“Nothing cooking back at the lab?” Her voice was gently teasing; there was no evidence of hard feelings regarding the way their previous acquaintance had drifted to its end.
“We only do the lawful stuff by day,” he told her. “Half the night too, most days. Difficult to find time for fun and games. The last civil service lab’s due to close next April—not cost-effective. Private contractors like me do all the statutory health and safety work these days, as well as all the forensic testing. Never been busier.”
“Health and safety work? Is that what you call it?”
It was more a veiled insult than a joke. He’d always offered products that were as safe and as healthy as he could contrive. He liked all his customers to stay fit and well—and happy too.
“Quality control is what I call it,” he said. “Making sure that the goods you buy at the supermarket, or over the pharmacist’s counter, are exactly what they’re supposed to be and as pure as scientific ingenuity can make them. It’s vital work in these corrupt times. There’s more money in faking designer drugs than there is in faking designer jeans or fine wines, and you know how paranoid people are about their food since last year’s pesticide plague. You look incredibly well, Jenny. I’d never have believed it. You must have kicked all your old habits.” He emphasized the word all very slightly.
“Every last one,” she said. “Where’s your car?”
“In the multi-storey. I never park illegally. Where do you want to go? Home?” He started walking again as he said it, pointing the way with a languid finger
“I guess.” She must have known that he was burning with curiosity, but she carefully didn’t say where home was. “Everything’s rosy with you, then?”
“Couldn’t be better,” he assured her, having no intention of telling her that some rival was taking a big bite out of his synthetics trade. “The revolution is bang on course. The great crusade continues.” He always took care to sound as if he wasn’t serious when he said things like that, but he was. He didn’t see himself as one more drug-peddler in the shark-infested soup; he really did believe that psychotropic chemistry would pave the way for the next step in human evolution. He’d tried to explain that to Jenny a dozen times and more, back in the old days.
“I know,” she said, perhaps implying that although she’d kicked the habits which had been destroying her she hadn’t given up on everything she bought on the street . . . or perhaps not.
“I hear you’re living with a laid-back creep,” he said, as they stepped into the lift that would take them up to level nine of the multi-storey. “Only comes out at night—some kind of vampire, maybe?”
She didn’t laugh. She didn’t even smile. In fact, she turned her head away, as if she didn’t want him to be able to read her reaction too accurately. As she moved her head the skin at the side of her neck stretched, and lifted an odd discoloration briefly into view above the collar of her neat black blouse. It looked like a love-bite, but Brewer only caught a momentary glimpse of it before she turned again and it disappeared.
“I’m with someone,” she admitted. “I’m not like I used to be, Bru. I learned to apply a little quality control of my own, just in time.”
This time the insult wasn’t even veiled.
“It’s okay,” Brewer said, uneasily. “I’m only curious, not jealous. We were never married, were we?”
“No,” she said, colorlessly. “We never were.”
When she got into the car—without pausing to admire it, although it certainly warranted a certain respect—she had to tell him where home was.
“Docklands?” he echoed, deliberately overdoing the contempt. “I thought even the yuppie dinosaurs had moved out of there. I suppose it’s handy for your old stamping grounds, though.”
“It’s quiet,” she said, as if that were explanation enough. Then she looked away, as if she wanted to punish him for wanting to hurt her feelings—but she didn’t try to get out of the car again, and she seemed perfectly relaxed as he zigzagged down to the barrier and out into the traffic.
He let the conversation lapse while he threaded his way through the crowded streets, pretending to concentrate hard but continually stealing sidelong glances at her at every junction. She gave him directions in an absurdly overabundant fashion, as if he couldn’t be trusted to find his way around the City Security Zone or through the road-works fringing the last of the Jubilee Line extension building sites.
The place to which Jenny eventually guided him was, indeed quiet—which wasn’t surprising, given that it was one of those maximum security buildings with a fiendishly complicated entry system and no ground-floor windows.
“Are you going to invite me in for a coffee?” he asked, as she got out. She hesitated, with her hand on the door handle, as if waiting for some extra inducement. Thinking that he understood, he reached under the seat and released his secret stash. “I can sweeten it for us,” he said.
“You’re crazy, keeping that stuff in your car,” she said. “Especially a thief-magnet like this.”
“We scientific geniuses have ways of thief-proofing our homes and vehicles,” he said, airily. “We don’t need that kind of hi-tech fortress.” He nodded at the armored entry-door with all its smart sensors.
She let go of the door handle without opening the door. “If you’re coming up for coffee,” she said, “you’d better put the car in the basement. And if you want it sweet, you can have all the sugar you need. Put that stuff back where it came from.”
He did as he was told. It would have suited him better if she’d been tempted, but he certainly wasn’t going to insist.
It was almost as difficult to get into the subterranean car park as it was to get through the building’s main door, and Jenny had to produce two different ID cards to open the doors of the lift which took them up to the apartments—all the way up, as it transpired. Jenny’s new man lived in the penthouse.
“The trouble with security,” Brewer observed, as they made their ascent, “is that it works both ways. If there were a fire, you’d never get out—and the fire brigade wouldn’t be able to get in to help you. Where I live it’s simple to get in and out, even though it’s not easy. My security systems are glorious in their subtlety.”
“Just like you,” she said, with telling sarcasm. Perhaps, he thought, she’d only invited him in to score a few points by showing him everything that she’d accomplished since he dumped her. On the other hand, living in a maximum-security love-nest with a guy that Simple Simon called a creep must have its downside. If she often went back to the Goat and Compasses to pass the time of day with whores whose beat she’d once shared she must be desperate for congenial company.
Brewer wasn’t surprised to find that Jenny’s boyfriend wasn’t home. He was, however, mildly surprised to discover what kind of place his home was. It wasn’t particularly plush, considering the rent one had to pay for that kind of situation and that kind of safety, and it was certainly no leftover yuppie’s style-trap. All the walls were lined with shelves and all the shelves were fully laden, ninety per cent with books and ten per cent with CDs: thousands of each. There was an alcove in the living-room fitted out as a workstation with a pair of widescreen PCs whose screensavers swirled different shades of blue and gray around one another in endless mirror-image sequences. Brewer took note of the laser printer and the idle fax machine, but they weren’t interesting enough to warrant close study. The glass in the broad window was heavily smoked; even though the sun was shining the room was distinctly dim.
It would have taken hours to make a detailed study of all the book titles, but a quick scan told him that they were all non-fiction, with no obvious specialism. The CDs were mostly audio or read-only, but there were at least fifty user-disks. If they weren’t just for show, that added up to an awful lot of gigabytes.
“Are you taking an Open University degree or something?” he asked, although he was painfully aware that it left much to be desired as a conversational gambit.
> “No,” she said, disappearing into the kitchen to put the kettle on. She had finally taken off her sunglasses, but he still hadn’t seen her eyes.
“Mind if I use your loo?” he asked, figuring that he would only get eaten away by curiosity if he didn’t.
“Into the hallway, second door on the right,” she answered, unsuspiciously.
The bathroom was ordinary enough. He turned the taps on while he opened the cabinet and began a scrupulous examination of everything stored there. His trained eye skated over the cosmetics and probed for something that didn’t look quite right, something revealing. He didn’t expect any illegals, or even anything particularly esoteric, but in his experience there were always clues in a bathroom cabinet for an expert eye to decode.
He grinned when he found three pill-bottles without proprietary or prescription labels lurking in a corner behind a flask of skin conditioner. When he shook the capsules out they didn’t have any indicative markings. He picked up three of each kind of capsule, slipped them into the inside pocket of his jacket and turned the taps off.
By the time he came out he’d triggered Jenny’s urge to go. When she locked the door behind her he moved swiftly into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, just on the off chance.
This time the anomaly leaped right out at him. Three non-standard hooks had been installed in the left-hand wall and the grille below them had had two bars removed so that three fluid-filled bags could be hung there. Brewer didn’t like to judge by appearances but the straw-colored fluid that filled the bags looked like blood plasma—the real thing, not the standard synthetic substitute. He just had time to squeeze a sample into one of the specimen bottles he always carried with him before moving swiftly back to the living room and taking up his coffee cup.
“Well,” he said to Jenny, as she came back into the room “you certainly landed on your feet. I’m glad. How did you kick the hard stuff—some kind of substitution program?” Her eyes were blue and radiant, exactly as he’d expected, and they had a curious haunted look that was very attractive—as if they had seen far more than they had ever hoped or expected to.
“Willpower,” she said, shortly. “You don’t seem to have taken too much harm from sampling your own products—but you were always a moderate man. I suppose you’ve got plenty of girlfriends, just as lovely and every bit as eager as I was?”
“No one special,” he said.
“No one is,” she retorted. He wondered if it was a philosophical remark or yet another insult, to be understood as including an unspoken to you.
“Anyhow,” he told her, truthfully, “I don’t know anyone as lovely as you. You used to be pretty, all right, but now . . . what’s your secret, Jenny? I bet those kids you were talking to in the pub would give a hell of a lot to know it.” He couldn’t help adding: “They must really hate you now.”
“It’s no secret, Bru,” she said. “It was just a matter of getting the shit out of my system. I’m okay now—absolutely clean. Nobody hates me. I don’t go back there to rub their noses in it. They know I only want to help.”
Saint Jennifer, reformed whore and would-be savior of fallen women? he was tempted to say. All he actually said was: “Nobody’s absolutely clean.” He held up the coffee cup as he said it, to remind her that caffeine was an upper of sorts. The coffee was too strong for his own taste, and he noticed that she was drinking hers black, without sweeteners. She’d always liked it white before, with one or even two.
She didn’t dignify his stupid correction with a reply.
“The light in here is distinctly dismal,” Brewer observed, feeling that he’d somehow gone five points down in the game and hadn’t a clue how to start scoring on his own account. “I don’t wonder you feel the need to get out in the sun once in a while, even if you have to go back to your old haunts in search of a bit of company. Don’t you have new friends now? Or is your boyfriend the solitary type, outside of bed?”
“You’d probably get on with him well enough,” Jenny told him, wryly. “You have lots of interests in common.”
Brewer let his eyes travel over the loaded bookshelves. “He probably has interests in common with everyone who has interests,” he remarked. “He’s obviously a very interested man. Is that why you’re at a loose end? Is he out pursuing his interests?”
“He doesn’t have a lot of free time at the moment.”
“I know the feeling,” Brewer said. “Exactly what interests do he and I have in common?”
“Biotech,” she said, shortly. After a pause, she added: “Quality control.” Now she was being deliberately enigmatic. Her blue eyes were looking up at him from beneath slightly lowered brows. She was fishing for a reaction. Brewer wondered whether she expected him to be flattered by the news that she’d picked out a man like himself once she’d been consumed by conformity and decency—if she had been consumed by decency and conformity, and wasn’t just a better class of whore than she’d been before.
“Are you happy?” he asked.
“What kind of question is that?”
“Just a question.”
“Do you think I was happy before?” she asked, with some slight asperity. “Do you think I was happy when I knew you?”
“You were sometimes,” he said. “I was the one who gave you the happy pills, remember. I make a good product. You were happy enough when you were under the influence. I just wondered if you were happy now that you don’t even take sweeteners in your caffeine-loaded coffee.”
“What you’re wondering,” she said, “is why I invited you up here, and why I agreed to let you drive me home. You’re wondering whether you might possibly have got lucky, now that screwing me would count as getting lucky instead of trivial commerce.”
“I never thought of it like that,” Brewer said, as equably as he could.
“No, you didn’t. For me, trading sex for the stuff you had to sell was cutting out the middleman, but you really did think that it didn’t count as whoring if no actual money changed hands. I never quite understood that.”
“I liked you,” he said, truthfully. “You were pretty, and sweet. Are you pissed because I never asked you to let me take you away from all the rest of it? I might have, if I’d thought you’d say yes—but you were the one who was just cutting out the middleman.”
“I’m a lot prettier now,” she said, “but not nearly so sweet. I’m not so sure you’d like me now, once you got to know me.” The haunted note was sounding in her voice now.
“I’m sure,” Brewer told her. He intended it as a compliment, but she didn’t seem to take it that way.
“Because nothing else counts except the looks,” she countered. “Because getting to know me better couldn’t possibly change your mind, which you made up the instant you saw me in the Goat and Compasses. What were you doing there, anyway? I haven’t seen you in there before—not for at least a year.”
“Looking up an old friend,” he told her. “You remember Simon, don’t you? Simple Simon.”
“Oh, him,” she said, as if the revelation explained everything.
“He’s no worse than the old friends you were looking up,” Brewer pointed out. “Maybe a cut above, depending how you compare things. Either way, he brought us together again. It really is good to see you, and I really am pleased that you got out of the gutter and started reaching for the stars. Sure you’re happy. Who wouldn’t be? So why did you let me drive you home instead of calling me a shit and kicking me in the balls? If I was just a paying customer before, why give me the time of day now? If you don’t want to pick up where we left off—and I assume you don’t—you must have some little itch of curiosity needling you. You must at least be interested to know how I am.”
“I already asked you how you were,” she pointed out.
“So what else do you want to know?”
“How you really are. As you say, there’s just a slight itch of nostalgic curiosity. Do you know the one thing about you I missed, when you stopped coming round because I
was too much of a wreck?”
It wouldn’t have been diplomatic to say the pills so Brewer said: “My acid wit?”
“Those little rhapsodies about the psychotropic revolution,” she said. “Not the acidly witty ones, the ones when you forgot yourself just a little, and actually half-meant what you were saying, about a world where biotechnology would save us from ourselves. It was all bullshit, of course, but it was nice that you believed in something, even if it wasn’t love or honesty or common decency. I was young then, of course. Too young. Do you still believe in it, just a little, or have you become just one more drug-peddler, dedicated to being rich and having a flash car with cunning anti-theft devices?”
“Oh, I still believe in it,” Brewer assured her. “I really and sincerely do. I only use the acid wit to cover up that fact. Always speak the truth in a sarcastic tone of voice, and no one will ever find you out.”
“No one?”
“Except you, of course. I let my guard down with you. I’m letting my guard down now, or hadn’t you noticed? It came crashing down the moment I saw you in the pub. I should be busy breaking Simple Simon’s legs, or persuading him that I might if he doesn’t shape up, but I never had the heart for that kind of crap, and the moment I saw you . . . well, here we are. This is a terrible cup of coffee. How can you drink it black like that?” He put the cup down and moved closer to her, pretending that he was just pointing at her coffee cup.
“Our tastes change as we mature,” she told him. She must have known that he wasn’t moving closer to point to her coffee cup, but just for a moment she hesitated about backing away. He took that as a green light, but when he reached out for her she froze. He’d gone too fast. “No, Bru,” she said. “It’s nothing like that. It really was just curiosity.”
He didn’t believe her. He took hold of her anyway, hoping that it might be the kind of stall that could still be overridden, although he knew that the odds were against him, for the time being. He tried to kiss her, but she wouldn’t be kissed. He held her more firmly, but when she stopped struggling it wasn’t surrender.
In the Footsteps of Dracula Page 48
