1951 - In a Vain Shadow by James Hadley Chase Read Free Book Online Page B

don’t care what you do. Maybe you keep the house nice, hey? You have the car. You go for drives, but get back before is dark. Keep the foxes away from my chickens. You understand?’
    ‘Well, all right. But isn’t there anything else I can do? How about your business? Can’t I do something for you there?’
    He gave me a quick, sly look, and shook his head.
    ‘You look after the chickens. My business is very, very personal. Is nothing you can do. Emmie can handle it.’
    ‘Just thought I’d offer.’
    ‘Is all right.’
    There wasn’t much for me to do that afternoon. I sat in the outer office, smoking cigarettes and reading the Evening Standard until I knew lumps of it by heart.
    Sarek and Emmie shut themselves up in the inner office and stayed there until closing time.
    Once or twice I put my ear against the door panel, but apart from a continuous murmur of voices I didn’t hear anything worth hearing. All the same I knew Sarek was giving that fat little horror the lowdown on his racket, and it infuriated me she was getting it and not me. But there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t expect him to take me into his confidence when he had known me only for four days.
    Already I was beginning to wonder if I wouldn’t work it so that he accepted me as a son instead of pipe dreaming about a son I felt in my bones she would never give him. I was twenty-seven, and be must have been sixty. If ever anyone deserved that chess set, I did, and given the chance I could prove to him I was no fool when it came to working a racket.
    But that kind of set up needed time and patience. He liked me already. But liking me and making me his heir were things poles apart. What I had to do was to stick with him until the penny dropped, if it ever dropped, and sticking to him wasn’t going to be all that easy.
    They came out of the inner office around six-thirty. He had wrapped himself in his awful overcoat and was smoking a cigar.
    She looked like the cat that had swallowed the canary, and gave me a smirking look of triumph that made me want to sink my list into her fat face.
    ‘Okay. Now we go!’
    I stood up.
    ‘If there’s anything I can do up here during the day, perhaps Miss Pearl will let me know.’
    They exchanged glances while I stood there trying to look as if I had nothing up my sleeve.
    She shook her head.
    That was when I realized just how badly I had played my cards. If I had sucked up to her, treated her with a little politeness at the beginning, she might have given me an in but, instead, she shook her fat, greasy head, and I was as far away from the money as I was when I first sat in the outer office waiting for an interview.
    ‘Is all right. Emmie can manage.’
    I followed him down the stairs, across the pavement to the car.
    I had worked on the car. There had been a lot of things wrong with it. Oil seeped up the camshaft and leaked into the distributor head for one thing, and there was a sticking valve for another. The plugs hadn’t been touched since he bought it, and the engine had as much compression as a milk pudding.
    I fixed the valve, fitted a washer at the back of the camshaft, bought a new set of plugs and scraped the carbon of the distributor head points. I could beat her up to seventy now with a little in hand, but I didn’t tell him that, I kept her at a sedate fifty, and he thought I was a miracle worker.
    As I swung the car on to the Watford Bypass, I said, ‘A woman’s all right up to a point, but when it comes to hard graft, give me a man every time.’
    ‘How do you mean?’
    ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. I was voicing my thoughts, but since you ask me, I’ll tell you. You have a business to look after. I don’t know what you do, you do well. All right. You have to go to Paris. That leaves your business wide open until you get back. I should have thought a man with your experience would have felt happier to leave a smart man in charge rather than a smart woman. A woman is