by Tom Holt
He handed over the carrier bag with his laundry in, put the ticket away safely in the back of his wallet and walked briskly up Clevedon Road into Asquith Terrace, where Jack had his office.
“Mr Tedesci back yet?” he asked the receptionist. No, he wasn’t, but if he’d care to wait. He grinned, sat down and picked up this month’s issue of Expensive Homes, which he hadn’t had a chance to look at before.
Blue Remembered Hills always took a centre spread in EH, four pages of rich colour pictures of the latest development. At the moment, this was Orchard Acres, seventy-five luxury four-bedroom eco-friendly rabbit hutches huddled, like settlers’ wagons encircled against hostile Indians, in a crease in the Malvern Hills on the outskirts of picturesque, unspoiled Norton St Edgar. He considered it, and was pleased with what he saw. True enough, he’d rather sleep in a tent than live in one of those ghastly, tacky boxes. Fortunately, his preferences weren’t shared by the house-buying public. It’d be misleading to say that BRHD homes sold like hot cakes; rather, hot cakes sold a bit like BRHD homes, only not nearly as well.
“Sorry, sorry.” Here was Jack, bustling towards him across Reception. “Had to park half a mile away, under the railway arches. It’s time they did something about parking in this town. It’s killing business. Come on up and we’ll get started.”
It turned out to be a long session. Although Mr Huos was perfectly happy with the deal they’d outlined over the phone three days ago, Jack Tedesci was one of those annoying people who won’t take yes for an answer. Accordingly they’d danced a few pointless dances, fallen out over nothing at all, made up and eventually ended up precisely where they’d started. An excellent result, Jack called it, several times. And it was, too. Mr Huos had got everything he wanted; Jack was happy; Jack’s people were happy; the bank was practically incoherent with joy, and now all that was left was ordering the little people to draw up the paperwork.
“Magic,” Jack summarised, and if he noticed Mr Huos wincing, he didn’t comment. “I reckon this calls for a drink. What’d you say?”
Mr Huos smiled. “No,” he said. “Thanks,” he added, “but I really must be making tracks.” Jack’s face had drooped slightly, and Mr Huos was afraid he might have hurt his feelings, so he ransacked his mind for something to say that would make him feel better. “I’ll say this for you, Jack, you drive a hard bargain.”
He’d got that right. Jack beamed. “That’s what it’s all about,” he replied happily. “Give no quarter, expect none, that’s always been my motto.” Mr Huos tuned out for a minute or so, while Jack rehearsed his repertoire of hunter-gatherer-based business clichés – eat what you kill, hungry dogs run faster, so on and so forth – then, when the performance seemed to be over, he smiled again and stood up to leave. No, really, there was no need for Jack to drive him anywhere. Really.
It was dark outside, and raining. He glanced at his watch. If he looked sharp about it, he might just be in time to pick up his laundry before they shut. He’d paid extra for the express service, in the fond hope that he’d be able to wrap things up with Jack before the shops shut. Fortunately, the dry cleaners in Clevedon Road stayed open late, which was the main reason he went there.
As he walked quickly through the fat, wet rain, he played back the negotiations in his mind, just in case he’d missed something. Everything seemed to be in order, however, and he let his mind stray a little, back to the business with the parking space, the after-effects of which were still bothering him. The numbness in his hands and fingers hadn’t lasted more than half an hour, but the headache and a few other cramps and pains were still with him; likewise the heartburn. Maybe, he thought, it’s cumulative: the more of this stuff I do, the worse it’ll get. That would be a pity. It couldn’t help but cramp his style; on the other hand, it’d be a perfect excuse for taking early retirement. Quitting the game, selling up – he’d made enough money, God knows – digging in somewhere pleasant and taking it easy. Tentatively he sniffed at the thought, like a dog smelling paint, and found it repulsive. It was, he noted, a purely intuitive revulsion (Me, take it easy? You’ve got to be kidding! ) and he recorded it in the back of his mind as valuable additional data relating to the great mystery of his life. Apparently he was a single-minded workaholic. Fancy that. He wasn’t quite sure if that was a good thing to be. Purposeful, driven; that’s how Jack would describe it, bless him. Or you could say he was a sad, joyless individual who really ought to think hard about getting a life.
Getting a life. Ha! Good one.
If only they knew, he thought, at the same time renewing his deadly vow that they never would, not if he had anything to do with it. What mattered, after all, wasn’t where he’d come from but where he was going (actually, that sounded a bit too much like something Jack would say), and if his origins were obscure and shrouded in mystery, surely that made his subsequent achievements all the more admirable. Even so, it was disconcerting sometimes to look in the mirror and say to himself, I don’t think I should talk to me. I don’t know where I’ve been.
By now it was tipping it down, and he could feel crawly rain seeping into his collar. He shoved open the door of the dry cleaners and dived in.
There was a nice middle-aged lady sitting behind the counter. That was fine. But…
“Excuse me,” he said. “This isn’t the cleaners, is it?”
The nice lady looked at him. “Alas, no,” she said.
“Ah, right. Wrong shop. Sorry.”
He backed out again, cursed himself for the embarrassment and looked down the street. A mobile-phone shop. A video library. The newsagent’s he’d just come out of. No dry cleaners.
A ghastly thought struck him, and his hand shot into his jacket pocket. Nothing there but a handkerchief and a tape measure.
He knew it was pointless, but he dashed back into the newsagents. “Sorry to bother you,” he said, “but are you sure you’re not a dry cleaners?”
The lady nodded sadly.
“You’re quite certain about that?”
“Alas, yes.”
“Ah. Fine.” He bowed his head. “Thanks anyway,” he added, and went back out into the rain.
CHAPTER THREE
Stupid, really stupid, to get so uptight about a ridiculous office darts match. What could be simpler, after all, than to pretend she had a headache and back out? Somehow, she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it, so she attacked her work instead, to take her mind off it.
That’s one of the few things work is good for. The drudgery, the pointlessness, the total lack of significance of most of the stuff the average office worker does during the day, acts as a powerful analgesic to the troubled mind. Maybe it’s because the petty annoyances of the office routine drive out the bigger, slower-moving worries of real life, in more or less the same way as little furry rat-like mammals inherited the Earth from the dinosaurs.
Ten o’clock came and went; no word from Don about the dress, and she assumed he was still wallowing in bed. She opened a file: Plot 16 Pretty Crescent; some awkward sod of a solicitor had sent in a whole page of supplementary enquiries, and she’d been putting off doing them. She reached for a pencil and attacked the rotten lousy job, which turned out to be quite simple and straightforward after all, and then she got a phone call from the solicitor in Evesham who’d liked her voice, thanking her for sending him the whatever-it-was.
“No trouble,” she replied briskly. “That’s what I’m here for.”
Which was, she reflected later, a terrible thing to say about yourself, even if it was true. She went to the kitchen, made herself a coffee, and took it into the library while she looked up section 144(c)(i) of the Domestic Premises Act 2001.
They called it a library, which was a bit like calling croquet on the vicarage lawn a fight to the death. All an outsider would have seen there was a slightly enlarged section of corridor with a couple of chairs parked in it and a line of bookshelves on one wall. There were books on the shelves, true enough, but they had the melancholy, s
omething-out-of-Chekhov look of books that never get opened, because lawyers these days don’t muck around with crushed-tree sandwiches; they get their information online, from comprehensive hourly-updated cyberdatabases, fast as ICBMs and just as prone to causing mayhem when they crash.
Today happened to be one of the days (on average, there were 320 of them in a year) when WebLaw was down, or playing up, or simply not in the mood, and she needed the reference. She had to stand on a chair to get the book she needed, and while she was getting it a spider ran across the back of her hand. Progress.
Section 144(c)(i) could hide, but it couldn’t run; eventually she got it cornered in a footnote in an appendix, copied it out in longhand and returned the book to its eyrie. Then she put the chair back neatly where she’d got it from, picked up her coffee cup—
Which was empty.
She stood staring into it for quite some time. Nothing to see except a little dark brown sludge. That’s impossible, she thought, I was here the whole time, and I know I didn’t drink it, because I was busy the whole time; I had my hands full. She examined the floor, just in case she’d spilt it without realising, but there was no telltale stain on the pale industrial Wilton. As a last resort she held the cup up to the light, looking for tiny pinholes in the bottom.
This can’t be happening, she thought.
She felt an icy calm seep through her; a natural defence mechanism, she supposed, to keep her from freaking out and screaming the place down. So what, she told herself; so there’s some sort of conspiracy around here to stop me drinking coffee. Big deal. I’ll show them.
She went back to the kitchen and made herself a nice strong cup of tea. She didn’t like tea much, but that was hardly the point. She took it back to her room, put it down on her desk and did the business with Section 144(c)(i). That took about six minutes. Now then, she told herself. Drink your tea before it gets cold.
She took a wary sip. It was coffee.
In the time it takes a barrister to earn a pound, she’d jumped up out of her chair and hurled the cup away from her, while her other hand rubbed savagely at her lips. This time, it had gone too far. It was getting creepy, and she’d had enough. Her first instinct was to get out of there, leave the building and not come back. Only the thought of how she’d explain her actions at her next job interview made her change her mind. She was a rotten liar, and if she told the truth they’d either disbelieve her and not give her the job, or believe her and assume she was crazy. Besides, she was braver than that, she told herself (and thought, See what I mean? Rotten liar).
It’s only coffee, she decided. Hardly life-threatening. Weren’t there stories about people who’d lived in haunted houses for years, and who reckoned they regarded the ghosts as somewhere between pets and old friends? She hadn’t thought of it in those terms before. So, fine. My office is haunted by an unquiet spirit who likes coffee, does some of the difficult drafting for me, sometimes answers the phone when I’m out – not a hundred percent about passing on the messages, but nobody’s perfect. What exactly is so bad about that?
A slow tide of coffee was gradually dripping down the opposite wall. She wiped it off with a couple of tissues, and binned the bits of broken cup. It wasn’t so much what the ghost did; it was knowing she didn’t dare tell anybody about it – that and the extremely unpleasant hours she’d spent believing she was losing her mind, but that was all poisonous effluent under the bridge now, and she was prepared to think no more about it, provided— Provided what? That it didn’t get any worse? Yes, she decided, I’ll settle for that. The best thing would be to rise above it, fail to take official notice, like a government not recognising a nasty foreign regime. She wasn’t sure that’d be possible, but she could see no reasonable alternative to giving it a try.
The phone rang; she sat down and answered it, but it wasn’t Don, just some woman. It turned out that she and her husband had bought a house on the development before last, and she wanted to know some trivial detail about boundaries. Of course it wasn’t BRHD’s place to advise her on that, now that the purchase was completed. As it happened, though, she still had the file in her cabinet, and the woman seemed perfectly nice and polite. She got the file out and looked through it.
“Before my time, actually,” she said. “My predecessor handled your purchase. But it’s all here in the file. Hold on, let’s see. Yes, you’re responsible for the east-facing fence, and your neighbour owns the other side. I can send you a copy of the plan if you like.”
That would be ever so kind of her. No problem, it was her pleasure.
“It’s such a nice house,” the woman was saying. “We’re so pleased with it. Such a good neighbourhood, and of course, the views are wonderful. We love sitting out on the patio in the evening looking out over the woods, with the hills in the background.”
She made it sound as though Polly had designed and built the house with her own two hands, just for them, which was rather nice, and all the better for being unexpected. “Thank you,” she said awkwardly. “I’m glad you’re settling in so well.”
“Best thing we ever did, dear, moving here. We always wanted to retire to the country, but prices are so terrible, especially these days. I honestly don’t know how you do it for the money.”
A few more pleasantries of that sort, and the woman rang off. A satisfied customer, apparently. For some reason, Polly felt better because of that. Being a lawyer, therefore bred to cynicism the way collies are raised to chase sheep, she’d taken it for granted that the houses they built and sold were nasty, over-priced little boxes and their customers were gullible fools. Maybe not; in which case, maybe her job and therefore her life weren’t as pointless and malign as she’d always assumed. She gathered up the papers and started putting them back in the file.
Hold on a moment. There was something written on the inside cover; written in such teeny-tiny handwriting that she could barely read it. Luckily she had a magnifying glass in her desk drawer, for checking out details on deed plans and the like. She retrieved it and bent her head low over the folder.
There is something very odd going on in this office, she read. Well, more like lots of little very odd things. It’s enough to make me think I’m going mad. Maybe I am, I don’t know.
Oh, she thought.
If it goes on much longer, I’ll have to tell someone. I can’t cope with bottling it all up inside me like this. I think I’ll explode. The trouble is that it all sounds so silly. But it’s not silly, it’s something big and dangerous, I’m sure of it. I think something bad must’ve happened to whoever had this job before I did. I suppose I ought to go to the police, but they’d just laugh or have me locked up. I can’t go on like this. If only I didn’t need this stupid job so badly. NB remember to book car in for MOT, dishwasher being delivered Friday am, collect cushion covers, 3lb calabrese, 6 onions, mince for shepherds pie, soap powder, kitchen towels, aspirins
That was all. She read it twice, then slumped back in her chair. I could have done without that, she thought; it really doesn’t help matters. All this fuss over a few cups of stupid instant coffee. And anyway, if her weird handwriting was anything to go by, a pound to a penny whoever it was that wrote that really was off her head. Which I’m not, she reminded herself firmly.
At which point the phone rang again. Don.
“Just thought I’d let you know, I haven’t forgotten.”
“What?”
“About your dress. I’m just off to ask about it now.”
“Forget about that,” she said impatiently. “Listen.”
When she’d finished, he said, “Do you still want me to go and ask about your dress?”
“Bugger the stupid dress.” On balance, probably a No. “What do you make of that, then?”
“I’m not sure,” he said slowly. “I’ve got to say, it sounds a bit iffy to me.”
“Me too.”
“But then,” he added, “so would you, if I didn’t know you well enough.”
“Thank you
so very fucking much.”
“You asked. And look, about this tea business. Are you quite sure you didn’t just think about making tea and then go ahead and make coffee instead?”
“No, of course not.”
“It’s the sort of thing I do sometimes.”
“If that’s meant to reassure me,” she said icily, “it doesn’t. The reverse, in fact.”
He knew that particular mood, and he couldn’t really blame her. There did seem to be something odd going on at her office, and in her shoes he’d most likely be stressing out about it too. Even so, the important thing right now was to calm her down, before she worked herself up into a state and did something permanent. “Tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t you have a sudden migraine and go home? Get out of there for the rest of the day, think about it calmly and rationally—”
“I can’t,” she snapped. “I’ve got this ridiculous bloody darts match tonight.”
“Screw the darts match,” he said. “It’s not like you actually want to go. Besides,” he added slyly, “you can’t go, you haven’t got anything to wear. Talking of which,” he continued, “do you want me to go and check out the dry cleaners or not? I will if you insist, but there’s other stuff I could be doing.”
“What? Oh, yes, do it. One less thing for me to worry about. And if you do manage to get my dress back, jump on a bus and bring it here straight away. All right?”
Which he took to mean that she wasn’t going to take his advice and go home. Ah well. He rang off, put on his trousers, shoes and a jacket, and made for the front door. At the last moment, he remembered the fancy pencil sharpener, which he had to give back, assuming he managed to find someone to give it back to. If not, of course, he could keep it. Lucky him.