'Then leave it to me. I know this guy owes me a favor. He'll be round this afternoon, right?'
'Right,' said Joe, thinking, the Prince of Wales would probably be round this afternoon if Jurassic George asked him. 'Tell him I'll leave the door open.'
It took George a full thirty seconds to work this one out, but when he did, he really appreciated it, and Joe heard his deep bass laugh echoing all the way down the corridor.
When it died away, he felt suddenly lonely.
In the bedroom he stripped naked and examined his assaulted parts in a mirror. Apart from being a rather fetching shade of red and feeling very tender, no real damage seemed to have been done, and five minutes under an icy shower completed the good work begun by the frozen broccoli. He got dressed in his loosest fitting boxers and slacks and gingerly made his way down to the Morris.
22
The Right Price
Ten minutes later he was walking into the Supporters' Club. He met Larry Hardwick and one of his staff coming out of the kitchen bearing trays of beer and sandwiches. 'Those for the directors?' Joe asked. He knew a meeting was scheduled for today. 'Yeah, they just rang down. Must have a lot to talk about.' 'Give Sir Monty a message, will you, Larry? Tell him I'd appreciate a quick word.' 'Now, you mean?' Hardwick looked at him. 'Joe, personally I'd walk a hundred miles for one of your smiles, but I don't think even your rendition of 'Mammy' is going to get Sir Monty out of his meeting.' 'Tenner says you're wrong, Larry,' said Joe. 'You're on.' Joe sat down at the big corner table and hoped he was going to have to pay up. If Monty Wright appeared, it had to mean he really was involved. A couple of minutes passed. Then the door opened and the club chairman came in. He made straight for Joe's table and sat down heavily. He carried too much weight, most of it round his waist, and his round face was flushed. 'You've got two minutes,' he said. 'No,' said Joe, determined not to be over-faced. 'You being here means I got as long as I like.' The man said, 'We'll see. So talk.' In most of life's transactions there are two possible approaches, the subtle and the direct. By getting Sir Monty to leave his meeting, Joe reckoned he'd scraped the bottom of his subtlety barrel. Time for a dose of directness. He said, 'You planning to build a hyper-market on the Royal Hoo golf course, right?' If this came as a shock to Wright, he was too experienced a negotiator to show it. He said, 'Nice idea. So how am I going to get planning permission?' 'Getting permission's no problem. Specially not with Mr. Ratcliffe King on the case,' said Joe. 'It's getting the land that's hard. Mainly because you'd need a majority of the members who are also the shareholders to agree to a sale, and the majority shareholder is the Porphyry family, represented by Christian Porphyry.' 'A bastard who loves me so much, he's going to roll over and say, There you go, Monty, it's all yours for a shilling an acre. I don't think so!' This was spoken with real venom. This isn't just business, this is personal, thought Joe. That was good. Business he'd never really understood, but personal was people and that was his strength. 'You don't like Mr. Porphyry much, do you?'
'Hardly know the guy. But from what I've seen, he's not my type, no. Life's been easy for him. When his mother dropped him, he landed right at the top of the pile, didn't have to get dirt under his fingernails dragging himself up there.'
Joe considered this. Social envy played as little part in his own make-up as social ambition. You played the cards life dealt you. Injustice wasn't the deal, it was when some joker cheated. And he didn't really believe Sir Monty had a socialist chip on his shoulder either. If you think you're any man's equal, there's not much space for social resentment.
Suddenly he recalled something Merv had said the other night about his conversation with the club chairman at this very table.
He said, 'This is because you think Chris Porphyry blackballed you, isn't it?'
Sir Monty shook his head perhaps a little too emphatically.
'That's not the way I work,' he growled. 'Business deals are about money and markets. Minute you start letting personalities get into them, you're in trouble. I've got thousands of employees, even more shareholders. You don't think I'd put their well-being at risk for the sake of a private grievance, do you?'
He spoke with a dismissive assurance that was completely convincing. But it rang a note Joe recognized. He'd been performing in public, and certainly in public houses, as long as he could remember, and he knew that to take your audience with you, it wasn't enough simply to sing a song, you had to inhabit it. You had to leave people in no doubt that, martial or romantic, melancholy or comic, you really meant those words you were singing.
That was the note his performer's ears were hearing. The note of rehearsal to such a pitch of perfection that Sir Monty probably believed himself when he spoke, the same way Joe could never finish singing 'Mammy' without tears streaming down his cheeks.
He said, 'Don't believe you. I think you're so pissed off with Porphyry that when Ratcliffe King contacted you to say there could be a chance the Royal Hoo was coming on the market, you didn't ask questions.'
Wright said, 'I always ask questions.'
'But maybe this time you didn't ask enough. And when you found out it all depended on Chris being stripped of his membership 'cos he'd been found guilty of cheating, bet you didn't ask questions then? Bet you were just over the moon to hear he was going to be disgraced?'
'No, I didn't ask questions then because it didn't surprise me,' said Wright aggressively. 'That type, they think they've such a God-given right to be on top, the usual rules don't apply to them.'
'Yeah? So why'd you start asking yourself questions the other night when you heard Porphyry had hired me? I think you started wondering why the shoot would someone like Porphyry hire someone like me to prove he was innocent? Bet you thought, a guy would have to be really desperate to do that. And then you got to thinking, or maybe he'd have to be really innocent.'
Wright leaned forward so that his round perspiring face was close to Joe's.
'OK, mind reader, so here's a question for you. Have you proved he's innocent, Sixsmith?'
Joe didn't flinch but said, 'No, I've not proved it. But I know!'
'You've not proved anything, but you know?' Wright echoed mockingly. 'And this is what I've missed my beer and sandwiches for? Sixsmith, I'd always heard you were a better singer than a detective. My advice is, get yourself a pitch down the underpass and start busking.' He began to rise. Joe tried to think of something that might hold him, but nothing came. Running out of ideas rarely involved him in a marathon, but this hadn't even been middle distance. Then his phone rang. He took it out, glanced at the caller display and said, 'Hi, Christian.' Sir Monty froze. 'Joe, glad I got you. I'm sorry to disturb you when you're away on another case…' 'No, that's OK,' interrupted Joe. 'Change of plan. I'm still here.' 'Thank God for that! Listen, something's happened.' There was an edge of desperation in the YFG's voice that made Joe's heart sink. It was like hearing Callas reaching for the notes after her ill-advised comeback. He said, 'What?' Sir Monty had sat down again and was watching him like a cat who sees his dinner slowly approaching through the long grass. Porphyry said, 'Have you seen the Crier?' 'Yeah, but that's nothing-' 'Yes, it is. I hadn't mentioned any of this to Tiff, that's my fiancee, but now she's seen it and her father Bruce has seen it and he's furious about that crack about the Bugle and furious that I hadn't told him what was going on-' 'Chris, this is all irrelevant,' urged Joe. 'Newspapers print so much crap, no one even notices the smell anymore. Tomorrow it will be forgotten.'
'Don't think so, Joe,' said Porphyry gloomily. 'Tomorrow it looks like they'll have an even better headline. I've just been talking to Tom Latimer. He said the Four Just Men had been worried about my hearing because the next round of the Vardon has to be played by the end of next week and it depends on the outcome whether Syd or myself goes into the draw. Then this thing in the Crier made up their minds for them. As long as it was kept inside the club, that was fine, but now it's in the open, it isn't something the Hoo needs to have hanging over it. The upshot is they've brought their meeting forward to this evening. God, Joe, I thought we had a fortnight and now there's only a few hours. What do you think, Joe? Is there any hope?'
No wonder King was happy to get me out of the way for a couple of days! thought Joe. The bastard knew this was on the cards. It was probably him who primed the Crier. There I was thinking it would make no difference, when the truth was I'd have come back to find everything done and dusted. And when he discovered I hadn't gone to Spain, he decided that a few broken bones would do the job just as well.
