You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps (38 page)

Colin took a step toward the door, then hesitated. ‘But surely—’ he said.

‘Mr Hollingshead, ‘ Mr Dao said firmly. ‘The difference between luck and a Land rover is that you don’t have to push it to make it work. Quite the opposite, in fact. Goodbye. It was a pleasure meeting you, and of course this is merely auf wiedersehen.’

‘What?’ Colin said, then, ‘Oh. Right.’ Already the door was starting to drift shut. Colin lunged at it, collided with it, and fell through it into blinding, burning light.

When he opened his eyes again, he was lying on the floor of the office he’d wandered into. Next to him was a door. It was padlocked, bolted, chained and barred, and in case there was still any room for doubt, there was a little notice on it saying No entry. Fine, Colin said to himself, no problem.

He was alive.

There had been times over the years when he’d wondered whether being alive was everything it’d been cracked up to be. There were a lot of things wrong with life - unpleasant people, domineering parents, boring, pointless jobs, maths homework, ravioli, girls who burst out laughing when he asked them out on dates, stuff in general - and at various low ebbs in his career he’d wondered whether life was a tooth better removed than endlessly drilled into and root-filled. To be, he’d asked himself, or not to be. Now, at least, he had an answer to that old chestnut. To be, every time, no contest, and bugger not-to-be for a game of soldiers.

Colin lifted his head a little and gave the door a long, hard look. He didn’t ever want to go back there again.

‘You,’ someone said; and a hand attached itself to his collar and hauled him to his feet.

He squirmed, and the hand let go. He staggered.

‘There you are. We’ve been looking everywhere for you.’

It took him a moment to place the short, bearded, bespectacled man who’d just let go of him: a Monopoly board, and vague memories of tea shops and pins and needles.

‘Benny Shumway,’ the man said. ‘We met in Funkhausen’s Loop. This is my office. What are you doing in it?’

Colin backed away, felt something obstruct him, looked over his shoulder and saw a desk. ‘I’m sorry, ‘ he said. ‘Only, I was looking for - ‘

‘Cassie Clay.’

‘Yes. And then I went through that door there.’

‘Oh.’ The short man frowned thoughtfully. ‘You did, did you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And now you’re back again.’

‘Yes. I met a Chinese bloke.’

The short man’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Mr Dao.’

‘That’s right. You know him?’

‘Oh yes. And he let you go?’

Colin winced. ‘I don’t think he wanted to, not at first,’ he said. ‘But then he changed his mind.’

‘He changed his mind?’

‘Yes. In fact, he pretty well chucked me out.’

‘Fine.’ The short man frowned, as though trying to crush a beetle to death with his eyebrows. ‘Sit down. I’d better give Connie a ring, let her know you’ve turned up at last. You do realise you’ve been here all night.’

‘No, I haven’t,’ Colin objected. ‘I was only in there a few —’

In his mind he heard Mr Dao’s voice: ‘Time has no meaning here.’ ‘Oh,’ he said.

The short man grinned. ‘Count yourself lucky,’ he said. ‘You could’ve been in there for thirty years, and it’d still have felt like five minutes. Or the other way round, of course. So that was all there was to it, then? He changed his mind and let you go?’

Colin nodded. ‘Bloody good job, too. Look, was that place really—?’

‘Yes. Now sit still and be quiet while I phone Connie.’

The short man picked up the phone and talked to it for a bit, then put it back. ‘She’s coming over,’ he said. ‘Wants a word with you. Me too, for that matter. I don’t know if you realise, but you’re causing a lot of problems for a lot of people.’

‘Am I? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.’

The short man shrugged. ‘I guess being you is a bit like being a landmine. You didn’t ask to be left lying around for people to walk all over, and when it starts going wrong you’re the first one who gets blown up. You have my sympathy; but that doesn’t mean you’re not a bloody nuisance. In case you’re wondering, I asked Connie to tell young Cassie that you’d been found, but not that you’re here. It might complicate matters, and we’ve got things we need to talk about.’ The short man sighed and sat down on the other side of the desk. ‘Right,’ he said, resting his elbows and steepling his fingers. ‘How much do you know already about this mess?’

Telling his complex and unfortunate life story to a complete stranger struck Colin as a dubious course of action; on the other hand, the short man seemed to know more about it than he did, and besides, he’d just come back from the dead. If there was any chance that this strange person with the beard and the glasses could actually explain any of it, he was prepared to take the risk.

‘Well,’ Colin said. ‘You were there, weren’t you, when —’ He stopped. The Monopoly incident. It occurred to him that, up till now, he’d been assuming it had all been a dream, like the Bobby Ewing farce in Dallas. But the short man knew all about it, so obviously it hadn’t been.

‘Funkhausen’s Loop, yes. So you know about the time-crossed lovers thing. What about the contract with the Bad People? You know that it’s you that’s for the high jump, not your Dad.’

Colin nodded. ‘I had sort of gathered,’ he said.

‘And you know that yesterday, someone spiked your tea with love potion to make you fall in love with young Cassie.’

‘That too,’ Colin said, with a faint, humourless grin.

The short man sighed. ‘Then you’re pretty much up to speed,’ he said. ‘And now you’ve been through that door there, you’ve met Jackie Dao and he let you go. You know, that’s rather interesting. In fact — Oh, bloody hell, what is it now?’

The phone on the desk was burbling. The short man picked it up, listened, then started up the beetle-squashing routine again. ‘No,’ he said. ‘She’s not here, but don’t bother ringing around any more, I’ll come and deal with him. Yes, fine. Bye.’

He put the phone down and leaned back in his chair. ‘You wouldn’t happen to know our new receptionist, would you?’ he said.

Colin nodded. ‘She’s my one true love,’ he said. ‘Or at least,’ he added with a scowl, ‘she was, until someone put that stuff in my tea.’

‘I see.’ The short man was staring into space; then he seemed to snap out of it. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you may be interested to hear, your old man’s just turned up at the front office, and he wants to see young Cassie. I don’t think that’d be a good idea right now, and I feel like a word with him myself. You want to see him?’

‘No.’

‘Didn’t think you would, somehow. All right, you push off. Go sit in one of the empty offices or something. I’ll get Connie to come and find you when the coast is clear. I’m going down to have a chat with your Dad.’ Benny stood up, then stopped. ‘I had a look in the closed-file index,’ he said. ‘Turns out that your Dad’s company has been a client of ours for a hundred and eighty-odd years. You wouldn’t happen to know offhand exactly what it is that we’ve been doing for you all that time, would you?’

‘Not a clue.’ Unlike the short man, Colin didn’t have the eyebrows for beetle extermination, but he could probably have managed a small earwig. ‘The first I heard about this firm was when Dad was negotiating the contract. And he made it sound like he’d only just found out about you.’

‘Mphm. Well,’ the short man said, ‘it may pain you to learn this, but your Dad’s a bit of a fibber. I hope it won’t scar you for life, me telling you that.’

Colin smiled thinly. ‘I think it’s rather nice to have a life to be scarred for, actually. Do you think there’s any chance that I might be allowed to keep it?’

The short man breathed in deeply. He had the air of someone who’s just agreed to take on another tiresome chore he could well do without – organising the Christmas party, being secretary of the Esperanto Club, looking after someone’s dog while they’re abroad for a fortnight. He gave the impression that he didn’t exactly welcome that sort of thing, but he was used to it.

‘No promises,’ he said, ‘but I’ll see what I can do.’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

It should only have taken Benny Shumway three minutes to get from his office to the small interview room, even if it happened to be a Wednesday, when the boardroom was in the habit of rotating through ninety degrees, thereby blocking the corridor and making it necessary to take the long way round, through the laser-printer room and down the back stairs. As it was, Colin’s Dad had been waiting for a quarter of an hour when the interview-room door opened and Benny strolled in. He was holding a dog-eared manila envelope with a long number written on it.

‘Sorry to keep you hanging about,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I got held up on the way here - we’ve got the auditors in and they wanted some old files. Also,’ he added with a frown, ‘a set of encyclopaedias and a dartboard. My name’s Benny Shumway, by the way, and you must be Colin Hollingshead.’

‘That’s me,’ Hollingshead senior grunted. ‘Where’s the Clay woman, then?’

‘Oh, she’s a bit tied up at the moment,’ Benny said, sitting down and tossing the envelope onto the desk, ‘so I thought I’d drop by and keep you entertained till she’s available. No charge,’ he added, ‘just a free service we offer to all our old and valued clients.’

Hollingshead senior scowled at him. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind waiting till she’s ready to see me.’

Benny waved a hand. ‘It’s no bother,’ he said. ‘It so happens there’s a couple of things I wanted to ask you, saves me the cost of a phone call. What’s in the bag, by the way?’

On the floor beside Hollingshead senior was a plastic Tesco’s bag; he tried to hide it by shifting his leg a little, but obviously it was too late. ‘Oh, nothing,’ he said.

‘Nothing? Looks like a pretty chunky nothing to me.’

‘Apples,’ Mr Hollingshead muttered. ‘Promised my wife I’d pick some up while I was out. All right?’

‘Absolutely,’ Benny said, with a pleasant smile. ‘I love apples, me. I always say you can’t beat a good Cox’s, though I’m quite partial to these new Braemars you see everywhere. New Zealand or some place, I gather they’re from. Is that what you’ve got?’

‘No idea,’ grumbled Mr Hollingshead. ‘It just said “apples” on the bay at the supermarket.’

Benny shrugged. ‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘Anyhow, to the matter in hand. I take it you want to see young Cassie about the contract.’

Mr Hollingshead’s eyes narrowed. ‘You know about that.’

‘Here at JWW we’re very much team players,’ Benny said brightly. ‘We don’t go in for all that old-fashioned this-is-my-file-keep-your-filthy-paws-off nonsense. No, we all muck in, offering new viewpoints and perspectives according to how the Venn diagrams of our areas of expertise intersect each other. So yes, I know a bit about your case.’

‘A bit?’

‘Enough.’

‘Enough for what?’

Benny smiled. ‘Enough to realise that someone’s made a complete bog of something, somewhere. I mean,’ he went on, ‘otherwise I’d have to believe that you deliberately sold your only son to the Devil to keep your poxy little factory going. And you wouldn’t do that, ‘ Benny added sweetly, ‘would you? ‘

Mr Hollingshead was breathing heavily through his nose, making a sound like a sawmill in wet weather. ‘What’s it to you, one way or the other?’ he said, shifting in his seat. ‘You people are just here to do the paperwork, not stick your noses in.’

‘Absolutely,’ Benny said. ‘After all, your company -Hollingshead and Farren, isn’t it? - you’re long-established clients of the firm, excellent customers, the last thing we’d ever want to do is piss you off so that you’d take your business elsewhere.’ He reached across the desk and picked up the buff envelope he’d brought with him. ‘I did my homework, you see: took the liberty of looking out some of the old files on stuff we’ve done for you in the past. Seems like Hollingshead and Farren have been clients of ours for well over a century; almost as long as both firms have been in business, in fact. Does your son know that, by the way? Not that it matters particularly.’

‘Colin’s not really interested in company history,’ Mr Hollingshead replied. ‘Which is a bit of a disappointment to me, of course, but there you go.’

‘Ah.’ Benny nodded as he opened the envelope. ‘So presumably he doesn’t know about the first job we did for your company, way back in - let’s see, good heavens, 1839. That’s, what, a hundred and sixty-two years—’

‘Hundred and sixty-seven, actually,’ Mr Hollingshead grunted.

‘Is it? Yes, you’re right. Well done. Usually I’m pretty good at mental arithmetic, but today’s just not been my day as far as maths is concerned. Anyhow,’ he went on, ‘it’s been a long and fruitful association, by any standards. You’ve got a whole shelf to yourselves in the closed-file store, which means I haven’t had time to go back through all the work we’ve done for you, not by a long shot. So I started at the beginning.’ He reached into the envelope and pulled out a folded sheaf of yellow paper. ‘Here it is,’ he said, ‘that first bit of business you ever put our way. Fascinating stuff.’

‘Is it?’

‘Oh yes, ‘ Benny said, with a brisk nod. ‘Of course, you’ll know all about it. ‘

‘Can’t say as I do.’

‘Really? Good heavens. Well, in that case, I’ll fill you in on the details. After all, I’m sure you’re interested in company history, even if your son isn’t.’

Mr Hollingshead yawned ostentatiously. ‘Is Ms Clay going to be very long? I could come back.’

‘She’ll be here any minute, I’m sure. Now then.’ Benny smiled and unfolded a piece of paper. ‘Actually, it’s amazing how little Jack Wells’s handwriting has changed over the years. Here we are. If you want to know what a file’s about, start with the copy of the invoice. Let’s see: To Alexander Farren, Esq., alchemist, Mortlake, Surrey! Benny raised his eyebrows. ‘That’s a funny word to use, isn’t it? I guess back then it just meant someone who did scientific research, what you’d call R&D these days.’

‘Fascinating,’ Mr Hollingshead said. ‘Look, can’t you ring the bloody woman and ask her how much longer—?’

Benny frowned. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘we haven’t got to the good bit yet. Ah yes, here we go. To the procurement and supply of one pip from an apple from the Tree of Life: twelve pounds, eighteen shillings and fourpence. And then there’s a stamp, and someone’s written Paid and the date.’ He paused. ‘Now, I’m assuming that Alexander Farren was your great-great-great-grandfather’s business partner, yes?’