May Contain Traces of Magic (5 page)

‘Hello.'

‘And you're doing the graduate-intake initiative.'

‘'Sright.'

They tell you, practically from the cradle, that Man is a social animal, loneliness is a truly terrible thing, and humans can really only be happy in the company of their fellow creatures. Shocking, the way they're allowed to lie to you like that. ‘That's where the firm pays for your college tuition and stuff, and in return you come and work for us afterwards.'

‘Mm.'

Well, Chris thought, at least she's not one of those terrible gabby females who won't ever shut up. Indeed. Quite the bloody opposite. ‘Well,' he said, ‘I guess I'd better fill you in on what we're going to be doing today. First we'll be calling on Cotterells, they're what we call a typical mum-and-dad independent; there's quite a lot of them still, though the big foreign multiples are just starting to get established over here, Zauberwerke and Boutiques de Magie and Sorcery Source; but they're still only, what, fifteen per cent of the overall sector as a whole—'

‘I know all that,' Angela said, each word an effort, like digging coal. ‘I'm doing my dissertation on the structure of the magical retail trade, so you don't need to tell me.'

A very faint emphasis on the ‘you'. Well, that was fine, too. ‘A dissertation,' Chris replied. ‘Fancy. That must be a lot of hard work.'

‘Mm.'

OK, Chris said to himself, let's not talk. Let's sit here in stony silence, me driving, you hating the whole of Creation. He drove, therefore, for a quarter of an hour, allowing his mind to drift. Bloody Burnoz, he thought, lumbering me like this. And what's it going to be like at the shops? Fat chance I'll have to do any selling with this millstone round my neck. How am I supposed to do my job with—?

He realised he didn't have the faintest idea where he was. Silly: he drove these roads for a living, he knew every alley, lane and byway - except this one, he admitted. Must've taken a wrong turn somewhere.

Um, Chris thought.

Under normal circumstances (in which, of course, this wouldn't have happened to begin with) he'd just flip on SatNav and she'd have him out of there and back on the straight and narrow in a minute or two. For some reason, though, he really didn't want to use SatNav while the miserable girl was in the car; as if she wouldn't understand, as if it'd somehow be inappropriate, like snogging in the office. He looked in the mirror, then straight ahead, just in case he'd missed some obvious landmark he could triangulate by. No such luck.

‘Um,' he said. ‘You wouldn't mind just getting that map off the back seat, would you?'

Angela turned her head and looked at him. ‘Why don't you use your GPS?'

It was a moment before Chris realised what she was talking about. ‘Oh, that,' he said. ‘Bust. Doesn't work. Been meaning to get a new one.'

(Forgive me, he thought; but it was switched off, and couldn't absolve him.)

‘All right.' She stretched past him and got the map. ‘But I'm rubbish at map-reading.'

A truthful girl, whatever her other faults. If she'd been Columbus's navigator on the
Santa Maria
, the world's leading superpower in the twenty-first century would probably have been Australia. Eventually, after a misguided tour of half the lanes-with-grass-growing-up-the-middle in the Midlands, they floundered out onto a dual carriageway that he knew, unfortunately going the wrong way. But it only took ten minutes to get to a junction where they could turn round, and that left them a mere forty-five minutes behind schedule—

‘Do you get lost a lot?' she asked.

‘No,' Chris replied.

Thanks to some dangerously reckless driving (Angela didn't approve of speeding, Chris could tell) they reached Cotterells an hour after they should've arrived. Not good; Mandy the manageress was a nice girl, but heavily into punctuality.

‘This is Angela,' Chris said - he found he still couldn't remember her surname - ‘she's going round with me for a few weeks, learning the ropes.'

Mandy the manageress smiled at her, and he could practically feel the goodwill bounce off and shatter. Great start. It was as though all the friendliness and rapport he'd built up here over the last few years had been hoovered up into a great black bag. Mandy was distinctly chilly as he tried in vain to interest her in the new range of bottled dreams, and the portable parking spaces went down like a lead balloon. Even the DW6 order was down by a dozen on last time (yes, but what do they
do
with it?) and he wasn't offered a cup of tea, which was definitely a first.

Curiously, when they got back in the car and set off for the next call the girl seemed marginally happier. At least, the sharp edge of her frown blurred just a little, and after ten minutes she spoke without being spoken to first.

‘You didn't have much luck there,' she said.

‘No.'

‘I don't think that woman likes you very much.'

‘Mandy?' Chris frowned. ‘Oh, she's all right. We get on pretty well, usually.'

Pause; then, ‘I expect it's really important, getting on well with the customers.'

‘It helps,' he said. ‘I mean, obviously there's going to be some who just don't want to know, but basically we're all in the same business. If they want stuff to sell to their customers, they've got to get it from somewhere, and our range just happens to be one of the best in the trade. Got to believe in what you're selling,' he went on, ‘because if you don't, they pick up on it really quickly, and then it's forget it. Believe in the stock and try and be nice to people, that's really all there is to it.'

Angela shrugged, as if to imply that the other one was festooned with little tinkly silver bells. ‘I don't think I'd be any good at this,' she said. ‘I don't get on well with people.'

No, Chris thought, you don't. ‘It's a knack,' he said. ‘You learn it, along with the other tricks of the trade. Mind you, it helps if you like the sound of your own voice.'

‘I don't,' she said. ‘I think my voice sounds horrible.'

Two things we agree about; at this rate, we could be friends. ‘So, you aren't planning on going into the marketing side, then?'

Angela shook her head. ‘Research and development,' she said. ‘I've got extremely advanced magical abilities, or at least that's what they told me when I went for my interview. They seemed very keen to have me,' she added mournfully. ‘Specially when I told them about my uncle.'

‘In the trade, is he?'

She nodded. ‘Professor of Applied Effective Magic at UCLA,' she said. ‘And his father was head of demonology for Leclerq Freres in São Paulo, so it sort of runs in the family.'

‘Sounds like it,' Chris replied, trying really hard not to sound in any way jealous or resentful. ‘Of course,' he went on, ‘my grandad was in the trade too.'

‘Oh yes?'

He nodded. ‘Senior chargehand at JWW Industrial by the time he retired. Spent most of his working life in the genie-bottling plant. Very responsible job, you can imagine.'

Angela didn't say anything, and on balance Chris approved of her decision. Not a lot to be said, really. But the silence got on his nerves after a bit, so he said, ‘Research and development generally, or is there anything in particular you're—?'

‘Well,' she said, ‘in my second year I did quite a bit on transmigration of energy - you know, spontaneous generation of morphogenic fields, subatomic disruption, ionic interface re-sequencing, all pretty basic stuff but potentially quite interesting if you look at it from the standpoint of effective metanormal transmutation, and my tutor's currently working in theoretical cross-dimensional transmigration, which of course would change everything if he can make it work, so I think I'd quite like to be in on that, if it comes to anything. I mean, the practical applications in the construction and entertainment sectors alone would be pretty exciting, not to mention the possibility of finally bridging the effective/practical dichotomy—'

Chris tuned out. It was depressing; she made it sound like
science
, and surely the whole point of what they did in the trade was that it wasn't science, it was
better
. All that stuff about energy and atoms and ions; it sort of took the magic out of it, somehow. At any rate, she seemed happy enough babbling on about it, and she clearly hadn't noticed how what she was saying was affecting him. That or she didn't care. All in all, he was in a thoroughly bad mood when they rolled up outside Domestic & Commercial Magic for their next call.

‘Just let me do the talking, all right?' he said (which, he'd have been the first to admit, was like telling the Pacific Ocean not to catch fire). ‘This lot - well, I'm not saying they're difficult exactly, more sort of cautious. Don't particularly like reps. But I can handle them, so—'

Angela nodded, and Chris led the way into the shop.

It was the smell, more than anything: a strong but delicate scent of violets and roses, combined with just a hint of woodsmoke. A civilian would've taken no notice, or made a mental note to ask the shopkeeper where they got their potpourri from. But Chris was no civilian, and he'd come across that smell before.

‘Get out,' he said. ‘Back the way you came. Don't look at anything.
Do it.
'

Pitch the tone of voice just right, and even graduate trainees will do as they're told. Anglea backed out of the shop; Chris really, really wanted to follow her, but he couldn't, not without looking, just in case there were survivors. Not that there'd be much he could do for them—

Slowly he turned his head, and for a moment he wondered if he'd lost it completely and made all that fuss over nothing. No blood, severed limbs, giblet-splatters on the walls; the shop-fittings untrashed, the stockroom door still squarely on its hinges. But the shelves behind the counter were bare, and he knew without having to look further that there was nobody else in the shop. Nobody human.

But why?
he asked himself.
Not that they need a reason
—

One of the things that made Chris uncomfortable about what Jill did for a living was the heroism element. She never called it that, of course, pulled a face at him if he ever used the word, but that didn't mean it wasn't appropriate; and he had this thing about heroes. Didn't hold with them. They made him nervous, mostly because he simply couldn't fathom what made them do all that stuff. Why anybody with more brains than a teaspoon would willingly advance into danger, when they could perfectly well run away, he couldn't begin to understand. Altruism, to save others, to make a difference; the thrill, the adrenalin rush, the only time you feel really alive is when you're staring Death in the tonsils; he'd heard all the justifications loads of times, from some of the best heroes in the business. Made no difference. He still didn't understand.

He was, therefore, both surprised and extremely unhappy with himself for taking a couple of very tentative steps forward, away from the door, towards the counter. Out of my tiny little mind, he told himself, why the hell am I doing this? And the only answer he got was: Please hold, we'll get back to you as soon as we've figured it out for ourselves. In the years and decades and centuries and millennia it took for him to cross the seven yards separating the door from the counter, Chris tried to remember everything he'd ever learned about Domestic & Commercial Magic Ltd that might conceivably be relevant. Didn't take long; they were an average, run-of-the-mill small chain operation, consisting of five shops in the west and south Midlands, stocking an unambitious range of general merchandise for the commercial, manufacturing, construction and entertainment & media sectors, with small but active niche markets in spatio-temporal design and archaic enchanted weaponry—

Oh, Chris thought. Three guesses what they came for, then.

He'd reached the counter. Very slowly, he leaned across, to see if there was anything—There was. He had to look twice before he could make a positive identification. Looking back the second time was the most unpleasant task he'd ever set himself, and he wasn't getting paid for it or earning brownie points or anything.

Poor Mr Newsome. Not his favourite shop manager, by any stretch of the imagination. He had an infuriating habit of whistling softly under his breath while you were trying to pitch him a new line; he never took more than four dozen of anything (except DW6, of course), and he was a terror for sending back anything that had the slightest mark or crease on it. Over the years Chris had got the impression from the two girls who worked there that Newsome was a bit of a martinet, inclined to snarl and whine about sixty-five-minute lunch hours and incoming personal calls on the company's phone lines. Nearly everybody who'd ever met him compared him, appearance and personality, to Captain Mainwaring (but without, according to Veronica from Zauberwerke, the wit, charm and sex appeal). Not, then, the most endearing man who ever lived. Even so.

Whatever it was that had done for him had aimed for outright decapitation. Probably it had underestimated the density and tenacity of Mr Newsome's unusually thick neck. Consequently, it had managed to tear through the left-side skin, flesh, tendons and blood vessels and had cracked open the spinal column, but that was as far as it had managed to get. As a result, Mr Newsome's head lay tilted to one side, as if it was a removable component that had got stuck. Apart from that, he looked fine - suit neat, shirt hardly stained at all, shoes still bright-shiny polished, nicely manicured hands limp and relaxed at his sides. In an ideal world, you'd be able to fix him by unscrewing the damaged components and slotting in new ones. But the world isn't ideal, and even magic has its limitations. Poor Mr Newsome.