Barking Read Free Page A

‘I’ll be keeping an eye on your printouts from now on, Duncan. I’m sure you won’t let me down. Thanks so much for your time.’
    The law of the jungle, he thought as he wandered slowly back to his office; yes, well. It was all very well telling himself it was high time he got away from this bunch of Neanderthals and found himself a proper job, but it wasn’t as easy as that. He’d been trying for - what, six months? During that time, the agency had set him up with half a dozen blind dates. He’d built his hopes up, trotted along to the interviews, sat down in the chair with his confident, capable look smeared all over his face; and guess what? Each time, the eyes that had stared back at him across the interview desk were exactly the same as the eyes he was trying to get away from: the same greedy, vicious glow - predators, Jenny Sidmouth had said, and for once he reckoned she was spot on. He hadn’t needed to listen to the words they said. The eyes told him everything he needed to know. It didn’t matter what sort of face they were lurking in - round and chubby, thin and pointy, smooth or hairy. They were always the same eyes, identical to the ones that glowered at him here, and they gave him the creeps.
    But (Duncan reminded himself as he sat down and reached for the drift of yellow Post-It notes that had settled round his phone while he’d been away from his desk) it’s all very well fantasising about chucking in the legal profession for good: going straight, retraining, carving out a new and meaningful life for himself as a restaurant critic or a gentleman thatcher. The simple fact was, he was a competent lawyer and no bloody good at anything else. True, he had a crummy job, but not so crummy that shelf-stacking or burger-flipping would be better. Besides, he had a mortgage and a credit card to think of.
    Even so. Predators. Well.
    One good thing about being a tax lawyer. When you’re sunk in a bottomless slough of depression and self-loathing, you can always phone the Revenue and reassure yourself that you’re not the greenest, slimiest breed of algae floating on the surface of the gene pool - not by a long way. He returned a call from Our Ref X/187334/PB/7 at the Capital Taxes Office, and it made him feel a lot better.
    Even so . . . It wouldn’t be all that much to show for a life (Duncan mused, as he pencilled in figures in a draft Form IHT200) if all they could find to inscribe on your tombstone was At least he wasn’t a taxman . No, there had to be something better than this, somewhere over the rainbow; not a daydream or a TV lifestyle make-over, but a better, less painful way of being a moderately competent lawyer for eight hours a day. Fix that, and the other stuff - the dustbin bag full of old broken junk he was pleased to call his personal life - would sort itself out without any conscious effort on his part. Or if it didn’t, he wasn’t all that bothered, just so long as he could find a way of making work just a tiny bit less shitty. Possible, surely. Hardly rocket science, but think of how it’d improve his quality of life. One little change was all it’d take. One small step for a lemming; a giant leap for lemmingkind.
    At his elbow the phone burbled. One good thing about being a lawyer: the phone rings so often, you never have a chance to concentrate long enough to get really depressed.
    He didn’t recognise the name of the firm that apparently wanted to talk to him: Ferris and something. ‘Yes, all right,’ he grunted, and there was a click.
    â€˜Dunc?’
    Duncan Hughes was six foot two in his socks and no bean-pole; there had only ever been one person big and fast enough to call him Dunc twice. But he blinked three times and stared at the receiver as if it had just kissed his ear; because he hadn’t heard from that one person for fifteen years—
    â€˜Luke?’
    He could hear the smile; and two