You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps (40 page)

The thin-faced girl smiled. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘My apologies -1 overestimated you. I’d assumed that by now you’d have worked out for yourself the identity of the new owner of the firm.’

‘Can’t say as I have,’ Cassie growled. ‘So maybe you should just come right out with it and tell me.’

‘Of course,’ the thin-faced girl said. ‘It’s me.’

Push off, Benny had advised him, and Colin had been brought up to defer to his elders and betters. He pushed.

Finding his way out of the maze of corridors, staircases and landings was an intriguing mental challenge, for which he wasn’t in the mood. He’d just about given up hope of ever seeing the sun again when he found someone to ask.

‘Excuse me,’ Colin said, ‘I’m lost. I’m trying to get to the front office.’

The stranger, a thin-faced girl with mousy hair tucked behind her ears, pointed down the corridor he’d just emerged from. ‘Down there and follow your nose,’ she said. ‘You can’t miss it.’

‘Oh,’ Colin said. ‘I was just there, and it didn’t—’

‘It does now.’

Deferring to his youngers and inferiors hadn’t been part of his upbringing, so presumably he’d learned to do that all by himself. ‘Thanks,’ he said, and went back down the corridor.

A moment or so later, he pushed through a fire door and found himself in reception. The first thing he saw was the back of her head. Then she turned round.

‘Oh,’ said Fam. ‘It’s you.’

Nice to be reassured about something. ‘Yes,’ Colin said; then he remembered something that had slipped his mind during the search. ‘Have you decided yet?’

‘About what?’

‘About coming to Vanuatu with me.’

Fam seemed to hesitate; and Colin also remembered that he’d asked her that yesterday afternoon, promising to return and hear her decision in about twenty minutes. ‘You still want me to?’ she said.

‘More than anything.’

She frowned. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

Colin took a deep breath. ‘Maybe we should talk about it.’

‘Maybe.’ The phone on Fam’s desk rang, but she didn’t seem to have heard it.

‘But not here,’ Colin added quickly. ‘Come on. We can get a cup of tea or something.’

He wasn’t quite sure why he’d said that; partly because he had bad memories about tea-drinking in this part of London, partly because it sounded so middle-aged. Nevertheless; she looked at him for a moment, then said, ‘All right.’

‘Good.’

‘I’d better ring Christine and tell her I’m just popping out for a minute.’

‘No.’ Colin took a step closer. ‘Don’t do that. Just come with me.’

‘All right.’

They didn’t say much to each other as they walked down St Mary Axe. She asked him where he’d got to the previous evening; he replied that it was a long story and he didn’t want to talk about it; she said, ‘Oh all right, then,’ or something to that effect. They turned a corner, and there was a tea shop.

It wasn’t the sort of place you’d expect to see in the City of London. It was nestled in a tiny space between the feet of two soaring glass towers, like a hedgehog between the hooves of a giraffe. It had a bow-fronted window with chintz curtains, and the little tables each had a white lace tablecloth and a vase of wild primroses. On second thoughts, it was a work of genius, the perfect catnip to attract hassled City types. In spite of that, it was empty.

The menu came in a red plastic leatherette folder with faded gold lettering on the front cover. ‘What would you like?’ Colin asked, rather formally, as they sat down. ‘The home-made sponge sounds good.’

‘Just tea, thanks,’ Fam said, perching gingerly on the edge of her chair. ‘What about you?’

For some reason he couldn’t fathom, he really fancied a hot chocolate with whipped cream and a macaroon. ‘Just tea for me as well,’ he said. A waitress decloaked off their port bow and took the order; neither of them looked at her, and she went away.

‘Right, then,’ Colin said, inappropriately brisk. ‘Vanuatu. What about it?’

Fam looked at him; it felt like straight through him. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said.

Not what he wanted to hear. ‘Yes’ would’ve been very nice, ‘No’ he could’ve lived with, but ‘Not sure’ just meant it was all going to keep going on and on, and he wasn’t sure he could stand that.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘if you don’t like the idea of Vanuatu, there’s all sorts of other places that’d do just as well. Anchorage. Tahiti. Ulan Bator. Sutton-bloody-Coldfield. Anywhere, so long as it’s a long way from here and we’re together.’

Fam was still looking at him. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘it’s not the destination.’

‘Oh.’

Pause. The faceless waitress brought two cups of tea and a sugar bowl; then an interspacial void opened and swallowed her up as though she’d never existed. ‘So what is it you’re unsure about?’

‘Whether I love you or not.’

At least it was a straight answer; no mucking about decrypting tortuous verbal defences. ‘You’re not sure,’ Colin repeated.

Fam nodded. ‘At least,’ she said, ‘I know how I feel, and I do love you—’ She stopped, as though she’d just noticed that some part of her clothing had come undone. Then she sort of shrugged; cat out of bag, too late to go back on it now. ‘I do love you,’ she repeated. ‘What I’m not sure about is whether you love me.’

That, as far as Colin was concerned, was the daftest thing he’d ever heard. ‘Of course I bloody love you,’ he snapped. ‘I wouldn’t be asking you to run away with me if I didn’t.’

She shook her head. ‘You think you do,’ she replied. ‘But it’s only five minutes ago you were having a thing with that Cassie woman.’

Oh, for crying out— ‘A thing?’

‘I’m not stupid, you know,’ Fam said angrily. ‘I heard you together, in the office that time. And yesterday; you came to see her. You said you’d be coming right back to hear what I’d decided, and then, when the office closed, you were still in there with her. What did you do, Colin? Go back to her place?’

‘No. ‘

‘All right, so where were you then?’ She was scowling at him. ‘I had your Dad on the phone this morning, one minute past nine, soon as the switchboard came on. He said you’d been out all night, hadn’t come home, wanted to know where you were. Where were you?’

Colin hesitated. ‘It’s a bit awkward,’ he said.

‘Right.’

‘No, not like that. I was stuck in there all night. They locked the door and I couldn’t get out till the doors opened.’

That look again. ‘You weren’t in reception when we opened up this morning.’

Colin felt twitchy, from his feet upwards. ‘I found an office to crash out in and went to sleep. I didn’t wake up till after nine.’

Fam sighed. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said. ‘You know what I think? I think you went home with her. But it didn’t work, or something went wrong; she’s ditched you, so you’re trying me again. The rebound, isn’t that what it’s called? Well, that’s not good enough for me, Colin.’

‘But—’

Her face had gone cold and hard as stone. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘You promise me faithfully that you don’t love that Cassie Clay woman and I’ll believe you. Just say it: “I promise.” Well, go on.’

Colin opened his mouth, but nothing happened. It wasn’t that he couldn’t tell a lie; he’d been telling them all his life, though according to most people he didn’t tell them very well. It wasn’t even that he couldn’t lie to her, because he knew he could, if he had to. But… maybe it was some side effect of the love potion, or possibly even hanging out with Oscar and the lads; or maybe he simply couldn’t tell her a lie about that. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I do love her. A bit,’ he added quickly, ‘but really, it’s not like that at all, it’s this stupid fucking love potion that someone made me drink, and—’

Fam had stood up. ‘Goodbye, Colin,’ she said, and started to walk out of the tea shop.

The solution hit him like a bus. All he had to do was jump up, grab her by the arm, frogmarch her back to 70 St Mary Axe, find the Connie woman or that short man, and make them explain to her that the love philtre really did exist and that someone was playing silly buggers with his life and his happiness. He pressed his feet to the ground, ready to stand up.

Yeow!

That’s the bad thing about pins and needles: no matter how much you want to stand up, you can’t. Simply not possible. No blood supply to the feet, therefore no motor control. The most you can hope to achieve is toppling over and crashing to the ground in a heap. Colin tried that, but apparently it was a really acute case, and he couldn’t move at all. Instead, he watched the back of Fam’s head all the way from his table to the door.

And then she’d gone.

She’d left.

There’s probably a mathematical formula to calculate the exact point at which it’s no longer possible to set things right, when it’s definitively too late. It’s only ever a matter of seconds either way - if I can get to my feet and hobble to the door before I can count to five, I’ve got a fair chance of catching her before she’s swallowed up in the crowd of pedestrians; three, four, five and that’s that, my life has changed, irreversibly, for ever.

Colin sank back into his chair. Well, no need to hurry now, I can take my time. Got all the time in the world, now that I’ve lost my one true love, everything that made the world worth putting up with. Might as well wait until my feet are completely better before finding a shop that sells rope and hanging myself.

The waitress came and gave him the bill. Inexplicably, she was almost cheerful now; was it possible that she hadn’t figured out what was happening here? Could anybody be that unperceptive and still remember to breathe? He grunted and picked up the scrap of paper. He looked at it, trying to remember what the hell it referred to. Tea. Tea, for crying out loud; what possible good was tea to anybody at a time like this?

Colin knew that he was supposed to pull himself together or something, but he doubted that the bits of him still had enough tensile strength to withstand the procedure. So he looked at the bill instead; two teas, Ł1.20 each. Total Ł13.75, service not included.

He dropped the bill back onto the plate it had arrived on, loathsome and unambiguous as the head of John the Baptist. The only possible explanation for its being there was that the world simply didn’t give a damn. Nobody cared; they probably hadn’t even noticed. No worldwide appeals for help, no emergency relief operations or days of national mourning, no rock concerts in Hyde Park in aid of the victims. Instead, there was just him, with a broken heart and a demand for thirteen pounds seventy-five pence.

Colin frowned.

Two teas at Ł1.20. Total Ł1.75.

Not that it mattered remotely; but Ł1.20 times two doesn’t come to Ł1.75, not even in leap year with Gordon Brown doing the arithmetic. It was absolutely irrelevant to anything at all, but the bastards were trying to overcharge him. No, scrub that, they were charging him too little. A consolation prize, maybe, or perhaps today they were running their Broken Hearts special offer; between 11 a.m. and 2.30 p.m., a twenty per cent discount for anybody whose one true love walks out on them during the course of the meal.

Because maths wasn’t his strongest suit, Colin ran through the figures one more time. Fine. Either the laws of mathematics had broken down entirely, or else he was sixty-five pence ahead of the game. Meanwhile—

Shock, probably, freezing relays in his mental database. A lovers’ quarrel in a tea shop, over a ludicrous misunderstanding; she departs in tears; he fails to follow because his foot’s gone to sleep. Either the scriptwriters on Tragedy have no shame about recycling old ideas, or all this had happened before.

Funkhausen’s Loop.

But that’s … His foot was better now, much better, and Colin jumped up as though he’d sat on an electric fence. He scrabbled in his wallet, yanked out a five-pound note, and scampered to the door.

CHAPTER EIQHTEEN

Surprise, surprise; there was nobody on reception at 70 St Mary Axe when Colin burst in through the door a few minutes after leaving the tea shop. He stopped in front of the desk and looked round for a bell to ring.

‘Can I help you?’

He looked up and saw the thin-faced girl he’d met earlier in the corridors. If she recognised him, she gave no sign of it.

‘I need to see Connie …’ He frowned; couldn’t remember her other name. ‘Connie,’ he repeated. ‘Followed by something complicated beginning with an S. It’s urgent.’

She looked at him as though he was swimming in a Petri dish. ‘If you’ll just take a seat, Mr Hollingshead, I’ll tell her that you’re here.’

Impressed and bewildered, Colin sat down and hid from her look behind an elderly copy of Homes & Gardens until she’d gone away. He’d just turned the page after skipping a tedious-looking article about hollyhocks when an advert in the Classified section caught his eye: Confused? Bewildered? Disappointed in love and wondering what the hell’s going on? You must be Colin Hollingshead.

Colin frowned, and looked at the date on the front cover. March 1976, at which time he hadn’t been born; in which case, the advert must’ve been referring to his father. He turned back, and read —

No, you fool; not him, you. Talking of which, Benny says your horrible father is in the building right now. Visit Connie Schwartz-Alberich NOW in her comfortable, well-appointed second-floor office (just refer to the easy-to-follow sketch map below for directions) and within minutes everything will be crystal clear. But hurry - offer ends in ten minutes.

Fine, Colin thought. The sketch map - he wouldn’t have known it was a map unless the advert had said so, it looked a bit like a wiring diagram, with a hint of a map of the London Underground as it might have looked if drawn by M. C. Escher -was crammed in at the bottom of the page. A cross at one end was labelled You Are Here; an arrow roughly in the middle pointed to Connie’s Room. Holding the magazine, he stood up and wandered over to the fire door. Nobody about. Well, why not?

‘What the hell kept you?’ Connie demanded when he finally walked into her office.

‘Your stupid map,’ Colin answered. ‘In the end I had to ask somebody. Short, beefy bloke with a beard like a doormat.’

‘What? Oh, that’ll have been Cas Suslowicz - he’s all right. Come in, sit down, before anybody sees you.’