by Tom Holt
Our place. As in our movie, our song; no, probably not. ‘Crosswoods?’
‘Yes. Well, were you?’
He remembered. ‘That’s right, yes. Some female—’
‘My assistant, Imogen Bick.’
‘That’s her, yes.’
‘You asked after me.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, don’t.’
‘Sorry? I don’t—’
‘Don’t ask after me,’ Sally said, cold and precise as an ice scalpel. ‘Do you understand?’
‘I was just—’
‘Don’t. Come on, it’s simple enough.’
‘Well, all right.’ He hesitated. ‘I was only—’
Click. He stared at the receiver for a moment, as though it was something he’d found in an apple he’d just bitten a chunk out of, then put it back on its cradle, carefully, as if afraid of waking it up again.
‘Let me guess.’ Luke’s voice, behind him. ‘One of those tele-sales people, right?’
Certainly the most striking example of cold calling he’d come across in a long time. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Not your ex, then.’
Duncan closed his eyes; his hands clenched, and he felt his fingernails digging into the torn-off lapel. He turned round slowly.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m really sorry about ruining your jacket and I’ll buy you—’
Luke did a really rather fine dismissive gesture. ‘Forget it,’ he said.
‘I’ll buy you another one,’ he repeated. If it’s the last thing I do, he didn’t need to add. ‘But the answer’s still no; I’m not packing in my job and coming to work for you lot. I’ve made my mind up, and nothing you can say will—’ He broke off. Luke had jumped up, crossed to the window and twitched aside the curtain.
‘What’s the time?’ he asked.
Duncan checked his watch. ‘Quarter to eight,’ he replied. ‘Why?’
‘Sod.’ Luke seemed agitated about something. ‘It is the twenty-first today, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. What’s that got to do with—?’
Luke was walking towards him; he felt an urge to get out of the way. ‘Well,’ Luke said, ‘sorry to hear you’re not interested, but it’s your life.’ He was rummaging in his side pocket. ‘I’ll see myself out. There isn’t a back door to this building, is there? No? Oh well. See you around, I hope.’As he opened the front door, he slid a pair of sunglasses onto his nose. ‘Take care, all right?’
‘Luke,’ Duncan said to the closed door.
He stood quite still for the best part of a minute, trying to clear his head. Then he crossed to the window, pulled back the curtain and looked down into the street. In the moonlight he saw Luke crossing the road, his maimed lapels drawn up round his face as though it was raining. He wasn’t actually running, but he moved quickly. He stopped beside the driver’s door of a new and illegally parked Ferrari. Apparently he’d left it unlocked. He drove off like a drag racer.
Duncan let the curtain fall back. ‘Don’t understand,’ he muttered to himself. But then, he’d never really got a handle on what made Luke Ferris tick, not even at school. There didn’t seem to be any point, somehow. You don’t need a degree in mechanical engineering to know not to play about with an unexploded bomb that suddenly stops ticking. No; the strange and alarming behaviour wasn’t what was bothering him. It was the fact that Luke Ferris had apparently accepted defeat. That, he realised, was definitely a new one on him; and, although it meant he’d apparently won, he couldn’t help feeling decidedly apprehensive about it.
Next morning he arrived at the office twenty minutes early.
It was the first time he’d ever done such a thing, but he knew what he’d find when he got there: a small knot of his colleagues, standing about aimlessly, waiting for a partner to arrive and let them in. The point of the exercise was to be noticed, and recorded in the corporate mind as keen and dedicated. Actually, Duncan suspected as he looked at their faces, it was probably subtler and darker than that. Once the custom had become established, it was more a case of not daring not to be there on the doorstep bright and early, for fear of being classified as not keen and non-dedicated, like that Duncan Hughes. At any rate, they stared at him when he joined them, and nobody spoke to him.
Tony Utgarth-Loki, the senior litigation partner, arrived to let them in at a quarter to. He carried a briefcase the size of a small trunk in each hand, and three pink wallet folders wedged under each armpit, and he gave the impression that he hadn’t seen any of them.
Never mind. Obviously, it’d take Duncan time and perseverance to build his new persona, and one had to start somewhere. He dashed up the stairs two at a time instead of trudging - there was nobody to see him to do it, but it helped him establish the all-important mindset: the Stanislavsky approach, as he was coming to think of it. He sat down at his desk and, instead of sitting motionless and struggling to cope, which was what he usually did for the first quarter-hour of the working day, he grabbed the nearest file, opened it and tried to remember the plot so far.
The crazy thing was, the Stanislavsky approach did seem to have a grain of merit in it. Simply by pretending very hard that the work was worthwhile, interesting and urgent, he found it easier to bear. The Chapman tax-planning file, for example. It had pottered along at the speed of tectonic shift for the last two years and finally come to monolithic rest, simply because he didn’t want to take responsibility for doing the calculations, and neither did the accountant. Since Mr Chapman appeared to have forgotten all about it, there was nobody to make a fuss and get things moving again, and the file nestled peacefully in his cabinet, as safe from disturbance as a Martin Amis novel in a library. But (protested the character Duncan was method-acting) that wouldn’t do at all. There were hours of unbilled chargeable time on the file; thousands of pounds ready and waiting to be invoiced for, just as soon as the finger was extracted and applied to the keys of a calculator.
So he did the sums, which turned out to be not nearly as scary as he and the accountant had thought; then he incorporated them in a letter to the client, copy to the accountant, and added Finally, please find enclosed a note of my firm’s charges for work done to date. He should then have gone through the file costing it, letter by letter, phone call by phone call, but by now he was feeling far too dynamic and motivated for that sort of nonsense; so he looked up the client’s telephone number, doubled it, added seventeen hundred pounds for luck, and dictated an invoice.
Piece of cake, he thought. I could get the hang of this.
Encouraged, he took a similar approach to the Thorketil, Morrison, Ganga Ram and Danby Trust files (the Danby file was so ancient, he half expected to find ammonites pressed neatly between its pages like dried flowers in an Edwardian lady’s diary), bunging down any old thing to gloss over the original insoluble problem, and enclosing with each letter a suitably awe-inspiring bill, its initial integers trailed by a string of noughts as long as a comet’s tail. This, he began to understand, was how partnerships were come by. As for the money: that, he realised, was the key to the whole alchemical miracle. It’s a fundamental law of economics that a thing is worth what someone’s prepared to pay for it. If his client paid five figures for his advice, it inevitably followed that his advice was very valuable; by the same token, the more he charged the more precious it became. The fact that in many cases his advice wasn’t capable of being put to any useful purpose was neither here nor there. A Ming vase is, after all, just a very old flowerpot if looked at in strictly utilitarian terms, and a genuine Titian is just a bit of canvas covered in paint, no good for anything except hiding a damp patch on a wall. They’re only worth anything because people pay money for them; and the same was true of his legal services. So: all strictly fair and above board.
He’d just cleared up the Ibbotson file (wouldn’t Mrs Ibbotson be delighted to find out that for years she’d been the owner of legal advice worth a small fortune without even knowing it; like finding a Leonardo sketch in the attic) wh
en the door opened and Jenny Sidmouth came in.
‘Got a moment?’ she said.
Duncan put down the file (very busy man, but never so busy he couldn’t find time for her) and smiled, keenly and with dedication. ‘Sure,’ he said.
She sat down. ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’
Duncan suppressed the urge to raise an eyebrow. A partnership, already? He’d only been doing the Stanislavsky thing for - well, less than twenty-four hours, but evidently the partners could spot potential in the bud. ‘Fire away,’ he said.
Jenny Sidmouth sort of grinned, then straightened her face. ‘Funny you should say that,’ she said.
‘Excuse me?’
‘You’re sacked.’
Once upon a time, many years ago when he was a small, vicious child, he’d gone to use the lavatory and found a large spider crawling up the inside of the toilet bowl. He’d immediately pulled the chain, and to this day he could picture the spider swirling round in the vortex of foaming blue water, its repulsive legs vainly pumping up and down. Now he knew how it must’ve felt. ‘Sorry, what did you—?’
‘There’s a cardboard box behind the desk at Reception,’ Ms Sidmouth went on. ‘You can use that for clearing out your things. You needn’t bother about bringing it back,’ she added magnanimously. ‘We’ll send on the paperwork.’
‘You’re sacking me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
Duncan thought he could see the tiniest glint in her eyes, like the final twinkle of a star sucked deep into the heart of a black hole. ‘Breach of duty of care and confidentiality,’ she replied. ‘Which reminds me. You can have a reference if you insist, but if I were you I wouldn’t. I don’t think it’d help you get another job, if you follow me.’
‘But that’s—’ He shook his head. ‘What did I do?’
She looked gravely at him. ‘You’ve been taking confidential material out of the office,’ she replied. ‘Files, clients’ documents, that sort of thing. If you look at your contract of employment, page 476, paragraph 98 (c), you’ll find that it’s expressly forbidden. ’
Incy-wincy spider, its eight eyes blinded by Harpic. ‘But—’
She sighed, like St Peter bouncing a sinner at the Pearly Gates. ‘Imagine if you took a sensitive file home,’ she said, ‘and you got burgled, and the thief stole the file. Or what if your house burned down? I’m sorry, but we can’t make exceptions. We’ve got our professional-liability insurance to think of.’
‘Just a minute,’ Duncan objected feebly. ‘Mr Utgarth-Loki takes work home with him, doesn’t he?’
‘Of course not. Like I said, it’s strictly—’
‘Really? So what’s in those two sodding great big briefcases he lugged in this morning?’
She looked straight at him. ‘Sandwiches,’ she said. ‘He has a thyroid condition.’
In popular folk tales, of course, the spider is proverbial for its dogged perseverance. The difference was that, if Jenny Sidmouth had been Robert the Bruce, she’d have smeared the spider all over the cave wall. ‘Fine,’ Duncan snapped. ‘I’ll clear my desk.’
‘Good.’ She stood up. ‘Oh, while I think of it: did you manage to get the Sudowski file wrapped up, like you promised last night?’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’ Disappointment filled her big round eyes, so that she looked like a pedigree Jersey deprived of its daily silage. ‘Well, never mind. Goodbye.’
After Jenny Sidmouth had closed the door behind her, Duncan sat staring at it for at least four minutes. Then, as the implications started soaking into his brain like acid, he squirmed in his seat. Sacked; no reference; thirty-four years old, with a law degree, a mortgage and some extremely valuable credit-card bills. While he was striving not to accentuate the negative, the word screwed did seem to cover the situation like a bespoke shroud.
Options, he thought. I must have some, somewhere. This has got to be one of those moments you look back on in later life, while you’re watching the Caribbean sun go down over the rim of your banana daiquiri, and you say to yourself, getting the sack from Craven Ettins turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. No doubt; unfortunately, this particular blessing appeared to be a master of disguise, like Inspector Clouseau.
He went downstairs to the front office. ‘I need a middling-size cardboard box,’ he said to Reception, as casually as he could. ‘You wouldn’t happen—’
She’d produced it before he finished speaking. ‘Will that be big enough?’ she asked. ‘I mean, you haven’t got a lot of stuff, have you?’
The box turned out to be slightly too small, but Duncan couldn’t face the thought of making two journeys, so he balanced a few books and the spare pair of shoes he always kept at the office on top, and staggered back down the stairs. He stopped at the desk, still half expecting to find all his colleagues gathered there, with cakes and champagne, to reassure him that it had all been a merry prank, and really he was being promoted—
‘Jenny said you’re to hand over your keys before you leave,’ Reception said cheerfully. Why was it, he couldn’t help wondering, that she always called the partners by their first names and got away with it? He dumped the box awkwardly on the desk, tried in vain to catch a fugitive shoe as it slid past, and pulled out his keyring. Needless to say, the office keys were stuck, and he broke two fingernails trying to prise them out.
‘I think that’s everything,’ he said briskly, when Reception had taken the keys away from him and locked them in a drawer. ‘Well,’ he added, ‘it’s been—’
‘’Scuse me.’ Reception darted past him to pick up the phone. ‘Craven Ettin solicitors, how can I help you? No, sorry, Mr Hughes isn’t with us any more. Ms Sidmouth is handling his cases for the time being - shall I put you through?’
He waited till she’d transferred the call, then asked: ‘Who was that?’
‘Oh, just a client.’ She was looking through him, as if he wasn’t there.
‘Well, bye, then.’
‘Bye.’
The phone rang again; she swooped down on it. Duncan juggled with his box for a bit, then stuffed the leftover books in his coat pockets, binned the shoes and walked out.
Out in the world, it was drizzling. The box was heavy, and he knew that everybody who passed him on the pavement couldn’t help but realise what it signified; if a passing artist had happened to be looking for inspiration for an updated Business Tarot pack, he’d have needed to look no further for the perfect image of the Sacked Man. Needless to say, nobody looked at him. It’s a well-known fact among office workers that unemployment is contagious, and is passed on by eye contact.
I’m an eccentric senior partner, he muttered under his breath all the way to the Tube. I carry all my stuff with me wherever I go because I don’t trust the cleaners. But it appeared that the Stanislavsky effect didn’t always work, because no matter how passionately he struggled to believe the lie, it still wasn’t true by the time he got off the train at the other end. The weight of the box was making his shoulders and elbows ache. It felt bizarre and unnatural to be walking home in the middle of the day. The streets were much emptier than they were during the morning and evening lemming-runs, and he was reminded of all those sci-fi films where the Last Man In The World wanders through the deserted city.
When Duncan finally got home, he dumped the box on the kitchen table and left it there. It contained, he realised, nothing he actually wanted: pencils, a calculator, his desktop electric fan, the strange and vaguely disturbing paperweight he’d been given by his aunt for his last birthday but one. He wondered why he’d bothered bringing it all home, when it’d have made much more sense to have dumped it in the first rubbish-bin he’d come to.
He flopped into his chair and shut his eyes, asking himself, What the hell just happened to me? It made no more sense here than it had back at the office. Why had they fired him? Well, because he wasn’t exactly an asset to the firm: clash of mindsets, difference of attitudes, square pegs a
nd round holes. Fine; but why now, so suddenly? Sacking the unwanted staff wasn’t the Craven Ettin way; instead, they made life so miserable for them that they quit of their own accord. He’d seen it happen half a dozen times, he knew the drill, and that wasn’t what had happened to him. It must have been something he’d said or done, something so intolerable that they’d reacted with the swift, sudden, bloody stroke rather than the gradual easing-out. He had no idea what the something could have been; but anyway, it didn’t matter now.
Quick ransack of his memory, followed by a flurry of mental arithmetic. Add the interest on his credit-card debts to the mortgage, the bills and even the bare minimum for subsistence, and you came up with a depressingly substantial sum of money, which he now had no way of earning: because nobody would give him a job without some kind of reference.
Nobody. No normal employer—
He groaned out loud. No, he thought, I’d rather stack shelves or clean toilets. No doubt; but neither of those vocations paid well enough to keep him solvent. Working for Luke Ferris, on the other hand - assuming the offer was still open, after he’d insulted, abused and practically assaulted his well-meaning old friend, who’d only been trying to be nice.
It was, he decided, his Japanese game show moment; a point in his life where he had no choice but to embrace the humiliation, plunge right into it as if immersing himself in a hot bath. As he called directory enquiries for the number of Messrs Ferris & Loop, Mortmain Street, he tried out various opening gambits in his mind—
‘Hello, could I speak to Mr Ferris, please? Duncan Hughes.’
The being-put-on-hold music buzzed in his ear like an electric hornet, disrupting his attempts at structuring a well-turned phrase. Count to five, he told himself. If they don’t put me through by then, put the phone down and think of something else.