Girls Best Friend: Part 3

Millie didn’t want to get Anne the receptionist in trouble but needs must and so she replied to her saying that Denise had asked her to tell Anne to change the date to the Friday after next. That would give Millie an extra week.

For the rest of the day Millie had struggled to keep her concentration, she had been on tenterhooks waiting for Anne the receptionist or Denise from Marketing to say something, but it seemed that the date change had gone unnoticed. She had little work to do and had been using the time to finish her plans. It wasn’t until she was walking home that she realised that Denise and Mark were a "couple" and was surprised that this could even be true and immediately wiped the image from her mind.

On her evening walk with Elvis, Millie ran through her lists again in her head, she knew that she was being particularly meticulous but the devil was in the detail as they say and she thought about what she still had left to sort out. She wondered how people managed to plan adventures in the day before there was the internet. Millie had been able to book most of her tickets and accommodation without leaving her house or her desk. As she walked, she slowed almost to a stop when she remembered that she had left a copy of the map of Marrakech on her desk, she had marked on it where the offices were and had even gone so far as to annotate it with the instructions on where to find them. She slapped a hand to her forehead at the ridiculous of herself and this so called top secret diamond adventure. In the afternoon, the office had been quiet and she had finished all her work, with that spare time she had gone a bit over the top in marking up the map, and then when she saw the clock change she had rushed out to get home and ended up dashing out the door leaving the map on her desk. She wondered if anyone had seen it, or if they would have even bothered looking very closely at it, she had written the instructions in her own secret childhood language. It was a language she had invented, because at the time everyone at school had one, it went hand in hand with having the most stylish and coolest imaginary friend. Millie hadn’t been too inventive and worried that it might be decipherable.

All evening she couldn’t shake the thought from her mind and decided to go back into work and collect the piece of paper. It was about 8pm and she wondered what security would think but she had to at least try. As she drove into the office car park she was surprised to see cars still there, and although it worried her some, she decided that the only way to make it work was to act like it was the most normal thing to do and that she was just being conscientious.

She strolled into the main foyer and reception area where the security guard usually sat and noticed that he wasn’t there. Millie imagined he was doing a walk around or some such security thing. She went straight to the lift and pressed the number for her floor, looking around the foyer with the blackness of the night sky and the twinkle of the office lights it made it all seem christmassy, yet she felt a shiver run up her spine as she stood alone by the lift. She was on edge, with every sense electrified as she listened for the sound of the security man returning to his desk, it was like when she was at home and could hear the flat breathing, the creaks and groans and noises about the place that freaked her out and made her jump. The office was different in that it was mainly silence with a low humming from the computers and lighting. Millie kept thinking she saw movement, ‘too many reflective surfaces in this place’ she wondered aloud. There was a low groaning sound that freaked Millie out and that coincided with the lifts arrival, she jumped quickly into the lift and pressed 3 repeatedly until the doors closed. The inside of the lift was mirrored too and the sight of herself or rather and infinitesimal number of herself didn’t help to calm her nerves. She chose to compose herself and think of a good excuse to use in case she saw the security man. She had read a story by one of her favourite writers Marjie Myers around Halloween about some murderous security man and it was putting her a little on edge as her imagination began to get the better of her.

Fortunately, her desk wasn’t too far from the lift and she could quickly dash to it and get back in the lift and go home to Elvis. She reached her desk and the paperwork was still on her desk, phew she thought, she picked it up and looked at her funny language and as she examined it, she realised that it was a photocopy, what? she looked about her desk for the original but it was nowhere to be seen. She looked behind the monitor screen, underneath the keyboard, in random files on her desk, she went through her drawers but nothing. She looked under her desk and saw a piece of paper down between the wires and crawled under to get the paper and whilst down there she heard a noise. Millie panicked and then remembered that it was probably the security guard, she was about to stand up and say Hi and explain what she was doing there when something told her to stay put, she heard voices:

'Stop moving Mr Rob, I don’t want to make this more painful than it already is, you know.'

‘Let me go, what do you want?’

‘You know, it’s not what I want, it’s what my boss wants, he wants the diamonds and you’re gonna be our trade.’

‘What, that’s stupid! Mr Roberts wouldn’t trade the diamonds for me.’

‘Well, that’s what my boss says, and if he doesn’t...we'll start sending him little gifts until all that’s left is your pinky finger, haha...hahahahhaha’

‘You’re crazy! You’re fucking crazy, let me go, you won’t get away with this.’

‘We'll see, unless you know where the diamonds are? Do you?’

‘I’m not telling you thugs nothing! I have life insurance you fool.’

Millie stayed put beneath the desk for what seemed like an hour but when she felt safe enough to come out she had only been under there for 15 minutes. She should call someone, the police, Mr Roberts...someone! How would she explain why she was there? She would tell the security man and he could do it, and she grabbed her photocopy and headed to the lift. In the lift on the way down she thought about who could possibly have seen her map and photocopied it? Why wouldn’t they just take it completely?

When she reached the foyer and the lift doors opened, the first thing she noticed was that the security man wasn’t back, then she noticed the security camera was dangling precariously from a wire and was no longer attached to the wall, she walked towards the desk and decided that an anonymous call to the police would be best. As she went around the desk to call she saw the badly beaten body of the security guard, it was awful and an image she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to remove from her mind, she moved closer to see if he was still breathing and she gently poked his torso with her toe, then she heard a low groan exactly like the one she heard before. He was alive. She grabbed the phone with her sleeve over her hand and used a pen to dial the police. She took the pen and left the office as fast as her feet would carry her, ran into the car park and jumped in her car. She sat there knuckles white from gripping the steering wheel so tightly, her stomach was doing somersaults and the adrenaline was pulsating around her body, she started her car and sped off into the night. She felt alive.