Barking (15 page)

Bzzzz. Duncan put the phone down. He'd said it, he realised, almost as if he'd meant it.
I'm concerned
, he'd said,
naturally
. But he wasn't, of course. He hated the bloody woman. After all, she'd screwed up his life (his other, his pre-bite life; had that really been him, that passive and unsatisfactory creature, now mercifully extinct?) before walking out of it for ever, making it plainly, viciously clear that she never wanted to see or hear from him ever again, not until the skies fell and the seas ran dry and the dead were raised incorruptible. Nothing natural, therefore, about being concerned about her, except in a vague, woolly, no-man-is-an-island sort of a way, the concern a normal person feels for whales stranded in the Thames estuary. The right to worry about her had been taken away from him years ago, after all.

He leaned back in his impossibly comfortable chair and closed his eyes. Without quite realising he was doing it, he was listening; as though his extraordinary hearing might be able to pick up her voice, faint and distant, moaning ‘Help!' somewhere. Not that he cared, of course. Quite the reverse. If something bad had happened to her, he'd want to know about it, of course, so he could gloat, possibly revise his hitherto negative opinion of cosmic justice. Other than that, couldn't care less. Honest.

And then the penny, burning up in the Earth's atmosphere, streaked across his plane of vision like a shooting star. She'd gone out at a quarter past ten yesterday, that foul woman had said, to buy a pound of liver. Strange behaviour, all things considered, on the part of the most adamant and proselytising vegetarian he'd ever met in his life.

Sometimes, conclusions are like bits of driftwood floating past a sinking ship; we leap to them for our very survival. Think about it. She wasn't likely to be buying liver for herself. Therefore, inevitably, she was buying it for someone else. Further: if she was prepared to defile herself with the flesh of murdered animals, it could only be because there was someone whose heart she was anxious to short-cut to via his stomach. Apparently, Ms Bick's guess hadn't been so wide of the mark. He quickly pieced together a storyline: unexpected phone call (on her mobile, so it didn't go through Reception).
Darling, I'll be stopping off in London on my way to LA, but I've only got thirty-six hours
; drop everything, quick dash to the butcher for the makings of his favourite liver, bacon and onions, then a fast taxi to his penthouse flat - You didn't have to be Sherlock Holmes or a werewolf to figure that one out.

Duncan frowned. Not that he cared any more. He was tempted to phone up Ms Bick and share his insight with her, but he decided against it, if only because he didn't relish the prospect of getting frostbite in his ear. She was a smart girl, she'd figure it out for herself sooner or later. Besides, if his hypothesis was right, Sally would be back at work in a day or so, smiling a lot and walking awkwardly. Problem solved. The whole issue flushed from his mind.

His mouth, he discovered, was full of little crumbs of wood, all that remained of a perfectly good pencil. He spat them out. It'd have been nice to have some work to do right now, to take his mind off the whole tiresome business; some nice, difficult work, something he could really chew on. Right now, in fact, he could even tackle the Allshapes estate accounts—

Which reminded him.

One of those little things, like bits of grit in the corner of your eye. How had Felicity Allshapes found out so quickly that he'd left Craven Ettins? Furthermore, how had she known that he'd joined Ferris and Loop?

Particularly the latter; because he knew for a fact that he hadn't called up his old employers to share the happy news with them, and he doubted very much whether Luke would have done so, unless it was some fine detail of professional etiquette, the sort of thing senior partners do when they're not nibbling canapes and swigging Bollinger. But presumably he had; or else how come Ms Bick had known where to find him?

Another insoluble mystery solved, ahead of schedule and within budget. Duncan relaxed. Away in the distance, up against the opposite wall of his office, he noticed for the first time a large padded thing, a cross between a paddling pool and a coracle but made out of foam rubber covered in soft, warm fabric, inside which someone had thoughtfully placed a delightful-looking old blanket. It seemed to call to him, promising warmth, comfort and safety; so much nicer than this horrible, limb-cramping chair. He stood up and walked across the room.

(This is silly, he thought. Whoever heard of a grown man curling up in a doggy-bed at three o'clock in the afternoon? But it looked so soft and cuddly, and the blanket so gorgeously fuzzy and frayed—)

Without knowing that he was doing it, he got down on his hands and knees and approached the padded thing warily. When his nose was about six inches from it, he stopped and sniffed.

He felt his ears twitch. There was something about the smell; that who's-been-sleeping-in-my-bed blend of apprehension and annoyance. He was new to all this stuff, of course; but he knew enough to recognise the scent of his own kind. The last occupant of the bed had, beyond question, been One of Us. That, however, didn't make a whole lot of sense.

He hadn't been conscious of uploading the information, but he knew the scents of the rest of the Ferris Gang. The whole building was filled with them; so much so that he could have drawn a diagram showing which rooms each of them had been in over the last week, with detailed itineraries and timings. The smell from the bed, however, most definitely wasn't Luke (a sort of fiery dark red with cinnamon and a hint of tenor saxophone) or any of the others. He could hear a low growling noise, which he quickly traced back to himself.

Silly. So somebody else had slept in it at some stage: so what? Did this mean he'd never be able to stay at a hotel ever again without barking himself hoarse? He sniffed a little more, but the lure of the bed had evaporated and he went back to his chair and picked up the phone.

‘Hello,' he said, and dried. Luke had told him Reception's name, but it had slithered out of his mind like a wise fish in a net. ‘You there?'

Someone at the other end of the line squeaked.

‘Great.' He was finding the conversation a bit trying, but he soldiered on. ‘I was wondering if you could do something for me.' Squeak; oh, for crying out loud. ‘Come in here,' he said firmly, ‘and, um, get rid of something.'

That made him sound like a little boy scared of spiders. He put the phone down, and a few seconds later the little bald man from the front office knocked at his office door.

‘That bed thing,' Duncan said, pointing. ‘Chuck it out, would you?'

The little man stared at him as if he'd just been ordered to woodchip over the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. ‘Squeak?' he said.

‘I don't like it,' Duncan said. ‘If you'd just get rid of it. Throw it out, or,' he added, as the little man's eyes widened like sunflowers, ‘stick it in a cupboard somewhere out of my way. Thanks.'

The man stood there. He was quivering slightly.

Duncan sighed. ‘Here,' he said. He stood up, went across and picked the padded thing up. ‘Take it,' he said. The little man stared at him sadly, so he shoved it into his arms. ‘Thanks,' he said; then, as the little man seemed rooted to the spot, ‘Go away,' he added. That worked, at any rate; the little man walked backwards to the doorway, then turned and scuttled away, leaving the door wide open.

Strange. But strangeness was the livery around here. Other firms had monogrammed carpets or colour-coordinated open plan, Ferris & Loop had weird. He yawned. He really did fancy a little nap, after the day's exertions. Pity about the padded thing, really. He could see how comfortable one of those could be, for a busy man in need of a quarter of an hour's down time.

He looked up. The little bald man was back again. Only the shiny top of his head was visible. The rest of him was obscured by a colossal quantity of pink, blue and green wallet files.

‘Hello,' Duncan said, trying a bit too hard to sound breezy and relaxed. ‘What've you got there?'

No reply. The little man dumped the stack of files down on a table that Duncan hadn't got around to noticing yet, stared at him for a moment, then fled. At least this time he remembered to shut the door.

Ah well, Duncan thought, then frowned. One pink, green or blue file looks pretty much the same as any other, but there was something familiar about these specimens. He advanced quietly and carefully, as though stalking wary prey, until he could read—

- His own handwriting on the cover of the file on top of the heap:
Bowden Allshapes dec'd
. There was a single sheet of A4 folded under the flap.

Ask, apparently, and it shall be delivered unto you by Federal Express. It'd have been fun, he thought, to have been a werefly on the wall when the Sidmouth woman found out that one of her department's files was being snatched away from under her nose. She hated it when that happened. He smiled.

Dear old Bowden Allshapes deceased, may he rest in peace. Duncan pulled out the third file from the bottom, the one containing his twenty-seven attempts at drawing up estate accounts. A fine coup, he decided, on his first day as a partner, to clear up this trifling spot of unfinished business and whack in an eye-watering final bill for the first scrap of meat he'd personally brought to the communal feast. He flicked open the file and took out a computer printout. Today's date; efficient. The most recent entry was a debit for £4,337.97. He checked the correspondence. Sure enough, the top sheet was a bill: Messrs Craven Ettin & Trowell, final account to date of transfer of file: £4,337.97. He grinned. Credit where it was due; when it came to gouging the punters, Jenny Sidmouth sometimes displayed a reckless arrogance that was beautiful to watch.

The accounts. He took a sheet of A4 and a biro, drew his centre line, his sun and his moon, and set to work. Amazing, the difference; rather like the contrast between a fish in water and a man wading through waist-high slurry. He dived, gambolled and spun in the flow of the figures, and the mistakes fled before him, their cover blown, their pathetic attempts at deception laughable. When he'd made the last entries and drawn his bottom lines, he began to add - first the left side, then the right.

For a breathless second, he thought it was going to balance. Almost; very nearly. The discrepancy was a trivial 43p. You couldn't buy a second of a solicitor's time for that. He grinned so widely that his face nearly came unzipped. Just once more, to check; he did the sums.

Discrepancy £7,973.34.

Oh.

Panic grabbed him. Had it worn off? Was he going to have to go back to being a stone-deaf, puny, fragile, unable-to-smell human again? That would be more than he could bear. He had to find out. He held his breath and listened; and down in the street, someone sneezed. Joy.

Encouraged to hope, he stood up, crossed to the far wall and took down a framed print of some miserable-looking dead judge or other, the sort that seem to grow on lawyers' office walls like honey-fungus on rotten trees. He smashed the glass against the edge of the desk, picked out a jagged shard and ran it across the palm of his hand. It tickled a bit. No blood.

Relief surged over him like car-wash suds. He was still a werewolf. He went back to his desk and added the figures up for the third time. The discrepancy had shrunk to £677.31.

He sat at his computer and wrote a letter:

Some things, apparently, don't change just because you stop being human. Duncan shrugged. Maybe it was just as well. His life would be that little bit emptier, he decided, without Bowden Allshapes deceased. There has to be a challenge, an impossible dream, or we stop trying.

Just for fun and something to do, he added the figures a fourth, fifth and sixth time; then he screwed up the sheet of paper, ate it and started again from scratch.

 

He was running, bright eyed and bushy-tailed, through a misty forest of tall grey pines. His nose was full of the intoxicating scent of the prey: delicious, unfamiliar, so rich and strange that it made every nerve in his body hum and tingle with the desire to catch, kill, eat. The scent was like a filament of burning gold; it was silk and chocolate and Beethoven, and no more than a minute old. He was running impossibly fast (he could feel his lungs bursting) but not fast enough. He needed more strength. He found it.

A great leap over a trackway in a ride, flooded with stagnant water. The shock of landing squeezed air out of him like water from a sponge. He forced his back and hind legs to kick back against the mat of rotting pine-needles. Faster now. Fast enough?

The scent was almost strong enough to choke him as he flew over the trunk of a fallen tree, landed, recovered his stride. He could feel the weight of his lolling tongue.

He saw movement. Up ahead, a flash of white between the trees, moving. He arched his back and lengthened his stride. He knew he was running well, fast even for one of his kind; he also knew that he wouldn't be able to keep it up for more than a minute, ninety seconds at most. He was burning too much energy, putting too much strain on his joints and tendons. No stamina; he'd have to do something about that. Meanwhile, the prey—