Reginald Hill: Killing the Lawyers

‘That’s right. Look, I know you said I should be here by quarter to six but it’s only …’

He glanced at his watch and saw that the interlude with old Black Belt down below had shrunk his couple of minutes to a couple of seconds.

‘… well, anyway I’d be very grateful if you could just take a quick look …’

He put on what Beryl Boddington called his baby-seal look which she averred might make him irresistible to mummy seals but did nothing for staff nurses who had to be up for the early shift.

Happily, large lawyers didn’t seem to be so adamant.

‘All right,’ said Potter. ‘A quick look then I’m off.’

Joe followed him into the room which was smallish and contained a desk with a typewriter, a few filing cabinets and an old-fashioned coat stand. The lawyer took the file and began to leaf through its contents. Joe, perspiring freely from his recent exertions, took off his donkey jacket, to get the benefit later, and began to hang it on the stand.

‘No need to strip off,’ said Potter irritably. ‘This won’t take long. You’ve wrecked your car, right?’

‘It got wrecked …’

‘And it’s a write-off?’

‘So they say but …’

‘And it was an old banger, made in the sixties? And they’re offering you one twenty-five? Grab it, you’ve got a bargain.’

He glared at Joe as though challenging him to demur.

Joe thought, glad I’m not paying this guy else I’d want a refund! He opened his mouth to voice this thought when a telephone started ringing. The man looked over his shoulder, looked back at Joe, snapped, ‘Wait here!’, stood up and went through a door behind him. It was dark through there, but Joe got a sense of a much larger room. Or chamber ! The bastard’s kept me in his typist’s office, thought Joe indignantly.

He heard Potter on the phone, his voice still loud and bad tempered enough to be clearly audible.

‘Felix, I’ve been trying to get hold of you. Yes, that’s right. It’s urgent. Something’s come up. Can you get back for a meeting tomorrow? Good. Midday would be fine. Hang on a moment, will you?’

Potter came back into the outer office.

‘You still here?’ he said. ‘I’ve told you, you haven’t got a case. Now if you don’t mind, I’m busy.’

He rammed the contract back into its file and thrust it at Joe, using it as a weapon to force him to the door.

Joe said, ‘Hey, man, no need to get so heavy …’

‘Just go away,’ snarled Potter. ‘The days are past when you could wreck your old banger and get paid for a Jag XJ.’

Joe was out in the corridor now. He wasn’t a man to raise his voice but some things needed to be heard.

‘One thing to get straight,’ he said forcefully. ‘This ain’t no old banger we’re talking about. This is a vintage Oxford with an engine so sweet it could sing in the Philharmonic Choir.’

‘And pigs could fly!’ sneered Potter. ‘Good night!’

He closed the door. Joe turned away, paused, turned back, and flung it open again.

Potter re-entering his chamber , turned with a look of such fury that Joe almost fled. But some things are more precious than mere self-preservation.

‘I may not have a case,’ he said. ‘But I do have a coat, and you’re not having that off my back.’

So saying, he seized his donkey jacket and swept it down off the coat stand. Unfortunately for the gesture, the collar caught on the point of the hook and as he dragged it loose, the whole stand came toppling over.

Joe’s evasive backward leap took him out into the corridor once more as the stand hit the floor with a tremendous crash. It seemed like a good sound to exit on and pulling his coat round his shoulders he went down the stairs like Batman.

Black Belt was standing in the doorway of her office.

She said, ‘What the hell’s going on up there?’

Joe said, ‘Not much. Whoever said “Kill all the lawyers” just about got it right!’

It was a bold thing to say to someone whose earlier response to much smaller provocation was still jangling through his nerve ends. So he didn’t pause for an answer but headed straight out into the street where the sight of the Magic Mini brought his indignation back to boiling point.

‘Old banger!’ he yelled up at the blank-eyed building. ‘Now this is an old banger. You lawyers can’t tell tit from tat!’

His anger took him down to the Glit, the famous Luton pub dedicated to the living legend of Gary Glitter, superstar, where he poured Guinness down his gullet and his woes into the ear of Merv Golightly. Merv, old workmate, fellow redundant, and reconstructed taxi driver, said, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ in tones of sepulchral sympathy at all the right moments, but his body language, which was as articulate as his six and a half foot length, seemed to have a different script.

‘So what you been up to that’s so interesting, Merv?’ said Joe, slightly hurt to find he was boring his friend. ‘How’s the publicity campaign? I ain’t been swamped by enquiries yet.’

It was a pretty mild retaliatory gibe, but it seemed to hit the button. Merv’s face screwed up in a rictus of anticipated pain and he said, ‘Well, yeah, something to tell you there, Joe.’

‘Hey, Joe, how’re you doing? You look tired, doesn’t he look tired, guys?’

‘Well, he would be, wouldn’t he? All that hard work he’s been doing, but he loves his work, don’t you, Joe?’

‘Yeah, night and day he stays on the job. Night and day!’

The enigmatic greetings from a group of regulars who’d just come in set the whole bar laughing. Joe grinned too and waved his glass, though he couldn’t for the life of him see what was so funny.

‘About the hand-outs,’ said Merv.

Merv regarded himself as a kind of sleeping partner in Joe’s PI business, and as he was Joe’s oldest friend, and as he had sometimes been positively helpful and as he didn’t want pay, Joe was happy to go along with this.

Just before Christmas Joe had been bewailing the slowness of business and Merv, a man of sudden enthusiasms, had said, ‘Yeah, it’s all this goodwill but that won’t last. Holiday over and it’s back to basics. You want to be ready, Joe. You want to be sure your name comes up first when folks find they need a gumshoe. You want to advertise!’

‘Great,’ said Joe. ‘I’ll take a ten-minute spot in the middle of The Bill .’

‘Start small, build big,’ said Merv. ‘Printed hand-outs are the thing.’

‘Couldn’t afford more than three, handwritten,’ said Joe.

‘No sweat. I got this friend, Molly, whose daughter works with some printing firm …’

‘You going out with a woman old enough to have a working daughter?’ interrupted Joe mockingly. ‘You’ll be into grannies next.’

‘She was a child bride,’ retorted Merv. ‘Anyway, I’ve been checking out the cost of putting out fliers advertising the cab, and Molly says Dorrie – that’s the daughter – can get these hand-outs done real pro standard, cost next to nothing, materials only. And I got to thinking, sheet of paper’s got two sides, why not let my friend Joe in on this unique marketing opportunity? Ten quid your share, call it fifteen for cash. What do you say?’

‘I say, what about distribution?’ said Joe, interested despite himself.

‘I go all over in my cab. Few here, few there, push ’em through letter boxes, pin ’em on walls, word’ll spread like smallpox. Let’s work out the wording. Direct message, that’s the name of the game.’

The direct message he’d come up with was:

IN TROUBLE? NEED HELP?

JOE SIXSMITH’S THE MAN

ON THE JOB NIGHT AND DAY

NOTHING TOO SMALL OR TOO BIG