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Broke a company branded paperweight in meeting suite five last summer.
Four individual sick days this last quarter.
That leaves us, she says. It’s bound to be one of us. Both of us. Who knows?
That’s when she decides to run us through the ropes. Just in case.
I listen in awe at the end of our Friday shift, soaking in every single word as she tells us all about the inside of Alexander Henley’s home, the inside of Alexander Henley’s world.
Alexander Henley collects gemstones. Rare ones that she has to polish with a special cloth. He keeps them in a dedicated room on the top floor of his Kensington town house, in special cabinets with combination locks. She knows the codes by heart, even though he changes them every month like clockwork.
Alexander Henley has more suits than she’s managed to count, but they’re all black, and so are his ties. Every. Single. One.
Alexander Henley finishes every evening with a single shot of whisky from an expensive crystal tumbler. He smokes one cigarette, by an open window in his entrance hallway and leaves the ash in an antique inkwell she has to polish to gleaming every afternoon.
Alexander Henley only ever uses the same one set of cutlery, and would rather take it from the dishwasher than choose a fresh set from the cutlery drawer.
He listens to dreary melancholic blues to wake up in the morning. Sometimes it’s still playing when she gets there. She hates it, but I know I’ll just love it, like I love everything else about him.
My heart tickled when she told us about the framed photographs of his children, and how they have to be facing just so on his mantelpiece. She told us that they’re gone, to Hampshire with his ex-wife and her new boyfriend, some football coach named Terry.
Maybe the biggest surprise of all came when she told us he has a dog. Brutus.
I can’t imagine Alexander having a dog, and I don’t know why, it just seems so… human. Not much seems human about Alexander Henley.
She shook her head when she gave us the warning, beckoned us in close, as though she was spilling state secrets.
“Brutus is a beast,” she said. “You’ll have to win his trust or he’ll take your hand off, and you don’t want that. The last thing you want to be doing is bleeding over Mr Henley’s cream carpets.”
We’d oohed and aahed as she told us about his favourite treats, these weird dried fish sticks she has to pick up from the vets in the middle of Kensington.
“Never run short,” she told us. “Friendship is unsteady with that dog, and you’ll never get him out for his afternoon walk if you don’t have those to bribe him with.”
It turns out that’s another of Cindy’s duties. The afternoon walk, and apparently she’s gone through three different aprons after Brutus has tried to tug them off her halfway around the block.
“Why is he so mean?” I asked, and she’d sighed and shrugged.
“Rescue, I think, after his wife left. Guess he was lonely.”
I can’t imagine that, either. He always seems so… composed.
“Just remember,” she told us, “Mr Henley notices everything. Every. Thing. Make sure you get it right, or you’ll be out of there before your feet hit the floor.”
We nodded. Nodded some more. Made little notes for later. Made notes to give us the edge.
And so we make a pact, Sonnie and me, at the end of another long week as we hobble down the bazillion steps to the ground floor.
No hard feelings, that’s what we promise.
“May the best scrubber win,” she says, and holds out her hand before we part ways on the street.
And I shake it, I shake it and smile, and wish her good luck, even though I know it won’t be going her way.
Because there’s no way on earth I’m going to let her win this one.
Alexander Henley’s dirty boxers will be all mine.Chapter FiveAlexanderMost addicts won’t accept they’re addicted. That’s a fact. Not a fact I read in some shitty self-help book, either. It’s something I see every day, every time I have to pluck the same old assholes from the jaws of a custodial sentence.
That’s the other thing about money – it grants the privilege of eternal self-delusion.
My clients aren’t addicts, they’re professionals with hobbies. No client has ever looked me dead in the eye and admitted they’ve got a problem, not even in the cold light of day with their back against the wall and their freedom well and truly in my hands.
There’s always a million excuses. A set-up, burning the candle at both ends, living life to the max, and, of course, the best one – they went a little overboard.
That’s what they call snorting drugs all weekend and setting fire to your five-star hotel suite – going a little overboard.
