Barking (18 page)

His Aunt Christine had said once that he was so untidy that if ever he was burgled, he wouldn't notice for a fortnight. It was good to be able to lay that old slander to rest. He noticed as soon as he walked through the doorway. Not, however, because of the mess. It was the smell.

Intruder alert
; so much for
x
million years of evolution. He stood rooted to the spot, and the hair on the back of his neck was bristling. He sniffed, and growled; and then he noticed the yanked-out drawers, overturned furniture, scattered books, DVD-player-sized void, et cetera.

Bastards
, he thought; then he was grinning, and he had a good idea why. He sniffed again; then he knelt down next to one of the discarded drawers, put his nose to the handle and breathed in.

Fine: that told him everything he needed to know. His only regret as he slammed the door behind him and set off down the stairs, snuffling as he went, was that he didn't have a tail. If he'd had one, it'd have been wagging so hard he'd have sprained a buttock.

 

Their scent disappeared at the kerb, but Duncan picked up a strong smell of diesel and sump oil, so he followed that instead. He lost the diesel after a few hundred yards, blended hopelessly into the general traffic stench, but the oil smell was clear and distinctive. He didn't have to trail it very far, no more than four or five miles. It took him to a lock-up workshop under a railway arch. He knocked and waited for six seconds before kicking down the door; after all, just because he was a werewolf, there was no call to go acting like a wild animal.

‘Here, what d'you think—' said the man in the grey parka, just before Duncan sprang. He went down on his back with a thump, with Duncan's hands round his neck, too startled and terrified to move. Duncan knew the drill. One hard bite into the throat, then shake vigorously until the prey stops moving. He could smell the prey's fear, and it made him feel painfully hungry. He bared his teeth—

And then he thought,
No, this is wrong. No - I'm a human being. Well, a lawyer. Tearing people's throats out, for a straightforward domestic burglary? Even David Blunkett never went that far.

He lifted his head. Out of the corner of his eye he could see two more men. They were frozen, staring, making no effort whatever to intervene. He looked up at them and growled.

Sometimes, you hear your own voice and somehow, for a split second it isn't you. On this occasion, he was glad it was him. He wouldn't have wanted to be in a confined space with whatever had made that noise otherwise. Instinct or deep-seated genetic memory was keeping the three men from moving, and that was probably just as well. Anything remotely resembling a threat or hostile action would have given his own instincts the shred of pretext they needed. He growled again. The man whose throat he was gripping had gone ever such a funny colour, and you didn't need a werewolf's nose to tell you that he was in urgent need of a change of undergarments.

He relaxed his grip, and the man gasped, gulping down air like Luke with a glass of beer. ‘All right,' Duncan heard himself say. ‘But I want my stuff back. And God help you if you've buggered up my PC. Have you any idea how long it takes to install broadband?'

They hadn't unloaded his things from the van yet, so he took the keys and quickly checked everything was there. Fine. He climbed into the driver's seat while they opened what was left of the doors. The man he'd jumped on, he noticed, was wiping drool off his chin. Yuk, he thought.

‘I'll leave the van outside, with the keys in,' he said. ‘You can pick it up in the morning. Oh, and you've got an oil leak somewhere. '

It didn't take him long to put everything back and get the place straightened up; another werewolf superpower, he supposed, because usually tidying and housework took him for ever. When he'd finished, he looked the place over and decided he wasn't going to be staying there long. A dump, by any meaningful criteria. Most definitely not suitable for his new, evolved self; an aristocrat of the animal kingdom, one of supernature's gentlemen. The hell with grotty little flats. Something large and detached was what he deserved, with a nice big garden you could run in; down by the river, maybe. Chiswick, somewhere like that.

Even the bed felt small and cramped, and he found it hard to get to sleep. By rights he should've been exhausted after the day he'd had, but instead he was bursting with energy. After an hour of fidgeting and listening to next door's clock he jumped up, burrowed around in the coal seam of papers and junk in the kitchen drawer, and found the calendar he'd been given last Christmas and never got around to putting up. It was one of those information-packed calendars, detailing among other trivia the phases of the moon.

Only two weeks to go. He couldn't wait.

‘T
o begin with, it was cats,' Pete said, idly nibbling a plastic ruler. ‘Everything else I could pretty much take or leave alone, but just the faintest whiff of a moggy and I was completely out of control.'

A week since Duncan had joined Messrs Ferris & Loop, solicitors. Quarter to twelve; all the day's work long since done and profitably dusted, and the lunchtime drinking ceremony only fifteen minutes away. Duncan had come to look forward to it, even though the procedure was invariably the same. Quick march to the pub, drink twelve pints of Guinness, leave, and no more than a dozen sentences spoken from start to finish. But, as Pete had pointed out, when you've known each other as long as we have, you don't need to be forever chatting away.

Pete was by far the most talkative of the gang. Duncan wondered whether this was because he'd briefly escaped to teacher training college before the long arm of Luke Ferris reeled him back in again, or whether he'd made his abortive break for freedom because he wasn't quite like the others. Probably the latter; which in turn might account for his habit of dropping by for a chat around half-eleven, which had become something of a daily ritual. None of the others had come by for a chinwag; indeed, their chins generally only tended to wag when they were drinking beer or baying at the moon.

‘I quit, though,' Pete went on. ‘I just told myself one night: from now on, no more cats. And it worked. Haven't had a cat now for - what, three years this April. Sheer will-power, too. No support from the rest of 'em, and bugger-all from anywhere else, either. You can't just stroll into Boots and buy yourself a cat-impregnated patch or a box of cat-flavoured chewing gum.'

‘I see,' Duncan said. ‘So it was simply guts, determination and strength of character.'

‘Exactly,' Pete replied, yawning. ‘That and Luke telling me he'd rip my throat out if I ever so much as sniffed another cat as long as I lived.' Pete frowned. ‘Luke can be a bit of an old worry-wart at times,' he said. ‘Apparently we were getting in all the local papers - well, you know how people are about their pets. And I'd be the first one to admit, I was laying into the suburban moggy population a bit, people were bound to notice sooner or later. That's the thing about Luke: like it or not, he's always right.'

There was something about the way he'd said it; almost the way you'd imagine Lucifer talking about God, when he was plotting the rebellion of the fallen angels. Maybe, Duncan told himself, there's more to this than just cats. Maybe.

‘So,' Duncan said, mostly just to keep the conversation going, ‘you're cured as far as cats are concerned.'

‘Yup.' Pete spat out a few shards of scrunched plastic. ‘And besides,' he went on, glancing at Duncan out of the corner of his eye, then looking away, ‘once you've seen Millie, it's hard to work up much enthusiasm for small game. I mean, I can show a little polite interest in a fox or a dog - a proper dog, I'm talking about now, a Labrador or a Staffordshire, not the small fuzzy rubbish - but let's face it, it's not the same. Luke says I should try and get over it, but it's not as easy as that.' He sighed. ‘Ah, but Man's reach must exceed Man's grasp, or what's a Heaven for?'

A quotation, presumably. Pete went in for quotations; probably a legacy of his time in teacher training. He never talked about his brief sojourn in the Real World, but he carried a sort of aura of difference around with him that was hard to overlook. Obviously Luke was prepared to tolerate it, though presumably there were clearly established limits. He tried to remember what Pete had been like at school; but when he cast his mind back, all he tended to get was a series of group photos. Remembering the gang, the gestalt, was easy enough. Trying to prise the individuals out of the group was as tricky as catching eels while wearing boxing gloves.

‘Anyhow,' Pete went on, adjusting his perch on the edge of the desk. ‘The billion-dollar question: how are you settling in? On balance a good career move, or would you rather still be at Craven Ettins?'

‘On balance?'

Pete nodded. ‘On balance.'

‘Fucking wonderful,' Duncan replied with a huge grin. ‘I mean, the superpowers—'

Pete nodded gravely. ‘They are rather nice, aren't they? After a bit, you start to forget what it was like, back before you could do all the cool stuff; when you couldn't smell worth shit, or hear. Really, I don't know how the humans survive, with only fifty per cent sight and about ten per cent of the other senses. You're so vulnerable, for one thing. Like, how the hell can anybody get run over by a car? You think, surely they must've heard it coming from miles away. And then you remember, sort of. No, that's a lie,' Pete said abruptly. ‘The nearest you ever get is sort of like history, or archaeology even. You know more or less what happened in the past, but you can't begin to imagine what it must actually have been like.'

Poetry, almost. Duncan raised his eyebrows. This took slightly more effort than it used to do; his eyebrows, like his hair, were growing at a remarkable rate, and shaving was getting to be such hard work every morning that he was seriously considering growing a beard.

‘I've got that to look forward to, then,' he said. ‘I take it you've got no regrets.'

He'd said the wrong thing, yet again. On the other hand, it wasn't so scary saying the wrong thing to Pete, without the others there. Transgressions committed in front of the whole pack were met with about half a second of total, frozen silence, and then the subject was changed and it was as though it had never happened; Micky might laugh, if it wasn't too dreadful an error, but otherwise the protocol was unvarying. Pete on his own might look shocked or disgusted, but there wasn't the same desperate falling-overboard-in-the-North-Atlantic-in-winter drop in temperature that'd probably kill you if it lasted for more than a second and a half.

‘Regrets?' Pete said, without much expression. ‘I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention. Why? You wishing you hadn't joined?'

‘Me? God, no.' Duncan meant it, too. But that wasn't the same thing as having no regrets. ‘I can honestly say I've never been happier in all my life. I mean, it's perfect, isn't it? Not just the superpowers,' he added, ‘the—Oh, I don't know. It's sort of the Three Musketeers thing, all for one and that stuff. Being part of the group again. Knowing you belong.'

(Knowing your place? Well, if you put it like that.)

‘Quite,' Pete said. ‘It's very important, belonging. Though a certain amount depends on who you belong to.' He lifted his head and sniffed. ‘They're coming,' he said. ‘Pub time. You realise I haven't had a single cold since I got bitten? Marvellous. Not a single snuffle. Worth it just for that, if you ask me.'

 

Apart from the Allshapes estate accounts, the work part of Duncan's working day was generally short and sweet. The Ferris Gang didn't tend to talk about work much. Their attitude seemed to be that it was a bit like ironing: it had to be done and you were better for it, but it did so cut into your free time. Nevertheless, Luke had taken the trouble to reassure him that he was performing up to expectations;
doing all right
were the words he used, but from Luke that was high praise, practically gibbering with enthusiasm.

Two new estates to start off when he got back from the pub. He tore into them, got the initial letters written, drew up the schedules of assets, all that. The clock said two-thirty. He sighed happily and looked out of the window.

Nothing to do.

There was always Bowden Allshapes. Duncan frowned. He didn't like to admit it to himself, but his repeated failures with those bloody accounts were starting to prey on his mind. He'd even mentioned it to Luke, who looked at him oddly and asked if the punters were getting difficult. No, he'd replied; well, then, Luke said, and that had been the end of the discussion. Even so; he'd had the feeling that Luke had been a bit taken aback, as though Duncan had used a word he hadn't understood.
There's no such word as can't
; which of his annoying female relatives used to say that? He couldn't remember offhand, because his family belonged to the unsatisfactory part of his life, which was now over. He couldn't quite see Luke Ferris as an aunt, even if he sounded like one sometimes.

Nothing to do.

When they had nothing to do, the rest of the Ferris Gang slept. They had little beds, like the one in Duncan's office. They curled up in them (not forgetting to turn round three times first) and went to sleep until it was time for their next meeting. It was, Duncan had to admit, supremely logical, like all the things animals do: conservation of energy, which to animals is as valuable as money is to humans. Unnecessary exertion to a werewolf would be like setting fire to a wad of banknotes. He'd tried nodding off like they did himself. Sometimes it worked, though he slept in his chair, slumped forward over his desk with his head pillowed on his forearms. It wasn't something he could do at will, however; he couldn't use sleep as a way of fast-forwarding through the boring bits of the day, as they could. He hadn't got the knack of switching off his brain. He could close his eyes and practise deep, even breathing, but his thoughts carried on spinning round, like the tumblers of a fruit machine. Simple, really. They could sleep because they had no cares or troubles. He—