Free Here Comes the Sun by Tom Holt Page A

fenced-off catwalk into the works of the grass-growing plant was an accident, or a coincidence. Just so happened he’d found out about the foreman and the cocoa money, that’s all. Of course, they hushed it up. Blamed it all on the frosts, they did.’
    Gustav smiled and tried to seep away into the cracks between the stones, but there was too much of him for that. ‘Gosh,’ he said.
    â€˜Right bastards, some of those foremen were, mind,’ Bjorn went on. ‘There was one when I was on Miracles - some years ago, this is, because they’ve closed that department down now. Evil Neville, they used to call him. Short, round bloke, face like a road map. Whenever we were told to turn water into wine, he’d be in there with his mates and a couple of hundred jerrycans, and the poor bloody punters would have to make do with water turned into lager. Couldn’t tell the difference half the
time. No wonder the whole department got such a bad name with the high-ups. Talking of which, you got any more?’
    He waved the empty bottle, and Gustav, simpering, fetched another. It had cobwebs on it.
    â€˜Cheers,’ Bjorn said. He decapitated it, absent-mindedly swallowed the top, and slurped deeply.
    â€˜It sounds very unpleasant,’ Gustav said.
    â€˜Unpleasant!’ Bjorn sniggered noisily. ‘You’re telling me, sunshine. I could tell you some stories, no worries. What about that time we were working Nights and Norm the Headbanger got completely rat-arsed and left his brother’s old van parked right in the middle of the Great Bear? Or there was that time Mad Trev and me were working on Rivers, and Trev got taken short just before the flooding of the Nile. Those Egyptians sure got a shock that year, I’m telling you.’ He laughed brutally. Gustav closed his eyes and felt sick. He had a little picture of an angel over his bed: his mother had put it there years ago, telling him that it would watch over him while he was asleep. As soon as he was alone in the house again, he told himself, he’d get a shovel and bury it under the oak tree.
    â€˜Not that it was all bad, mind,’ Bjorn was saying. ‘There was guard duty, f’rinstance. I liked that. They gave you this flaming sword and you stood about in front of the gates of Eden, and anybody who was daft enough to try and get in there - shunk!’ He made a sharp, graphically illustrative movement with the bottle, spilling the few remaining suds it contained over the back of his hand. ‘Don’t get up,’ he said. ‘In that cupboard, right?’
    He lurched to his feet and went to the cupboard. Gustav shut his eyes.
    â€˜Here,’ he heard Bjorn call out. ‘There’s no more beer
left, that’s a bummer. Hold on, though, this’ll do. Cheers.’ Oh wonderful, Gustav thought, he’s found the paint thinners.
    â€˜Help yourself,’ he said, in a small, tinny voice he barely recognised as his own.
    â€˜Anyway,’ Bjorn said, sitting by the fire again and wiping the neck of the bottle. ‘I stuck it as long as I could, but in the end I couldn’t stick it any more.’
    â€˜Really?’
    â€˜Yeah.’ Bjorn drew heavily on the bottle, winced and licked his lips. ‘I reckoned it was, well, brutalising me, you know? Like, when I was young they said I was sort of sensitive, you know, feelings and all that. So I reckoned, if I stick this job any longer, what’s going to happen to me? I could end up turning into a really nasty person if I wasn’t careful. So I quit. Probably I was just imagining it,’ he added, ‘but you can’t be too careful, right? I mean, there’s integrity, for one thing.’
    â€˜Er, right.’
    â€˜So,’ Bjorn said. Then he sat silently for a very long eight seconds, glaring viciously into the fire. Just as Gustav was beginning to feel a scream welling up inside the pit of his stomach, Bjorn got