Read Redlaw - 01 for Free Online Page A

draped crosswise on a plate and drizzled with a few drops of sauce.
    “You look hot,” Lambourne observed dryly as he and Slocock shook hands. “Run here all the way from Whitehall, did you?”
    Slocock’s face still carried a sheen of perspiration from his session with his muay thai trainer, Khun Sarawong, at the nearby Soho Dojo. “Been working out. Absolutely famished. Shall we order?”
    The maître d’ danced attendance around Lambourne like a drone bee around the queen. There were plenty of the rich and powerful dining this evening at the Flaming Aubergine. None, though, was quite as prestigious, nor as apt to tip good service so liberally, as the CEO of Dependable Chemicals PLC.
    “May Ah rah commend ze oyster of steer stuffed wiz oysters, M’sieur Lambourne,” the maître d’ said. He was a bilingual Lyonnais who could speak English almost without a trace of an accent, but when at work he laid the Frenchness on thick. It was what people expected.
    “Oyster of steer?” Slocock enquired.
    “Testicles,” said Lambourne. “Bull’s balls.”
    “Ah. Maybe not. You know what I fancy? A nice fat steak.”
    “A steak. Oui , eet iz posseebluh, m’sieur. Ah sink chef can rustle up that.” The maître d’ made no attempt to hide his scorn. This, too, was expected. “Wiz ze tomato ketchup, non ? An ’ow would m’sieur like eet cooked?”
    “Rare. Very rare.”
    “ Bleu .”
    “Very bleu . True bleu . ”
    “ Formidable , m’sieur.”
    The steak arrived pink and oozing watery blood, and Slocock tucked in avidly. Lambourne, who’d chosen the à la carte special of duck breast in a pistachio marinade on a bed of wilted dandelion leaves, eyed the young MP with a lofty amusement in an avarice marinade on a bed of wilted fondness.
    “Can’t stomach blood,” he said.
    Slocock looked up from his food. “What?”
    “Human beings. Can’t actually drink blood in any quantity. Makes you physically sick. You throw it right back up.”
    “Oh.” Slocock dabbed steak juice from his mouth with a linen napkin. “Your point being?”
    “It’s not natural, what the vampires do. None of it natural.”
    “They are, are they not, super natural creatures? Clue’s right there.”
    “Don’t get snarky with me, Giles,” said Lambourne. He brushed back his wavy mane of silver hair. It may have lost its colour but he still had a full head of it, unlike the majority of men his age. “I’m merely saying anyone who even considers a Sunless a person is an idiot. A dangerous idiot. Your pal Wax, for example.”
    “He’s not my pal. And I don’t know if he particularly approves of vamps or not. He’s just toeing the party line on them. ‘We must be fair. We mustn’t judge. We have to treat them as if they were human, different but equal’—which they’re clearly not.” Slocock sheared off another glossy sliver of steak and forked it into his mouth. “What are you complaining about anyway? You’re raking in a fortune off them.”
    Dependable Chemicals, from relatively humble beginnings as a minor player in the pharmaceuticals industry, had grown under Lambourne’s aegis into an immense umbrella corporation sheltering numerous smaller firms, one of which was BovPlas Logistics. Lambourne had zeroed in on the cattle blood market at the earliest opportunity, when the first SRAs were being set up, and had created BovPlas by buying up a medical supplies transportation company and a chain of abattoirs and splicing the two together. BovPlas had further benefited from the Private Finance Initiative scheme, a brilliant wheeze whereby private companies working in the public sector were able to charge the government usurious rates of interest on their initial outlay. The Treasury, a seemingly bottomless well, never failed to meet the repayments however extortionate they became and, should the business fail, would invariably bail it out or write off its losses. This meant responsibility without accountability and profit