Doughnut - By Tom Holt Page 0,18

pecking at the screen with her fingernails, and various boxes were appearing and disappearing. “I didn’t know we had any of that left.”

“Just the one bottle.”

“You’re right.” She’d brought up a screen labelled wine cellar manifest; and scrolled down a monstrous list of names. “There you go.” She highlighted the box next to Château d’Yquem 1932 and changed the one to a zero. “You found it all right, then? It’s a big cellar.”

“I was lucky.”

“You were, weren’t you? Right, for future reference, here’s the manifest, look; and these coordinates next to the name refer to this plan here.” The screen changed to a diagram of the cellar, with each block numbered in what Theo recognised from his time at Leiden as a cunning variation on the Dewey Decimal System. “Just be sure to update the manifest every time you take out a bottle. Otherwise,” she added with a grin, “it’d be chaos.”

So much, he thought wistfully, for his haystack. “Right,” he said, “I’ll do that. It’s an impressive collection they’ve got down there, isn’t it?”

“One of the best in this part of Holland, apparently,” she replied. “I don’t drink the stuff so I wouldn’t know. How about you?” She turned up the thermostat on her smile a degree or so. “Are you a wine buff?”

He kept perfectly still. “Me? No. My dad was, a bit. I’d just as soon have a beer.”

“Me too. Or a coffee. I love coffee. How about you? Do you like coffee?”

She didn’t look at all like the vanishing girl on the train, but in other respects there were distinct similarities. Any minute now, her thought, she’ll be pulling out her maths homework for me to do. “Yes. I used to drink it a lot a while back. Not so much now, though.”

“Same here. It’s supposed to be not very good for you. But I do like it.” She paused, the way a mountain lion does just before it pounces. “What made you stop?”

“Well.” Instinctively he wanted to lie, but lying is so exhausting. It’s like being nice to people. You can only keep it up for so long. “I used to be a scientist—”

“Ooh, how exciting.”

“Or at least,” he quickly amended, “I used to work in a sciency sort of place. And I had to do tricky maths problems, and the coffee helped me concentrate. Now, though—” He shrugged.

“I love science,” she said. “I find it absolutely fascinating. What made you give it up?”

Gestures, of course, can lie for you as effectively as a bought-and-paid for politician. He lifted his invisible arm and said, “Accident. After that, well, I just didn’t—”

He let the sentence drain away into the silence. She gave him a look of sympathy so deep you could’ve dumped radioactive waste down it and never had to worry about it again.

“That’s so terrible,” she said; and then, “I expect you don’t want to talk about it,” at precisely the same moment as he said, “I don’t like talking about it.” She smiled at him and said, “Of course, I do understand.” Then, just when he thought he was home safe and she’d lost interest and was about to go away, she said, “So, where are you from? Have you got any brothers or sisters?”

Deep inside, he smiled. She’d overreached herself. Long experience had taught him that nobody, no matter how inquisitive or predatory, could bear to listen to him talking about his family for very long. He relaxed slightly, almost feeling sorry for her. “Well,” he said.

He gave her the complete treatment. He told her about his father, the only son of Bart Bernstein. Pause. The Bart Bernstein.

“Who?” she obliged.

The Bart Bernstein, who’d written all those appallingly soppy sentimental ballads round about the time of the First World War. Since Bart was a shrewd cookie when it came to investing the proceeds of bestselling slush, his son had never done a day’s work in his life, preferring to devote his considerable energies to annoying his wife and children. Eventually Mrs Bernstein decided she’d had enough and vanished without trace, leaving Bart Junior with two sons, Max and Theo, and a daughter, Janine. Max grew up to be a slightly more acceptable version of his father, and was generally well regarded until he accumulated a collection of gambling debts that even his father regarded as unconscionable and refused to pay; whereupon Max took the sensible precaution of making himself very difficult to find. But not difficult enough, apparently, because nine years ago, shortly before

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