But his awkward mind was asking, why hadn't the legal lady been roused? Phone ringing, door opening, strange voice downstairs ... Maybe she'd been so affected by what happened to Potter she'd knocked herself out with a pint of gin? Maybe ... He decided to abandon maybes, knowing from experience how soon you ran out of the comfortable zones and got down to the scarys.
It was simpler to try and wake her, then run like hell at the first sound of movement.
He advanced to the foot of the stairs and called, 'Ms lies? You up there?'
No reply. I am definitely not going up those stairs, thought Joe.
Not any more than two or three, anyway.
But four or five never seems much more than two or three, and in no time at all he found himself where he had no intention of being, on the landing.
'Ms lies?' he called again, thinking that if she came out of the bathroom now stark naked, she probably knew enough law dating back to the Middle Ages to get him broiled on a gridiron.
He moved slowly forward towards an open door. It led into a bedroom. She was in there. He could see her. She was naked.
'Oh shoot,' said Joe.
Maybe she'd got so pie-eyed she couldn't make it under the duvet. Maybe
There he went with his maybes again when all the time he knew from the angle of her head to her body that maybes were right out of fashion.
To his long list of folk he'd got wrong he added Sandra lies. Unless she'd been so ridden with guilt, she'd managed to break her own neck.
He went closer to make absolutely sure. Her nakedness embarrassed him and it would have been easy to imagine accusation in those staring eyes. But there was only death. He touched her face, mouthing, 'Sorry.' Cold. Dead for hours. He ran his gaze round the room. No clues leapt up and hit him in the eye. And why the shoot should he be looking for clues anyway? No one was paying him to do a job here.
Still, like Endo Venera said, one way or another a PI was always on the job. No harm then in a few mental notes.
The bed was big enough for two but there was only one central pillow and that had a single indentation in it. Looked like she'd gone to bed then been disturbed. No sign of a nightgown. Either she slept raw or it had been taken. No obvious sign of rape. Her legs weren't splayed and there were no scratches or bruising that he could see. No sign of struggle either. Everything neat and tidy. The clothes she'd been wearing last night were arranged on hangers and hooked over the edge of the wardrobe door.
On top of the wardrobe he could see the edge of what looked like a black metal box.
According to Endo Venera, two things a good PI never missed the chance of looking into were an open bar or a closed black metal box.
He tried to reach it, couldn't. He picked up the stool in front of the dressing table. He knew he shouldn't be doing this, but in for a penny, in for a pound, it's nose that makes the world go round.
Even standing on the stool only got his head level with the top of the wardrobe. He wrapped his handkerchief round his right hand, reached up, fumbled till he found a handle, and lifted the box down.
It was eighteen inches by nine, the kind of portable strongbox you can buy in any legal stationer's. There was a key in the lock. He turned it and lifted the lid.
'Shoot,' he said.
No telltale legal documents here, just photos, the kind of pictorial biography to be found in nearly everyone's desk or attic. Sandra lies (presumably) as baby, as infant, as (now recognizably) schoolgirl; on holiday, in cap and gown, in (bringing a reminiscent twinge to his neck) a judo gi fastened with a black belt. Other people, presumably family and friends, appeared on some of the snaps but no one Joe knew till he hit a group photo taken on the steps of Number 1 Oldmaid Row.
There were five of them, lies and four men. Joe recognized the burly figure of Peter Potter. The other three a distinguished elderly man with silvery hair, a slight dark man with a sardonic white-toothed smile showing through an eruption of black beard, and a big blond Aryan in his early thirties -were presumably Pollinger, Naysmith and Montaigne, though not necessarily in that order.
Two down, three to go. The thought popped uninvited into his mind.
Then the doorbell rang, making him drop other people's worries and several photographs.
He went to the curtained window and without touching peered through a tiny crack.
On the cobbles below stood a police car. Alongside it, looking up at the house and listening with polite boredom to the expostulations of the military man, was a pair of uniformed cops.
Joe glanced at his watch. Dickhead! I went in, found her dead, and was about to raise the alarm when the police arrived wasn't going to sound so convincing now fifteen minutes had elapsed. It was going to sound even worse if they caught him in the bedroom, going through the dead woman's things.
Hastily he scooped up the spilled pics, dropped them back in the box, locked it, clambered on the stool, replaced the box on the wardrobe, jumped down, replaced the stool before the dressing table, and headed for the door.
One last glance round to make sure he hadn't left any traces of his illegal search. And he had. The group photo of the Poll-Pott team had fluttered half under the bed. He picked it up. The doorbell rang again and a voice started shouting urgently through the letter box. No time to put it back. He shoved it into his pocket and sprinted downstairs just in time to open the front door before they smashed in the glass panel with a truncheon.
'Hey, that's timing,' said Joe. 'I was just going to ring you.' But he could see they didn't believe him.
Six.
