hey man, no one mentioned you were a short black balding no-hoper with parrots on his shorts? No, I don’t recollect hearing anything like that. Unless giving me four fifties and saying come and have lunch with me at the club is posh shorthand for I’d be crazy to hire a slob like you.’
‘Joe, don’t go sensitive on me. It doesn’t suit you.’
He consulted his feelings. She was right. And in any case, it was too much of an effort in this weather to keep it up.
‘Apology accepted,’ he said.
‘Apology? You going deaf too?’
That was better. Now they were back on their proper footing.
They chatted about other things till Butcher told Joe to drop her in an area on the fringe of Hermsprong that even in the full brightness of a midsummer day had an aura of dark menace.
‘You want I should come with you?’ offered Joe, glancing uneasily at a group of young men who looked like they were planning to blow up Parliament.
‘To do what?’ she asked. Then, relenting, she added, ‘No, I’ll be OK, Joe, but thanks for the thought. It’s you who needs protection. I’m just going among the poor and the disadvantaged. Tomorrow you’ll be mixing with the rich and successful. That’s where the sabre-toothed tigers roam. Take care of yourself there, Joe.’
She got out of the car, lit her cheroot, and set off along the pavement, pausing by the terrorists to say something that made them laugh and exchanging high fives with them before she moved on.
Sixsmith watched her vanish behind the graffti’d wall of a walkway, tracking her progress for a little while by the spoor of tobacco smoke which hung almost without motion in the lifeless air. She’d be OK, he guessed. She was worth more to these people alive than dead. This was her chosen world. People like Porphyry and the other members of the Royal Hoo were the enemy, which was why she knew so much about them, presumably.
Not that Butcher was the only one able to identify the enemy.
The terrorists had begun a slow drift towards the Morris.
He gave them a friendly wave and accelerated away towards the visible haven of Rasselas.
Tiger
That night, with Beryl working, nothing but repeats on the box, and his cat Whitey plunged deep into whatever the summer equivalent of hibernation was, Joe decided to wander round to the Luton City Supporters’ Club bar in search of social solace.
To start with it seemed a good decision. He arrived just in time to get in on the end of a round that most democratic of club chairmen, Sir Monty Wright, was buying to celebrate the close-season signing of a sixteen-year-old Croatian wunderkind. Word was that Man U and Chelsea had both been sniffing around, but while they hesitated, Sir Monty, who hadn’t got where he was by hesitating, had dipped his hand into his apparently bottomless purse and said to the manager, ‘Go get him.’
Joe bore his pint of Guinness to a seat next to his friend, Merv Golightly, self-styled prince of Luton cabbies but known because of his exuberant driving style as the man who put the X in taxi.
‘Good to see you, Joe,’ he said. ‘But I thought you was on a promise tonight. What happened? Beryl give you the elbow?’
‘Something came up at the hospital,’ said Joe.
‘Better than washing her hair, I suppose,’ laughed Merv. ‘So how’s business? Slow or stopped?’
The slur prompted Joe to tell Merv about Christian Porphyry. If he’d hoped to impress his friend he was disappointed.
‘And this guy wants you to meet him at the Royal Hoo? And he’s going to say you’re applying for membership? Must be someone there he really wants to wind up! Give him the finger, Joe. He’s using you. You don’t believe me? Take a look at Sir Monty there.’
Joe, ever a literalist, turned to look towards the table where Sir Monty was holding court with some of his directors. He found Sir Monty was looking back. Joe gave him a cheerful wave and got a nod in return, which was not to be sneezed at from a man worth a couple of billion and rising.
The Wright-Price supermarket chain had started from a flourishing corner shop owned by the Wright family in a Luton suburb. When Monty was eighteen, one of the big supermarket chains looking to expand had approached Wright senior with an offer for the business, while at the same time negotiating with the Council for the purchase of a small playing field adjacent to the shop. This looked a smart move, taking over a flourishing local business and acquiring enough land to expand it into a full-blooded hypermarket. With young Monty pulling his parents’ strings, the sale of the shop was delayed and delayed until the day before the Council Planning Committee meeting which was expected to confirm the sale of the playing field on the nod. Fearing that if they went ahead with the land purchase before they’d got the shop, the Wrights would be in an even stronger bargaining position, the big chain caved in to most of their demands and ended up paying almost twice as much as their original offer.
The deal was signed.
Next day the Planning Committee voted to reject the chain’s offer for the playing field, preferring, as it said, to put the needs of the local community first.
On the same day the bulldozers moved on to a piece of derelict land only half a mile away and, financed by the big chain’s own money augmented by a large loan from a city bank whose CEO had long nursed a grudge against his opposite number on the chain’s board, the first of Monty Wright’s supermarkets was erected in record time.
Five years later even the City’s most dedicated doubters had to accept that the Wright-Price chain was here to stay. By that time another dozen shops had gone up in the southeast and marketing whiz-kids were keen to climb aboard the bandwagon. The fact that an early appointee to the Board of Directors was a local businessman called Ratcliffe King who had happened to be Chairman of the Planning Committee which rejected the application to purchase the playing field was noted but not commented on. At least not by anyone with any sense. Ratcliffe King wasn’t known as King Rat in Luton political circles without reason. No longer a councillor, he retained the title and still wielded much of the political power in his role as head of ProtoVision, the planning and development consultancy he had founded on retirement from public life. Officially his role on the Wright-Price board was and remained nonexecutive, but in the view of many he’d played a central strategic role in the campaign which twenty years on had led to Monty Wright being knighted for services to industry as head of a company no longer coveted by the market leaders as possible prey but feared by them as potential predator.
‘What about Sir Monty?’ asked Joe, turning back to Merv. ‘And keep your voice down, I think he heard you talking about him.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’ said Merv. ‘Not saying anything everyone doesn’t know.’
But he dropped his voice a little, or as much as he could, before he went on, ‘Like I said, look at Monty. All that lolly plus the title – even got his teeth straightened to go to the Palace, I heard! – and what happens when he applies
