Days (18 page)

“You prefer ‘store detective’ to ‘Ghost’.”

“Most definitely.”

“How interesting,” the woman says, nodding to herself. Frank has the impression that she thinks she is at a cocktail party, making small talk. Consequently her next question catches him off-guard. “Have you ever shot a shoplifter?”

He hesitates before deciding that he has nothing to lose by telling her the truth. “A few times.”

“How many times?”

Frank frowns. “Five, perhaps six. Back when I was starting out.”

“And did you kill any of them?”

“I shoot to wound.”

“But it’s not always possible to aim accurately, not in the heat of the moment.”

“No, it isn’t”

“So have you killed anyone by accident?”

“Not me,” he says. “But it has happened.”

“And would you shoot me?” The woman fixes her bloodshot gaze on Frank, giving him such a searching look that for a worrying moment he fears she can actually see into him, see into his soul.

“If you resisted arrest or ran,” he answers eventually, “it would be my duty to bring you down using any means at my disposal.”

“Would the fact that I’m a woman make any difference?”

Thinking of Clothilda Westheimer at the sale, Frank replies, “None at all.”

“How interesting,” she says again.

Frank holds up a hand, pausing the conversation to subvocalise to the Eye.
Did you get a clip of the woman in Optical Supplies?

Certainly did. I was following her all the way. Subtle she was not.

All right.
He clears his throat and addresses the shoplifter formally. The Booster’s Blessing. “Madam, I regret that it is my duty to inform you that at 10.03 a.m. – 10.03?” He looks to Gould for confirmation.

The guard nods. “Thereabouts.”

“Well, is it or isn’t it 10.03?”

“Precisely?” Gould retorts coolly. “I don’t know. I was looking at
her
, not my watch.”

“We’ll say 10.03 for now, but the time is subject to amendment.” Testily, Frank returns his attention to the shoplifter. “At 10.03 a.m. you were spotted removing an item from the Optical Supplies Department without having purchased it and with no obvious intent to purchase it. For this offence –”

“I needed it.”

“I’m sure you did, madam.”

“My contact lenses were hurting, and I’d lost my card. I’d never have taken it otherwise.”

“For this offence, the penalty is immediate expulsion from the premises and the irrevocable cancellation of all account facilities. If you wish to take the matter to court, you may do so.”

“I don’t.”

“Bear in mind, however, that we have the following evidence on disk.”

He presses the Play key on his Sphinx, and he and the woman watch the clip of the theft on the screen. Gould was right: the woman is no natural born shoplifter. Trying to act casually while at the same time trembling like a palsy victim, she spends far too long inspecting the plastic bottles on the revolving rack in front of her before reaching out to take one, and as she does so she makes the elementary mistake of darting a glance over each shoulder – the quintessential flagging sign. She tries three times to slip the bottle into the pocket of her slacks, becoming visibly more flustered with each attempt, until in the end she actually looks down in order to guide the stolen article into its hiding place. By this time Gould has appeared on-camera, coming up behind her. The clip ends with Gould taking hold of her arm.

“Do you understand what I’m showing you, madam?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.” The woman peers up at the ceiling. “You know, I’ve often watched those little cameras following people around. I suppose I should have realised that they’ve also been following
me
. Perhaps I did realise but preferred not to think about it. It’s quite disconcerting to think that someone is watching us all the time, seeing everything we do, don’t you agree? I’m not a religious person, but that’s how I’d feel if I were. That God has His eyes on me every second of the day, like those cameras, and that He’s just waiting for me to slip up.” She returns her gaze to Frank. “And what does that make you, I wonder, Mr Store Detective, if those cameras are God’s eyes? You whose job it is to hover at our shoulders and not be seen? You who force us by the threat of your presence to listen to our consciences?” Her tone shifts from ruminative to sly. “An angel, perhaps?”

“Hardly.” Frank allows a small measure of irony to lift the word. “I’m nowhere near pure enough.”

“Oh, angels don’t need to be pure. They just need to be there.”

“Then that’s us,” he says, humouring her. “That’s store detectives. Always there, always at your shoulder.”

“But not mine,” the shoplifter points out with a sorrowful little smile. “Not any more. I broke the rules, didn’t I? I’m not coming back.”

Neither am I
, thinks Frank. Which makes them a pair, of sorts. The sinner and the disaffected angel, both denied a place in Mammon’s heaven, one because she has strayed from the straight and narrow, the other because he can no longer bear the notion of staying.

“Well, let’s get it over with, then,” says the shoplifter, rising stiffly to her feet. “Mr Store Detective? You’ve been polite and considerate. Thank you.” The woman extends a hand. “My name is Mrs Shukhov. Carmen Shukhov.”

The gesture utterly flummoxes Frank, who only touches people when he has to, when he has no choice, for instance when collaring a shoplifter. This woman, this Mrs Shukhov, wants him to take her hand in his? Their bodies to make contact, skin against skin? Absurd. It’s bad enough that she has got him conjuring up abstract similarities between them. Now he has to form a physical bridge with her? Out of the question.

He bows instead, just a tiny forward tip of the head.

Realising she has stumbled over an unseen boundary, Mrs Shukhov embarrassedly withdraws the proffered hand. She tries to apologise, and is almost relieved when Gould takes her by the elbow and leads her away from Frank and her
faux pas
.

As the guard and the shoplifter leave the department, Mrs Shukhov makes a doomed attempt to pat her unruly hair into shape, and again Frank is puzzled by her air of neglected elegance. It looks as if she has been wearing the same clothes for at least a couple of days, and in that time hasn’t been near a make-up case or a bath. None of which would mean anything if she didn’t come across as the kind of woman for whom appearance and personal hygiene matter. And then there is the question of how she got in without a card, unless she is lying about losing it. And why risk your Days account over a bottle of contact lens solution, for heaven’s sake?

All very perplexing, but let them sort it out in Processing. Ultimately, it’s not Frank’s problem.

15

Heptarchy
: government by seven persons.

10.07 a.m.

B
Y NOW THE
rightmost of the Boardroom’s triptych of south-facing windows is almost entirely taken up by the dome’s dark side. A dazzling reflection of the cloudless sky whitens the surface area of clear glass that still predominates, a convex mirror of the convex heavens, while scratches and flaws in the ever-encroaching segment of smoked glass refract the light into needle-thin rainbows.

Inside the Boardroom there is a strained silence as six of Septimus Day’s sons look on while the seventh painstakingly mixes himself a gin and tonic.

Sonny, the tip of his tongue lodged in one corner of his mouth, is concentrating as hard on the task at hand as if he were constructing a scale model of a Gothic cathedral out of matchsticks. He has succeeded in pouring a generous measure of gin and a top-up of tonic into the glass without spilling too much of either, but now he finds himself having to grapple with the slippery problem of how to get half-melted cubes of ice out of the malachite bucket with only a pair of silver ice tongs to help him.

The way Sonny handles the tongs, you could be forgiven for thinking that they were not a tool designed expressly for the purpose of retrieving ice cubes from an open container. He operates them as though hampered by an invisible pair of gardening gloves, and whenever he does manage to secure one of the deliquescing lozenges of frozen water between the tongs’ clawed tips, it invariably escapes and goes skidding across the tabletop (and more often than not over the edge of the table and onto the carpet) before he can transfer it to the glass.

For his audience it is the worst kind of slapstick, teeth-grindingly aggravating to watch. Each brother has the urge to go over, snatch the tongs out of Sonny’s hands and, as if he were an invalid, do the job for him. Anything to bring the whole pitiful performance to an end.

Sonny saves them the trouble. Losing patience, he abandons the tongs, reaches into the bucket, and plucks out a fistful of ice to toss into his drink. A slice of lemon follows. Then, carefully sliding the brim-full glass towards him, he brings his nose to the surface and inhales, revelling in the tangle of tangy aromas – juniper, quinine, lemon. Puckering his lips into a funnel, he sucks up a mouthful.

“Fabulous!” he croaks, slapping the arm of his throne, and takes another long, noisy slurp, and another.

Having drained two centimetres of liquid by this means, he feels he can safely pick up the glass. He polishes the drink off in two swift swallows.

His hands are steadier, his movements more fluent and less grimly precise, as he pours himself a follow-up. Gulping it down, he feels the pulsing, nauseating rage of his hangover begin to dim as the alcohol spreads its glacial tendrils through his bloodstream. The hot iron bands cinching his eyeballs slacken their pressure, and his brain begins to feel less like a dozen kilogrammes of molten magma and more like an organ capable of reason and deduction. To his observers, the outward signs of this inward regeneration are the pinkish glow that dawns in his pallid cheeks and the substantial improvement in his physical co-ordination.

Confidently Sonny reaches out to pour himself a third drink. This one winds up being nine parts gin to one part tonic, a tongue-blistering ratio that, when swallowed, sends a wave of regurgitative heat burning back up his throat. He sucks in air. “Whoa! Ooh! Ah!”

Eventually the inside of his mouth cools, and a big fat grin butters itself across his face.

“Well,” he says, beaming blearily around the table, “here we all are again. Another day of custom and commerce and profit and plenty and all that shit. What have I missed?”

“Only everything,” says Sato tonelessly.

“Perhaps a quick recap of the morning’s admin would refresh all of our memories,” says Mungo to Thurston.

Thurston sighs, twists his lips into a Möbius strip, then punches his minutes of the day’s meeting back up onto the screen and scrolls quickly through them, reading each heading aloud. He concludes by saying, “We’ve voted decisions on all of those,” and sits back in his typist’s chair, folding his arms.

“Actually, not all,” says Mungo. “That interdepartmental dispute...”

“We came to a decision on that.” Thurston eyes his eldest brother cautiously.

“But we didn’t actually vote on it, and now that Sonny’s here, it’s only right that his opinion be sought and his vote counted. So, Thurston, run through the details of the dispute again, and if Sonny or anyone else feels like adding any comments, fine. If not, let’s just vote on it and call the meeting to an end.”

“Thanks, Mungo,” says Sonny. “I knew I could count on you.”

Thurston, with a surly grimace, leans over his terminal again, calls up the history of the disagreement between Books and Computers, and summarises it in a few terse sentences. Sonny, meanwhile, takes the opportunity to mix himself a fourth drink. The food on the silver salver in front of him – grilled bacon, eggs and tomatoes, a round of toast with butter and marmalade – goes untouched. Sonny rarely feels up to eating anything until after midday, by which time he has relaxed his stomach with a soothing lining of liquor. Nevertheless, at Mungo’s insistence Perch serves Sonny a solid breakfast every morning as well as a liquid one, in the hope that one day the former will suggest itself as an appetising alternative to the latter.

“And so,” Thurston concludes, “we decided that Chas should go down and sort it out.”

“Good idea,” says Sonny, without looking up. “A few silken words from the Sultan of Smooth and they’ll be rolling over onto their backs, begging to have their bellies tickled.”

“You have a better suggestion?” says Chas, a crease of annoyance unbalancing the enviable symmetry of his features.

“I do, but what chance does it have of getting a fair hearing?”

“Not much,” Chas admits.

“There you go. No point opening my mouth. But then
that’s
hardly news, is it? For all the influence I have around here, I might as well be a janitor.”

“It’s not our fault you don’t get a day of chairmanship,” says Wensley in what he hopes is a placatory tone. “It’s just how Dad arranged it. We may think that his obsession with the number seven was perhaps a little misguided, a little
anal
, but there’s nothing we can do about it. What’s ordained cannot be unordained.”

“Yes, it can,” says Sonny. “We could open on Sundays, for one thing. That would put me on an equal footing with the rest of you.”

The response is as immediate as it is inevitable. Sonny would have expected little else of his brothers. He knows what each is going to say almost before he has said it.

“Out of the question,” Thurston snaps.

“Think of the expense,” says Sato. “We’d have to put employees on shifts and we’d have to pay them overtime rates. That would never do.”

“And we wouldn’t want to offend our Christian customers,” adds Chas.

“And what about the living mannequins?” says Fred. “They deserve a day of rest as much as anyone.”

“
We
need a day of rest,” says Wensley.

“Besides,” says Chas, “Dad specifically decreed that the store would never open on a Sunday. ‘Sunday,’ he said, ‘is the keystone of the week.’ Remember? ‘Its purpose is to hold the other six in place, and for that reason it must be kept distinct from the rest.’”