You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps (29 page)

‘She left?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

Another smile. If ever they got around to inventing the smileproof vest, a smile like that would present a very substantial challenge. ‘I don’t know, do I? I’m just a temp.’

‘A what?’

‘Temp. Temporary receptionist. There was an ad in the local paper, and I answered it.’

Which was a lie, of course. Fam had been there that morning; unless, of course, she’d given in her notice immediately after Colin had stood her up, and Dad had phoned in the ad as soon as she’d crossed the threshold on her way out. Dates, copy deadlines: he tried to do the mental arithmetic, but he couldn’t concentrate. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Look, I need to talk to her about something. Did she leave a number or anything like that?’

Beautiful Rosie shrugged; her perfectly straight shoulder-length auburn hair bobbed slightly, like the most beautiful maggot any fish had ever seen squirming on a hook. Complete waste of effort. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I suppose Mr Hollingshead senior might know. Why don’t you ask him?’

No point answering that. ‘All right,’ Colin said, ‘give me the phone book, I’ll look in that.’

Rosie got the book for him. Her nails were blood-red, perfectly almond-shaped and implausibly long. He grabbed the book and started turning the pages.

Shouldn’t be difficult, surely. Her Dad’s initial, he remembered, was E. He rifled pages till he got to Williams.

He had no bother at all finding E. Williams in the book. There was a whole page of them, two full columns in tiny type; and, by some bizarre coincidence, all of them appeared to live in Mortlake. He sighed, closed the book and slid it back across the desk at her.

‘What’s the matter?’ Rosie said.

‘Nothing.’ Colin was about to slouch off when he hesitated. Something about the way she’d looked at him; or rather, something about the very corner of her eye.

‘Do I know you from somewhere?’ he asked.

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you. Where was your last job?’

A very slight frown. A stunningly lovely frown, sure, but a frown, as opposed to a smile. ‘Oh, up in the City. Packed it in because I couldn’t be bothered with the commuting.’

‘Specially now that they’ve closed the station.’

‘That’s right, yes.’

Colin looked at Rosie again. Quite definitely he’d never seen her before in his life. On the other hand, he knew exactly where he’d seen her last. ‘Your last job,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t an outfit called J. W. Wells, was it? Seventy St Mary Axe.’

She looked as though he’d just slapped her or something. ‘As a matter of fact, yes, it was,’ she said. ‘Fancy you knowing that.’

‘Yes,’ Colin said. ‘Fancy.’

‘Actually,’ she went on, ‘that’s sort of why I took this job. You see, I remembered the name, what with you being clients of JWW and all; so when I saw your ad in the paper, I thought, there’s a funny thing. It felt like it was - I don’t know, sort of meant, if you know what I mean.’

‘Yes,’ Colin grunted. ‘I get the general idea.’

‘So, anyway,’ Rosie went on. ‘Here I am. I think I’ll enjoy working here, after JWW. It was always so hectic there - you know, phone always ringing, clients coming in without an appointment, all stressy. This looks like it’ll be a nice change of pace.’

‘Sure,’ Colin said. ‘Nothing ever happens here.’

She looked at him. ‘Listen,’ she said - it was a sort of stern cooing, like a turtle-dove demanding to see the manager. ‘I’m sorry about your friend leaving, but there’s no point getting all tense with me about it, is there? So let’s just start again and see if we can’t be pleasant. Right?’

If Colin had been a cat, he’d have had his ears flat to the sides of his skull by now. ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘Quite right. Welcome to Hollingshead and Farren, Rosie. Great to have you on board.’

‘Thanks.’ She smiled once more, but he saw it coming in plenty of time, and it whistled past him like a cannon ball. ‘Oh, I clean forgot. Oscar said, soon as you got in, could you nip down to the foundry and have a word?’

‘Foundry,’ Colin repeated. ‘Got you, yes. Cheerio for now, then.’

He didn’t go to the foundry. Instead, he ran up the stairs, two steps at a time, to the manky, dusty, cobwebby old cupboard on the second-floor landing where all the junk and wiffin went to hide. There was all sorts in there: dead typewriters, broken office chairs, worn-out brooms, seventy years’ worth of back numbers of the British Plumbing & Sanitaryware Gazette. Also, he knew for a fact, there were loads of old phone directories; he’d seen them once, when he’d been looking for something. True, they were very ancient; the most recent one, he recalled, was at least eight years old. But it was worth having a look, on the assumption that Fam’s family had lived at the same house eight years ago—

E. Williams: bingo! Instead of a whole page of the bastards, all huddled together in Mortlake like Boers in a laager, there were just two of them; and one of them lived in Putney. He stuffed the book under his arm, scuttled across the landing to the room where the laser printer lurked, nestled like a fairy-tale dragon in its tangled brake of cables, shut the door and sat down. There was a phone on the desk. He reached for it, found the place in the phone book and started dialling. There was a knock at the door, but he ignored it.

He waited for the ring-ring. It didn’t come. Instead, he got the bagpipe drone that tells you the number’s been cut off.

He swore and dumped the phone back on its cradle. More knocking on the door. Screw it, he thought, and yelled, ‘Come in.’

It was Rosie, and she was smiling. ‘Thought you might like a nice cup of tea,’ she said.

‘Not really,’ Colin replied, but by then she’d put the cup and saucer down on the desk and gone away. He sighed. As it happened, he was quite thirsty, and it was a shame to waste a nice cuppa that he hadn’t had to make himself. He liked milk, no sugar, though he was prepared to bet a million pounds she already knew that.

He picked up the cup and froze.

On the rim of the cup, opposite to where he’d been about to put his lips, was a row of little houses; also a tiny dockyard and a miniature wee jetty, extending a centimetre out to tea. The buildings and structures were quaint and oldy-worldy, and there was a minute little signboard, like the ones you get on the railway telling you the name of the station, that said Boston. Seven millimetres or so from the end of the jetty floated a very small sailing ship, on whose deck scuttled teeny-tiny specks of activity. Colin didn’t have a magnifying glass or anything like that, but he reckoned he knew what they were doing. They were throwing stuff over the side of the ship. Just as he was about to throw the cup at the wall and run for it, the dinky little sail unfurled, and on it he saw titchy little letters that read:

NICE TRY

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Banks have a thing about snappy, friendly-sounding slogans. They want to be thought of as action banks, listening banks, banks that like to say Yes. The Bank of the Dead was no exception. Originally founded in China over a thousand years ago as a means whereby the living could provide for the souls of their ancestors in the afterlife, the Bank had pioneered the concept of the snappy, friendly slogan along with paper money and the endowment mortgage. Though some of their earlier efforts at catchy advertising punchlines had, on reflection, struck them as unfortunate (‘Now you can take it with you’, regrettably followed up with ‘Why not pockets in shrouds?’), they’d always been rather proud of one they’d come up with towards the close of the Yuan Dynasty:

The Bank Of The Dead: We Are Your Future

Small wonder, then, that dealing with them on a daily basis for nearly three years had come to prey on Benny’s mind. The one thing that came close to setting it at rest was the door that separated his office from their bleak, dimensionless realm. It was only cheap plywood, but it was hexed, bewitched, shielded and enchanted with every kind of spell, incantation, charm and rune known to the trade, along with a battery of locks whose wards existed on different spatio-temporal planes, and a chain forged from meteorite iron in the flames of the last of the Great Dragons. It’s an uncertain world, and Benny had never trusted it or any of its components, but if there was one thing in which he had any degree of faith, it was the door.

Which someone had apparently opened.

He stood and stared at it for close to twenty seconds. Understandable: it’s not every day that you see something that’s completely impossible. The door couldn’t be open, because he knew for a stone-cold fact that he’d locked it himself, personally - it wasn’t something he was slapdash about - and he had the one and only set of keys. Just to make sure that he hadn’t left them in his desk drawer, he felt his right thigh until he found the chain, looped round his manticore-hide trouser-belt, from which his keyring hung in his pocket. He pulled them out and looked at them. All present and correct.

So, Benny thought, if I didn’t unlock it and I’ve got the only keys, and it’s magically impossible for anybody on this side to open the door without the keys, it stands to reason—

He shuddered. The disturbing fact was that the defences, though theoretically perfect and absolute, only really worked from this side. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. That was the whole point of the door. But Benny was a realist. Everything real, even magic, obeys certain basic physical laws. But the dead aren’t real, it’s one of their salient features, and accordingly they are bound by no laws or rules of any kind. Door or no door, deep down in his uncomfortable soul Benny knew that the dead only stayed on their side because of a gentleman’s agreement between Mr Dao, the bank’s chief cashier, and Jack Wells, the firm’s erstwhile senior partner. Under the terms of the deal, J. W. Wells & Co had moved all their accounts to the Bank, in return for higher interest rates on fixed-term deposits, highly competitive business-account charges, free monthly statements and a promise on Mr Dao’s word of honour not to come through the door and start abducting the living. Any breach of the agreement, it was strictly understood, wouldn’t be tolerated, which meant that if the dead did come marauding through the door, snatching up any hapless mortal who crossed their path and dragging them back with them into their infinity of desolation and despair, JWW would be entitled to close all their accounts and take their business elsewhere without incurring penalty charges or loss of interest. That was, of course, a comfort. But.

Benny backed slowly away until he was standing by his desk. Without turning his head or taking his gaze from the door, he leaned back and fumbled till he’d laid hands on a ten-foot pole he kept handy for all sorts of reasons. With this, he prodded at the door until it swung shut; then he pounced forward and started shooting home bolts and turning keys.

That was better, but only up to a point. He’d locked the stable door, but something told him he was way, way beyond stray horses. Something had come through. Whatever it was, there was a fair chance that it was still in the building. And, since he was the firm’s pest-control officer, which is only a PC way of saying hero, it was his job to go and look for it. How jolly nice.

The problem was, how do you set about looking for the dead? The Undead, now, that was a piece of cake. Benny had a whole battery of handy, pocket-size gadgets, ranging from the basic cheap-and-cheerful Pedersen’s Zombie-Find-‘n’-Stake to the cutting-edge, top-of-the-line RDG200 from Van Helsing Direct. A fat lot of good they’d do him. He didn’t know what to look for, because he knew perfectly well that what he was looking for didn’t exist. It’d be like searching for WMD’s in Iraq.

Never mind, said a quiet voice inside Benny’s head. If it was easy, they wouldn’t need you to do it.

Fine. Benny sighed. The most obvious way to find lurking predators from beyond the veil was to wander about the building looking weak and helpless. He was under no illusions about their possible intentions. They weren’t here to see the sights or do a spot of early Christmas shopping. If they’d broken through, it could only be because their insatiable, ravening hunger for some tiny scrap of life had driven them to it. The best way to find them would be to offer them bait and lure them into attacking. How he’d deal with them once he’d found them was another problem he didn’t have an answer to right now, but with any luck he’d think of something when the time came.

No point sneaking and prancing round the place Starsky-and-Hutch-style, flattening himself against walls and kicking doors open. Instead, he stuck his hands in his pockets, let his shoulders slump, and strolled down the corridor in the general direction of the stationery cupboard.

Just round the corner he met the thin-faced girl from Kntertainment & Media, the one whose name he could never remember. Even at JWW, questions like, ‘Excuse me, but have you seen any dead people recently?’ would be likely to result in lips pursed and eyebrows raised. Instead he asked, ‘Did you see anybody come out of my office just now?’

She frowned before answering. ‘You mean the young couple in the funny clothes?’

Just occasionally, it’s better to search hopelessly than to find. ‘That’d be them,’ Benny replied. ‘You don’t happen to remember which way they went?’

More serious consideration; then she said, ‘I think they were heading for the back stairs. You only just missed them.’

‘Thanks,’ Benny muttered, and started to walk away; but the thin-faced girl coughed meaningfully.

‘Have you got a minute?’ she asked.

‘What? Well, no, actually,’ Benny said. ‘I wanted a quick word with those people, before they leave the building.’

‘Only,’ the thin-faced girl went on, as though she hadn’t heard him, ‘I wanted to ask you about something. Not you personally,’ she added, and the tip of her usually sallow nose pinkened a little. ‘A senior practitioner. Someone with wisdom, knowledge and experience.’

In spite of what the proverbs say, the difference between flattery and Virgin Atlantic is that, occasionally, flattery will get you somewhere. ‘Fair enough,’ Benny said. ‘What?’

‘Love philtre,’ the thin-faced girl said. ‘I have a job on at the moment where the use of love philtre seems the obvious course.’