Playing Dead: Book One of The Whitechapel Chronicles

Chapter 4

A/N: This chapter is marked for possible deletion or at least a heavy edit once the first draft is completed. I thought I'd add in for now but this one may be taken out at some point.

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 "Megs, be a love would you and get everyone's coffee orders for the meeting?"

Georgia Hayes-Barnes was the senior buyer on the team and despite only being a couple of years older than me; she always had the canny ability to make me feel like a work-experience school girl who didn't know her arse from her elbow.

Every day was a catwalk fashion show with Georgia around. I was pretty sure I'd never seen her wear the same thing twice and labels were everything to her. Well, not quite everything. The other thing that was important to Georgia was money. Or more to the point, men with money. There was always a new guy on the scene and if there wasn't, let’s just say she made our lives fucking hell. Rumour had it, she funded her extravagant wardrobe and lifestyle using her many credit cards and was up to her Harley Street boobs in debt, but if it bothered her she didn't seem to show it. She swanned in and out of the office whenever it suited her, uploading pictures of her many wild and costly holidays to Facebook and did as little work as possible.

And I always seemed to bear the brunt of her moods, which seemed to turn on a whim. Clara said it was because Georgia knew I lived in a nice house, with a highly paid solicitor husband and that I didn't really need to work. The last part wasn't strictly true. I still needed to earn a wage and I had no desire to become a lady who lunches and does bugger all else, apart from go the gym and carry a ridiculously small pooch in her designer handbag. But I could see where Clara was coming from. And maybe that was the reason why Georgia loved to turn on the thumbscrews, but whatever it was, I couldn't help but wish her dreams would come true and some millionaire prince would rock up and whisk her away and give us all a break.

But in the meantime, with no rich sugar daddy on the horizon, we were stuck with her. And I was stuck with scrabbling around for everyone's coffee orders and then had to work out how to get ten scalding hot cups from the canteen on one side of the building, all the way to the meeting rooms on the opposite side. I foresaw numerous scorched fingers and coffee stains down my top by five o'clock. Then to top it off, this was definitely one of those meetings that was going to run into the evening and whatever time it finished, I was the chump that would have to clean out the room, clear up all the discarded, lipstick stained coffee cups, take all the samples back up to the buying floor and type out all the notes from the meeting and email them to the chief bitch before I went home.

I flashed a typical fixed Megan-The-Reliable-Dogsbody smile at Georgia.

"No problem," I lied and wondered if I could get away with spitting in her skinny latte.

Later on, when I checked the clock and saw it straining to reach nine pm, I really wished that I had spat in Georgia's coffee. The rest of the team were nowhere to be seen of course, having left me to it over an hour before, probably all heading off to the local pub to congratulate themselves on how fucking wonderful they all were. Clara had shot me a sympathetic smile before she left, offering weakly to stay and help me out, which of course was an offer she knew I would never accept seeing as I knew she had a hot date with one of the bozo's she met on Friday night. I had shaken my head and given her the thumbs up.

"Good luck," I said. "Knock him dead."

She had let rip with a filthy laugh and fluttered her eyelashes. "Well, I was hoping to knock him but I'd like him to be alive when I do it. Nothing worse than shagging a corpse."