What he hoped to get out of the interview, he still wasn't sure. But he'd learnt long since that when things were going his way, the only tactic was to go with the flow.
Usually the sight of the Magic Mini was an instant mood depresser, but as he approached it now, it had the opposite effect.
He'd spent much of the sixties in short trousers, so most of the ideology had passed over his head. But one thing was for sure, no one painted such way-out stuff on a piece of machinery without they thought they could see a big bright light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe hope was all we had,
all we needed. And when had hope ever had anything to do with reason?
With a smile that would have had Ram Ray raising his eyebrows and his prices, he patted the Mini on the bonnet, slid inside, gave an amazed Whitey a big hug, and drove away.
Twenty-Two.
An hour later the Magic Mini was puffing its way up Beacon Heights. Houses here were set too well back for curtain twitching, but Joe did not doubt that some kind of early-warning system operated and wouldn't have been surprised to find his way into Naysmith's drive blocked by old Marble-Tooth of the S AS bearing a horsewhip. Instead, all he found was a young Scottish PC called Sandy Mackay looking bored in a Panda.
Mackay's soul was still up for grabs between the instinctive belligerence of officers like Chivers and Forton, and his own natural friendliness. True, he'd once nicked Joe on suspicion of being a hospital flasher, but Joe, who believed in building bridges rather than burning them, greeted him enthusiastically.
'Sandy, my man, how're you doing? Hey, they're not keeping a man with a claymore in his sporran on duty over Hogmanay, are they?'
He only had a faint idea what claymores and sporrans might be but the notion tickled Mackay who grinned and said, 'No way. I've got tickets for the ceilidh at the Cally. You coming, Joe?'
'No, I'm going to the Hoolie at the Glit. May see you in the streets later. Sandy, I'm expected here, you want to check?'
'No, Mrs. Naysmith told me you were coming when she brought me a coffee out. Nice lady. You can take the cup back if you like.'
'Glad to, but sure you don't want to hang on to it so's you've an excuse to knock at the door later on when you fancy another cup?'
'Good thinking,' said the youngster appreciatively. 'Hey, Joe, I heard them saying down the nick that you probably knew more about this lot than you're letting on. Do you think there's much chance of this geezer Montaigne having another go?'
Joe's ears twitched. The reference to Montaigne sounded a bit stronger than just a precautionary assumption.
He said, 'If he's got any sense he'll have got out of the country again.'
'Again? From what we've been told he never left it in the first place. Not unless he swam.'
He looked at Joe speculatively as if it was dawning on him he was giving rather than receiving information.
Joe said hastily, 'You'll have got a good description, I suppose?'
'Yeah, medium size, hook nose, black beard.'
'Yeah, well,' said Joe. 'But don't forget.'
He made a cutting motion at his throat with his index finger.
'You reckon he might've topped himself ?'
'No,' said Joe. 'Shaved himself. See you.'
The door opened as he approached and Lucy Naysmith greeted him politely rather than warmly and repeated her telephone reservations.
'He's still very weak, Mr. Sixsmith. Please don't overtire him. He's stubborn and will probably go on as long as you want to talk to him, so I'm relying on your good judgement.'
She herself looked a lot better today with her hair in some kind of order. But there was still a lot of strain showing and she still wasn't bothering her make-up bag.
She led the way up the stairs into a roomy, overheated bedroom. The curtains were drawn back, but there were Venetian blinds on the windows half closed, ploughing furrows of light across the bed. This, with the heat and a faintly musky perfume, gave Joe the weird impression that he'd strayed from an English winter into the kind of old-fashioned colonial set-up you sometimes saw on the movies.
Should maybe have worn my houseboy gear, he thought.
Naysmith was sitting up in bed, propped against an avalanche of pillows. He wore a bandage round his brow and had a dressing taped from his left cheek across his nose with a lot of bruising seeping from under it. With the memories, not to mention the pain of his own recent assault fresh in his mind, Joe regarded the man with considerable sympathy.
'Mr. Sixsmith, I'm glad to have a chance to thank you at last.'
The man's voice was strong but had an odd lisp to it. He smiled as he spoke and Joe saw where the lisp came from. His top front teeth were missing.
'I didn't do much, well, nothing actually,' said Joe. 'All over by the time I got here.'
'You tried,' said Naysmith. 'And if I'd listened to you a bit longer on the phone, I probably wouldn't have opened the door.'
'Yeah. You remember that now, do you?'
