Free Last Gasp by Trevor Hoyle Page A

fashionably scuffed training shoes. (Adidas—he knew it!) He couldn’t have looked less like a Clydeside spot-welder if he’d tried, Chase thought uncharitably. And the little squirt—he was under five feet six—had kissed Angie not on the cheek but on the lips, with a warmth that didn’t befit an employer-employee relationship. It prompted him to wonder whether she’d been unfaithful while he was away, which led to the speculation of how he, Chase, might have behaved had the circumstances been reversed. He’d have been tempted, but would he have fallen? He didn’t honestly know.
    Content with the Scotch for company, Chase stood in the lee of a monstrous growth of dark-green shrubbery that sprouted from a Victorian urn. What was it about these people he didn’t like? He felt uncomfortable, the stranger-in-a-strange-land syndrome. They inhabited a world he didn’t understand, glossy and slick, “trendy” in the worst possible meaning of the word. As if—this was the implication, he sensed—what they were involved in mattered, was at the center of the stage, while everyone else didn’t matter and was thus relegated to shadowy anonymity.
    Steady, he told himself. Your paranoia is showing. He guzzled the Scotch and tried to remain inconspicuous.
    “You’re Angie’s man,” said a small dark-haired girl, appearing at his elbow. Obviously not inconspicuous enough.
    Chase nodded and looked down into large brown eyes ringed with spiky black lashes. She wore an embroidered sleeveless jacket over a loose peasant dress with a revealing neckline. He could see where her tan ended. Thin gold bracelets clinked on her arms.
    “Dr. Chase, the intrepid Arctic explorer.”
    “Right bloke, wrong continent,” Chase replied.
    The girl bit her lip in mock horror. “I do beg your pardon. Geography was never my best subject. That’s at the bottom, isn’t it?”
    “Yes. Or the arse-end as we Arctic explorers might say.”
    The girl’s head fell back and she laughed, showing small, sharp, white teeth. Chase tried not to stare at her trembling bosom. “You know my name. What’s yours?”
    The girl said she was called Jill, touched his glass with hers, and drank. ,
    “Swell party,” he said benignly, grimacing with pleasure as the whiskey warmed his gut. Angie was right. For three months he’d been completely absorbed in his work and it was high time he got smashed. The mood beckoned to him like a seductive lover.
    “You really think so?”
    “Definitely. Plenty of excellent free Scotch and attractive company.”
    “I thought Arctic explorers were supposed to be shy.”
    “That wasn’t a proposition.”
    “Wasn’t it? Oh, what a pity.” She pouted coquettishly and he wasn’t sure whether she was being serious or pulling his leg. “You fit the description, anyway. My illusions haven’t been shattered.”
    “What description?” Chase said, having lost the drift.
    “For Arctic explorers. Tall, dark, and handsome.”
    Was she being serious?
    “I suppose Glaswegian spot-welders are short, fat, and hairy,” he said.
    “What?”
    “Private joke. You work in television, I suppose.”
    “I’m a PA. Production assistant.”
    Chase had only a vague idea what that was.
    Jill explained. “I do the running around, getting everything organized. We move about a lot, news, current affairs, documentaries, local programs. PAs are the gofers of the television industry. Without us it would collapse.”
    Chase had never thought of television as an industry. Its product seemed so ephemeral. In one eye and out the other.
    “What do you do when you’re not exploring?” she asked him. “I’m in the marine biology department at the university. At the moment I’m classifying some specimens I brought back from the Antarctic. Microscopic plant life.” Chase waved his hand dismissively. “Not very interesting to the layman, I’m afraid. Or the laywoman, for that matter.”
    “Plankton?” Jill said. She gave him a look.