‘Whitey,’ said Joe, ‘this has been a busy day. And nothing to show for it, except more mess than when you chased that blue-tit that came through the window.’
Whitey gave his are-you-never-going-to-forget-that? mew, and disappeared behind the armchair. He emerged a moment later dragging little Amal Bannerjee’s toy bull which he deposited in front of Joe before climbing back on to the chair and going to sleep with the complacent look of one whose duty has been done.
‘The poor kid,’ said Joe, picking up the bull. He went on to the balcony and looked down. All the cars had gone including the one with the new non-sliding sunroof.
With a sigh, Joe placed the bull carefully among his begonias and started clearing up the mess.
CHAPTER 5
Next morning didn’t begin too well.
Joe found he’d run out of provisions for the fried breakfast and had to make do with plum jam on high bake water biscuits which Whitey loathed.
Also he felt very tired. After his third mug of tea, he recalled he’d been woken at least twice in the night by the strident strains of the Casa Mia quartet.
Still, the way business was he didn’t anticipate much difficulty catching up on sleep at the office.
As usual, he stopped to pick up his papers at Mr Nayyar’s shop on Canal Street which linked Rasselas and Hermsprong. Mr Nayyar claimed to run a speciality store, which meant he sold everything.
‘And I’ve run out of food,’ said Joe after he collected the Sun and The Times, the former to keep him abreast of current events, the latter for his crossword ploy.
Mr Nayyar’s real speciality was knowing his customers’ requirements better than they did. As he busied himself assembling the rich and varied ingredients of the fried breakfast, Joe browsed through his tabloid, careful to avoid the page with the boobs as he knew these caused Mr Nayyar a problem. Banned from his shelves were any magazines which flaunted flesh, but this principle if extended to papers would drastically limit his trade. So regulars like Joe kept the curves at a low profile till well clear.
The front page headline and three lines of text were still concerned with the horse-loving politician, and the back page concentrated on the A505 plane crash. The pilot, Arthur Bragg, had been taken ill not long after leaving Luton Airport to ferry Mr Simon Verity, a business executive, and his secretary, Miss Gwendoline Baker, to a conference in Manchester. He’d managed to keep control just long enough to flop the plane down on the roadway. None of the three was seriously injured, but they’d all been kept in hospital for observation and the Press concentrated on the woman who’d taken the video, ‘Raven-haired beauty, Meg Merchison (29)’.
She said: ‘I was trying out my new camcorder on a flock of rooks when I suddenly spotted this light plane diving out of the sky. It was terrifying. I thought at first it was going to hit me, but it levelled off, just missing some trees, and I was able to follow it all the way down on to the road. I never dreamt when I bought the camera it would give me a thrill like this.’ There was a photo of the raven-haired beauty astride a gate, caressing her camera sensuously and showing enough leg to give Mr Nayyar moral palpitations.
Lucky lass, thought Joe. Wonder how much she got for the video?
He turned to the inside pages and found that here the Casa Mia killings got a double-page splash. There was a lot of sensational speculation, but nothing new and they were still using the same blurred picture of Rocca that had been shown on telly. There was no mention of Joe. He didn’t know whether to be disappointed at missing the publicity or glad at missing the Press.
The shop door opened and two teenagers came in. Dressed identically in T-shirts, jeans and trendy trainers, with hair razored to a crowning crest, they were sexually distinguished only by a faint smear of moustache on the larger one’s lip and a bubbling of breast on the smaller one’s chest.
Sixsmith recognized the design on their T-shirts, a Union Jack with Maggie Thatcher’s face at the crux. This meant they belonged to the True Brits, the leading white gang on the Hermsprong Estate. Joe doubted if they’d enter a Pakistani-run shop looking for anything but trouble, so he kept a close eye on them as Mr Nayyar busied himself with the order.
As the shopkeeper turned his back to weigh some tomatoes, the girl thrust a handful of chocolate bars under her T-shirt. She felt Joe’s eyes on her, grinned at him and nudged the boy. He looked towards Joe, bared his teeth in an animal snarl, picked up a music cassette from a display rack and slipped it into his pocket. The girl meanwhile was pushing a couple of packs of panti-hose down the back of her jeans.
‘I think that is everything, Mr Sixsmith,’ said Mr Nayyar. ‘Now let me see, how much will that come to?’
‘Serve these young folk first,’ said Joe. ‘I’m in no hurry.’
‘Nah,’ said the boy. ‘Nothing here we want. Load of Pakky junk. Come on, Suzie.’
They made for the door. Joe moved quickly and blocked their way.
‘Hey, man,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something? Even junk costs money.’
‘What you on about, Sambo?’ said the boy. ‘You best keep your black nose out, you don’t want it even flatter.’
The girl laughed shrilly and said, ‘You tell ’im, Glen.’
Mr Nayyar said, ‘Please, Mr Sixsmith, it is all right. Let me deal with this.’
Joe looked at him in surprise, then doubled up as the boy, seeing his chance, hit him in the belly and dived through the door. The girl went after him, Joe flung out an arm to grab her but all he managed was to push her shoulder. Unbalanced she staggered over the threshold and fell forward on to the pavement. The boy grabbed her hand and dragged her to her feet. Her forearm was badly grazed and there was a new tear in her jeans through which blood was oozing.
‘Come on, Suzie,’ screamed the boy, dragging her away. ‘You black bastards, I’ll get you for this!’
A moment later they heard the roar of a motorcycle engine rapidly fading.
‘Mr Sixsmith, you OK?’ demanded Mr Nayyar.
‘I will be,’ gasped Joe. ‘Hadn’t you better ring the police?’
Nayyar shrugged.
‘Why bother?’ he said. ‘They have other things to do than trouble with petty pilfering from a shop like this.’
‘It’s still crime,’ said Joe. Then as his breath came easier, he looked sharply at the shopkeeper and said, ‘You knew they were nicking stuff, didn’t you?’
Nayyar looked as if he was going to play at indignation for a moment, then he shrugged and said, ‘Mr Sixsmith, people like you and me, we know there are pressures that other people, white people, do not know. Sometimes if we give a little with the little pressures which irritate us, we may hope to avoid the big pressures which can burst us.’
‘You mean you don’t want to antagonize these kids who come here thieving in case they gang up on you?’ said Joe. He shook his head and went on, ‘Suit yourself, Mr Nayyar. Just give me my shopping. How much do I owe you?’
‘Please, Mr Sixsmith, you have tried to be helpful. No charge today.’
Joe took out his wallet and said firmly, ‘You’ve got me wrong, Mr Nayyar. I’m not a pressure, I’m just a customer. How much?’
Back at the car, he gave Whitey a raw sausage and some radical ideas on the reform of the young to chew over. Then he said, ‘Shan’t be long. Watch out for joyriders, now.’
Five minutes’ walk took him into Bullpat Square. It was a market day and the traders’ vans and stalls made it quite impossible to park here. The market customers also tended to overspill into the Law Centre and when he opened the door and saw how crowded it was, he began to turn away. But a voice called, ‘Sixsmith! I want you.’ And he turned back to see a small bird-like woman of about thirty ushering an elderly couple out of the inner office.
He went inside and said, ‘Hi, Butcher. You’ve gone blonde. What are you up to? Trying to get out of paying your husband alimony?’
‘I was always blonde. I’ve just gone back to my roots.’
; She was not much over five two, and skinny as a well-picked chicken wing. She had an initial, C, which presumably stood for something but Joe had never called her anything other than Butcher. She pushed work his way when she could, though there was rarely much money in it.
They’d met when Joe went to the Centre looking for help in the aftermath of his redundancy. There’d been none forthcoming. Robco had done everything according to law and what Joe got was what he had coming, no more, no less. It was when Butcher asked, ‘So what will you do now?’ and Joe replied, ‘How do you go about setting up as a private detective?’ that she had started looking at him with more than professional interest.
‘First thing is, you’ve got to be able to wisecrack and to whistle. You know how to whistle, do you, Sixsmith?’
‘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.’ He could see tha
t he was still failing to impress. ‘That’s what it said in the paper.’
Her eyes touched the tabloid sticking out of his pocket.
‘I hope you don’t base all your appreciation of objective reality on what you read in that rag. Let me see.’
He handed it over, feeling like a small boy caught reading a comic under his desk.
A snarl of fury animated her features as she glanced at the back page.
‘So you’re not Mr Verity’s secretary?’ said Sixsmith tentatively.
‘No, I am not. Au contraire, as they say. He is my secretary. He was accompanying me to a business conference in Manchester. I should be giving a paper there at this very moment.’
‘You could send it by special messenger, it won’t get there too late,’ suggested Sixsmith.
She rolled her eyes upward and said, ‘I’m beginning to have serious doubts about this, Mr Sixsmith. One thing is certain. We will get on much more speedily if you refrain from further interruption.’
Sixsmith, relieved that the spectre of the battering husband had receded, nodded agreement. Things were beginning to sound much more interesting. His second guess was that she was going to tell him the plane crash wasn’t an accident, but had been arranged by some business rival to get rid of her or at the least keep her away from the Manchester conference.
She said, ‘The first thing to understand is that the plane crash wasn’t an accident. I’m sorry?’
Sixsmith’s inner triumph and regret at letting himself be browbeaten out of a chance of showing her he wasn’t an erk, had expressed itself in a plosive grunt. He turned it into a cough and smiled apologetically.
She went on.
‘The pilot’s illness was induced deliberately with the sole purpose of bringing the plane down and causing my death. Does that cat always stare like that?’
Whitey hadn’t followed his usual practice of opening the lowest desk drawer and climbing in, but was sitting upright as an Egyptian artefact, apparently rapt by Ms Baker’s speech. Sixsmith felt the direct question entitled him to speak.
‘I’m sorry. Is he bothering you? Whitey, get in your drawer. You can listen just as well there.’
Blood Sympathy Page 5
