Read Online Armadillo by William Boyd - Free Book Online Page B

and it wasn’t smoke damage. One visit to Edmund, Rintoul Ltd should confirm it, he reckoned. This had the air of an old, familiar scam, some ancient chicanery, but the scale was all wrong – perhaps a modest bit of routine deceit that had gone hideously out of control, exploding into something from a disaster movie. Hogg was over-confident in one area, though: they would be paying out a few red cents on this one; the question was, how much?
    He heard the soft chirrup of his mobile phone in his jacket pocket.
    ‘Hello?’
    ‘Lorimer Black?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Fraught, we’d seal the drain.’
    ‘Hello there.’
    ‘You free for lunch? I’ll pop down to you. Cholmondley’s?’
    ‘Ah. All right. Sounds good.’
    ‘Brilliant. See you at one.’
    Lorimer beeped Helvoir-Jayne back into the ether and frowned to himself, recalling Hogg’s ambiguous suspicions. First day in the office and he wants lunch with Lorimer Black. And where do I happen to be?
    Cholmondley’s looked like a cross between a sports pavilion and an oriental brothel. Dark, from the rattan blinds that shrouded the windows and copious date palms in every corner, it boasted roof fans and bamboo furniture warring with battered sporty memorabilia – peat-brown cricket bats and crossed oars, wooden tennis racquets, sepia team photos and ranked split-cane fishing rods. The staff, men and women, wore striped butcher’s aprons and boaters (could you wear a boater with a city suit?). Country and Western ballads thudded almost inaudibly from hidden speakers.
    Helvoir-Jayne was already at the table, half way through a celery-sprouting bloody mary and unwrapping the cellophane from a pack of cigarettes, just brought to him by a waitress. He waved Lorimer over.
    ‘Do you want one of these? No? Well, we’ll have a bottle of house red and house white.’ A shocking thought seemed to occur to him, and he froze. ‘It’s not English wine, is it?’
    ‘No, sir.’ She was foreign, Lorimer heard, a thin, somehow stooped young girl with a sallow, tired face.
    ‘Thank Christ. Bring the wine then come back in ten minutes.’
    Lorimer held out his hand.
    ‘What’s going on?’ Helvoir-Jayne looked at him, baffled.
    ‘Welcome to GGH.’ Lorimer kept forgetting they didn’t like to shake hands so he rolled his wrist vaguely, creating a standard gesture of welcome, instead. ‘Missed you at the office.’ He sat down, refusing Helvoir-Jayne’s offer of a cigarette. Automatically, he did a quick inventory: maroon, motif-sprinkled, silk tie, off-the-rail pale pink cotton shirt, badly ironed, but monogrammed T HJ, on the lip of the breast pocket, oddly, French cuffs, gold cufflinks, no silly braces, signet ring, tassled loafers, pale blue socks, slightly too small, old, off-the-peg, double-breasted pin-stripe dark blue suit with twin vents, designed for a thinner Helvoir-Jayne than the one opposite him. They were both dressed almost identically, right down to the signet ring; apart from the socks – Lorimer’s were navy blue – and both his double-breasted pin-striped suit and his shirt were hand-made. Furthermore, his shirt had no breast pocket and his monogram – LMBB – which had been discreetly placed on his upper arm, like an inoculation scar, had been removed since the day Ivan Algomir had told him that mono-grammed shirts were irredeemably common.
    ‘Sorry to bug you on day one,’ Helvoir-Jayne said. ‘By the way, you must, simply must, call me Torquil. Anyway, I had to get out of that place. What a bunch of fucking geeks.’
    Torquil. Torquil it would be, then. ‘Who? What geeks?’
    ‘Our lot. Our colleagues. And that girl, Dinka, Donkna? Where do they dig them up from?’
    ‘Dymphna. They’re all very good at their job, actually.’
    ‘Thank God for you, that’s all I can say. Red or white?’
    Torquil was eating spicy Cumberland sausages with mash; Lorimer was pushing bits of over-dressed, char-grilled Thai chicken salad around a black papier