Quite Ugly One Morning Read Online Free Page B

just that if we draw a total blank on this one, we’ll need someone to fit up for it, and you’re the obvious choice.’
    ***

    ‘What are you so bloody happy about?’ Dalziel asked as Parlabane shuffled out of the room.
    ‘It took a second climber to get into Mr Parlabane’s flat,’ McGregor replied contentedly. ‘The first one fell in the attempt and broke his ankle.’
    Dalziel didn’t need to ask who it was.

FOUR
    Stephen Lime lay back in his bath and farted contentedly to himself. If he pressed his chubby legs together just the right way, he could send the bubbles rolling along beneath him until they emerged between his ankles near the taps. And if he got his timing right he could let some of the next volley emerge between his knees at the same time, twin currents disturbing the calm surface eighteen inches apart.
    He was not, he was convinced, fat. Poor people were fat. Stupid people were fat. He was a man of imposing stature. Like a great oak, the wider rings of girth were evidence of health, strength and vitality.
    He smiled to himself.
    It was all coming together, the orchestra of his business plans finished their cacophonic tuning and now playing in concert, conducted expertly by his baton. To plan, to organise, to execute and to reap from such complex and multifarious components as he was doing required a talent that was no less than exceptional. And exceptional abilities deserve exceptional reward. He wasn’t in the half-a-million-plus-twice-that-in-share-options bracket, far from it, but the success of his present enterprises was proof, to himself at least, that he was of that calibre. And talent like that does not go unrecognised for long.
    These insect pipsqueaks who were always questioning the salaries of top British management were not only ignorant, but bigoted and bitter if they couldn’t – or simply wouldn’t – appreciate the priceless brilliance that it bought. Cheap at twice the price.
    He had been furious when he saw footage of those select committee hearings on the news that time. Malignant, unworthy and ungraciously envious worms, sneering little bastards and tub-thumping luddites. He knew you had to watch what you said these days, and that they were elected members and all, but there was still something patently very wrong when the finest of Englishmen could be spoken to like that by blacks and Jews.

    And why weren’t they scrutinising the fact that some bunch of layabouts could pick up millions just for strumming three chords and going without shampoo for six months at a time? Or that there were northern scruff earning more than he was simply for kicking a ball around a patch of grass in front of hordes of other neanderthals.
    But not for long. The cash was piling up, and the floodgates were about to open; within a couple of years he might be making more per annum than his father did in his whole life.
    However, what meant most now was not the money, but the sense of achievement, and there was no fitter crown to it all than the Trust being on the verge of going into the black for the first time.
    His father had taught him well, given him the basics. A climate of job security is a climate for stagnation. In management, you are the benefactor who has granted the worker a job; it is you who is putting food on his table and clothing his grubby litter – and for that he owes you diligent service. That kind of thing. Truths that you couldn’t stick your head above the parapets and openly declare in these topsy-turvy times, but truths nonetheless.
    No man works harder for you than your money, his father had always said, and had made sure he got an assured, worthwhile but unspectacular return on every last brown penny he invested anywhere. A valuable lesson to the young Stephen, possibly the most important he ever learned, with the attendant warning that risk and reward were inseparably proportionate.
    But what had distinguished Stephen Lime, what had afforded him the opportunities to