You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps (42 page)

Smashing doors wasn’t quite up there with bashing heads, but it was better than doing the quarterly VAT returns or the petty-cash reconciliations. Even so, Benny asked, ‘Why?’

‘Because I’ve been knocking and shouting and God knows what for the last half-hour and they’re not answering,’ Mr Tanner said angrily. ‘They rang down to reception for last Thursday’s Investors’ Chronicle, seventeen pairs of ladies’ tights, a pipe wrench and a marmoset. I’m going to find out what’s going on in there if it bloody kills me.’

Benny nodded. ‘Fair enough,’ he said, and swung the axe.

There’s a measure of science to busting open a door with an axe. Rather than hewing wildly at the panels, the sensible man goes for the area around the lock, the idea being to cut it out as neatly as circumstances allow. It took Benny seventeen carefully placed chops, but there was a lot more to JWW doors than mere planks, dowels and glue. When the last blow had gone home and the last splinter had flown wide, Benny leaned his axe against the wall, reached out and gave the door a gentle prod with his fingertip. It swung open.

‘There you are,’ he said. ‘Piece of cake.’

Mr Tanner took a step forward, then paused. ‘After you,’ he said.

Benny frowned. ‘Why?’ he said. ‘You’re not scared, are you?’

‘Of course I’m bloody scared. Go on, you’re the pest controller. Get in there.’

Benny could see the logic in that; but logic will only get you so far. When, after all, was the last time you saw a Regius professor of philosophy driving a Maserati? ‘I think you ought to go in first,’ he said. ‘After all, you’re the ex-partner, not me. It’s bad enough having to go to the Bank every day, and—’

‘Please,’ Mr Tanner said.

‘Ah.’ Benny grinned. ‘Since you put it like that.’ He picked up the axe and slowly put his head round the door.

‘Jesus,’ he said.

‘Well?’

‘You’d better see for yourself.’

The room was in a mess. The floor was carpeted with bits of paper, file covers, scraps of shredded cloth and pizza crusts. Empty bottles and styrofoam fast-food boxes covered the desk and the bookshelves. On the wall facing the door someone had drawn a large, poorly executed picture of a peacock, apparently using a fingertip dipped in curry sauce. The cashier’s-room calculator, which Benny had been looking for for days, had been cracked in two and thoroughly gutted, and the keypad numbers had been stuck to the arms of a chair with Blu-Tack in the shape of a smiley face. The phones had been ripped out of the wall, their casings cracked open like crab shells and stuffed with olive stones and pilau rice. The tights were still in their cardboard boxes, the pipe wrench lay beside the battered remains of the filing cabinet, and there was no visible trace of the marmoset. Or, for that matter, the auditors. There was also a very, very unusual smell.

‘Hang on,’ Benny said slowly. ‘So if there’s no window, and the door was locked from the inside—’

Mr Tanner, who’d been staring like a lunatic, pulled himself together, with a shudder. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘I mean that,’ he added grimly. ‘Just wipe the whole thing from your mind and pretend it never happened. Understood?’

Benny thought about that for three seconds. ‘It’s a bit odd, though. I mean, four accountants from Moss Berwick don’t just vanish into thin air like—’

‘Understood?’

‘Yes.’

‘Fine.’ Mr Tanner held the wreck of the door open for Benny, then pulled it shut. ‘I’ll get Cas Suslowicz and Peter Melznic to drop by later,’ he said. ‘I seem to remember Peter telling me once about a spell he knows where you can seal off a room completely for ever, so nobody can ever find it again.’ He frowned.

‘He knows all sorts of cool stuff, that bloke,’ he said. ‘Pity he’s such a plonker.’

Benny followed Mr Tanner through the fire doors, along the corridor and down the stairs until he was back outside his office again. There Mr Tanner paused, as if he was struggling with something.

‘Thanks,’ he said.

‘My pleasure,’ Benny replied.

‘And if you could see your way about not mentioning this to — ‘

‘No problem.’

Mr Tanner sighed. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you spend your whole adult life in this business and you think you’ve seen it all, and then — ‘ He shrugged, and lit a cigar. ‘I’ve got a good mind to retire come the new year,’ he said. ‘You know, relax, put my feet up, spend less time with the family. You ever thought about retiring?’

‘Only at night,’ Benny replied, ‘after eating too much strong cheese. Was there anything else?’ Mr Tanner shook his head. ‘Mind how you go,’ he said, and walked away.

‘In that case,’ Connie said, ‘you can see for yourself what’s likely to happen. You’re the true lover, right? Something goes wrong, you don’t get together with the girl. You die. You go to Hell. The little men with pitchforks do whatever it is that they do with the souls of the damned, and you can’t be reincarnated; therefore the screw-up can’t be corrected, the backed-up-toilet effect comes into play, and it’s only a matter of time before the immutable laws of spatio-temporal physics are just so many manifesto promises. In other words,’ Connie added, ‘a right mess. Bad,’ she added, ‘but not so bad that attempts to set it right by well-meaning officials can’t make it worse. Which,’ she added with a sigh, ‘is what I assume has been happening.’

Colin looked at her blankly. ‘Ah,’ he said.

‘That’s right. I’m thinking,’ Connie went on, ‘about the business of you and young Cassie getting dosed with the love philtre.’

‘Ah,’ Colin said again. ‘That.’

Cassie nodded. ‘That. Stands to reason, someone did it on purpose. Went to a certain degree of trouble: getting hold of the philtre, arranging things so you and she’d be together in one place at a specified time. Even,’ she added, with a grim undertone in her voice, ‘a bit of A-level-standard shape-shifting, to make it seem as if it was me who gave that ditz on reception the order to take up the tray of spiked tea and bickies. Why do all that unless the guilty party believed it’d somehow help matters?’

‘Why indeed?’ Colin muttered.

‘So.’ Connie shifted a little in her chair. ‘The logical assumption is that whoever the mystery tea-spiker was, he or she reckoned that if our Cassie fell in love with you, that’d be it, end of problem. But — ‘ Connie shook her head and looked away for a moment. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it obviously hasn’t worked, has it? Because although you seem to have knocked back a large enough dose of that muck to poison an elephant, you aren’t actually in love with Cassie one little bit, are you?’

Colin shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Which is pretty remarkable in itself,’ Connie observed. ‘That stuff’s been on the market for nigh on two hundred years: one hundred per cent success rate, until now. It seems to me,’ Connie added with a thoughtful frown, ‘that someone who can just shrug off something that powerful could only do so if he was already under the influence of something even stronger. Like,’ she said with a slight shudder, ‘genuine true love. Implications,’ she added, pulling herself together. ‘One: young Cassie isn’t your destined soulmate. Two: someone else is. Well?’ she demanded briskly. ‘Yes or no?’

‘Yes,’ Colin replied, beetroot-faced and glowing like a nuclear meltdown. ‘I told you about her just now, remember? Fam — ‘

‘Oh yes.’ Connie nodded. ‘That chubby girl on reception. Well,’ she said brightly, ‘there you have it. The question I’d like the answer to, though, is why our phantom tea-adulterator thought the girl you needed pairing off with was young Cassie. Any ideas?’

‘No.’

Connie sighed. ‘Me neither. And until we know that, I put it to you that we remain conclusively screwed. There’s got to be a reason,’ she said angrily. ‘And between you, me and the filing cabinet, I’m prepared to bet that it’s also the reason why the stupid bastards who’re running this outfit nowadays have given me the sack. And that,’ she growled, ‘is very much my business, even if the rest of it isn’t.’

Colin waited for four seconds just to be sure she’d finished, then said: ‘All right, so what do you think we should do about it?’

‘Ah.’ Connie clicked her tongue. ‘There you have me, I’m afraid. There’s an old saying in this business, of course: when all else fails, ask somebody. The question is, though: who do we ask? Answer,’ she went on before Colin could say anything, ‘the clown who put that stuff in your tea. Trouble is, we don’t know who it was. Although — ‘

Colin leaned forward, but Connie wasn’t looking at him any more. Instead, she was staring very hard at a spot on the wall about three inches above his head. Colin looked round, but there was nothing to see except the painted-over scar where a picture-hook had once been.

‘What?’ he demanded.

‘Just occurred to me,’ Connie said. ‘Young Cassie used to be with Mortimers, right?’

‘If you say so.’

‘You don’t know what that means. Right. Mortimers are the best in the business; much better firm than us, more prestigious, better chances of getting ahead, and young Cassie’s pretty ambitious. But she quits Mortimers and comes here instead. I remember asking her why, and she told me it was because they offered her a ludicrously large sum of money; real offer-you-can’t-refuse sort of deal. Now, Cassie’s all right, but she’s nothing very special. Why would anybody do that unless they needed her here for some other reason?’

‘Me,’ Colin mumbled.

‘Exactly. Furthermore,’ Connie went on, ‘not so long ago, when JWW was bought out by the new people, I don’t mind telling you that we were in a right old state. I remember thinking when I heard the news. Only a complete idiot would spend good money buying us. I simply couldn’t see a reason. But there is one thing JWW has which no other firm in the trade can offer. You lot.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘You. The Hollingshead family; you’ve been clients of the firm for generations. So, the hypothesis runs, our new mystery proprietors bought JWW simply in order to get access to you. You and Cassie. To get the two of you together in one place. In which case,’ Connie said, jumping to her feet, ‘I know exactly who we need to ask in order to get the answer to my question. Come on.’

Colin wanted to say something - quite a few things - but he didn’t get the chance. Connie had a firm grip on his ear, and was pulling him out of his chair towards the door.

‘Well?’ the thin-faced girl said.

It was a bit like trying to walk through an upended trampoline: the harder Cassie pushed toward an answer, the harder it seemed to push back. It was an impossible choice; because there was no way she’d ever make such a stupid, disastrous, idiotic gesture, not even if it was real love, instead of some horrible manipulative trick that’d come out of a bottle. It didn’t help that she’d never quite managed to believe in Hell, even though she’d spoken to it so many times on the phone; to give away your soul for all eternity to something you were convinced couldn’t possibly exist struck her as being pretty close to the ultimate humiliation. On the other hand —

Cassie was trying to make some sense of what she’d just heard. Since she didn’t believe in it, she had no sense of what Hell could actually be. If she could draw, she could have sketched out a huge bonfire, vats of something resembling yellow porridge (what is brimstone, exactly?) and a crew of anatomically improbable Butlin’s redcoats with pitchforks cackling wildly and prodding people in the bum. But drawing a picture wouldn’t have made it any more real to her, because she knew, right down at the molecular level, that it couldn’t possibly be like that. For one thing, once you’d got used to it (and she could only think of it in terms of a rather too hot bath; it’s scalding when you climb in, but after a while it fades into pleasantly warm, and then it’s cold and time to get out), it wouldn’t be horrible and terrifying and agonising, it’d just be very boring and silly. A bit like a bad day at the office, really. Maybe that was Hell, and Bosch and Bruegel had painted in all the bird-headed fiends simply because offices hadn’t been invented yet.

Or - try this one for size - maybe Hell was being made to do supremely stupid, humiliating things against your will just because someone had stuck love philtre in your tea. Perhaps it was being made to be in love with someone you’d only met a few times and didn’t really like very much. Maybe Hell was Connie losing her job and Colin being stuck in the family business with his horrible father and Cas Suslowicz and Dennis Tanner having to sit behind their desks watching some ignorant clown of an angel running their firm into the ground because she simply wasn’t interested in it. All those things were real enough; that’s why they call it real life. But real life is tolerable because, however implausible it may seem, there’s always a wispy, unrealistic flicker of hope to be clung on to - lottery win or tall, dark, handsome stranger or your immediate superior in the chain of command getting eaten by bears - and so long as there’s that little hole in the roof through which you can see the stars, being stuck in the cellar isn’t so bad. But suppose you knew, guaranteed for certain, that this was all there’d ever be: the job, home, your unsatisfactory family and disappointing friends, without even retirement to look forward to; without even death.

Benny Shumway didn’t talk about it as a rule, but he’d told Cassie about it once; about death, what it was like to go to the Bank every day and see it. One thing he’d said had always stuck in her mind: it’s nothing, for ever. She’d thought about that a lot, trying to figure out what he’d meant by it, and the explanation she’d come up with was scarier than anything Stephen King and Dean Koontz could’ve concocted, even after a gallon of strong black coffee and a tureenful of bad magic mushrooms. Nothing, as in nothing ever happens here. For ever, as in the sun goes cold, the planet freezes into lifeless rock, collides with an asteroid, smashes into gravel and dissipates into the empty vacuum of space, and you’re still there, as though nothing had happened; because, of course, as far as you were concerned, nothing had. So: if hell is worse than death, it’s got to be pure distilled essence of nothing for ever —

‘Well?’ the thin-faced girl said.

On the other hand, there was love: fake, false, not real, as unreal as the brimstone porridge and the pitchforks. Cassie knew very well what it said on the label: JWW patent oxy-hydro-gen love philtre, guaranteed to last for ever, till the seas run dry and the sun goes cold; for ever, this lie, this total absence of feeling. This nothing.