the office, and Simon had closed the door, ‘I cud do it for yeh Wednesday, if yeh still fancied it.’
‘Yeah?’ said Simon, sitting himself down at his desk. ‘I thought you said it was all ready to go?’
‘’Tis, but I can’t fix up collection till Wednesday.’
‘How much did you say again?’
‘Eighty notes, fer cash.’
The boy chewed vigorously; Simon could hear his saliva working. Gum-chewing was one of Simon’s many pet hates.
‘It’s the proper thing, though, is it?’ Simon demanded. ‘Not some knock-off piece of crap?’
‘Come straight from the warehouse,’ said the boy, shifting his feet and his shoulders. ‘Real thing, still boxed up.’
‘All right, then,’ said Simon. ‘Bring it in Wednesday.’
‘What, here?’ The boy rolled his eyes. ‘Nah, not to work, mate… Where d’you live?’
‘Pagford,’ said Simon.
‘Where’bouts in Pagford?’
Simon’s aversion to naming his home bordered on the superstitious. He not only disliked visitors — invaders of his privacy and possible despoilers of his property — but he saw Hilltop House as inviolate, immaculate, a world apart from Yarvil and the crashing, grinding printworks.
‘I’ll come and pick it up after work,’ said Simon, ignoring the question. ‘Where are you keeping it?’
The boy did not look happy. Simon glared at him.
‘Well, I’d need the cash upfront,’ the forklift driver temporized.
‘You get the money when I’ve got the goods.’
‘Dun’ work like that, mate.’
Simon thought he might be developing a headache. He could not dislodge the horrible idea, implanted by his careless wife that morning, that a tiny bomb might tick undetected for ages inside a man’s brain. The steady clatter and rumble of the printing press beyond the door was surely not good for him; its relentless battery might have been thinning his artery walls for years.
‘All right,’ he grunted, and rolled over in his chair to extract his wallet from his back pocket. The boy stepped up to the desk, his hand out.
‘D’yeh live anywhere near Pagford golf course?’ he asked, as Simon counted out tenners into his palm. ‘Mate o’ mine was up there las’ night, an’ saw a bloke drop dead. Jus’ fuckin’ puked an’ keeled over an’ died in the car park.’
‘Yeah, I heard,’ said Simon, massaging the last note between his fingers before he passed it over, to make sure there were not two stuck together.
‘Bent councillor, he was. The bloke who died. He was takin’ backhanders. Grays was paying him to keep them on as contractors.’
‘Yeah?’ said Simon, but he was immensely interested.
Barry Fairbrother, who’d have thought it?
‘I’ll get back ter yeh, then,’ said the boy, shoving the eighty pounds deep into his back pocket. ‘And we’ll go an’ get it, Wednesday.’
The office door closed. Simon forgot his headache, which was really no more than a twinge, in his fascination at the revelation of Barry Fairbrother’s crookedness. Barry Fairbrother, so busy and sociable, so popular and cheerful: and all the time, trousering bribes from Grays.
The news did not rock Simon as it would have done nearly everybody else who had known Barry, nor did it diminish Barry in his eyes; on the contrary, he felt an increased respect for the dead man. Anyone with any brains was working, constantly and covertly, to grab as much as they could; Simon knew that. He gazed unseeingly at the spreadsheet on his computer screen, deaf once more to the grinding of the printworks beyond his dusty window.
There was no choice but to work from nine to five if you had a family, but Simon had always known that there were other, better ways; that a life of ease and plenty dangled over his head like a great bulging pi?ata, which he might smash open if only he had a stick big enough, and the knowledge of when to strike. Simon had the child’s belief that the rest of the world exists as staging for their personal drama; that destiny hung over him, casting clues and signs in his path, and he could not help feeling that he had been vouchsafed a sign, a celestial wink.
Supernatural tip-offs had accounted for several apparently quixotic decisions in Simon’s past. Years previously, when still a lowly apprentice at the printworks, with a mortgage he could barely afford and a newly pregnant wife, he had bet one hundred pounds on a well-favoured Grand National runner called Ruthie’s Baby, which had fallen at the second last. Shortly after they had bought Hilltop House, Simon had sunk twelve hundred pounds, which Ruth had been hoping to use for curtains and carpets, into a time-share scheme run by