She was doing an utterly fantastic job of pretending Pember didn’t exist, as she didevery timehe called in. It was doing nothing to quell the nerves in his stomach, and he balled his fists in his pockets to stop his hands from shaking.
Just as it was starting to get awkward, he cleared his throat.
“Um… hi, Samantha.”
The receptionist’s eyes flicked to him from behind her computer screen, and she let out a weary sigh. “I suppose you want me to call him?” she said, her voice crackly through the ancient two-way speaker.
“N-no, I… um… I’m not here to see Oliver. It’s my first day. A job… I have a job.”
Samantha raised a brow, her eyes dragging up and down his body before finally landing on the blue Forensic Services badge peeking out from under his coat.
“You’rethe new science guy?” she said, brows tilting into a frown.
“Y-yes,” he said. “I mean,yes.” He tried to sound confident but was doing a piss-poor job of it.
“I expected someone taller. And with glasses. Do you have glasses?”
“No? Should I?—”
Pember’s head snapped up as a fire door opened behind Samantha.
“Saint Peter’stits, Sam, it’s freezing in the lab.” A rough North Wales accent suddenly came through the speaker. “Be a lamb and lend us the electric heater?”
An older man appeared behind the screen, his wiry grey hair and bushy beard giving him the appearance of a rather eccentric discount Santa Claus. Samantha scowled as she propped her feet up on a rusty old heater.
“Over my dead body,” she growled, top lip peeling back over her fangs. “I had to fight admin tooth and nail for this baby.”
The older man tutted, doing a double take when he noticed Pember shuffling from foot to foot. “Oh, hello!” he said, a wide smile splitting his kind face. “You must be Pember, the new SOCO?”
Pember nodded, watching as the man slid a blue lanyard from around his neck and tapped it against a keypad on the other side of the door. As he looped it back over his head, Pember readWallace Davidson - Lead Crime Scene Investigator.
“Come in, come in.”
Pember was ushered out of the waiting room and into the front office, which feltutterlywrong and like he was breaking the Geneva Convention or something.
“I’m Wallace, your CSI team leader. We’d have liked you to start last month, but…” He shrugged. “Home Office vetting, and all that.”
Pember swallowed, shuffling past Samantha and her ancient heater.
“Y-yes, hi, I’m Pember… but you already know that.”
Wallace nodded, pushing open the security door and leading him down a long, terribly lit corridor. He could hear Samantha mumbling something from back in reception, but it quickly faded away as they took a sharp left towards a set of stairs leading into the basement.
Wallace smiled and exchanged pleasantries with every person they passed, until they eventually reached a grey door with the words ‘Forensic Biology & Scene Investigation Unit,No Unauthorised Personnel’ stamped across the frosted glass. It was like something from a horror movie, with a cloudy halogen lamp flickering and casting washed-out shadows.
Wallace hummed, tapping his badge to another keypad, which was followed by a high-pitched beep and awhooshof air as the sealed room came into view.
The harsh lights, linoleum flooring and chemical stench were an immediate comfort to Pember’s nerves. The lab at university had been his safe space prior to graduation, and he’d thought about carrying on to complete a PhD as a means to escape his mother for a few more years.
Until his sister?—
“Biochem, right?” Wallace said, knocking him out of his thoughts. He plucked a lab coat and face mask from a hook by the door, handing them to Pember.
“Y-yes. Master’s at Wickham University,” he replied.
“Specialisation?”
“Enzymology and mathematics.”
