Free You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps by Tom Holt Page A

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