by Tom Holt
He was dreaming that he’d died; and Uncle Norman and Aunt Freda, being his closest living relatives, had come in to the office to see him, to sort out the paperwork. Can we start with the full name of the deceased, he asked: Duncan Maurice Hughes, Uncle Norman replied. Did he make a will? No, he never got round to it - silly, really, him being in the trade; cobbler’s children, as they say. He nodded, and made a mental note to sell Uncle Norman and Aunt Freda a will before he left the building. So, he said, what does the estate consist of? Uncle Norman smiled; couldn’t really call it an estate, he said, just a few bits of old junk, an overdraft, mortgage, credit cards . . . He frowned, and got ready to do the speech about What Happens When The Loved One Dies Insolvent . . .
And the box, of course, Uncle Norman said.
Box?
Nod. He had this box.
From a Morrisons bag, Uncle Norman produced a box. It was small and black, clearly quite heavy for its size: cast iron, or something like that. There was a tiny keyhole in the lid. It’s locked, of course, Uncle Norman said, we’ve looked all over for the key, but he always was a messy devil.
I see. Do you happen to know what’s inside it?
No, Uncle Norman replied, just that it’s very valuable.
Fine, Duncan replied, and reached for the sledgehammer leaning against his desk. You don’t mind if I—?
You go ahead, said Uncle Norman. So he hefted the sledgehammer in both hands, took a big, slow swing and brought the hammer head down on the box lid with all his strength. The box exploded in a glittering shower of burning sparks, and he woke up.
Duncan Hughes adhered to the school of thought that maintains that you shouldn’t buy newspapers, because it only encourages them. Nevertheless, he had a guilty feeling that he really ought to keep up with current affairs, as a sort of miserable civic duty. The best compromise he could handle was a radio alarm clock.
Straight from the dream, then, to the collapse of the EU budget negotiations, the latest suicide bombings Over There somewhere, factories closing, oil prices rising, some political scandal he’d stopped trying to understand weeks ago, a disturbing rise in cases of dognapping in the Home Counties, and finally time is running out for Cuddles the giant hammerhead shark stranded in the mouth of the Severn Estuary—
Yawn; shut the bloody thing off, cold feet groping for slippers, cold lino tiles in the kitchen as he waited for the kettle to boil. Tiny fragments of dream-shrapnel still dug into the lining of his brain (hammer head, hammerhead; he was lashing out at Uncle Norman’s little black box with a seventy-foot shark) as he thumbed the lever of the broken toaster a couple of times before remembering. At least, he told himself, I was sensible last night and didn’t go out drinking. Just think how much worse all this would be if I was hung over.
Train full of people, their feet on his feet, their elbows in his ribs; do they still have manned lighthouses any more, or is it all automated? A thousand mirror-lemmings sharing one escalator. The front office; two minutes late.
‘That Mr Martinez rang. I told him you weren’t in yet. Could you call him back soon as possible?’
Nod. (Marvellous. Now Mr Martinez would picture him dallying over hot buttered toast in front of a roaring fire, probably wearing a silk dressing gown, instead of making the effort to be at his post at nine sharp. Not fair, really.) Up the stairs, through the maze. Big tray of post. Another day.
‘Hello, Mr Martinez? Sorry I missed you, what can I—?’
More stuff like that; also standard letters, probate valuations, the Capital Taxes Office, capital gains tax implications, Nottingham and Swansea. At eleven-fifty, the phone rang.
‘Mr Ferris for you,’ said Reception. ‘Ferris and Loop.’
‘What?’
‘Ferris,’ Reception explained.
But - ‘Oh, right, yes.’
Click; and he was about to say I wasn’t expecting to hear from you so soon when Luke’s voice thundered in his ear:
‘Did she really just up and leave you, out of the blue?’
‘What? Oh, yes.’
‘That’s terrible. Bloody cow. Anyway, see you at the Bunch of Grapes at one o’clock.’
‘No, I can’t, that’s—’
Click.
Duncan felt a surge of anger, like stomach acid refluxing through a hiatus hernia. Bloody Ferris, ordering him about—He was still holding the phone; tightly, as if he was about to strangle it. He frowned (don’t strangle the phone, Duncan, it’s not its fault) and put it carefully back.
I’m buggered if I’ll go, he thought.
He picked up a letter and stared at it, but it could’ve been written in classical Sanskrit for all the sense it made. What’s going on? he asked himself. Fifteen years since he’d last run with the Ferris Gang, and now they wouldn’t leave him alone.
Possibly, he thought, just possibly, Luke Ferris wants to see me again because he likes me.
He held the letter in front of him and picked the words out one by one. Dear sir, we thank you for your letter of the 21st and note what you say. However, we cannot agree that the property referred to in the third schedule to the conveyance dated 17th January 1946—
There is a moment, a watershed in one’s development as a human being, which must be passed before one has any claim to enlightenment and understanding. It’s the moment when you come to realise that, just because somebody likes you, you’re under no legal or moral obligation to like them back.
Even so—
Duncan shook himself like a wet dog. Third schedule to the 1946 conveyance: there was a photocopy of that in the file somewhere. He scrabbled for a bit until he found it. All that freehold property more particularly described in a conveyance dated the 4th March 1926—
In which case, he told himself, he didn’t really have a choice. He’d go to the stupid pub and tell stupid Ferris to quit bothering him: straight from the shoulder, no messing, polite and civilised but firm. He could hear himself: To be quite frank, Luke, I think it’s been too long for us to be able to pick up the threads just like that. And besides, I never really liked you anyway.
Ring. He opened his fingers, letting the sheet of paper flutter unhindered to the desktop, and picked up the phone.
‘Crosswoods for you.’
‘What?’
Of course, he didn’t even know if she was still with Crosswoods; it had been a long time, and ambitious go-getters like Sally don’t hang around out of sentiment or loyalty. ‘Crosswoods,’ Reception repeated impatiently. ‘You want to take it or not?’
‘Put them through,’ he replied, with a shrug that nobody was there to see.
Click; and then a voice that, thankfully, wasn’t hers.
‘Imogen Bick, Crosswoods,’ the phone said chirpily. ‘Barker, deceased. You act for the plaintiffs.’
Do we? ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘What can I—?’
‘I’ve got your letter of the twenty-sixth of November here in front of me,’ said the voice; and thereafter it was just legal stuff, and he disconnected his brain from his tongue and let it drift. Coincidence, he told himself. Big firm like Crosswoods, very highly regarded in the death-and-taxes game. Absolutely no call for him to assume it was personal. However, when the legal stuff had finished and the woman was about to ring off, he said, ‘Excuse me, but can I ask you something?’
Slight pause. ‘Go on.’
‘It’s just a personal thing. Have you got someone called Sally Hughes working for your lot? Sally Moscowicz, I mean. Of course, she’ll have gone back to her—’
‘Well, yes,’ the voice replied, rather as if he’d asked her if the big yellow bright thing in the sky was really the sun. ‘My boss.’
‘Oh.’ He frowned. ‘She’s a partner now, is she?’
‘Head of the probate department. Why?’
But not the whole truth. ‘Oh, we were at law school together,’ he said. ‘Thanks. Bye.’
This time Duncan ground the phone into its cradle like someone stubbing out a cigarette. Not th
at he was jealous, or resentful. Good heavens, no. No skin off his nose, even though she’d never have scraped her pass in Probate and Trusts if he hadn’t lent her his notes a week before the exam and spent hours and hours of his own precious revision time drilling the rudiments of discretionary settlements and the perpetuity rules into her short-plank-thick skull. Bloody good luck to her, even if but for him she wouldn’t have known the rule in Saunders v Vautier if it had bitten her on the bum. Obviously, she must have hidden depths, like the Atlantic (dark, murky, inhabited by pale creepy things with huge eyes and rows of needle-sharp teeth). For some reason he could hear Luke Ferris - Did she really just up and leave you, out of the blue? That’s terrible. Bloody cow. There, he suspected, had spoken a true misogynist; whereas he, Duncan, liked women, admired and respected them, enjoyed their company, even forgave them for fucking up his life and leaving him an emotional and spiritual wreck. My boss, the Bick woman had said. Well, that he could believe. If Sally was good at anything, it was ordering people about. He yawned. The past was apparently coming back to haunt him like London buses, all huddled together in a flock. But as far as he was concerned, the past was a horrible place, only marginally preferable to the present and the future.
He checked his watch; 12.15 already. To walk to the Bunch of Grapes, seven minutes. Except that he wasn’t going. Wild horses—
‘There you are,’ Luke said. ‘You’re late.’
‘I’m—’ Duncan resisted the urge to defend himself. He wasn’t late, he knew that, and even if he was, so what? ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I can only stay for a minute, I’ve got to prepare for a meeting with—’
‘Sit down.’ He saw that there were two pints of Guinness, huge and black as the gaps between galaxies, already waiting on the table. He sat, feeling uncomfortably like a well-trained dog.
‘Well, cheers,’ Luke said, and his share of the black beer vanished down his face in eight enormous, throat-convulsing gulps. In a way it was a sight to admire, but only if your taste also ran to volcanoes and the like. ‘Glad you could make it. Look,’ he went on, before Duncan could draw breath, ‘I’ve been thinking about what you were saying yesterday, and I sort of got the impression - put me straight if I’ve got this wrong - that you’re not exactly thrilled with your job. Right?’
‘Well, it’s all right,’ Duncan replied without thinking. ‘I guess.’
‘You like it there, then.’
Lying to Luke was a bit like supporting the weight of the Albert Hall on your shoulders. You could do it, for perhaps as long as a millionth of a second, before you got squashed flat. ‘Actually, no,’ Duncan said. ‘It’s rotten, it sucks. But it’s the only job I’ve got, and the only one I’m likely to get, so—’
‘Really?’ Luke put his head on one side as he looked at him. What great big eyes you’ve got, Grandma. ‘Why’s that?’
Shrug. ‘Well, I guess I’m not the greatest solicitor who ever lived.’
‘You reckon? Why do you say that?’
‘Because I’m useless.’ Again, the insupportable weight of his own dishonesty; he knew he wasn’t as bad as all that. In fact, he’d be all right at it, if only—‘Not good enough, at any rate. It being such a competitive business and all.’
Luke seemed to find that amusing. ‘Who says?’
‘My boss. All the partners. Everybody else in the office. Everybody I ever met in the business. My Aunt Freda. My Aunt Freda’s friend Sharon—’
‘I see. And you believe them.’
‘Well, yes.’
‘Oh.’ Luke’s lip curled a little, a sort of handy combination smile and sneer. ‘You surprise me. Personally, I’ve never seen it that way.’
Too stunned to react. ‘You haven’t.’
‘No, not really.’ Luke stared absent-mindedly into space for a few seconds. ‘Competitive means everybody fighting each other all the time, right? Well, that’s not how we run our business. God, no. I suppose it helps that we’ve all been friends as long as any of us can remember. But it’s just common sense, really. How can you concentrate on doing a good job if you’re at each others’ throats all day long? Stupid.’
‘Yes, but—’ Yes, but that seems to be the way the whole world’s run, not just the law business; and if it wasn’t a good thing, all those clever people who run things wouldn’t do it. Would they? ‘All right, it sounds fine in principle. It’s just not the way they do things at our place.’ He frowned without knowing it. ‘We work more on the gladiatorial system, I guess. We all fight each other to the death, and the ones who’re left alive at the end get thrown to the lions. Standard British management philosophy, I’d always assumed.’
Luke shrugged. ‘It may be, for all I know. It just doesn’t make much sense, that’s all.’
The discussion was leading somewhere, Duncan could tell; he could almost see the tour guide’s raised umbrella. ‘So you don’t—’
Luke smiled. ‘Thought so,’ he said. ‘I told Kevin and Pete and the lads, after I’d seen you yesterday, he doesn’t like it there much. Not his style, my guess was. And then we had this sort of collective brainwave, lightning flash of inspiration, all of us simultaneously. Sort of like a multiple pile-up on the road to Damascus. Why don’t you chuck in your job with the arseholes and come and join us?’
Mostly, Duncan wanted to scream. It was intolerable; sheer torture. The choice: stay where he was, for ever, and wake up every single morning cringing, or rejoin the Ferris Gang, with the subtle distinction of being the lowest form of life. ‘Come and work for you, you mean?’
‘Not for,’ Luke said irritably. ‘With. Join us.’
Penny dropping, burning up in the atmosphere, splattering the ground below with droplets of molten copper. ‘What, you mean, as a partner?’
‘Mphm.’
‘But—’ Well, at least he had a reason to refuse, and so end the torment. ‘No, I couldn’t. I can’t afford to buy into an outfit with an office in Mortmain Street.’
Luke’s tongue clicked like a bullwhip. ‘You don’t need to worry about all that rubbish,’ he said. ‘All we do is, we get a whole load of new stationery printed with your name in the list of partners - roughly in the middle, because we do it in alphabetical order. Simple as that. After all—’
Duncan knew what was coming. It was like the end of the world; the trumpet had sounded, and the Messiah was swooping down to earth in His winged chariot, and scrunch - guess who just happens to be standing underneath its wheels as it touches down. After all, you’re our friend, one of us.
Trouble was, he wasn’t. That had been his choice, and he could still remember why he’d made it. No use worrying about that now; he’d left the band before they became famous, and he couldn’t go back to them now, on these terms. Could he?
‘After all,’ Luke said, ‘it’s not like you’re a stranger. We’ve all known you since you were the little fat kid with the really bad acne, who got crispbread and lettuce for his packed lunch instead of proper sandwiches.’
A shrewd point to raise. The only reason he hadn’t starved to death before he reached sixteen was because the others had shared their lunches with him; because (he couldn’t help remembering) Luke had made them share their lunches with him. But that recollection started a whole new rail network of thought, and he didn’t want to go there.
‘It’s very kind of you, really—’
‘But.’ Luke pulled a sad face. ‘You’re about to say but, aren’t you?’
Nod.
‘Why?’
Duncan remembered a playground: early autumn, dry leaves drifting in on the wind from the plane trees that grew just outside the school gates. Hughes the new boy, just moved into the neighbourhood, uncrinkles the silver foil in which lurks his first packed lunch at Lycus Grove. He’s nervous about anybody seeing; understandably, since inside the foil are three slices of Ryvita spread with couscous, two cherry tomatoes and a short stick of celery.
He knows why it has to be that way, of course. His mother and father had explain
ed to him, kindly and patiently, why he was a vegetarian and why we don’t eat processed bread and chocolate and biscuits and all that rubbish. It had made sense at the time; it always did, except that shortly afterwards the sense would always evaporate, like the ramparts of Elfland, and that could only be because he was too dim-witted to have understood properly. And, if he couldn’t remember the sense himself, he knew for certain that he’d have no chance of explaining it to his contemporaries and so excusing himself of the mortal charge of being different.
One last furtive glance over his shoulder; then he pinches the edges of the first crispbread between forefinger and thumb—
‘What’ve you got there, then?’
Terror and despair; because he recognises the voice, though he hasn’t yet spoken to its owner. That Luke Ferris, the dark lord of the Ferris Gang; the sort of kid his parents have warned him about. Rough, uncouth, no respect for rules, almost certainly a vandal and a bully. The last person on earth who’d be prepared to overlook Ryvita spread with couscous, cherry tomatoes and a stick of celery.
He knows he’s done for; but a tiny spurt of courage burns inside him, like a rat at bay turning on the terriers. ‘Mind your own business,’ he says.
‘What’ve you got there?’
‘Piss off.’
That Luke Ferris doesn’t say a word; but two of his trolls materialise on either side of Duncan, taking firm but ineluctable hold of his elbows. Ferris advances slowly and takes the foil parcel from his hand like someone picking a ripe apple off a tree.
He looks at it. ‘You like this stuff?’
Duncan looks up, meets his dark, terrible eyes. As he does so, an urge rises inside him to tell the truth; a truth he’d never quite admitted to himself before.
‘’Salright.’
‘Looks like shit to me.’
‘Yeah.’
Ferris’s head dips ever so slightly, and the Stilson-like grip on Duncan’s elbows relaxes. Ferris is still staring into the foil, as if he’s looking at something bizarre and inexplicable. Then, with a move as graceful as it’s swift, he lobs the package underarm into the nearest of the four tall plastic trash-cans parked twenty-five yards away, by the alley that leads to the kitchens.