A Strange Likeness. Paula Marshall
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look dismissed this poorly dressed anonymous young man.
‘I have an appointment with Mr George Johnstone at ten of the clock,’ Alan announced without preamble.
‘Doubt it.’ The clerk’s drawl was more insolent than ever. ‘He never gets in before ten thirty, mostly not until eleven.’
‘Indeed.’
Alan looked around the untidy, disordered room, and listened to the staff chattering together instead of working. He noted the clerk’s languid manner and the idle way in which he entered figures into a dog-eared ledger. He reminded himself that his father, always known to his family as the Patriarch, had sent him to England with instructions to find out what was going wrong with the London end of the business.
He wondered grimly what the Patriarch would do in this situation. Something devious, probably, like not announcing who he was in order to discover exactly how inefficient the business had become. Yes, that was it. They could hang themselves, so to speak, in front of him. Yes, deviousness was the order of the day.
‘I’ll wait,’ he offered, a trifle timidly.
‘I shouldn’t,’ said the clerk, grinning at Alan’s deplorable trousers. ‘He won’t see you without an appointment—and I’ve no note of one here.’
Alan forbore to say that, judging by the mismanagement he could see in the office and its slovenly appearance, the clerk’s list might be neither accurate nor reliable.
Time crawled by. When the clock struck eleven the clerk looked at Alan and said, ‘Still with us, then?’
‘Nothing better to do.’ Alan was all shy, juvenile charm, which the clerk treated as shy, juvenile charm should be treated by a man of the world: with contempt.
‘Pity.’ The clerk’s sympathy was non-existent.
Everyone stopped work at eleven-thirty. One of the junior clerks was sent out for porter. Alan looked around, identified where the privy might be, used it, and came back again to take up his post before the clerk’s desk.
‘Thought you’d gone,’ tittered one of the younger men, currying favour with the older ones, waving his pot of porter at him.
No one offered Alan porter. He resisted the urge to give the jeering young man a good kick and sat back in his uncomfortable chair.
It was twelve-fifteen by the clock when George Johnstone entered, blear-eyed and yawning. The clerk waved a careless hand at Alan. ‘Young gentleman to see you, Mr Johnstone.’
Johnstone looked at Alan in some surprise.
‘Good God, Ned, what are you doing here? Still wearing those dreadful clothes, I see. Lost all the Hatton money?’
‘I came to see how hard you businessmen work.’
Alan’s imitation of Ned’s speech was perfect enough to deceive Johnstone.
‘Come into my office, then. Thought that I’d have a visitor waiting to see me. Some colonial savage—but he’s obviously given me a miss. Or he’s late. You can entertain me until he arrives.’
Alan followed him into his office. It was little cleaner or tidier than the one which the clerks occupied.
‘Have a drink,’ offered Johnstone, going immediately to a tantalus on a battered sideboard. ‘Must get ready for Baby Bear.’
‘Not in the morning,’ said Alan, still using Ned’s voice.
‘T’isn’t morning,’ said Johnstone, sitting down and swallowing his brandy in one gulp. ‘By God, that’s better. Hair of the dog. But have it your way, Ned.’
‘I fully intend to,’ returned Alan, in his own voice this time. He rose abruptly: now to do the Patriarch on him. He leaned forward, seized Johnstone by the shoulders and hauled him to his feet with a jerk. He let go of the astonished man and stood back.
‘Stand up when you speak to me, you idle devil!’
His cold ferocity, so unlike Ned Hatton’s easy charm, was frightening in itself. Coming from someone with Ned’s face it was also overpoweringly disconcerting.
‘You aren’t Ned!’ squeaked Johnstone, beginning to sit down again.
‘How perceptive of you. No, I’m not. And stand up when Baby Bear speaks to you.’
‘Oh, by God, you weren’t Ned Hatton last night, were you?’
‘No, I wasn’t Ned Hatton last night, either. I am your employer, Tom Dilhorne’s son Alan, come over without his chains to find out what has gone wrong with the London end of the business. I only needed to look at you to find out. Would you care to explain how a worthless fine gentleman like yourself came to be in charge here?’
‘But why do you look exactly like Ned Hatton? Are you his cousin?’
Alan surveyed Johnstone wearily. ‘No, I’m not his cousin. It’s just a strange likeness, that’s all. Pure chance. And I’m not a pigeon for the plucking like poor Ned, either—which you found out last night.’
‘Doosed bad form that, pretending to be Ned Hatton.’
‘You called me Ned first. You were so dam’d eager to fleece him that you couldn’t look at him properly. You haven’t answered my question.’
‘What question?’
Alan sighed. ‘How you came to be in charge here? Good God man, where’s your memory?’
‘I was Jack Montagu’s friend. He knew I needed to find work so he made me the manager here when he married his heiress.’
‘I suppose you think that you’ve been working. Good God, man, you don’t know the meaning of the word, but you will by the time that I’ve finished with you.
‘I want to inspect all your books and papers. I want to interview every clerk in your employment, see all contracts, bills of sale, be given a full account of all transactions, wages, rents, and what you’re paying for this hole—it had better be cheap. In short, I want a full account of the whole business, and I want everything ready for inspection by ten of the clock tomorrow. Not ten-thirty, mind, but ten. You take me, I’m sure.’
This last sentence was delivered in a savage imitation of Johnstone’s own gentlemanly drawl.
Johnstone blenched. ‘I can’t, Dilhorne, you’re mad.’
‘Sir, to you,’ said Alan, in the Patriarch’s hardest voice. ‘You can and you will, or it will be the worse for you.’
‘Good God, sir, it will take all night.’
‘Then take all night. You and the rest of the idlers in the other room have wasted enough of the firm’s time and money. Now you can make some of it up.’
Johnstone sank back into his chair, his face grey.
‘I didn’t give you leave to sit, you idle devil. You’ll remain standing until I leave.’
Mutinously Johnstone rose, silently consigning all sandy-haired young Australians to the deepest pit of Hell.
‘Now mind me,’ said Alan pleasantly. ‘You’ll jump when I say jump, and you’ll say please nicely when I ask you to if you don’t want instant dismissal. And if you think that Baby Bear plays a rough hand I can’t recommend you to meet Father Bear. He’d not only eat your porridge, he’d eat you, too.’
He strolled into the outer office, leaving behind him a stunned and shaken man. The clerk, quite unaware of what had taken place in Johnstone’s room, gave him yet another insolent grin, and said, ‘Got your interview, did you? Not long, was it?’
‘Yes,’ said Alan sweetly. He looked judiciously at the clerk, registered his leer, leaned forward, picked up his inkwell and slowly poured its contents over the page of ill-written figures which the clerk had been carelessly copying