Moving on

That the vans had painted signs was why she never saw it coming, she said. Logos, letter headings and uniforms, they had it all, she said. That's why she never saw it coming. When they came she even offered to lend a hand, she helped them load up desks and drawers and cupboards and chairs. She made coffees while they wheeled cabinets and stacked self-assembled boxes three high one by one. They didn't stop at the painted vans, she said, they had offices and mobile phone numbers and receptionists who put her through to extensions. She felt safe that they had receptionists. She never suspected a thing because they had receptionists. It was only when she arrived to a bare office, stripped of all but the carpet, wires trailing, doors left open, absent of life, she twigged all was not well. They called numbers that nobody answered, they wrote letters to which no-one replied and filed charges against a company that had never existed, two of them even went to the addresss printed so effortlessly on that 80gsm paper, but, of course, by that time it was all too late. They never did locate their office. Sometime later, through a friend of a friend, one of them heard about a new firm, just recently opened up across the river, selling a fine line in office furniture, that just so happened to have some wonderful stationary. But that was just a whisper.