Barking by Tom Holt Page B

murderously hot in summer; three people turned it into a Bakerloo Line carriage in the rush hour, and the door didn’t close properly. This office wasn’t like it at all. You could’ve staged the Olympics in it and still had room for a modest international airport.
    â€˜You don’t like it,’ Luke said.
    â€˜No, I mean yes.’ Duncan scrabbled frantically for words. ‘It’s big .’
    â€˜What? Oh, I see. Well, it’s all right, I suppose. A bit cluttered for my taste, but you can chuck out anything you don’t want, obviously.’
    Define clutter. There was a desk you could’ve landed Sea Kings on (but the legs were grooved with scratches) and the sort of chair that emperors used to sit on; a huge leather-covered sofa out in the western prairies; the wall opposite the door was one huge window, with a view of all the kingdoms of the earth; against the north wall, enough raw computing power to send a manned probe to Andromeda. If you lived in a room like this, sooner or later you’d be overwhelmed by the urge to be discovered sitting in your chair stroking a big fluffy Persian cat and drawling, ‘We meet at last, Mr Bond.’
    Duncan found he was clinging on to the door frame. ‘It’s nice,’ he said.
    Luke shrugged. ‘It’s an office,’ he said. ‘And at least you can sneeze without the walls getting wet. Seen enough?’
    â€˜Luke.’ Duncan took a deep breath. ‘I think I ought to tell you something.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜All this—’ He made a vague gesture. ‘Must cost a fortune.’
    Luke frowned. ‘Well?’
    â€˜Which means you must be pretty bloody good at the job in order to pay for it.’
    â€˜We manage.’
    â€˜The thing is,’ Duncan said, slowly, in a very small voice, ‘I’m not a particularly wonderful lawyer. Like, on a really good day, I’m sort of middling to average. What I mean is, if I had a place like this, I wouldn’t hire me to wash down the bogs and frank the letters.’
    Luke grinned at him. ‘Oh, come on,’ he said. ‘You were always fairly bright at school. Except maths, of course.’
    â€˜Yes, but—’ Sort of a surreal feeling about this. ‘School’s different, isn’t it? Just because you can do French irregular verbs—’
    â€˜You can do French irregular verbs?’
    â€˜Well, yes. At least, I used to be able to. I’ve probably forgotten, of course.’
    â€˜I’m impressed,’ Luke said. ‘I sort of tuned out at nous sommes, vous êtes .’
    â€˜But that’s not important, is it? What I’m trying to say—’
    â€˜The only maths I can do is adding up and a bit of subtracting,’ Luke said. ‘And I learned that from playing darts in pubs. No,’ he went on, shaking his head, ‘you don’t want to worry about not being bright enough, God knows. Lawyering isn’t exactly rocket science, after all. If I can do it, so can any bloody fool. The important thing is getting on well with your mates and having a reasonably good time while you’re at it. At least,’ he added, ‘that’s how we do things, and it seems to work all right for us.’
    â€˜Oh.’ Definitely surreal; a job interview conducted by René Magritte and Salvador Dali, wearing silly hats. ‘Well, I suppose that’s all right, then.’
    â€˜Excellent.’ Luke sounded like he’d just fixed up peace in the Middle East. ‘Well, you’ve seen pretty much everything. Come and meet the lads. They’re dying to see you again.’
    The moment, in fact, that Duncan had been dreading. Luke on his own, he mused as he followed his soon-to-be partner down a long corridor, was one thing. Meeting the whole Ferris Gang again, on the other hand, was going to be—
    Luke shoved open a door and called out, ‘He’s here’.