stairs. Oh shoot! thought Joe, his heart sinking not only at the prospect of renewing acquaintance with Mrs. Tremayne but because he already had his answer. She emerged from the kitchen in a puff of vegetable steam. Presumably she was preparing her returning lodgers' evening meal. It did not surprise Joe that she belonged to that old-fashioned school of landladies who thought that vegetables could never be boiled too much. Her face was already flushed from the heat of the kitchen, but irritation at the sight of Joe slapped on another coat of puce. 'What?' she demanded. 'Mrs. Tremayne, quick question then I'm out of here. Did you cook breakfast for Mr. Waring the morning he left?' She hesitated, obviously debating whether an answer or a slam of the door would get rid of Joe quickest. Then she glanced up the stairs and said, 'What's he been saying?' 'Nothing,' said Joe. 'He's a good lad. I can see that.' 'He says you're a private detective.' 'That's right. And all I'm doing is asking a question that the police might want to ask.' 'The police?' she said, outraged and anxious at the same time. 'Nothing for you to worry about,' he assured her. 'Only, please, in your own interest, answer me the same as you'd answer them, so there's no contradiction.' As an argument it didn't feel all that weighty to Joe, but it worked for Mrs. Tremayne. 'Yes, I started cooking it, but no he didn't eat it, if that's what you're getting at. Two eggs, three rashers, half a pound of pork sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes and a slice of fried bread. No use to me when it's cooked, is it? So I didn't see why your friends shouldn't pay for it.'
'Ain't no friends of mine,' Joe assured her. 'So when Mr. Waring didn't appear for his breakfast, what did you do?'
'I yelled up the stairs, then I went to his room and knocked, then I opened the door.'
'Did his bed look like it had been slept in?'
'It looked like it always looked,' she snapped. 'A tip! I told him, Mr. Waring, I said, if you want your room cleaned and your bed made, you had better start leaving it halfway decent. Till you do that, I'm not going in there!'
'But you went in that morning and he wasn't there?'
'No.'
'And when Mr. Waring's brother was settling his bill this morning, he didn't make any fuss about exactly when Mr. Waring had left?'
'No. He was most accommodating. He said, 'Mrs. Tremayne, no problem, I'm perfectly happy to accept that my brother was here till the morning of the Wednesday the twelfth and left after eating his usual hearty breakfast,' and he insisted on me putting that down on the receipt.'
'I bet he did,' said Joe. 'Thank you very much, Mrs. Tremayne.'
'Is that all I get? What about some explanation?' demanded the woman switching back to aggrieved-party mode. 'I'm entitled to know what's going on in my house.'
Joe sniffed. The steam seemed to be darkening and the boiling smell was being overtaken by the odor of burning.
'Think what's going on is your veggies have boiled over,' he said.
With a scream of rage, she turned and rushed back into the kitchen.
Joe made his escape. As he headed up along Plun- kett Avenue, he felt his sense of relief at escaping from Mrs. Tremayne evaporate like the nourishment from her over-cooked vegetables.
He was bearing news to rejoice and news to dismay the Young Fair God, and by now he felt he knew his man well enough to be sure which would prevail.
26
Pain
The Young Fair God was pacing up and down the Hoo car park in a state that came close to mortal agitation. Even the capsule of coolness in which he moved seemed to have shrunk to a mere aureola. Joe opened his passenger door and said, 'Get in.' Human anxieties of course are no match for divine good breeding and, as he settled into his seat, Porphyry looked around with interest and said, 'What a nice car. And a lot more comfortable than my sardine tin.' 'Swap you,' said Joe. 'You bring me good news, Joe, and it's a deal,' said Porphyry fervently. Anyone else, Joe might have asked for this on paper, but somehow with the YFG that would have been really offensive. He said, 'Chris, I got news and some of it's good and some of it's bad, and a lot of it's guess work and, like the man said, sometimes my theories make them Harry Potter movies seem like documentaries.'
The man in question being Willie Woodbine, but he saw no need to name names.
He took a breath and began.
'Don't know what order most of this stuff is in, but here's what I think happened. I'd guess it really started after you'd let Arthur Surtees take a look at the foundation document before the AGM in the spring. Having a drink later with his mates, Rowe and Latimer, talking about their favorite subject, money, he probably said something like, if you ever lost your membership, they should move quickly to buy up your shares as the Hoo site was worth a bundle. Now they knew that already, of course. What they probably hadn't realized till Sur- tees spotted it was that the rule about giving up shares applied just as much to you as any other member. Expect you knew that already?'
Porphyry shook his head.
'Never really thought about it,' he said, clearly struggling with the implications of what he was hearing.
'Why would you?' said Joe. 'The only difference is that your shares go to your successor on death whereas with everyone else the share merely returns to the pool. You still with me, Chris?'
Porphyry had got there and didn't much care for where he found himself.
'Joe, if you're suggesting that Arthur or either of the other two may be involved in this business, then really I think you're barking up the wrong tree,' he said almost indignantly. 'They've been members forever, and good members too. I mean, Tom's vice this year, he'll be captain next-'
This had been a foreseeable problem. Joe had guessed that getting Porphyry to believe ill of anyone of his acquaintance was going to be hard.
He said, 'Chris, just listen, will you? You don't like my theory, that's fine. Should know pretty soon if there's any facts to support it, but, just in case, you gotta listen, OK?'
'Yes, of course. Sorry, Joe. Go on.'
'Right. Then Latimer probably mentioned this to Ratcliffe King-you know Ratcliffe King?'
'Not personally, but I've heard of him. Little good, I'm afraid. He's not involved, I hope?'
Welcome to the real world, thought Joe.
'I think he is,' he said. 'King Rat-that's what his friends call him-thought about it a bit, then saw a way that this could be turned into really big money, with himself getting a fat slice, coming and going. It involved getting Sir Monty Wright fired up to throw huge sums of money into acquiring the site to build a new branch of Wright-Price on.'
'But why on earth would anyone want to build a supermarket here? Couldn't do it anyway. This is Green Belt. And what about access? Even some of our members complain about these little country lanes. Building new access roads alone would cost a fortune, and they'd never get planning permission-'
'Chris, you'd better believe me, everyone knows- everyone 'cept you maybe-that King Rat's got hold of enough people's strings to get permission to put up a massage parlor in the town cemetery if that's what he wants. As for the roads, I reckon he's been quietly buying up a lot of the land they'll have to cross, at agricultural prices, natch. No, the Rat only needed two things to make this work. First was to get Sir Monty fired up enough to make him ignore the fact that the Hoo's a really stupid place to build a new hyper-mart. That was easy. Latimer proposed Sir Monty for membership and then blackballed him.'
'You mean Bert was right and it really was Tom? But that's-'
'Not playing the game? Yeah, these guys aren't playing the game, get your head round that, Chris. And the real clever thing was that Latimer made it personal to Sir Monty by letting him think it was you did the blackballing. Second part of the plot was harder. You had to lose your club membership. The only way they could see of doing this was getting you caught cheating. Like you said, the rule here's absolutely clear. You get found guilty of cheating, you're out, no appeal, right?' Porphyry was still in denial. He shook his head and said, 'Joe, this really is
