One of Joe's strengths was knowing when he needed help.
And another of his strengths was knowing what sort of help it was he needed.
Give half a dozen people the same information and you get half a dozen different interpretations, all equally valid and probably not even mutually contradictory in any significant way, but each of them will bear the style of the individual interpreter.
Butcher's interpretation would be sharp, incisive, intellectually rigorous, and indelibly marked with her law training on the one hand and her political philosophy on the other.
Merv Golightly's response would be direct and pragmatic, almost you might say simplistic, and marked with a taxi driver's cynicism about the purity of human motives which had left him so ready to believe the worst that it tended to be the first thing he looked for.
Beryl Boddington, on the other hand, was the personification of common sense. Her job as a nurse had given her the ability to recognize when someone was terrified either because of what their body was doing to them or what they thought their doctor might be about to do to them, and the capacity to deal with this. In all other areas she tended to see what was clear and say what was obvious, though in Joe's case the clarity and the obviousness often only became apparent after she'd pointed them out to him.
It was Beryl he needed to talk to.
He headed back to Rasselas and took the lift up to her floor.
After ringing her bell twice he began to think she must be out. Then the door opened on the security chain and she peered through the crack at him.
'Joe, what do you want?'
'Hi, Beryl,' he said. 'Can I come in and have a talk?'
The eye he could see regarded him dubiously, then she said, 'I suppose.'
When he got into the flat he saw why she'd taken so long. Nurses work odd hours and catch their sleep when they can. His detective expertise put together the clues of her mussed-up hair, the dressing gown she was wearing and the fact she kept on yawning and arrived at the conclusion that she must have not long before arrived home from her shift and he'd woken her up.
Normally he would have been full of apology, but his sense of urgency was such that he just plunked himself down on a chair and started filling her in on what had happened since their last encounter early that morning.
She stretched out on the sofa opposite him. The dressing gown had fallen open above her knees revealing enough leg to have set Joe's blood bubbling through his veins at a dizzying speed normally, but today he had other concerns, or maybe the damage Hardman had done to his nether region had been more serious than he'd realized.
He went on talking, but not even his sense of urgency or his possible injury could prevent him registering when the dressing gown slipped down her left shoulder revealing the upper curve of her full and darkly smooth breast.
But that wasn't what he'd come here in hope of today. In any case, having forced his way in more or less and woken her from sleep after her hard labors, it would be unmannerly to try to take advantage. And besides, Beryl was a woman well able to take care of herself.
So he carried on and it wasn't until she closed her eyes and her breathing became regular and her grip slackened altogether on her dressing gown, letting it fall apart to reveal beyond all doubt that she was quite naked underneath it, that his sense of professional urgency diminished at the same rate as his feeling of incapacity, and he began to lose the thread of his talk and eventually stuttered to silence.
It was Beryl who broke it.
'Well,' she said in a low husky voice, 'you just gonna look, or are you gonna do something about it?'
It occurred to Joe to wonder as he approached the high point of doing something about it whether he would have got Beryl into bed if his reaction to getting her out of it had been grovelling apology and averted eyes, rather than apparent indifference to her deshabille. Perhaps inadvertently he'd hit upon the perfect scoring technique! But he was far too clever to even dream of suggesting this and in any case as he spiraled toward the aforementioned high point, all his expressive baritone could produce as counterpoint to her coloratura trills was an increasingly atonal series of rumbling, roaring, profundo groans. Finally there was silence. They rolled over so that they lay side by side, face to face. And Beryl said, 'So now we've established what's important, what was it you wanted to tell me?' He told her everything, in order and in detail, and she never interrupted once, which roused in him the suspicion that he'd bored her to sleep. But when he raised his head so that he could see her face clearly, her eyes were wide open and she was looking at him so lovingly he would have been happy to forget his professional responsibilities for a second time. She said, 'This Christian, he's a lucky guy to have someone like you working for him, Joe.' 'You reckon?' said Joe, his heart ready to burst with pride at getting praise from this most precious of sources. 'I do,' she said, then spoiled things by adding, 'Not that you've been able to help him, of course.' 'Eh?' 'He hired you to prove he didn't cheat. Can you prove it?' 'No, but I can show what's really going on here…' 'Can you, Joe? Have you got one tiny little bit of hard evidence to back up this theory?' 'Well, no, but I've got lots of circumstantial… quite a lot anyway… some…' 'Yeah. So you've got nothing to prove Chris is innocent and even less to prove there's some complicated plot going on. Right?' 'Right,' he admitted glumly. Here was where he'd been able to get by himself. On the one hand (which was caressing her left buttock), it was disappointing that Beryl's commonsense and clear vision wasn't going to take him any further. On the other hand (which was cupping her right breast), no way the visit had been wasted.
'Joe, you forget about that for the time being,' she commanded. 'And don't look so downhearted. What you got to ask yourself is this. If you're getting nowhere with proving the cheating was a set-up, why are they so keen to get you off the job? I mean, why not just let you go bumbling around in full view of everyone so they can say, Look at how Christian Porphyry even smuggled a private detective into the club to try to find a way out of his trouble, but what did he come up with? Nothing! No. Trying to bounce you off the case one way or another was a bad move, an unnecessary move, but they still did it. So you gotta ask, Why?'
'I'm asking, I'm asking,' said Joe. 'What do you think I'm doing here?'
'Don't know what you call it, but you did it well enough for me to wonder where you're getting the practice. Listen, Joe, it's obvious. You go to the Hoo to meet Christian. Those three guys-what did you call them…?'
'The Bermuda Triangle.'
'Right. The Triangle's waiting for you. They chat you up, check you out, probably decide you're no problem…'
'Hold on. How did they know I was coming?'
'Sir Monty,' she said in exasperation. 'You said Merv was shooting his mouth off at the Supporters', right? And Sir Monty took an interest. Don't matter if he knows the cheating is a set-up or not, he'd be straight on the phone to King Rat asking, What's going off here? This going to make any difference to our deal? The Rat says, No way. Be still. I'll sort it, and gets on to this Latimer guy and warns him to look out for you. Not that you were going to be hard to spot. But Porphyry might have got away with it if it hadn't been for Merv's mouth. I mean, no one's going to think Christian's so stupid as to hire a black PI who knows nothing about golf to go undercover at the Hoo!' She laughed so heartily at the notion that her breast joggled interestingly beneath his hand. But he forced himself to concentrate on what she was saying. 'So you have an iced coffee with them, and they have a bit of a laugh with you. Then you go on a walkabout with Chris. You visit the guy with the pool…' 'Jimmy Postgate.' 'No trouble there. Either he knows nothing or they've got him all tied up.' Joe shook his head. 'Knows nothing, I'd say,' he said. 'That's what makes the case so strong. He's such a big admirer of Chris, for him to give evidence against him is a real big strike.' 'Whatever. So nothing here to make them worry. But there was something else during your visit, wasn't there?' 'Was there?' 'Yes, you told me!' she cried in exasperation. 'You talked to this greenkeeper, Davie.' 'Chris did most of the talking,' said Joe. 'Yes, and what about? He was asking about the lad who'd gone missing, Steve Waring, right? Then you say when you got back on the terrace, Christian actually mentioned him to one of the Triangle…' 'Rowe, yeah, he's in charge of the Greens Committee or something.' 'Never mind that stuff. Did you say anything about him then?' 'Might have done. Just protecting my cover.'
'Cover!' She snorted. 'Then while Chip, the assistant pro, changed your wheel, you talked to him too about Waring, right?'
'Just passing the time,' said Joe.
'Yeah, and someone probably passed the time with Chip after you'd gone and heard what you'd been saying
