Read Online May Contain Traces of Magic by Tom Holt - Free Book Online

Angela said. ‘That’s stupid.’
    He shrugged. ‘Not up to me,’ he said. ‘Also, to be fair, they’re bloody hard to kill. Friend of mine works for the department - you know, those comedians we met back there - and apparently you need very specialised kit, not the sort of thing that fits neatly in your handbag or jacket pocket. Anyhow,’ he added, as she started to ask another question, ‘let’s not talk about it any more, if you don’t mind. All right?’
    She shrugged too but he could see that she wasn’t happy. ‘If you like,’ she said.
    â€˜Thanks. So,’ Chris went on, taking a deep breath, ‘apart from that, how are you finding it?’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜The business. The thrill of the open road, the challenge of hand-to-hand marketing. About what you’d expected?’
    Another shrug. ‘More or less,’ Angela said. ‘Though really it’s not about, well, magic, is it? You might as well be selling envelopes or toilet rolls.’
    â€˜Yes,’ Chris said. ‘Except I wouldn’t be, because all that stuff’s done by technology now, electronic point of sale reordering and centralised buying. But this is an old-fashioned business, so they still need reps. Which is just as well for me, really.’
    â€˜I suppose.’ Angela looked away, then down at her fingernails, which were bitten short. ‘Anyway, I get the general idea. You go round the shops and try and get them to buy stuff. That’s about it, isn’t it?’
    â€˜Broadly speaking.’ Chris offered a corner of his fried-bread crust to the cat; it stared at him, yowled and ran away. ‘Still, it’s as close to the interesting stuff as I’ll ever get. Not like you, with your high-powered research.’
    â€˜Actually, it’s mostly pretty boring,’ Angela replied. ‘I mean, when I was a kid I thought it’d be all invisibility cloaks and turning people into frogs, but it’s not like that. Really, the only difference between what I’m doing and ordinary physics and chemistry is that there’s a little chip of Knowing Stone inside my calculator instead of silicon, so it doesn’t need batteries.’
    Chris nodded. ‘We sell those,’ he said. ‘They’re not very reliable, though. Drop them or leave them out in the sun and they’re knackered.’
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    All in all, a long, fraught day. Karen was out when Chris got home, so he defrosted a pizza and sat down in front of the telly. Nothing on the news about the grisly murder of a shopkeeper in the West Midlands, so maybe he’d imagined it after all.
    He was halfway through his pizza when the phone rang. ‘Chris?’
    There was an edge to her voice, but he could understand that. ‘Hi, Jill. How did you get on with the—?’
    â€˜Did you open my carrier bag before you gave it back?’
    He jumped, as though the phone had bitten his ear. ‘What? No, of course—’
    â€˜There was a sealed packet of biscuits in there and now there’s just a wrapper.’
    So the day hadn’t finished with him quite yet. ‘Was there?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    Chris hesitated. ‘I guess Karen must’ve eaten them. I left the bag on the kitchen table. She must’ve wandered down in the night and—’
    â€˜They were plain digestives. She hates plain digestives.’
    â€˜Does she?’
    â€˜Yes.’ Less than friendly tsk noise. ‘I know that for a fact, Chris, she was my best friend at school, remember?’
    And he, Karen’s long-term significant other, hadn’t got a clue what sort of biscuits she did and didn’t like (but Jill, he happened to know, adored chocolate hobnobs). ‘Is that right?’ he said. ‘I never—’
    â€˜Which means,’ Jill continued grimly, ‘she wouldn’t have eaten them. But somebody did.’
    He really