disposed of, he relaxed with coffee and a slice of toast doubled in thickness by Aunt Mirabelle's home-made marmalade.
There are few finer stimulants of digestion, both in the belly and in the brain, than chunky marmalade and under its beneficial influence Joe reviewed his current problems, starting with Merv's phone number on the hand- out. It was of course an amazing coincidence that it had got misprinted as Naysmith's number, but after a lifetime stumbling over amazing coincidences and finding most of them could in fact be easily explained, Joe wasn't about to waste too much marmalade on that.
Next was the question of who was killing the lawyers, which was none of his business in the business sense, but when you tread in dog dirt, before you start cussing, better ask yourself if the Lord might not have nudged you for a reason.
Would he ever grow out of thinking Mirabelle-type thoughts? he wondered. No matter. The old lady sometimes spoke sense. So it was his bounden duty to direct the mighty machine of his marmalade-lubricated mind at the Poll-Pott puzzle.
Here he was spoilt for theories. Well, he had two anyway. One was that someone in the firm was on the fiddle, Potter had got a line on him or her and summoned Naysmith to a conference to work out how best to proceed. Of course, anything that Potter had said on the phone would already have been passed on to the police except maybe if Naysmith didn't want to finger a colleague till he was certain. Well, he'd found out the hard way how dangerous it was keeping things to yourself! Obvious candidates for the fiddle must be the surviving partners, except that Montaigne was sliding down an Alp and Pollinger would hardly rob his own firm. Would he? Anyway, you didn't cover your tracks by killing off all your partners, you laid a trail that led right to your own feet! So someone else in the firm maybe, not a partner, but a clerk, say, or better still an accountant. Useless speculation without a list of personnel and their responsibilities. So turn to theory two, which on the whole he favoured, recognizing the homicidal thoughts his own treatment by Penthouse Assurance had roused in his peaceful breast.
Someone who'd been messed about by Poll-Pott couldn't wait for the Law Society's complaints procedure and decided the simplest thing was to off the lot of them! In which case, the thing to do was keep a close watch on the survivors at the same time as going through the records with a fine-tooth comb till some disgruntled nutter popped out.
With neither theory being beyond Woodbine's grasp, or even Chivers's, sensible thing to do was forget both of them till the Lord gave another nudge, and turn to the last question on his list.
Which was, who the shoot was trying to kill him?
The reason this came last wasn't any exaggerated humility. Though free enough from ego still to enjoy a mild shock of surprise whenever he happened to get something right, Joe's deep-rooted belief in the sanctity of life definitely included his own. The trouble was, he felt so little urge to harm anyone else that he found it hard to imagine why anyone should want to harm him. And when he found his list of people he might have offended headed by Aunt Mirabelle for not having managed a third helping of her Christmas pudding (which was so richly dense, if it had gone into orbit it would have been a Black Dwarf), he abandoned rationality and switched the problem to his subconscious.
All that happened was that Mirabelle was joined by Sergeant Chivers, with Rev. Pot, whose last choir practice he had skipped, lurking in the background.
Marmalade had failed. He got up to make himself another cup of coffee. As he waited for the kettle to boil, his mind turned to the accident with the office kettle the previous morning.
Accident? Suppose that had been deliberate too? One shot at your life could be a haphazard spur-of-the- moment thing. Two suggested serious and dedicated purpose. 'You and me have got to take good care of ourselves, Whitey,' he said.
The cat, who was an equal-opportunity eater, paused in the task of cleaning marmalade off his whiskers and bared his teeth. Could be that he'd just got a piece of rind stuck, but it looked like the sneer of someone saying, 'Nobody's after me, buster.'
'Maybe not,' said Joe. 'But where would you find another mug willing to work his fingers to the bone so you could enjoy the Full British Breakfast?'
Which reminded him, the one problem he hadn't bent his mighty mind to that morning was the one he was actually getting paid to solve.
There were only two days till Zak's big race, and bigger decision.
Supposing (which was not unlikely) he hadn't come up with anything by then, which way would she jump?
Her business. His was to try and get a line on who was behind the threats. The obvious explanation which, like in the dead lawyers' case, he saw no reason to ignore, was a gambling coup. The odds against Zak losing an exhibition race at the official opening of a new pleasure centre in her home town must be astronomical, so well worth a fix. And these days the whole world was your betting shop. A sudden surge of Malayan money on Oxford sinking in the Boat Race would have the Dark Blues checking their hull for limpet mines. So Zak's fixer didn't need to be some guy going into William Hill's with a suitcase to collect his money, it could be some laid-back business man in Bangkok whose winnings were transferred electronically to his Swiss account.
That would be way out of his league, of course. And Zak, who wasn't stupid, must know that. But still she'd hired him, despite the fact that the best he could hope to do was ferret out any local or personal domestic links.
Only possible explanation was Hardiman's. She was scared the cops would point the finger at someone in her own family. If that was the case, time for some straight talk. Endo Venera might enjoy creeping around dark alleys but Joe liked to work out in the open.
He said, 'Come on, Whitey. Time to go.'
It was eight twenty when he reached the Oto residence, still early but not so early that the bulky figure of Starbright Jones wasn't there before him.
'Sleep in, did you?' enquired the Welshman.
'Sleep out, did you?' said Joe, staring at the man's crumpled black jacket and pants. 'What happened to the tracksuit?'
'She's not running round the streets talking to useless wankers today,' said Starbright.
Joe worked this out as he rang the bell and decided not to take offence. Man who'd thrown Jowett of the SAS
