the door. 'But that only works when I'm with a lady.'
11
Knobbly
Scones and Lipton's Tea It wasn't often Joe got away from Butcher on a good line so as he stepped out into the cauldron of Bullpat Square, he felt so full of bounce that he greeted the heat with a spirited rendition of the opening lines of 'Mad Dogs and Englishmen.'
Then the words dried up on his lips and his mood deflated as he saw that he and Noel had got it wrong together. It was mad dogs and English traffic wardens that went out in the midday sun. One of them was just about to stick a ticket on the Morris.
The guy looked very hot and very ill-tempered so Joe aborted his instinctive friendly how're-you-doing- let's- talk-about-this approach. Instead he held out his hand for the ticket and said, 'Thanks. I'll see Mr. King gets it.'
'Uh?' said the warden, squinting malevolently through a fringe of sweat.
'Mr. Ratcliffe King. It's his car.'
The warden looked doubtfully at the Morris.
'He collects vintage,' said Joe. 'I'm delivering it to him. Here, let me take a note of your number. You know Mr. King, he likes to keep things up close and personal.'
The warden snatched back the ticket.
'Piss off out of here,' he growled and shambled on his way.
As Joe got into the car he should have felt triumphant that his ruse had worked. Instead he found himself thinking, if King Rat's name's enough to send an overheated traffic warden into retreat, better watch how you go, Joe Sixsmith!
ProtoVision House was Luton's Trump Tower, on a more modest scale perhaps, but in proportion to the buildings that surrounded it, just as dominating. Its golden obelisk arrowed into the sky a good thirty meters above its nearest rival and it was said that at certain times of day the sun striking back from its reflective surface caused the pilots descending toward Luton Airport to put on their Ray-Bans. The architect had been not unsuccessful in realizing his client's vision of a building that would convey the power and the feel of a newly launched space rocket, and it was the generally unspoken hope of many Lutonians that they would wake up one morning and find it was actually going boldly where no building had gone before. Certainly it had been born in fire, the much loved if rather dilapidated old theater that had previously occupied the site going up in flames one night. There had been talk of replacing it with a new modern arts center, then suddenly, no one quite knew how, it emerged that King Rat already owned the site and had somehow got planning permission to build an office block there. The sop to civic pride was that the bottom floor contained a small concert hall and studio theater, enabling King to present himself as a local benefactor.
The next five floors were prestigious office space, soon taken over by Luton's premier commercial organizations who paid a price for the privilege that, combined with the grants obtained for the ground-floor arts area and the insurance pay-out for the burned theater, meant that the ProtoVision Consultancy got the top three floors pretty well free, gratis and for nothing.
King Rat himself had established his throne room in the obelisk's apex or the rocket's nose cone, depending how you looked at it. Joe had never been in the building before and he entered the reception area at street level half expecting to be subjected to the kind of in- timidatory security checks that were now the norm for anyone crazy enough to go near an airport. Instead as he made his way toward the desk a small but perfectly formed young woman with a smile that could have lit up a prison cell on a cold winter's morning intercepted him and said, 'It's Mr. Sixsmith, isn't it? Hi, I'm Mimi.'
He took her offered hand. It was far from frozen, but if he'd been a young romantic tenor he might have burst into song. From a middling aged, middling bald, middling middled baritone it would just be embarrassing. Anyway, she'd probably had to endure the joke a thousand times before.
He said, 'Pleased to meet you. Sorry, I'm a bit early.'
The wall clock behind the desk read ten to three.
'That's good. Mr. King likes early,' said Mimi. 'Over here.'
Taking his arm, which was nice because you could feel the animal energy surging through her gorgeous frame, she steered him past the main lifts to a narrower rather anonymous-looking door with a key pad on the wall beside it. She punched in a code and the door opened to reveal a mahogany-paneled lift with a deep-piled carpet. 'In you go, Joe-may I call you Joe?' 'Oh yes,' said Joe. She followed him in and waved up at a discreet camera set in a corner of the ceiling. The door closed and the lift began to ascend so smoothly the motion was almost imperceptible. 'You don't press any buttons then?' he said. 'Oh no. If you're not who you should be, you stay down below.' She laughed as she spoke and he found himself laughing with her. She wasn't conventionally beautiful; in fact she had what Aunt Mirabelle would have called a good old-fashioned homely sort of face. But she radiated so much vitality and merriment that it was a pleasure to be in her company. 'You worked for Mr. King long?' he asked. She thought about it then said, 'Four years,' as if slightly surprised. He recalled what Eloise had said about King's powers of retention. 'Was talking to an old school mate of yours when you rang,' he said. 'Eloise Bracewell.' 'Oh, Edith,' she said. 'Haven't seen her for ages. How is she?' 'She's fine. Sends her best. Edith, you say? You all change your names?' 'A few of us. Why not? Like clothes. Up till nine or ten you wear what your mum buys, after that you choose your own, right?'
'Right,' he said, thinking that he was nearer twenty before he finally convinced Aunt Mirabelle he could buy his own gear. As for turning up one day and saying, from now on in I want to be called Brad, the simple thought made him shudder!
'Good boss, is he, Mr. King?' he ventured.
Again she had to think.
'Fine,' she said, a slight frown momentarily darkening her face. But it was only the shadow of a summer cloud cast by the bright sun which now came out again as she smiled and said, 'Four years working for the one guy has to mean something, right?'
But what? wondered Joe.
He'd never met King face to face but, like most Lu- tonians, he'd heard a lot about him. Nothing to look at, was the general verdict. In fact so inconspicuous you could meet him then forget all about him when you turned your back. Until you felt the pain.
Only child of middle-class parents who were willing and able to send him to university, instead he had opted to remain in Luton, working as a clerk and getting involved in local politics as a ward councillor. In the eyes of old school friends who were forging ahead in the rat race, he appeared as a stick-in-the-mud they'd left far behind. In council circles, his apparent lack of interest in money won him the reputation of being rather unworldly, and as he never appeared a threat to anyone, he was everyone's compromise candidate when positions of power were wrangled over.
And then gradually it began to dawn on his fellow councillors that all lines of power led to Ratcliffe King, and on his rat-racing school friends that, far from sticking in the mud behind them, King Rat was already breasting the tape some distance ahead.
It was said that it only took one meeting for King Rat to suss out your talents and your weaknesses. He could then, if it seemed worthwhile, show you how to channel the former to achieve your aspirations, at the same time using the latter to bind you close to him forever.
The lift came to a jerk-free halt and the inner door opened, but their exit was barred, literally, by a curli- cued lattice in gold metal through which Joe could see a man seated at a desk behind a bank of security screens.
The man studied them for a moment. He had the sleek muscularity of a killer shark, the kind of no-expression face you don't want to see on your doctor coming to give you your X-ray results, and his eyes were so cold they froze you where they touched.
It wasn't a long moment but long enough for Mimi to say with good-natured patience, 'Hey, come on Stephen! You going to keep us waiting all day?'
