Barking by Tom Holt Page A

seat.’
    Duncan looked round. One thing there wasn’t, in all this genteel splendour, was a chair. The old man was muttering into a phone, like an elderly clergyman intoning responses at evensong. On his desk, a VDU the size of the screens they show football on in pubs flickered and dissolved into a screen saver of prancing antelopes.
    â€˜Do please sit down,’ the elderly man said. ‘Mr Ferris will be with you directly.’
    Duncan glanced round again, but saw no chair. He turned away and pretended to be fascinated by the nearest tapestry - a bunch of big, nasty-looking dogs bothering an anatomically improbable unicorn, wearing what looked like a gold Christmas-cracker party hat.
    â€˜Duncan. You’re here at last. Come on through.’
    There was Luke. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, and his shirt-tails hung out over his trousers, as they had all those years ago. There was an enormous grin on his face as he lunged forward. For a moment Duncan thought he was about to offer to shake hands; instead, he walloped Duncan between the shoulder-blades like a cyclops performing the Heimlich manoeuvre, then grabbed him by the arm and dragged him towards a panelled oak fire door.
    â€˜Guided tour,’ Luke thundered in his ear, as the door swung shut behind them. ‘The others’ll be down to see you in a tick, but I thought you might like to see the old dump first.’
    Dump, oddly enough, wasn’t too inappropriate a term. A great deal of money had been spent at some point on decorating and furnishing; there was enough solid hardwood around the place to account for decades’ worth of despoiled rainforest. But every single desk, chair, table and door he saw as Luke whisked him along was chipped, scratched or gnawed up to a height of about four feet off the ground. The filing cabinets were more than usually battered, and the flex spaghetti that hung out of the back of the technology like disembowelled entrails was heavily patched with black insulating tape. The fabric of all the chair seats was frayed, and covered in grey and white hairs. All in all, it was a bewildering mix of industrial extravagance and lived-in scruff. There was also a curious smell, which Duncan couldn’t quite place.
    â€˜Library,’ Luke said, as they swept through a huge room, floor-to-ceiling with the usual black, blue and fawn-spined volumes - law reports, forms and precedents, the loose-leaf planning encyclopedias, Kemp and Kemp on mutilations, a whole wall full of tax statutes. On the floor, next to a battered grey waste-bin, something had apparently savaged an elderly and obsolete edition of Megarry and Wade’s Law of Real Property ; it lay open on its broken spine, and several pages had been torn out, screwed up and shredded. In the opposite corner, a bank of computer screens showed the same running-antelope screen saver he’d seen in the front office.
    Duncan frowned. ‘Does someone around here have a dog?’ he asked.
    â€˜What? No,’ Luke snapped. ‘Why? You’re not allergic to dogs, or anything like that?’
    â€˜No, I don’t think so. I’m not exactly what you’d call a dog person, but they don’t make me come out in spots or anything like that.’
    â€˜Cashier,’ Luke said, pushing open a door like the DEA pulling a dawn raid. A little white-haired man with enormous glasses looked up at him from behind a huge desk, then went on with his work. None of those cloying how-utterly-wonderful-to-get-to-know-you introductions in this office. Back out into the corridor again; another swift forced march.
    â€˜This is where we’ve parked you for the time being,’ Luke said, opening another door. ‘If you absolutely hate it, we’ll have to sort something out, but I hope it’ll do for now.’
    Duncan’s office at Craven Ettins had, once upon a time, been a boiler room. It was small, windowless, cold in winter and