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 you could lose more than your bones, the highest break-in rate, the lowest clear-up rate, more hoodies than a monastery, and so on, and so on. If ever a place should have been razed to the ground, Hermsprong was it. But paradoxically it survived because of Rasselas’s success. How could you say an experiment had failed when you could produce evidence only a mile away that it could succeed? Or to put it another way, why should you demolish Hermsprong and relocate its inmates to the lovely new small well-planned developments the council was building to the east when the inhabitants of Rasselas were so much more deserving?
These were the arguments the sophists of the City Council produced in order to postpone a decision which was going to put an intolerable strain on their already overstretched budget.
Joe knew that to ask why Butcher was heading for Hermsprong would be like asking a bank robber why he robbed banks. ’Cos that’s where my clients are, stupid.
Instead he said, ‘You’re not going to light that thing in my car, are you?’
Referring to the cheroot which Butcher had inserted between her lips.
‘Jesus, Sixsmith, you should watch more old movies. You can’t be a proper PI unless you chain smoke!’
‘Like you can’t be a proper lawyer ’less you wear a wig and charge five hundred pounds a minute?’
‘Don’t insult me. I’m worth more than that.’
But she put the cheroot away then asked, ‘So, business is so bad you’ve shut up shop and decided to spend the rest of the day watching mucky videos?’
‘Wrong, as usual. Matter of fact, I’m going home to do some research on the very important client I’ll be lunching with at his club tomorrow.’
‘Oh yes? And I’m going to meet the Lord Chancellor to talk about becoming a High Court judge!’
This provoked Joe to telling her all about his encounter with the YFG.
She listened with interest. He tried to conceal his ignorance of what the case was all about by claiming client confidentiality but she saw through that straightaway.
‘You mean you haven’t got the faintest idea, don’t you? How many times do I have to tell you, Sixsmith? Always find out what you’re getting into before you get into it. Interesting though that the sun doesn’t shine all the time, not even on Golden Boy.’
‘You know Porphyry?’
‘Not personally, but professionally I had occasion to do some research on the family three, four years back in connection with a compensation case.’
‘Shoot. And that was against Porphyry?’ said Joe, feeling illogically dismayed.
‘Against the Porphyry Estate, which makes it the same thing. One of their employees died. Coroner said accident, no one to blame, but that’s what they appoint coroners for, isn’t it? To make sure the Porphyrys of this world never get blamed. There was a widow and a son. I reckoned they deserved better.’
‘And did they get it?’
‘Unhappily the mother didn’t survive her husband long enough for things to run their course. If there is a God, he’s a member at Royal Hoo and looks after His own.’
‘I thought Chris was OK,’ Joe protested.
‘And you’ve got O-levels for character judgement, right? I’m sure he’s a very likeable guy. In the class war, the ones that make you like them are the worst, Joe. He might seem to be trailing clouds of glory, but he’s also trailing a couple of centuries of unearned privilege. And if you get to thinking he’s different from the rest, remind yourself he’s just got engaged to a fluff-head whose father runs some of the most fascist
