It was eighteen inches by nine, the kind of portable strongbox you can buy in any legal stationer’s. There was a key in the lock. He turned it and lifted the lid.
‘Shoot,’ he said.
No telltale legal documents here, just photos, the kind of pictorial biography to be found in nearly everyone’s desk or attic. Sandra Iles (presumably) as baby, as infant, as (now recognizably) schoolgirl; on holiday, in cap and gown, in (bringing a reminiscent twinge to his neck) a judogi fastened with a black belt. Other people, presumably family and friends, appeared on some of the snaps but no one Joe knew till he hit a group photo taken on the steps of Number 1 Oldmaid Row.
There were five of them, Iles and four men. Joe recognized the burly figure of Peter Potter. The other three – a distinguished elderly man with silvery hair, a slight dark man with a sardonic white-toothed smile showing through an eruption of black beard, and a big blond Aryan in his early thirties – were presumably Pollinger, Naysmith and Montaigne, though not necessarily in that order.
Two down, three to go. The thought popped uninvited into his mind.
Then the doorbell rang, making him drop other people’s worries and several photographs.
He went to the curtained window and without touching peered through a tiny crack.
On the cobbles below stood a police car. Alongside it, looking up at the house and listening with polite boredom to the expostulations of the military man, was a pair of uniformed cops.
Joe glanced at his watch. Dickhead! I went in, found her dead, and was about to raise the alarm when the police arrived wasn’t going to sound so convincing now fifteen minutes had elapsed. It was going to sound even worse if they caught him in the bedroom, going through the dead woman’s things.
Hastily he scooped up the spilled pics, dropped them back in the box, locked it, clambered on the stool, replaced the box on the wardrobe, jumped down, replaced the stool before the dressing table, and headed for the door.
One last glance round to make sure he hadn’t left any traces of his illegal search. And he had. The group photo of the Poll-Pott team had fluttered half under the bed. He picked it up. The doorbell rang again and a voice started shouting urgently through the letter box. No time to put it back. He shoved it into his pocket and sprinted downstairs just in time to open the front door before they smashed in the glass panel with a truncheon.
‘Hey, that’s timing,’ said Joe. ‘I was just going to ring you.’ But he could see they didn’t believe him.
It took the police doctor’s confirmation that Sandra Iles had been dead between twelve and fifteen hours to move Sergeant Chivers away from the pious hope that Joe had been caught in the act. But it didn’t move him far.
‘OK, so maybe you were just revisiting the scene of your crime,’ said Chivers. ‘Let’s concentrate on what you were doing between say seven and ten last night. And if you were sitting at home watching the telly, the courts don’t accept alibi evidence from cats!’
‘Shoot,’ said Joe. ‘Then I’m in real trouble, ’cos my witnesses are a lot less reliable than Whitey.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘It means that for most of the time, I was here being questioned by you, Sarge. Remember?’
Chivers closed his eyes in silent pain.
‘And when you were done with me, I went straight round to the Glit to wash the taste out of my mouth,’ said Joe, pressing his advantage.
‘The lowlife that drink there are anyone’s for a pint,’ said Chivers without real conviction.
‘I’ll tell Councillor Baxendale you said that, shall I? We got there the same time, and it’s true, I bought him a pint.’
Dickie Baxendale was chair of the council’s police liaison committee.
Chivers said, ‘Just tell me again what you were doing at Number 7, Coach Mews.’
Joe told him again, or rather told him the revised version which was that, being keen to assure Ms Iles of his innocence in the matter of Potter’s death, and not trusting the police to set the record straight (a good authenticating point this) he had decided to call on her personally.
‘Mr Dorken said you spoke to someone before you went in.’
Mr Dorken, the ‘military gent’, had turned out to be a retired fashion designer. Just showed how wrong you could be.
‘That was a bit of play-acting,’ admitted Joe, who knew the value of a plum of truth in a pudding of lies. ‘The door opened by itself and I got worried ’cos Mr Dorken was watching me suspiciously. Sorry.’
‘It’s stupid enough to be true,’ admitted Chivers reluctantly.
DC Doberley called him out of the room for a moment. When he returned he said, ‘Come across any Welshmen recently, Sixsmith?’
Joe thought of Starbright Jones, decided against mentioning him, and said, ‘Can’t think of any. Why?’
‘There’s an odd message on Ms Iles’s answerphone. Funny accent, could be Welsh.’
Pride almost made Joe protest, but sense prevailed.
He said, ‘Everybody sounds funny on tape. Can I go now, Sarge? I’ve got an appointment. For a job. In sport.’
‘Oh yes? Who with? Head scout down the football club?’ Chivers sneered.
And Joe couldn’t resist replying, ‘No. It’s Zak Oto down the Plezz. Got your ticket for the opening, have you, Sarge?’
To the faithful, the Plezz with its great silver sports dome from which radiated all the other support and activity buildings in broad and tree-flanked avenues, was Luton’s Taj Mahal. Literally, according to some who claimed that every local mobster who’d gone missing in the past decade had been consigned to the depths of its concrete foundations. Metaphorically there was certainly blood on its bricks. Since the idea first got floated in the overreaching eighties, fortunes had been made and lost, reputations inflated and burst, both locally and nationally. At times the government had pointed to it proudly as the very model of partnership between public money and private enterprise, at others it had provided a gleeful opposition with yet more ammo to hurl across the floor of the House. But once under way, like a juggernaut it had rolled on: and though the complexion of the local council had fluctuated in tune with the times, and work had sometimes slowed almost to a standstill, no one had had the nerve to pull the plug altogether and make Luton and its folly the mockery of the civilized world.
So now, ten years on, it was finished, and though Joe had generally been of the party who thought the whole idea was crazy, now as he drove along the main avenue, with that phlegmatic pragmatism which makes Lutonians such great survivors, he felt a glow of proprietorial pride.
He was a bit late, partly Chivers’s fault, partly Whitey’s. He’d rushed back to rescue the cat from the office and found him full of indignation at having been left so long. Also of pee because he was clearly going to have nothing to do with his new puce tray, so they’d had to stop at the first flowerbed as they reached the Plezz complex and despite the evident urgency, it had taken the cat the usual ten minutes of careful exploration with many false starts to find the piece of earth precisely suited to his purpose.
Being late didn’t matter, however, as he clearly wasn’t expected.
‘I’m here to see Zak Oto,’ said Joe to the armed guard. In fact he wasn’t armed, but he looked as if this was just because he’d left his Kalashnikov in his ARV as he