to recognize. He hesitated a moment before he replied. His relationship with the Super was a bit like his relationship with Beryl. Not that he had any ambition to get in bed with the guy, but sometimes it was man to man, sometimes boss to man, sometimes first name, sometimes not. Trick was to read the signals and decide if this was a Willie day. Same with Beryl, if you thought about it.
He decided to sit on the fence.
‘Hi there, how’re you doing?’ he said.
‘That could depend on you, Joe. I was ringing to tell you that I’ve pushed a possible client your way. Christian Porphyry. You heard of him?’
‘Didn’t I see his picture in the paper recently?’ said Joe. ‘Got arrested or something?’
He didn’t see the need to tell Woodbine Porphyry had been and gone. Might be some chance of getting a bit of info from the horse’s mouth.
‘Got engaged, Joe. Not the same thing. Though, come to think of it, maybe you’re right.’
He chuckled. His voice was quite friendly. Looked like this might be a Willie day, which probably meant he wanted something. Woodbine was the kind of ambitious cop whose gaze was fixed on the high ground. He only glanced down in search of small change that someone else had dropped. In his mind, professional and social upward mobility marched hand in hand and he’d married accordingly. But popular judgement was that he’d need to become Lord High Executioner before his wife would reckon she’d been compensated for her noble condescension.
He stopped chuckling and went on, ‘The thing is, Joe, I’ve given you a good write-up, and I just wanted to make sure you won’t let me down.’
‘Wouldn’t dream of it, Willie, no sir, you can rely on good old Joe.’
He’d over-hammed it. Woodbine said sharply, ‘This is serious, Joe. I hope you’re going to take it seriously.’
‘Of course I am,’ said Joe in his serious voice. ‘Might help, though, if you gave me a hint what it is I’m being serious about?’
‘It’s nothing, storm in a teacup, really. Mr Porphyry, Christian, has got himself a bit of bother at the golf club. He mentioned it to me, asked my advice. I gave it some thought, and I told him, Sorry, Chris, but this doesn’t get close to being a police matter. You know me, Joe, always willing to stretch things a bit for a friend, but in this case I really couldn’t see how anything in the official machinery could be of any use. But I hate to let a chum down. And it struck me, what he really needed was someone so unofficial, you’d pay him no heed. Someone so unlikely, no one would worry about him. Someone you’d not lay good money on to know his arse from his elbow. Someone like you, Joe.’
It wasn’t exactly a glowing testimonial. But Joe knew that he probably only survived in Luton because Willie Woodbine felt able to give it.
Very few cops like private eyes. Most view them with grave suspicion. And a few hate their guts and would love to put them out of business.
Not that Joe had looked like he needed much help in that line when he started. But somehow again and again after stumbling around like a short-sighted man in a close-planted pine forest on a dark night, he had emerged blinking with mild surprise into bright light and open country with everything lying clearly before him.
On more than one occasion Willie Woodbine had been nicely placed to take most of the credit. But the cop was clear-sighted enough to recognize it was Joe’s success, not his own, and from time to time he reached out a protective hand, not so much to pay a debt as to protect an asset.
Reaching out the hand of patronage was something new.
‘That what you told Mr Porphyry about me, Willie?’
‘No,’ sighed Woodbine. ‘I told him that in something like this, despite appearances, if anyone could get the job done, it was likely to be you. So don’t you go letting me down, Joe. Or else…’
‘Yeah yeah,’ said Joe, to whom a veiled threat was like a veiled exotic dancer. While you didn’t know the exact proportions of what you were going to see when the veil came off, you knew you were unlikely to see anything you hadn’t seen before. ‘But just what is the job, Willie?’
There was another voice in the background now, saying something Joe couldn’t make out, but the tone was urgent.
‘Joe, got to go. Keep me posted, OK?’
The phone went dead.
‘Shoot,’ said Joe, draining his can of Guinness.
He hadn’t got much further forward. What could a bit of bother at a golf club amount to? Taking a leak in a bunker, maybe. Or wearing shorts with parrots on.
There was mystery here, and maybe trouble. At least he had the consolation of knowing beneath the parrots he had two hundred quid of the YFG’s money thawing in his pocket.
He looked at his watch. Just after three, but he might as well go home. He didn’t anticipate getting any more business today.
He tossed the can towards the waste bin, missed, rose wearily and went out to brave the heat of the Luton dog days.
Blackball
As Joe drove the Morris through Bullpat Square, he saw a familiar figure coming out of the wide-open door of the Law Centre. Tiny enough for even a vertically challenged PI to loom over, from behind she could have been taken for a twelve-year-old, but that wasn’t an error anyone persisted in once they’d looked into those steely eyes and even less after they’d listened to the words issuing out of that wide, determined mouth, usually borne on a jet of noxious smoke from a thin cheroot.
This was Cheryl Butcher, founder and leading lawyer of the Centre, which offered a pay-what-you-can-afford legal service to the disadvantaged of the city.
Joe slowed to walking pace and pulled into the kerb.
‘Hey, Butcher,’ he called. ‘You looking for action?’
She didn’t even glance his way.
‘What the hell would you know about action, Sixsmith?’
‘Enough to know you walk too far in this heat, you’re going to melt away. Like a lift?’
Wise-cracking was an area of traditional gumshoe activity Joe didn’t usually bother with. It required from-the-hip rapid-fire responses and he was honest enough to recognize himself as an old-fashioned muzzle-loader. But his relationship with Butcher somehow seemed to stimulate him to make the effort. Maybe it was the certainty that in their mutual mockery there was a lot of respect.
‘You heading to Rasselas?’
The Rasselas Estate was a collection of sixties high-rise blocks which would probably have been demolished years ago if a determined Residents’ Committee, led by Major Sholto Tweedie, ably assisted by such powerful personalities as Joe’s Aunt Mirabelle, hadn’t succeeded in making it a place fit for humans to live in.
‘I surely am.’
‘Then you can drop me at Hermsprong,’ said Butcher, opening the car door and stepping in, which you could do with the old Morris Oxford if you were only as big as the lawyer.
Architecturally, Hermsprong was a mirror image of Rasselas built on the other side of the canal. And, like a mirror image, it showed everything back to front.
Unlike reconstructed Rasselas, every cliché of depressed urban high-rise living could be found on Hermsprong.
Crack-houses, corner dealers, lifts that were moving urinals when they moved at all, underpasses which were rats’ alleys where