Peter McAllister sat on the other side of the same desk, with the same degree of non-view out of the semi-window. He was stretching his arms as far back and up as they would go, and his pinstripe suit was riding up. He was looking a bit porky, Alison felt; as if whatever horse-riding-type exercise he was taking at the weekend was not keeping at bay the effect of his eating and drinking during the week. Her first impression of him, two years earlier, was that he looked like a privileged man passing into early middle age with his early assumptions and prejudices entirely intact. That impression was accurate: that was exactly who Peter McAllister was. He had been to Radley and St Andrews, had been a pupil under an old friend of his father’s, had gone into commercial law but had disliked using his brain quite so ferociously, so had ended up here, where his moral certainty was useful. He was a member of the Tory party and he and his wife, who was the one with the money, were back-and-forthing about whether he could put himself up for a constituency at the next election: realistically, he would probably do best to fight a Labour safe seat this time, then bag a winnable one next time round. He’d be in his early forties then; with a following wind, he’d be a minister within a few years, and after that, you never knew. In the mean time, he was fighting the good fight by injecting the traditional values of Englishness into an immigration system which was always in danger of ‘producer capture’. The people who worked with immigrants always ran the risk of coming to believe that they worked for the immigrants. That was a mistake Peter never made. He remembered who paid his salary. He did not rule for the government (he would have said, for the taxpayer) in every case, but he did often enough to mean that his and Alison’s judgments more or less cancelled each other out. They got on perfectly well, discussed work in neutral terms and mainly when it concerned technical points of law, and never socialised.
‘So what have you got?’ said Peter, unwrapping his own brief, after he’d finished the yawn induced by his stretch. ‘I’m not at all in the mood today, rode ten miles cross-country at Josie’s dad’s place last night and I’m so stiff I can hardly move. Getting too old for it. So what’s on?’
Alison had scanned the first page of her brief.
‘Saudi dissident. You?’
‘Some Zimbabwean woman. Quentina something.’
88
Roger came downstairs in the late morning to find that the post consisted of three bills and a mysterious A5 envelope. It had something in it, something that wasn’t a book or a CD. He pulled the envelope open and his head jerked back when he saw what was inside: a dead blackbird, rigid with rigor mortis. The bird was starting to smell. With it was a card with the usual words written on it: ‘We Want What You Have’. He threw it in the kitchen bin. The perfect start to the day.
The sheer unfairness of life. That was the thing that Roger couldn’t get out of his mind, couldn’t stop thinking about. The sheer unfairness of life.
He had done his job. He hadn’t been flaky or negligent. If he were to be completely honest – if you were to strap him down and pull out his fingernails – he might admit that there had been a passage of time when he was a tiny bit absent minded, a tiny bit floaty, a tiny bit prone to spending the odd hour here or there thinking about how nice it would be to be bending Matya over his desk and taking her from behind. But that had only been for a while and was in any case no worse than anyone else. It was all as if he was being punished for a crime – and what had he ever done wrong, apart from having a deputy who was a crook and a sociopath? It just wasn’t fair.
The worst of it was the maths. The Younts’ outgoings were still what they had been. Two houses to run and maintain, neither of them cheap, clothes and holidays, Arabella’s completely out-of-control discretionary spending – he’d given her a semi-lecture on the subject a few days after he was sacked, and the net effect of that was that she went out with Saskia, got drunk and came back in a taxi with four colossal bags of new clothes, to cheer herself up. Talking to Arabella about money was like trying to talk to a child about nuclear physics. There were the cars, the service costs which seemed to bleed out of them – by chance he’d just had the car insurance and travel insurance bills in the last few days, which had caused him to go and look at the house insurance contracts, which were apocalyptically expensive, even given the fact that they’d shelled out for the also-apocalyptically-expensive burglar alarm and home security – laundry and haircuts and taxis and piano lessons for Conrad and swimming lessons ditto, and food and wine and Arabella’s personal trainer and a constant haemorrhage of house bills for carpets and chairs and kitchen equipment and who knew what, and nursery fees for Conrad in the mornings combined with Matya who was lovely, who was the incarnation of loveliness, but who was not cheap, when you drilled down into what she cost the Younts and allowed for the fact that if they let her go they would be saving some serious cash.
Money coming in, money pouring out had been a source of anxiety to Roger even back in the days when money actually was coming in. This, though, took that to another level. This was Apocalypse Now. The money was still going out – gushing out like a bust tap – but it wasn’t coming in. Zero. Zilch. Nada. The big egg. Zip. Sweet FA.
The other possibility was going to get a job. Of course that was the first thing Roger had thought of. He wasn’t going to just sit there on his arse, not him. That wasn’t the stuff the Younts were made of. He called an old chum from school who now ran a headhunting company, and tried to put a few feelers out. But that experiment in testing the water had gone badly; very badly. The first warning had been just how hard it was to get Percy on the phone. He’d called five times in two days. Finally he’d rung and the phone had been answered by a different secretary – Percy’s PA must have been away from her desk – and he’d said ‘it’s a personal call’ with just enough negligent public-school authority for her to put him straight through. When he got through, Percy had been reserved. No, strike that: he’d been outright shifty. He had treated Roger like a down-and-out trying to touch him for money.
‘Old boy,’ said Percy. ‘Always so good to hear from you.’
‘I won’t beat about it, Perce – I’m looking for work. I’ve had a spot of bother with Pinker Lloyd. You might have heard some chat. Somebody stuck his fingers in the till and because he worked in my department, they’re trying to stick it on me. My plan is, get another job and then sue the bollocks off them. I mean, really take them to the cleaners. The advice I’m getting is, we’ll be talking seven figures.’ This was a flat lie. Roger had been so demoralised and taken aback that he hadn’t even spoken to his solicitor about what happened – and the fact was that the bank’s employment contracts were drafted in such a way that he would be unlikely to see any cash at all. Another of life’s lavish unfairnesses, but not one he was about to share with his old school semi-friend. ‘Anyway, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life on my rear end counting out the settlement and living off the interest on the interest, so I thought perhaps we’d have a chat, see what’s knocking around out there?’