Doughnut

by Tom Holt

  Another file. Oh God, she thought, I remember this one: 14 Amazing Road, the bloody awkward one with the drainage easement, the one she kept putting off because it needed thinking about.

  Like a lion tamer armed with a fly whisk and a deckchair, she faced the problem and decided that today she’d be brave. It was, after all, only a matter of draughtsmanship, of finding the right combination of words to transfer a slab of territory subject to a few conditions. It couldn’t bite her or bash her over the head. True, it could make her lose her job, but so could lots of other things. The world is a dangerous place, after all. She opened the file and found the lethal document.

  She stared at it, then blinked and stared again. And thought, for the first time in years, of Terry Duckett.

  A tall ash-blond young man with a face like a pig, Terry had made salaried partner by the time he was thirty by timing his annual holiday with micromillimetre-perfect precision. Every difficult thing, everything he’d screwed up on or didn’t know how to do, he left to moulder quietly on the file, with a bare minimum of weeding and watering to ensure it didn’t actually die or turn septic, but with an eye constantly fixed on the clock and the calendar, and then he’d book his two weeks in Ibiza at exactly the point when every toxic chicken in his filing cabinet was due to come home to roost simultaneously. Result: while he was away, his co-workers charged with minding the store had to cope with a year’s backlog of poison, and Terry came back to his desk looking suitably tanned and dissipated with a squeaky-clean slate and a 100-per-cent record. Needless to say, everybody knew how he did it, but the sheer skill involved commanded unqualified respect and admiration. This man, the partners agreed, was born to delegate. We need him on the team.

  She dismissed Terry Duckett from her mind and checked the front cover of the file, just to be sure. Then she reread the perfectly, actually quite brilliantly worded drainage easement in the draft contract for 14 Amazing Road and said quietly to herself, I didn’t do that.

  The obvious temptation was to shrug, grin and get on with something else. There was, after all, an element of natural justice about it all. Why, after all, should shoemakers have all the luck? Why shouldn’t conveyancers also have kindly elves to help out with the daily chores? It was payback for all the times she’d been landed with Terry Duckett’s files. It was compensation for half a dozen cups of undrunk coffee. It was the perverse inexplicability of the universe doing something nice for a change. Don’t knock it. Put out a saucer of bread and milk, be grateful and move on.

  My mind’s going, she thought. In six months I’ll be in a home, with battleship-grey paintwork and the TV on all the time in the day room. Maybe (she shuddered at the thought) it was me all along: I drank the coffee and then forgot I’d done it.

  Thoughts don’t come much scarier than that, and the mild euphoria of the conveyancing high was gone for good. It was of course absolutely impossible that a healthy twenty-seven-year-old like her should be suffering from some ghastly brain-eating disease. She was annoyed with herself simply for letting the thought amble across her mind. She wasn’t like that, not one of those sad people who spend their time wishing all manner of unspeakable ailments on themselves and treating medical dictionaries like mail order catalogues. On the contrary. She was so relentlessly healthy it was practically unfair. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a day off work for a cold or a sore throat or a sniffle.

  The door opened. She looked up and was annoyed to see a short, turkey-throated young man standing in the doorway. Alan Stevens, her head of department. She found the desiccated shell of a smile and put it on.

  “I thought you ought to know,” said Mr Stevens gravely. “We have a darts team.”

  His tone of voice went far beyond gravity. To get the full impression, imagine that what he’d actually said was, “Houston, we have a darts team.” Clearly there had to be more to it than that, and she waited patiently until he added, “We play in the London and Middlesex Young Lawyers’ League. Fourth division.”

  She nodded. “How many divisions…?”

  “Four. It’s a social activity,” he explained. “We feel it fosters a sense of community and teamwork, and there are first-rate opportunities for networking and establishing contacts within the profession.” He paused for a very long time, then added, “Can you play darts?”

  “My parents run a pub,” she replied. “Yes,” she translated. “Actually, I’m pretty good.”

  “Ah.” Mr Stevens frowned, giving the impression that dart-throwing ability wasn’t his main selection criterion. “Only,” he went on, “we’re playing Thames Water tomorrow evening, and Leo Fineman’s got an important meeting at half seven, so he’s had to drop out.”

  “Ah. Tomorrow evening.”

  “You’re busy, I’m sorry.” The speed with which Mr Stevens spoke annoyed the hell out of her for some reason. If he was disappointed, it was in the same way that water is dry. Silly, she thought; if he didn’t want her on the team, why’d he asked her in the first place? Answer: because she’d admitted to being good at the game, and it probably wouldn’t go down well, from a networking and contact-establishing viewpoint, if Thames Water’s star player got beaten by a girl. Not on my watch, his little piggy eyes were saying. In which case…

  “Nothing I can’t cancel,” she said, perfectly truthfully as it happened. “Tell me where and when, and I’ll be there.”

  Mr Stevens was wearing a wounded look, as though he’d just been tricked into doing something ghastly by someone he believed he could trust. “That’s great,” he said. “We’ll meet up here at seven and go on together.”

  He left, looking very sad, and about thirty seconds after the door closed behind him she felt the another-fine-mess reaction that she knew so well. Idiot, she told herself. You could have lied. You could even have told the truth. But no. Instead, you volunteer to join the office darts team, just because an annoying man annoyed you. Must stop doing things like that.

  She sighed. The world would be an OK sort of place if it wasn’t for people. It was just as well, she thought, that she’d taken her I-don’t-really-want-to-be-here party dress in to be cleaned the day before yesterday. It was the only garment she possessed which was anything like suitable for such an occasion. The thought of going to an office darts match in an article of clothing she actually liked was rather more than she could bear.

  (And then she thought, Yes, but it’s taken your mind off that other business, hasn’t it? And now you’ve got over the panic you somehow contrived to whisk yourself up into, you don’t really believe it any more. See? All for the best, really.)

  The hell with it, she thought, and went to the kitchen for another coffee. She took it back to her office and put it down on her desk, where she could keep an eye on it while she was working. Then, after about five minutes, she deliberately got up and left the room.

  In the corridor she ran into the boss. The great man himself, not a spokesman or a representative, not a lookalike hired to foil kidnappers. She knew it was him because his picture was everywhere: framed on walls, smiling gleaming-toothed from brochure covers and in-house newsletters. Actually meeting him was faintly surreal. You’re supposed to be flat, what are you doing in three dimensions? Also, he wasn’t smiling, Mr Huos was like the Mona Lisa and the Cheshire Cat. He was the smile.

  She tried to slip past, but her personal invisibility field wasn’t working. He noticed her. Worse, he spoke.

  “Polly Mayer?”

  Oh shit, she thought. “Yes, that’s me.”

  “Ah, right. I was just coming to see you.”

  “Me?”

  Slight frown. “Yes,” he said. “Got a minute?”

  This from the man who owned her daytimes. “Yes, of course. Um, come into my office.”

  Of course, it was his office really. Rumour had it that BRHD actually owned the freehold to this vast, centrally located castle of commerce. If true, it was a staggering display of reckless indulgence. She opened the door for him,
but he didn’t go in. There was an awkward pause while she wondered what the matter was.

  “After you,” he said.

  She went in but didn’t sit down. She couldn’t figure out which chair to sit in. Normally, of course, she’d sit on the far side of the desk, in her chair, because it was her chair, in her room. But you couldn’t very well expect the owner, master of all he surveyed, to park his bum in the visitor’s chair (small, plastic, stacking) while she luxuriated in foam-backed swiveldom. It’d be like Captain Kirk taking the ops station while Chekov sat in the centre seat.

  Get a grip, she ordered herself. “Please,” she heard herself say, “sit down.”

  Mr Huos sat on the visitor’s chair and smiled at her. Normality at least partially restored.

  “Um,” she said, perching on her chair (not sitting back and stretching the spring, just in case it broke), “what can I do for you?”

  It turned out to be nothing more than routine enquiries about the progress of half a dozen ordinary, everyday sales. As she answered the questions, he nodded, frowning slightly. He looked ever so slightly worried, which scared the life out of her, but when the interrogation was over, he smiled again, thanked her politely and stood up as if to go.

  “How are you settling in, by the way?” he asked.

  If she’d been a cat, her ears would’ve been right back. She knew that question, or at least she knew the way in which he’d asked it. The Columbo technique: make ’em think they’ve got away with it and you’re going, then at the last moment turn round and hit them with the real question, the one you can’t answer without giving the game away.

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Splendid.” He frowned again. “No problems, then.”

  “No.”

  He nodded. “All the files in good order?”

  She had to replay that a couple of times in her mind before she figured out what it meant. “Fine,” she said.

  “That’s good. Only,” he went on, and the frown deepened, “the girl who was here before you left in a bit of a hurry. I was afraid she might have left you with a bit of a mess.”

  “No, not at all. Everything’s…” She ran out of words and did a goldfish impression.

  BY TOM HOLT

  Expecting Someone Taller

  Who’s Afraid of Beowulf?

  Flying Dutch

  Ye Gods!

  Overtime

  Here Comes the Sun

  Grailblazers

  Faust Among Equals

  Odds and Gods

  Djinn Rummy

  My Hero

  Paint Your Dragon

  Open Sesame

  Wish You Were Here

  Only Human

  Snow White and the Seven Samurai

  Valhalla

  Nothing But Blue Skies

  Falling Sideways

  Little People

  The Portable Door

  In Your Dreams

  Earth, Air, Fire and Custard

  You Don’t Have to Be Evil to Work Here, But It Helps

  Someone Like Me

  Barking

  The Better Mousetrap

  May Contain Traces of Magic

  Blonde Bombshell

  Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sausages

  Doughnut

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  Contents

  Welcome

  Dedication

  Part One: In The Beginning Was The Misprint

  Part Two: Message In A Bottle

  Part Three: Somewhere Over The Doughnut

  Part Four: Doughnut Go Gentle Into That Good Night

  Part Five: One Empty San Miguel Bottle To Bring Them All And In The Darkness Bind Them

  Extras

  Meet the Author

  A Preview of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sausages

  By Tom Holt

  Newsletters

  Copyright

  Copyright

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2012 by One Reluctant Lemming Company Ltd.

  Excerpt from Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sausages copyright © 2011 by One Reluctant Lemming Company Ltd.

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First e-book edition: March 2013

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  ISBN 978-0-316-22610-3