A CHRISTMAS TALE IN 25 PARTS: PART FIVE

After bundling the ridiculous girl whom he only considered to be the “help” out of his party and into the elevator, Mr Snatch leaned against the doors and was happy to feel the coolness of the metal against his forehead, helping him to clear his head and think.

Someone in his office had obviously made a dreadful mistake in sending the girl, whatever her name was, an invitation to this exclusive pre-Christmas fund-raiser, and so, tomorrow morning, someone was going to pay very a very high price indeed, and he remained pretty certain that, whoever it was, it definitely wasn’t going to be him.

Mr Snipe, the office enforcer, would be waiting in the lobby at the start of business in the morning and, whoever the poor unfortunate in Administration who had made this grave error was, they would be greeted with a box of their personal items (not that he actually approved of them having personal items in his offices), and a stern letter from the legal department, and they would thereafter be heading homewards before they had even had a chance to warm themselves in his building’s state-of-the-art climate control system.

He pushed a few buttons on the device in his pocket and an electronic pulse of less than an alphabet’s worth of letters beamed out into the cold and dark of the night sky and changed someone’s - he never even knew who it was – life forever, and not for the better.

Well, whoever it had been, the mistake had cost them dearly, but they only had themselves to blame. Instead of merely passing on his instructions for that girl from Housekeeping to look after his dog for the duration, he or she had caused Mr Snatch to endure an awkward moment in his otherwise trouble-free evening and that sort of thing simply could not be tolerated.

More importantly, it had to be seen that it wouldn’t be tolerated. There might very well be people prepared to queue around the block in order to get a job like he would now be making available (assuming, of course, that he couldn’t get the rest of the office to absorb the miscreant’s workload into their own – he’d have to get Snipe to look into that tomorrow) but it didn’t do any harm every once in a while to demonstrate the penalties for failure, and Christmastime was as good a time as any to do so, because the sentimental fools tended to remember it all the more at that time of the year.

He paused to ponder upon whether he ought to actually plan to do it each year as a matter of course in order to improve efficiency, and was just about to dictate the thought into his machine when it dawned upon him that he had, in fact, already done it for so many Christmases now that it was already pretty much company policy anyway.

Personally, as on all those previous occasions, he would never see any of it happen, or ever be exposed to the results of his actions, but the knowledge that it simply would happen was enough to lift his spirits slightly and allowed him to summon the strength to turn and face the room again and start attempting to bleed his guests dry once again in order to get them to contribute to one or other of the tax-exempt offshore “Charitable Institutions” which his company ran, making the kinds of considerable profit which supported his lifestyle and had the added benefit of being well and truly hidden from the armies of solicitors and accountants employed by his surviving ex-wives.

Mitsy was usually his only companion through life nowadays, but she hadn’t ever really taken to him after the latest Mrs Snatch had finally packed up and left, taking her half share of the business, and promising to take him for the rest if she ever got the chance.

After she had opened that particular doorway of opportunism, it had simply been a matter of principle that the twin dachshunds had to be divided equally between them, and so it had been Mitsy who had drawn the short straw and ended up living with the “Master of the House” rather than her beloved mistress and her twin sister.

It had been but the work of a moment to bundle both the girl and the wretched hell-hound into the lift and punch the buttons to make them disappear from his universe for the evening. If only, he thought, the rest of life could be so easily controlled.

He sighed, switched on the smile, and turned to face the room.

And Old Marley saw it all...