May Contain Traces of Magic (18 page)

As Chris got out, he felt his phone clunk against something in his jacket pocket: the tapemeasure, just to make him feel a tiny bit more secure. ‘Tell you what,' he said, as they walked up to the shop door. ‘I'll start off with the usual stuff, and then you can pitch them the new lines. If you feel like it, of course.'

He had no idea why he'd offered, but Angela squealed ‘Ooh, yes please' before he could come up with a viable weaselling-out strategy, so that was that. ‘Um, you do know about the—'

She nodded. ‘I've been reading up on our product portfolio,' she said. ‘Which one do you most want to shift?'

‘BB27K,' he said immediately; no need to think about that.

She smiled. ‘Well, if they want a testimonial, you can honestly say they work.'

Maybe I liked her better when she was sullen, Chris said to himself, and pushed open the door.

There was some man he didn't know behind the counter; a big, square man who looked like a builder. ‘Hello,' he said. ‘I'm here to see Christine.'

The man looked at him. ‘Rep?'

‘That's right. Chris Popham, JWW Retail, and this is my associate, Angela—' Screw it, he couldn't remember her surname.
This is my associate Angela
made her sound like a faded blonde in fishnets who passed him the top hat with the rabbit in it and got sawn in half. Still—

‘Christine's left,' the man said, with just a hint of smugness. ‘I'm the new manager. John Iconodule.'

‘Ah.' Briefly disconcerted, but a good recovery. Chris held out his hand, which Mr Iconodule apparently failed to see. ‘Pleased to—'

‘You aren't down in the book,' Mr Iconodule said.

Chris smiled feebly. ‘Well, it's not actually my usual day, but I did phone through—'

Mr Iconodule frowned, held up a hand as though commanding a dog to sit, scrabbled in a small sheaf of bits of paper, found one, smoothed it out and scowled at it.

‘Ah, right,' he said. ‘Stupid girl took the message, can't read her writing. So this is you, then.'

‘Suppose it must be,' Chris said. It was supposed to be airy banter, but it came out sounding half-witted. ‘Look, if it's not convenient, I can come back.'

‘That'd be a bit pointless, since you're here,' Mr Iconodule said, raising an eyebrow. ‘You'd better make it quick, though. I've got Zauberwerke coming in at ten.'

A good pitch is a thing of light and air, a gossamer-light touch on the customer's heart and mind. The tone is brisk but chatty, posited on the assumption that of course the customer wants as much of this excellent merchandise as the seller can spare him; fortunately, since he's a favoured client and a personal friend, he can usually be accommodated. Phrases like ‘This is going to do really well for you' and ‘I think this is exactly what you've been looking for' should dart out like white doves from the magician's hat, inspiring the client, making him feel good about his commercial judgement and breadth of vision. Businesslike, to be sure; but not so intense that the negotiations can't be put on hold for five minutes while conversation is made about the wife's back, the daughter's GCSE grades, the football, or the number of VAT inspectors required to change a light bulb.

This pitch wasn't like that. Chris could feel himself wallowing, like a car stuck in mud, and the harder he revved his charm, the more the wheels spun. Mr Iconodule wasn't interested in JWW's new, improved bottled dreams or the Haitian Surprise melting wax (pins sold separately). All he wanted was another nine dozen of the DW6, and he kept glancing down at his watch.

Desperation time. ‘In that case,' Chris said, ‘my colleague would like it if you could spare her a minute of your time to hear about our new line in portable folding parking spaces. Angela?'

Such a difference. For the first thirty seconds, he was stunned; then furiously jealous; then he pulled himself together and started paying close attention, in the hope of learning how it was done. That didn't do him much good. Angela was brisk but chatty, rewriting the rules of engagement so that she was the one doing the customer a favour, businesslike but not intense, pausing for digressions on house prices, ice hockey and reality TV. When she finally released him, she'd got an order for eight dozen BB27Ks and helped him see the error of his ways about the bottled dreams, the melting wax and the Miracle Sprout padded insoles (guaranteed to leave a trail of spring flowers wherever you walk; may contain traces of chlorophyll).

‘Is that the time?' she said. ‘We'd better leave it there for now, then. Didn't you say you'd got Zauberwerke coming in at ten?'

Mr Iconodule gave her a slightly dazed look. ‘Forgotten about him,' he mumbled. ‘Sod it, yes. Not sure why I'm even bothering, they've never got anything worth having.'

(And Chris thought: that settles it. Instaglamour cream; which is unethical, and banned, and if she gets caught selling to the customers with it on it'll be me that gets the bollocking. On the other hand—)

‘Thanks,' Angela said as they left the shop, ‘that was fun. I can see how you get a sort of rush out of doing this.'

(There was a jar of it, he remembered, in his sample case. Just a tiny little smudge on the tip of his nose and the point of his chin; nobody'd ever know—)

She opened the car door for him, and he climbed in and pulled down the seat belt, ready to clip it on. The feel of the webbing was unpleasantly familiar; the demons had copied that exactly, too. He could remember how it had buckled as he drove his fingernails into it -

‘Where next?' Angela was saying; asking him for directions. You know, as in
At the end of the road, turn -
It took him a moment to get his mind back; it had strayed off, like a bad dog. ‘Back onto the ring road,' he said, ‘and then we want the B194 as far as—'

Chris was pretty sure what she'd done; the question was, why? Made no sense. There were all sorts of reasons why someone should want to daub on the Instaglamour. It could get you love, popularity, the trust of the electorate (though the discerning buyers in Hollywood, Westminster and DC tended to go for Zauberwerke's LikeMe; twenty per cent more effective and without the unfortunate dermatological side effects). It could make you adored, worshipped, revered. It could even shift BB27Ks, though of course you weren't supposed to do that.

But why should Angela the trainee put the stuff on just to spend a day doing the rounds with him? If she'd read the little booklet that came inside the box, she must have seen the Dire Warnings section: apply not more than once every ten days, remove with JWW GlamourOff within six hours, failure to observe safety precautions may result in lasting physical and spiritual damage or death, and that's if you're lucky. The natural assumption was that she wanted him to like her, or she was anxious to make a good impression on the customers, but neither of those would wash. After all, she was trainee management, graduate entry, being put through uni by the firm because they believed she was destined for greatness. She had no reason to be interested in anything here; she was just passing through, because she'd been ordered to, and it didn't matter whether anybody liked her or not, or whether she impressed some underachieving rep who'd never make it off the road and into management. As for - well, a personal, as opposed to a business motive, he was inclined to doubt that, in the same way that he was sceptical about the sun being a fiery chariot drawn by milk-white horses. In which case—

She was telling him about someone she'd met who'd actually met someone who knew Morrissey. He suppressed a frown. That was first-date chatter, and besides, she didn't seem to be giving her full attention to the traffic and other road users. In which case; for some reason Chris couldn't begin to guess at, he'd recently become special, an object of interest to a community he'd only vaguely heard of until they started popping up all round him, ripping off heads, hitching rides in his car, kidnapping him and asking him weird questions. Was it logical to assume that he was caught up simultaneously in more than one strange and inexplicable sequence of events? Not really.

But consider the facts. Angela the trainee had come into his life on the insistence of his boss, Mr Burnoz - crass, prosaic, insensitive, perhaps the most annoying man he'd ever met in his entire life - but nevertheless
safe
. He simply couldn't imagine him being mixed up with demons or even demon-hunting. Mr Burnoz was a simple man. He existed only to supervise the exchange of goods and money, and anything that didn't directly concern that process was as alien and irrelevant to him as a Rachmaninov piano concerto to a Trobriand fisherman. And - not just presumably, but as a matter of record - Mr Burnoz knew Angela, had known her some time as a friend of the family, probably given her a vague smile as she sulked at dinner parties; Mr Burnoz
proved that she existed
, that she was a real person with a family and a history, therefore not a demon-wrought illusion. By implication, he vouched for her, and although there were times when he'd gladly have fed Mr Burnoz to a tankful of piranhas, Chris was prepared to take his unspoken word on something like this.

Maybe he should ask Jill what she thought; but that didn't feel right, somehow. He could see the look on her face, the twitch of an eyebrow, the expression that said,
you know perfectly well why, and please bear in mind that Karen's my friend too
- and it wasn't like that, he was prepared to bet money on it, but that'd be the conclusion she would jump to, if only because it was a perfectly reasonable one - to an outsider who wasn't there to see for herself.

‘And the scary coincidence is,' Angela was saying, ‘that a friend of my dad's was at college with a girl who went out for a while with a man who used to work for the same company that did the lighting at a gig in Preston where the warm-up band had once—'

‘Look out,' Chris yelled.

Poor road skills but top-notch reflexes; she dragged the wheel round, nearly crunching the jeep into the crash barrier but avoiding the oncoming lorry by at least a quarter of a millimetre. A horn dopplered away behind them; she straightened up and went on, ‘- Been on tour with Morrissey back in the nineties, well, when I say on tour, they did a couple of gigs with him in Scotland, I think, but even so, it just goes to show it's a pretty small world -'

Chris was forgetting to do something: to breathe. He gobbled a double ration of air, and made his hand let go of the seat belt. ‘Is that right?' he whimpered. ‘Like you say, it only—'

He forgot the rest of what he'd been going to say. He was staring down at his left hand, slowly unclenching from around the seat belt. A habit of his, purely unconscious, when he encountered lethal danger as a passenger on the road. He'd done it only yesterday, tearing a fingernail as he'd dug his nails into the canvas while the demon prowled round him. And again just now, when he'd grabbed a handful and squeezed—

But not dug his nails in, he was pretty sure about that. There hadn't been time, and his fingers were still sore from yesterday, so instinctively he'd squeezed instead of digging. A personal choice, and equally valid.

In which case, though - he glanced quickly across so make sure Angela wasn't looking, then down at the belt, to confirm. In which case, why were there nail marks, deep and crisp and even, scored into the webbing at precisely the point on the belt where he'd just grabbed it?

 

 

T
here were, of course, alternative explanations. For example: the demon who'd abducted Chris yesterday had borrowed Angela's car, while she was in her room doing her college assignment, and put it back again after the bungled kidnapping attempt was over. Piece of cake for a demon; but why bother? Any old car would've done, since he hadn't had a clue what she drove, or even if she had a car at all. All right, then, how about: she was a distinctly unnerving driver, and the nail marks weren't his; they'd been left there by a previous passenger. He liked that one a lot, but he didn't believe it.

On the other hand, did he really believe that Angela the trainee, vouched for by Mr Burnoz, hand-picked by JWW Retail as a future jewel in their corporate crown, was really in league with demons, and had helped them set him up? Harder to swallow than a razor blade. Also, the same objection held true: why use her car, he thought again, when any old banger off the street would've done just as well? Unless, of course, the jeep had been specially modified to do the necessary magic to get him into the demons' dimension. As a hypothesis, however, it was still thin enough to grace any catwalk in Paris; and even if he believed it, which he didn't, what (being realistic) was he proposing to do about it?

Well: one thing Chris quite definitely wasn't going to do was risk any sort of confrontation. Quite apart from the possibility that Angela had demon allies at her beck and call, accusing someone of being a cat's-paw for the forces of darkness would be quite excruciatingly embarrassing. How would he work it into the conversation? And what was he supposed to say when she looked at him and said, ‘You
what
?'

No: a sensible, rational man would do what sensible, rational men are supposed to do when confronted with the raw face of evil; look the other way until it's gone, and then call a policeman. In this case, Jill. Either she'd tell him not to be so paranoid, in which case he could revert to the terrified-previous-passenger theory and think no more of it, or else Jill would send in the black helicopters and it'd be out of his hands and someone else's problem. Assuming, of course, that she wasn't leading him into another trap. Well: he could feel the casing of the tapemeasure, pressed by the seat against his hip. He felt slightly reassured, but not nearly enough.