The Kingdom of Us

Graham Boone's Adams

Description

We all have a breaking point and Michael Richardson has reached his. His girlfriend has left him and he is being made redundant. Worse, he discovers that the businessman putting him out of work is the bully who tormented him as a child and attacked his 16-year-old sister.

Michael plots revenge but he needs an alibi for murder and who better than a psychologist to vouch for him? Enter Bronwen, who has a questionable dress sense and an even more questionable code of conduct. As their cat-and-mouse therapy sessions delve into his past he finds his life is changing, but not in the way he — or she — expects.

Sujets

• Fiction
• Crime

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 21 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456608873
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Kingdom of Us
 
 
A Crime Story
 
 
Graham Adams
 


Copyright 2012 Graham Adams,
All rights reserved.
 
 
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0887-3
 
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
 
 
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to persons living or dead (unless explicitly noted) is merely coincidental.


 
 
 
We have got into the habit of admiring colossal bandits, whose opulence is revered by the entire world, yet whose existence proves to be one long crime repeated ad infinitum , but those same bandits are heaped with glory, honours and power, their crimes are hallowed by the law of the land [yet] a poor man’s theft is seen as a malicious attempt at individual redress.
— Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night
 
PART I
You get the impression that business these days is mostly run by ruthless, faceless men wheeling and dealing in glass towers around the globe, out of the sight of the people who make the products that generate the profits, but today I glimpsed Blue Harrison, high up on the gantry above the factory floor.
He was wearing a pinstriped suit with a yellow tie and shiny black shoes. He’s jowly and thickset now but I’d recognise that military clip from a hundred paces, even after twenty years. He holds his right arm bunched at his side like he’s a sergeant-major with a swagger stick, while he swings the left one. He’s walked that way since he was a kid.
It’s a faintly comical gait but it’s a lot more dangerous than it seems. His right arm looks frozen, but it’s waiting. Waiting to do some damage. In fact, I know all about his right arm...or more particularly his right fist.
I watched Harrison complete an aerial tour of the factory, then descend onto the walkway that runs around the perimeter and disappear into the managing director’s office. He was followed by a good-looking blonde clutching a black folder to her chest. Blue surrounds himself with beautiful personal assistants who accompany him everywhere; apparently he pays nearly twice the going rate for their services.
He emerged fifteen minutes later, laughing, his head thrown back, the big-titted blonde close behind.
Sonny came up to me just then to tell me how happy he was that his daughter had finally given him a grandson after three granddaughters but I couldn’t really hear what he was saying. I retreated into my office and closed the door. I had to lean against the wall. My head was pounding. I grabbed a couple of Panadol and washed them down with a long swig from the tap, then topped that up with a shot of brandy from the bottle I keep behind the cupboard for emergencies.
 
When I had caught my breath, I went out to the window in the corridor to check that Blue had gone. I was just in time to see his big black Mercedes pull away from the executives’ car park in front of the CEO’s office.
I stood there staring at nothing in particular for a few minutes, trying to put my thoughts in order. Then a silver Saab glided into the vacant space and a man and two women got out.
The woman who exited from the front passenger’s door was a petite brunette. The blonde who followed from the rear was bordering on obese. Her dress had ridden up and she smoothed it over her rump with a fluid sweep of her hands.
The driver was middle-aged, with a beard, balding pate and scraggy grey ponytail. If that wasn’t bad enough, he’d let his eyebrows grow into two exaggerated sooty arches. He was obviously a prat. You got the impression he lived alone too: no self-respecting woman would have let her old man venture into public looking like that.
The trio gazed around at the faceless buildings and one of them said something that must have been insulting because they all laughed in that clipped, urbane way you get with professionals taking the mickey.
As I watched them stroll towards the main doors holding their briefcases, Mad Dog McWilliams came bustling up and planted himself between me and the window.
“Who’s the arsehole that’s been talking to my missus, then, eh?” he said. His eyes turned up in their sockets so the whites flickered beneath his irises.
“What arsehole?” I asked. “There’s a lot of them around here.”
“The arsehole who told her how much redundancy I’m getting.”
Mad Dog’s eyes narrowed. He has a nervous tic that makes his forehead crinkle, his eyes roll up and then scrunch into slits. “Was it you, Mike, you sneaky bastard?”
“I didn’t even know you were married, Mad Dog. You keep it pretty quiet.”
As it happens, I did know he was married. He pretends he isn’t so he’ll have a better chance with the girls in the cafeteria and accounts. I also know he owns two cars his wife knows nothing about, because it’s certain she would object to the expense. He parks the Alfa and the E-Type in a garage across town he hires from Brendan upstairs. No one has any idea where he gets his money from. He wouldn’t have any idea I know about his cars either.
“Some arsehole told her!” he said. His forehead bunched up; his eyes rolled. Then the squint.
“Well?” he said. “Was it you?”
I went back to my office and started rearranging things in the lockers to calm myself.
Eruptions happen nearly every day now. Everyone’s been at each other’s throats since the news of the redundancies was announced three weeks ago.
 
The factory I’ve worked in for the past five years is in an industrial estate on the outskirts of the city. It was the region’s showpiece when it opened. It’s modern, anonymous, but clean. I keep it that way. I’m paid to keep the building ticking over and dirt and microbes in check.
I was a production manager at another firm for ten years before that but when the caretaker’s job came up I applied. The managers couldn’t understand why I wanted the change since I would be moving from the boss class to be a worker, but I didn’t need the aggravation of worrying about production tallies and the like any more.
I did the right thing. It’s better on the shop floor and this company has always had a policy where the CEO can’t earn more than eight times the workers’ average salary. So even the cleaners don’t do too badly and we all get production bonuses twice a year as well.
I take pride in my job and the boys on the textile machines seem to like a managerial type working alongside them. I’ve got two guys who can tell me if there’s going to be any trouble on the factory floor. If I’m tipped off I know I can defuse it before it gets out of hand. I might be the caretaker but if there’s trouble brewing I’m the one management turn to. They pay me slightly above the odds because I’m useful.
One half of the workforce is Tongan, the other half mainly Samoan, and they compete like mad to get the best production total. Once when a brawl broke out on the lawn, management got the fire hoses out and gave them a good soaking. That sort of thing doesn’t get into the news media because the boss has a reputation as a humane employer that no one can shake for now.
He flies the best team back to the Islands at Christmas, which just makes the others so mad they work like crazy to raise their tally. He’s not stupid, the boss.
I hate the thought of losing my job. Most shifts, I can spend at least three hours reading in my “office” alongside the brooms and cleaning machinery without anyone noticing, or caring. Right now I’m reading books on neuroscience and economics.
The best thing about being a caretaker is that no one owns me. The boss has a call on my time but that’s all. He doesn’t have any call on my imagination.
 
Twenty minutes after Blue had left the premises, I joined a line of workers filing into the canteen to hear the psychologists. Now that the company is making us redundant, it’s giving us advice on how to cope with it. It’s management’s attempt at humour right to the bitter end.
We had to wait for ten minutes before the Wise Ones entered. It was the smug trio who’d arrived in the Saab. They looked solemn, as befitted the occasion and their status as seers.
They seated themselves in a row on plastic chairs under the fluorescent lights. They put their briefcases on the floor at their feet, then looked pityingly at the workers arranged obediently before them. It was at the crossover between the day and evening shifts, so they had a full house.
After everyone had settled down, the short brunette on the left got to her feet to introduce the fat blonde in the middle, who was an authority apparently on “transitions” of the kind we were about to experience. There was nothing unusual in such experiences, the short one told us – as if we got made redundant every other week.
Then the fat one got to her feet. Her dress had bunched up again and she pulled it down over her ample contours in a languid motion that in other circumstances, and dim lighting, might have been erotic. You got the impression she enjoyed touching herself.
She cleared her throat – a little nervously for an authority I thought – and explained she wasn’t going to use the “r” word, because that excited negative emotions. Instead, she was going use words that began with “ch” – challenges, changes and taking charge of one’s destiny.
She talked for some time without saying anything but when she mentioned that the Chinese ideogram for “crisis” meant not only “danger” but also “opportunity”, the prat with the ponytail sprang to his feet and said it would be a crisis only if we were passive and refused to meet life’s challenges head on.
It must have been a set-up – his jumping up like that – because the fat one eased her vast bulk back onto her chair without any hint of resentment at being upstaged.
He then segued into a speech about remaining po