"No! They need to look you over, check your family and friends then move on to your bank balance, your tailor and your table manners. After that if you"ve got someone to propose you, second you and probably third and fourth you, they take a vote ..."
"Who"s this they?"
"Some committee," she said dismissively. "And it just takes one blackball and you"ve had it."
"Black ball?" said Joe. "Don"t like the sound of that."
"Don"t go vulgar on me, Joe," she said.
"Sorry. So Chris is putting Willie up for membership, is that what you"re saying?"
"So I"d guess. And of course if you want to get into the Hoo, then getting yourself proposed by Christian Porphyry is just about the closest thing you can get to a guarantee of success."
"Because everybody likes him, you mean?" said Joe, who didn"t find this hard to believe. One of the many perks of being a YFG had to be that everybody liked you.
"Don"t be silly. What"s liking got to do with it? Because the Royal Hoo more or less belongs to the Porphyry family, of course."
"That more or less?" asked Joe.
"I don"t know the precise details," said Butcher. "Just what I picked up when researching the family background. Know your enemy, Joe. You never can tell when some little detail might come in useful in court."
Joe shuddered at the thought of finding himself on the wrong end of Butcher in a courtroom. Not even Young Fair G.o.ds were safe.
He said, "OK, give me the history lesson, long as you"re not charging."
"I"ll put it on your slate," she said. "Back in the twenties, one of the Porphyrys was so hooked on golf he built a course on an outlying stretch of the family estate known as the Royal Hoo because, according to tradition, King Charles had been hidden there in a peasant"s hut during the Civil War."
"And he was anonymous, so they called it Hoo?"
"Funny. I hope. No, it"s called Hoo because that"s what hoo means: a spur of land. At first it was for private use only, by invitation from the family. Then the war came and the course got ploughed up. When peace broke out, and the UK was once more a land fit for golfers, the old gang of chums and hangers on started pestering Porphyry to have the course refurbished. Only this was a new Porphyry, your boy"s grandfather, I"d guess, and he was commercially a lot sharper and didn"t see why he should pick up all the tabs. He insisted a proper company was formed and the Royal Hoo Golf Club as we know it everyone, that is, except you came into being."
"With the Porphyrys still in control?"
"Don"t know the contractual details, but I"d guess they kept a controlling interest. People like them don"t give their land away, free gratis and for nothing," she said grimly.
"So, with Christian"s backing, Willie looks like a cert for membership? Good for him, if that"s what he wants."
"And good for you too, Joe. Maybe. I"d guess whatever trouble Porphyry"s got, he did what the ruling cla.s.ses always do and turned to his old butler for help. That"s OK if you"ve got a Crichton or a Jeeves, but all he had was Woodbine, who felt he couldn"t help officially but tried to keep his nose up master"s b.u.m by recommending you as a last resort."
Joe tried not to show he was hurt but he wasn"t very good at dissimulation, and Butcher, who was very fond of him, said placatingly, "Look, I don"t mean you don"t get results. For G.o.d"s sake, I"ve recommended you myself, haven"t I?"
This was true, and the memory eased the smart a little.
"All I meant was, I mean, Jesus, what can you do in a set-up like the Hoo? You"ll stick out like a ..."
She seemed lost for a simile.
"Like a black ball," completed Joe.
This time she didn"t reprove his vulgarity.
"Something like that. When Porphyry met you, didn"t he say anything?"
"Like, hey man, no one mentioned you were a short black balding no-hoper with parrots on his shorts? No, I don"t recollect hearing anything like that. Unless giving me four fifties and saying come and have lunch with me at the club is posh shorthand for I"d be crazy to hire a slob like you."
"Joe, don"t go sensitive on me. It doesn"t suit you."
He consulted his feelings. She was right. And in any case, it was too much of an effort in this weather to keep it up.
"Apology accepted," he said.
"Apology? You going deaf too?"
That was better. Now they were back on their proper footing.
They chatted about other things till Butcher told Joe to drop her in an area on the fringe of Hermsp.r.o.ng that even in the full brightness of a midsummer day had an aura of dark menace.
"You want I should come with you?" offered Joe, glancing uneasily at a group of young men who looked like they were planning to blow up Parliament.
"To do what?" she asked. Then, relenting, she added, "No, I"ll be OK, Joe, but thanks for the thought. It"s you who needs protection. I"m just going among the poor and the disadvantaged. Tomorrow you"ll be mixing with the rich and successful. That"s where the sabre-toothed tigers roam. Take care of yourself there, Joe."
She got out of the car, lit her cheroot, and set off along the pavement, pausing by the terrorists to say something that made them laugh and exchanging high fives with them before she moved on.
Sixsmith watched her vanish behind the graffti"d wall of a walkway, tracking her progress for a little while by the spoor of tobacco smoke which hung almost without motion in the lifeless air. She"d be OK, he guessed. She was worth more to these people alive than dead. This was her chosen world. People like Porphyry and the other members of the Royal Hoo were the enemy, which was why she knew so much about them, presumably.
Not that Butcher was the only one able to identify the enemy.
The terrorists had begun a slow drift towards the Morris.
He gave them a friendly wave and accelerated away towards the visible haven of Ra.s.selas.
Tiger.
That night, with Beryl working, nothing but repeats on the box, and his cat Whitey plunged deep into whatever the summer equivalent of hibernation was, Joe decided to wander round to the Luton City Supporters" Club bar in search of social solace.
To start with it seemed a good decision. He arrived just in time to get in on the end of a round that most democratic of club chairmen, Sir Monty Wright, was buying to celebrate the close-season signing of a sixteen-year-old Croatian wunderkind. Word was that Man U and Chelsea had both been sniffing around, but while they hesitated, Sir Monty, who hadn"t got where he was by hesitating, had dipped his hand into his apparently bottomless purse and said to the manager, "Go get him."
Joe bore his pint of Guinness to a seat next to his friend, Merv Golightly, self-styled prince of Luton cabbies but known because of his exuberant driving style as the man who put the X in taxi.
"Good to see you, Joe," he said. "But I thought you was on a promise tonight. What happened? Beryl give you the elbow?"
"Something came up at the hospital," said Joe.
"Better than washing her hair, I suppose," laughed Merv. "So how"s business? Slow or stopped?"
The slur prompted Joe to tell Merv about Christian Porphyry. If he"d hoped to impress his friend he was disappointed.
"And this guy wants you to meet him at the Royal Hoo? And he"s going to say you"re applying for membership? Must be someone there he really wants to wind up! Give him the finger, Joe. He"s using you. You don"t believe me? Take a look at Sir Monty there."
Joe, ever a literalist, turned to look towards the table where Sir Monty was holding court with some of his directors. He found Sir Monty was looking back. Joe gave him a cheerful wave and got a nod in return, which was not to be sneezed at from a man worth a couple of billion and rising.
The Wright-Price supermarket chain had started from a flourishing corner shop owned by the Wright family in a Luton suburb. When Monty was eighteen, one of the big supermarket chains looking to expand had approached Wright senior with an offer for the business, while at the same time negotiating with the Council for the purchase of a small playing field adjacent to the shop. This looked a smart move, taking over a flourishing local business and acquiring enough land to expand it into a full-blooded hypermarket. With young Monty pulling his parents" strings, the sale of the shop was delayed and delayed until the day before the Council Planning Committee meeting which was expected to confirm the sale of the playing field on the nod. Fearing that if they went ahead with the land purchase before they"d got the shop, the Wrights would be in an even stronger bargaining position, the big chain caved in to most of their demands and ended up paying almost twice as much as their original offer.
The deal was signed.
Next day the Planning Committee voted to reject the chain"s offer for the playing field, preferring, as it said, to put the needs of the local community first.
On the same day the bulldozers moved on to a piece of derelict land only half a mile away and, financed by the big chain"s own money augmented by a large loan from a city bank whose CEO had long nursed a grudge against his opposite number on the chain"s board, the first of Monty Wright"s supermarkets was erected in record time.
Five years later even the City"s most dedicated doubters had to accept that the Wright-Price chain was here to stay. By that time another dozen shops had gone up in the southeast and marketing whiz-kids were keen to climb aboard the bandwagon. The fact that an early appointee to the Board of Directors was a local businessman called Ratcliffe King who had happened to be Chairman of the Planning Committee which rejected the application to purchase the playing field was noted but not commented on. At least not by anyone with any sense. Ratcliffe King wasn"t known as King Rat in Luton political circles without reason. No longer a councillor, he retained the t.i.tle and still wielded much of the political power in his role as head of ProtoVision, the planning and development consultancy he had founded on retirement from public life. Officially his role on the Wright-Price board was and remained nonexecutive, but in the view of many he"d played a central strategic role in the campaign which twenty years on had led to Monty Wright being knighted for services to industry as head of a company no longer coveted by the market leaders as possible prey but feared by them as potential predator.
"What about Sir Monty?" asked Joe, turning back to Merv. "And keep your voice down, I think he heard you talking about him."
"What"s wrong with that?" said Merv. "Not saying anything everyone doesn"t know."
But he dropped his voice a little, or as much as he could, before he went on, "Like I said, look at Monty. All that lolly plus the t.i.tle even got his teeth straightened to go to the Palace, I heard! and what happens when he applies to join the Royal Hoo? They turn him down flat!"
"So what"s your point?" asked Joe, who liked things spelt out.
"My point is, doesn"t matter what this plonker Porphyry says. The only way they"ll let you into the Royal Hoo is through the back door dressed as a waiter! Maybe that"s it. Maybe they"re short of staff. They ask to see your testimonials, just you be careful!"
Merv"s difficulty in keeping his voice low even to share a confidence was compounded by a compulsion when uttering a bon mot to up the volume several decibels as if to make sure no one in the same building was deprived. Heads turned, and when a few moments later he went to the bar to get a round in, he was pressed to elaborate by several of the other drinkers.
The result was, for the rest of the evening Joe found himself the object of much cheerful waggery. Normally this was water off a duck"s back, but even his good nature was finding it hard to raise a smile the tenth time someone tapped him on the shoulder and said, "Pardon me, sir, aren"t you the one they call Tiger?"
Rumours of the joke must have reached Sir Monty"s table. After a visit to the Gents, Joe returned to see Merv sitting next to the baronet, talking expansively. At least he wasn"t getting the easy laughs he"d wrung out of the rest of his audience. Indeed, Sir Monty, though listening attentively, had a deep frown on his face. Maybe after his own experience with the Royal Hoo he didn"t reckon there was much to laugh at.
Serves Merv right, thought Joe.
"Fancy another one, Tiger?" called an acquaintance from the bar.
"No thanks. On my way home," he replied.
It wasn"t just the golf jokes that had got to him. He"d found himself thinking, what if Merv was right and this guy Porphyry was pulling his plonker by using him to get at some of his fellow members? He hadn"t struck Joe as that kind of bean-head, but what did he know about the mind processes of Young Fair G.o.ds? So tell him to take a jump. Except he didn"t know how to contact him. OK, just don"t turn up. Except he had two hundred quid of the guy"s money in an envelope in his back pocket (somehow it hadn"t seemed decent to put such lovely clean money in with the dirty old stuff in his wallet). Perhaps he should get there early, intercept him in the car park, hand back the cash and take off. But that would be hard.
"What would you do, Whitey?" he asked the cat, who"d woken up long enough to join him for a late supper after he got home.
For answer Whitey yawned, jumped up on the bed and closed his eyes.
"Good answer," said Joe, who was blessed with the invaluable gift of rarely letting the troubles of the day spill over into his rest.
He lay down beside the cat and soon joined him in deep and dreamless sleep.
Pastures New.
The Reverend Percy Potemkin, pastor of Boyling Corner Chapel, master of its famous choir, and known wherever song is sung or souls are saved as Rev Pot, preached a mean sermon.
Twice every Sunday he preached it, and with slight variations he made it do for weddings, funerals, christenings, and the opening of garden ftes.
Any suggestion that a little variety might not come amiss was greeted with the response, "If it"s not broke, why fix it?" And if the doubter were foolish enough to persist in his doubt, perhaps educing in evidence the fact that most regular members of the congregation knew the words by heart, Rev Pot would reply, "Now that is good, that"s exactly what I want. I"m just a messenger, these are the words of the Lord, and He wants them to be burned on your soul so you never forget!"
A couple of lines from the mean sermon came into Joe"s mind as he drove in search of the Royal Hoo Golf Club not long after ten o"clock the following sweltering morning.
h.e.l.l is a populous city a lot like Luton, and one of its suburbs is called Privilege and another is called Wealth. They look at things differently there.
Following Beryl"s directions he found himself on the big roundabout which he sent the Morris round three times before opting for the only exit that didn"t have a signpost. Soon he found himself driving along narrow country roads, not much more than lanes really, winding between high hedgerows. To make matters worse he got stuck behind a tractor for half a mile. Finally it turned into a gateway. When the driver stopped to open the gate Joe drew up alongside.
"All right for the Royal Hoo, am I?" he asked.
The man, who looked like a farmer in every respect except that his expression was happy, said, "Oh yes, another mile or so, and there you are. Lovely day for golf."
At least he doesn"t a.s.sume I"m a delivery man, thought Joe.
Leaning over the gate he saw a possible explanation of the man"s demeanour in the shape of an estate agent"s sale board across which was plastered SOLD.
"Selling up then?" he said. "Expect you"ll miss it."
"Miss drought, and drench, and interfering b.a.s.t.a.r.ds from DEFRA? Oh yes, I"ll miss them, right enough! I"ll lie in bed on a cold wet winter"s morning and think of some other poor sod getting up to milk his beasts! It"s a mug"s game these days, farming."
"Lucky you found a mug then," said Joe lightly.
"Not really. Some so-called agri-conglomerate with a fancy name. "New Pastures," would you believe? Pastures! They"ll likely cover the place in polytunnels and grow soft fruit. Me, I"ll be long gone. Cheers now. Enjoy your game."
"You too," said Joe.
He drove on, smiling.
After perhaps a mile the high hedgerows gave way to an even higher wall, topped with shards of champagne-bottle gla.s.s that signalled clearer than billboards he was getting near one or both of Rev Pot"s suburbs.
One thing you couldn"t say about the Royal Hoo, however, was that it was ostentatious.
Joe had once been retained to look into a suspected fiddle in the kitchen of a very exclusive restaurant. He had walked by it three times before spotting the entrance. When he"d suggested to the owner that a sign invisible till you got within six feet wasn"t going to bring in much pa.s.sing trade, the man had winced and replied, "The kind of people who don"t know where we are, why would I want to tell them?"
The Hoo clearly worked on the same principle. Not that the entrance itself was understated. Eventually the wall was interrupted by a ma.s.sive granite archway on which he wouldn"t have been surprised to find listed the dead of both world wars.
Instead all he found after getting out of the car to do a recce was a sign as discreet as that of a Harley Street pox doctor. It didn"t declare but rather murmured that this was indeed the Royal Hoo Golf Club.