by Tom Holt
‘Well, quite,’ Karen replied. ‘Which is why I haven’t asked you for your opinion.’
Hpq’s face relaxed into a smile. ‘Situation normal,’ he said.
‘Oh come on,’ Karen replied. ‘I’m not that bad, am I?’
‘Yes,’ Hpq said. ‘Well, no. Just out of interest; did you really hate Gndva-S’sssn that much?’
‘Yes. Well, no. Sometimes. Most of the time she was my best friend. But you know what it’s like at that age. Just because she was my best friend didn’t mean I ever liked her much.’
Hpq nodded. ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘So we’re not going to Canberra?’
‘No.’
‘And we’re not going to do anything here either?’
‘No. In fact,’ Karen said, ‘the way I see it, the best thing we can do right now is nothing at all.’
‘You’re joking,’ said Mrs White.
Susan shook her head. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘but I’m quite serious. I’ll work a week’s notice if you insist—’
‘One week? Now just a minute—’
‘But,’ Susan went on, ‘it’s only fair to warn you that if you make me stay here a whole week, I’ll be fretting so much about being cooped up behind my desk when I should be out there looking after my poor old grandad—’
‘I thought it was your aunt.’
‘Whichever. The point is, I’ll be so preoccupied that I’ll probably make a whole bunch of silly mistakes. You know: filing things in the wrong places, sending people to view the wrong properties, messing up the mailing list, leaving the answering machine on whenever you’re out of the office, carelessly spilling drinking chocolate all over my keyboard—’
‘You wouldn’t.’
‘It’s dreadful,’ Susan went on, ‘how easy it is to make stupid mistakes when your mind isn’t on the job. And there’s so many things that can go wrong in a place like this—’
‘All right.’ Mrs White glowered at her, as if trying to turn her into yoghurt by sheer effort of will. ‘Clear your desk and go away, if you insist. But I hope you realise that with Karen leaving and that dreadful business with Paul, and now you going off as well—’
‘You’re in grave danger of having to do some work. And at your age, too.’ Susan beamed at her. ‘There now,’ she said. ‘Is that rude enough to be unforgivable, or do you need me to come up with something nastier? Actually, I quite like you, but I won’t let that stand in my way, I promise you.’
The only effect of that was to make Mrs White look thoughtful. ‘There’s more to this than you wanting to go and look after some ailing relative,’ she said. ‘You could try telling me what’s really going on.’
Susan shrugged. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but it wouldn’t be any advantage to me, and I’m rather pressed for time. And now, if you don’t mind, I really must be going. I won’t bother with my things, if it’s all the same to you - it’ll be hell facing the future without my Darth Vader coffee mug and my cute furry VDU-top animal, but I guess I’ll just have to be very brave. I suggest you give them to the Institute of Contemporary Arts, if the dustmen won’t take them.’
‘Go,’ Mrs White said, making a vague shooing gesture. ‘Good luck with whatever it is.’
‘Thank you,’ Susan replied solemnly, and left.
After she’d gone, Mrs White sat still for a while, thinking and chewing the end of her pencil. Over the years she’d been managing the branch, she’d seen ever so many bright young men and women come and, invariably, go (that was how she knew they’d been bright), but at least the reasons had always been fairly self-evident. Usually it was because they’d got a better job somewhere else, one that paid enough for a Brahmin ascetic to live on. Often girls left to spawn, boys left to tour Australia in unreliable camper vans or write novels. Sometimes they left because they couldn’t stand the sight of Mrs White any longer, or because they’d had enough of estate agency and decided to go straight. At least she’d always known; this was the first time in twenty years that she simply hadn’t got a clue. Her instinctive reaction was that it had something to do with young Paul being kidnapped in that deplorably melodramatic fashion; after all, what better way to provide for a secure financial future than to hold the son of one of the world’s richest men for ransom? The police would be bound to see it that way when she told them. But her instincts were often wrong. It had something to do with Paul Willis, but only tangentially; more likely, it had something to do with Karen Orme (who was a much more credible suspect for the kidnapping thing—never trust someone who voluntarily washes out other people’s coffee cups and then hangs the wet dishcloth over the taps to dry) and whatever it was the police had been chasing her for, several days before Paul was abducted . . .
Mrs White shook her head like a wet dog, as if trying to be rid of the whole subject. Whatever the deadly secret really was, she was fairly certain it didn’t have anything to do with the business of peddling overpriced dwellings, which was the only field of activity that really concerned her. She made up her mind; first a cup of tea, then check Susan’s in-tray for anything that needed doing, then a phone call to the cloning vats for a couple more junior staff. Once she’d done that, she’d be free to get on with some work, for a change.
Terrorism? Drugs? Fanatical religious cults? The CIA? Nah. They weren’t the type, any of them; too clean-cut, pink and English for anything like that. Even Karen - in her memory, she’d already tagged her mental image of Karen with the weirdo icon; stereotyping does wonders for information-retrieval response times - even Karen the Weirdo had been weird in a typically English, boring way. The thought of either of those dreary young women being involved in anything more dangerous or exciting than putting on dark glasses to go slumming at a Chippendales gig was more than her imagination could encompass, whereas Paul - if anybody ever wandered through life with a fluorescent sign on his back reading VICTIM: PLEASE DISPOSE OF REMAINS TIDILY, it was him. Anything they could possibly have been up to would have to have been something you wouldn’t mind your mother knowing about. The hell with them.
Once the kettle had boiled, and her teabag was quietly stewing on the end of its leash, she remembered to phone the police. They were very interested indeed to learn that Susan had left unexpectedly without leaving a forwarding address (she didn’t bother to point out that she had given them this information a couple of days earlier, and they had it on file; it’d give them something to do, finding that out the hard way) and they did their best to insinuate that whatever it was that Karen had done, she must have been in on it too. She ignored that, as being the equivalent of a puppydog whining at her feet with its lead in its mouth, said goodbye politely and hung up; she was hot, her desk fan wasn’t working and the way the sun was leering at her through the office’s plate-glass window seemed to imply some kind of personal grudge. Enough of these fevered imaginings; it was a fact that English people tended to go a little crazy if they’d had to go without rain for more than ten days.
It was just after half-past five, when the office was officially closed but she hadn’t got around to locking up, when the strange men in grey suits walked in. There were three of them, which puzzled her a little. Policemen arrive in pairs, or by helicopter in the small hours and wielding sledgehammers. The extra body implied that what she had here was one of the more recherché breeds of pest. This intrigued her; at the very least, they must be foreign policemen (as in the old Soviet joke; one can read, one can write, and the third one keeps an eye on the two intellectuals). Accordingly she gave them a broad smile and asked how she could help them. Were they, she enquired out of wickedness, interested in buying a nice house?
The spokesman shook his head. He seemed uncomfortable, rather uncertain when he spoke (as if Human wasn’t his first language).
‘Not really,’ he replied. ‘Actually, we were looking for someone.’
Mrs White clicked her tongue. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ she said, ‘but we don’t sell people, just houses. I suggest you try the employment bureau,
six doors down on your left; or I’ve heard there’s quite a nice brothel in Kennedy Street, round the back of Marks and Spencers—’
‘A specific person,’ the spokesman said, reaching inside his buttoned jacket and producing a rather unflattering picture of Susan. ‘Do you recognise this woman?’
Mrs White took the photo and studied it for a while, holding it up to the light at various angles and even turning it upside down. ‘I think so,’ she said.
‘She works here,’ the man pointed out.
‘Ah,’ Mrs White said. ‘That’ll explain why the face seems familiar.’
To his credit, the man didn’t seem to mind. It was as if he wasn’t really aware that she was trying to be funny, like a foreigner failing to get the point of a pun. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Is she here, or has she gone home?’
Mrs White shook her head. ‘She left,’ she replied. ‘Left as in went away for ever. Are you boys policemen?’
The man thought for a moment before answering. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’re friends.’
Mrs White smiled. ‘All three of you? How nice.’
‘Friends of Susan’s,’ the man said, speaking a little louder, the way Mrs White would have done to someone who didn’t understand English. ‘She said that if we were ever in the area, we should drop by and say hello.’
‘So you brought along a photograph of her so she’d know who she was. How thoughtful. Well,’ Mrs White went on, ‘I’m terribly sorry, but I honestly don’t know where she is. As I told you, she quit her job here this morning, and she didn’t tell me where she was going.’
The three men looked at each other. ‘Oh,’ the spokesman said. ‘Isn’t that—’ I mean, that’s unusual.’ One of his colleagues nudged him and whispered something in his ear. ‘Perhaps she left to have a baby,’ he said.
‘It’s possible,’ Mrs White replied. ‘But if that was the case, I’d have expected her back by now. I mean, it’s been over seven hours.’
‘Ah,’ the man said. ‘Of course, yes. Well, if you do see her, please let her know we called.’
‘Of course.’ Mrs White nodded. ‘Would you like me to tell her your names, or will she know who you are?’
‘Just say her friends called,’ the man replied. ‘She’ll understand. ’
After they’d gone, Mrs White sat quite still for some time. One of the life skills that a career in estate agency teaches you is the knack of recognising the truth even when it’s apparently impossible; and for what she’d definitely heard the strange men say, there was only one logical explanation. They weren’t human.
She recalled the faces into her conscious mind: Karen, Paul and Susan. Boy, had she underestimated one of them!
In fact, it challenged a whole bunch of comfortable assumptions about the nature of aliens. Could it really be true that what they actually said on establishing first contact was, ‘Take me to your classic underachievers’? Were they really as dumb and gullible as they’d seemed? Could any sentient life form be that gormless and still remember to breathe? It was possible; everything’s possible in a curved and infinite universe. Somehow she’d allowed herself to lose sight of that fact over the last fifty years.
It was all very interesting, but what it lacked at the moment was a quantifiable financial value. That, however, was something she could change. Pulling open the top drawer of her desk she took out a small notebook, in which she’d written down the special telephone number, the one with all the 0s at each end, that Paul’s father had given her when he came to work here (the idea being that when, as would inevitably happen, he got himself into some horrendously complex and expensive form of trouble, she was to ring him and let him know in good time so he could get damage limitation under way as soon as possible). She hadn’t called the number before and wasn’t really expecting it to work; but it did, because fairly soon after she’d dialled it, she found herself listening to a mellow, avuncular voice saying, ‘Paddy Willis here.’
She hesitated for a split second. She had a feeling that what she was about to do was somehow wrong. On the other hand, she was morally certain that it would be extremely profitable. She smiled.
‘Mr Willis,’ she said, ‘you won’t remember me, but . . .’
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘My third wife - no, hold on, I’ve skipped a marriage somewhere, my fourth wife, she was a redhead. Green eyes. Freckles. You know,’ Gordon went on, ignoring the fact that Neville hadn’t been listening for at least a quarter of an hour, ‘this is a funny old country. You need to have all kinds of licences and stuff before they let you own dynamite, and yet there’s women walking around with long red hair, green eyes and freckles, and nobody seems to give a damn. But when you think of all the damage one green-eyed freckled redhead can do in just one afternoon—’
‘Are you sure this is the right direction?’ Neville interrupted. ‘Only I’m fairly sure we came this way an hour ago.’
‘Don’t think so,’ Gordon said firmly. ‘I mean,’ he went on, ‘with dynamite, all you can really do is blow stuff up. By contrast, the variety of different ways in which a green-eyed redhead with freckles can bugger up someone’s life is pretty well infinite, especially,’ he added with feeling, ‘if she’s wearing light blue. If the disarmament process is ever going to get anywhere, they’re going to have to round up all the red-haired, green-eyed, freckled women in long blue dresses and bury them in concrete somewhere in the New Mexico desert. Otherwise, it’s just asking for trouble.’
‘Definitely been this way before,’ Neville said. ‘Look, there’s that crab-shaped mark on the wall.’
Gordon stopped to take a closer look. ‘That’s not a crab,’ he said. ‘More like a horseshoe. The crab-shaped mark was just past the taped-off three-phase point.’
‘You’re thinking of the other taped-off three-phase point,’ Neville replied. ‘Only it wasn’t, it was a vent outlet. It just looked like a three-phase point.’
They looked at each other for a moment.
‘Sorry,’ Gordon said, ‘I haven’t got a clue where we are, either.’
‘Wonderful. Then why were you leading the way like you owned the place?’
‘I was following you.’
‘Oh, for—’ Neville leaned his back against the corridor wall and slid down it to the floor. ‘This is getting us nowhere,’ he said.
‘You know,’ Gordon replied, squatting down beside him, ‘just then you sounded remarkably like my first wife.’
‘The blonde?’
‘The other blonde. She used to take every slight navigational error as proof of gross moral turpitude. Then she’d insist I find somebody to ask.’
Neville sighed. ‘They do that,’ he agreed.
‘And then, when you do ask someone, they give you directions that don’t make sense or lead you round in a circle. And then you get spoken to for not following the directions properly.’ Gordon paused, and frowned. ‘I didn’t realise you were married,’ he said.
‘I’m not. But I do have a sister.’
Gordon nodded. ‘I believe sisters can sometimes be worse,’ he said.
‘You haven’t got any sisters?’
‘Oddly enough, no. I’ve always assumed the extra wives were to make up.’ He stared at the wall opposite, as if trying to cut through it with his X-ray vision. ‘I had a brother once,’ he continued. ‘Had him for years. But then he became a chartered actuary and moved to Canada.’
Neville clicked his tongue sympathetically. ‘Don’t you just hate it when that happens?’ he said.
‘Oh, I never liked him much. He had enormously bony knees, even as a small boy. Not his fault, of course; then again, having green eyes and freckles isn’t really ever anyone’s fault. It’s what you do with them once you’ve got them that matters.’ Gordon sighed, and breathed out slowly through his nose. ‘Any particular reason why you never got married?’
Neville considered for a moment. ‘I think mostly,’ he said, ‘it was the way all the women I asked either changed the subject or
burst out laughing. The first two dozen times you just shrug it off, but after that it starts getting to you. Mind you, I’m probably over-sensitive.’
‘No, no.’ Gordon shook his head. ‘Sensitive is good. Apparently. Though I think there must be a knack to it. Every time I tried being sensitive, I was just told to shut up.’
‘Maybe there’s different kinds,’ Neville speculated. ‘Like - oh, I don’t know, direct and alternating current. Maybe you were just using the wrong one at the time.’
Gordon shrugged his shoulders. ‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘Anyway, it makes no odds, because I’m through with all that stuff now. Particularly,’ he added, tightening his face into a frown, ‘if we can’t find a way out of this bloody building. Do you realise we’ve been walking for nearly two hours and we haven’t even come across a staircase yet?’
Neville looked puzzled. ‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning this building must be huge. The size of a small town. Practically visible from orbit. How many buildings that size do you think you can hide away in a small country like Britain before somebody notices?’
‘Hadn’t thought about it like that,’ Neville admitted. ‘Of course, it could be dug into something or disguised as something. Like in that James Bond film, where they built the underground hideout inside a volcano.’
‘You think we’re inside a volcano?’
‘No, of course not. Why did you think I meant that?’
‘I don’t know, you’re the one who’s supposed to have a third bloody eye. For all I know, you can see waves of infrared radiating out of the magma core.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Neville replied. ‘I’m pretty sure I’d have noticed something like that over the last six months or so.’
‘Really? In Shepherds Bush?’
‘Well, obviously not in Shepherds Bush, no. But anywhere. I went to Hawaii once, you know.’