‘Pardon?’ said Joe, bewildered.
‘There’s a lot of work to do,’ said Butcher and had started the crash course in how to wisecrack like a real Private Eye which was still going on.
Now she said, ‘Don’t sit down, you’re not staying.’
‘Look, I was going anyway when I saw how busy things were,’ said Joe slightly offended.
‘Highty-tighty,’ said Butcher. ‘I meant you’ve got business.’
‘Sorry?’
‘That Bannerjee you put me on to last night, I was able to help. At least I sat with him till they got it into their thick heads he wasn’t going to say any more. Then I got his wife and kids into an hotel.’
Joe looked at her with admiration. She must have been up half the night and still managed to look bright as a glass of lager, while a couple of bad dreams left his mind cloudy as homemade ale.
‘Did he do it, then?’
‘Do what? They’re not saying he did anything. The game they’re playing now is that this is an immigration case, his papers aren’t in order. This is clearly bollocks. He’s been living here for nearly fifteen years. He’s the sales manager for Herringshaw’s, a Midlands rag trade firm. All they’re trying to do is put the squeeze on him so that if he does know anything, he’ll get so scared about possible deportation he’ll cough.’
‘And what do you think?’ asked Joe. ‘Is he straight?’
‘I’d say so,’ she said. ‘He’s certainly won golden opinions from his employers. At his request I rang Herringshaw’s and his boss, Charles Herringshaw no less, got very indignant and said he’d come down himself to see what he could do. He told me to stay on the case, he’d pick up all the tabs, so I’m in gainful employment at last. I owe you, Sixsmith.’
‘My pleasure,’ said Joe, who knew that Butcher was forever jammed in a cleft stick of needing well-paid private work to subsidize the Centre without having the time to go out and find it.
She glanced at her watch and said, ‘Christ, look at the time. You’re late.’
‘Me? I wish I had something to be late for. Or is this a not so subtle hint you want shot of me?’
‘No, it’s tit for tat. That’s why I wanted a word with you. I’ve sent you a client. She wants a good PI so I told her to be at your office at ten-thirty. I meant to ring, but things got hectic, and I didn’t realize you kept upper-class hours.’
‘Can’t afford to keep anything else,’ said Joe. ‘What’s her name? What’s she want? Can she afford me? Can I afford her?’
But Butcher only cried, ‘Go, go, go!’ and opened the door to admit what looked like a tribe of gypsies.
Joe fought his way through them, checked his watch and wallet (the first step to integration is a shared prejudice) and headed back to the car where he found Whitey had unwrapped and eaten the rest of the sausages.
It was dead on ten-thirty as he parked the car outside the office. There was a BMW in front of him. A woman got out. She was elegantly dressed in black culottes and a jacket of pearly grey silk, a severe white blouse relieved by a large pink brooch at the neck. Her short bronze hair looked as if it had been sculpted, an effect heightened by the classic regularity of her face, which however bore a badge of mortality in the shape of a black eye beyond the scope of cosmetic disguise.
‘Mr Sixsmith, I presume?’ she said.
‘Well, I’m not Dr Livingstone,’ said Joe, still under Butcher’s cinematic influence.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ he hastily added, seeing from her face that this lady was not for joking with.
Her eyes were running over his clothes, his car and his cat like a VAT man’s over a ledger. They then turned to the building which belonged to the nineteen-sixties Prince-Charles-hates-it school of architecture.
‘Cherry said I shouldn’t judge by appearances,’ she murmured half to herself, but only half.
‘Cherry?’ said Joe.
‘Cheryl Butcher,’ she said.
‘Oh, that Cherry. Would you like to come inside?’ said Joe.
In the tiny dark foyer, he automatically checked his mailbox. As he opened it he felt those assessing eyes watching him and prayed it wouldn’t be revealingly empty. He was in luck. There was a Security Trade Fair opening at the National Exhibition Centre the following week and various electronic firms were bombarding him with invitations to come along and check out their bugs.
Clutching the sheaf of envelopes ostentatiously, he ushered the woman into the lift. Whitey howled. He didn’t trust the lift and usually they walked up the stairs together. When he realized that good client relations were going to be put before good cat relations he jumped down from Joe’s shoulder and set off up the stairs with his tail at a disgusted angle.
‘Sorry, I didn’t get your name,’ said Joe as the lift laboured up three storeys.
‘Baker,’ she said. ‘Gwen Baker.’
It sounded as if it meant something, or perhaps it was just the way she said it.
‘And have you known, er, Cherry long?’
‘We were at school together.’
‘Old friends, then.’
‘You could say so. We were thrown together by linguistic affinity. Little girls like that sort of thing.’
This was like one of those crossword clues, the ones which obliged him to invent his own answers. He worked at it and was delighted to have a sudden revelation as the lift shuddered to a halt.
‘Butcher and Baker!’ he said.
She looked at him sharply as if suspecting she was making a very large mistake. The doors opened to reveal Whitey yawning on the landing as if he’d been waiting for ages.
Inside the office she did her audit act again. He felt like asking her what he was worth. But when he offered her a chair he noticed that she sat down rather stiffly and also that the bruising on the left hand side of her face was accentuated by the pallor of the right.
‘You OK?’ he asked in concern. ‘Anything I can get you?’
‘Like all the best private eyes, you have a bottle in your desk, I suppose,’ she said.
‘Well, no. I was thinking, more a cup of sweet tea, like.’
She smiled for the first time.
‘It’s kind of you, but no, thanks. Let me put you in the picture then we can decide if we’re wasting each other’s time.’
It was, he had decided, a wife-battering case. His heart sank. A man who could batter a woman would probably have little qualms about battering a middle-aged balding PI.
But no harm in showing her he was no slouch, deduction-wise.
He said, ‘Go ahead. You want to tell me about your husband, I presume.’
He took her by surprise.
She said, ‘Yes, but …’
Then he saw those sharp eyes backtracking his line of reasoning, and a twitch of the right-hand corner of her mouth told him he’d got it wrong.
‘Perhaps I should begin by explaining I suffered my injuries in a plane crash …’
Of course! That was why her name was familiar.
He jumped in eagerly. ‘Yes, Gwendoline Baker. The A505 crash yesterday. You’re the secretary.’
‘The what?’
‘The secretary. To Mr what’s it. Verity. Mr Verity.’