Barking (2 page)

‘Mr Wood—'

‘We've decided,' said Mr Woodcock. ‘She's having the shoes, and I'm keeping the costume jewellery. Thought you ought to know, so everything's above board.'

Wait for it, Duncan told himself.

‘But it's still not right.' The words gushed out of Mr Woodcock like poison from an abscess. ‘She distinctly told me, the last time at the nursing home, I was to have everything in the big suitcase; and what I'm saying is, why would she think I'd want a load of old shoes and plastic bloody beads? It could only be because she didn't want Dolly to have any of it, so—'

‘Mr Wood—'

‘And I've only agreed because the worry is killing my wife, she's lost four pounds in weight and the physio says her wrist is all just nerves, so I just can't go on living like that, and if Dolly's set her heart on hounding an innocent woman to her grave over a few pairs of old shoes that're only fit for the skip anyhow, well, what can you do with someone like that? So anyway, I thought I'd better just check with you, make sure it's all legal and proper.'

‘Absolutely, Mr Woodcock. The will just says—'

‘Oh.' Disappointment. ‘So there's nothing in the will says Dolly can't have the shoes.'

One good thing about the phone: the man at the other end can't see the faces you pull. ‘Really it's a matter of being practical, Mr Woodcock. I suppose you could argue, strictly speaking—'

‘Yes?'

Duncan had completely forgotten what he'd been going to say. Probably just as well. ‘That's fine, Mr Woodcock,' he snapped politely. ‘Glad to hear that's all sorted out. Now we can crack on with selling the house and the stocks portfolio and the investment properties in Surrey, and it should all be wrapped up by June. The way the market's shaping, it should be a good—'

‘Yes, right. But about the shoes—'

That, Duncan thought as he put the phone down some time later, was the really weird, scary thing about the death biz. Greed - naked, vicious, more than happy to tear out its own sister's throat rather than cede her a few clapped-out old shoes with the heels trodden down; but the money, the seriously big money, didn't seem to interest him. So he stood to cop for over a million and a half quid. So what? Dolly was getting the shoes. The fact that, with the money he'd flushed down the bog through whining to his hourly-paid lawyer about the injustice of it all, Mr Woodcock could've bought enough shoes to satisfy the wildest dreams of Imelda Marcos was apparently neither here nor there.

People, Duncan thought.

Work helped calm his jangled sensibilities: standard letters to banks, building societies, stockbrokers, National Savings, estate agents, the Probate Registry, the Revenue. As he droned them into the dictating machine, he spared a thought of deep pity for his secretary, who had to put up with his voice reverberating through her headphones all day long.
Kindly forward us a note of the closing balance at your earliest convenience, together with the sum total of deposit interest accrued at date of death
. What a thing to whisper in the ear of a sensitive young girl, or even Tricia (sensitive as a shock absorber, delicate as the Atlas Mountains, quick as a glacier, his girl Friday). Did his numbing bleat echo through her nightmares, a voice in her head that only she could hear, like God and Joan of Arc? The possibility twisted in his conscience like an arrowhead.

Duncan tended to think of his progress through the working day in terms of Frodo's journey through Mordor; in which case, his eleven-thirty meeting with Jenny Sidmouth was Shelob's lair. Not that Ms Sidmouth looked particularly like a giant spider. She was long and thin, like a skewer: sharpest around the eyes, which could pierce any armour as effectively as the English arrows at Agincourt. Her dark hair was precisely straight (she must have it engineered, rather than cut) and her slender, bony fingers tapered eventually down to close-bitten nails.

As always, she let him stand in the doorway for seven seconds before acknowledging his presence; then she laid down her sheaf of computer printouts, and smiled right through him.

‘Not so bad this month,' she said. ‘Up seven-point-six-three on this time last year.' But her eyes were narrowing, like the diaphragm of a laser lens. ‘That said, we did decide on a target increase of ten-point-seven, which leaves you three-point-o-seven per cent short. Perhaps you'd like to explain that.'

Duncan shrugged. ‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘People just aren't dying fast enough, I guess.'

You could get away with saying something like that to Jenny Sidmouth, if only because she regarded anything you said to her with equal contempt. Humour, irony or rank insubordination - she swept over them all like flood water. ‘Let's see,' she went on. ‘Billable hours are up, that's encouraging, but charges rendered are down, and there are a number of discrepancies I'd just like to run though with you.' Instinctively, Duncan groped for the arms of the chair - something to hold on to as the wave crashed down on him - but of course there weren't any. ‘For example, the Hohenstaufen file. On a time-plus-value basis, you should have charged twenty-seven thousand, but you only billed nineteen. Why was that?'

Because—

(Because the money-grubbing bastards would've screamed the place down if I'd charged them that much; which was why I did most of the work at home, on my own time, so I wouldn't have to bill them for it. But of course I daren't tell you that—)

‘Goodwill,' he said. ‘Sort of a loss-leader. Like Captain Scott,' he added, mostly because he still could.

‘Strictly speaking,' (did she know any other way?) ‘you should have cleared that with me first. And then there's the Martinez file. You haven't rendered an interim bill for three months. Standard procedure for long-running cases is a bill every six weeks. Can you perhaps—?'

‘Well, yes,' Duncan said, and for some reason he thought of the Polish cavalry in World War Two charging the German tanks with lances. ‘I sort of used my discretion there a bit. It's sort of an unusual case, really.'

Jenny Sidmouth nodded. ‘Very unusual. It's the only case in my department where an interim bill hasn't been sent out for three months, which makes it actually unique. Perhaps you'd like to do something about it. By Friday.'

No need to say
yes
or
of course
or
I'll see to it immediately;
just as there's no need for the grass to acknowledge the edge of the scythe. Ms Sidmouth rolled on over him, her voice sandpaper, her eyes drills: Parsons, Barlotti, Singh, Bowden Allshapes, the Atkinson Will Trust - all the sleepers, cupboard-skeletons and too-difficults that lurked in the places in his filing cabinet where he was too scared or too ashamed to go. It was, Duncan decided, a bit like the Last Judgement would be, if Margaret Thatcher was filling in for God. With an effort he tuned out the voice and did a few quick calculations. A three-point-whatever shortfall wasn't bad enough for the sack, so the only possible way for the ordeal to end was The Speech. And, sure enough—

‘Duncan,' she said, tightening the apertures of her eyes down to pinpricks, ‘let's make no bones about this.'

Thought so. And, of course, he'd heard The Speech before. Parts of it he could recite along with her. Somehow, though, knowing exactly what was coming didn't make it any easier to handle. If anything, the reverse. Like injections: you know it doesn't really hurt, far less actual pain than a paper-cut or stubbing your toe. But as you sit there in the waiting room, your knees can't help shaking and the knot in your stomach slowly gets tighter than a schoolboy's tie; and then when the buzzer goes and it's your turn—

‘Actually—'

He'd said it before he'd realised he was speaking. Pure reflex: he didn't have anything to say. A bit like raising your arm to shield your face when a fifteen-storey building's about to fall on top of you.

‘Yes?'

‘No, sorry. You first.'

The look on Ms Sidmouth's face quickly reduced Duncan from three dimensions to two. ‘As I was saying,' she said, ‘in the final analysis, it all comes down to attitude. In this business, Duncan, we're all predators.' Her nostrils twitched slightly, as if scenting the prey. ‘There's no room for herbivores in the legal profession. You can't just mumble along, chewing the cud. If you want to eat, you've got to hunt and kill. We're not just a team, you know, Duncan, we're a
pack
; and a pack runs at the pace of the fastest dog. So it's no good waiting for work to come to you. You've got to go out there into the long grass and flush it out; and when you've got hold of its neck, you've got to
bite
. Letting clients off the hook just because you're sorry for them isn't predator thinking, Duncan. That's your dinner you're letting get away from you. If it moves, you go after it; that's the rule you've got to learn to live by. Remember: we're here to get paid, so if you've done the work, you've got to charge, and charge, and keep on charging—'

‘Like the Light Brigade.'

As already noted, using humour against Jenny Sidmouth was pointless, like trying to stab a dragon with a rose.
‘Exactly
like the Light Brigade, Duncan, yes. No matter what the enemy throws at you, no matter how tough it gets along the way, you've got to keep going until you get there. It's survival of the fittest, it's natural selection, it's the thrill of the chase and the law of the jungle . . .'

‘Ah,' Duncan said sagely. ‘Only I didn't do jungle law at college. Timetabling screw-up: you could do either jungle law or tax and probate, and I thought—'

‘Attitude.' She stared through him, as though he was one of those transparent tropical fish and she was a cormorant. ‘That's what it comes down to. In this business, you're either a wolf or a sheep; and I want to you ask yourself, really deep down: which one are you?'

Baa, Duncan thought. ‘I see,' he said. ‘Now you've explained it to me, I think I understand.'

‘Excellent.' A smile you could've shattered into chunks and stuck in gin and tonic. ‘I'm so glad.' Jenny Sidmouth looked past him, towards the door. ‘I'll be keeping an eye on your printouts from now on, Duncan. I'm sure you won't let me down. Thanks so much for your time.'

The law of the jungle, he thought as he wandered slowly back to his office; yes, well. It was all very well telling himself it was high time he got away from this bunch of Neanderthals and found himself a proper job, but it wasn't as easy as that. He'd been trying for - what, six months? During that time, the agency had set him up with half a dozen blind dates. He'd built his hopes up, trotted along to the interviews, sat down in the chair with his confident, capable look smeared all over his face; and guess what? Each time, the eyes that had stared back at him across the interview desk were exactly the same as the eyes he was trying to get away from: the same greedy, vicious glow - predators, Jenny Sidmouth had said, and for once he reckoned she was spot on. He hadn't needed to listen to the words they said. The eyes told him everything he needed to know. It didn't matter what sort of face they were lurking in - round and chubby, thin and pointy, smooth or hairy. They were always the same eyes, identical to the ones that glowered at him here, and they gave him the creeps.

But (Duncan reminded himself as he sat down and reached for the drift of yellow Post-It notes that had settled round his phone while he'd been away from his desk) it's all very well fantasising about chucking in the legal profession for good: going straight, retraining, carving out a new and meaningful life for himself as a restaurant critic or a gentleman thatcher. The simple fact was, he was a competent lawyer and no bloody good at anything else. True, he had a crummy job, but not so crummy that shelf-stacking or burger-flipping would be better. Besides, he had a mortgage and a credit card to think of.

Even so. Predators. Well.

One good thing about being a tax lawyer. When you're sunk in a bottomless slough of depression and self-loathing, you can always phone the Revenue and reassure yourself that you're not the greenest, slimiest breed of algae floating on the surface of the gene pool - not by a long way. He returned a call from Our Ref X/187334/PB/7 at the Capital Taxes Office, and it made him feel a lot better.

Even so . . . It wouldn't be all that much to show for a life (Duncan mused, as he pencilled in figures in a draft Form IHT200) if all they could find to inscribe on your tombstone was
At least he wasn't a taxman
. No, there had to be something better than this, somewhere over the rainbow; not a daydream or a TV lifestyle make-over, but a better, less painful way of being a moderately competent lawyer for eight hours a day. Fix that, and the other stuff - the dustbin bag full of old broken junk he was pleased to call his personal life - would sort itself out without any conscious effort on his part. Or if it didn't, he wasn't all that bothered, just so long as he could find a way of making work just a tiny bit less shitty. Possible, surely. Hardly rocket science, but think of how it'd improve his quality of life. One little change was all it'd take. One small step for a lemming; a giant leap for lemmingkind.

At his elbow the phone burbled. One good thing about being a lawyer: the phone rings so often, you never have a chance to concentrate long enough to get really depressed.

He didn't recognise the name of the firm that apparently wanted to talk to him: Ferris and something. ‘Yes, all right,' he grunted, and there was a click.

‘Dunc?'

Duncan Hughes was six foot two in his socks and no bean-pole; there had only ever been one person big and fast enough to call him Dunc twice. But he blinked three times and stared at the receiver as if it had just kissed his ear; because he hadn't heard from that one person for fifteen years—