Expectant eyes focused on him. He smiled guiltily. The door opened and he slipped back in.
‘Heard of Poll-Pott?’ she said.
‘Butcher, I’m not going to Cambodia.’
‘Ho ho. Pollinger, Potter, Naysmith, Montaigne and Iles,’ she said.
‘That Poll-Pott,’ he said. ‘With those posh offices in Oldmaid Row?’
‘That’s them, except when they charge like they do, they don’t have offices, they have chambers.’
‘Sort of chamber poll-pot,’ said Joe, who was often stimulated to wit by Butcher’s presence.
‘Je-sus. Anyway, Peter Potter and I used to be sort of buddies way back, before he became too rich to afford me. He specializes in insurance cases.’
‘And he’ll look into mine?’
‘Not so much look into as glance at. He’ll give you five minutes to tell your tale of woe then he’ll spare five seconds to tell you whether you’ve got a hope in hell. You want more, you’ll have to make an appointment and start paying by the parsec for his professional services. Sorry, that’s the best I can do, and even that has cost me dear.’
‘It’s great,’ Joe assured her. ‘When do I see him?’
‘In the next half hour. After that, don’t bother.’
‘What’s he doing?’ said Joe, looking at his watch which said quarter past five. ‘Jetting off to Bermuda for his hols?’
‘Don’t kick a gift horse in the teeth, Sixsmith. Pete Potter may be self-seeking, hedonistic, and fascist, but he makes the big insurance companies reach for their bulletproof vests. You can be round there in five minutes if you step smartly.’
‘No, I can’t,’ said Joe. ‘The policy’s back in my flat.’
‘Oh God. Why do I bother? And why are you still cluttering up my workspace? Don’t step smartly, run like hell!’
Joe ran like hell.
Even running like hell and driving like Jehu couldn’t get Joe back to his flat and out to Oldmaid Row much before a quarter to six.
Still, he thought, if the guy’s as good as Butcher cracks him up to be, couple of minutes should be plenty to confirm I’ve got a cast-iron case.
He rehearsed it as he kerb-crawled the elegant Regency terrace looking for the chambers.
Back in the autumn, his car had nose-dived through a cattle grid and been bombed by rubble from a ruinous gate arch. Ram Ray had produced an estimate for repairs running into a couple of thousand. ‘No sweat,’ the Penthouse assessor had said. ‘Cause of accident, faulty cattle grid. The estate owner pays.’ But when it turned out that the ownership of the estate was in dispute and that the current occupier was about to start a long prison sentence, the tune changed. This was when Mrs Airey, the senior claims inspector, appeared. She came to look at the remains of the car, sucked in her breath sharply, said it was clearly a write-off and if Joe cared to submit his own estimate of value with supporting documentation, it would be taken into account. Joe made his submission. Penthouse made their offer, Joe thought it was a misprint. He pointed out that his car was close to vintage status. They suggested it missed by a good thirty years and pointed out that the same model was still being manufactured in India. In fact, if they took the price of a new one from Ram Ray and projected twenty-five years depreciation, the value came to something less than one hundred. So the argument swayed for a good three months till finally Penthouse ended it with their cheque and Joe was desperate enough to admit he needed a lawyer.
It wasn’t that he had anything against lawyers, except that they were slow, pompous, patronizing and extortionate. Nothing personal, just what everybody knew. And he saw nothing in Oldmaid Row to disabuse him. It was described in The Lost Traveller’s Guide, the best-selling series describing places you were unlikely to visit on purpose, with a rare lyricism.
‘But now after a long trudge through a desert of architectural dysplasia, the traveller sees before him an oasis of style, proportion and elegance which he may at first take for mere mirage. Here behind a small but perfectly formed park, bosky with healthy limes, runs a Regency terrace so right in every degree that one wonders if some Golden Horde of Lutonian reivers has not rampaged westwards and returned dragging part of Bath amongst its booty. Rest here a while and rebuild your strength for the struggles still to come …’
No one lived here any more, though royal-blue plaques alongside several doors signalled that some of Luton’s brightest and best had once dwelt within. Now it was the best and brightest of the town’s businesses that located here. The rentals were astronomical but the letterhead alone was worth a thirty per cent hype of any normal professional fee.
The firm of Poll-Pott occupied the last house on the left, which in olden times had nursed the muse of Simeon Littlehorn, Poet, ‘The Luton Warbler’. Though not much known beyond his native heath, his ‘Ode on the Death of Alderman Isengard Who Fell Out of a Hot Air Balloon on the 17th of July 1843’ is the shibboleth of all claiming to be native-born Lutonians. As Joe looked at the plaque he could no more keep the opening lines out of his mind than an Englishman can refrain from saying, ‘Sorry,’ when asked to pass the salt.
Oh Isengard whose winged word,
High borne aloft on fiery breath,
E’er raised the hearts of all who heard,
Can such as thou plunge down to death?
As he mused, a BMW pulled up behind the Mini. A woman got out, looked at the poppied paintwork in horror, then advanced to the door and punched in a code which opened it.
As the door closed behind her, Joe jumped forward and blocked it with his foot.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, though in fact he only got as far as ‘Exc …’ before the woman whirled round, jabbed her fingers in his throat, seized his right wrist in both hands, pulled him towards her, then stepped aside and swept his legs from beneath him so that his own momentum sent him crashing to the ground. A knee then rammed between his shoulder blades and his head was dragged back by the hair just high enough for her forearm to slide beneath his chin and crush up against his Adam’s apple.
‘Try to move and I snap your windpipe,’ she said.
Joe tried to croak his understanding, found nothing came out, so tried to telepath it instead.
‘OK, let’s get the police,’ she said.
The hand holding his hair let go, then the arm beneath his chin moved away. He risked a glance round and saw it was no relenting on her part which had brought this relief but the need of both hands to use a mobile phone.
At sight of his head movement she stopped dialling and raised the instrument like a club.
‘I told you, don’t move!’ she yelled. ‘You want your head ripped off?’
She could do it too, Joe guessed. He’d recently started on a martial arts evening class and if he’d learned nothing else after four lessons, he knew that Mr Takeushi, his elderly Japanese instructor, could fillet him and lay him out to dry without breaking sweat. This woman was clearly Black Belt or beyond.
He tried the croak again, this time managed, ‘… Potter …’
She’d resumed dialling. Now she paused once more.
Encouraged, he gasped, ‘… Mr Potter … appointment …’
‘You’re here to see Peter?’ She didn’t sound persuaded. Balding black PIs wearing ex-Luton-works-department donkey jackets and driving antediluvian Minis clearly didn’t figure large among Potter’s clients.
‘… Butcher sent …