by Peter James
‘So,’ Susan said. ‘You have a month. At least we have time.’
Inside the house a phone rang. John started, then checked himself. Susan made a move. ‘I’ll get it, hon.’
Then the ferocity of John’s reply halted her in her tracks. ‘No!’ he said. ‘Dammit, leave the fucking thing. Let the machine get it.’
She left it, and on the fifth ring it stopped.
‘You haven’t any more news about your job?’ he asked.
‘No.’
Susan worked as a non-fiction commissioning editor at Magellan Lowry, a good, solid company, and one of the few independents left in publishing. ‘Not since Peter Traube came in to give me his reassurances that if the Media International Communications Group take over does go ahead, there won’t be any redundancies in Editorial.’
‘Traube’s the head honcho, right?
She nodded. ‘Managing director.’
‘And he’s a man of his word?’
Susan thought before she replied, and then said, ‘No, I don’t think he is.’
John drank some more whisky, and watched the trees at the end of the garden, and in the park beyond, turning dark, like silhouettes against the sky. His mind was scrabbling around for straws to clutch. The bank would seize the equity in the house, but with Susan’s salary, and cashing in his pension fund and the few stocks and shares he had, they could, perhaps, just about manage the mortgage for a while. Except there was another problem that neither of them had yet spoken about. Susan’s kid sister, Casey.
‘OK,’ Susan said. ‘You owe this money, but what about your assets? Your order book’s healthy, you have all the computer and office equipment, the lease on the offices, that must have some value –’
John cut her short. ‘We paid over the odds to get those offices, and the second-hand value of all our kit is peanuts. Our cars are mostly leased.’ He thought for some moments. ‘We’d be talking about a fire sale,’ he said, bitterly. ‘It’s not an option.’
‘Hon,’ Susan said, ‘don’t forget the little bit of money I have stashed away in the States. It’s close on ten thousand dollars and you can have that if it’ll help. And I could sell my jewellery – not that I have much.’ She reached out, took his bandaged hand and kissed his fingers lightly.
John shook his head. Casey was in a coma in a home in California. She’d been there for nine years and might go on living, in her persistent vegetative state, for many more years yet. ‘That money is for Casey. You need to keep that back for when the insurance runs out,’ he replied.
‘Archie Warren,’ Susan said. ‘Why don’t you talk to him?’
‘I will.’
‘It’s Tuesday – shouldn’t you have been playing squash with him tonight?’
‘I cancelled, wasn’t feeling too great.’
‘I’m sure Archie will be able to help.’
Susan moved across and sat on his lap, and looked straight into his eyes. They were a deep nut brown, hard as nuts sometimes, but there was a warmth and kindness that never left them. ‘We’ll survive,’ she said. ‘We can find a solution to this problem. And if we can’t, we still have each other. If we have to sell the house, we’ll sell it. We’re still young – well, youngish – we can move back to a smaller place again, even a little apartment if we have to, start over again. It’s no big deal.’
‘No big deal,’ John echoed. He could see Clake’s face and his lopsided smirk and the Bible on his desk. And he wished he could agree with Susan, but he couldn’t. It was a very big deal, it was huge.
It was everything.
Chapter Eight
‘So?’ Archie Warren said. ‘What do you think?’
They were driving down the Fulham Road in Archie’s Aston Martin Virage Volante. The car was brand new: he had taken delivery of it that morning, and there were only seventeen miles on the clock. The roof was down and John was cocooned in the cockpit in cream Connolly hide with red piping. The car smelt like a saddlery. A reverberating boom from the exhaust accompanied the Dr Hook song erupting from the speakers, ‘I’m rich and I’m having a ball.’
Archie Warren was having a ball.
And John, who was normally a bit of a show-off himself, was not up to all this today. He felt self-conscious in this gleaming haemoglobin-coloured monster that was deafening the passers-by, as well as more than a tiny bit jealous.
In answer to Archie’s question, he thought that, driving along like this, Archie looked like Mr Toad. But he didn’t tell him that.
And the more he looked at him, the stronger the resemblance to Mr Toad became. Archie had fair, thinning hair that was more like bum-fluff, and he’d probably be completely bald on top in a few years’ time. He was wearing a loud silk tie, chalk-striped suit and tiny oval sunglasses that were cool to the point of being sinister.
Archie was thirty-four and had the figure of a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. Yet he usually beat John at squash, and at tennis, and could swim much faster than John and get out of the pool less out of breath. And, what made John really mad, was that Archie could do all this in spite of smoking twenty, maybe thirty, cigarettes a day.
John had always been something of a loner, driven by his ambition, and had drifted apart from his few childhood friends. From school he’d gone to technical college to study architecture, and after only a couple of months working on the Computer Aided Design systems, he had realised the potential market for serious and informative software for home computers.
Building DigiTrak had been his life ever since, and the friends he now had – not by design, but because that was the way it had happened – were all, with the exception of Archie, connected in some way to his business. Susan’s friends were drawn from her publishing world.
He probably liked Archie the most because he was different and because Archie always amused him. Another part of the attraction was that Archie was well bred, with a public-school background, and had the careless air of aristocracy about him to which John secretly aspired.
They had met on a ski lift in Switzerland seven or so years ago, both highly ambitious men with an enjoyment of the good life. Although Archie came from the hunting, shooting, fishing set, he had made his money, not inherited it. He had a brace of Purdey shotguns he had bought at auction for over fifty thousand pounds – an amount that had staggered John when Archie had told him. He had an impressive country estate, a villa in France, a small aeroplane, and the rest.
Archie earned an obscene salary, trading Japanese convertible bonds and warrants in the City. In a bad year he cleared a million before tax, and in a good year a whole heap more. He spent as much as he could, some on girlfriends – he was still single – but most on toys and food.
The restaurant to which he took John for lunch seemed happy to oblige Archie’s whim for emptying his wallet. Its speciality, assiette de fruits de mer, arrived at the table embedded in crushed ice and stacked on four tiers, accompanied by a full set of surgical instruments. Tackling it, with no appetite, John felt like an archaeologist encountering a cryonically frozen tableau of some past civilisation’s excess.
Archie split open a crab claw and the juice squirted onto John’s cheek, but Archie didn’t notice: he was busy chewing the remnants of a sea snail and washing it down with a glass of Chablis to make room in his mouth for the crab meat. John dabbed his cheek discreetly with his napkin.
‘Those whelks are yours,’ Archie said, pointing. ‘And that crayfish.’
‘Thanks.’ John removed the legs from a prawn. He’d had a million questions he was going to put to Archie today, but so far Archie had been more interested in talking about his new car and this new restaurant he’d heard about than suggesting whom John might approach for funding. And John’s hint, earlier, that Archie might like to invest in DigiTrak had fallen on deaf ears. That had been his own fault for being impatient. He needed to pick a better moment, perhaps now.
They were on to the second bottle, with most of the first one inside Archie. ‘I can think of plenty o
f places,’ Archie said, suddenly. ‘No problem. But you’re going to have to get rid of that lawsuit before we go to ’em.’
‘How do you mean?’
Archie snuck in a quick prawn before the crab meat. Its tail poked through his lips as he talked, slowly working its way in and disappearing. ‘Settle it.’
‘I don’t have the money to settle, and besides –’
‘John, no one’s going to touch you with a barge pole with a lawsuit like that hanging over you. That’s your problem, that’s your real buggeration factor.’
John picked up a narrow stainless-steel implement with a hook on the end. He tapped the prickly spines of a raw sea urchin, but left it on the stack. Half the creatures in front of him should have been left on the ocean floor, he thought. They looked more like relics from the gene pool than anything that would pass a selection committee for the human food chain.
The eyes of a spider crab were eerily fixed on him. ‘We have a good defence,’ John said.
Archie pulled the head off another prawn and dropped it on his side plate, then dunked the remains in the mayonnaise. ‘How about biting the bullet, letting DigiTrak go under and starting again with new finance?’
‘DigiTrak isn’t a limited company, it’s a partnership. If it goes under, I go under. We lose the house, the lot.’
‘Shit.’
‘And there’s another problem.’
Archie had the grace to stop eating.
‘Susan’s kid sister, Casey, I told you about her, right?’
Archie’s forehead narrowed. ‘The one in the home?’
‘Yes. She costs two thousand dollars a month, and the insurance runs out in September.’
Archie whistled. ‘That’s a lot of boodle. You’re going to pay for her?’
‘Susan and me, between us. Susan’s going to contribute.’
‘What about her family in LA?’
John smiled at him and shook his head. ‘They haven’t a bean. They can look after themselves but nothing else.’
A waiter filled Archie’s glass and put a token splash into John’s, which was still full. John asked for another mineral water. Archie nodded at the stack of crustaceans in front of them. ‘Come on, you’re lagging.’
John selected a half lobster; lobster was normally one of his favourites, but as he ate the first mouthful of this, he was so deep in thought that he barely noticed it. ‘If I do go under, Susan’s going to take it really hard – quite apart from losing everything herself.’
Archie nodded. ‘I’ll make some calls this afternoon.’ He lifted a large crab onto his plate.
Swallowing an enormous amount of pride, John said, ‘I – I was wondering, Arch, if you might be interested in coming into DigiTrak yourself? It’s a great business, and – we’re looking at the very real possibility of going public in the next couple of years.’
Archie shook his head. ‘I’ll take a look, but I don’t think so. Nothing personal, but I’m a trader not an investor. I’ve sunk money into half a dozen businesses in the past few years – a door-to-door wine outfit, a car-tyre dealership, a mobile-phone operation. Truth is, I’ve saddled myself with a fucking great mortgage on that pile I’ve bought in the country and I’m losing a bundle on my investments. I don’t have the kind of money you need lying around in readies.’ Then he smiled at John kindly. ‘But if you get into real shit, let me know. I’ll lend you something to tide you over.’
‘Thanks, I appreciate it,’ John replied, ‘but I don’t want to do that.’
Archie, who had never done anything he didn’t want to do in his entire life, smashed open the crab’s belly and said, ‘We all have to do things we don’t want to do, sometimes.’
Chapter Nine
‘OK, this is how I understand it,’ Susan said. ‘You freeze water and it turns into ice cubes. You warm those ice cubes and they turn back into water. The state of those molecules is reversed, but that change is still taking place in linear time.’
She twiddled with the tag hanging from the new telephone that had been installed early this morning, before she had arrived in the office. There had been some fault with her previous phone, apparently, not that she’d been aware of it.
Fergus Donleavy gave away about as much in his expression as he might if he’d picked up a bum hand of cards in a poker game. He was sitting, in Susan’s cramped, hopelessly cluttered office that looked out through grimy glass on to a Covent Garden rooftop, his tall frame folded like an Anglepoise lamp into the solitary armchair in front of her desk.
He was dressed in an old tweed jacket, lumberjack shirt, drainpipe jeans and black boots. His greying, wavy hair was carelessly long. His face was thin and lean, handsome in a Marlboro Country way, which was exactly what he looked like, Susan always thought – an ageing cowboy.
Over the past five years working as his editor she’d grown very fond of him: he had become almost a father figure to her. Fergus had been the first person she’d rung to tell when they’d made the decision to buy the house, and he’d approved of the area – although a couple of decades ago, he had warned her, it had been a lot less salubrious.
‘You boil an egg,’ he said, in his quiet voice that was close to a murmur, ‘and there’s nothing you can do that is going to turn it back into a raw egg. A sperm fertilises an egg, there is no way you can reverse that. That’s linear, but that’s chemistry not physics.’
Fergus talked laconically, the voice of a man who had been around life’s block a few times, although he wasn’t jaded: life was still vibrant for him. ‘Susan, the point I’m trying to get over to the readers is to make them imagine time as being that water. It can be liquid, fluid, but it can also be solid, like the ice, three-dimensional. It’s just a question of how we perceive it at any given moment. Time is both linear and static. It’s like Schrödinger’s cat, the wave and the particle –’
Susan stopped him in his tracks. ‘Fergus, if I’m confused by your argument, and I have a physics background, how’s the average reader who has no science background going to feel?’
She had spent the past two weeks grappling with his manuscript. Although worrying desperately about John’s problems with DigiTrak, for which there was still no solution on the horizon, she had tried her hardest to concentrate on her work and not be distracted, and all her instincts were telling her that the manuscript in its current form did not work. At the end of the day, this would reflect badly on her.
She sipped coffee from the yellow mug John had given her a couple of years back for her birthday. On it was printed, in bold black lettering, YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT I THINK.
‘Fergus, when Einstein published his theory of relativity, there were something like only five people in the whole world who could understand it.’
Dr Fergus Donleavy, professor of physics at University College, London, grinned. ‘I heard it was six, actually.’
‘Well, we want to outsell A Brief History of Time with this one, and we’re only going to do that if people can get their heads around at least some of it. I’m not knocking your thesis, it’s the way you’ve put it across.’
Fergus looked at her thoughtfully. ‘Is it chapter seventeen you’re worried about?’
Susan genuinely believed this book could be an international best-seller. Fergus Donleavy had the credentials and the book had the content. That was how it had looked from his six-page synopsis. Now she had on her desk eleven hundred pages that were almost impenetrable. He was going to have to drop everything else he was doing for the next six months and rewrite it. She was trying to be tactful, and had hoped that by gentle manoeuvring she would bring him round to see this, but so far it wasn’t happening.
She felt a deep responsibility for this book: she had planted the seed for it in Fergus’s head, sold the outline to her firm and commissioned it. It was a great concept: Fergus was going to argue that physics proved the existence of God – or a Higher Intelligence, at any rate. He was going to prove that some being, smarter than humans, had
created the universe.
In the book, Fergus demolished the Big Bang theory. He trashed Darwinism as a means of explaining human existence. He demonstrated how it was possible to travel faster than the speed of light. And he had hard evidence to show that earth was not man’s natural habitat – that the first humans had been brought here from elsewhere in space.
Her mind veered briefly back to John. He was having another meeting today, another bank, a contact of Archie Warren, and then he was seeing Archie. John had thoughts of trying to put together a consortium of backers, including people who had a vested interest in DigiTrak, like the gynaecologist Harvey Addison who hosted their best-selling series, but so far the response had been lukewarm.
It was the lawsuit that was the bitch. John had now been served with a writ from Zak Danziger, and it was looking bad. Although John was trying to keep up a brave face, she knew that he was running out of options. And, to make matters worse, people here at Magellan Lowry were getting increasingly nervous about the impending takeover.
Tomorrow Archie had invited her and John to Ascot and she was looking forward to that break from their worries. Archie did Ascot in style every year, taking a box, and always brought along a string of influential people. Maybe John would meet someone willing to take a punt. But it seemed more likely that he’d lose a few hundred pounds on the horses.
At least Archie’s company would be cheerful. She liked him: he made her laugh.
And tonight held possibilities too. They were going to a seriously smart black-tie do at the Guildhall. She wasn’t sure why they’d been invited, and neither was John. The invitation had arrived only a week ago, as if they were an afterthought. There seemed to be some link with a book she had once edited on Oriental antiquities, but beyond that she was unclear.
The invitation had impressive names on it – Mr and Mrs Walter Thomas Carmichael. She knew that Walter Thomas Carmichael was one of the richest men in America, a philanthropist and a patron of the arts. Initially, John hadn’t been that keen to accept, but Susan had persuaded him, telling him that wealthy people would be there and that he might find someone who could help him.