The Last Signature

Note: Obviously death will happen, but not graphic. Thank you. Enjoy.

“Good reflexes,” Vanessa Cross said.

She smiled at the pen between my fingers, caught two inches above the carpet. Her pale gloves made a soft whisper as she turned another page of the contract.

Thomas Vale grinned at me from across the boardroom table. “Another company asset saved from disaster.”

“It’s a pen, Thomas.”

“And without it, none of today’s decisions would come into being.”

It was black, plastic, and worth less than the coffee cooling beside my elbow.

Thomas accepted it with the solemnity of a ceremonial sword, then ruined the effect by putting the cap between his teeth.

The boardroom creaked with age, but Thomas had refused to hold the meeting anywhere else. He wanted to sign the preliminary sale agreement in the room where he had signed the first lease on Vale Engineering thirty-one years earlier.

Back then, the company had been Thomas, two machinists, and a borrowed desk.

Now it employed eight hundred people.

I had worked for him for six years, which was long enough to know he would spend an hour choosing a retirement gift for a receptionist and ten seconds approving a machine worth half a million pounds.

Long enough to know the sale was breaking his heart.

Thomas scanned the final page, biting down on the cap whenever he reached a sentence he disliked. Vanessa watched him over the top of the contract.

“The buyers still want access to the historical accounts,” she said. “Fifteen years is excessive.”

“They’re buying the company,” Thomas replied around the pen cap. “They’re entitled to know what they’re buying.”

“They could limit the review to seven.”

“They could. I won’t ask them to.”

Vanessa’s expression remained pleasant. “Of course.”

Thomas removed the cap from his mouth and signed his name. He pushed the agreement towards Vanessa, then held out the pen.

“Yours.”

Her gaze dropped to the teeth marks around the cap. Her gloved hand drew back.

“Not anymore. You’ve chewed it. As always.”

Thomas chuckled. He had known Vanessa for twenty years and trusted her with the company’s finances for fifteen. She was the only person in the building who could insult him without risking a farewell letter in Monday’s post.

The door opened before she could reach for her own pen.

Nathan Vale came in without knocking.

“You started without me.”

Thomas’s smile faded. “You said you weren’t coming.”

“I said I didn’t want to watch.”

Nathan shut the door behind him.

At twenty-eight, he had his father’s height and none of his charisma. Thomas could walk into a room of furious shareholders and have them laughing within minutes. Nathan entered friendly rooms as though they had already conspired against him.

His eyes settled on the documents.

“So it’s already done.”

“Not yet,” Vanessa said.

Thomas gestured to the empty chair opposite him. “Sit with us.”

For a moment, Nathan glared at the documents as though he might set them alight by concentration alone. Then he pulled out the chair and sat.

“I know this hurts,” Thomas said.

Nathan laughed once. There was no humour in it. “Do you?”

“Yes.”

“You’re selling my inheritance.”

“I’m selling the company. Your inheritance will be the proceeds.”

“I don’t care about the money.”

“I know.” Thomas leaned forward. “This is not a punishment. I am not saying you’re lazy or stupid. You’re neither. But running a company is not something you know how to do simply because your surname is on the building.”

“You never gave me a chance.”

“I gave you three departments.”

“For three months each, with everyone reporting back to you.”

“Because purchase orders went unanswered in the first, you promised delivery dates we could not meet in the second, and in the third you approved a supplier without checking whether they could manufacture to tolerance.”

Nathan’s face reddened. “I was learning.”

“And people here cannot afford to become lessons.”

The words were hard. Thomas’s voice was not.

He took a breath and softened it further.

“Do you remember the enterprise club at university?”

Nathan looked away.

“You had good ideas,” Thomas continued. “You made people excited. But the treasurer quit, the venue went unpaid, and you forgot to submit the funding forms.”

“I was nineteen.”

“Yes. And now you’re twenty-eight, and you still hate schedules, avoid difficult conversations, and agree to every exciting idea before checking whether it can be done. None of that makes you a bad man. It would make you a dangerous chief executive.”

The door groaned open again.

Milly appeared, one trembling hand holding it in place and the other balancing a tray piled with small chocolate soufflé cakes.

“Your cakes, Mr Vale.”

“Thank you, Milly, dear. Leave them on the table.”

She crossed the room in five quick steps and lowered the tray without toppling anything. Then, sensing the atmosphere, she retreated without another word.

Thomas reached across the table. His hand hesitated near Nathan’s before settling on a cake instead.

“I would rather leave you enough money to choose a life you are good at than leave you a company that will ruin you while you ruin it.”

He took a large bite, swallowed, and frowned.

“And I would rather see what I built survive under someone else than watch it collapse because I was too sentimental to let it go.”

Nathan stared at him.

“You trust strangers more than me.”

“I want to see you build your own life, not force yourself to take over mine because of a surname.” Thomas took another bite, slower this time. His brow furrowed. “Does this taste bitter to anyone else?”

I had taken one from the opposite side of the tray. It tasted of chocolate and enough sugar to shorten my life by several respectable years.

“Mine’s fine.”

Thomas glanced at the half-eaten cake suspiciously. “Metallic, almost.”

“You’ve been drinking your coffee since eight,” I said. “It could strip paint by now.”

“That may be it.”

He put the cake down, then reached for another from the far end of the tray.

Nathan watched him. “You can put it into nice words. That’s what you’re best at, isn’t it?”

Thomas bit into the second cake and grimaced again.

“That won’t change what you mean,” Nathan continued. “You think I’m incapable.”

“I think you would wake up miserable every day just to prove that you aren’t.”

Nathan’s eyes shone, and for one uncomfortable second, I thought he might cry.

Anger saved him.

He snatched the black pen from beside the contract and stabbed its point at a paragraph on the second page.

“Then what is this?”

Thomas glanced down. “A non-interference clause.”

“Five years barred from an executive position. You truly made sure I couldn’t ruin your favourite toy, didn’t you?”

“A company is not a toy.”

Thomas’s voice cooled by a degree.

“No. It’s your real child.”

“Nathan.”

“You’re giving strangers control and paying me to disappear.”

“The buyer will not proceed if you can walk into management the following morning and overturn every decision they make.”

“Because you told them I would.”

“Because you told them you would.”

Nathan shoved the contract across the table. Pages scattered, one sliding into my coffee cup.

Thomas rose. “Enough.”

Nathan stood with him.

“No, not enough. You’ve spent my entire life telling me this would be mine one day.”

“I said you would have a place here.”

“All those nights I’ve spent studying the material to have qualifications for this role.”

“And I regret deeply not encouraging you enough to choose something you were naturally good at.”

“You can’t even name a thing like that.”

Nathan caught the corner of the agreement and pulled. The paper tore halfway across.

Thomas seized his wrist.

“Let go.”

“Stop behaving like a child.”

Nathan ripped himself free and shoved him.

Thomas stumbled backwards into a chair. The wooden legs shrieked against the floor, but he did not fall. He caught himself on the table, breathing hard.

Nathan’s anger vanished as quickly as it had come.

“Dad—”

“I’m fine.”

Thomas straightened slowly. He rubbed his hip, then bent to gather the fallen pages.

“You think I don’t love you,” he said.

Nathan looked at the floor.

“I think you love this place more.”

The pen had rolled beneath Nathan’s chair. Thomas reached underneath to retrieve it and pressed the stack of documents on the table. He raised the cap to his mouth, but it glanced off his lower lip. On the second attempt, he managed to catch it between his teeth.

Nathan looked up at him.

“You told me this would be mine one day.”

Thomas placed the pen on top of the papers and stood back up. “I believed it would be.”

“So did I.” Nathan’s voice cracked. He swallowed and tried again. “Every year I failed, I thought I only had to work harder. That if I became good enough, all the time you wasted on me would mean something.”

“It wasn’t wasted.”

“You’re giving up on me right now.”

“Nathan, I’m not—"

Thomas swayed.

Nathan moved before any of us.

He caught his father around the shoulders, but Thomas’s knees had already given way. Their combined weight struck the edge of the table. Coffee sloshed from three cups. The tray of cakes jumped, one toppling onto its side.

“Dad?”

I was already on my knees. Thomas’s eyes were open but unfocused. His breath came in shallow, dragging pulls. When I reached for his wrist, Vanessa’s voice cut across the room.

“A man in his late fifties collapsed. We need an ambulance.”

Thomas attempted to breathe. The sound that emerged was small and wet.

Nathan caught his hand.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it. Dad, I’m sorry.”

Thomas’s fingers tightened once around his son’s.

Then they went slack.

I reached for his wrist. There was no pulse.

For several seconds, nobody moved.

Vanessa was the first to recover.

“Start compressions.”

I placed the heel of my hand against the centre of Thomas’s chest and locked my fingers together.

The first compression forced a noise from his throat.

Nathan flinched.

“Keep his head back,” Vanessa said. She still held the phone to her ear. “They’re sending someone with the defibrillator.”

I pressed again.

“One, two, three…”

Nathan knelt near his father’s head, clutching his hand as though Thomas might still decide to squeeze back.

“I barely pushed him,” he said.

“Four, five, six…”

“He was standing. He said he was fine.”

I knew.

Thomas had gathered the papers. He had spoken clearly. He had bent beneath Nathan’s chair and stood again without help.

The shove had not killed him. He had not hit his head. This shouldn’t be happening.

“Seven, eight…”

A crumb of chocolate clung to the corner of Thomas’s mouth.

The cakes.

He had eaten two. One from the centre of the tray and another from the opposite end. Both had tasted metallic.

Mine had tasted normal.

“Ten, eleven…”

Only some cakes were poisoned.

Possible. Risky.

Milly might have known which ones Thomas preferred. She might have arranged them carefully, watching where she placed the tray.

Except Thomas had taken the first without looking.

For Milly to have poisoned both, she would have needed to predict two choices Thomas himself had not made until seconds before taking them.

And I had eaten from the same tray.

“Fourteen, fifteen…”

They had both tasted metallic. But the metallic taste could not have been in either cake. It was way too coincidental.

But he had to feel the metallic taste because of something he put in his mouth.

My hands faltered.

“Keep going,” Vanessa snapped.

I pressed harder.

Coffee. He had been drinking it since eight.

And—

My eyes flicked to the pen lying beside the fallen documents, half concealed beneath a page darkened with spilled coffee. Its black cap was marked with crescents where Thomas’s teeth had bitten into the plastic.

“Eighteen, nineteen…”

He had chewed it while reading.

Removed it to speak.

Put it back between his teeth.

Again and again.

Nathan had held the pen.

So had I.

Neither of us had collapsed.

We had touched the barrel.

Thomas had put the cap in his mouth.

“Twenty-two…”

My eyes found Vanessa’s hands.

The pale gloves she wore every day were still immaculate.

“Twenty-five, twenty-six…”

Not anymore. You’ve chewed it. As always.

She had known.

Good reflexes.

I touched it.

“Twenty-eight…”

My fingerprints were on the pen.

Nathan’s were there now too.

Vanessa’s would be nowhere.

“Thirty.”

My arms had started to shake.

Vanessa crouched beside me. “Switch.”

Nathan looked up.

“Take over,” she told him. “Same place. Keep your arms straight.”

He released Thomas’s hand reluctantly and moved into my position.

I shifted back while he pressed down.

“One,” Nathan whispered.

“Louder,” Vanessa said.

“Two. Three. Four.”

I pushed myself upright.

The room tilted with me.

“I need sugar,” I said.

Neither Nathan nor Vanessa looked away from Thomas. That was what I needed.

I reached for the tray and took the half-eaten cake Thomas had abandoned. My stomach turned at the thought of putting it in my mouth. I bit into the untouched side anyway.

Chocolate melted across my tongue.

No bitterness.

No metal.

My gaze returned to the pen.

Vanessa had brought it. I had caught it. Thomas had chewed it. Nathan had grabbed it.

A perfect line of fingerprints leading everywhere except back to her.

The historical accounts.

Fifteen years was excessive, Vanessa had said.

Thomas had trusted her with the company’s finances for fifteen.

The sale would bring auditors. Strangers with no loyalty to her and no reason to accept explanations Thomas had accepted for years.

Whatever she had hidden, they would find it.

Unless Thomas died and the sale dissolved into grief, inheritance disputes and police tape.

Vanessa glanced at the cake in my hand.

Her expression changed so slightly that I might have imagined it. A tightening at the corner of her mouth. Her eyes dropping to the bite I had taken from Thomas’s half.

She knew why I had eaten it.

I crossed to her.

Nathan’s counting filled the room. His voice cracked on every few numbers, but he kept pressing.

“The cakes aren’t bitter,” I whispered.

Vanessa’s gaze remained on Thomas.

“You’re in shock.”

“You should be careful,” she said. “Shock can make people remember events rather creatively.”

It sounded like advice.

“You’re pale,” Vanessa adjusted the cuff of one pale glove, “you should sit down.”

“You put it on the cap.”

Vanessa’s hand stilled at her cuff.

“I know what you did.”

She looked at me fully then.

“Prove it.”

I looked at the pen beside the contract.

My fingerprints would be on it.

Nathan’s too.

Vanessa’s would not.

The police would hear that Thomas had argued with his son, been shoved, collapsed and died. They would find Nathan’s prints on the poisoned pen.

But Vanessa would not choose Nathan.

She could not.

I had seen Thomas chewing the pen before Nathan entered. If she blamed him, I could say he had never brought it. I could tell them it was already on the table.

Nathan could not do the same for me.

He had walked in after Thomas signed. He had not seen Vanessa lend his father the pen.

From his perspective, I might have brought it.

“You’re going to tell them it was mine,” I said.

Vanessa did not answer.

“You’ll say you saw me hand it to him. Nathan will remember that Thomas already had it when he arrived. He won’t know whether you’re lying.”

“You appear to have thought this through.”

“If you accuse me, I tell them everything,” I said. “The cap. The gloves. The accounts. Fifteen years of them.”

“You still have no proof.”

“No. But they’ll look.”

The first trace of unease entered her expression.

Nathan reached thirty and stopped.

“What now?”

“Again,” Vanessa said without turning. “Keep going.”

Nathan repositioned his hands.

I lowered my voice further.

“You don’t accuse me. I don’t tell them the pen was yours.”

Vanessa studied me.

“And what do you expect them to believe instead?”

Nathan pressed down on his father’s chest.

“One. Two. Three.”

I looked at him.

His face was wet now. He seemed unaware of it.

He had threatened Thomas. Torn the agreement. Put his fingerprints on the pen and shoved his father minutes before his death.

He already believed he might have killed him.

Vanessa followed my gaze.

For the first time since Thomas collapsed, something close to horror crossed her face.

It disappeared quickly.

“You would do that to him?”

I watched Nathan force another compression into his father’s motionless chest.

“No,” I said. “You did.”

The sound of sirens reached us faintly through the boardroom windows.

Vanessa looked towards the door.

“What will you tell them?”

“That Nathan brought the pen.”

I dropped the remainder of Thomas’s cake onto the tray.

“And you will tell them the same thing.”