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

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.