I now felt part of an audience, my participation not required, and my instinct told me to get out, collect my husband and other belongings, so we could escape this madhouse, but as a would-be writer, I saw it as fodder for a future novel. On a more base level, I was intrigued, while working at the company, many questions had formed and it looked like at last I may get the answers.
Mr Watt was not at all perturbed by the gun and treated the whole thing as a spat between boys in a playground – with himself as a master, sorting it out. After telling the two men to pull themselves together and act like the adults they supposedly were, he turned to the rest of us, telling Lorraine that there would be some parts of this she needn’t minute and that was one of them!
As he began to talk, Mrs Pipe bustled in with a tray of tea and coffee, and a large silver tray, complete with biscuits. She set this down and moved to Mr Watts’ side, almost in a protective manner. A cloud had come over , and the sky outside had become dark. Someone had flicked the lightswitch – but nothing happened. Mr Watt just sighed – another bulb gone – and Mrs Pipe left to find a replacement. The elderly gentle man leant forward and switched his desk lamp on. Still we all sat. An acting troupe awaiting direction.
But Mr Watt started talking generally, not giving away why we had all been gathered, while Mrs Pipe returned, drew a chair into the centre of the room and changed the bulb. Not one of the men present had seen fit to help her, indeed she was not the sort of person who needed help. She got down and once again Mr Watt drew the file towards him, flicking through the paperwork until he came to the buff coloured envelope. He looked up and around the room, taking in all the faces.
Talking about his advancing years and the rapid advances in technology, he called forward Deano, and told us how proud he was of his great grandson, and how it would be his wish that one day the lad took over his empire. Dean in his eyes had shown extreme promise with the development of the cameras within the workplace – for it had been his idea to place them within the light bulbs themselves, where they were non-intrusive and people knew not of their location, but simply continued in their day to day lives.
But it was also a way of detecting unnecessary behaviour among his employees. This was how he had found out about Maggie and Mr Edison. But also how he had discovered that Derek had been beating his grand daughter, so she had to go to work wearing thick make-up to cover the bruises. While he understood that Maggie was in the wrong for the affair with Tom, it was never the right way for Derek to hurt her in this way. Maggie had not had the most salubrious of upbringings, and Dean had been raised between Helen and Mrs Pipe, following the death of Giles Osmington, Dean’s father. Maggie’s own parents, had both been alcoholics and the young girl had sat forgotten in a room, day after day as her mother and father drank themselves into early graves in their forties. A pattern had emerged and Maggie herself had been siezed from the path to the off-license by her grand father, but almost not soon enough, as after one night out she had come home and collapsed in a stupor. James knew he had to sort this out, and she had come to live with him, in this huge house.
Giles was a friend of James Watt and a fair bit older than Maggie, but had taken to the young girl at a family gathering, seeing her cower timidly in a corner. He offered Maggie solace – and her son – whom she adored. Giles had a house a few hours north of James and he took Maggie to live there as his young wife. It was on a visit to his grand daughter and lifelong friend that James decided to open Brightsparkz in what had turned out to be a great location, carrying his business forward onto the successful path he felt it belonged.
But since Giles had died, she had come into the acquaintance of Derek Mills and become Margaret Osmington Mills, a woman of some financial substance. Derek knew he had his work cut out to get hold of her money and at first had played the dutiful beau, wooing and charming her, and in turn marrying her, before being told in a visit to the family home that Margaret’s money was held in trust by her Grandfathers estate, until such time as he saw fit for her to have it or he passed on.
It looked like no-one liked Derek Mills, least of all his stepson Dean and he had long had suspicions that Derek was up to something in order to get his mother’s money.
Tom Edison played golf on the same course as Derek and the two had built up a tentative friendship, though Tom did not approve of the way Derek treated his wife and and her son, Through strange coincidence, both men worked at Brightsparkz, though Derek had been more than put out when Tom had risen to the position of CEO, and was relatively well-respected by the employees, where as Derek himself was still in the warehouse packing, but at least could keep an eye on his wife. This had come to an end eighteen months ago when Derek thought something was going on between Tom and Maggie – which was actually before they had started the affair proper – and had beaten Maggie black and blue in the car park. He had chosen a time when he thought no-one had seen, and his rage had come out at this man having everything he though should be rightfully his. He had no longer been able to keep it under control. But someone had seen and told Dean. The cover had been blown and his services to Brightsparkz were no longer required.
