The Fix Read Free Page B

serviced the upper floors. We stepped into one as the doors were closing.
    â€˜As good-news stories go,’ I said to Brett, ‘this one should be easier to work with than most. At least it’s got a good story. A real story.’
    â€˜Yeah, right,’ he said, too positively. It was as if he had held his breath since he’d mentioned Eloise, and now he could let it out. ‘Yeah. And I don’t think they’ve done much with it yet at all.’
    At thirty-seven, the lift doors opened to a curved white marble reception desk and, behind it, a broad painting of the city at night. It was an aerial view, with the vigour of the brushwork on show and picking up all the colour and mess of the lights without being gaudy. On the front of the desk, fixed by steel rods tothe marble, the names Randall, Hood and Beckett had somehow been worked into a wave of bluish glass. I wanted a tie. I should have looked harder for one, back at the flat. I should have thought it through.
    â€˜They’re expecting you on thirty-eight,’ the receptionist said when Brett signed us in. ‘Let me sort that out for you.’ She took a pass on a lanyard from her drawer and led us back to the lift. When the doors opened, she stepped in, waved the pass in front of a sensor and pushed the button for the next floor. ‘For Mister Ainsworth’s office, you turn left out of the lift, then keep going to the end. I’ll let him know you’re on your way.’
    She was leaving the lift as she spoke, but she kept her hand on the doors to stop them closing on us as we got in.
    â€˜Security,’ Brett said as soon as it was just the two of us. ‘I think that’s since the incident. I heard they’d had a security revamp.’
    â€˜But wasn’t it a client? Wouldn’t he have got in anyway?’ I was trying to work it out, not trying to pick a fight.
    â€˜I just heard,’ he said. He cleared his throat, and watched the thirty-seven change to a thirty-eight on the liquid crystal display. ‘I think if a client turned up on thirty-seven with a gun and looking kind of crazy, it’d be a hint that you wouldn’t take them to thirty-eight.’
    â€˜Good point. Here’s hoping I’ll do all my work on thirty-eight then.’
    The lift doors opened to a corridor of glass-fronted offices. We stepped out onto a dark blue carpet with a recurring green motif, and just enough give to underline its quality.
    Frank Ainsworth stood as we arrived at the open door to his corner office.
    â€˜Brett, come in,’ he said, his voice a little louder than it needed to be. ‘And you must be Joshua.’
    Through the windows behind him, the office blocks paraded down Charlotte Street, the afternoon sun flaring from their glass faces. I could only see the middles of most buildings and the tops of some, and couldn’t tell between them. One or two of them might even have been built while I was away. I recognised the street less than I expected to. Maybe it wasn’t Charlotte Street, but one of the other queen streets instead.
    Of the two walls without windows, one had a dot painting that at a guess would have cost ten grand, and the other had shelves full of the kind of books that make a classic lawyer backdrop in TV interviews. I had never seen them close up, and wondered if they were legislation, or textbooks, or something you bought by the metre – a kind of office dressing from the age of encyclopaedias.
    Frank came around his desk to meet me with a bone-crushing handshake, a wave of manly sandalwood aftershave straight out of the eighties and his pale blue eyes working me over, summing me up, already checking whether or not I was up to the job. He was not someone to be sucked in by a well-massaged CV. He wore a crisp white shirt and a club tie and could have been any other hard-edged, no-nonsense man in business, had it not been for the pink scar on his tanned bald scalp,