In such circumstances in a French farce or a British sit-com, the character in Joe's situation would probably have said, "It's not what it seems…" but Joe knew from his gumshoe guru, Endo Venera, that unless you were watching one of those Ag Christie shows on the telly, it was wise to assume a guy with a smoking gun standing over a bleeding corpse was guilty as hell. OK, maybe his gun wasn't smoking, but a naked man standing over a woman in a nurse's uniform with her legs kicking in the air was a situation it would take even that Aircool Parrot a couple of hours in the library to explain away.
He said, "Don't think I'm going to make it, Mimi."
She managed a grin and said, "Looks to me like you're halfway there, Joe," and left.
Beryl pulled herself upright.
"And who the hell was that?" she demanded. "Maybe I should have let Jurassic George tear your head off, after all!"
"No, no," protested Joe. "That wasn't Eloise. That was Mimi. We were flying off to Spain together… Hang about till I get dressed…"
He should have stuck to silence. Even that small beginning of explanation was a mistake. When he returned from his bedroom, fastening up his trousers, the living room was empty.
But not for long. Through the open door stepped Whitey. He looked around as if to say, I leave the place for a few hours and it's a tip! Then he moved purposefully into the kitchen.
He was right, thought Joe. Nothing so bad that a spot of breakfast wouldn't help.
From the kitchen came an imperious howl.
"I'm coming, I'm coming," said Joe.
An hour later, his belly distended by a Full English Breakfast (minus of course that percentage which Whitey felt was his due), Joe felt able to bring the full beam of his mental searchlight to bear on recent events and his best response to them.
Going back to bed was a distinct possibility till it occurred to him that at some point Jurassic George was going to approach Eloise with a view to telling her all was forgiven and folding her to his bosom.
Now Eloise he knew to be a girl of spirit, and while she might react by returning the embrace with an equal passion, she might also knee him in the crutch and tell him to get his big bear paws off her lily-white body which belonged to another, and take a hike. In which case the likely direction of the hike could be back to Rasselas.
He'd already taken the precaution of shutting, locking and bolting his front door, but when he looked at the devastated security chain, even this didn't make him feel secure. Best, he decided, to be out of here and on the move.
First, though, he stripped off again and got under a nice hot shower. The Full English had fortified the inner man, but the outer man was indicating by a network of twinges and bruises exactly where Jurassic's assault had left its mark. In the shower he sang, not to keep up his spirits, which were self-raising anyway, but because a singer needs to exercise his vocal cords and the shower was the only place he could do it in the flat at this hour of day without the neighbors banging on the walls. He did Vaughan Williams' Songs of Travel, which had won him plaudits at the last Luton Singfest, then he tried Bach's "Ich habe genug" with which he was hoping to impress Rev. Pot sufficiently to put him forward for the baritone solo in the Luton Combined Choirs' performance of the Christmas Oratorio at the end of the year. It still needed a bit of work, he judged, so for his finale he moved on to a selection more in favor on Entertainment Night at the Supporters' Club, building up to his show-stopping "Ol' Man River."
This usually left him as uplifted as his audience but as he stepped out of the shower, his thoughts moved naturally from the Supporters' Club to Sir Monty Wright and thence to Monty's cohort, Ratcliffe King, who had paid him good money to be on a plane to Spain at this very moment.
While King Rat wasn't a real and present danger- unlike Jurassic, whose battering ram of a shoulder might at any moment be applied to the door-he was in the long run a far more potent enemy.
Probably Mimi had already put him in the picture so it might be a wise move to try and take the sting out of his anger by ringing up to explain and apologize and offer atonement.
He went to the phone and saw the message light on the answer machine had come on while he was showering. He pressed play.
"Joe, hi! It's Mimi. Listen, I'm just boarding our flight. Now don't get your boxers in a twist worrying about missing it. We've all been there and I know how easy it is to lose track. Anyway, things are busy here and the next flight I could get you transferred to leaves at two p.m., OK? So I'll take care of things till you show; quite looking forward to doing a bit of the real PI stuff instead of just being your gofer! But, Joe, Mr. King wants me to report in soon as we get ourselves settled at the hotel and make contact with Tomlin. I can hold back till this evening, no problem, but if you haven't shown by then, he'll have to know. So don't let me down. Give me a ring to say you've got the message, OK? Cheers."
I am surrounded by wonderful women, thought Joe. Whoever said that stuff about a monstrous regiment got it wrong. Must have meant wondrous!
That dealt with the King Rat problem, and flying to Spain seemed a very good way of dealing with the Jurassic George problem.
He picked up the phone and rang Mimi's mobile number. He got the message service. Of course, she'd be switched off on the plane.
He said, "Hi, Mimi, got your message, I'll be on the two o'clock. And thanks a bunch. I owe you."
As he spoke he found himself thinking, What was it she'd said? We've all been there. Might be worth asking her about that when I get to Spain!
He shoved the unworthy thought out of his mind and rang Beryl's mobile. Her phone was off too, for which he was somewhat relieved.
"Hi," he said. "It's Joe. Listen, sorry about all that stuff this morning, but when you hear everything that's been happening, you'll understand. Main thing is, I'm still going to be away for a couple of days, well, four actually. So if you could do what you said about keeping an eye out for Whitey I'd be truly grateful. I expect you're up to your elbows in new-born babies or something now, so I'll ring you later, OK? Thanks a lot and I'm really sorry that moron George got you involved. Bye."
There. Nothing there to get her heating up again. You are the master of diplomacy, Sixsmith. Now show you are also the master of self-preservation and get the hell out of here!
He grabbed the bag he'd packed the previous night and headed down to his car.
17
A Message from Frank
First stop was his office to check his mail, except that when he got there the postman hadn't been yet. He doubted it would hold anything but requests for money, whether official, commercial or charitable. It was far too early to go to the airport, but maybe hanging around here wasn't such a good idea. George, though no Nobel Prize winner, was quite capable of checking the Yellow Pages.
In any case, his conscience told him, after his deception of the Young Fair God last night, he really owed it to him to put these hard-won hours at his disposal. But how?
All he could think of was Steve Waring. Porphyry had supplied the address of the lad's digs. Joe didn't have a great memory except for song lyrics, but he'd found he could extend this specialized skill to other areas such as addresses by fitting their rhythms to a melody in his repertoire.
Mrs. Tremayne, 15 Lock-keeper's Lane marched very nicely with "Give me some men who are stout-hearted men" from The New Moon. As for Upleck, this was a suburb of Luton whose name was engraved on Joe's heart as the site of the bus shelter in which he'd had his first experience of coitus which, perhaps fortunately, had been interruptus by the approach of the last No. 27 bus. Later he sometimes mused that a five-mile walk home might have been a small price to pay for letting this supremely important encounter run its full and natural course.
He couldn't really see how a visit to Waring's might be helpful in the case, but as he couldn't see how anything other than a small miracle was going to help, he might as well drive out there. At least it was unlikely he'd run into George in Upleck.
A quart
er of an hour later he was driving past the famous bus shelter. He slowed down to take a closer look. It looked as drab and drafty and uninviting as these things usually did.
What're you expecting, Sixsmith? he asked himself. English Heritage sticking a blue plaque on it?
Lock-keeper's Lane had indeed once been a lane, and a busy one too, carrying traffic down from the main highway to the Luton-Bedford Canal created to form a link with the Ouse to the north. Twentieth-century improvements in road and rail services had long since put paid to the canal's commercial claims to survival. From time to time proposals were made to revive it recre- ationally, but they always collapsed under the sheer weight of investment necessary to reconstitute the canal from the sorry string of silted-up, overgrown and usually stagnant pools it had degenerated into. At its urban end, Lock-keeper's Lane had become just another dusty suburban street with few of its inmates sufficiently curious even to wonder where the name came from.
It was still early enough in the morning for both curbs to be lined with parked cars. Joe drove slowly, looking for a space. His luck was in. As he approached the estimated location of No. 15, a silver Audi A8 4.2 Quattro pulled out and he gratefully slipped the Morris into the space.
The house had a sign in the window saying Rooms to let-vacancies. Joe rang the bell and a couple of moments later the door was opened by a woman who looked like Princess Anne in a bad temper after falling off a horse which had then kicked her.
"Yes?" she exclaimed.
"Mrs. Tremayne, is it?"
Joe took the yellow-toothed snarl as an affirmative and pressed on.
"Sorry to bother you, but it's about one of your lodgers, Mr. Waring-"
"Him? Why's everybody so interested in him all of a sudden? And why can't they be interested at a decent time of day?"
"Mam!" yelled a voice from within. "Something's burning!"
"Well, turn it off then! Jesus, what do they teach them nowadays?"
She turned on her heel and vanished inside. After a while Joe took the still-open door as an invite and followed. A spoor of charred bacon led him into the kitchen where a teenage boy sat at a table eating bran flakes while his mother scraped the blackening contents of a frying pan on to a plate.
"Here," she said. "Take that in to Mr. Logan. Hurry up, before it gets cold." "You mean that would make it worse?" said the boy, looking at the plate with exaggerated revulsion. "Just for once in your life, Liam, do something without being smart, all right?" Joe caught the boy's eye and gave a sympathetic smile. He got blanked for his pains. He's a teen, thought Joe, probably sensitized to trouble and something about me says I could be trouble. The boy seized the plate, kicked the door open and went out of the kitchen. "Right," said Mrs. Tremayne, turning her attention to Joe. "So what the hell do you want?" The interval since their first brief exchange had given Joe time to ponder. He said, "Who else has been interested in Mr. Waring, then?" "His brother," replied the woman, surprised by the directness of the question. "His brother?" Joe recalled the YFG talking about Steve being an only child. "Which brother would that be?" "His brother, Stephen." "So Steve's got a brother called… Stephen?" "Yeah, why not? I've got a sister called Elspeth. Anyway, that's what his friend called him." "Whose friend?" "Mr. Waring's brother Stephen's friend who helped him clear out his things." At this point Mrs. Tremayne registered that somehow she'd been bounced into co-operation and exclaimed, "Who the hell are you anyway and what am I doing standing here in my own kitchen answering your sodding stupid questions?" "I'm a friend of Mr. Waring and I'm here to clear out his things," said Joe who, not being a very good liar, was happy to pick up his lies ready-made, off the peg. "Looks like I got my wires crossed." "That's right, so why don't you sod off before I cross your wires some more?" She didn't look like the kind of woman who made threats lightly, but even though Joe didn't really know what it was he was looking for, he knew he needed more time to look for it and cast around for something to gain a stay of execution. Money. He'd never met a landlady yet who wasn't interested in money. He said, "Mr. Waring all paid up when he left, was he?" "No, he was not! Why're you asking?" "Just thought if you could work out what he owed, I might be able to sort things out when I see him." She regarded him speculatively. The door opened and out of the corner of his eye he saw the boy come back into the kitchen. "And maybe I could pay a little on account," added Joe, recalling the saying of that great student of female psychology Merv Golightly that most women were suckers for promises except landladies, who were softened by nothing but hard cash. Mrs. Tremayne was nodding as if at last she was hearing something that made sense. Liam said warningly, "Mum…" "Don't interrupt," she snapped. "Mr. Logan says he doesn't want it. He says he'll buy a Mac on his way to work and knock it off his bill." Now he had his mother's full attention. "He says what? We'll see about that!" She snatched the plate from the boy's hand. Young Liam was a lad of some discernment, thought Joe. Cold, the breakfast looked even worse. With her Habsburg lip thrust out like a locomotive's cow-catcher, Mrs. Tremayne stormed out of the kitchen. Joe caught the boy's eye and tried to share a poor-sod smile, but Liam wasn't having any. On the whole, Joe got on well with kids. Just because most of today's teenagers chose to shuffle around with their pants at half-mast, talking in grunts and looking like they hated the universe didn't mean they were flesh-eating zombies on their way to an eat-in. Except on Hermsprong, where it might. This boy seemed to have his wits about him. And there was that warning note in his voice when he'd come back into the kitchen and heard what Joe said to his mother… He said, "You get on all right with Mr. Waring?" "Steve? Yeah, he was cool." "Didn't say anything to you about going away, did he?" "Nah." "This brother who collected his stuff this morning, did he look much like Steve?" "Nah." "Didn't show any ID or anything, just to prove he was Steve's brother, did he?" "Nah. You a cop, yeah?" There it was. He'd been right. The kid had sussed he was nosing around soon as he'd seen him, but he'd jumped to the wrong conclusion. Joe said, "Sort of. PI." This finally got the boy's interest. "You mean like private?" "That's what the P means, I think." The boy looked like he might have some other suggestions, but he kept them to himself. "You think something's happened to Steve?" "Would it surprise you?" Liam thought about this. Involvement was humanizing him. Also, Joe guessed he really did like Waring. "Don't know. Thought it was odd he went off without his Frank Lampard picture." "What's that then?" "He was a big Chelsea fan. Couple of years back he'd gone down to watch them and that night when he was wandering round the West End, he saw Frank getting out of a cab to go into a posh restaurant and he went up to him to ask for his autograph. Some of the guys with Frank told him to bog off, but Frank said no, it was fine, and he asked what Steve's name was and he signed this photo of him that was in a fan mag that Steve had." "And that was one of Steve's treasured possessions, was it?" "Oh yeah. He'd got it in this gold frame and he had it on the wall at the bottom of his bed where he could look at it." "And you were surprised it hadn't gone." "Yeah, but I expect his brother took it this morning." "Couldn't check, could you, Liam?" The boy went out. From what must be the dining room came the sound of Mrs. Tremayne in full flow, counter-pointed by a desperately querulous male voice. Joe moved across the kitchen. On a shelf between two wall units he'd noticed a jar full of ballpoints alongside a blue duplicate receipt book. He opened it and looked at the last carbon. It had today's date on and was headed Re Mr. S. Waring. Beneath this he read Back rent received up to and including breakfast Wed. July 12th?135 payment. Then on another line To cover period July 12th to present July 19th?40. And finally Total received?175 cash, followed by Mrs. Tremayne's signature.
This confirmed what Joe had guessed. No landlady let anyone remove an errant lodger's belongings without she got payment first. It also explained Liam's admonitory tone. The boy hadn't wanted his mother to get involved in ripping off a cop.
He heard footsteps outside and quickly replaced the receipt book.
A moment later Liam returned clutching a photo in a cheap gilt frame.
Across it was scrawled, To Steve, good luck, mate! Frank.
"He didn't take it," said Liam. "Steve will be gutted. He really liked that picture."
"Yeah," said Joe. "Nice message."
He was thinking, you send someone to pick up your stuff, you mention what you value most. But you come to clear all traces of a guy out of his lodgings, you don't look at what's hanging on the wall.
He said, "This brother who came, you see what he was driving?"
"His mate was driving, but it was a silver Audi," said Liam, confirming what Joe had guessed. But the boy hadn't finished, "That's how I knew it was all right."
"Sorry?"
"Yeah, I saw Steve in the car before."
"You did?" said Joe, feeling the not unfamiliar feeling that another promising theory might be on the point of crumbling. "When was that?"
"I don't know, week back maybe." "Morning, night? Weekend, weekday? Before the heatwave started, after the heatwave started?" "Don't remember," said the boy with that indifference to temporal matters that is one of the blessings of childhood and one of the penalties of age. "So where was this?" said Joe, moving from time to place. It was a clever move. Suddenly he got precision. "Coming down Plunkett Avenue from the bypass about half a mile away," said Liam. "I'd been round at my mate Trent's-" "So this was evening?" interrupted Joe. "That's right, late on, still light but fading-" "So nine-ish?" said Joe. "Bit later. Mum got real ratty, says I should be in by nine on a school day. Anyway, this silver Audi goes by and there's Steve in the passenger seat. I gave him a wave, thought I might get a lift, but he didn't see me." "So did you mention this next time you saw him?" Liam's face went slack, which in another age might have been taken as evidence of incipient idiocy, but which Joe recognized as signifying the modern teenager's entry into deep-thought mode. "No," said the boy finally. "Didn't mention it 'cos I didn't see him again." "You mean…?" "Yeah. He was up in his room when I got back, and next morning must have been the day he took off. What do you think I should do about the picture?" "Best keep it safe," advised Joe. "You a Chelsea fan?" "No," said the boy indignantly. "Luton!" "Good lad!" said Joe. "Could be a cracking season ahead, specially with Sir Monty coming up with the cash to sign the Croat kid."
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