now, here, it had happened again – but this one, he thought, would survive sober reassessment. He swallowed; he recognized the authentic symptoms: the slight breathlessness, increased pulse, the sensation of a packed thoracic cavity. The girl’s wan, perfect, oval face – the woman’s face? – had been eager, hopeful, leaning forward to the window, long-necked and wide-eyed with pleasurable anticipation. It came and went so rapidly that the impression, he told himself, so as not to ruin his entire day, couldn’t fail to have been an idealized one. He shivered. Still, it had been a form of benign random compensation, erasing the image of Mr Dupree’s suspended scruffy shoes for a moment or two.
He turned right and headed for Archway. In his mirror he could see that the small crowd around Dupree’s Display Mannequins lingered on balefully. The girl’s taxi had become stuck behind the ambulance and he saw a policeman gesticulating at the driver. The rear door opened – but that was all, because he was away, off down Archway and Holloway Road, down Upper Street to the Angel, along City Road to Finsbury Square to see, soon appearing ahead of him, the rain-lashed, jagged towers and dripping walkways of the Barbican.
He found a meter near Smithfield Market and strode briskly back up Golden Lane to the office. Some sort of stingy, sleety rain was falling diagonally – he could feel it, despite his bowed head, smiting his cheeks and chin. Freezing, foul day Shop lights glowing orange, pedestrians hurrying, heads down like him, suffering, clenched, concerned only about reaching their destination as quickly as possible.
At the door he keyed in his code and stamped up the pine stairs to the first floor. Rajiv saw him through the reinforced glass panel, the door buzzed and Lorimer pushed through.
‘Brass monkeys out there, Raj.’
Rajiv stubbed out his cigarette. ‘What’re you doing here?’
‘Hogg in?’
‘What d’you think this place is? Holiday camp?’
‘Humorous, Raj. Very satirical.’
‘Idle damn bastards.’
Lorimer hefted his briefcase on to the counter and clicked it open. The neat rows of new bills always gave him a small shock – their unreal latency, their strange mint purity, unfingered, not crumpled or folded, yet to be exchanged for goods or services, yet even to function as money. He started stacking the trim wads on the counter top.
‘Aw, fuck,’ Rajiv said and strolled to the back of his den to open the big safe. ‘Police called, asking about you. Thought it might be trouble.’
‘Not the best start to the day.’
‘Bleater?’ Rajiv filled his palms with money.
‘I should be so lucky. Topper.’
‘Ouch. I’m going to have to get security back, aren’t I? Doesn’t make Rajiv happy.’
‘I’ll take it home, if you like.’
‘Sign here.’
Lorimer signed the money back in. £500,000. Twenty wads of five hundred fifty-pound notes, fresh with their astringent, chemical, paper smell. Rajiv hitched his trousers over his belly and lit another cigarette as he checked the docket. As he bent over the page the overhead strip light was reflected down the middle of his shiny, perfectly bald pate. A lucent Mohican, Lorimer thought.
‘Want me to call Hogg?’ Rajiv asked, not looking up.
‘No, I will.’ Hogg always claimed that Rajiv was the best accountant in the country; he was even more valuable to the firm, Hogg said, because he didn’t know it.
‘Damn bore,’ Rajiv said, slipping the docket into a file. ‘Hogg was expecting you to have this one sorted, what with the new chappie coming.’
‘What chappie?’
‘The new director. For God’s sake, Lorimer Black, how long’ve you been away?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Lorimer said, remembering.
He waved vaguely and airily at Rajiv and headed down the corridor to his office. The set-up here reminded him of his college: small, identical, boxy rooms off an overlit corridor, each door fitted with a rectangle of reinforced glass so that absolute privacy was denied. Pausing at his hutch, he saw that Dymphna was installed opposite, her door ajar. She looked tired, her eyes weary, her big nose blown raw. She smiled lethargically at him and sniffed.
‘Where’ve you been?’ he said. ‘Sunny Argentina?’
‘Sunny Peru,’ she said. ‘Nightmare. What’s up?’
‘Had me a topper.’
‘They are bastards. What did the Hogg-man say?’
‘Haven’t told him yet. I had no idea it was likely. Never suspected. Hogg never told me anything.’
‘He never does.’
‘Likes surprises.’
‘Notour Mr Hogg.’
She made a knowing, resigned face, hoiked up her heavy bag – one of those squared-off ones with many internal compartments reputedly favoured by airline pilots – and set off past him down the corridor, homewards. She was a big,