Secret Satan is a seasonal murder mystery in 24 episodes. When one of his work colleagues is murdered with a Secret Santa present the office Christmas party, Linus Sweet decides to try and find out whodunnit. At first it seems like the answer lies in their office's version of Secret Santa, which they call Secret Satan. But as Linus investigates, he begins to unwrap more mysteries. All may not be as it seems. In fact, this might not even be just a murder mystery, either.
For perhaps the first time in the history of the Mary Meade Marple internal communications department, every single full-time employee arrived at work early. There was absolutely no way any of us were missing whatever was about to happen.
First of all, I need to protest too much about what did happen. I am not proud of what we did to Radu. As I think I have made it clear, he was not my favourite person. I very much did not want a freelancer and, what’s more, I even more didn’t want Radu as the freelancer I didn’t want. He was the wrong man in the wrong job, doing it wrongly and behaving wrongly as he did it. He was incompetent and uptight about it, unfriendly and angry that other people found him difficult, he was tightly wound and wound everyone else up by being so. None of us liked him and all of us were glad to see the back of him.
On the other hand, a lot of his problem was that none of us liked him and would be glad to see the back of him. He was tightly wound because we responded to his hair-trigger nature by winding him up. We didn’t make him welcome and he consequently reacted in an entirely unwelcome manner. In other words, we kicked the dog and then got cross that it barked at us.
We treated Radu badly the whole time and I’m sorry that we did, even if he did deserve it and I was kind of proud of the way my plan turfed out two annoying birds with one stone. This possibly reveals a degree of hypocrisy I have hitherto suspected in myself but not noticed due to highly evasive skills.
There can have been no way that Radu didn’t realise something was up the moment he walked into our area of the office. Just the fact that everyone was there before him probably seemed weird enough, and I’m willing to bet the expectant hush and the way absolutely no one was even daring to look in his direction probably didn’t feel all that normal either.
He didn’t get any time to do anything about it though, because the moment he appeared in view, Balls flung open his office door and shouted:
“Funar!” in the voice of someone who’s just been looking up an employee's surname in their files.
Radu stopped in his tracks. Balls had never so much as acknowledged his existence before and now here Balls was flaunting his hitherto unguessed in depth knowledge of Radu’s surname out in public for all to hear.
“Quick - uh - review,” said Balls, “Managerial contract review. In my office.”
Radu looked at me and I just about managed a sickly, apologetic grin. He stiffened his jaw and followed Balls into his office. It was at this point that I regret to inform you that Balls closed his office door.
We all sat in silence, straining to hear. At one point Lem slurped his tea and was roundly shushed by everyone else. All we could hear was the rumble and murmur of back and forth conversation, but the rhythm was speeding up, the urgency increasing, the volume rising, until we all very clearly heard Radu shout:
“You’re crazy!”
“Hey, now!” Balls’ voice, “Sit down, please!”
“I cannot stand!” said Radu, although it didn’t sound like he sat back down, “You’re all crazy!”
“Stay back!” said Balls, becoming hysterical, “If you come any closer it will be assault.”
Balls was not, it should be evident, a lawyer.
“You follow me!” said Radu, “You accuse me! That is assault!”
“How dare you!”
“I dare!”
The door was wrenched open and we finally heard him at full volume.
“I dare tell you, you all crazy!” he said, “People die here. I am not staying to die. I am going!”
He rounded on us all, declaring to the room:
“You’re all crazy! And rude! And you all dress badly!” he stormed past us towards the lifts, stopping only to shout back, “I hope you have a terrible Christmas!”
And he was gone.
“Sweet,” Balls was in the doorway of his office, “I’ve just had a confrontation. A one to one with Funar. The man’s erratic. Unhinged. I feared violence. I want you to talk to HR, terminate his contract. I want him gone.”
Well, if I was going to have to go and talk to HR, I was going to take Allie with me. After all, all of this, from employing Radu on down, was largely her fault. And also, HR liked her. Of course, I say all this, but I actually wanted to go. The plan depended on it.
Since I’m being hypocritical right now, I’m also going to say that I’m sorry about everything I said about HR. I mean, they do regularly foul up our hiring system, resulting in having to sit opposite someone like Radu, but then our department is a weird little outlier inside the business. And we are, to be honest, to an individual, weird little outliers too. To be fair to HR, like the police, a fair deal of their job is dealing with people at their absolute worst. We’re all forced to work by the duresses of capitalism, we’re all forced to work on meaningless and demeaning tasks by the exigencies of corporate culture and we’re all forced to work on these tasks together by the stochastic competitiveness of the employment market. If we had the choice, we wouldn’t be there, we wouldn’t be doing the things we’re doing while we’re there and we wouldn’t be doing them with the people we’re sat next to. And all these weary sadnesses and humiliations eventually become HR’s problems in the end.
Of course, the majority of the people we’re made to go to meetings with are just fine, but the quirks of evolution and human psychology mean that about five percent of them are going to be awful, awful enough to make the other ninety-five percent miserable and to so account for ninety five percent of what HR have to deal with.
Let’s just say that it’s not a job that I would want to do. I certainly wouldn’t have been nearly as patient with the two oddballs from internal comms as the representative who spoke to Allie and I was.
She apparently took us seriously when we told her that we hadn’t wanted to blow any whistles and buck the chain of command, but that we felt our boss’ workplace behaviour was increasingly dangerous. She made empathetic noises when we described that behaviour and took copious notes when we mentioned drug use. She actually offered to call security when we talked about his increasing paranoia and treatment of staff.
She even promised to deal with Radu in a sympathetic and professional manner and you know what? I believed her, and it made me feel a little better about having used him as a pawn in our tactic to deal with Richard Balls.
For whom I felt no sympathy at all. Which was just as well, given what we were about to do to him.