The Quorum Read Online Free PDF Page B

it?’
    ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
    Disgust bulged through fear for a moment and he got up, barging out of the pub, leaving her with the satchel. A couple of others left almost immediately.
    She gathered the papers. She’d win untold brownie points for this coup, but didn’t know how much of it was her doing. As she left, she noticed an almost-full pint abandoned on a table by the door. The man who’d sat there had struck her as familiar. Broad, undistinguished, in overalls. With a spine-scrape of fear, she wondered if he might be the van driver.
    Out in the street, she couldn’t see Roebuck or the nondescript drinker who could have been following him. So much to think about. She looked for another cab.
    * * *
    A man in a suit was dismantling April’s desk, sorting through every scrap of paper and odd object in its tardis drawers. April had a system whereby every unwanted freebie and done-with document was shoved into a drawer until it disappeared. Tiny was either overseeing the job or ordered to be present at the dissection. The suit worked like a callous surgeon, calmly incising closed envelopes and packets. Sally wondered if he were from the drug squad.
    ‘This is Mr Quilbert,’ Tiny said, ‘our new security manager.’
    Quilbert smiled and shook her hand limply. She instantly pegged him as a cuckoo slipped into the Mythwrhn nest by Derek Leech. He had one of those close-to-the-skull haircuts that disguise premature baldness with designer style.
    ‘We’ve lost an important file,’ Tiny said. ‘Bender might have given it to April.’
    ‘I didn’t think they were talking,’ she said. ‘Well, not recently.’
    ‘Nothing scary,’ Quilbert said, ‘just stats about the building. There was a security survey in there.’
    ‘We can get a copy from the consultants,’ Tiny said, ‘but it’d be embarrassing.’
    Quilbert slit open a packet and slid out a pornographic magazine in Hungarian.
    ‘That’s from one of last year’s items,’ Tiny said. Quilbert smiled tightly and dumped it on the pile.
    ‘Have you tried asking April?’ she suggested.
    ‘A bit tricky,’ Tiny said. ‘She’s had a relapse. They’ve had to put her under restraint.’
    * * *
    She took the file, which she’d sincerely forgotten about, home, hoping it might help her understand the tangle of mysteries. Besides, an evening poring through arcane security lore seemed more comfortable than an evening phoning her mother and announcing a compromised ‘blessed event’.
    There was a new security guard, in a black one-piece bodysuit, installed in Reception, presumably on Quilbert’s orders. She was sure his X-Ray vision would perceive the documents she was smuggling out but he was too busy trying to cosy up to Heidi. That hardly suggested fearsome efficiency.
    She made herself tea and sat on her sofa, television on but with the sound down. The file Bender had given her for April was tied with red ribbon. She let it lie a moment and drank her tea. On the screen, an interracial couple argued their way to a cliffhanging climax on Cowley Mansions. The soap’s storylines had become increasingly bizarre: Peter, the gay yuppie, was discovered to be ‘pregnant’, a long-unborn twin developing inside his abdomen; Joko, the cool black wastrel, was revealed to be a white boy with permanently dyed skin, hiding out; and Ell Crenshaw, the cockney matriarch who ruled the top floor, spontaneously combusted the week the actress demanded a vast salary hike. Either the writers saw a Leech take-over as inevitable and were devaluing the property before the new landlord arrived, or GLT had ordered audience-grabbing sensationalism in the run-up to the auction.
    After the soap came a commercial for the serialisation of Josef Mengele’s Auschwitz diaries in the Argus , Leech’s heavy paper. Then a caring, sensitive ad for Chums.
    Sally undid the ribbon and didn’t find a security survey. The first item was familiar: a glossy Mythwrhn press