‘Well now,’ said Notley, in jovial tones. ‘I’m not really much more than a figurehead around here so I’ll hand over to Louise for the moment. Let’s all take a seat and, would you like a drink?’
‘Green tea, if you’ve got it.’
‘Certainly. I think a pot would be in order. Jiang estate okay?’
Chris nodded, impressed. Notley walked up to the large desk near one of the windows and prodded a phone. Louise Hewitt seated herself with immaculate poise and looked across at Chris.
‘I’ve heard a lot about you, Faulkner,’ she said neutrally.
‘Great.’
Still neutral. ‘Not entirely, as it happens. There are one or two items I’d like to clear up, if you don’t mind.’
Chris spread his hands. ‘Go ahead. I work here now.’
‘Yes.’ The thin smile told him she hadn’t missed the counter-blow. ‘Well, perhaps we could start with your vehicle. I understand you’ve turned down the company car. Do you have something against the house of BMW?’
‘Well, I think they have a tendency to overarmour. Apart from that, no. It was a very generous offer. But I have my own vehicle and I’d rather stick with what I know, if it’s all the same to you. I’ll feel more comfortable.’
‘Customised,’ said Hamilton, as if naming a psychological dysfunction.
‘What’s that?’ Notley was back, settling predictably into the armchair. ‘Ah, your wheels, Chris. Yes, I heard you’re married to the woman who put it together. That is right, isn’t it.’
‘That’s right.’ Chris took a flickered inventory of the expressions around him. In Notley he seemed to read an avuncular tolerance, in Hamilton distaste, and in Louise Hewitt nothing at all.
‘That must give you quite a bond,’ Notley mused, almost to himself.
‘Uh, yes. Yes, it does.’
‘I’d like to talk about the Bennett incident,’ said Louise Hewitt loudly.
Chris locked gazes with her for a beat, then sighed. ‘The details are pretty much as I filed them. You must have read about it at the time. Bennett was up for the same analyst’s post as me. Fight lasted to that raised section on the M40 inflow. I swiped her off the road on a bend and she stuck on the edge. Weight of the car would have pulled her over sooner or later; she was running a reconditioned Jag Mentor.’
Notley grunted, a used-to-run-one-myself sort of noise.
‘Anyway, I stopped and managed to pull her out. The car went over a couple of minutes later. She was semi-conscious when I got her to the hospital. I think she hit her head on the steering wheel.’
‘The hospital?’ Hamilton’s voice was politely disbelieving. ‘Excuse me. You took her to the hospital?’
Chris stared at him.
‘Yeah. I took her to the hospital. Is there a problem with that?’
‘Well,’ Hamilton laughed. ‘Let’s just say people around here might have seen it that way.’
‘What if Bennett had decided to have another crack at the post?’ asked Hewitt gravely, detached counterpoint to her junior partner’s hilarity. Chris thought it rang rehearsed. He shrugged.
‘What, with cracked ribs, a broken right arm and head injuries? The way I remember it, she was in no condition to do anything but some heavy breathing.’
‘But she did recover, right?’ Hamilton asked slyly. ‘She’s still working. Still in London.’
‘Back at Hammett McColl,’ Hewitt confirmed, still detached. The jab, Chris knew, was going to come from Hamilton’s corner.
‘That why you left, Chris?’ The junior partner was right on cue, voice still tinged lightly with derision. ‘No stomach to finish the job?’
‘What I think Louise and Philip are trying to say,’ Notley interposed, the kindly uncle at a birthday-party dispute, ‘is that you didn’t resolve matters. Would that be a fair summary, Louise?’
Hewitt nodded curtly. ‘It would.’
‘I stayed at HM two years after Bennett,’ said Chris, keeping his temper. He hadn’t expected this so early. ‘She honoured her defeat as expected. The matter was resolved to my satisfaction, and to the firm’s.’
Notley made soothing gestures. ‘Yes, yes. Perhaps, then, this is more a question of corporate culture than blame. What we value here at Shorn is, how shall I put it? Well, yes. Resolution, I suppose. We don’t like loose ends. They can trip you, and us, up at a later date. As you see with the embarrassment the Bennett incident is causing us all here and now. We are left in, shall we say, an ambiguous situation. Now that couldn’t have happened had you resolved the matter in a terminal fashion. It’s the kind of ambiguity we like to avoid at Shorn Associates. It doesn’t fit our image, especially in a field as competitive as Conflict Investment. I’m sure you understand.’
Chris looked around at the three faces, counting the friends and enemies he appeared to have already made. He manufactured a smile.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Nobody likes ambiguity.’
CHAPTER THREE
The gun sat, unambiguously, in the middle of the desk, begging to be picked up. Chris put his hands in his pockets and looked at it with wary dislike.
‘This mine?’
‘Heckler and Koch Nemesis Ten.’ Hewitt strode past him and filled her hand with the black rubber butt. ‘The Nemex. Semiautomatic, double action hesitation lock, no safety necessary. Just pull it out and start shooting. Standard Shorn issue. Comes with a shoulder holster, so you can wear it under a suit. You never know when you’ll have to give a coup de grâce.’
He fought down a smirk. Maybe she saw it.
‘We’ve got a way of doing things here, Faulkner. If you call someone out, you don’t take them to the hospital afterwards. You go in and you finish the job. With this if necessary.’ She pointed the pistol one-handed at the datadown unit built into the desk. There was a dry click as she pulled the trigger. ‘If you can, you bring back their plastic. Speaking of which.’ She reached inside her jacket pocket with her free hand and produced a small grey rectangle. Light flashed on the entwined red S and A of a Shorn Associates holologo. She tossed the card onto the table and laid the gun down beside it. ‘There you are. Don’t get separated from either. You never know when you’ll need firepower.’
Chris picked up the card and tapped it thoughtfully on the desktop. He left the gun where it was.
‘Clips are in the top drawer of your desk. It’s a jacketed load, should go through the engine block of a bulk transporter. You actually used to drive one of those things, didn’t you? Mobile Arbitrage or something.’
‘Yeah.’ Chris pulled out his wallet and racked the card. He looked back up at Hewitt expectantly. ‘So?’
‘No, nothing.’ Hewitt walked past him to the window and looked out at the world below. ‘I think it was an inspired idea, selling commodities from a haulage base. But it’s not quite the same thing as driving for an investment bank, is it?’
Chris smiled a little and seated himself on the corner of the desk, back to the window and his new boss.
‘You don’t like me very much, do you Hewitt?’
‘This isn’t about like, Faulkner. I don’t think you belong here.’
‘Well someone evidently does.’
He heard her coming back to the desk and turned his head casually towards her as she arrived. Behind her, he suddenly noticed how bleak the undecorated office was.
‘Well, look at that,’ she said softly. ‘Got me back here, didn’t you? Is that the kind of powerplay you’re used to? You won’t cut it here, Faulkner. I’ve seen your résumé. Big kill eight years back with Quain, nothing much since. You got lucky, that’s all.’