Ten Second Staircase by Christopher Fowler

This new doubting demeanor was unsettling. 'Delegation,' May concluded feebly. 'Let someone else do it for a change. You've devoted your life to this place. You've paid your dues.' But he could tell that Bryant thought he was being put out to pasture, and had no way to convince him otherwise.

    'Cool gaff,' said Colin Bimsley, admiring the redbrick exterior of the double-fronted house while they awaited an answer. 'She's got a bob or two. When I get promotion, I'm going to get on the property ladder.'
    Meera Mangeshkar snorted derisively. 'Yeah, right. From a rented bedsit in Stoke Newington to a two-million-pound town house in Holland Park.'
    'Sneer all you like, mate. You'll be sorry you turned me down one day. I'm not going to be slapping the sidewalk in a padded parka for the rest of my life.'
    'No, you'll be sitting at a cheap desk filing reports and dropping bits of burger into the keyboard of a seven-year-old computer, before going down the local for eight pints of bitter and a curry with the lads.'
    Colin subjected his colleague to intense scrutiny. 'I don't know what makes you so sarcastic, but it's incredibly unattractive.'
    Mangeshkar sniffed. 'So now I'm ugly.'
    'What do you care what I think? You've already told me I'm not good enough for you.'
    'I never said that.'
    'So will you go on a date with me?' Colin asked, sensing a gap in her defence.
    Before Meera could answer, the front door opened.
    'I don't know where she got this new identity from,' said Eleanor White. 'Certainly not from us.'
    'What do you mean, new identity?' asked Meera, setting aside her notepad.
    Mrs White fell silent, distracted by something fluttering past in the garden. The lawn was an absurd shade of countryside emerald that could still be seen in expensive parts of the city. 'This workingclass thing,' she said finally, sniffing drily and turning from the windows. 'Her name was Sarah, you know. Perhaps she thought "Saralla" sounded more exotic. She dropped out of Oxford. She was training to be a biochemist. We didn't hear from her for two years. Can you imagine how that made us feel?'
    Meera was in danger of sinking inside the immense floral sofa. She felt suffocated by the arrangements of dried flowers, the emetic purples and greens, the gathered flounces of material around the tables and curtains. A woman like Mrs White cut little ice with her, even if she had just lost a daughter. She belonged to a breed of county women who dwelt in bay-windowed Edwardian villas and never showed emotion to those they perceived as social inferiors. Meera had grown up in a battery of pebbledashed Peckham council flats where the sound of police sirens nightly bounced off the balcony walls.
    'She reappeared when she had run out of money, of course.' Eleanor White tapped out a cigarette and lit it. 'Living in an East End squat with some other so-called artists, including the one who made her pregnant. Casually announced that she was a sculptor, if you please, not that she'd had any formal training. Didn't look like she'd had a bath or a hot meal in months. My husband, Patrick, refused to give her a penny, but I couldn't let her leave the house without something. She was our only child. The next time we saw her was on the television, drunk, swearing at a man who had once interviewed Nixon. Then that disgusting magazine photo spread, her sex life revealed, the abortion, and the rest I don't even want to think about. Patrick won't have the subject mentioned in the house. Soon afterwards we started hearing that her—installations, is that what you call them?—were fetching record prices with private collectors.'
    'You must have taken some pride,' Meera wondered, 'at least in her success.'
    'Pride?' Mrs White was horrified by the idea. 'To have our name dragged through the mud? To see such muck being sold to the public? There are plenty of other ways to be successful. An animal can be seen rutting in a farmyard, but that doesn't make it talented. She became