Free In Your Dreams by Tom Holt, Tom Holt Page A

take the Tube), time sheets and invoices and credit control printouts and a whole bunch of other stuff you won’t find mentioned in the Norse sagas or the Morte d’Arthur . But the mornings were better than the lunch hour, because between one and two he was either in Mr Shumway’s office being lectured or shouted at, or in the closed-file store, which doubled as an assault course, firing range and tournament lists. The experience helped Paul discover things about himself that he hadn’t appreciated before: that Semtex brought him out in a rash, for example, and firing antitank rockets from the shoulder gave him a headache, and his fear of needles also extended to hand-and-a-half katzenbalger broadswords. His cunning plan of deliberately doing so badly at everything that Mr Shumway would despair of him and get him transferred to another department turned out to be a non-starter; mostly because he didn’t need to pretend. Even when Mr Shumway yelled at him so ferociously that he gave it his very best shot out of sheer terror, he was still uniformly hopeless at everything. His fuses spluttered and died; he couldn’t hit a barn door at point-blank range with the .50 Barrett; he consistently failed to remember the right proportion of SlayMore to water; and the only way he’d ever hurt a dragon or a gryphon with a sword would be if the unfortunate creature was standing directly behind him when he lost his grip on the handle. This, unfortunately, was precisely what Mr Shumway seemed to expect of him. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he’d sigh, as Paul’s dummy hand-grenade bounced off the opposite wall and landed at his feet for the sixth time in a row. ‘It just takes practice, that’s all. Another couple of weeks and you’ll be just fine.’
    Lunchtimes, then, were bad enough; but they were a week at the seaside compared to the afternoons. In the afternoon, Paul helped Mr Shumway with the banking.
    The first time had been the worst, because he’d had no idea. ‘Little job I’d like you to do for me,’ Mr Shumway had said, poking his head round the door of Paul’s office. ‘Won’t take a minute.’
    Of course Paul had said, ‘Yes, right, of course,’ like the fool he was, instead of ‘No way’, or ‘Over my dead body’ – though, in the event, the latter would’ve been a very silly thing to say, because—
    Just inside the door of Mr Shumway’s office was another, smaller door. It was decorated with six bolts, four deadlocks, two Yale locks and a chain you could’ve anchored an aircraft carrier from – curious in itself, because the door was just standard office chipboard, with an aluminium handle. Paul had noticed it the third or fourth time he’d been in Mr Shumway’s office, but compared with some of the other fixtures and fittings he’d come across at 70 St Mary Axe, it was prosaic to the point of brain damage, and he’d ignored it. This time, however, Mr Shumway was busy with a bunch of keys that must’ve weighed three pounds. ‘I’ll go first,’ he sang out cheerfully. ‘You follow on with that satchel on the desk there.’ He was referring to a shabby-looking leather case, the sort of thing Just William carried his schoolbooks in. Paul picked it up; it felt as though it was empty.
    â€˜Um,’ he asked, as Mr Shumway shot back the fourth bolt, ‘what are we doing, exactly?’
    â€˜Just nipping to the bank,’ Mr Shumway replied. ‘Paying in some cheques, drawing petty cash, handing in some TT forms. Usual stuff.’
    Paul nodded warily. He knew TT stood for ‘telegraphic transfer’, which was when you sent large sums of money by fax or Internet or something. Why usual stuff needed two of them, with Mr Shumway going first, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
    â€˜Ready?’ Mr Shumway had finished with the bolts and