by Tom Holt
They promised it’d be ready by lunchtime, and the man looked ever so relieved. On his way out he bumped into a woman with red wine stains on a cashmere coat, who in turn was replaced by a man who needed his suit for a funeral, and so it went on. Busy, needed, providing a service; neither of them had a chance to draw breath before the ten-thirty lull.
There was always a lull at ten thirty: twenty minutes, just long enough to put the kettle on, drink a cup of tea and munch a ginger nut from the self-refilling jar in the kitchen, before the inevitable customer came in at ten to eleven. At ten forty-five both of them remembered that they’d been discussing something just before the first customer of the day arrived, but neither of them could recall what it was.
As they passed the toilet, on their way back from the kitchen to the shop, they heard a few notes of plainsong, a clank, a muffled scream, the distinctive tzing of a sword being drawn from a scabbard. “At it again,” she muttered, and he nodded. Then the shop bell rang.
Later, around three in the afternoon, he remembered what they’d been talking about earlier: that man in the paper, what was his name? But a lot of customers came in between three and six, and drove the whole thing clean out of his mind.
The pub was called the Slug & Lettuce, and things went downhill from there. The Blue Remembered Hills team consisted of: Alan Stevens (captain); Terry Lopez from Sales, a tall, fat, pink young man who bumped into tables; Gordon Smith from Accounts, short, bald, with his own set of molybdenum carbide Pro-Flite match darts; Joe Vetterli from Planning, who talked for hours to anybody who’d stay still long enough, but nobody could ever remember anything he said; and Polly Mayer from Legal, standing on the edge of the group wishing she was somewhere else. The Thames Water team turned up wearing matching darts shirts with their logo on the fronts and their names on the backs in sequins. They were all called Paul. One of them wore glasses.
She’d been a bit apprehensive beforehand about being the only female. Needn’t have worried about that. Far more daunting was being the only human being. She allowed herself to be furnished with a half of lager (she loathed beer in any form) and tried to think herself a cloaking device.
Alan Stevens (captain) was slaughtered in the opening game, still vainly popping away at double top by the time his opponent hit double bull first dart to win. Since Mr Stevens was their star player, that more or less set the tone for the evening. The Pauls were very good-natured and sportsmanlike about it all, mooing encouragingly whenever a BRHD player actually managed to hit the board, murmuring condolingly every time a dart ended up sticking in the wall or a tabletop. One of them, presumably the designated first-aider, was on the scene immediately when Terry Lopez’s ricochet hit the Australian barman on the ear. Mr Vetterli, given free rein to network, was broadcasting on all channels, and one of the Pauls actually appeared to be listening. Time passed in that unique blur you only get with quintessential boredom, and then it was her turn to play.
Her opponent was the Paul with glasses. He speared double sixteen with deadly precision and started pounding the twenty like an artillery barrage. At this point Team BRHD was down four–nil with just her game left to play; after which, as far as she could judge, she was free to feign a headache and go home. The sensible thing, therefore, would be to lose as quickly and efficiently as possible. The last thing she wanted to do was incur the lasting hatred of her teammates by winning.
She was using the pub darts (blunt, tatty, mix-and-match flights), and as she stepped up to the line she called to mind just how long it had actually been since she’d played this stupid game, and how rarely she’d won at it. Dad always beat her, of course, and Don had spent most of his university years in the union bar studying biochemistry and ballistics. It was all, she couldn’t help thinking, a bit like Life.
At which thought a hitherto unsuspected caged lion began to growl softly inside her head. Of course it didn’t matter, and of course she was expected to lose, and of course it’d be easier and less trouble to herself and others if she didn’t even bother to try. Instead, she felt a cold fury seeping through her veins. Suddenly, all her enemies were subsumed into the dartboard, and the dart in her hand was a spear. If she listened very carefully, she wondered, would she be able to hear double eighteen scream when she transfixed it? She could just fancy that.
It didn’t. Instead there was a split second of pure silence, followed by bemused but sincere expressions of delight from the Pauls, which only made her bloodlust stronger. I’ll give them something to cheer about, she thought grimly, and drove the remaining two darts barrel-deep into treble twenty.
There then followed the sort of performance which, recalled in leisurely tranquillity, makes your colon pucker with embarrassment. Mercifully it didn’t last long, and then Paul-with-glasses was burbling well-done-thanks-for-the-game, and Mr Smith with the molybdenum carbide darts was giving her a scowl that would have stripped chrome plating, and Mr Vetterli had stopped trying to network and was staring at her as though she’d just grown a tail, and Terry Lopez was back from the bar with a tray of glasses, asking, “Well, who won that one?” and not getting a reply, and she asked herself, What the hell did you want to go and do that for? At which point the caged lion inside her head made a sort of mewing noise and tried to hide behind her subconscious. She muttered something even she didn’t catch, fled to the ladies’ and stayed there for five minutes, until the dripping of a tap drove her out again.
By the time she got back, Team BRHD and the Pauls had oil-and-watered into two separate knots of listless not-talking standers. She couldn’t face her lot, so she walked up to the Pauls and smiled.
Cracking game, they said; where did she learn to play like that? So she embarked on the authorised biography – brought up in a pub, used to practise with her brother after school before the bar opened, leading on to general observations about growing up on licensed premises. She’d been through it often enough to be able to recite it without thinking, and it went down well with the Pauls, who asked all the usual questions, laughed at the purportedly funny bits, world without end, amen. She was, in fact, making quite a hit with Thames Water’s finest, which was the professed purpose of the exercise, while Captain Stevens and his platoon stood sullenly by and scowled at the back of her head. Just goes to show. If there’s one thing the British can never forgive, it’s winning.
She rounded off the pub soliloquy with the usual peroration and looked for a lull in the conversation through which she could make her escape. Instead, Paul-with-glasses said, “I’ve got an aunt in Norton St Edgar.”
Where? Oh, yes, right. “Great,” she said feebly.
Paul-with-glasses had that distinctive soft-Lancashire accent that always made her think of Gardeners’ Question Time. “She lives just down the street from your houses. She says they’re very nice.”
“Thank you,” she said.
He accepted her thanks with a graceful dip of the head. “Apparently, everybody in the village was really worried when your company put in for planning,” he went on. “Thought it’d spoil the neighbourhood, all that sort of stuff. But no, she reckons they’re tucked in so unobtrusively you wouldn’t know they’re there.”
“Glad to hear it,” she said. And then a little bell rang in the secret depths of her mind where the cowardly lion had been a short while earlier, and she asked, “Which lot are we talking about?”
Puzzled face. “Excuse me?”
“Well,” she said, “we’ve built a lot of developments round Norton St Edgar. In fact, by now the place is probably about the size of Liverpool. Which estate was your aunt talking about?”
He looked at her. “There’s just the one,” he said.
“Sorry?”
“Just the one lot of houses your people built,” he said. “About a dozen of them, down the bottom of the village, between the church and the pub. Very tasteful, my aunt says they are, all faced with the local stone and blended in nicely.”
For five seconds or thereabouts her mouth w
asn’t working. Then she said, “Norton St Edgar, Worcestershire?”
“Yes, that’s right. Twelve minutes from Malvern on the main road. We stopped off there year before last on our way back from the Lake District.”
Not long after that she played the headache card and escaped into the cool night rain. It was no more than a gentle plant-mister drizzle, the kind that you hardly register until you’re soaked to the skin. She wouldn’t have noticed if a big cedarwood boat loaded down with pairs of animals had gone drifting past her, swept along on a tide of floodwater.
Only one development in Norton St Edgar, tucked in unobtrusively between the pub and the church. You wouldn’t know it was there. She tried to remember how many brand new houses in Norton St Edgar she personally had conveyed to their new owners. Definitely more than fifty, maybe as many as fifty-five. She’d only been there a relatively short time; before that, her predecessor (There is something very odd going on in this office, she’d written in teeny-tiny letters so small nobody would notice them) must have dealt with scores, hundreds of transactions, all of them in or around Norton St Edgar. The company employed six full-time conveyancers apart from herself; that must mean thousands of houses.
Hang on, she thought, I’ve seen a map. Ordnance Survey, definitive as the Pope. Norton St Edgar fitted onto just one sheet. It was tiny.
She went home, took off her dress and stuffed it in the laundry basket and went to bed. For an hour she lay in the dark staring at the ceiling, until the soothing whale song of the central heating system lulled her to sleep. Then she had a dream.
In her dream she was back in the office. On her desk was a stack of files, sales of houses in Norton St Edgar. Beside the stack was an unsolicited cup of coffee, which some kind, anonymous person had made for her. She opened a file and looked at it to see what needed doing. Ah yes, she remembered this one. 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, then realised that the work had already been done for her.
Just a moment, she thought.
She opened her desk diary. Today’s date. Pencilled in at the bottom of the page, Darts match. She stared at the scrawl, her handwriting, for a moment or so, then turned the page, picked up a red pen and wrote HELP in big capital letters. Then the alarm went, and she woke up.
B&J Removals turned off the motorway at Junction 15, followed the A road to Malvern, turned on the satnav and pottered along quiet lanes until the snooty bitch told them they’d arrived at their destination. Maybe she knew them too well; she’d brought them to a pub.
Since it was still only a quarter to nine in the morning, satnav’s kindness was misplaced. The pub stood at the end of a quaint, tourist-board-approved village street. Opposite, flaked paintwork on a board identified the church as St Edgar’s.
“Bloody thing,” said B. “We got a map?”
In the passenger seat J shook his head. “Fourteen Attractive Close, Norton St Edgar,” he said. “That’s all it says here.”
B craned his neck and looked round. The street they were in, like Clint Eastwood in his signature role, had no name. “We’d better find someone to ask,” he said.
Easier said than done. The street was deserted. B and J walked a few yards, stopped, turned round, walked back the other way. They were beginning to wonder if something was wrong.
“You sure this is the place?” J said.
His scepticism was perfectly reasonable in the circumstances. There was one street, comprising a dozen thatched, half-timbered cottages, the pub and the church. Beyond that was a drive with a hand-painted board saying Home Farm. Beyond that, mere bucolic wilderness.
“Must be the wrong village,” B said firmly. They walked on a few yards further, until they came to a road sign, NORTON ST EDGAR, and below that, in smaller letters, “Please drive carefully.”
“That’s odd,” J said.
“Maybe there’s two villages with the same name,” B suggested. “You get that sometimes.”
So they went back to the van and dug the road atlas out from under the empty sandwich cartons in the passenger-side footwell. Just the one Norton St Edgar.
“We need to find someone to ask,” J said.
At that precise moment a middle-aged woman in a scarf came out of one of the cottages, with a dog on a lead. B and J looked at each other. Now, their body language said, we’re going to get somewhere.
B wasn’t good with the public, so it was J who asked the question, at which the woman frowned. “Never heard of it.”
J repeated the address. The woman looked blank. “There’s just the one street,” she said. “This one. It’s called The Street. Sorry.”
The dog was pulling at its lead, anxious to be off. She let it drag her away, leaving B and J standing still and decidedly thoughtful.
B looked at his watch. “It’s gone nine,” he said. “Phone the estate agents.”
J went back to the van, got the piece of paper and prodded buttons on his phone. “Where?” said the voice he was eventually connected with.
J was getting tired of saying it. “Fourteen Attractive Close, Norton St Edgar.”
Pause. “What close?”
“Attractive.”
“Please hold.”
J had sharp ears. He could hear muttering in the background, then the voice came back. “Sorry,” it said, “that’s not one of ours. You’re sure you’ve got the right office?”
“Yes,” J said, keeping his temper. “It’s here on the top of the letter.”
“Please hold.”
This time they played music at him. Probably not a good sign.
“Well?” B asked.
“I’m holding.”
“You sure you rang the right place?”
“Don’t you start.”
Long wait; J feared for his battery. Then the voice came back. “Sorry,” it said, “there’s nothing like that on our books. What was the developer’s name again?”
“Blue Remembered Hills Developments.”
“Blue what?”
No such company on their books. No record of any properties in Norton St Edgar. She was the manager. Click.
They were both very quiet for a while. Then B said, “All right, ring the customer.”
J shrugged, found the number and rang it. No reply. Well, there wouldn’t be, not on the landline. Try the mobile.
“Hello,” J said, “this is Jim, B & J Removals. Listen, we’re at the address, but there doesn’t seem to be any—”
“Who is this?” said the woman at the other end of the line.
“B & J Removals,” J said, rather desperately. “We’re moving your stuff for you.”
“Stuff ?”
“All your furniture and stuff. From your house. We were over your place last night—”
“No, you weren’t.”
“Yes, we were.” There was panic in his voice. “We came over and loaded up, so we could get up here early. You specifically asked—”
“But we’re not moving.”
“We’ve got all your stuff in our van.”
“No, you haven’t. It’s here. I’m looking at it.”
“Listen—”
Click.
J looked at B. “Did you…”
B nodded. He had that empty look.
“We went over there,” J said, “last night.”
“That’s right,” B said. “And loaded up. There was that big old sideboard.”
“That’s it,” J replied eagerly. “And that crummy wardrobe that wouldn’t go through the door. And that bloody tropical fish tank with all the wires out the back.”
A thin filament of hope stretched between them, tense and brittle. They went back to the van, unlocked the padlock on the up-and-over door and slid it up. They looked inside.
The van was empty.
CHAPTER FIVE
Ever since Don was a small child, he’d had this recurring ni
ghtmare. It was Christmas. The pub was shut for the day and the whole family was gathered round the tree. Mum and Dad were handing out presents, some for Polly and some for him. Polly’s presents all had little labels on – from Mum and Dad, from Aunt Jane with love, the usual – and when she opened them they were all in their proper as-seen-on-TV packaging, with the maker’s name prominently displayed on the carton. But his presents had no labels, and as soon as he ripped them out of their glossy wrapping he could tell there was something wrong with them. No packaging. No plastic blister packs, nothing to say that batteries weren’t included. They were old-fashioned, crude. They looked (he could feel tears of disappointment and anger burning in the corners of his eyes) home-made, or if not actually that, then not made in a proper factory, by machines.
“Well, of course not,” said his mother. “They’re made by Santa’s elves.”
“At the North Pole,” added his father.
“Don’t be stupid,” he snapped peevishly. “There’s no elves. The North Pole’s nothing but snow and ice, I saw it on David Attenborough. Santa’s not real.”
Mum and Dad looked at each other nervously. Then Dad said, “Well, actually…”
Something in his tone of voice, perhaps. Or maybe it was loads of tiny snippets of evidence, rejected over the years by his conscious mind but gradually building up in his subconscious till they reached an unsustainable level. Anyhow, he knew. Everybody – his sister, the other kids at school, even the teachers – had been deliberately lying to him all these years. There genuinely was a Father Christmas. Santa Claus existed.
At that point in his dream he’d burst into hysterical sobs and wake up, falling sharply and reassuringly into a world where E equalled MC², and where to every action there was an equal and opposite reaction. Even though he knew at that moment that it had all been a ghastly nightmare, even so the relief, the glorious realisation that it wasn’t true, always filled him with joyous gratitude, together with a renewed determination not to have rich food and black coffee after nine o’clock at night.