RISE OF THE FORSAKEN SON-IN-LAW

Chapter 2

He prepares lunch with a lot of care and this time was the same. He was cooking a proper cold chicken and leek pie wrapped in greaseproof paper, inside a small pot of dressed salad, and some shortbread biscuits from the tin on the counter. 

He had been making really thoughtful foods for Clarissa since the beginning, but she had suddenly stopped collecting his food from the front desk three months into their marriage. He didn't mind though and continued making anyway, for reasons he could not entirely defend.

He had been to her office twice before. 

The security staff at the Hale-Mortimer building remembered his face and waved him to come in. He entered the fourteenth floor with the cold aluminium of the lift doors at his back. His heart beating at a speed he refused to accept.

Clarissa's office wasn't far. It was at the corner. Her window blinds were lowered, but they had not been on his former visits. He told himself this meant nothing. He walked the last twenty feet and pushed the door to open.

The scene he met in front of him was with the horrible clarity of something that somehow, he already knew.

Clarissa jumped up in shock.

 A man who was tall, well-suited, with the particular confidence of someone accustomed to getting what he wanted separated himself from her with maddening unhaste. Dominic Hale. Oliver had seen his photograph in the company directory on Clarissa's desk. He had not imagined this.

"What are you doing here?" Clarissa's voice was fury dressed in dignity.

"I brought your lunch." Oliver set the box on her desk.

Dominic Hale buttoned his jacket with deliberate slowness. He looked Oliver up and down the way a man appraises something he is considering discarding. "Is this the husband?"

"Yes." Clarissa said it flatly, as though confirming a fact of mild inconvenience.

"I will write you a cheque," Dominic said to Oliver. "Be reasonable about this. Name a number."

Oliver looked at him. He looked at Clarissa, who was watching him with her chin raised, waiting to see what he would do. He understood, in that moment, that there was no version of this scene in which she was sorry.

"Keep it," Oliver said.

"I am being generous."

"I can see that." He looked at Clarissa again. "Do not call me."

He picked up his lunch box -- he had made it, and he was not going to leave it here -- and walked out.

* * *

He was three blocks from the building when the rain began in earnest. He walked through it because standing still felt worse. He had expected to feel destroyed. He felt instead an odd clarity, as though something that had been clouding his vision for years had simply lifted.

The anger was deep and clean -- not the wet, shapeless kind but something more like a blade being slowly ground, patient and getting sharper.

That evening, Clarissa came home with a thick envelope and placed it in front of him without ceremony.

"Divorce papers. I would like this done cleanly."

He picked them up and read through them at the kitchen table. They were straightforward. He signed each page with a steady hand and passed them back.

"You will regret this," he said, his voice low and even. "Not today. But you will."

Clarissa tucked the envelope under her arm. "Is that a threat?"

"No. It is a prediction."

He walked out of the Voss house with his coat, the suit he was wearing, and the contents of his wallet, which amounted to forty-three pounds and a Tube card. Helena shouted something from the dock and Geoffrey kept calling after him with something that sounded like an apology.

The rain had softened a bit. Oliver walked without direction and then stopped when he realized it. He knew that walking without direction was like simply standing still.

A black Rolls-Royce Ghost idled at the kerb ahead of him. Its  engine was barely audible. A man emerged from the rear door. He looked like he was in his late sixties, silver-haired. On his body was a charcoal overcoat with a white pocket square, his back straight despite the walking stick in his right hand.

Oliver had not seen Edmund Graves in nineteen years. He recognised him immediately.

"Young Mr. Marlowe," Edmund said.

Oliver stopped walking. He said nothing for a moment, and then: "Edmund."

"I have been looking for you for a very long time. Please. Get in the car."