Reginald Hill

Killing the Lawyers


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      REGINALD HILL

      KILLING THE LAWYERS

      A Joe Sixsmith novel

       COPYRIGHT

      Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      Previously published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1997

      Copyright © Reginald Hill 1997

      Reginald Hill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

      Source ISBN: 9780007334803

      Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2015 ISBN: 9780007397679

      Version: 2015-07-27

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

       8

       9

       10

       11

       12

       13

       14

       15

       16

       17

       18

       19

       20

       21

       22

       23

       24

       25

       26

       27

       28

       29

       Keep Reading

       About Reginald Hill

       By Reginald Hill

       About the Publisher

       1

      Christmas.

      Season of d.i.y. divorce and marital mayhem.

      Meaning that while cop cars and meat wagons are ding donging merrily down Luton High, a PI can get festive and know he’s not missing much business.

      Especially a PI like Joe Sixsmith who doesn’t have much business to miss.

      December 28th, Joe called in at his office. Didn’t anticipate a queue of clients but what were the alternatives? More force-feeding at Auntie Mirabelle’s, more unforced boozing down the Glit, or joining the other lost souls cruising the Palladian Shopping Mall in search of bargains they didn’t want in sales that had opened in Advent.

      There were no turtle doves or partridges waiting for him, only a single typewritten envelope and a sodden cat-litter tray. Whitey must’ve taken a valedictory leak as Joe waited for him on the landing on Christmas Eve. Perhaps it was memory of this peccadillo which had kept the cat firmly pinned in front of Mirabelle’s fire, but more likely it was just his insatiable appetite for cold turkey.

      ‘Thanks a bundle,’ said Joe as he emptied the clogged grit and damp tabloid into a plastic carrier and dumped it on the landing for later transfer to the bin below. Swilling the tray out in his tiny washroom, he noticed that the uric acid had produced a kind of stencil through the newspaper on to the beige plastic bottom. At various levels there must have been a colour photo of Prince Charles, a Page Three girl, and some guys firing guns in one of the world’s chronic wars. The resultant blurred image, framed in broken sentences, lay there like a drunk’s philosophy at closing time, and as difficult to get rid of. Cold water wouldn’t budge it.

      ‘Shoot,’