Barking (23 page)

‘She flew in through the bathroom window.'

Luke didn't seem to find anything worthy of comment in that. ‘She tried to recruit you to their side. Didn't work, of course. She gave you some sort of explanation, then went away. All right so far?'

Duncan dipped his head slightly in acknowledgement. ‘Is that what Micky meant yesterday, when he said I shouldn't get mixed up with those people? He knew she's a—'

Luke laughed. ‘She works for Crosswoods, right? That's all we needed to know.' He leaned forward a little. ‘It's my fault, I suppose. Me and the rest of us, we've been through this whole thing together, from the start. We found all the stuff out as we went along - there wasn't any need for briefings and putting anybody in the picture. Now you've joined us, not having a clue about any of this. I guess I should've taken the trouble to fill you in.'

Pause. If Luke was expecting him to say something, Duncan didn't know what it was. ‘Maybe it would've been nice,' he said.

‘Well, there you go,' Luke said briskly. ‘Listen, there's something you need to understand, about their lot and our lot. We don't get on. I'm not saying we're the good guys and they're the baddies, it really isn't like that. It's more a case of cats and dogs. Bats and dogs would be more appropriate, but anyhow: it's a feud, basically. I imagine that at some point, a long time ago, one of us pissed off one of them, or vice versa, God only knows what about. Ever since, there's been bad blood, if you see what I mean. We don't like them, they don't like us. It's not exactly open war - I mean, we don't go looking for a fight, nor do they, mostly - but if the opportunity comes along, naturally we do what we can to screw them over, so long as it doesn't lead to serious escalation.' He sighed. ‘It's stupid, really. It'd be much better if we could all just get along peacefully. I mean, all that hatred and intolerance stuff, it's so
human
, we should be above that kind of thing. On the other hand,' he added, with a trace of a grin, ‘when we do manage to get one over on them, it's sort of fun.'

‘Fun,' Duncan repeated.

‘Fun,' Luke said firmly, in an and-that's-an-order kind of a voice. ‘Relieves the boredom a bit, which is always welcome. Probably why we do it. Anyway, that's beside the point. What you need to remember is, Romeo and Juliet and star-crossed lovers are all very well for teenagers, but we're grown-ups now; so if you're still carrying a torch, I suggest you switch it off and bury it somewhere. All right?'

Not a good time to argue the toss with the alpha. ‘Sure,' Duncan said. ‘It was all over a long time ago.'

‘Really. Which explains why you go off the rails as soon as she whistles for you.' He twitched his nose. ‘You realise you were set up.'

Duncan looked up sharply. ‘I don't—'

‘Use your intelligence. Come on, you're one of us now. Or maybe you're too close to it to see, I suppose that'd be understandable. All right, I'll spell it out.' Luke took another biscuit and ate it before continuing. ‘There you are at Craven Ettins, and in the ordinary course of business you get a call from some tart at Crosswoods. In conversation, you ask after your ex. Fair enough: you don't know their dark secret. They don't want humans taking an interest in them, also understandable. It's obvious she left you because she was about to be recruited; even you can see that, I'm sure.'

‘She said that wasn't the reason.'

‘I bet she did. The sad fact is, though, that sometimes people don't tell the truth. Even lawyers.' Luke grinned. ‘So,' he went on, ‘they start figuring that if you've got it into your head that you wouldn't mind giving it another go, and you start hanging round her, calling her, all that - needless to say, her bosses wouldn't be happy. Fine; they tell you to piss off, they get her to tell you, in no uncertain terms. Problem solved. But then they find out you've left Craven's and joined us. And they know what we are, goes without saying.'

‘Oh.'

Luke smiled. ‘It's a small community, we all know each other. So, it's suddenly a different ball game. Now they do things a bit different, their lot. We recruit straight away - well, you know that, Day One and we go straight for the jugular, no messing about, it's the canine way. Their lot like to take things a bit more slowly. You start off on probation: they let you in on the secret, and then you've got to prove you're worthy for a week or so before they actually sink the teeth in. I'm assuming that Crosswoods assumed that we do something similar; in which case, there'd be a fair chance that we wouldn't have bitten you yet. Hence their cunning plan: to piss us off by snatching you from under our noses, so to speak. Get you before we can, turn you into one of them. I don't know if they just wanted to be annoying or whether they had something sneakier in mind - have you as some kind of undercover agent or whatever. It's a bit technical, but basically, they don't have the invulnerability thing that we do. It's swings and roundabouts, because they're completely immortal unless they get the old two-by-four through the heart or they go out in the sunlight without the special make-up. Anyway: if they'd recruited you first, I could still have bitten you without needing a trip to the dentist afterwards, but it wouldn't have had any effect. Result: we'd have thought you were one of us, but you'd really have been one of them. Just a theory,' Luke added, ‘and it's entirely possible they weren't planning anything so devious. But it's what I'd have done in their shoes, if I'd thought of it. But there're other explanations. Like I said, it could just be spite, or maybe the girl's still fond of you and—' He shrugged. ‘No matter. The phone call and the cry for help were just bait, of course. Probably she never went missing at all, that was just to snag your attention. Anyhow.' Luke stood up, stretched his legs and appropriated the last Viennese finger. ‘Now you know the score, and the bottom line is, stay well clear. We may decide that honour calls for reprisals at some stage - I haven't made my mind up yet - but as and when we do them over, it's got to be a pack decision and organised entirely by me. It's too complicated an issue for lone wolves. All right?'

Even if he'd had the courage, Duncan wasn't sure he'd have been physically capable of displaying dissent. A voice that, by a process of elimination, had to have come from him said, ‘Understood.' And that, apparently, was that.

‘Fine. Glad we've cleared that up, and like I said, maybe I should've put you in the picture right from the off. Anyway: serious talk now over, the rest of the day's your own. Oh.' Luke stopped, and frowned. ‘Nearly forgot. There's a punter to see you. I parked her in the big interview room, you'd better get down there sharpish before she starts climbing the walls. Something to do with that funny estate of yours, the one where the accounts won't balance.' Grin. ‘In your shoes I'd be inclined to anticipate a bollocking, unless you've got the clients really well trained.'

Shit, Duncan mused, as he darted back to his office for the files. He really wasn't in the mood for anything to do with Bowden Allshapes deceased right then. Volcanoes had been erupting right across his world lately, heaving up new mountains and submerging the familiar, old continents under the sea, and all the maps he'd carefully drawn of his life over the years were now just so much waste paper. There were serious issues to be addressed urgently, matters of identity, self-image and quite possibly true love. He simply didn't have the time or the energy to be bothered with silly old
work
.

‘Sorry you've been kept waiting, I was in a—' Duncan's words had preceded him into the room. But as soon as he saw the person sitting opposite the door, on the client's side of the table, something seemed to happen to his mouth, or possibly his brain. He stood and gawped for a good five seconds.

‘Hi,' she said. ‘I'm Felicity Allshapes. Are you Duncan Hughes?'

He nodded.

‘Great to meet you at last. I love being able to put a face to a name.'

The Australian accent helped, a bit. Australia is a wonderful country, just coming into its glorious prime as a nation, but its inhabitants, when they speak, do tend to sound rather as though they're chewing toffee. They don't immediately put you in mind of goddesses or angels. To a certain extent, this helped break the spell. Duncan was just about able to speak.

‘Um,' he said.

‘Sorry to barge in like this,' she went on, ‘I know how really busy you are, and it's so kind of you to spare me a few minutes. But I had to come to London on business at literally an hour's notice, and I thought that while I was here—'

‘Fine,' Duncan croaked. ‘No problem.'

Felicity Allshapes smiled. Of course, you can't analyse smiles. You can't measure them with micrometers and Vernier callipers and say, if the left upper corner of the top lip had been twelve-thousandths of an inch lower down, it'd have been completely different, no big deal at all.

‘That's so nice of you, I really appreciate it. And we're all so grateful to you for agreeing to carry on acting for us, what with you changing jobs and all. You've done so well for us already, it's such a comfort knowing you're here looking after us.'

Something's wrong, Duncan thought. ‘Oh, it's all part of the service,' he said vaguely, and managed to load himself into a chair without falling over. ‘What did you want to see me about?'

‘Well.' She bit her lip, and Duncan had to try very hard not to think about pearls on a bed of rose petals. ‘I've got to say, we're all really sorry about this and we do hope it's not going to mess everything up, not after all the hard work you've put in already. The thing is, there's some more assets of the estate we've only just found out about: stocks and shares, building land, a small block of flats in Canberra, stuff like that.' Her face clouded up, and for a split second Duncan wanted to burst into tears. ‘Is that bad? I mean, is it going to make all sorts of problems for you?'

While she was saying that, Duncan was setting himself a test. Look away, he ordered himself, and see if you can tell me what colour her hair is. He looked away. He couldn't.

‘Well yes, actually.' It was a sort of deep chestnut brown. His favourite hair colour. ‘You see, it's the duty of the executors to make a full declaration of the assets when applying for probate, so the Revenue can calculate the amount of tax payable—' Luckily, the speech came out automatically, no thought required. He couldn't be bothered to listen to himself making it. Instead, he tried the test again, this time with the colour of her eyes. They were green (he'd always had a thing about green eyes) but he had to look.

Query: had the hair been chestnut and the eyes green when she came into the room? Would they be those colours if there wasn't anybody there to see them?

‘Oh.' He must've come to the end of the speech, because she was gazing at him, all guilty and sad. ‘So what you're saying is, you're pretty much going to have to start all over again.'

Duncan nodded. ‘Not quite as bad as that, but we'll have to submit a corrective account, and it's going to have a knock-on effect because of reassessing all the other property, not to mention the income-tax implications. There may also be penalty charges from the Revenue, if they don't believe it was an honest oversight. And then there's the problem of some of the new assets being located overseas—'

Now he knew what it was, the thing that was so wrong. He wondered how he could've been so stupid. ‘Excuse me,' he said, cutting the foreign-domicile speech off in mid-flow, and made a show of looking at his watch. Then he frowned, took it off his wrist and shook it before dropping it in his pocket.

‘Very sorry about all this,' he said. ‘Can you possibly tell me the time? My stupid watch has stopped, and I've got these clients coming in at ten-fifteen.'

‘Oh dear,' Felicity said, ‘it's nearly that now.' He knew that, of course. ‘ Look, would it be all right if I came back to see you at half past nine tomorrow morning? I really would like to get this wretched mess sorted out, otherwise I'll be worrying myself to a frazzle about it.'

Duncan smiled warmly. ‘That'll be fine,' he said. ‘If you could bring the rest of the papers with you, that'd be a great help.'

As soon as he'd shooed her off the premises, Duncan scuttled back to his office, dropped into his chair like a dead weight, and lay back with his eyes shut for five uninterrupted minutes. Then, with a long sigh, he opened the file and pulled out the great fat bundle of correspondence.

He hadn't been able to smell her. That, of course, was what he'd noticed, but hadn't realised he'd noticed until the penny finally dropped right on top of his breeze-block-thick head. On the other hand, he'd taken a good long look at her reflection in the shiny stainless-steel back of his watch, so she wasn't one of
them
(shit;
he
was doing it now). In which case, what the hell was she? And why was she suddenly at risk of worrying herself to a frazzle over a transaction she'd cheerfully allowed to go to sleep for well over a year?

Most of all, though: why
now
?

There was some work to be done: post to be answered, the missing information he needed to finish off a couple of complex inheritance-tax returns, a few grossing-up calculations, a handful of apportionments of income . . . He tore through them like a wild boar in brushwood, not stopping to check his results (he knew they were perfect), devouring them like a starving man eating. When he'd finished he felt a great pang of regret, because now there was nothing to stop him turning his mind to the important, impenetrably bewildering shit that had showered down on him over the last forty-eight hours. Trying to remember how Luke had done it, he stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled. The first two attempts sounded like a live duck in a blender. The fourth was exactly right, and a moment later the little bald man appeared with a tray. Duncan nodded, not looking up, and reached for the sugar bowl, which he emptied into the cup until it started to slop over.