You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps (8 page)

‘Ah.’

‘It does, however,’ the thin-faced girl went on, ‘have some interesting properties. If you hold it up to the light and look into it, you can see the face of your own true love.’

‘Gosh,’ Cassie said; and she was about to add that it was a really, really nice thought but even so, if it was all the same to her, she’d pass on it just for now, when the thin-faced girl grabbed her by the wrist and pressed something small, round and hard into the palm of her hand. ‘Well, bye for now,’ she said. ‘And if you want to drop by my office later on and tell me what you saw in there, do please feel free. There’s nothing I enjoy more than some really juicy girl-to-girl gossip.’

The thin-faced girl opened the door of the closed file store and went inside. Cassie wasn’t sure, but she had an idea that she heard the click of a lock, or the graunch of a bolt. You don’t have to be weird to work here, she thought, but—

On her desk, when she got back to it, was a small stack of those little red-and-white While-You-Were-Out notes. All of them urged her to phone Mr Hollingshead, at Hollingshead and Farren, ASAP. She sat down, realising that she was still holding in her hand the small round thing that the loony girl had given her. She opened her hand, and something dropped onto her desk, bouncing and rolling a bit before finally coming to rest beside her stapler. After all that, it turned out to be nothing more exciting than a perfectly ordinary kid’s marble. Then she picked up her phone and called the front desk.

“Which Mr Hollingshead?’ she asked.

‘You what?’ replied Rosie on reception.

‘There’s more than one of them,’ Cassie explained. ‘An old one and a young one.’ Pause. ‘You left a note on my desk saying I’ve got to call back a Mr Hollingshead, of Holl—’

‘Yes, all right. No need to make a three-hour bloody mini-series out of it.’

‘Sorry. Look, did he say which one he was?’

‘No.’

‘All right,’ Cassie said, driving away the small yapping Yorkshire terrier of frustration from around her mind’s ankles. ‘Did he sound old or young?’

‘Search me. All you humans sound the same.’

‘Look—’ Cassie snapped; but Rosie on reception went on: ‘He sounded really pissed off and swore a lot, if that’s any help.’

‘Ah,’ Cassie said. ‘That’ll be Mr Hollingshead senior.’

‘There you go, then.’

Cassie put the phone down and picked up the file, which was on her desk where she’d left it. Father Hollingshead, calling to ask about some detail of the draft contract. For some reason, she felt mortally disappointed. But why?

She found the number on the information docket stapled to the back cover of the file and dialled it.

‘At last,’ said Mr Hollingshead. ‘I called five times.’

‘Six, actually,’ Cassie replied amiably. ‘How can I help?’

‘It’s this Clause Three. What the bloody hell is it supposed to mean?’

So she explained Clause Three. This process required no conscious thought whatsoever; she’d explained that clause, or clauses just like it, a hundred times to a hundred different clients. She wasn’t even listening to herself. Instead she was thinking, if Benny Shumway thinks it’s weird, it must be really out-of-this-world bizarre; and then he tells me not to worry about it. Yes, right. No problem, I’ll dismiss it from my mind this instant. Like hell I will.

‘And that,’ she caught herself saying, ‘is all there is to it, really.’

‘I see,’ grumbled Mr Hollingshead. ‘Then why in buggery can’t you just say that, instead of wrapping it up in all that legalese bullshit?’

‘Why indeed?’ Cassie replied. ‘Well, actually, it’s because a contract like this is a highly technical document, and all the words in it have very specialised meanings, which aren’t necessarily the same as in everyday speech, so—’

‘And another thing. Schedule Five, paragraph two, five lines up from the bottom.’

‘What? Oh yes, the jurisdiction clause. What about it?’

‘I can’t understand a bloody word of it. What’s all this about the Acapulco Convention, for a start?’

So Cassie explained about conflicts of jurisdiction, and how some kinds of dispute that might arise from the contract could be dealt with by an ordinary County Court in Britain, while other kinds would have to be referred to the Supreme Tribunal of Absolute Evil in Pandaemonium ‘It’s a bit of a pain,’ she conceded, ‘but I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do about that, it’s a standard clause, take it or leave it. Besides,’ she went on, ‘that sort of dispute is pretty unlikely to crop up, it’s only really relevant if—’

‘Fine,’ grunted Mr Hollingshead, ‘so what’s all this in Schedule Ten, Section 6B? You never mentioned any of this shit at the meeting.’

Ten more minutes of that sort of thing; which was good in a sense, because it meant that Cassie could score another two six-minute units on her time sheet, which in turn meant a proportionate increase in Mr Hollingshead’s bill, about which he would unquestionably complain bitterly. Fine. Then a little crackle of inspiration jumped her mental points.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘obviously there’s quite a lot in the draft contract that we need to talk about, so wouldn’t it make more sense to go over it together face to face rather than on the phone? If you could maybe drop by the office—’

Derisory snort. ‘No chance. Far too busy.’

‘That’s all right,’ Cassie said smoothly, ‘I’ll come and see you. Would ten-fifteen tomorrow morning suit you?’

Pause; silence of a man who should’ve seen it coming. ‘Yes, all right. We can get it all sorted and out of the way, and then maybe we can get on and see some action. Ten-fifteen sharp.’

‘As a needle,’ Cassie said cheerfully. ‘Goodbye.’

She put the phone down and leant back in her chair. So, she thought; so tomorrow I’m going to where he lives, to see his old Dad. Maybe he’ll be sitting in on the meeting too, in which case— In which case what, though? Still no trace of an answer to that question.

Sigh. She dumped the corrected draft of the contract into her out-tray, with a yellow sticky attached that read Revised draft by 9.15 a.m. tomorrow, please. The sooner the contract was signed and out of the way, the sooner she could close the file, bang in a whopping great bill and move on to something else. Wouldn’t that be nice.

Something caught her eye; that stupid marble, the present from the thin girl. On a whim Cassie picked it up and held it up to the light, but all she could see was the little red swirly bit in the middle.

That evening, on her return to her small, expensive flat in Chessington, she found six messages on her answering machine. Messages one to five inclusive were from her mother. Message six, on the other hand, was a bit odd. She couldn’t make out what it was; either birdsong, or someone whistling very badly, or the warble of an unusually melodious fax machine. She played it through three times out of sheer naked curiosity; then she deleted it and went to bed.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘I’m in here,’ Dad growled.

With his default now-what-am-I-supposed-to-have-done? grimace on his face, Colin followed Dad into the study and sat down. He noticed that the green file he’d been to London to collect was open on the desk.

‘That bird you went to see the other day,’ Dad barked, ‘is coming in at quarter past ten.’

Colin hadn’t been expecting that. ‘Oh yes?’ he said.

‘I’ve decided that you’d better sit in on the meeting,’ Dad went on. He was pacing up and down, tense and majestic as a caged lion. That wasn’t like him; usually he lounged in his expensive office chair, into which he fitted the way a pint of beer fits into a mug. ‘All right?’

Another odd thing, because Colin’s consent wasn’t usually asked for; it was one of those commodities where supply vastly exceeded demand. ‘Sure,’ he said (and he was thinking: her? Coming here? And his right foot was already starting to tingle).

‘And before she gets here—’ Dad had his back to him. ‘Before she gets here, there’s a few things you need to know, so sit quiet and don’t interrupt. Got that?’

Colin nodded, realised Dad couldn’t see him, and squeaked, ‘Yes.’ Dad sighed, took a long stride forward, like a fencer lunging, and poured himself a medium-large glass of whisky from the bottle that lived on top of the filing cabinet.

Colin knew that bottle. In fact, it was an old family friend, since its remote ancestor had been the source of his first experience of strong liquor ten years ago, practically to the day. He’d since found out that Dad’s office bottle was strictly industrial-grade whisky: crude, functional and cost-effective. Nevertheless, it had put him off the stuff for life. furthermore, he’d never known Dad touch a drop before a quarter to six.

‘These people—’ Dad stopped, glugged a fair-sized dose of the whisky, and turned round to face him. ‘J. W. Wells & Co,’ he said. ‘Very good firm, probably the best in the business. You know what they do?’

Colin frowned. ‘Some sort of lawyers, aren’t they?’

Dad grinned, but the expression on his face had nothing whatsoever to do with humour. ‘Sort of. Actually, they’re—’ He hesitated again; then he fished about in the file and took out a sheet of paper; thick, heavy cream paper, with an old-fashioned embossed black letterhead. ‘Read that,’ he said.

So Colin read - J. W. Wells & Co. Practical & Effective Magicians, Sorcerers and Supernatural Consultants. 70 St Mary Axe, London EC3

Then he read it again. Unfortunately, he’d been right the first time.

‘What,’ he said, ‘you mean, like, conjurors and kids’ birthday parties and stuff?’

‘No,’ said Dad.

‘Oh.’ Colin read it a third time. Under the address, he saw:

Partners: J. W Wells, MAA (Oxon) LLB FIPES DipN; C. N. Suslowicz, FSEE AIBG; Dennis Tanner, BA (Plymouth) BG

‘Magic,’ Dad said, and there was a weight of sadness in his voice that Colin had never heard before. ‘That’s what we’ve been reduced to, son. It’s enough to make you bloody weep.’

Colin screwed his eyes up and relaxed them again. ‘They’re putting in an order for stuff,’ he hazarded. ‘Those little brass interlocking rings, or whatever it is they hide up their sleeves for holding the spare ace of spades, or—’

‘Not,’ Dad said (you could hear the fraying of his patience), ‘that kind of bloody magic. This is—’ He stopped, closed his eyes. ‘This is real magic. It’s what they do. It works.’ He breathed out a long sigh. ‘It’s the only thing that can stop H&F going right down the pan. So we haven’t any choice.’

‘Magic?’ The word burst out of Colin’s mouth like water from a cracked pipe. ‘Oh come on, Dad, you’ve got to be—’

‘I’m fucking not.’ Dad rounded on him so fiercely that Colin took a step backwards. Then he seemed to deflate a little, and went on in a slightly calmer voice: ‘It was Ben Phillips from Amalgamated Box that put me on to them. They were in the same fuck-awful mess as us three years back; then someone told them about these people, JWW, and look at them now. Amalgamated Box plc, and they’ve just bought a fifteen per cent stake in Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits. So I thought, well, we’ve got fuck all to lose, so why not?’

‘Magic?’ Colin repeated.

‘Keep your bloody voice down!’ Dad roared. ‘You want the girls in the back office to hear? They’ll think we’ve gone round the bend.’ He sat down heavily, as though he’d just run a marathon. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘magic. Turning stuff into other stuff; casting spells; doing curses, reading the future, disappearing things, the works. Ben says they can even raise the dead and fight dragons.’

‘Dragons.’ Colin rubbed his eyes. ‘Dad, have you paid these jokers any money yet, because I’ve got a feeling they’re—’

‘It works,’ Dad said firmly. ‘I know it does, because I’ve seen it. That bird who came here—’ He leaned forward, unlocked his desk drawer and pulled out a small leather bag about the size of a baby’s sock. ‘See this?’ he said, and opened the top. Colin peered inside. It was stuffed full of gold coins. ‘That’s a genuine authentic bottomless purse,’ he said wretchedly. ‘You keep on taking the gold coins out, and they just keep on coming. Turn it upside down over the floor, and before long you’re ankle-deep in gold, quite literally. That girl showed me, I nearly shat myself. Unfortunately,’ he added with a rather disturbing grin, ‘if you don’t enter your PIN code the gold turns into little wriggly worms in about ten seconds.’

‘Ah. So what’s the—’

Dad smiled. ‘You don’t get the PIN till you’ve bought the purse. This is just, like, for demonstration purposes.’ He emptied out a palmfull of softly chinking coins, looked at them wistfully and put them back; all except one, which he allowed to full on the floor. Then he started to count, slowly. As he reached ten, the coin stopped being solid and became a very tightly wound spiral, which gradually straightened itself out into a straight line and squirmed away under the desk. ‘No kidding,’ he said. ‘They’re the genuine bloody article. They’re also,’ he went on, ‘bloody extortionately expensive. No, we aren’t keeping the bottomless purse, because we couldn’t ever afford it in a billion years. Real pity, that.’

Colin thought for a moment. Then, in a very quiet voice, he asked: ‘Dad, has this got anything to do with the damn great big tree growing right up through—?’

‘All we can afford,’ Dad went on, as though Colin hadn’t spoken, ‘is to hire them to broker a deal for us, a deal with one of their other clients.’ He frowned, then continued: ‘You know what our biggest headache is?’

Colin nodded; easy peasy. ‘Cheap imports,’ he said.

‘That’s right. And you know why we can’t compete with those—’ (Here Dad said something highly reprehensible about the Chinese.)

‘Labour costs,’ Colin replied promptly. ‘You told me all this.’

Dad nodded slowly. ‘These clients of JWW,’ he said slowly, ‘are going to solve all that. What we’re going to do is, we make all the workforce redundant, effective immediately, and these friends of JWW are going to supply us with replacement workers. No minimum wage, no pension contributions, no sick pay, maternity leave, equal opportunities, investing in people, health and safety, nothing like that. We’ve got their cast-iron guarantee that their workers’ll work an eighteen-hour shift, no tea breaks, no unions, per capita productivity like you wouldn’t fucking believe and - this is the really good bit - they don’t want paying. And—’ the grin on Dad’s face extended from ear to ear, like a professionally cut throat ‘- the joy of it is, it’s all absolutely hundred-per-cent legal.’