by Holt, Tom
How could they do that to me? Their own son ?
Not that it mattered. Evil, unspeakable bastards, like every other living thing on the planet. Four hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars; what did that come to in English money, anyhow? Paul shrugged. It sounded like a lot, but hadn’t he found all those hidden bauxite reserves for Mr Tanner, just by looking at photos of blank bits of desert? Maybe he’d already earned out what they’d paid for him; in which case, no wonder Countess Judy regarded him as nothing more than a Kentucky fried soul on legs, handily in reserve for the next time she needed a midnight snack.
Talking of which, he was feeling painfully weary. Just ten minutes’ zizz was all he wanted, and could it possibly matter now, if he slept and dreamed, and never woke up? Paul thought about the fairy tales that had scared him so much when he was just a kid: stories about young men who get lured into the fairy castle, and wake up to find it’s a hundred years later and all their family and friends have died. What was it Ricky had said about people dying in their sleep? Not that he was in any position to believe anything Ricky said, at that.
Ricky Wurmtoter. I trusted that bastard. I gave him the last of my coffee (and that posh stuff he bought me tastes horrible, too). I ought to be fucking angry about that. Depressing, really, that I’m not.
(If I went to Florida and killed them both, strangled them with my bare hands, I’d inherit the four and a quarter hundred thousand dollars, assuming they haven’t frittered it all away on garden makeovers and soft furnishings. That’d be no more than justice, because that way at least I’d get the money that paid for me. Not that money’s any good to me. Besides, killing them would mean having to be in the same room as them, and I don’t think I could face that. And I’d have to ask Mr Tanner for time off, and he probably only lets you take your holiday if you’re dead.)
Ricky Wurmtoter —
The door opened, and Ricky came in. Today he was well groomed and elegant, Pierce Brosnan modelling Armani; not a hair out of place, no scars or bruises. He had a large black box file tucked under his arm. It wasn’t often that Paul felt an urge to use the word ‘smarmy’; right now, though, he reckoned that it had evolved its slow, painful way from Anglo-Saxon through Middle English to its present meaning just for this very moment. Ricky smiled and said, ‘Hello.’
‘Hello,’ Paul replied.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Tired.’
‘Well, that’s understandable,’ Ricky said, with a viscosity of sympathy you could’ve poured on flapjacks. ‘No return visit, though?’
‘No.’
Ricky’s frown was so slight that most measuring devices wouldn’t have been finely enough calibrated to detect it. ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘I said, didn’t I, she wasn’t likely to try again right away. I guess that means we’ve got a little time—’
‘She explained about that,’ Paul said grimly. ‘Apparently, she found someone else to murder, so I’m off the hook for now. I expect you’re glad,’ he added. ‘After all, it’s your money too, isn’t it? Seventy thousand dollars.’
Ricky looked genuinely confused. ‘What about seventy thousand dollars?’
‘Six partners,’ Paul said. ‘Six into four hundred and twenty-five thousand is seventy thousand, five hundred.’
‘Eight-hundred and thirty-three, actually.’ Ricky pulled a sad face. ‘She told you about that, then.’
Calm, always calm. ‘Yes,’ Paul said. ‘She told me.’
‘Oh.’ He paused, then shrugged. ‘You wouldn’t care to consider the soccer transfer fee analogy, I suppose.’
‘Not really.’
‘Thought not. And you aren’t flattered, I guess.’
‘No.’
Ricky grinned. ‘You should be,’ he said. ‘And if it’s any consolation, it’s a good sign – for your career prospects.’ He put the file down on the desk, and sat in the chair; Sophie’s chair, of course. ‘Shows how highly the firm values you, and all that.’
‘I couldn’t give a flying—’
‘They only paid twenty-five thousand for me.’
Paul couldn’t remember what he was about to say, even though he was in the middle of saying it. Instead, he froze with his mouth open.
‘Mind you,’ Ricky went on, ‘that was when twenty-five K was worth something – we’re going back a few years, to when money was something you could melt down and turn into jewellery. Even so, with due allowance for inflation and the underlying trends in the industry as a whole, I was cheaper than you when I was your age. And I’m sure you know better than to go telling anybody what I just told you. It’s one of those deadly men’s-locker-room secrets that you don’t even share with your best friend.’
Paul was still staring, but his mouth was back on-line. ‘They own you too?’
‘Not they,’ Ricky said with a sad smile. ‘We. As you so astutely pointed out just now, I’m one of them, which means that I own a sixth of me. Well, a twelfth, if you take the bank’s share into account, but even a twelfth of yourself is better than—’ He shook his head. ‘For a twelfth of me, I’ve worked seven days a week, five hundred and forty-seven days a year—’
‘Five hundred and—?’
Ricky smiled. ‘In a magical environment, the term “time and a half“ takes on nuances you couldn’t even begin to imagine. The point is, I survived and I’m still here, dragons and vampires and animated skeletons and office politics notwithstanding. If I can do it, so can you. It’s tough, but this is a tough business. Besides,’ he added, scowling fiercely, ‘Judy was entirely out of line trying to cull you like that. Clause fifteen of the partnership agreement is absolutely clear: partners must not use the firm’s assets in such a way without formal consent at a properly constituted board meeting.’ He glanced at his watch and stood up. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘this time I think she may finally have gone just too far enough, if you see what I mean. In which case, we’ve got her. Thanks,’ he added graciously, ‘to you. Of course, it’d be better if we had something in the way of proof other than your word. Still, it’s a start.’
Paul shook his head. ‘That’s all you’re interested in, then. Booting her out of the partnership so that you can work your way up the letterhead. Is that it?’
Ricky nodded. ‘Partly. In fact, mostly. There’s also the small matter of her trying to have me killed for the past hundred and sixteen years, but I flatter myself that I’m big enough to overlook that.’ He paused, hand on the door handle. ‘Oh, one other thing,’ he said. ‘I guess I owe you an apology.’
Quite, Paul thought; and on the same scale of values, the attack on Pear Harbor was a bit uncalled for. ‘Really,’ he said.
‘Yup. Your Portable Door. You remember you lent it to me, just before I— Well, anyway, I’m afraid I haven’t got it any more. It was taken from me when I was in the dungeons. They gave me back the rest of my stuff when they let me go, but not that. Sorry,’ he added. ‘I’d replace it if I could, but it’s not really the sort of thing you can buy in Lakeland Plastics.’
It was some time after Ricky had gone that Paul noticed he’d left his box file on the desk. Paul picked it up, and a typed memo fluttered out from under the lid.
Paul,
Thanks for minding the fort for me while I was away. By and large you coped pretty well. However, work has been piling up rather, and I’d be grateful (since you’re still offi cially part of my team) if you’d deal with a few odds and ends for me – routine paperwork, mostly. I’ll drop JDCB a memo explaining that you’ll be working for me for the next few days, as she’s now your nominal head of department.
Ricky
– and in handwriting underneath:
PS I’d clean forgotten, but today’s my birthday; and in case nobody’s told you, we’ve got this corny old thing where on your birthday you buy cakes for everyone in the office. I know you like Uzbek, so yours is honey and nut baklava Tashkent style. Enjoy.
Sure enough, inside the box file, along with half a dozen fat brown
envelopes full of papers, was a white paper bag, partly transparent with oil and honey, inside which was some sort of sticky pastry thing with bits on top. Paul couldn’t see any reason why it should be poisoned, and he’d missed breakfast, so he ate it, but not in such a frame of mind as could in any way be construed as forgiveness. It tasted all right, though.
Work, Paul thought; well, why not? He opened the top envelope: a thick wad of forms, most of which he recognised – Form JX775, application for a special licence to cull banshees on a Site of Special Scientific Interest; Form JK981(B), application to remove a Tree Preservation Order from a rogue Ent; Form JG663, special dispensation to burn the corpse of an Undead in a smokeless-fuel zone. He sighed, reached for his pen, and yawned hugely.
So Ricky had lost the Portable Door. Pity; it had been an amusing toy, at least to begin with. Paul had been able to spend week-long lunch hours in exotic places and had still managed to catch up on his work before the front office opened again. At one point, he’d honestly believed that it had helped him attain True Love, in a confused, untidy sort of a way. Possibly it might have come in handy in his present ghastly dilemma; maybe he could’ve escaped from Countess Judy and the Fey through it, next time they came for him, but he doubted that. You had to be awake to use it, after all. On balance, it was no great loss. He’d learned before that the Door’s principal and fatal drawback was always what you took with you every time you stepped through it: namely, yourself. Paul shrugged and added it to the list of magical goodies that had recently passed briefly through his hands, along with the Sea Scout badge, the wyvern’s-brain stone, Uncle Ernie’s stash of bizarre stuff that Mr Tanner’s mum had whisked away from him on the pretext of making the world a safer place. Yeah, right. Come to think of it, he’d lost, given away or mislaid enough potentially devastating weapons to equip a small but very nasty army.
If he believed that it probably wasn’t a coincidence, would that make him certifiably paranoid? On balance, probably not.
Paul finished one lot of forms, and found another lot in the next envelope ( JJ409, application to renew a helmet of invisibility licence; JF006, statutory notification of intent to destroy a Ring of Power in an environmentally sensitive area). Filling them in gradually lulled him into the Accountancy Zone, that dazed no man’s land between sleep and waking in which nothing seems to matter except writing the answers to damn-fool questions into cramped little printed boxes. Even as his mind drifted away into the fog, he couldn’t help wondering if the Fey could operate in this disputed border country, and at some level he was relieved and pleased when the phone rang and jerked him out of it.
The phone ringing was something of a novelty in itself. ‘Hello?’ he mumbled.
‘Outside call for you.’ Paul recognised Mr Tanner’s mum’s voice, wondered vaguely why she was filling in on reception and remembered that Melze was the cashier now, even though Benny was presumably free too . . . ‘Did anybody tell you that you’re not supposed to take personal calls during office hours?’
‘What?’ Paul said, but the phone clicked in his ear, and then someone said, ‘Hello, Paul?’
‘Hello?’ He recognised the voice. Of course he recognised the bloody voice – he heard it nearly every day.
‘Paul, it’s me, Demelza Horrocks. Melze.’ Pause. ‘You don’t remember me.’
Huh? ‘Of course I remember you, Melze. What’s—?’
‘Oh, that’s all right.’ Giggle. ‘I know it’s a bit strange, me ringing you out of the blue like this after all these years, but last week I ran into Jenny Wheeler, and she said Neville Connelly had told her you were working at this place in the City, which sounded really sort of grand and impressive, so I couldn’t resist ringing you up and seeing how you were. How are you?’
‘Melze? Is that you?’
Pause. ‘Oh, very funny. Same old Paul. Anyhow, long time no see. Did you hear, I got married? That’s right. Well, you remember Damien Turnbull; his sister was going out with this bloke Sean, and then they broke up and I happened to run into him at a party, and—’
Pointless trying to listen, absorb information and have the world blow up all around you, all at the same time. Paul tuned out. It sounded like Melze. Fact was, it sounded a hell of a lot more like Melze than Melze did, and it was dropping all the right names, the people they’d been at school with, the friends of the friends of their friends. But Melze was only a staircase and a few yards of corridor away, so what was she doing ringing him long distance from the deep past?
‘Melze,’ he interrupted, ‘where are you living these days?’
‘Saffron Walden,’ she replied promptly. ‘Well, just after Kevin was born we decided it was time we got out of London, and then Sean got a transfer—’
‘Saffron Walden,’ Paul repeated. ‘Look, excuse me asking a very strange question, but what made you decide to call me? Right now, I mean.’
‘Didn’t I just tell you that? About running into Jenny Wheeler, who told me Neville Connelly had—’
‘Right now,’ Paul repeated firmly. ‘As opposed to last Friday, or tomorrow week. Did you . . .’ Battle-hardened and soul-callused as he’d become, he still cringed as he said it. ‘Did you have a dream about me?’
Pause. ‘You know, that’s absolutely amazing; yes, I did. Not a strange dream or one of those dreams, you just happened to be there in it, and it made me think, I wonder whatever happened to Paul Carpenter; and then I bumped into Jenny Wheeler in Superdrug, and she said Neville Connelly—’
‘That’s great, Melze,’ Paul said, ‘I’ll call you back. Bye.’
He sagged back in his chair and dropped the phone onto its cradle; then he glanced at his watch. Quarter past three – he’d worked through lunch, apparently. At that moment, Melze – must get out of that habit – the fake Melze would be at the Bank, paying in the cheques. Good, he thought, I should just about have time.
As Paul stood up, he felt strangely energised. Well, he thought, at least I’ve figured out what’s been going on around here. The fact that there’s nothing I can do about it is another matter entirely.
It was cold and slightly damp in the strongroom, just as it had been when Paul and Sophie had catalogued the contents, somewhere between three months and a thousand years ago. Much of the register was written in her spiky, difficult, little-girl handwriting, and Paul found that enormously distracting; bad, since he really did have to concentrate.
As he’d assumed, Countess Judy hadn’t written register entries for the wyvern’s third-eye stone she’d taken from him; nor had she simply shoved it onto the shelves where the catalogued items ended up. On the other hand, he was morally certain that she must’ve stashed it in here somewhere. Why he was so sure, he had no idea. Logically, she could just as easily have hidden it in her own room somewhere under an invisibility glamour, or logged it somewhere in the post-relativistic vastness of the closed-file store, or in any of the countless hiding places with which 70 St Mary Axe was undoubtedly riddled; or she could’ve gone for absolute maximum security and stuffed it down the front of her blouse, like a madam in a Western. Logic, though, hadn’t exactly been on his side ever since he first walked through the door of this hell-hole. Could a Vulcan survive on the premises for more than a fifth of a second, Paul wondered, before his green brain boiled out through his pointy ears? Almost certainly not. The thing was in here somewhere, he knew it. But where?
When searching for proverbial needles in proverbial haystacks, there’s always the robust approach: set fire to the hay, then sift through the ashes with a metal detector. Such an approach wasn’t likely to endear Paul to his employers terribly much, but he wasn’t really too fussed about that. If they chose to fire him for it, yippee; but they weren’t going to, because that would mean kissing goodbye to four hundred and twenty-five thousand bucks. In any event, he placed a slightly higher value on his life than on his job, and pissing off Mr Tanner would be fun. He closed the strongroom door behind him, and went to reception.
‘So
rry to bother you,’ he told the ice-blue-eyed Swedish blonde bombshell behind the front desk, ‘but I need a favour.’
Mr Tanner’s mum scowled at him. ‘You’ve got a nerve,’ she said.
‘Several. Well?’
She shrugged. ‘What can I do for you?’ she said.
‘I need to borrow some of your friends and relations for a few minutes.’
‘Don’t be bloody stupid,’ Mr Tanner’s mum replied, and she was about to remind Paul of the fundamental deal whereby the goblins stayed strictly out of sight during office hours in return for the run (scamper, slither, crawl, waddle) of the place once everybody had gone home, when he shushed her. ‘It’s an emergency,’ he pointed out. ‘I need at least two dozen goblins for maybe ten minutes. Is that such a big deal?’
If she hesitated, it was probably only for show. ‘What for?’ she said warily.
‘Research,’ Paul replied.
‘Fair enough. Where do you want them?’
Ten minutes proved to be a wild overestimate; Mr Tanner’s mum’s sisters, cousins and aunts were through the strongroom in four, leaving behind a snowstorm of floating papers, shredded envelopes and viciously abused index cards. Sorting and clearing up was going to be the sort of job that’d have all the king’s horses and all the king’s men sulking in their barracks screaming for their shop stewards; not, Paul thought smugly as he cradled his matchbox in his arms, my problem.
‘Is that the lot?’ asked the boss goblin.
‘Yes, thanks.’
‘Oh. Pity. We could do upstairs for you, no worries. Five minutes—’
Paul shook his head. ‘That’ll be fine,’ he said.
