May Contain Traces of Magic Read online

  TOM

  HOLT

  May Contain Traces of Magic

  This edition published 2009 by BCA by arrangement with Orbit An Hachette UK Company

  CN 161445

  Copyright © 2009 by The One Reluctant Lemming Co. Ltd

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Typeset in Plantin by M Rules

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives

  To my father; who carried the bag with humour. And to all salesmen everywhere.

  CHAPTER ONE

  He was losing her, he could tell. The polite smile was still there, but the eyes were glazing over, the mind was drifting away. Right, he thought.

  “Or there’s the new BB27Ks,” he said, increasing the volume just a trifle. “I think they’d do really well for you. Ever since we brought them out, it’s been phenomenal.”

  He’d got her back, just for a moment. “I read about them,” she said; just enough enthusiasm to dirty a microscope slide, but that was something like a ninety per cent improvement. “How-are they going?”

  “Brilliant,” he said, “absolutely brilliant Doing very nicely. Everywhere I go, people keep telling me they’re just flying off the shelves.”

  Immediately, he knew he’d said the wrong thing; her mouth tightened, her eyes narrowed a little. No idea why. “In fact, we’re doing a special ...” he started to say, but a flicker of movement behind her head snagged his attention and he dried up. On the top row of the shelf unit facing him, a cardboard box had just sprouted wings.

  Sod it, he thought. The NM66.

  “Um,” he said, as the box stretched, preened its light grey feathers and made a soft cheeping noise. The shopkeeper looked round, swore and grabbed at it, but it was too late. The box spread its wings, hopped off the shelf and glided lazily, just out of reach of the shopkeeper’s flailing hands, over their heads, out through the open door into the street. She looked at him.

  “We’re working on that,” he said sheepishly. “Bit of a snarl-up with quality control, but they promise me the next batch...”

  “Fifteen of them,” she said bitterly. “In just one week.”

  “It’s the mating season,” he mumbled. “But they’ve completely redesigned the DNA sequence, and that’ll sort it, no problem. Meanwhile, if you’ll just do us a returns note for the, um, escaped stock, we’ll get that straightened out for you, and...”

  He ran out of words. The expression on her face was quite clear: forget it, don’t bother, save your breath. But that wasn’t his way. He sucked in a little air, and said brightly, “So, shall I put you down for three dozen of the BB27K, for starters? We’re offering special display materials, dumpbins, special promotional ...”

  “No, thanks,” she said.

  Oh, he thought. Right, fine. “Well, I guess that’s about it for today, then. Thanks ever so much for seeing me, and I’ll be back again first week in June. Meanwhile, if there’s anything I can help you with ...”

  It was like pouring water into sand. He was used to it, but that didn’t make it fun. And it’d be nice, just once, if he got a chance to end a sentence with something other than three dots. He smiled, closed the lid of his briefcase, thanked her once again for her time and left the shop.

  It was raining outside, needless to say, as though tears for the miserable fate of all salesmen everywhere were rolling down heaven’s face. One of these days, he thought, I’ll get a proper job, in an office, and I won’t have to do this any more. One of these days.

  He looked up, and saw the stray NM66 perched on top of a nearby traffic light. Stupid bloody things, he thought as the box, now distinctly damp, cooed mildly at him; not enough sense to stay out of the rain, it’ll get all soggy and fell to bits if it’s not careful.

  He walked back to his car, which winked its indicators at him as he thumbed the plastic key thing. At least someone’s pleased to see me, he thought.

  Before he drove off, he filled in the order form. That didn’t take long. No BB27Ks, no GP19s, he’d been stone-cold certain he’d be able to shift a couple of outers of YJ42s but no dice. Just a couple of trays of AAls and the inevitable repeat order for DW6...

  That made him frown, as it always did. DW6: one of the firm’s biggest sellers, but in seven years he’d yet to meet anybody who knew what the stupid stuff was actually for. It was, by any criteria, the weirdest, most totally improbable concept he’d come across (and in this business, that was saying a lot). None of the reps knew what it was supposed to do, the buyers hadn’t got a clue, the shop managers and sales assistants didn’t know; but the customers bought it, by the bucketful, by the skipload, so—

  Never mind, he told himself firmly as he switched on the SatNav and waited for it to warm up. A mystery it might be, but at least he could shift it; three hearty cheers for small mercies. There were some months (and this might well prove to be one of them, the way things were going) when the only thing that stood between him and an excitingly challenging change in career direction was DW6.

  Even so.

  SatNav flickered into brightly backlit life, and he touched the nail of his index finger to the screen. The colours swirled, and it said—

  (It said; she said—)

  —SatNav said, “Your route is being calculated; please wait,” and for a moment he forgot about snotty shop managers and flying cardboard boxes and his monthly target and perversely inexplicable megaselling DW6, because there was something about its voice, her voice, that was so wonderfully soothing and reassuring; like she understood him, like she cared—

  He frowned. They’d warned him about that, of course. He glanced at the little screen, as the picture swung wildly through the x axis and settled itself. Straight on out of town until he hit the main A666, then take the second exit. Fine.

  Not much traffic at this time of day. He’d warned them about the NM66, of course, told them till he was blue in the face and would they listen? Fat chance. He’d told them that it was just a matter of time before an escaped pair started breeding, and then the brown stuff’d hit the swiftly whirring blades all right: tabloid headlines, billion-dollar lawsuits, the boing-boing noise of rolling heads in the deep-pile-carpeted corridors of corporate power. He sighed. They lived in a world of their own in Kettering.

  He turned the radio on, but it was some phone-in, so he fished about in the glove compartment for a CD. Now there (he thought, as he scrabbled one-handed through the plastic cases) was another bloody mystery, because a third of the stuff in there was garbage he’d never have bought in a million years, a third he couldn’t even recognise, and of the remaining third that he was prepared to acknowledge as his own, the one thing he actually wanted to find was always missing. White Stripes—no, not today. Very Best of James Blunt—contradiction in terms. He looked up just in time to avoid smashing into the back of a lorry, and grabbed something at random.

  It turned out to be a home-made job, no label or writing on it, so presumably one of Karen’s compilation CDs—no idea how they came to end up in his glove compartment; another mystery. He stuck it in anyway, and it turned out not to be too bad after all, though of course he had to keep the vol
ume right down so he could hear SatNav—

  “After three hundred yards,” SatNav said, “turn left.”

  He realised he was smiling, and frowned instead. So what, she had, it had a nice voice: bright, warm, friendly, ever so slightly sexy but— All right, so what? Obviously they’d chosen a voice that was carefully designed to appeal to the tired, stressed-out male driver, and they were good at their jobs, and they’d succeeded. There was absolutely nothing wrong with that, nothing odd or sinister or strange about it, and if he’d rather listen to her—it—than to the Proclaimers or the miserable sods on the radio, that was perfectly all right, nothing whatsoever to worry about. Even so, he turned the CD player up just a little bit, and self-consciously tapped out the beat on the steering wheel with his fingers.

  I worry too much, he thought; and when there’s too much or too little to worry about, I worry about worrying. Maybe I should be worried about mat, too. Or maybe I should just get a bloody grip, and concentrate on getting through the next call without screwing up too monumentally badly.

  “At the next junction,” SatNav said, “turn left.”

  “What? Oh, yes,” he muttered, and dabbed at the indicator stalk. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Now then, he thought. Next call was Stetchkin & Sons: old-established family firm, conservative, the archetypal no-call-for-that-round-here outfit, which meant he was going to have to come up with something pretty stunningly amazing if he was going to offload any BB27Ks on them. He rehearsed the standard pitch in his mind. No chance. Come on, he told himself reproachfully, you’re a salesman, you can do this—

  “I can,” he said aloud, like they’d told him to on his Innovation & Assertiveness Awareness Day (complete waste of time, except for the spring rolls at lunchtime). “I can. There’s no such word as can’t.”

  It sounded even sillier than usual, and he grinned. Yes, he thought, but just for the hell of it, like it’s some kind of bet I’m having with myself; if only to see the look on old Mr Stetchkin’s face when he realises he’s just placed an order for three dozen of something he didn’t know he wanted. I can do this—

  “Yes,” he said. “Can’t I, SatNav?”

  “Of course you can.”

  He frowned, changed down to overtake a cyclist, and said, “Yes, well, it’s easy for you to say. You’ve never met old Mr Stetchkin.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  He grinned, and turned off the CD player. “Oh God, where do I begin? Right, then, for a start he’s seventy if he’s a day, bald with little bits of white fluff over his ears like cotton wool, stupid little tufty white beard—”

  “He sounds rather sweet, actually.”

  Bitter laugh. “I don’t think so,” he said. “He’s one of those miserable, nit-picking types, never satisfied, nothing’s ever right, won’t ever listen to what you’ve got to say, reckons he knows it all, you really wouldn’t—”

  “After three hundred yards,” SatNav interrupted, “turn right. And perhaps,” she went on, “if he’s been in the business for a long time and he’s still going, maybe he does know it all. Or at least quite a lot of it.”

  He was going to laugh derisively, but he didn’t. “It’s a good business, Stetchkins,” he said thoughtfully. “They’ve always done well, even in the recession. There’s not many that can say that.”

  “Now turn right,” SatNav said. “So perhaps Mr Stetchkin’s got good reason to think he knows it all.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’d have thought someone like that would be quite proud of his experience.”

  He frowned. “Go on.”

  “Oh, I was just thinking, after all those years in the trade, he must have heard every pitch there is, over and over again, till he’s sick of hearing them all. People trying really hard to sell him things, I mean.”

  “I suppose so,” he said. “But that’s not helping me, is it?”

  “After six hundred yards, take the second exit. If I was Mr Stetchkin,” SatNav said, “I wouldn’t want some young rep coming into my shop and trying to shove some new product up my nose, telling me how wonderful it is. No, if there’s a new line I might be interested in, I’d want to look at it carefully, see if it’s any good and make my own decision. Don’t you think?”

  “Fine,” he replied huffily. “That’s me out of a job, then.”

  “Not at all. Your job is to bring the merchandise to the customers’ attention.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” he said sarcastically. “Only I wouldn’t last very long if all I...”

  “Take the second exit.”

  “What? Oh, shit, right.”

  “Personally,” SatNav went on, “if it was me, I’d start off just taking down the reorders, let him do all the talking to begin with, and then I’d say something like—”

  “Like?”

  “I’m thinking, please wait. Something like, ‘I don’t know if you’ve got a moment, Mr Stetchkin, but I’d quite like your opinion of this new line we’re bringing out’; and then you hand it to him and take a step back, and don’t say anything until he’s finished looking at it—”

  “That’s not bad,” Mr Stetchkin said.

  Oink, he thought. “You think it’s OK?” he said.

  Mr Stetchkin nodded. “It’s quite good,” he said. “Neat. Well thought out. Good value for money.”

  He frowned, like she’d told him to, and tried to sound slightly worried. “You don’t think the packaging’s a bit, well, loud—?”

  Mr Stetchkin shook his head. “No, not really. Nice bright colours, catches the eye.”

  “But isn’t it a bit on the dear side? For what it is, I mean.”

  Mr Stetchkin thought about that for a moment. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Customers know they get what they pay for. If it was any cheaper, it’d send the wrong message. You wouldn’t expect to get anything like this worth having for nine ninety-nine.”

  “That’s true,” he said, as though reluctantly conceding the point. “And you think the way it folds up at the back is all right? I was a little concerned people might think it’s a bit, well, fiddly.”

  Mr Stetchkin gave him a patronising smile. “Hardly,” he said. “Look, I can do it with one hand, see?” And he folded it up easily, as though he’d been practising for a week. “No, I have to say, I really like this—What did you say the code was?”

  He made a show of looking at his book. “BB27K,” he said.

  “Yes, thank you.” Mr Stetchkin handed him back the sample, and nodded. “I’ll take ten dozen.”

  “I think we may be able to—Just let me check.” He looked back at the book and saw that it was upside down. Luckily, Mr Stetchkin hadn’t noticed. “Yes, we can let you have ten dozen, just about. Usual rate?”

  Mr Stetchkin nodded again, and for a moment the shop seemed to flicker, because Mr Stetchkin always screwed you to the floor over discounts. “Now then,” Mr Stetchkin went on, “I’d like another six dozen of the DW6, and this time, tell them I don’t want to find any of them with the seals broken, I think I may have mentioned this before—”

  “It was amazing,” he said. “Ten dozen. He took ten dozen, and—”

  “At the end of the road, turn left”

  “Yes, I know, I’ve been here before. Now all I’ve got to do is shift three dozen more and I’ve made my target, and I’m pretty sure I can get rid of two dozen on the Valmet brothers, which just leaves one, and I’m home free.”

  “That’s marvellous. I knew you could do it.”

  He was grinning again. But, he thought, why the hell not? Nobody else would’ve said that to him. “I reckon we’ve done a good day’s work today,” he said. “You and me.”

  No reply; but that was fair enough, it was a straight stretch of road. He sat back in his seat and tapped the wheel a few times, beating out the rhythm from one of the tracks he’d played earlier; catchy tune, he wondered who it was by.

  “Excuse me.”
r />   “Mm?”

  “Only,” she said, “I was wondering.”

  “Yes?”

  “This BB—”

  “BB27K?”

  “That’s it, yes. Only...” Brief hesitation, like she was about to take a slight liberty. “What is it? I mean, what does it actually do?”

  He smiled. “It’s the latest thing,” he said. “Kettering’s mad about it, really pushing it. Hence the bloody enormous target.”

  “Yes, but—”

  His smile widened. “It’s a portable folding parking space,” he said. “It comes in a little plastic wallet, and you take it out and unfold it and lay it down on the road, and it expands into a space big enough to take anything up to a small minibus. When you’re ready to leave, you just pick it up and put it away and off you go. Even works on double yellows. I’m going to see if I can nick one for myself, it’ll make my life so much—”

  “That’s a really good idea,” she said.

  “Invented by Professor Cornelius Van Spee of Leiden,” he recited, “a by-product of research into—”

  “Wasn’t he the one who went mad and tried to blow up the planet?”

  He shrugged. “Search me,” he replied. “I just sell them. Or try to,” he added. “And, thanks to you...”

  “Not at all,” she said. “You were the one who made the sale. I just—”

  “Should I be turning right here?”

  “What? Oh, yes, sorry.”

  “No problem,” he said, turning the wheel. “And then it’s right at the crossroads, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. I mean, at the end of the road, turn right. Sorry.”

  “That’s OK.” He slid the gear lever into fourth. “What were you telling me just now about Professor Van Spee?”

  “Well,” SatNav replied, “if he’s the one I’m thinking of, he tried to create a pocket universe. There was a lot of trouble about it, at the time.”

  He frowned. “That’s no big deal,” he said. “I mean, we do those: the JH88C. Get away from it all in a world of your own for only two-nine-nine ninety-nine. We sell a lot of them.”