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something. Part of him knew the sensible thing was to talk to Emma but now he was not only scared of hurting her, he was furious with her. He wasn’t thinking straight. So he got up quietly, headed to the spare bedroom, opened up his laptop and began searching around the internet.
    Later that day, when Emma headed to the break room to get her Pret-a-Manger salad from the office fridge, Ian leapt into her seat. He disabled her computer’s firewall like his friend Stewart in IT had shown him, loaded up the image from his pen drive as an email attachment and pressed send. As quickly as he could, he put the firewall back, took out the pen drive and set Emma’s computer back to sleep.
    For a moment or two Ian could hear nothing but the beat of his own heart. He felt breathless and like he might actually faint. As soon as he had done it, he knew that it was not only wrong but pretty much evil. In a bid to clear his mind he went to the loo and splashed water on his face. It didn’t help. He realised that he had gone too far. What he had done was too awful. He would have to go up to Stewart in IT and see if he could get the email back or at the very least hide where it had come from. Glad that he had made up his mind to do the right thing, he went back to the office but it was too late. Emma was standing at her computer in tears while an angry looking Douglas stood next to her shouting into his phone for IT to come up to the fourth floor right now.

Chapter 13
    “This has been the worst day of my life! The worst ever,” sobbed Emma as she and Ian got home and she flung herself on the sofa. “They’re going to sack me for sure and I’ll never be able to get another half-decent job again and all for something I didn’t do! It’s not fair, Ian! It’s just not fair!”
    “You never know,” Ian said soothingly, “they might just give you a good telling off and leave it at that.”
    “But I haven’t even done anything to be told off for!” sobbed Emma. “You know me. You know I’d never do what they say I’ve done. So who is picking on me? What have I done to make someone hate me so much that they would set me up like this?”
    If it had been possible to press a button to open a door so he could jump in and be swallowed up, Ian would have been pressing it now. He hated seeing Emma upset like this. And he hated himself for putting her in this position in the first place.
    The idea had come to him that morning. The only way to end the nightmare was to get Emma sacked. Heading to the spare room he had typed, “Reasons why people get sacked” into the search engine. One of the top entries was a story about an office worker who had forwarded a picture of a semi-naked glamour model with his boss’s face stuck on her body. A few clicks and a cut and paste job later, Ian had exactly what he needed – Douglas’s head stuck on the body of a topless girl on a Harley Davidson. Adding a speech bubble to the picture that said, “My name’s Douglas and I like a big Chopper!” Ian had then downloaded the image on to his pen drive and put his plan in motion.
    Watching Emma sobbing as IT took away her computer had been awful. She was sent home and told to come back first thing next morning to find out what would be happening to her. Feeling like he was going to throw up, Ian had asked Douglas for a half-day to go and look after her. It took a while to talk him into it but after ten minutes of begging, Douglas had finally said yes.
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    The next morning Ian still felt sick. Emma had spent most of the night crying and had even said she might not bother to go in as there was no point if all they were going to do was sack her.
    “You never know,” said Ian as Emma finally got up to take a shower. “Maybe they’ll find out who really did it. Or maybe the person who did do it will own up.”
    “Do you really think that’s likely?” sniffed Emma. “Come on, Ian. The kind of person who would sneak around using other