‘That why you left, Chris?’ The junior partner was right on cue, voice still tinged lightly with derision. ‘No stomach to finish the job?’

‘What I think Louise and Philip are trying to say,’ Notley interposed, the kindly uncle at a birthday-party dispute, ‘is that you didn’t resolve matters. Would that be a fair summary, Louise.’

Hewitt nodded curtly. ‘It would.’

‘I stayed at HM two years after Bennett,’ said Chris, keeping his temper. He hadn’t expected this so early. ‘She honoured her defeat as expected. The matter was resolved to my satisfaction, and to the firm’s.’

Notley made soothing gestures. ‘Yes, yes. Perhaps, then, this is more a question of corporate culture than blame. What we value here at Shorn is, how shall I put it? Well, yes. Resolution, I suppose. We don’t like loose ends. They can trip you, and us, up at a later date. As you see with the embarrassment the Bennett incident is causing us all here and now. We are left in, shall we say, an ambiguous situation. Now that couldn’t have happened had you resolved the matter in a terminal fashion. It’s the kind of ambiguity we like to avoid at Shorn Associates. It doesn’t fit our image, especially in a field as competitive as Conflict Investment. I’m sure you understand.’

Chris looked around at the three faces, counting the friends and enemies he appeared to have already made. He manufactured a smile.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Nobody likes ambiguity.’

The gun sat, unambiguously, in the middle of the desk, begging to be picked up. Chris put his hands in his pockets and looked at it with wary dislike.

‘This mine?’

‘Heckler and Koch Nemesis Ten.’ Hewitt strode past him and filled her hand with the black rubber butt. ‘The Nemex. Semi-automatic, double action hesitation lock, no safety necessary. Just pull it out and start shooting. Standard Shorn issue. Comes with a shoulder holster, so you can wear it under a suit. You never know when you’ll have to give a coup de grace.’

He fought down a smirk. Maybe she saw it.

‘We’ve got a way of doing things here, Faulkner. If you call someone out, you don’t take them to the hospital afterwards. You go in and you finish the job. With this if necessary.’ She pointed the pistol one-handed at the datadown unit built into the desk. There was a dry click as she pulled the trigger. ‘If you can, you bring back their plastic. Speaking of which.’ She reached inside her jacket pocket with her free hand and produced a small grey rectangle. Light flashed on the entwined red S and A of a Shorn Associates holologo. She tossed the card onto the table and laid the gun down beside it. ‘There you are. Don’t get separated from either. You never know when you’ll need firepower.’

Chris picked up the card and tapped it thoughtfully on the desk-top. He left the gun where it was.

‘Clips are in the top drawer of your desk. It’s a jacketed load, should go through the engine block of a bulk transporter. You actually used to drive one of those things, didn’t you? Mobile Arbitrage or something.’

‘Yeah.’ Chris pulled out his wallet and racked the card. He looked back up at Hewitt expectantly. ‘So?’

‘No, nothing.’ Hewitt walked past him to the window and looked out at the world below. ‘I think it was an inspired idea, selling commodities from a haulage base. But it’s not quite the same thing as driving for an investment bank, is it?’

Chris smiled a little and seated himself on the corner of the desk, back to the window and his new boss.

‘You don’t like me very much, do you Hewitt?’

‘This isn’t about like, Faulkner. I don’t think you belong here.’

‘Well someone evidently does.’

He heard her coming back to the desk and turned his head casually towards her as she arrived. Behind her, he suddenly noticed how bleak the undecorated office was.

‘Well, look at that,’ she said softly. ‘Got me back here, didn’t you? Is that the kind of powerplay you’re used to? You won’t cut it here, Faulkner. I’ve seen your resume. Big kill eight years back with Quain, nothing much since. You got lucky, that’s all.’

Chris kept his voice mild. ‘So did Hammett McColl. They saved about fifteen mil in bonus payments when Quain went down. And I haven’t needed to do much killing since. Sometimes it’s just enough to do the work. You don’t have to be proving yourself all the time.’

‘Here you do. You’ll find that out.’

‘Really.’ Chris pulled out the top drawer and looked in at the contents as if they interested him marginally more than the woman in front of him. ‘You got some toy boy lined up to call me out for this office?’

For just a moment he had her. He caught it in the way her frame stiffened at the upper edges of his peripheral vision. Then she drew a long breath, as if Chris was a new flower she liked the scent of. As he looked up, she smiled.

‘Cute,’ she said. ‘Oh, you’re cute. Notley likes you, you know that? That’s why you’re here. You remind him of him, back when he was young. He came out of nowhere just like you, riding one big kill. He had a tattoo, just like you. Stream of currency signs, like tears down from one eye. Very classy.’ Her lip curled. ‘He even dated his mechanic for about five years. Little zone girl, with a smudge of grease across her nose. They say she even turned up to a quarterly dinner once with that smudge. Yeah, Notley likes you, but you notice something about that tattoo? It’s gone now. Just like that little zone girl. See, Notley gets sentiment attacks sometimes, but he’s a professional and he won’t let it get in the way. Hold that thought, because you’re going to disappoint him, Faulkner. You don’t have the grit.’

‘Welcome aboard.’

Hewitt looked at him blankly. Chris gestured with one open hand.

‘I thought one of us should say it.’

‘Hey.’ She shrugged and turned to leave. ‘Prove me wrong.’

Chris watched her go, face unreadable. As the door closed, his eyes fell on the matt black Nemex pistol on the desk and his own lip twisted derisively.

‘Fucking cowboys.’

He swept the gun ceremonially away with the clips and slammed the drawer closed.

There was a list of induction suggestions on the datadown: people to call, when to call them, and where they could be found. Procedures to implement, the best time to access the areas of the Shorn datastack necessary for each procedure. A selected overview of his caseload for the next two months, flags to indicate which needed attention first. The p.a. package had phased everything into a suggested convenience sequence which got the work done as efficiently as possible and told him he would find it most convenient to go home at about eight-thirty that evening.

He toyed briefly with the idea of loading up the Nemex with its jacketed ammunition and repeating Hewitt’s target practice on the datadown.

Instead, he punched the phone.

‘Carla, this is Chris. I’m going to be late tonight, so don’t wait up. There’s still some chilli in the fridge, try not to eat it all, it’ll give you the shits and I’d like some myself when I get in. Oh, by the way, I’m in love.’

He put down the receiver and looked at the datadown screen. After a long pause, he prodded the bright orange triangle marked Conflict Investment and watched as it maximised like an opening flower.

The backglow lit his face.

It was past eleven by the time he got home. He killed his lights at the first bend in the drive, though he knew that the crunch of his wheels on the gravel would probably wake Carla as surely as the play of high beams across the front of the house. Sometimes she seemed to know he was home more by intuition than anything else. He parked beside the battered and patched Landrover she ran, turned off his engine and yawned. For a moment he sat in the still and the darkness, listening to the cooling tick of the engine.