“Um. Yes. Look, there are things I have to take care of at home . . . d’you think it’d be all right if I took the rest of the day off and—“
“Suit yourself. You aren’t meant to be back in till tomorrow anyway.”
“I’m not?” he asked. “Right.”
Sylvia frowned. “What happened to your finger?”
“I broke it,” he told her.
She looked at his hand with concern. “You weren’t in a fight, were you?”
“Me?”
She grinned. “Just teasing. I suppose you shut it in a door. That’s what my sister did.”
“No,” Richard began to admit, “I was in a fi . . . ” Sylvia raised an eyebrow. “A door,” he finished lamely.
He went to the building he had once lived in by taxi. He was not sure that he trusted himself to travel by the Underground. Not yet. Having no door key, he knocked at the door of his flat and was more than disappointed when it was opened by the woman Richard last remembered meeting, or rather, failing to meet, in his bathroom. He introduced himself as the previous tenant, and quickly established that a) he, Richard, no longer lived there, and b) she, Mrs. Buchanan, had no idea what had happened to any of his personal possessions. Richard took some notes, and then he said good-bye very nicely, and took another black taxi to go and see a man in a camel-hair coat.
The smooth man in the camel-hair coat was not wearing his camel-hair coat, and was, in fact, a good deal less smooth than the last time Richard had encountered him. They were sitting in his office, and he had listened to Richard’s list of complaints with the expression of someone who has recently and accidentally swallowed whole a live spider and has just begun to feel it squirm.
“Well, yes,” he admitted, after looking at the files. “There does seem to have been some kind of problem, now you mention it. I can’t quite see how it could have happened.”
“I don’t think it matters how it happened,” said Richard, reasonably. “The fact of the matter is that while I was away for a few weeks, you rented my apartment to,” he consulted his notes, “George and Adele Buchanan. Who have no intention of leaving.”
The man closed the file. “Well,” he said. “Mistakes do happen. Human error. I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do about it.”
The old Richard, the one who had lived in what was now the Buchanans’ home, would have crumbled at this point, apologized for being a nuisance, and gone away. Instead, Richard said, “Really? Nothing you can do about it? You rented a property I was legally renting from your company to someone else, and in the process lost all my personal possessions, and there’s nothing you can do about it? Now, I happen to think, and I’m sure my lawyer will also think, that there is a great deal you can do about it.”
The man without the camel-hair coat looked as if the spider was beginning to crawl back up his throat. “But we don’t have any other vacant apartments like yours in the building,” he said. “There’s only the penthouse suite.”
“That,” Richard told the man, coldly, “would be fine . . . ” The man relaxed. ” . . . for living accommodation. Now,” said Richard, “let’s talk about compensation for my lost possessions.”
The new apartment was much nicer than the one he had left behind. It had more windows, and a balcony, a spacious lounge, and a proper spare bedroom. Richard prowled it, dissatisfied. The man-without-a-camel-hair-coat had, extremely grudgingly, had the apartment furnished with a bed, a sofa, several chairs, and a television set. Richard put Hunter’s knife on the mantelpiece. He bought a take-away curry from the Indian restaurant across the road, sat on the carpeted floor of his new apartment, and ate it, wondering if he had ever really eaten curry late at night in a street-market held on the deck of a gunship moored by Tower Bridge. It did not seem very likely, now that he thought about it.
The doorbell rang. He got up and answered the door. “We found a lot of your stuff, Mr. Mayhew,” said the man who was once more wearing his camel-hair coat. “Turned out it’d been put into storage. Right, bring the stuff in, lads.”
A couple of burly men hauled in several large wooden packing cases, filled with Richard’s stuff, and deposited them on the carpet in the middle of the living room.
“Thanks,” said Richard. He reached into the first box, unwrapped the first paper-covered object, which turned out to be a framed photograph of Jessica. He stared at it for some moments, and then he put it down again in the case. He found the box with his clothes in it, removed them, and put them away in his bedroom, but the other boxes sat, untouched, in the middle of the living room floor. As the days went on, he felt increasingly guilty about not unpacking them. But he did not unpack them.
He was in his office, sitting at his desk, staring out of the window, when the intercom buzzed. “Richard?” said Sylvia. “The MD wants a meeting in his office in twenty minutes to discuss the Wandsworth report.”
“I’ll be there,” he said. Then, because he had nothing else to do for the next ten minutes, he picked up an orange troll and menaced a slightly smaller green-haired troll with it. “I am the greatest warrior of London Below. Prepare to die,” he said, in a dangerous trollish voice, waggling the orange troll. Then he picked up the green-haired troll, and said, in a smaller trollish voice, “Aha! But first you shall drink the nice cup of tea . . . “
Someone knocked on the door, and, guiltily, he put down the trolls. “Come in.” The door opened, and Jessica came in, and stood in the doorway. She looked nervous. He had forgotten quite how beautiful she was. “Hello Richard,” she said.
“Hello Jess,” said Richard, and then he corrected himself. “Sorry—Jessica.”
She smiled, and tossed her hair. “Oh, Jess is fine,” she said, and looked as if she almost meant it. “Jessica—Jess. Nobody’s called me Jess for ages. I rather miss it.”
“So,” said Richard, “what brings, do I have the honor, you, um.”
“Just wanted to see you, really.”
He was not sure what he ought to say. “That’s nice,” he said.
She closed the door to his office and took a few steps toward him. “Richard. You know something strange? I remember calling the engagement off. But I hardly remember what we were arguing about.”
“No?”
“It’s not important, though. Is it?” She looked around the office. “You got a promotion?”