Dispossession by Chaz Brenchley Page A

to sound bullish, I thought there was
something urgent and unhappy in his voice, I don’t
suppose you will, but please surprise me...
    Almost a disappointment to me, that I couldn’t; but at the
same time a major relief that he’d phrased the question that way, that I could
respond, “No. I’m sorry, not a thing. Not yet.”
    “No. Well, I hadn’t expected... You said it would take time.
And I suppose this’ll hold you up longer, yes?”
    “I’m afraid that’s inevitable,” I agreed, fighting not to
grin at my own private subtext there, all the extra meaning that he hadn’t
cottoned on to yet. And might very well not, on this visit at least: so long as
he didn’t question the staff here about my condition, or didn’t find them
forthcoming...
    He nodded, frustrated but accepting. “Don’t rush things, on
my behalf or Lindsey’s. Take your time. He’s got all the time we need,”
bitterly, cryptically. “We can keep him where he is a long time yet. So get
well first, before you jump back into this. Understood?”
    “Yes, sir,” I said without irony, surprising myself as he
had just surprised me. I hadn’t expected such a seemingly-genuine solicitude
from Deverill; that was not his reputation with his employees, and it seemed
that he was employing me, though for what I still had barely a notion.
    He needed me, I guessed, he must need me badly; and his next
words seemed to confirm that.
    “Anything you want,” he said, “the money’s there. You know
that, don’t you?”
    “Yes,” I said, and no lie that. If he’d paid already for a
smart car and private treatment, then demonstrably Vernon Deverill’s
purse-strings were open to me, his wealth was mine to call on. Which was a
deeply uncomfortable position for me, though I did my best to hide it.
    “Good, then.” Another grunt that seemed to say the
conversation was over, or his part in it; and it was picked up smoothly by the
lackey on my left, asking if there was anything I needed or needed doing right
now, anything I couldn’t manage from my hospital bed?
    I shook my head, hoping he’d read a simple message: that
Deverill wasn’t the only one who found it hard to delegate, that what I had to
do I’d do myself, as soon as I was fit.
    “Fair enough,” he said, and his voice too was friendly, as
the minder’s wink had been, confirming my status as friend of the family, part
of the team. And oh, I didn’t like that one bit, and I wanted to resign, but my
need to know wouldn’t let me.
    “There’s been some more interest in the press,” he went on,
balancing his briefcase on the edge of my bed, flicking up the latches and
lifting the lid. “Only in the extradition, they’ve not made any connections
beyond that, but I thought you’d be interested to see it.”
    “Yes, right. Thanks...” I was interested in anything that
could give me clues without yielding up my ignorance as a hostage to fortune. I
was too vulnerable just now to take any chances with a man like Vernon
Deverill.
    Four photocopied sheets came out of the briefcase; at the
angle the man held it, I couldn’t see anything else that was in there, though I
did try. My need against his training, the echo no doubt of his master’s voice, don’t flash my secrets around ; that time he
won, but there’d be other chances, I reckoned. Accepted by these men, maybe
even welcomed, what access I couldn’t claim I could try to steal.
    Which might be, very likely was what underlay all this.
Doing some job for Deverill, though I knew not what, I could penetrate his
innermost circles and learn more than any outsider would have a chance at. I
could be a spy, a fifth column, an undercover agent digging for victory...
    But why in the world would I want to? I wasn’t CID or a
private investigator, I was a solicitor with an established practice and no
ambition to look beyond that, very content with what I was doing. Why change
that?
    Because something or someone else had changed it for