wheat, floated in slow motion around her face. Her blue eyes smiled at him. She kissed him lightly on his forehead, on his cheeks, then on his lips. He woke with a start, convinced, for a fleeting instant, that she was in the room with him. And feeling horny as hell.

Of course, it was just a dream. But what a dream! He could feel some kind of strange, magical and deeply erotic connection with her across the ether. It was so powerful he had to switch on the light just to make sure she was not really in the room with him. But he was alone, of course. Alone in his big, loft-style bedroom, with its bare wooden floors strewn with rugs, and the curtainless picture window overlooking the inky waters of the Thames, half a mile upstream from Tower Bridge.

Lights glided by, accompanied by the throb of an engine: a Port of London Police boat. He slipped out of bed and padded through to his den, sat at his desk, which looked out over the river; then he flipped open the lid of his laptop and logged back on to Facebook. There was a notification: Your friend request has been accepted. Teresa Saunders is now your friend. And there was a message: Thanks for the friend request!

Yayyyyyy!

But he held off replying. Did not want to seem too keen. She might think him a bit of a saddo messaging her at 3.20 a.m.

He went back to bed and closed his eyes and wondered if she would come to him again. But all that came were images of MaximusBrek, the porridge of gladiators!

His slogan and he was proud of it.

He awoke at 6.15 a.m., a few minutes before his alarm was due to go off. Dawn had long broken and it was almost full light. He liked this time of year, early April. Spring was in the air. The nights were getting shorter. Maybe this spring he would fall in love. Perhaps with Teresa Saunders?

He sat in his black silk dressing gown in front of Daybreak on television, and ate his microwaved MaximusBrek. It tasted like molten plaster of Paris but, hey, he wasn’t going to tell the clients that. He would stride into the meeting bursting with energy, like an unleashed gladiator, and tell them how terrific this new food was. Especially for the below-the-line profits of the ad agency that paid his wages.

As he ate, angry Palestinians were shouting on the screen and holding up placards. He should have been thinking about his pitch at the meeting, but he couldn’t focus on that. All he could think about was the message he was going to send Teresa Saunders. Something original that would make her smile, that would make her think he was a really interesting guy to communicate with. Hell, he was one of the highest-paid advertising copywriters in London right now. He wrote hot slogans for hot products. So surely he could write one for the hottest product of all — himself.

He was thirty-two. Single. He had this cool pad. His charcoal Aston DBS. He kept himself and his bank balance in shape. But for the past eight months, since his last short-lived relationship, he slept every night in an empty bed.

He sent Teresa Saunders a message: Thanks for accepting my friend request... J

Then he got dressed and headed out to work, checking his iPhone at every red light he stopped at. Fresh emails popped up every few seconds. But to his disappointment, nothing from Teresa Saunders.

Come on, he chided himself. Focus. Concentrate! They sat round the black glass table in the stark white boardroom of Bresson, Carter, Olaff — the agency he worked for. Croissants and brioches lay on plates, alongside jugs of coffee and expensive mineral water. The four-strong team from the client, as well as his three agency colleagues, including his boss, Martin Willis, watched the presentation on the big screen. Then they were shown mock-ups of the TV campaign, the magazine campaign, the online campaign and the in-store point-of-sale artwork. He should have been watching too, but instead he kept glancing at his iPhone, surreptitiously cupped in his hands beneath the table.

‘Don’t you think, Jobe?’

Hearing his name brought him back to earth with a start. He looked up to see fourteen eyeballs fixed on him — several of them through stupidly trendy glasses. He went bright red. He stammered. ‘Um, well, yes,’ although he had, in truth, no idea what they were referring to. He felt their stares, and his face burned as if a corrosive acid had been poured over his skin.

‘Are you with us, Jobe?’ Willis said.

‘Totally.’ He began perspiring.

‘You have the floor,’ Willis said.

‘Yes, right. Um... ah... OK.’

The female, whose name he had forgotten, said helpfully, ‘We’re referring to the Twitter aspect of the campaign.’

‘Indeed,’ he said, waiting for the light-bulb moment. But it didn’t happen. So he took a stab in the dark. ‘My thinking is that all these tweets start appearing, from people who have eaten MaximusBrek, saying how much energy they suddenly have. Also, when anyone tweets that they’re on a diet, MaximusBrek starts following them. We kind of anthropomorphize it, so MaximusBrek becomes like a person out there in cyberspace, right, rather than just a brand.’

He was greeted with frowns and blank stares.

‘Diabetics,’ the female client said. ‘I thought we planned to target the two and a half million diabetics in the UK with the low glycaemic index of MaximusBrek.’

‘Absolutely!’ Jobe said, remembering suddenly. ‘Diabetics are a shoo-in. What we’re going to do is engage with the diabetic blog sites, as well as Twitter and Facebook. MaximusBrek is going to be the diabetic’s new best friend — types one and two! We’re going to make it the biggest breakfast cereal ever — first for this nation, and then we’ll break it out globally!’

Then he made the mistake of glancing down at his iPhone again. Hey Jobe, nice to ‘meet’ you! Just checked out your photos — you look a really cool guy! Tell me more about yourself.

After the meeting, Martin Willis asked him to come up to his office. Willis was in his early forties, with trim ginger hair, and was dressed in a traditional business suit and an expensive open-neck white shirt. He had a hard, blunt Yorkshire accent. ‘Who are you with, Jobe? The Woolwich?’

‘The Woolwich?’ Jobe frowned.

‘Yeah, the Woolwich? Are you with them? Because you sure as hell aren’t with us.’

‘I’m not quite with you.’

‘No, you’re sodding not. You’re not with anyone today; you’re on planet Zog. You on drugs or something? Not well?’

‘No — nothing... and I’m not unwell.’

‘You realize you almost lost us one of our biggest new clients this morning with your behaviour? Every time anyone asked you a question you were somewhere else.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘I don’t do sorry.’

Back home, Jobe typed: Hey Teresa, nice to ‘meet’ you too! Your reply got me a load of verbal from my boss a bit earlier! He seemed to think it was more important for me to concentrate on a meeting I was in than read your message. What a Philistine!

Anyway, about me: I’m single and I work in advertising. I live on Wapping Wharf, near Tower Bridge. I’d love to meet you properly J.

He posted the message then switched on the television, mixed himself a large vodka martini, took one sip, then checked his laptop before settling down to watch television. Whatever was on, he didn’t care. He needed a large drink tonight after the bollocking from Martin Willis — and what annoyed him most about it was that Willis was right. His mind had been all over the place in a crucially important meeting. God, Teresa Saunders was messing with his head and they hadn’t even met yet!

Yet!

And there was a reply from her, already.

I’d love to meet you too J.

He replied immediately.

When’s good for you?

She replied immediately too.

Tonight?

She was keen!

OK! What time and where?

There was a long delay, and then the message appeared.

10.35 p.m. Hampstead Heath. 51°56′ 47.251" N 0°17′ 41.938" W.

Jobe frowned for a moment, then grinned. Compass co-ordinates. Teresa Saunders was a piece of work! Smart girl. He liked challenges.

He typed back:

See u there!

The reply arrived:

I want u 2 join me! x

He typed:

That’s my plan! x

She replied:

Promise? x

He grinned and typed:

I promise! x

He picked up his iPhone and flicked through to the compass app he had downloaded a long time back for a coffee advert he had written, in which a man and a woman teased each other by sending compass co-ordinates that came closer and closer until they finally met in a coffee shop. That was one of his most successful commercials. Teresa must have seen it, he figured. His own location showed as: 51°50′ 33.594" N 0°06′ 15.631" W.

It was 9 p.m. At a rough guess it would take him an hour to drive there. He made himself a toasted cheese sandwich, which he figured would absorb enough of the alcohol to put him safely below the limit, then on his laptop googled Hampstead Heath, working out the nearest street to the co-ordinates he had been given.

Shortly before half past nine he brushed his teeth, squirted on some cologne, pulled on his black leather jacket and pocketed a small torch. Then he took the lift down to the garage, climbed into his Aston Martin and tapped his destination into the satnav. His stomach was full of butterflies. But good butterflies!

His drive across London through the thin evening traffic was joyous. A Michael Kiwanuka CD was spinning, the dials in front of him were spinning, and the GPS numbers on his iPhone were spinning as he headed nearer and nearer to Hampstead. To Teresa Saunders. His dream girl!

He reached his destination with twenty minutes to spare. The Kiwanuka CD had finished and now a Louis Armstrong track was playing: ‘We Have All The Time In the World’.

And just how appropriate was that?

He parked his car, pulled the torch from his pocket and entered the heath. There was no one around and ordinarily, in such a strange, dark and isolated environment, he might have felt apprehensive, but tonight the knowledge that Teresa was heading through the darkness too — and might already be there — allayed his concerns.

He watched the compass co-ordinates on the app spinning away, until he reached 51°56′ 47.251" N 0°17′ 41.938" W.

Right in front of him was a park bench.

Oh yes! He was loving this!

He sat down, the butterflies going increasingly crazy in his stomach, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. But what if she disapproved of smokers? There was a smell of burnt wood in the air.

He slipped the pack back in his pocket and sat listening. Somewhere in the distance he heard a man calling out, ‘Oscar! Oscar! Here, boy! Oscar!’

A dog barked.

The man said, ‘Good boy, good boy!’

The dog barked again.

Then silence.

He waited. The air was chilly. After a while he checked his watch. Five minutes had passed. Another five minutes passed. He checked Facebook on his phone. Nothing. He sent a message.

I’m here!

Moments later a message came back.

So am I!

He looked around, then switched on the torch and shone the beam in every direction. It fell away into the darkness. He sent another message.

I can’t see you. Did I get the co-ordinates right? 51° 56’ 47.251” N 0° 17’ 41.938” W.

The reply came almost before he had posted it.

Spot on!

He felt a sudden swirl of cold air; it went, almost as fast as it had come. Then he felt something digging into his back — something hard and flat that felt different from the rest of the bench.

He turned around and shone the beam onto it. It was a small brass plaque. Engraved, in tiny lettering, were the words: In memory of Teresa Saunders (1983–2011) who loved this heath. Tragically killed by lightning on this spot.

Another swirl of icy air engulfed him. Then he felt a touch, just the faintest touch, on his cheek. Like a kiss.

An instant later there was a crack, like a peal of thunder, directly above him. He looked up in shock to see a dark shape hurtling down towards him.

‘Poor bastard,’ the Police Sergeant said.

‘Must have been instant at least,’ the constable who had been first on the scene replied.

The fire brigade officers had rigged up some lights, and three of them were hurriedly attaching lifting gear from the rescue tender to the massive, blackened branch that pinned Jobe, by his crushed skull, to the ground.

The attending paramedic could find no pulse, and viewing the matter leaking from the unfortunate young man’s crushed head, was all too grimly aware that it was what he and his colleagues, with the gallows humour of their trade, called a ‘scoop-and-run job’. The Coroner’s Officer was on his way.

A man who had been walking his dog nearby was in shock. He had stood numbly watching, then several times had repeated crossly, almost shouting, to the attending officers beyond the police tape cordon, ‘They should have bloody cut it down — any fool could see it was an accident waiting to happen.’

Another police officer who had turned up, but had nothing to do, suddenly snapped on a pair of gloves, knelt and picked up an object. ‘iPhone,’ he said. ‘Might give us a clue who he is.’

He tapped the power key to wake it up, then studied the screen. ‘Looks like he was meeting someone here,’ he said. ‘Seems as if he had a date. Meant to be meeting her here at 10.35 p.m. — that’s half an hour ago. I haven’t seen any sign of a woman anywhere around.’

‘Not his night, is it?’ one of the fire officers replied. ‘Stood up, then this happens.’

‘Or maybe she broke it off and left,’ the Sergeant said.