by Tom Holt
Alan racked his brains for some useful contribution he could make. “Have you noticed if anything’s gone missing?” he asked. “Not anything big necessarily. That’s what stalkers do, I gather. They just like to take things. Underwear, mostly, but—”
“Shut up, Alan; you’re not helping,” Rachel said with a shiver. “And I’m not in the habit of keeping my knickers in my desk drawer, thank you so much.” She frowned thoughtfully. “Actually,” she said, “stuff has been disappearing lately, but it’s the sort of stuff you don’t think twice about. You know – staples and envelopes, rubber bands, that sort of thing.”
“That’s just being in an office,” Alan pointed out.
“Maybe. Also,” she added, “someone keeps making me cups of coffee.”
“Ah.” That sounded a bit more like it. “It didn’t taste funny, did it?”
She shook her head. “I assumed it was Pauline,” she replied.
“Pauline never makes me coffee.”
“Well, no,” Rachel replied. “She’s there to answer the phone and do photocopying, not run a buffet service. I just thought …” She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe we ought to involve the police.”
The look on Alan’s face told her what he thought of that idea. What is it about men and not making a fuss till it’s too late? Too late, she thought, and the implications weren’t very nice. “Well, we’ve got to tell someone,” she said firmly. “After all, if there’s a weirdo wandering about the office, we can’t just ignore it and hope it stops. Something’ll have to be done about it.”
Alan nodded slowly. “You’re quite right,” he said. “Who do you suggest we go to?”
She gave him a stern look. “Well,” she said, “I’ve just gone to you, because you’re my head of department. Far be it from me…”
“All right,” he said wearily. “I guess I’ll have to talk to Mr Huos about it.”
There was more than a hint of fear in his voice. Pathetic, she thought. Chicken. “Also,” she said, “I want you to come with me this evening when I go round to the flat directly under Kevin’s. I want to see if that man I told you about really lives there.”
Oh what fun. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Alan said quickly. “I mean, what if…?”
“Fine. I’ll call the police then.”
She’d trapped him neatly, caught him between his terror of physical confrontation and his morbid dread of getting mixed up in trouble-with-the-police. She was interested, from a purely psychological and sociological point of view, to see which dilemma-horn he’d ultimately choose to impale himself on.
“Tonight’s a bad time for me,” he said. “I’ve got this contract I really need to get finished.”
She was almost proud of him; it was a valiant attempt. “I’ll ring the police then.”
“No.”
(And for a moment she remembered what she’d once seen in him, before they got engaged and love duly atrophied. It takes character to be able to decide instinctively which of two very scary things you’re most afraid of.)
“Then you’ll come with me.”
“Yes, all right.”
She beamed at him, partly to reward obedience, partly from satisfaction that she’d already trained him so well. “Excellent,” she said. “I’ll meet you downstairs at half past six. And afterwards,” she conceded sweetly, “you can buy me dinner.”
On her way back to her office she reflected on the life choice she’d made when she induced him to propose, and decided that it was still valid. True, Alan did look a bit like he’d been shrunk in the wash and inexpertly dried over a radiator. On the other hand, he did what he was told. Five years of marriage and she’d have him chasing after sticks and fetching the daily paper in his mouth.
Back to her office, where she quickly churned through some routine trivia and had a refreshingly bracing run-in with a solicitor from Derby who phoned up to upbraid her for not sending him a copy of some inspection certificate or other. The stupid man swore blind he’d spoken to her only the day before yesterday and she’d promised faithfully the certificate would be in the DX that night.
“I don’t think so,” she’d replied sweetly. “In fact, I’m quite sure of it. What time did you call?”
“Just after eleven,” the Derby man replied. “Got a note of it here, as a matter of fact. Phoned BRHD 11:05 re cert; promised in post asap. So…”
“Not possible,” she cooed back at him. “You see, I’m looking at my diary for the day before yesterday, and it’s reminding me that I was in a meeting from ten to 11:45. So, I don’t know who you were talking to, but it most certainly wasn’t me.”
“Look, does it matter?” The Derby man sounded thoroughly rattled, which was how it should be. “I need that certificate as soon as possible, or I won’t be able to complete on schedule.”
“No problem,” she trilled back at him. “I’ll make sure it’s in tonight’s DX.” Slight pause then, “Anything else I can help you with, or was that all?”
When the stupid man had rung off, with a muffled snorting noise that she felt entirely justified in taking as an admission of defeat, she reached across her desk for her diary and flicked forward a page or two, just to remind herself what she’d be doing over the next few days. She was about to close the book when an entry caught her eye and made her frown. It was only Lutterworth 10:30, and she knew Mr Lutterworth was an accountant from Splice Watershed – vaguely, she remembered making the appointment – but the entry wasn’t in her handwriting, nor was it a hand she recognised.
Someone had been writing in her diary. Another point for Alan to raise with Mr Huos. Better look and see if there had been any further violations. Sure enough, she found another one, for next Monday: 9:30 Stevens assessment.
Her eyebrows shot up like oil prices. Stevens. Yes, nominally she had an appointment to see Alan to discuss the quality of her work over the past three months. It was a regular fixture; in fact, it had been in the course of the assessment before last that she’d finally choked a proposal of marriage out of him. But she’d have written Alan, and she’d have left out the demeaning assessment, and that most definitely wasn’t her writing.
Nor, she realised, was it the same hand that had written Lutterworth 10:30 on the previous page. Two people scribbling in her diary, one of them demonstrably creepy. She scowled horribly and went through the diary page by page, first the future, then the past. When she’d finished, she pushed the diary off the desk onto the floor as if it was crawling with spiders and instinctively wiped her hands on her sleeves.
Not just two entries in two different hands; there were dozens of them. Well, five at least. Furthermore (and this was the truly spooky bit) there were entries for appointments and meetings which she could clearly remember having made and written in herself, but which appeared on the diary page in handwriting most decidedly not her own, while of her own entries (she could practically see herself writing them down) there was no sign, not even Tipp-Ex splodges or the marks of rubbed-out pencil. Finally, to add insult to gross weirdness with intent to cause alarm and despondency, in the useful-phone-numbers section at the back of the diary, each of the interloping hands had written, in a different colour ink, the extraordinary line, Which came first, the or the ?
Mr Huos woke from a dream of acorn sandwiches and turnip sorbet to find he’d fallen asleep at his desk. He shook himself, rubbed his shoulder against the edge of the desk and reached for the phone.
“Mandy.”
“Yes, Mr Huos?”
“Has Mr Gogerty called yet?”
“No, Mr Huos.”
“Any messages at all?”
“Lots,” Mandy replied succinctly. “Shall I bring them in?”
He sighed. “Might as well.”
“Lots” was no exaggeration. Restored to life, the Post-It notes alone would have been enough for a medium-sized Scots pine. Then there were the printed-out e-mails and the internal memos. Everybody in the world, it seemed, wanted to talk to him.
Actually, not talk to. Shout at. One example at random: the site manager in charge of the new Far From the Madding Crowd development (a hundred and ninety luxury bungalows on the northern edge of Norton St Edgar) had turned up for work at nine sharp to find that the site wasn’t there any more. Hares lolloped and roe deer grazed on unsullied pasture where yesterday he’d had a dozen JCBs gouging out footings, and there was no sign at all that he and his men had ever been there. An explanation, please, and were they to forget it or start all over again? Meanwhile, the building inspector who’d come out to sign off on the Paradise Regained development was a bit put out because there weren’t any buildings for him to inspect – rather a surprise, since he’d been there a month earlier and they were just putting the roofs on. Had Mr Huos ordered the demolition of the properties in question, and if so was he aware that planning consent was required before any such demolition could take place? Those, and a dozen or so more like them, were bad enough. What made Mr Huos wince, however, was the sheaf of memos from the legal department – eleven of them, all asking the same question about the same property.
Oh hell, he thought.
He picked up the phone. “Get Gogerty on his mobile,” he barked. “Now.”
His own stupid fault, he was perfectly willing to concede, for trying to be clever. One scam at a time, his inner voice had yelled at him, but no, he hadn’t been able to resist the lure of the extra refinement, the tweak too far. Now everything was unravelling on him simultaneously, and he shuddered to think where it would end, unless something could be done about it. Unfortunately, right now the only person in the world who could sort it out for him was Gogerty, who when last spoken to had burbled to him about promising leads and intriguing potential lines of enquiry – translated into English, diddly squat. He couldn’t in all conscience criticise Gogerty on that score. The job he’d been set was, after all, monstrously difficult, quite likely impossible: looking for a phase-shifting needle in a polydimensional haystack, blindfold and wearing wicketkeepers’ gloves. The more he thought about it, in fact, the more depressing it became. What if Gogerty failed, and the whole horrible contrivance came apart at the seams? That was the trouble with using technology (for want of a better word) when you had no idea how it actually worked. Absolutely fine when it’s running smoothly, but as soon as the little red lights go on and the burning smell gets too rank to ignore, you’re in the hands of repair men and technicians, and if they don’t know how to fix it…
Brrr. “Mr Gogerty for you.”
“Put him on.”
Mr Gogerty sounded hassled, which was as unpromising as it was uncharacteristic. “Nothing so far,” he reported. “I’m following up an angle that might lead somewhere, but it’ll take time.”
“That’s a bit awkward,” Mr Huos said. “The fact is, I’m under a certain amount of pressure right now. I really do need this business sorted out as soon as possible.” He realised how that must have sounded, and added, “I know you’re doing your best. Do you need any more resources? Money?”
“No,” Mr Gogerty said. “It’s nothing like that. It’s just that I can’t be in two places at once.”
Been there, Mr Huos thought, done that. As for the other way round, that was what had caused all this mess to begin with. “Ah well,” he said, “I thought I’d ask, just in case. I’m holding you up. I’ll let you get on. Call me as soon as you’ve got anything at all.”
No hope there then. That really only left him one possible course of action, and it was something he’d wanted desperately not to have to do. He sent for Alan Stevens.
“It’s like this,” he explained. “I need to lay off staff in your department. It’s the economic climate. Just not enough work to justify current staffing levels.”
Mr Stevens stared at him. Respectfully, of course, a bit like a senior courtier staring at George III on one of his bad days. “Oh,” he said. “I was sort of under the impression we were rushed off our feet.”
“Not really,” Mr Huos said. “Probably it just feels like it from where you’re sitting. The view from my desk is that we need to slim down our operation a bit. In fact,” he went on, “I’m closing the whole department. From now on, we’ll be outsourcing our legal work. That,” he added quickly, “doesn’t include you, of course.” The agonised look on Mr Stevens’ face thinned a bit, but he still looked very sad indeed, like a spaniel whose bone has just been stolen by an Alsatian. “I’ll need you to, um –” (If he was outsourcing everything, what could he possibly need Mr Stevens for?) “– to coordinate the legal side of the business and, um, supervise things. If that’s all right with you, of course.”
Mr Stevens nodded so rapidly his head was a blur. “Of course,” he said, and any worries Mr Huos may have had about Mr Stevens resigning in solidarity evaporated like water in a furnace. “I’m sure I’ll be up to the extra responsibility.”
You had to admire a man like that, someone with the cool and the vision to turn a narrow escape from the dustbin into promotion. The sort of man you’d want at your side, if only so you could make sure he didn’t sneak up behind you with an ice pick. “We’ll discuss a new package to cover your, um, career restructuring.” A pay rise, in other words. Well, why not? For some reason thirty pieces of silver was the sum that sprang immediately to mind. “Well,” he went on with an effort, “I’d better let you get on. You’ve got a fairly miserable day ahead of you.”
“Have I?”
Mr Huos didn’t answer, whereupon it occurred to Mr Stevens that telling the legal department it had just got the sack was to be part of his extra responsibilities. He took it better than Mr Huos had expected, in that he didn’t audibly whimper. Instead, he stood frozen stiff for about ten seconds, then turned slowly and wordlessly and left the room.
Mr Huos slopped back into his chair, like cheese melting into toast. Nasty business and he felt truly rotten about it, but at least that was one small part of the mess dealt with, for now. The greater part was out of his hands. Only Mr Gogerty could save him now.
Pam and Trevor McPherson liked living in Norton St Edgar. It was their sort of place. As they stood on their drive at the top of the hill on a Sunday morning, they could look down on an apparently endless vista of salmon-pink bungalow roofs and neatly cut lawns, on an army of neighbours walking dogs, weeding borders and washing cars. If only, they sometimes thought, the whole world could be like Norton. It was the perfect place to retire to, an island of calm, order, homogeneity and sanity in a universe of wild men and madmen. The only thing it lacked, Mr McPherson had been known to say, was a moat and a drawbridge.
Today, however, they had to leave Norton, just for a little while, to drive into Malvern and stock up at Tesco. Under the warm mid-morning sun they got into the car, waved cheerfully at their neighbours, who waved cheerfully back, and set off down Attractive Drive towards what passed for a main road. At the T-junction they turned left, past the massive oak tree, past the track that led to Priory Farm, and found themselves back at the top of the hill, outside their house.
Trevor McPherson frowned, checked his mirror, indicated and pulled over. His wife looked at him.
“Didn’t we just…”
He shrugged. “Can’t have,” he replied, and drove on.
Down Attractive Drive (Mrs Clayton was pruning her roses; Mr Burgoyne was painting his windowsills), at the junction turn left, past the beautiful old oak tree in which Charles II was supposed to have hidden when escaping from the Roundheads, though he’d have had a job, since it was only two hundred years old, past the track that led to Priory Farm, over a slight rise, back in front of their house.
His wife scowled at him. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m not doing anything,” he barked. “We just—”
“I thought we did.”
He shook his head. “We can’t have.”
He drove on. Down Attractive Drive (Mrs Clayton too wrapped up in her roses to look up; Mr Burgoyne frowning slightly as he watch
ed them go past), at the end of the road turn left, past the tree, past the farm drive, over the little bump…
“This is daft,” Mr McPherson said.
His wife was getting edgy, he could tell. “I don’t like this,” she said. “Let’s go back in the house.”
The same thought had crossed his mind, but, since she’d suggested it, honour dictated that he couldn’t. “Don’t be silly,” he said. “We’re going shopping, all right?”
He drove on. Down Attractive Drive (Mrs Clayton, straightening up, secateurs in hand, waved cheerily, but they didn’t wave back), at the junction turn left, past the tree, past the farm, over the bump and, “Stop the car,” said Mrs McPherson, “I want to get out.”
“Shut up,” Mr McPherson reasoned with her. “All right,” he said grimly and drove on, down Attractive Drive, at the junction turn right –
“I thought we were going to Tesco,” said Mrs McPherson.
– through the village, past the church, past the pub, past the site where they were building the new houses, round the sharpish left-hand bend, and there they were again, opposite their front door.
“That does it,” Mrs McPherson said, reaching for the door handle. “I’m getting out.”
“Stay where you are,” Mr McPherson commanded, as she slammed the door behind her and marched up to the front door. Well, fine. “Stupid woman,” he muttered under his breath, and let the clutch in.
This time, he performed a flawless three-point turn and drove up the hill instead of down, over the little bump, out onto the narrow single-track road that meandered its way between tall hedges to the neighbouring village of Bawton. For the first minute his heart was in his mouth, but the road carried on being the road, the familiar landmarks (gateways, overhanging trees, a derelict barn) were all where they were supposed to be, and he gradually allowed himself to unclench a little. He was actually pleased when he met a tractor coming the other way and, having crammed himself into the hedge to let it crawl by, he wound down his window and hailed the driver.