You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps (13 page)

CHAPTER SIX

Dimly glowing, Colin’s watch dial told him that it was a quarter past one in the morning. Without switching on the light, he levered himself out of bed, padded to the door and opened it a sliver. All dark, all quiet. He took a deep breath and started to climb the stairs. He reached out to guide and steady himself, and his fingertips brushed the bark of the tree. He’d know its texture anywhere: familiar without being the slightest bit reassuring, like everything in this house.

He’d realised, long before he got back to the office after his strange, serendipitous meeting with her in the tea-shop place, that asking Dad straight out what was going on would be at best counterproductive, and most likely traumatic. That left him a stark choice: accept passively and wait, or go snooping in the wee small hours. Normally, he’d have gone for the first option like a terrier after a rat. But normality seemed to be distinctly out of fashion these days, so here he was.

Colin had never done anything like this before, of course, so he didn’t actually know whether Dad kept his study door locked during the night. Wouldn’t put it past the old bugger; but on balance he decided that it’d be worth the risk of frustration. If the door was locked, he’d turn straight round and go back to bed. On balance, he hoped very much that he’d find it locked.

It wasn’t. The door handle had a singularly powerful spring - he had to use both hands to turn it. Once inside, he closed the door carefully before flipping the light switch.

The file was there on the desk, its flap open, a big, thick typewritten document lying flat with its first few sheets folded back. Apparently, snooping was as easy as the made-for-TV movies made it look. Colin lowered himself into the chair - he’d never sat in Dad’s study chair before, and he felt like a royal footman trying out the throne when nobody’s looking - and pulled the document towards him. He’d filed away a mental picture of where it had been before he touched it, and the page it was open at.

This agreement –

First time lucky. He started to read.

This agreement made the day of 2005 between (1) Hollingshead of 17 Mere View Drive Mortlake Surrey (hereinafter ‘the vendor’) and (2) the Prince, governors, directors, supreme council and diabolical parliament of the Powers of Darkness (a statutory corporation; hereinafter ‘the purchasers’) witnesses as follows: (1). By a letter of agreement dated the 19th March 2005, the vendor agreed to sell his soul (hereinafter ‘the soul’) to the purchasers in consideration of the sum of money, facilities, services and other matters detailed in the first schedule hereto (hereinafter ‘the purchase price’)

Fuck, Colin thought, and that was putting it mildly. He looked up and read it again. The Powers of Darkness; well. Not much scope for ambiguity there. Likewise the bit about souls. This couldn’t be happening. That’s it, he lied hopelessly to himself, I’m sleepwalking, and—

He read on. Maybe he was hoping he’d get to a clause that said, Fooled you, really it’s only a second mortgage on the house but we like to make these things as scary as possible. If so he was disappointed. As a piece of draughtsmanship it was laudably clear. No melodrama here. It was a plain, functional businesslike instrument for getting a job done, rather like a bullet or a hangman’s noose. A chunk of legal bumf for selling your soul to the Devil.

Oh boy. Much, much scarier than melodrama. Pentangles and goats’ blood and circles chalked on the floor he could’ve handled, because everybody knows that’s just Hollywood, and if the special effects look so convincing that you can’t begin to imagine how they’re done, it doesn’t matter. Deep down, you still know they’re just Mr Lucas’s brilliantly crafted illusions. A piece of paper calling itself This agreement and ending up with dotted lines for signing on is in a completely different league.

Yes, but—

Yes, but what? Either it wasn’t true, in which case everything would be fine, or it was true, and everything was going to be as bad as it could possibly get. No compromise, no negotiated settlement, odds-playing, damage limitation. Straight heads-or-tails call, no big deal, or the end of the universe.

Bloody hell—

No pun intended. Colin rummaged in the file, and found what he’d hoped to find: the covering letter she’d written to explain the fine print. No wonder Dad had wanted to go through the contract in detail, clause by clause and line by line. Just this once, it was possible to justify Dad’s habitual pickiness.

He read the letter. Basically, it said the same thing, but without the Latin salad. If the letter and the contract were to be believed, Dad was proposing to deliver his immortal soul to eternal damnation to save the company from going bust.

‘That’s the spirit,’ said a voice behind him.

Colin jumped like a teal rocketing off a pond. There was Dad in the doorway, in that old-fashioned tartan wool dressing gown that Mum had been threatening to chuck out for years. He wasn’t shouting. He wasn’t even doing the glare that flayed you alive. He just looked unhappy.

‘What?’ Colin said.

‘I said, that’s the spirit,’ Dad repeated. ‘Getting some work done instead of lounging in bed like a pig in shit. And there’s me been thinking you’re nothing but a waste of space.’

‘Dad,’ Colin said.

‘So.’ Dad perched on the edge of the desk, leaned over his shoulder to see how far he’d got. ‘What do you make of it, then?’

‘It’s a joke, right?’

Dad frowned slightly. ‘If that’s your idea of funny, you want to see someone about it.’

‘It’s for real, then.’

‘Yes, son, it’s for real.’

Not the answer he’d been wanting to hear. ‘Dad,’ he said, ‘are you completely off your head? You can’t do this. It’s—’ But they didn’t make words big enough to describe what it was, or if they did, they didn’t leave them lying around where losers like him could pick them up and play with them. ‘You can’t,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’

Dad laughed. ‘Don’t talk daft,’ he said. “Course I can; I checked it out with that thin bird. Perfectly straightforward transaction; and, like I told you, totally hundred-per-cent legal.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ Colin whispered.

But Dad simply shook his head. ‘Don’t vex your pretty little head about it,’ he said. ‘It’s the original win-win scenario. As in: if it’s all make-believe and bullshit, I’m no worse off. If not -well, you know what sort of a life I’ve led, the way I’ve had to treat a few people who’ve got under my feet. It’s not like I was ever likely to wind up in the other place.’ He grinned. ‘Don’t suppose I’d have liked it there, anyway,’ he went on, ‘sat around on a cloud all day long with a load of wimps and goody-goodies being nice to each other. And I don’t imagine it’ll be all that bad where I’m going. Compared to running a small manufacturing business under a Labour government, it’ll probably be as good as a holiday.’ He turned his head and stared into Colin’s eyes; Colin tried to look away, but couldn’t. ‘You weren’t worried about me, were you, son? I’m touched.’

‘Of course I—’ Colin shut up. No point in trying to talk to him. That had always been a mug’s game, ever since his first lisped ‘Dada’, a quarter of a century ago. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘You go ahead.’

‘I mean to,’ Dad replied. ‘Else I wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble. I never start something unless I plan on seeing it through.’

And that was true, God knew. ‘So all that stuff,’ Colin said, ‘about your grand restructuring plan, sacking the workers and taking on trainees—’

Dad laughed. A different timbre this time; genuine amusement. ‘You what?’

‘Isn’t that what you told me you were going to do?’

‘Trainees.’ Dad pursed his lips. ‘I guess you could call them that.’

‘I thought—’ Colin frowned. ‘I thought you’d signed up to one of these schemes where you take on a load of school-leavers for work experience, and the government pays their wages. It’s not that, though, is it?’

Dad shook his head. ‘Better than that,’ he said. ‘Much better. You wait and see.’

‘So you’re not going to tell me, then?’

‘Nah. Spoil the surprise. Besides, it’s got nothing to do with you. Strictly between me and—’ He scowled. ‘Me and Him,’ he said. ‘That’s the thing about business,’ he went on. ‘Sometimes it means you’ve got to get a bit intimate with people you don’t like terribly much. Can’t be helped, you do it for the company.’ He stood up, suddenly restless. ‘I don’t suppose I could ever make you understand. You always were a bit of a disappointment to me, you know. I don’t think you’ve ever really felt what it means, being responsible for the company. It’s like it’s a living thing, you know; you can’t help it, you’ve got to look after it, keep it going, protect it from all the bastards who want to kill it. I’ve fought them, all my life. In the 1980’s it was the Yanks, coming over here, buying up good little firms like us, stripping out the good stuff, selling off the rest. Then there were the unions, and the men from the ministry with their gadzillions of bloody forms and regulations, and then it was the Chinese and the East Europeans, dumping their tat over here at way below cost, just to starve us out. I’ve seen them all off, over the years, and you know what? We’re still here, and so help me, we’ll still be here in a hundred years. It’s all I care about, Colin, and I’m buggered if I’m going to let them win. That’d be so much worse than—’ He shrugged. ‘I guess eternal damnation is like anything else, in the eye of the beholder. Fire and brimstone’s something I can learn to put up with, it can’t be so bad. Losing—’ He shook his head. ‘No, I won’t stand for it. Not while there’s something I can do.’

Colin looked at him. If it had been anybody else, he might just have found it in himself to make the effort, to go on resisting - tear up the contract, scream, shout, plead, whatever. But Dad was the one person in the world who he knew would never, ever listen to him. Wonderful thing, family.

‘What about the others?’ he said feebly. ‘Uncle Phil and Uncle Chris. What’ve they got to say about it?’

‘Haven’t told them. Can’t be bothered. They’re useless, they’ll do as they’re told.’

‘Like me.’

‘Like you. It’s been my bad luck,’ Dad said, ‘to be surrounded all my life by weak, useless people. It’s made it so hard for me, you know? In the end, it’s always had to be me, me against the whole fucking universe. On the other hand,’ he added, with a violent gleam in his eye, ‘I’ve always won, haven’t I? Guess that says something about me.’

Guess it does, Colin thought. I guess it means I’ve lost him; and so what if he’s a vicious, bigoted old bully who’s screwed up my life for me, he’s still my Dad. At the back of his mind, a small voice made a suggestion. What you ought to do, said the small voice, is offer to take his place, sign the contract instead of him. It’d be an absolutely pointless, idiotic thing to do, obviously you’d regret it every second of every day for ever and ever, it’d be completely unjustifiable and just plain stupid, but on the other hand he’s your father, so maybe you should. Because it’s the right thing to do. You know it is.

Colin shut his eyes. There was a moment, maybe a second and a half, when the offer was capable of being made. It passed.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Well, thanks for filling me in. I’ll go back to bed now.’

‘You do that. Sweet dreams.’

So he went. And of course, he had no chance whatsoever of getting to sleep after what he’d heard; nevertheless, he woke up to the shriek of his alarm clock, tumbled out of bed and, just before his feet hit the carpet, he realised what he had to do.

Cassie and Mr Tanner’s mother had disliked each other from the very beginning. Mainly, this was because Mr Tanner’s mother, who amused herself by looking after the reception desk at 70 St Mary Axe, was a goblin, and there’s always been bad blood between goblins and humans. Not that Rosie Tanner was a bigot. She liked humans, or young human males at any rate (hence, among other equally regrettable occurrences, Dennis Tanner), with the result that she took a great deal of trouble over her appearance when she worked on the front desk; and, like a daytime soap star, she never wore the same outfit twice. Today, she’d chosen red hair, green eyes, high cheekbones and a creamy complexion with just a faint sprinkle of freckles.

There was also, of course, something of a clash of personalities. Cassie tried to avoid being judgemental, but nevertheless had reservations about anybody who transformed herself into a different superbimbo every day and chased after anything in trousers like a ferret down a rabbit hole. Rosie Tanner, by contrast, had long maintained that human women had simply lost the knack of having fun and were seriously out of touch with their inner orc.

Accordingly, she leered menacingly at Cassie when Cassie arrived late, and wrote something down on a piece of paper. In fact, the something was nothing more malicious than the answer to seven across, but Rosie dwelt with relish on the thought of That Thin Cow fretting herself all morning in case she’d been reported to the boss for deficient timekeeping. She was still smiling to herself over it when a young man - tall, solid, a bit gormless but who wants an intellectual? - turned up at the front desk asking if Ms Clay could spare him ten minutes.

Carelessly, Rosie Tanner left the smile in place and loaded as she turned to answer his enquiry. To her annoyance, it didn’t have the usual effect. Either the young man was smileproof (and she hadn’t met one yet) or he had something pretty substantial on his mind.

‘I’ll ring through and see,’ she said. ‘What name, please?’

She recognised him and of course the name was familiar, since the Hollingshead clan had been clients for yonks; now that she looked, he reminded her quite a bit of his great-grandfather, except that the relentless march of evolution had dispensed with the cute nose. Pity.

‘You’re in luck,’ she said, putting the phone down. ‘She can see you straight away. If you’d care to go through into the waiting room.’

He went. Rosie Tanner sighed, and fished a small mirror out of her desk drawer. What she saw in it gave her no pleasure - to her, one monkey-suit was much like another - but her proper sense of craftsmanlike pride was offended by the lack of reaction she’d had to what she knew was a perfectly well designed and executed flame-haired bombshell. Frowning, she made a few adjustments: the eyes a trifle bigger, a hint more fullness to the bottom lip, a few experiments with nose length and eyelash density. No, she’d got it more or less exactly right the first time. Maybe young Mr Hollingshead simply didn’t like girls. In which case, she reflected, Cassie Clay was welcome to him.