Barking (7 page)

Duncan sighed; Luke frowned. ‘Go on,' Luke said.

‘That's about it, really. We met, we fell in love - well, I know I did, and she said she did too.'

‘Quietly?'

‘And when we both finished law school and qualified,' Duncan continued sourly, ‘we got married. She'd got this job at Crosswoods lined up, I'd already got a place at Craven Ettins. We bought a flat in Battersea - it was just before it got too expensive - and everything seemed more or less OK. And then, one day out of the blue—' He snapped his fingers. ‘And that's all there is to it,' he added sadly. ‘My life down the toilet, basically.'

‘Ah well.' Luke shrugged again. ‘Spilled milk, plenty more fish, all that crap. I don't really see, though, what any of that's got to do with you quitting your job and coming in with us.'

‘You raised the subject,' Duncan snapped back.

‘Yes,' Luke said. ‘And obviously it's relevant. It's left you with a raw, bleeding hole where your self-esteem used to be, and that explains why you can't be bothered to try doing something about your wretched, pointless existence. Fair enough; I can see exactly where you're coming from. What I'm having trouble with is your reluctance to leave the barren desert island and let yourself get rescued by the passing ship. Can't see the problem myself. Perhaps you'd care to explain.'

It had never been what Luke Ferris said; always the way he said it. How else could anyone explain why instructions like
you take this bowl of cold custard and balance it on top of the Head's office door while I nip back and set off the fire alarm
had, at the time, seemed not only wise and sensible but the only possible course of action in the circumstances? Later on, in the still calm of triple detention, it was possible to unpick the strands of his logic and trace the fatal flaws. But when Luke was giving you your orders, it was as though the Oxford University Press had recalled all the earlier editions of the Dictionary and replaced them with one containing only the single word
Yes
.

‘I need time to think about it,' Duncan repeated.

And Luke shrugged again. ‘Sure,' he said. ‘You'd be an idiot to take a big decision like this without weighing up all the pros and cons, considering the implications, really thinking hard about what you want to do with your life.' He smiled. ‘You can have as long as it takes me to get in another round. Then you can toddle back to Craven Ettins and clear your desk.'

In spite of his mental turmoil, Duncan couldn't let that pass. ‘Does alcohol have any effect on you at all?' he asked.

Luke smiled. ‘Long story. Be back soon.'

There was, Duncan decided, only one thing he could sensibly do. He waited until Luke reached the bar and turned his back on him; then he jumped up and scuttled out of the pub as fast as he could go.

Reception glared at him as he loped through the front office, looking nervously over his shoulder. ‘There you are,' she said. ‘You've had ever so many calls in the last ten minutes. Ferris and Loop—'

He leaned on the desk, both hands planted, fingers spread, so that Reception leaned back nervously. ‘If Mr Ferris rings,' he said loudly and clearly, ‘tell him I died. Got run over by a bus at the corner of Barditch Alley. Private funeral, no flowers. You got that?'

‘Yes, but—'

‘Bus. Brakes squealing. Squelch. Flat as a pool table. Come on, picture it in your mind, it'll help you sound convincing.'

Duncan couldn't stop himself sprinting up the stairs, hardly stopping to draw breath until he was back in his office with the door shut. He was tempted to drag the filing cabinet over to block the doorway with, but he guessed the partners might not approve. To hell with Luke Ferris and his rotten gang, he said to himself. I've been there once, I'm not going back. Ever.

All that afternoon he felt as though his chair was stuffed with six-inch nails, and every time the phone rang he cringed. But apparently he'd shaken them off, at least for now. As four o'clock dragged by (it was one of those days when the Chariot of the Sun gets a flat tyre, and its fiery Charioteer has to get out and push it all the way to the portals of the sunset) he felt brave enough to suggest to himself that maybe, over the last fifteen years, Luke Ferris had learned how to take a hint. Curiously, in spite of the painfully slow movement of the clock hands, it turned out to be a reasonably good afternoon. No accountants rang in to point out his mistakes; no clients turned up unexpectedly to see him; no partners sent for him. He sat with his feet propped up on the opened bottom drawer of his desk, slowly enunciating a draft Deed of Trust into his dictating machine. Today, for a change, he was Richard Burton, with occasional intervals of Alec Guinness when the context called for it; and when he'd finished that he did Ian McKellen for the first sixteen clauses of a nil rate band discretionary will trust. Of course, when he hit the rewind and played any of it back, it sounded just like a duck quacking in an echo chamber.

Quarter past five, and it occurred to him that maybe Luke and the gang might be waiting for him outside the building, ready to pounce as soon as he set shoe-sole to pavement. He fretted over that one for five minutes or so until the answer came to him: work late. After all, he had nothing special lined up for the evening (nothing special? Nothing at all: frozen pizza, TV, bed) and in the top drawer of his filing cabinet lurked the Allshapes estate accounts, which he'd been putting off revisiting for weeks. Two birds, one stone; he'd get that particular albatross off his neck, and by the time he'd finished, Ferris and the lads would've long since given up and gone away.

Fine, he thought. Win/win scenario.

The Allshapes file. Duncan took it out and looked at it for three minutes before opening it. All solicitors know that certain files have curses on them: it's a simple fact, something they teach you on day two at law school. Sometimes the curse is relatively trivial: you buy the wrong house or, halfway through the case, you suddenly realise you're supposed to be acting for the defendant, not the plaintiff. Other files bear the weight of darker spells: inconvenient misprints (remarkable, the effect of leaving out a little word like ‘not' in a contract or a lease); title deeds that only show up once every hundred years, like the enchanted village in
Brigadoon
; as often as not, the real curse is the client himself. In the case of Bowden Allshapes, deceased, the curse seemed trivial at first sight but, after nine months of trying to deal with the bugger, it had grown so huge that it blotted out the light.

Quite simply, there was something squiffy with the maths. Every now and again, when he felt brave or reckless or so demoralised he didn't care, he'd get an up-to-date printout of the client account ledger, stick a new battery in his calculator and try and get the bastard thing to balance. Take a sheet of A3, draw a freehand line down the middle. On the left hand side, list all money paid into the account. On the right, payments made and cash in hand. The proverbial piece of cake; except that, each time he spread the printout in front of him on the desk, it was—

And that's where the Allshapes file got a bit spooky; because it was demonstrably the same as the previous edition: you could put them side by side, tick off the new entries and match the remainder with the earlier version. Except that it was also, in some way he simply couldn't put his finger on, different. Something happened to all the numbers while Duncan's back was turned; maybe they sneakily converted themselves from base ten to base eight (though he'd tried compensating for that and it made no difference). The visible symptom of this silent alchemy was that, no matter how many times you added up the numbers - the same fucking numbers, every time - they always came to a different total. One day the difference could be thousands; another, it'd only be out by 46p (but then you added it up again, and the discrepancy would swell to twice his yearly salary). Not that he'd have cared a damn if only he could have got the two sides of his A3 sheet to balance. But they wouldn't; not ever.

Perhaps the weirdest thing about the Allshapes file was that the deceased's heirs (two nieces and a nephew in South Africa) didn't really seem to care that their uncle's estate had taken six years to wind up and wasn't settled yet. The revolting thing was worth two and a half million, give or take a few thousand, and they'd never had so much as a penny piece or a paper clip out of it. Instead, Duncan sent them interim bills, which they blithely approved by return of post; and Sarah, the younger niece, had taken to sending him cards at Christmas and, for some reason as yet obscure, the Chinese New Year. It was the saintly, unclientlike behaviour of people who should by rights have been his principal natural predators that made the file rather more than he could cope with.

He opened the file and checked the date on the latest printout; recent enough that nothing on it should have changed, apart from the deposit interest. With a newly sharpened pencil he went down the page, drawing a little sun next to all the receipts and a tiny crescent moon beside each payment out. The familiar crawling feeling at the nape of his neck; but he washed it out of his mind with the image of Ferris and the gang standing out in the street shivering in the cold. This time, he said to himself (and his lips curved in an unconscious smile), let's do this as slowly as possible.

Outside in the world, he knew, it was cold and dark by now; and say what you like about Messrs Craven Ettin, they weren't cheapskates when it came to light and heat. He had a radiator of his very own, and above his head the fluorescent tube burned brightly. His fingers on the calculator keys were as light and swift as a concert pianist's, and he was nearly at the bottom of the first column of figures when the door opened and his concentration shattered like a glass dropped on a stone floor.

‘Oh,' said Jenny Sidmouth, staring at him round the door frame.

He was so pleased that it wasn't Luke Ferris that he almost smiled to see her. ‘Hi,' he said.

‘You're still here.'

‘Yes.'

‘It's a quarter to six. You usually go at half-five.'

This time he did smile. Her accusation was well founded. Duncan never stayed late if he could possibly avoid it, and Jenny Sidmouth, in common with her partners, held the view that people who downed tools and walked out at five-thirty on the dot ought really to be rounded up and burned alive in wicker cages, as an example.

‘Thought I'd polish off these accounts tonight, while it's quiet,' Duncan replied cheerfully. ‘You know what it's like trying to concentrate with the phones ringing all the time.' He took a surreptitious breath, then added, ‘I always reckon the real working day doesn't start till five-thirty.'

She stared at him as though he'd just sprouted wings. ‘But you're always the first one out of the door—'

He nodded. ‘I take work home with me,' he said. ‘I find it's easier to pace yourself in a less formal environment.'

She narrowed her small, vicious eyes. ‘You take work home?'

‘Yes.'

‘What in? You haven't got a briefcase.'

If it hadn't been for the thought of Luke and the boys shivering in the frosty darkness below, that would probably have beaten him. Instead he shrugged. ‘Big pockets,' he said, and although it was obviously blatant drivel, the words came so freely and easily to him that they must have carried conviction, because Ms Sidmouth frowned and said, ‘Oh.'

‘That's all right, isn't it?' Duncan went on. ‘Of course, I never take important documents or stuff like that out of the office, just photocopies.' Just the right modulation of self-doubt, as if it was something that had been preying on his over-conscientious mind. He could see from her expression that he was doing well.

‘I suppose,' she said. ‘I mean, obviously we prefer it if you do your work here in the building, otherwise there's not much point having an office, is there? But,' she went on, ‘if you feel there're some things you can do more productively at home, on your own time—' Baffled, Duncan decided, like a terrier that can't quite reach the rat. ‘It's entirely up to you,' she said after a pause. ‘Just so long as the work gets done and the staff's happy, we don't mind in the least.'

That's the thing with lawyers and lies, Duncan thought. They lie so often and so fluently, it can only be because on some level they can make themselves believe what they're saying; as if they had the power to reshape the world with a few words. Ms Sidmouth was a very good lawyer, and when she said the words there was a tiny part of Duncan that couldn't help believing them, just for a fraction of a second; in which time, perhaps, a small, sealed universe in which they were true came suddenly into being, glowed for an instant intolerably bright, and then went out, like a shooting star.

‘Great,' Duncan said. ‘Oh, while I think of it, that Sudowski file you were asking about the other day. Should have it wrapped up this week, and then if it's OK I'd like to have a word with you about the bill. I was thinking, we can probably justify charging the full five per cent value element, but I'd be glad of your thoughts on that.'

For a moment, Jenny Sidmouth almost glowed at him. Then she left; and he thought, there must be some truth in it after all. Because, for a split second there, I really believed that there's an ice lolly's chance in hell of getting Sudowski sorted out this week; and when I said it, for another split second she believed me, even though she knows it's a complete fuck-up that'd have all the king's horses and all the king's men quitting the service and moving to the private sector. Between us, we made a little bit of magic that actually existed for a while. Like antimatter. Of course, it wouldn't get the mess sorted or bring him any closer to the point where he could ram in a gigantic bill and close the file: that was where the magic failed, he presumed, and why the whole world wasn't run on it.