Chapter 10
“So Alex,” I said, from my face meat into his face meat on account of the fact that, for the first time in quite a long while, we were in the same room. “What’s a pirate’s favourite cheese?”
Alex perked up, much like Spud did when he was offered a treat. “Ah. I know this one. You’d think it’d be arrr, but his first love has always been the sea.”
Even by the standards of Alex Twaddle, this made no sense. “What? Are you having a stroke?”
“Don’t think so. Face seems okay.” He smiled. Then raised both arms. “Arms check out. Am I slurring?”
“No, I was using ‘Are you having a stroke?’ idiomatically to mean ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’”
“Oh.” He lowered his arms. “Then I’m not having a stroke. Or rather, I suppose I am having a stroke in the figurative sense. Sorry, I think I’ve rather lost track of the metaphor.”
“Why,” I asked, knowing, as always, I should not, “would a pirate’s favourite cheese be the sea?”
“Well, that’s what it was last time.”
I cast my mind back over the three hundred and seventy jokes I’d told Alex over the last few years and finally remembered myself in a minibus on the way to Alex’s own fucking wedding. “Hang on, that was a pirate’s favourite letter of the alphabet.”
“Same principle applies, surely?”
“No,” I told him. “Because there isn’t a principle. They’re unrelated jokes.”
Alex was looking perplexed. Which I admit was his usual state. “So what is a pirate’s favourite cheese?”
“Yarrrrlsberg.”
“Not Seasberg?”
“No.”
With a level of persistence substantially more dogged than my actual dog, he asked, “Why not?”
“Because there’s no such cheese as Seasberg.”
“There’s no such cheese as Yarrrrlsberg either.”
My brain was doing the mental equivalent of grabbing me by the arm and yelling, Leave him, Luc, he’s not worth it, but like a football fan about to get arrested for being drunk and disorderly, I carried on anyway. “Yes, there is.”
“What sort is it?”
There were a whole lot of skills I didn’t have. Cooking, for example. Or DIY. Or speaking more than three words of French, even though it was my mother’s native language. Or, apparently, describing cheese. “It’s…I think it’s one of the ones with holes in? It might be a bit rubbery?”
Alex got that concerned expression he used when he was trying to gaslight me into thinking the real world was the one he lived in, rather than the one I remembered having inhabited before he started talking. “Pretty sure that’s Emmental.”
“I think there might be more than one type of cheese with holes in it.”
With fatal comprehension, Alex nodded. “And pirates like that sort of cheese?”
“Pirates,” I told him very, very slowly, “like the syllable yarrrr.”
“I suppose they do,” agreed Alex, grinning. “Although in my experience, not as much as they like the syllable sea.”
Had I just…lost? Had I, in fact, lost every time for the past eight years?
Fuck.
“See you at the meeting,” I said.
“Don’t you mean, yarrrr me at the meeting?” Then Alex’s eyes widened. “Wait a moment. What meeting?”
“The meeting you organised?”
“Doesn’t narrow it down, old boy. I organise two, maybe even three meetings a month.”
I sighed. “The meeting you organised for today, where we meet the new earl and, if we’re lucky, don’t all lose our jobs. The meeting that took a solid six weeks to arrange because the man we’re meant to be meeting with was, and I quote, ‘not feeling it.’”
“Oh, that meeting.”
I nodded and went through to what we were charitably calling our open-plan hot-desking area.
In reality, it was Barbara Clench’s former office, and it was open plan because it contained exactly one desk, and it was hot-desking because it contained exactly one desk.
One desk that currently contained Rhys Jones Bowen.
“Hello, Luc,” he said, glancing up. “You know what’d be lovely right about now? A cup of tea.”
“Well hinted,” I told him. “Would you like a cup of tea?”
“That’d be smashing.”
“I’ll have one too.” That was Barbara Clench, lurking in the corner like, well, like a woman whose office had been transformed into a hot-desking area in which she no longer had space to hot-desk. “As you’re making.”
So I turned round and went straight back out of the office.
Since working from home had become a thing, we’d downsized CRAPP HQ, which meant the bottom floor of the building was now being let to a start-up called ERECTUS, who, as far as I could tell, were building an app they couldn’t describe to disrupt an industry they couldn’t identify.
Technically the kitchen and toilets were a shared space, although in practice ERECTUS had felt fully entitled to slap their messaging over everything, which meant I was left making tea under a big poster declaring itself, or possibly the organisation it represented, to be The Next Step in Digital Evolution.
It could have been worse. It could have been sepsis.
I was just plonking teabags into mugs, several of which carried now-discarded ERECTUS slogans, and trying to decide whether I wanted to drink out of Innovate, Iterate, Indiscriminate or The Future of Tomorrow, Yesterday, when an explosive va-va-vooming made me look out the window.
What a twat, I thought, as an ecologically ruinous vintage motorbike roared past. Followed by I wonder where that twat’s going as it stopped a little way up our road underneath the reddening leaves of an oak tree.
The amount of time I’d been at CRAPP, I should really have known better than to ask the second question. Because the rider, who was sixty-five if he was a day and had apparently decided to prioritise preserving his ash-grey mohawk over wearing a helmet, was heading straight for our front door.
An optimistic part of me that had yet to wither in the cold light of experience hoped he was here for ERECTUS.
A hope that was fleetingly buoyed up when the door was answered by Horse, of Horse and Todd, ERECTUS’s cofounders and, as far as I could tell, only employees.
Then Horse said, “No,” a single syllable he somehow managed to utter in an annoying way.
Followed by “Bug people are upstairs.” Which meant that this was the new Earl of Spitalhamstead, and, if I didn’t move quickly, the first person he met at CRAPP would be Alex.
I moved quickly.
I did not move quickly enough.
“—sorry, old bean,” Alex was saying. “Can’t slot you in right now. Got rather an important visitor coming.”
“Alex,” I near-yelled, over the shoulder of the man who was almost certainly the very important visitor. “I think this might, in fact, be the very important visitor.”
Alex scrutinised the very important visitor sceptically.
I found this particularly galling because Alex never looked at things sceptically.
I’d once told him they took the word gullible out of the dictionary, and not only had he checked, but he’d spent the rest of the day scouring bookshops for an updated edition.
“Seems unlikely, Luc,” he told me. “Chap seems like a fearful oik.”
“Pride myself on it,” said the very important visitor, in the voice of someone trying terribly hard not to sound terribly posh.
“See?” Alex gave me a triumphant nod. “Oiked by his own petard.”
Right now, I could try and explain the situation to Alex or I could ignore him.
And ignoring him was definitely the path of least resistance.
To be fair, compared with explaining things to Alex, tunnelling through a brick wall using only my tongue would have been the path of least resistance.
“This way,” I said to the very important visitor, hoping to steer him into the meeting room which was also the hot-desking area which was also Barbara Clench’s former office.
“What are you doing?” cried Alex. “You can’t just let anyone in off the street. What will the earl think?”
“He’ll think you’re a prick,” said the earl.
Alex drew back, genuinely affronted. “I’ll thank you not to put words in the mouth of a peer of the realm.”
Whether it was a mercy or an absolute kick in the balls that Rhys Jones Bowen chose this moment to come out and check on us, I couldn’t say.
“Hello,” he said. “What’s going on out here then?”
“I’m pretty sure,” I replied at full stop-Alex-getting-a-word-in-edgeways speed, “that this is the new Earl of Spitalhamstead.”
Rhys Jones Bowen’s eyes widened. “Ooh. You look very cool for an earl.”
“Thanks,” said the earl, sticking his hand out. “Saint.”
“That’s very kind of you.” Rhys Jones Bowen took the hand and shook it warmly. “But I’m just a friendly sort of person.”
“Name,” said the Earl of Spitalhamstead, who apparently went by Saint and was allergic to sentences.
Rhys Jones Bowen made a misplaced sound of comprehension. “Ahhhh. Rhys Jones Bowen. What’s yours?”
“Saint,” said Saint.
“Look”—Alex returned to the conversation like an unnecessary 90s reboot—“an earl you may or may not be—”
“He’s a fucking earl,” I growled.
“—but my friend here has asked you a perfectly civil question, and you’re just saying the word saint over and over again like you’re my uncle Archibald after that unfortunate incident with the croquet mallet.”
“My name,” repeated the earl with, honestly, less frustration than I would have shown in his place, “is Saint.”
“Ah hah!” exclaimed Alex. “So you are an imposter. The Earl of Spitalhamstead is certainly not named Saint. You may consult Burke’s if you need to.”
“My name,” repeated the Earl, now with about the same amount of frustration I would have shown in his place, “is Hilary Topwith St. John Edmonton Bloom de Lancy, fourteenth Earl of Spitalhamstead. I go by Saint.”
“Whatever for?” asked Alex.
“Because of men like my father and my grandfather and my great-grandfather and you.”
Having failed to get the We need to make this man like us memo, despite having personally sent it, Alex bristled. “I’ll have you know, I knew your father, and he was a damn fine chap.”
“He was a parasite,” said Saint bitterly. “Like all the rest of them.”