'No, she wouldn't,' he agreed. 'What she would like is for you to give me a helping hand, Eddie. She's got a spot of trouble which is why she's hired me.'
'And here's me thinking you were her financial adviser,' said Eddie.
Perhaps he should have gone for scary, thought Joe. Offer to push his face through his monitor so he could start seeing both sides of the question.
Instead he laughed and said, 'No way. With you and your box of tricks in the house, I guess she can have the best up-to-date financial advice she wants.'
'She could if she wanted it,' agreed the boy.
'But she doesn't?' said Joe. 'I'd have thought she'd have jumped at the chance.'
'She can please herself,' said the boy indifferently.
Joe observed him keenly. Smart folk still had feelings which sometimes they weren't smart enough to hide. Beneath this indifference he felt an undercurrent of resentment. Of what? Zak's success and high profile? Zak's top place in the family pecking order?
The boy was picking his nose, and suddenly this naive gesture stopped Joe from over complicating things. This was a kid, bright, certainly, but a long way from mature. Maybe all he resented about his beautiful and famous big sister was that she still treated him like a troublesome kid brother going through the computer-nerd stage. All this stuff he kept on digging out, the drug-test results on her competitors, Joe's own background, all this was Eddie's attempt to impress her. He thought she was great and all he wanted in return was a recognition that he was sort of special too.
This didn't mean that he couldn't have been conned or coerced into dropping the note on her pillow. But coming in hard on that might drive him deeper into denial as he realized just how much it had bothered Zak.
Joe said, There's something you could do which would really please your sister. Could be it's too hard, so don't be afraid to say you can't manage it.'
'What?' demanded Eddie.
This race Zak's running at the Plezz, there's probably a book on it..'
'Betting, you mean? It'd have to be on who's coming second then!'
He spoke with such proud confidence Joe was convinced that whatever else he knew, he had no idea about the threat to Zak. Perhaps the thing to do was let him have full details so that if he had been conned into leaving the note, he'd come out with the truth. But Joe was hog-tied by his promise to Zak.
Joe said, 'Any chance you could find out which bookies are offering odds, what they are, and who's betting on what? I should warn you, this is likely to involve organizations outside the UK, maybe even in the Far East.'
'You mean Clacton?' said the boy with the scorn of one for whom the remotest quarters of the globe were but an e-mail number away. 'I'll need to work at it. Since that scam in the States where someone hacked into a bookie's system and programmed his bet to register the winning horse's number the second the race finished, most of them have really gone in for deep protection.'
'So how'd this guy get caught?' asked Joe, interested.
There was an objection, upheld. The computer had already printed out the list of winners on the disqualified horse. Now it put the new winning number into the system, printed a new list, and this guy's name was still there. So they checked.'
'He could have said he backed both horses.'
'No. Just the one bet registered. His own fault. If it had been me I'd have fixed it so that any change because of disqualification registered as a separate bet. The guy didn't think it through.'
He turned back to his keyboard. Joe left the room thinking, this boy could eventually rule the universe. If they let him have a computer in his prison cell, that is.
As he crossed the landing to the stairs, the bathroom door opened and Mary came out. She was wearing only bra and pants and Joe's gaze ran down the athletically muscled body to the mass of scar tissue round the left knee.
'You want I should take the rest off so you can get a really good look?' she snarled.
'Sorry. I didn't mean to ... I came up to see Eddie ...'
'Prefer young boys, do you? In that case what are you staring at?'
'Sorry,' repeated Joe, turning his head and peering out of the landing window. 'Look, I wonder, would you mind, maybe we could sit down and have a bit of a talk
'If this is your subtle technique for getting into my pants, I suggest you go back to the correspondence course.'
'No, really, I meant downstairs when you're ...'
'Decent? You want to talk, talk now.'
She opened her bedroom door and went inside.
Joe didn't move. She turned round and said impatiently, 'You coming in or what?'
As she spoke she undid her bra.
'Oh shoot,' said Joe Sixsmith. And heard the door slam behind him as he hurried downstairs.
Twelve.
Later he decided he should have called her bluff. This had been a pretty unsubtle way of avoiding his interrogation and a PI in the true tradition wouldn't have let himself be fazed by it. Would have gone into the
