Reginald Hill - Blood Sympathy

‘Thank you very much, Mr Sixsmith,’ said the woman, smiling for the first time. She was rather pretty when she smiled. ‘You have been very kind. Amal, say thank you and goodbye to Mr Sixsmith.’

‘Thank you very much, Mr Sixsmith,’ piped the little boy to Whitey whom he had released with great reluctance.

He thinks the cat’s in charge, thought Joe. Maybe he’s right.

The Bannerjees went out.

Yarrop said, ‘I’m sorry about this. Can’t win ’em all.’

‘Well,’ said Joe grudgingly, ‘at least you can admit a mistake.’

‘Mistake,’ echoed the man thoughtfully. ‘Maybe. It would certainly be a mistake to start disturbing solicitors at this time of night, wouldn’t you say? Let’s both try to avoid any further mistakes, shall we? Good night now!’

He left. Joe went to the phone and dialled. He had a sense that Yarrop had gone no further than the other side of the door but he didn’t care.

A woman’s voice said, ‘Bullpat Square Law Centre.’

‘You really work late,’ said Joe approvingly. ‘Now that I admire.’

‘I know that voice. Is that you, Sixsmith? I heard you’d gone bankrupt.’

‘You heard wrong.’

‘You sure? I could swear I saw you flogging apples off a barrow in the market.’

‘Still can’t tell us apart after all these years? No wonder you’ve got to work long hours to make a living.’

‘And I want to get back to it, so why don’t you come to see me in the morning. I can maybe manage a two-minute slot around ten?’

Joe said, ‘I need you now, Ms Butcher.’

‘Ms ? Such politeness means trouble. But it’s no good, Sixsmith. I’m not moving out of here, not even if you’ve been gang-banged by the entire Bedfordshire Constabulary.’

‘Not yet,’ said Joe. ‘But there’s a man called Bannerjee in a fair way to being screwed.’

He explained. There was a long silence.

‘You fallen asleep?’ inquired Joe courteously.

‘Chance would be a fine thing. How do you know this Bannerjee guy isn’t a pro dope-smuggler?’

‘I don’t,’ said Joe. ‘But I don’t think his wife is. And I’m certain his kids aren’t. And the way the cops came bursting in here, they’re pushing this thing very hard, and that’s the way innocent people get squashed against the wall.’

‘God, you’ll be telling me next you’ve got a dream. These guys who turned you over, they had a search warrant, I take it?’

‘I forgot to ask,’ admitted Joe.

‘Oh Jesus. The great PI! I expect it was all so sudden.’

‘Well, it was.’

More silence.

‘And you say they dropped a sledgehammer on to a police car?’

‘From seven floors up,’ said Joe. ‘It went clean through the roof.’

‘All right. I’ll do it. Not for your sake, not even for the Bannerjee kids’ sake, but for the sledgehammer’s sake. A story like that deserves some reward.’

The phone went dead.

‘Whitey,’ said Joe, ‘this has been a busy day. And nothing to show for it, except more mess than when you chased that blue-tit that came through the window.’

Whitey gave his are-you-never-going-to-forget-that? mew, and disappeared behind the armchair. He emerged a moment later dragging little Amal Bannerjee’s toy bull which he deposited in front of Joe before climbing back on to the chair and going to sleep with the complacent look of one whose duty has been done.

‘The poor kid,’ said Joe, picking up the bull. He went on to the balcony and looked down. All the cars had gone including the one with the new non-sliding sunroof.

With a sigh, Joe placed the bull carefully among his begonias and started clearing up the mess.

Next morning didn’t begin too well.

Joe found he’d run out of provisions for the fried breakfast and had to make do with plum jam on high bake water biscuits which Whitey loathed.

Also he felt very tired. After his third mug of tea, he recalled he’d been woken at least twice in the night by the strident strains of the Casa Mia quartet.

Still, the way business was he didn’t anticipate much difficulty catching up on sleep at the office.

As usual, he stopped to pick up his papers at Mr Nayyar’s shop on Canal Street which linked Rasselas and Hermsprong. Mr Nayyar claimed to run a speciality store, which meant he sold everything.

‘And I’ve run out of food,’ said Joe after he collected the Sun and The Times , the former to keep him abreast of current events, the latter for his crossword ploy.

Mr Nayyar’s real speciality was knowing his customers’ requirements better than they did. As he busied himself assembling the rich and varied ingredients of the fried breakfast, Joe browsed through his tabloid, careful to avoid the page with the boobs as he knew these caused Mr Nayyar a problem. Banned from his shelves were any magazines which flaunted flesh, but this principle if extended to papers would drastically limit his trade. So regulars like Joe kept the curves at a low profile till well clear.

The front page headline and three lines of text were still concerned with the horse-loving politician, and the back page concentrated on the A505 plane crash. The pilot, Arthur Bragg, had been taken ill not long after leaving Luton Airport to ferry Mr Simon Verity, a business executive, and his secretary, Miss Gwendoline Baker, to a conference in Manchester. He’d managed to keep control just long enough to flop the plane down on the roadway. None of the three was seriously injured, but they’d all been kept in hospital for observation and the Press concentrated on the woman who’d taken the video, ‘Raven-haired beauty, Meg Merchison (29)’.

She said: ‘I was trying out my new camcorder on a flock of rooks when I suddenly spotted this light plane diving out of the sky. It was terrifying. I thought at first it was going to hit me, but it levelled off, just missing some trees, and I was able to follow it all the way down on to the road. I never dreamt when I bought the camera it would give me a thrill like this.’ There was a photo of the raven-haired beauty astride a gate, caressing her camera sensuously and showing enough leg to give Mr Nayyar moral palpitations.

Lucky lass, thought Joe. Wonder how much she got for the video?

He turned to the inside pages and found that here the Casa Mia killings got a double-page splash. There was a lot of sensational speculation, but nothing new and they were still using the same blurred picture of Rocca that had been shown on telly. There was no mention of Joe. He didn’t know whether to be disappointed at missing the publicity or glad at missing the Press.

The shop door opened and two teenagers came in. Dressed identically in T-shirts, jeans and trendy trainers, with hair razored to a crowning crest, they were sexually distinguished only by a faint smear of moustache on the larger one’s lip and a bubbling of breast on the smaller one’s chest.

Sixsmith recognized the design on their T-shirts, a Union Jack with Maggie Thatcher’s face at the crux. This meant they belonged to the True Brits, the leading white gang on the Hermsprong Estate. Joe doubted if they’d enter a Pakistani-run shop looking for anything but trouble, so he kept a close eye on them as Mr Nayyar busied himself with the order.

As the shopkeeper turned his back to weigh some tomatoes, the girl thrust a handful of chocolate bars under her T-shirt. She felt Joe’s eyes on her, grinned at him and nudged the boy. He looked towards Joe, bared his teeth in an animal snarl, picked up a music cassette from a display rack and slipped it into his pocket. The girl meanwhile was pushing a couple of packs of panti-hose down the back of her jeans.