Armadillo Read Free Page A

a thing, an unpleasant thing, true, but had a flayed cow carcase been hanging there, or, say, I had been confronted by a pile of dead dogs, I would have been equally upset. Or would I? Perhaps not. But Mr Dupree, the human being, had never impinged on me, all I had to go on was the importunate voice on the phone; he was merely a name on a file, merely another appointment as far as I was concerned.
    No, I don’t think I am a cold person, on the contrary I am too warm and this, in fact, may be my problem. But why am I not more shattered and distressed by what I found today? I do not lack empathy but my inability to feel anything lasting for Mr Dupree disturbs me rather. Has my job, the life Head, given me the emotional responses of an overworked stretcher-bearer on a crowded battlefield blankly noting and enumerating the dead only as potential burdens. No, I’m sure of it. But the case of Mr Dupree was something that should never have happened to me, should never have become part of my life. Hogg sent me there on his business. But did he know something like this might occur? Was it his insurance to send me there instead?
    The Book of Transfiguration
    He cabbed to the Fort. He would drink too much, he knew, they all would, they always did at these rare gatherings of the entire team. Sometimes if he drank a lot he slept at night but it didn’t always work, though, otherwise he would have embraced alcoholism with a convert’s zeal. Sometimes it kept him up, jangled and alert, mind going like a train.
    Getting out of the cab, he saw that the Fort was agleam, all aglow tonight, spotlights picking out its full twenty-four floors. Three swagged, gilded commissionaires stood at the porte coch è re below the aquamarine neon sign. Solid, emphatic, classical roman font – FORTRESS SURE. Something grand must be going on in the boardroom, he thought, all this is not for the likes of us. He was checked, saluted and directed across the lobby to the escalators. Second floor, Portcullis Suite. There was a full-sized catering kitchen on the twenty-fourth, he had been told, and a chef. Someone had said it could have doubled as a three-star restaurant: it probably did, for all he knew – he had never risen to those heights. He smelt cigarette smoke first, then heard the ebb and flow of too-loud conversation and chorused male laughter, feeling the transient electricity of excitement that free drink always provoked. He hoped some canapés had made their way down here to the proles. Mr Dupree had made him miss lunch, he realized, and he was hungry.
    Dymphna’s breasts were momentarily visible as she stooped to stub out her cigarette. Small with pale pointy nipples, he noticed. She really shouldn’t wear such low –
    ‘– He’s fucking livid,’ Adrian Bolt was saying to Lorimer with enthusiastic relish. Bolt was the oldest member of the team, an ex-police inspector, a Mason and an aspiring martinet. ‘Steam coming out of his ears. Course, you can’t tell with Hogg. That control, that discipline –’
    ‘Isn’t the steam a bit of a giveaway?’ Dymphna said.
    Bolt ignored her. ‘He’s impassive. Like a rock, Hogg. A man of few words, even when fucking livid.’
    Shane Ashgable turned to Lorimer, his square face sagging with false sympathy. ‘Wouldn’t like to be in your shoes, compadre.’
    Lorimer turned away, a sudden acid sting of nausea in his throat, searching the busy room for Hogg. No sign. He saw that a microphone was being attached to the moulded pine dais at the far end and thought he could make out the oiled grey-blond hair of Sir Simon Sherriffmuir, Fortress Sure’s chairman and chief executive, in the midst of a cluster of beaming acolytes.
    ‘Another drink, Dymphna?’ Lorimer asked, needing something to do.
    Dymphna handed him her warm, empty, smeared glass. ‘Why thank you, lovely Lorimer,’ she said.
    He pushed and eased his way through the drinking throng, all drinking avidly, quickly, glasses held close to