She said, ‘Hi, Joe. Thought you might have rung earlier to suggest going out tonight to make up for last night.’
As if it had been him who stood her up!
He said, ‘Sorry. I was busy on a job.’
‘Yeah. Down at the Hole in the Wall, was that?’
Shoot! How the heck did she know that? he asked himself. And guessed the answer almost simultaneously. Aunt Mirabelle. Who had an intelligence system in the Luton area that made the CIA look like amateurs. Correction! The South Beds Bird-watching Society made the CIA look like amateurs. Mirabelle’s totalitarian network was KGB or MOSSAD in its scope. One of her minions probably worked at the Hole, and news of Joe’s appearance among the ravers would have shot along the line like a sighting of Bin Laden at a bar mitzvah.
And once Mirabelle heard, she’d have been straight on to Beryl to find out if she could throw any light on this latest aberration.
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Working Chris Porphyry’s case.’
He guessed right that this would be a diversion.
‘The hunk in the Aston? You actually went to the Royal Hoo and got the job?’
‘I surely did,’ he said. ‘No need to sound so surprised either. Look, what I’m ringing for is, I have to be away for a couple of days, wondered if you and Desmond could keep an eye on Whitey for me. Usual: top up the water and food, don’t let the tray get too disgusting.’
Desmond was Beryl’s young son, who loved the cat.
‘Couple of days?’
‘Till the weekend maybe.’
‘That’s four days.’
‘Hey, three, four, no need to get hung up on counting.’
‘When I’m doling out your pills in the geriatric ward, you’ll want me to get hung up on counting, believe me.’
‘I surely will as you’ll likely be in the next bed,’ said Joe ungallantly.
‘I certainly won’t be in the same bed.’
This wasn’t going too well.
He said, ‘Will you do it? Please.’
‘Course I will. You don’t think I’d let a dumb animal suffer. And I worry about Whitey, too.’
This was better.
‘Well, thanks. You’ve got a key, right?’
‘Yeah, if I can recall where I put it. When are you leaving?’
‘Five tomorrow morning.’
‘Jeez, Joe. What’s Mr Porphyry offering you to get you up so early?’
‘This ain’t that job. This one, I’m working for Mr Ratcliffe King.’
There was a moment’s shocked silence then she said, ‘Oh Joe, Joe, all these high-up people, don’t be getting out of your depth.’
‘Hard with high-up people,’ he joked.
‘Then don’t be getting above yourself. Gotta go now. Bye, Joe.’
‘Bye,’ he said reluctantly.
As he ended the call, the phone rang again.
‘Sixsmith,’ he said.
‘Joe, it’s Chris. You said you’d let me know how you were getting on.’
There was no reproach in the voice, just hope. No, worse than hope. Confidence.
‘Making progress, Chris,’ said Joe.
‘Yes?’
He cast around for something reassuring to say and all that came to mind was Butcher’s obscurely jokey, What’s become of Waring?
He said, ‘That lad, Waring, the assistant greenkeeper, still no word of him?’
‘No. Why do you ask?’
‘Just think there might be a connection,’ lied Joe. ‘You being so concerned about him and all.’
It sounded so feeble that he anticipated the long silence that followed must signal the inevitable onset of doubt about his competence.
Instead…
‘Oh, Joe, Joe,’ said Porphyry. ‘What Willie said about you is true. You don’t say much, but nothing gets past that razor-sharp mind of yours.’
‘Eh?’ said Joe, thinking there must be a crossed line or something.
‘Yes, I take a special interest in Steve, but I don’t see how it can be connected with this business. Thing is, Steve’s local. Sally, his mother, used to work for my parents.
Housemaid. I remember her well, pretty little thing…I recall telling her I wanted to marry her…’
He paused as if in reminiscence.
Joe thought, Oh shoot! He’s not going to tell me Butcher was right, is he?
Then Porphyry laughed. It was good to hear him laugh. Young Fair Gods aren’t made for sorrow.
‘She said, “Thank you kindly, Master Chris, but my George has got first refusal.” Then she took me to the kitchen and gave me a huge slice of cook’s chocolate fudge cake. Best adhesive known for mending an eight-year-old’s broken heart. She got married soon after, handed in her notice when she got pregnant with Steve.’
Joe heaved a silent sigh of relief and said, ‘This George…’
‘George Waring. Worked on the estate. Sort of general dogsbody. Could turn his hand to anything. Might have made something of himself if he hadn’t been such a devil for the drink. Killed him in the end, poor blighter.’
‘He died of alcoholic poisoning?’
‘Not exactly. He was rolling home one summer evening with a few mates, took a shortcut over the fields that involved crossing a stream by a single plank bridge. He lost his balance and fell off. A fall of hardly a couple of feet, next to no water in the brook, but he banged his head on a stone and when his mates went to pick him up, they found he was dead.’
‘How? Why?’ asked Joe. It was totally irrelevant, but it was better than trying to explain he had no leads on the cheating case and not much hope of developing any.
‘Turned out he had an abnormally thin skull. You and me might have had a bump, nothing worse. Poor old George cracked his head wide open and that was that. It was an unfortunate accident, no one’s fault, but Sally, his wife, got embroiled with some ambulance-chasing lawyer who said it was the estate’s responsibility and wanted her to launch a huge compensation claim.’
‘That would be Ms Butcher,’ said Joe, relishing the ambulance-chasing bit.
‘Spot on, Joe. You really are a marvel. There was no case, it was never going to get near court, but this Butcher creature kept nagging away. Then poor Sally was diagnosed with cancer. We made sure she got the best of treatment, but a year and a half later she was dead too. Young Steve was sixteen then. I’d promised Sally I would keep an eye on him. He moved in with her family, who also worked on the estate. I offered to finance him through college, or he could have had a job on the estate, but he wasn’t interested. He wanted his independence and he wanted to be a bit nearer town. So rather than see him do something silly and go off the rails, last year I fixed up a job for him at the golf club. He found lodgings in Upleck – do you know it? Handy for town and on the right side for work. I bought him a little motor scooter so he could get to the Hoo nice and easy. He seemed really happy, which is why I can’t understand what made him take off.’
So much for Porphyry’s special interest. Guilt money, Butcher would probably call it, or at best feudal patronage, but to Joe it seemed like the decent concern of a decent guy. Whatever, it also smelt like a pongy red herring.
Still, when there’s nothing else in the fridge, red herring is what you dine on.
‘You got the address of his digs?’ he asked.
‘Yes. Hang on.’ A pause then Porphyry dictated, ‘Mrs Tremayne, 15 Lock-keeper’s Lane, Upleck. Anything else, Joe?’
No curiosity as to why he wanted the address, which was just as well. I’m the basket he’s put all his eggs in, thought Joe. And basket just about sums me up!
Something else from his talk with Butcher popped up.
‘There’s some kind of agreement you’ve got about how things work at the Hoo, right? Like when the place was set up as a club, there must have been something legal about who got shares and so on.’
‘Oh, you mean the deed of foundation.’
‘Do I? Yes, I suppose I do.’
�
�Yes, it was my grandfather who set up the club, of course. A private arrangement between himself and a few friends initially. But he once told me when I was only a nipper, a necessary qualification for being a gent used to be that you could read and write. That was so that you could make sure you kept a clear and detailed record of all the gentlemen’s agreements you entered into. I’ve got a copy somewhere.’
He chuckled. Was that a joke then? wondered Joe.
‘Don’t suppose you’ve got a copy handy?’ he said without much hope.
‘As a matter of fact, I think I have,’ said the YFG. ‘I dug it out for the club’s AGM in the spring. Something had come up, I forget what it was, but Arthur Surtees thought it as well to cast his lawyer’s eye over the original foundation document. Now where did I put it? Oh yes. Tucked behind the sherry decanter so I’d be reminded to put it somewhere safe every time I had a drink.’
Didn’t work, did it? thought Joe.
‘All right if I take a look at it?’ he said.
‘You think there might be a connection?’
‘Can’t say. Just covering all angles.’
‘Joe, you’re a marvel. I’d never have thought of such a thing. Shall I bring it round to your place now?’
‘No!’ said Joe. Fobbing the poor devil off with red herrings over the phone was one thing, but he couldn’t face the prospect of looking into those trusting eyes. Besides, he needed his sleep.
‘You got a fax machine?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Just fax it will you. Hang on.’
He opened the address book by the phone and dictated Butcher’s fax number. She was the one who wanted to see it.
‘One thing more, Chris,’ he said.
Typically, he’d almost forgotten the one thing he’d picked up at the Hole that might give a real pointer to who could be behind the frame-up, assuming that’s what it was.
‘Someone had to put a formal complaint to this Rules Committee before it could consider the case. I gather it wasn’t Syd Cockernhoe, the guy you beat. Any idea who it was?’
To Joe’s delight, Porphyry said, ‘Oh yes,’ instantly.
Then the delight faded as the YFG continued, ‘That would be me.’
‘You?’
‘Yes. Couldn’t have all those foul rumours flying around. This needed to be brought in the open and sorted out publicly. So I had a word with Tom Latimer and asked him to put the facts before the Four Just Men. You’d have done the same, I think, Joe.’
‘Maybe,’ said Joe. ‘Pity though. If you’d left it to someone else, we might have got a pointer to who it is that’s after you.’
‘Golly. Never thought of that. That’s why I need someone like you, Joe. Shall we meet up some time tomorrow for another chat?’
Joe took a deep breath.
‘Not tomorrow. I’ve got to be away a couple of days. On enquiries.’
‘OK, Joe. Understood. Ring me when you can.’
‘Yeah, I’ll do that.’
Joe sat by the phone and told himself he hadn’t lied. If Porphyry interpreted what he’d said as meaning enquiries on his behalf, that was his problem.
But he didn’t feel good.
His phone rang again.
‘Joe, Chris here. Listen, talking about young Steve got me thinking. I got a call from him that night…’
‘Which night?’
‘You know, the night all this bother started. I didn’t hang around the club too long after Jimmy showed up saying he’d picked my ball out of his pool. Bit of an atmosphere and I needed to think. So I went home, and a bit later my mobile rang. It was Steve.’
‘Yeah? So what did he say?’
‘Nothing really. We got cut off. I tried ringing back but just got his answer service.’
‘But it was definitely Waring.’
‘Oh yes. I recognized his voice. He said, “Hi, Mr Porphyry -” then we got cut off.’
‘So what time did this call come through?’
‘About nine thirty, I think. This help at all, Joe?’
No, probably not the slightest bit, thought Joe.
He said gently, ‘We’ll have to see, Chris. Good night now.’
Why is it I never talk to this guy without feeling lousy? he asked himself as he switched off.
Maybe it was because he’d got so used to being with people who at best regarded him as a lucky PI and at worst thought of him as a joke that it was hard to deal with someone who managed to find more evidence of his skill and insight every time they talked!
He needed someone down to earth and sensible to talk to, but when he looked around the flat, there was still no sign of Whitey.
He put his front door on the security chain and left it slightly ajar so that if the cat returned via the lift he could get in. The balcony door was wide open anyway to admit what little breeze there was. He recalled the scented air conditioning at ProtoVision House. Nice work if you could get it. But lower down the food chain all you could do was take off all your clothes and lie naked on top of your bed by an open window.
It had been a long day full of incident and information, a day made for lying idly in the sun but which had seen him moving sweatily between the Royal Hoo and Ram Ray’s garage and the Law Centre and King Rat’s palace and the Hole in the Wall, a day that might have had a lesser man lying awake pondering its significances and implications.
Joe did ponder, for all of five seconds, before bundling up the day and all its events and dumping them out of sight at the back of his mind. And in another five seconds he had plunged effortlessly into his customary deep sleep which Beryl claimed was indistinguishable from catalepsy.
Twitch
Except with regard to Luton winning the Premiership title, the FA Cup and the European Championship all in the same season, Joe was not a dreamer.
Tonight, however, he can’t have plunged to his usual depths of sleep because he found himself dreaming.
It was a really weird dream in which a pair of mighty hands seized him by the ankles, bore him through the air and hung him upside down over the railing of his balcony. The early July dawn was already painting the dreaming spires of Luton and its surrounding landscape in a beauteous light. He was facing outwards, and even upside down, the view looked really good. Blasphemously he thought, Maybe I’m being tempted like Jesus. A voice was calling his name in the kind of smoky rasp you would expect from the devil’s throat and it wouldn’t have surprised Joe to hear his assailant proclaiming, ‘All these things I will give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.’
Instead the voice cried, ‘Sixsmith, what you playing at? You are dead meat, man! Dead meat!’ And at the same time his body was pendulumed so violently that his head struck the underside of the balcony.
The first collision roused both pain and suspicion. A lesser detective might have leapt at once to the conclusion that he wasn’t dreaming, but Joe had learned a long time ago that it was better never to leap to conclusions but let them come to you in their own sweet time.
The second collision brought the conclusion a lot closer and the third confirmed its arrival.
This was no dream. He really was being dangled over his seventh-floor balcony by a homicidal maniac.
As if to reward this admission of reality, the swinging began to slow down. Which was nice, until it occurred to him this could mean either the swinger was tiring or maybe was thinking of letting go.
One result of the deceleration was that Joe was once more able to take in the view, but like one of his favourite songs almost said, What a difference a couple of seconds makes!
Now the soft beauty of the morning had completely evapo -rated and the gentle sun was a spotlight, picking out the little square of pavement far below against which his head was about to splatter.
He bent his neck so he could look up. Even if he hadn’t been able to recognize the rage-twisted features peering down at him, he would have made a good guess at the huge hands bolted tight around his ankles. Last time he’d se
en those fists they’d been remodelling the face of Ernie Jagger, the Battersea Bruiser.
He was literally in the hands of Eloise’s ex, Jurassic George.
Knowing how to say the right thing at the right time is truly a gift from heaven, which was why on the whole Joe usually opted for silence or a neutral ‘U-huh.’ But neither of these options seemed suited to his present circumstances. So Joe let his mind go blank and said the first thing that came into it.
Which was, ‘Hey, George, man, how’re you doing? That was a great job you did on Jagger. Those left hooks! Just beautiful.’
It was an inspired social gambit. Boxers are simple men, a condition refined by frequent blows about the head, and though they are generally indifferent to appeals to their better nature or the higher aesthetic, the one way of catching their interest is to make complimentary remarks about their ring technique.
Above him there was a change of atmosphere, or not so much a change as the kind of hiatus you sometimes get when a big black thundercloud seems uncertain whether to launch its floods and lightnings here and now or postpone them a bit till there and then. The swinging from side to side stopped altogether and the voice modulated from threatening rasp to modest roar.
‘Yeah, well, I just saw a gap, know what I mean, and I threw that first left and the gap got bigger, yeah, so I chucked in another couple and set him up to finish the job.’
Joe would have preferred it if George hadn’t felt the need to relax his grip with his left hand in order to illustrate the hooks. True, the man’s right hand seemed to have strength enough to hold his weight indefinitely, but if George should feel moved to demonstrate the combination with which he dispatched the unfortunate Bruiser, this diversionary tactic could prove counterproductive.
Time to change the focal point of the flattery.
‘Nearly took his head off!’ said Joe. ‘But it wasn’t just strength, though, no way, George. Your footwork, man, you’ve really been working on your footwork. Float like a butterfly, sting like a Centurion tank, eh?’
To his disappointment, all the fulsome compliment earned Joe was a mandatory shake of the ankles.
‘Sting like a bee, I think it is,’ growled George. ‘Ain’t that right, Twitch? Sting like a bee.’
The Roar of the Butterflies Page 11