by Tom Holt
He also knew her just a bit too well. “So,” he said, “what’s the matter?”
She knew she could tell Don anything. Even so, she hesitated. “I think I may be going crazy,” she said.
“Mphm.” Slight pause; then, “What makes you think that?”
So she told him. Another thing about Don that annoyed her (but not this time) was how he managed to stay calm, no matter what. Also, he was probably the only person in the world who took her entirely seriously.
“Well?” she demanded.
“I take your point,” he said. “But I wouldn’t start panicking quite yet.”
Not exactly what she’d wanted to hear. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It does look like there’s something funny going on,” Don replied, “but probably not what you think it is. What I mean is, unless there’s other stuff you haven’t told me about, that’s not nearly enough to support a diagnosis of mildewed brains. What I mean is, it’s just happening at the office, right?”
That hadn’t occurred to her. “I guess so.”
“Outside the office, no battier than usual?”
She took a moment to think. “No.”
“Well, there you go then. Coffee going missing at work is one thing. If the same thing was happening in the silence of your lonely room, I’d say you had something to worry about.”
For a moment she was overwhelmed by a flood of relief and sisterly affection. Then she said, “Well?”
“Well what?”
“What d’you think is going on?”
A sigh from the other end of the wire. “How the hell do I know?”
She smiled. “But Don,” she said sweetly, “you know everything. You keep telling me so, all the time.”
“True.” Silence. She could hear him thinking. “Let me mull it over and I’ll get back to you. Tell you what,” he added (she could picture that quick, face-creasing frown that looked so ominous but only meant he was applying his mind). “Meet me tomorrow evening, say sevenish, at the—”
“Can’t,” she interrupted him. “Otherwise engaged. And before you say anything…”
“Me? I never—”
“It’s a work thing, all right? Office darts team. Don’t laugh.”
“There’s nothing remotely amusing about an office darts team,” Don replied gravely. “It’s the sort of thing we all hoped mankind had outgrown in the twenty-first century, but apparently not.” His voice sharpened a little as he added, “You didn’t volunteer, did you?”
“No, of course not. Well,” she amended, “yes, I did, but it wasn’t voluntary volunteering, if you get me.”
“That’s what you get for going corporate,” Don replied with toxic smugness. “The team ethic. Next it’ll be baseball caps and compulsory t’ai chi on the roof before breakfast. Me,” he added, “I go to work in my pyjamas, and my daily commute is five yards, from the bed to the desk. Be that,” he added, as she started to say something vulgar about his life choices, “as it may, I’ll certainly think over what you’ve told me, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I’ve solved the mystery. If I don’t speak to you before then, enjoy your night out.”
He rang off before she could swear at him, which in her view was cheating.
At least her coffee was still there. It had gone cold, but she drank it anyway.
It was raining when she got off the bus. She had her umbrella, but it wouldn’t open; its slim, fragile little spokes jammed as she pushed, leaving her with something that looked upsettingly like a crushed daddy-long-legs. She interred it quietly in the nearest bin and scuttled across the street to the dry cleaners, to pick up her party dress for the darts match.
It was fat rain, the big, ripe drops like water bombs that soak you to the skin before you know it. Accordingly, she didn’t hang about. She lunged for the shop door, pushed it open and charged inside. A pleasant-faced middle-aged lady looked up from behind the counter and smiled at her.
“Hi,” Polly said, fumbling in her pocket for the ticket. “I’ve got a dress to collect, please. Mayer.”
The woman didn’t frown, but her eyebrows twitched slightly. “Excuse me, please?”
“I’ve come for my dress,” Polly said, trying not to sound impatient. “Here’s the ticket. My name’s…”
At which point she realised why the woman was looking at her like that. This wasn’t the dry cleaners. Where the racks of polythene-sheathed clothes should have been, there were magazines. Instead of the big stainless-steel laundry machinery, there were shelves of instant coffee, crisps, pot noodles, biscuits. Oh, she thought.
“Sorry,” she said. “Wrong shop.”
“Excuse me, please?”
She bought a small jar of coffee and a bottle of washing up liquid by way of an apology and went out again. In the street the yellow lamps turned the puddles into pools of honey. She looked up and down the small huddle of shops. Video library, mobile-phone shop, the corner shop she’d just come out of, hairdresser. No cleaners. No indication, furthermore, that there’d ever been a cleaners there at any time. She walked a few yards down the road until she was able to see the street name on the corner. Clevedon Road. Which was where her bus stop was, and the dry cleaners. Or not.
Outside the office, no battier than usual. Not any more, apparently.
Rain trickled down her nose and dripped on her chin. She dug her phone out of her pocket and stabbed in Don’s number. A polite voice told her she was being transferred to voicemail. She recorded a short, shrill scream, then rang off.
CHAPTER TWO
Always a pleasure to talk to his sister, he thought as he put the receiver back on its cradle. Hearing about her life always made him feel so good about his own. That kind of unsolicited affirmation is beyond price. He grinned as he looked around, caught sight of his trousers (they’d tried to burrow under a pile of discarded sheets, but they’d left a few square inches of grey corduroy sticking out, just like the proverbial ostrich), retrieved them and pulled them on over his pyjama bottoms. A new day.
When he’d told Polly he was just giving his current work-in-lack-of-progress a final polish, he’d been stretching the truth a little. He had five of the seven notes – they were locked in his mind like chunks of steel gripped in the toolmaker’s vice, as good as money in the bank – but that still left two more to go, and as far as they were concerned he was standing on the flat plain looking up at the peaks of the Himalayas. He could see where he needed to get to, but…
Dah, he thought hopefully, then shook his head. No. Completely wrong.
He wandered into the kitchen, thinking about breakfast, looked up at the clock, converted breakfast into lunch, opened the fridge door. There was a yoghurt, but when he looked at the date on the foil lid, he decided against it. By now there was a better-than-average chance that the contents of the pot had evolved into an entirely new form of life, in which case the Prime Directive applied, and it’d be unethical to interfere in its natural course of development. There was a small slab of cheese, but on inspection it proved to be heritage cheese, and since it had lasted so long it would be a shame not to preserve it intact for future generations. There was a bread roll, which looked rather more hopeful. But when he tried to take it out, it slipped through his fingers, fell on the floor and shattered into a dozen pieces, which suggested it was probably a bit on the stale side. Shucks, he thought. I’ll have to make do with pasta.
Donald Mayer could cook pasta. He was proud of this fact. You put water in a saucepan, you heat it till it starts surging and heaving about, then you get the plastic bag of little shrivelled yellow shapes—
Which proved to be empty. He frowned. No pasta. Also, while he was on the subject of negativity and things not going right for him, dee was just as unsuitable as dah had been, if not more so. Fine. He was hungry, there was no food and he was two notes short of a jingle. Nothing for it; he was going to have to go Out.
One little room an everywhere. He couldn’t remember where the quotation ca
me from, but it summed up his world view very neatly. He wasn’t afraid of Out, as such. It didn’t bite. That said, he found it hard to work up any enthusiasm for it. A fact of life, one of those things, and he didn’t have to like it; it was just there. He sighed, found his shoes, remembered his keys and made for the door. Something else, whispered a voice in his ear. Ah yes. The dry cleaning. Must remember to pick up the dry cleaning. He found the ticket on the kitchen shelf (it had got inside the empty drinking chocolate tin, ingenious little devil) and headed out into the world.
Bright sunshine; he squinted. Why can’t the sun be more like electric light, he often thought. He walked down the street, and as he went he felt the fog inside his mind thin and clear away. Say what you like about Out, it was bracing. A leftover from the cavemen, he supposed. Outside the cave you’ve got to be sharp, alert, or the sabre-toothed tigers’ll get you.
Derr, he hummed. Yes, of course. Perfect. He stopped for a moment and beamed a huge smile at a fat woman pushing a pram, who stared at him.
Six down, he told himself as he walked on, just one to go. How difficult could one note be?
The length of Palmerston Crescent and into Harcourt Road. Streets named after dead politicians; he frowned at the thought. Who chose street names, anyway?
Pasta, milk, bread, cheese, a pizza or two, and don’t forget to pick up the dry cleaning. Just one note to go, and then—
Of course, the last time he’d been stuck for just one note it had taken him six weeks to find it. That said, the note he’d finally come up with had been perfect, quite possibly the best note of his career so far, and radio listeners from Whitby to Penzance now had that jingle embedded deep in their minds, like a bullet lodged in a wound that can’t be extracted without killing the patient. He contemplated dumm, then felt ashamed of himself for even considering it.
Down Evelyn Street into Clevedon Road, where the shops were. Into the corner shop – pasta, milk, bread, cheese, pizza and a special treat, a six-pack of toilet rolls – then the video library, but Blood Frenzy IV wasn’t out yet, shame, and then the dry cleaners.
“Afternoon,” he said to the woman behind the counter. “Overcoat and a pair of trousers, Mayer.”
She nodded. “Got the ticket?”
“Yes,” he replied proudly, and gave it to her. She looked at it, then turned to the rack and unhooked a shiny plastic-wrapped hanger. “That’ll be twelve seventy-five, please,” she said.
He paid, thanked her nicely and went home, just missing the rain.
The first thing he did was write down the newly captured note: dum de dee, diddle-derr. But no dice. Sometimes it worked like that: hum what you’ve already got, and the rest just happens. Not this time, however. He sighed and put his shopping in the fridge. Just one last lousy note and he could relax for a month. All in all, it was a good life, but he could really do without the pressure.
He fitted himself into his armchair, which long use had moulded to the contours of his body, and gave his mind to what Polly had told him. Intriguing. Obviously she wasn’t really losing her marbles; he could rule that out straight away. His sister was a curious kind of life form in many ways – conventional, driven, insecure, plagued by a whole load of those nasty little Easter eggs programmed into human software to slow it down and screw it up. She cared about so many things that he simply couldn’t imagine himself bothering about. But she was smart. You could hear it in her voice, a slight tension, as in a coiled spring or a bent bow. I’m way ahead of you, it signified, but I’m too polite to leave you behind, so please think faster. It had always been something of a mixed blessing. It impressed college tutors and prospective employers at interviews, scared off boyfriends, infuriated her contemporaries at school and was completely wasted on her parents, who hadn’t listened to a word she said since she was six. If Polly was really losing it, he’d know. His musician’s ear would pick it up in a fraction of a syllable.
He couldn’t tell her that, of course. So, if he meant to do his fraternal duty and reassure her, he’d need something else, such as a rational explanation. He ran through the data, but nothing dropped into place. The only conclusion he felt sure about was that something funny was going on. What that something might be, he had no idea.
He glanced at his watch. A couple of supplementary questions had occurred to him, but he knew she didn’t like him ringing her at work. They’d keep till later. He got up and, in a frenzy of virtuous activity, put away the newly cleaned trousers in the suitcase under his bed. He had to sit on the lid to get it shut again.
The three bears, he thought. Who’s been drinking my coffee, asked Baby Bear. All right, he told himself, let’s go with that. Who’s been drinking my coffee; who’s been messing with my files; who’s been sitting in my chair? He wandered into the bathroom and turned on the bath taps. Let us consider, he said to himself, the quality of the actions in question.
You what? he asked himself; the phrase had sort of presented itself, ready-formed and complete, abandoned on his mental doorstep like Paddington Bear. It was a good question, though. What sort of thing were these things that kept happening to his sister? Annoying and inexplicable, yes, but only in context. Drinking coffee, doing work, a tricky legal document drafted, a phone call taken, a promise made to mail a bit of paper to a fellow solicitor. Ordinary stuff, the sort of things people do all day in offices.
He hadn’t solved the mystery, but he felt he was in a position to rule out a poltergeist. Having allowed himself to touch on the supernatural angle, he followed it up a little further. How about, he conjectured, the unquiet ghost of a solicitor, haunting her office, his soul burdened with the guilt of all the documents he hadn’t drafted and bits of paper he hadn’t sent on during his life? Well, he thought, it fits the known facts – possibly not the coffee; can ghosts drink coffee? Sure they can, if they’re also capable of drawing up transfer documents and answering phones. No, belay that. A transfer document is information inserted into a computer, which then transmits it down the wire to a printer. A voice on a phone is just a series of electrical impulses. Coffee, on the other hand, needs a throat, lips, a bloodstream and a bladder. With a certain degree of relief, he ruled out the supernatural. He was pretty open-minded about such things, but he knew for a fact Polly wasn’t.
Dah? For a moment he actually thought he’d got it, but no. Back to the drawing board.
While he was in the bath, the phone rang. He ignored it. As soon as the warmth of the water took hold and relaxed him, he slipped into that special bathtime mental state, part daze, part intense concentration. The note. He chased it through the maze of his subconscious mind, nearly managed to pounce on it half a dozen times. The mystery. Not a ghost, not an enemy, because enemies don’t do your grotty jobs for you, not a friend either, because friends don’t drink your coffee. Maybe she was going round the twist after all. Eventually he snapped out of it and realised the water was stone cold. He got out, looked for a towel, couldn’t find one and dried himself off with the bath mat.
His newly cleaned overcoat was hanging behind the door, still in its plastic wrapping. He frowned at it. There was a case to be made, he knew, for saying he was in danger of degenerating into a slob. Sometimes he worried about that, which was why he’d bought the coat. It was smart (navy blue, 100-per-cent pure wool, dry clean only) and he wore it when he went out into the world for important meetings with clients, agents and other grown-ups. It made him look serious, and if he kept it buttoned up to the neck nobody need know that he still had his pyjama jacket on underneath. Hence the need to keep it maintained, in good order. Carefully he removed the polythene and ran his hands down it to smooth out any wrinkles. Two thirds of the way down, he paused. There was something in one of the pockets.
There hadn’t been when he took it in to be cleaned. He was punctilious about that. Don’t leave anything in your overcoat pocket – it was the only bit of advice his father had given him which he’d ever taken any notice of – it’ll stretch the fabric and spoil it. C
learly the idiots at the cleaners didn’t know that. If they’d ruined his beautiful coat, they’d be hearing from his lawyers.
He reached down into the pocket, fumbled about and connected with something small, cold and heavy. He pulled it out and looked at it.
Odd, he thought. Why would somebody at the dry cleaners have put a pencil sharpener in his overcoat pocket?
And what a pencil sharpener it was too. Presumably it had come from one of those mail order catalogues, the sort that cater for people who can’t live without genuine Russian army watches, occasional tables crafted from paddle-steamer gear wheels and handsomely mounted slivers of deck timber from the ruins of the Cutty Sark. Solid brass, orifices to accept a bewildering range of pencil sizes from ultra-slimline to scaffolding-pole calibre, tastefully engraved in a script he couldn’t identify, possibly Cyrillic or maybe Klingon or Old Elvish. A gift idea for the man who has everything and whom you don’t particularly like. It lay in the palm of his hand, and he shivered.
Well, he thought, I can’t keep it of course; it doesn’t belong to me. Probably I should take it back to them, but I can’t be bothered to make a special journey. Next time I’m passing will do, and they’d better be grateful, not to mention apologetic for putting my best coat in jeopardy like that.