Read Online More Than Meets the Eye by J. M. Gregson - Free Book Online Page B

had to say here. ‘I’ve asked myself that. My answer is that I’m not a racialist. I was looking round for the most violent words I could find to stir the man into action. I picked the wrong ones, that’s all.’ He’d no idea himself whether this was correct or not, but he knew it had to be stated.
    â€˜Does Mr Junaid intend to take the matter any further?’
    â€˜No. I’ve told him that I lost my temper under pressure and spoke without thinking. I’ve apologized to him and he’s accepted that his speed of work was unacceptable and a contributory factor in the incident. We’re working together amicably again.’
    It was more or less what Shoab Junaid had said to Dennis Cooper when he had spoken to him on the previous day. He seemed a willing if limited worker, more anxious about keeping his own job than about exacting retribution from Wilkinson. Cooper reached forward and moved his pen minimally on the desk in front of him. ‘If what you said represents your real attitude, Hugo, you’d be better getting out now. Neither we nor you can afford any repetition of the incident.’
    Hugo knew now that he was not going to be told to pack his bags and get out. His relief was more overwhelming than he had ever expected it to be. He must say the correct, contrite things now. It would soon be over, if he ate a little humble pie. ‘There won’t be any repetition. I can guarantee that.’
    â€˜There mustn’t be, Hugo. I shall send you a formal written warning about this incident, which will state among other things that any recurrence will mean immediate dismissal. A copy will be placed on your file.’
    â€˜I understand that.’
    â€˜I hope you do. And I hope we can put this happening behind us and never discuss it again.’
    He stood up and Wilkinson followed suit, realizing that the meeting was at an end, hesitating awkwardly for a moment as he wondered whether the curator was going to shake his hand.
    Dennis Cooper sat still for a long time after the head chef had left his office. He pondered whether he should have raised his other concern with Wilkinson, but decided that he had been right not to do so. This was a formal reprimand and a formal warning about a serious incident in the man’s working environment. It wouldn’t have been appropriate to raise anything else.
    Cooper unlocked the top right-hand drawer of his desk and made a note in the small notebook he kept there. He’d need more than mere suspicion, to raise anything as serious as what he suspected.
    Most of the younger gardening staff at Westbourne thought Alex Fraser was a loner. In his first few months there, he had been quite prepared to foster that impression.
    He’d never had to think about company in Glasgow. The gang had seen to that. But when he’d moved south into an alien world, he’d chosen to keep himself to himself. That had been the advice of the only social worker for whom he’d had any respect, the man who’d hauled him out of trouble and then helped him to keep out of it, in the teeming Scottish city where he’d spent his turbulent adolescence.
    â€˜Keep your nose clean and join a golf club. The English will like that,’ Ken Jackson had said, after he’d helped him to get the apprenticeship at Westbourne. He’d smiled when he’d said it, almost smirked. Golf was a very odd thing for Alex Fraser to have in his armoury. Even in Scotland, where golf cuts across the class divisions much more than in England, a lad of Fraser’s background didn’t often get near a golf course, unless it was for theft or other mischief.
    Five years ago, when Fraser was fifteen, someone at the council had thought it a good idea for some of the boys in care to attend a golf clinic at the neighbouring municipal course. The tuition was subsidized by the golf authorities, who thought it was a splendid idea to introduce youngsters to