by Reginal Hill
Now why do I do these things? he asked himself helplessly. See a clever move and make it quick, is the way to lose at chequers, as Aunt Mirabelle always said after luring him forward with sacrifice, then triple-hopping his pieces.
But he'd done it anyway. Closing the door behind him so that Number 6 couldn't peer in, he peeped through a small curtained window and saw the old soldier still standing there like he was on sentry duty. Best thing to do was wait a couple of minutes, then exit boldly, shouting, Thank you andgoodbyel If the sound of his entry hadn't roused the drowsy Ms lies, then he could afford to exit with a bang!
But his awkward mind was asking, why hadn't the legal lady been roused? Phone ringing, door opening, strange voice downstairs ... Maybe she'd been so affected by what happened to Potter she'd knocked herself out with a pint of gin? Maybe ... He decided to abandon maybes, knowing from experience how soon you ran out of the comfortable zones and got down to the scarys.
It was simpler to try and wake her, then run like hell at the first sound of movement.
He advanced to the foot of the stairs and called, "Ms lies? You up there?"
No reply. I am definitely not going up those stairs, thought Joe.
Not any more than two or three, anyway.
But four or five never seems much more than two or three, and in no time at all he found himself where he had no intention of being, on the landing.
"Ms lies?" he called again, thinking that if she came out of the bathroom now stark naked, she probably knew enough law dating back to the Middle Ages to get him broiled on a gridiron.
He moved slowly forward towards an open door. It led into a bedroom. She was in there. He could see her. She was naked.
"Oh shoot," said Joe.
Maybe she'd got so pie-eyed she couldn't make it under the duvet. Maybe
There he went with his maybes again when all the time he knew from the angle of her head to her body that maybes were right out of fashion.
To his long list of folk he'd got wrong he added Sandra lies. Unless she'd been so ridden with guilt, she'd managed to break her own neck.
He went closer to make absolutely sure. Her nakedness embarrassed him and it would have been easy to imagine accusation in those staring eyes. But there was only death. He touched her face, mouthing, "Sorry." Cold. Dead for hours. He ran his gaze round the room. No clues leapt up and hit him in the eye. And why the shoot should he be looking for clues anyway? No one was paying him to do a job here.
Still, like Endo Venera said, one way or another a PI was always on the job. No harm then in a few mental notes.
The bed was big enough for two but there was only one central pillow and that had a single indentation in it. Looked like she'd gone to bed then been disturbed. No sign of a nightgown. Either she slept raw or it had been taken. No obvious sign of rape. Her legs weren't splayed and there were no scratches or bruising that he could see. No sign of struggle either. Everything neat and tidy. The clothes she'd been wearing last night were arranged on hangers and hooked over the edge of the wardrobe door.
On top of the wardrobe he could see the edge of what looked like a black metal box.
According to Endo Venera, two things a good PI never missed the chance of looking into were an open bar or a closed black metal box.
He tried to reach it, couldn't. He picked up the stool in front of the dressing table. He knew he shouldn't be doing this, but in for a penny, in for a pound, it's nose that makes the world go round.
Even standing on the stool only got his head level with the top of the wardrobe. He wrapped his handkerchief round his right hand, reached up, fumbled till he found a handle, and lifted the box down.
It was eighteen inches by nine, the kind of portable strongbox you can buy in any legal stationer's. There was a key in the lock. He turned it and lifted the lid.
"Shoot," he said.
No telltale legal documents here, just photos, the kind of pictorial biography to be found in nearly everyone's desk or attic. Sandra lies (presumably) as baby, as infant, as (now recognizably) schoolgirl; on holiday, in cap and gown, in (bringing a reminiscent twinge to his neck) a judo gi fastened with a black belt. Other people, presumably family and friends, appeared on some of the snaps but no one Joe knew till he hit a group photo taken on the steps of Number 1 Oldmaid Row.
There were five of them, lies and four men. Joe recognized the burly figure of Peter Potter. The other three a distinguished elderly man with silvery hair, a slight dark man with a sardonic white-toothed smile showing through an eruption of black beard, and a big blond Aryan in his early thirties -were presumably Pollinger, Naysmith and Montaigne, though not necessarily in that order.
Two down, three to go. The thought popped uninvited into his mind.
Then the doorbell rang, making him drop other people's worries and several photographs.
He went to the curtained window and without touching peered through a tiny crack.
On the cobbles below stood a police car. Alongside it, looking up at the house and listening with polite boredom to the expostulations of the military man, was a pair of uniformed cops.
Joe glanced at his watch. Dickhead! I went in, found her dead, and was about to raise the alarm when the police arrived wasn't going to sound so convincing now fifteen minutes had elapsed. It was going to sound even worse if they caught him in the bedroom, going through the dead woman's things.
Hastily he scooped up the spilled pics, dropped them back in the box, locked it, clambered on the stool, replaced the box on the wardrobe, jumped down, replaced the stool before the dressing table, and headed for the door.
One last glance round to make sure he hadn't left any traces of his illegal search. And he had. The group photo of the Poll-Pott team had fluttered half under the bed. He picked it up. The doorbell rang again and a voice started shouting urgently through the letter box. No time to put it back. He shoved it into his pocket and sprinted downstairs just in time to open the front door before they smashed in the glass panel with a truncheon.
"Hey, that's timing," said Joe. "I was just going to ring you." But he could see they didn't believe him.
Six.
It took the police doctor's confirmation that Sandra lies had been dead between twelve and fifteen hours to move Sergeant Chivers away from the pious hope that Joe had been caught in the act. But it didn't move him far.
"OK, so maybe you were just revisiting the scene of your crime," said Chivers. "Let's concentrate on what you were doing between say seven and ten last night. And if you were sitting at home watching the telly, the courts don't accept alibi evidence from cats!"
"Shoot," said Joe. "Then I'm in real trouble, 'cos my witnesses are a lot less reliable than Whitey."
"What's that mean?"
"It means that for most of the time, I was here being questioned by you, Sarge. Remember?"
Chivers closed his eyes in silent pain.
"And when you were done with me, I went straight round to the Glit to wash the taste out of my mouth," said Joe, pressing his advantage.
"The lowlife that drink there are anyone's for a pint," said Chivers without real conviction.
"I'll tell Councillor Baxendale you said that, shall I? We got there the same time, and it's true, I bought him a pint."
Dickie Baxendale was chair of the council's police liaison committee.
Chivers said, "Just tell me again what you were doing at Number 7, Coach Mews."
Joe told him again, or rather told him the revised version which was that, being keen to assure Ms lies of his innocence in the matter of Potter's death, and not trusting the police to set the record straight (a good authenticating point this) he had decided to call on her personally.
"Mr. Dorken said you spoke to someone before you went in."
Mr. Dorken, the 'military gent', had turned out to be a retired fashion designer. Just showed how wrong you could be.
That was a bit of play-acting," admitted Joe, who knew the value of a plum of truth
in a pudding of lies. The door opened by itself and I got worried 'cos Mr. Dorken was watching me suspiciously. Sorry."
"It's stupid enough to be true," admitted Chivers reluctantly.
DC Doberley called him out of the room for a moment. When he returned he said, "Come across any Welshmen recently, Sixsmith?"
Joe thought of Starbright Jones, decided against mentioning him, and said, "Can't think of any. Why?"
There's an odd message on Ms Iles's answer phone Funny accent, could be Welsh."
Pride almost made Joe protest, but sense prevailed.
He said, "Everybody sounds funny on tape. Can I go now, Sarge? I've got an appointment. For a job. In sport."
"Oh yes? Who with? Head scout down the football club?" Chivers sneered.
And Joe couldn't resist replying, "No. It's Zak Oto down the Plezz. Got your ticket for the opening, have you, Sarge?"
To the faithful, the Plezz with its great silver sports dome from which radiated all the other support and activity buildings in broad and tree-flanked avenues, was Luton's Taj Mahal. Literally, according to some who claimed that every local mobster who'd gone missing in the past decade had been consigned to the depths of its concrete foundations. Metaphorically there was certainly blood on its bricks. Since the idea first got floated in the overreaching eighties, fortunes had been made and lost, reputations inflated and burst, both locally and nationally. At times the government had pointed to it proudly as the very model of partnership between public money and private enterprise, at others it had provided a gleeful opposition with yet more ammo to hurl across the floor of the House. But once under way, like a juggernaut it had rolled on: and though the complexion of the local council had fluctuated in tune with the times, and work had sometimes slowed almost to a standstill, no one had had the nerve to pull the plug altogether and make Luton and its folly the mockery of the civilized world.
So now, ten years on, it was finished, and though Joe had generally been of the party who thought the whole idea was crazy, now as he drove along the main avenue, with that phlegmatic pragmatism which makes Lutonians such great survivors, he felt a glow of proprietorial pride.
He was a bit late, partly Chivers's fault, partly Whitey's. He'd rushed back to rescue the cat from the office and found him full of indignation at having been left so long. Also of pee because he was clearly going to have nothing to do with his new puce tray, so they'd had to stop at the first flowerbed as they reached the Plezz complex and despite the evident urgency, it had taken the cat the usual ten minutes of careful exploration with many false starts to find the piece of earth precisely suited to his purpose.
Being late didn't matter, however, as he clearly wasn't expected.
"I'm here to see Zak Oto," said Joe to the armed guard. In fact he wasn't armed, but he looked as if this was just because he'd left his Kalashnlkov in his ARV as he felt like tearing intruders limb from limb today.
"You and a thousand others," he said. "Piss off."
"She's expecting me," said Joe.
"She'd be wise to have an abortion then," said the guard.
"Hey, man, why so rude?" asked Joe. "OK, you've got a job to do, but maybe you should remember who's paying you and do it politely."
"Sorry," said the guard. "Piss off, sir!"
Joe regarded him almost admiringly. Dick Hull, manager of the Glit where they liked their humour subtle, should book this guy for Show Nite.
Meanwhile he stood there, like the big dog they'd told him about at school, guarding the entrance to hell, though why anyone should have wanted to get into hell Joe had never quite grasped. But the way to get round him was toss him something to eat.
Trouble was, Joe couldn't think of anything this guy might have an appetite for except maybe his head.
"Joe Sixsmith? Is that you?"
A burly balding man in a tracksuit had come out of the door leading into the depths of the Dome. He was smiling at Joe.
"Yeah, this is me," admitted Joe.
Thought it was. Don't recognize me, do you?"
In fact the man's creased and weather-beaten face did look familiar. But there was a sense of a thinner, younger face peering out of fortyish flesh which was more, though differently, familiar.
"Jim Hardiman," said the man. "We were at school together."
It was the nose that finally did it.
"You mean Hooter Hardiman?" said Joe.
A shadow touched the smile like a crow floating across the sun.
That's right," he said. "Long time no see, eh?"
But in fact Joe had seen Hardiman several times both in the local paper and on the telly since he had come to prominence, first as Zak's trainer, then as sports director of the Plezz. He felt ashamed as a PI that he'd never made the connection between the grown man, Jim, and the schoolboy, Hooter. His excuse was that the nose which had stood out like a chilli on a cheesecake at fifteen had been absorbed and assimilated by forty. Also the boy had been a class above him and they'd never had much more contact than the usual ritual bullying a schoolboy heavy feels it necessary to dish out to whoever gets in his way in order to encourage the others.
But now it was best-years-of-our-lives time.
"Heard a lot about you recently, Joe, and often meant to look you up. Have a chat about the good old times we had together."
Would take all of ten seconds, thought Joe.
He said, That would be great, Hoo ... er, Jim. But I'm here to see Zak just now. Any idea where she is?"
"Zak? She expecting you?"
That's right, Mr. Hardiman. Ms Oto told me to look out for him."
This was the gung-ho guard unexpectedly coming to his support.
Joe said, "You knew that, why all this guard-dog crud?"
Thought you were just a pushy fan, didn't I? Ms Oto didn't tell me you'd look like ... how you look."
A diplomat already, thought Joe.
Hardiman said, Thanks, Dave. Come on, Joe. Let me show you the way."
He set off into the Dome with Joe following. The place was full of workmen.
"You going to be ready on time?" said Joe, gingerly edging past WET PAINT signs.
"No sweat," said Hardiman. "Gilding the lily is all. Time for a quick word."
It wasn't a question. As he uttered the words he opened a door marked DIRECTOR OF PHYSICAL RECREATION, a title rather larger than the office he ushered Joe into. There were lots of files and correspondence in evidence, but all neatly stacked. To Joe, who could create chaos out of two sheets of paper and an empty desk, it looked like the workplace of a busy but well-ordered man.
"Have a pew," said Hardiman, 'and tell me what this is all about."
"Can't do that, Hoo ... er, Jim," said Joe. "Private business."
"So you're here professionally?"
So it wasn't Hooter who suggested me, thought Joe as he shrugged noncommittally.
"OK. But I need to know if this is anything to do with that stupid business about that phone call."
Another shrug. It was pretty good this shrugging business. Saved a man a lot of tripping over his tongue.
"I'll take that as a yes. Listen, Joe, I appreciate you got a duty of confidentiality, but I've got duties too, and anything to do with the New Year meeting is my business. Zak told me about the call, I told her it was the price of fame, some nutter, ignore it. I thought I got through. What's happened? There been more?"
Joe varied the shrug with a little hand movement, sort of French, he felt.
"OK, so there's been more. Listen, Joe, I've got to know this. Is Zak seriously thinking about scratching because of this crap?"
There didn't seem any harm in saying, "No, I don't think scratching's an option," till he'd said it, after which he realized it implied agreement with all that had gone before. But shoot, not even a Frenchman could shrug forever.
Thank God for that. But if she's so worried, why hire you? Why not talk to me again, or go to the police?"
Back to the shrug.
"I'll tell y
ou why," said Hardiman after a moment's pause for thought. "The girl's worried someone close to her may be involved. And if that's right, if it's someone in her family, Zak wouldn't want that to get public. She's a loyal girl."
Wasn't so loyal to you, thought Joe.
He said, "Why should she think someone in her family could be out to harm her? Thought she was the apple of their eye."
"I take it you haven't met her sister?" said Hardiman. "Zak might be the apple of her parents' eyes, but she's the pip up sister Mary's nose."
With a mental sigh, Joe abandoned all shrugs and pretence. This sounded too important to miss.
He said, "What's the set-up? Young sister having all the talent, getting all the attention?"
"Half right," said Hardiman. "But Mary was talented too, very talented. Squash was her game, and she was good. I've known her a long time. She used to work out at the gym where I took my athletes for weight training. From thirteen, fourteen on she had just one idea in her mind. She was going to be the world's Number One Woman, and nothing was going to get in her way. And I think she might have made it too if it hadn't been for the accident."
"Hey, I think I remember something of that in the Bugle," said Joe. "Car smash, wasn't it?"
That's right. She was driving her parents to see Zak run. They were shaken and bruised, nothing more, but Mary got her knee mangled. End of hopes."
Joe said, "You tell that story like there's a lot more to it, Jim."
"Sensitive soul, aren't you?" said Hardiman. "Listen, I'm into confidentiality too. Was a time when Zak used to tell me everything. There are things I figure you ought to know because of this situation you've got yourself into. But I don't want Zak knowing it comes from me, you understand me, Joe?"
Back to the playground, Hooter's voice soft, but his eyes oh so hard and menacing.
"Just tell me what you want to tell me, Jim," said Joe mildly.
Hardiman looked like this wasn't the cued response, then said, "OK. Way I got it from Zak was that in her parents' eyes she was the star who needed cosseting, Mary was the toughie could look after herself. Easy to see why. Mary was completely single minded, didn't care what kind of impression she made. While Zak, well, you've met her. Can't help liking her, can you?"
