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‘Mr Sixsmith.’
‘Yes?’ said Joe, halting.
‘I don’t think I said, you did OK.’
Saying it seemed to hurt his throat as much as speaking hurt Joe’s.
‘Yeah,’ said Joe. ‘Maybe not OK enough, eh? You’ll let me know if anything …’
‘Rest assured,’ said the inspector. ‘I’ll let you know.’
Maybe it was just the accent, but the words sounded very final.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_1046dfc4-7d6f-5eb6-bd01-9c006c4e2bbe)
In The Lost Traveller’s Guide, the famous travel book devoted to places unlikely to be visited on purpose, Branddreth Hall, the seat of Branddreth College, is described thus:
Here we have a building which achieves the remarkable feat of spanning six centuries, from medieval stronghold through Tudor hall, Georgian manor and Victorian mansion, to twentieth-century school, without once coming within welly-hurling distance of distinction. Succeeding generations have recorded their disappointment that, despite all attempts at contemporaneous improvement, the complete building sullenly insists on remaining less than the sum of its parts, and in this unrepentant ugliness, the Lady House, an Edwardian dower house built in what might best be called the Mock-Tudor Council Estate style, shows an almost touching family resemblance.
Joe, whose architectural acme was the green and yellow marble-clad ziggurat housing the new Malayan restaurant in Luton High, viewed the hall with no such critical eye. All he saw was the gift-wrapping round the cosy little sickbay where Beryl was going to act as his personal nurse.
On their way, they had passed the burnt-out shell of the farmhouse, or Copa Cottage as he now knew it was called. Only a jagged shell of outer wall remained standing and firemen were still picking their way through the ashes. A real inferno, thought Joe. And nearly my pyre.
A fire engine and two police cars were parked in front of the ruin with a plum-coloured Daimler standing a little to one side, like a duchess keeping her skirts out of the heavy tread of the hired help.
Next to it stood four people, watching the firemen at their work. Two of them, a man and a woman, thirtysomethings, smartly tweeded in the way posh townies dress for the country, he with his arm comfortingly round her shoulders, Joe guessed to be the Haggards from Islington. A little to one side, regarding them with grave concern, stood a tall distinguished man, with aquiline nose, silvering hair, and a walking stick.
And set back from this trio, regarding them all with unreadable blankness, was Detective Inspector Ursell.
Who’d had time to finish his business at the hospital, leave after them, and still get here before they did. Which meant that Merv could still be a long way from sussing out these winding country roads, a suspicion confirmed when Mirabelle hissed, ‘What you doing bringing us past here?’
Thinks seeing the place again might do my head in, thought Joe, not altogether displeased at being regarded as such a sensitive plant. Then Beryl’s arm went around him, and he realized his body was shivering. Maybe he was that sensitive plant after all!
The rest of the journey (less than a mile – Merv had got that right at least) passed in melancholy silence. But when they got out of the coach and heard the sound of singing voices drifting through the bright spring air, interrupted from time to time by Rev. Pot’s cries of encouragement or abuse, Joe’s heart bounded and he felt like he’d come home.
Even the discovery that the cosy little sickbay was more barrack room than BUPA didn’t depress his spirits. Meekly he allowed Beryl to check him over for damage in transit then put him to bed, with Aunt Mirabelle playing gooseberry, more, he thought generously, out of concern for his condition than suspicion it wouldn’t debar him from unclean thoughts.
He drank some thin soup and a cup of tea. A high liquid intake was prescribed till his throat eased. Hopefully he enquired about the availability of Guinness. Beryl pursed her lips (oh, how he longed to open that purse) but Mirabelle, God bless her, said, ‘That black stout supposed to be good for nursing mothers, isn’t it? Don’t see how it can do you any harm. But sleep first.’
Upon which promise, and the imagined promise contained in the kiss which Beryl brushed across his mouth, Joe closed his eyes obediently and, to what would have been his surprise if he’d been awake to appreciate it, he fell asleep immediately.
He woke in semi-darkness and the knowledge that there was someone in the room.
Like most of Joe’s instant certainties, evidence came a good way second. His occasional good friend, Superintendent Willie Woodbine of Luton CID, justified his plagiarism of Joe’s occasional detective triumphs (the same occasions on which he became a good friend) by saying, ‘God knows how you get there, Joe, but you’ve got to understand, the real work starts with me having to plot a logical path that won’t get laughed out of court.’
While Joe didn’t see how this entitled Willie to take ninety per cent of the credit, he did see that a lowly PI couldn’t afford to turn down any offer of goodwill from the fuzz on no matter what extortionate terms.
Now he didn’t waste time working out what combination of sound, smell and sixth or seventh sense was giving him this info, but focused on the two main issues: one, he wasn’t alone; two, he didn’t know who it was he wasn’t alone with.
He kept his breathing natural. Not as easy as it sounded. It had taken the great American gumshoe, Endo Venera, whose book Not So Private Eye had become Joe’s professional Bible, to point out that not many folk had the faintest idea what their natural breathing sounded like when asleep. ‘Only way to check if you gurgle like a baby or grunt like a hog is to use your VAT,’ said Venera.
It had taken Joe a very confused five minutes to work out that the American didn’t mean value-added tax but voice-activated tape. Such hi-tech aids weren’t in his armoury, but he managed to rig up a conventional recorder on a timer so that he got an hour’s worth of the weird noises he made in bed. Even then he had to separate the basso continuo of his cat, Whitey, from his own surprisingly high-pitched plainsong. So now he was able to avoid the giveaway error of an imitation baritone snore as he lay there, and felt the intruder moving stealthily closer.
Very close now. His mental eye was seeing a mad Welsh nationalist with a can of petrol in one hand and a lighter in the other, bent on getting rid of this potential witness to last night’s crime. It was hard, but he kept his nerve and waited. The intruder had come to a stop. So, Joe realized, had his own breathing. Dead giveaway! Showtime!
He shot upright, flung out his arms, grappled his assailant to his body in a weapon-neutralizing bearhug, rolled out of the bed and wrestled him to the floor.
Various parts of his body sent out signals. Conflicting signals. His injured shoulder, back and knee registered what-the-shoot-are-you-doing-dickhead? shafts of pain, while his face and chest acknowledged gratefully that what they were pressing down on was pleasantly soft and yielding.
Then his ears got in on the act, picking up a high-pitched shriek of shock and indignation which confirmed what his torso was telling him.
This him he’d got hold of was a her, and a well-built one at that.
Ignoring his pain, he rolled off, stood up, and pulled the curtains aside to let in a torrent of bright sunlight.
It fell on a young woman in her mid teens with long blonde hair and a surprised expression. She was wearing a red skirt and a white blouse, both of which had ridden up under the pressure of his attack. She had strong well-fleshed legs and a bosom to match.
‘Hey, man,’ he said. ‘I mean, hey … I’m sorry.’
He bent over her and offered his hand to help her rise. It occurred to him too late that if her purpose were offensive, he was laying himself wide open to a kick in the crutch or a blade in the belly.
But all she did was take his hand and draw herself upright, saying, ‘Bloody hell, boyo, they told me you were ill.’
Joe’s aches, temporarily anaesthetized by his chivalric guilt, came flooding back, and he sat on the bed with a groan.
‘Too late playing for sympathy now,’ she said. ‘Not when you’ve indecently assaulted me already.’
She had a voice like a Welsh stream, bubbling with gently mocking laughter.
Joe said, ‘Really am sorry. Thought you were a burglar or something.’
‘So it was just self-defence, not irresistible desire. There’s disappointing. Is it your back is hurting, then?’
‘Among other places,’ admitted Joe.
‘Let’s take a look, shall we?’
She came round the bed and before he could protest she had pushed his pyjama jacket up round his neck and her fingers were pressing up and down his spine, lightly at first, then probing ever deeper. He opened his mouth to cry out in pain, then realized there wasn’t any, or at least a lot less than there’d been a few seconds ago.
‘Going, is it?’ she asked. ‘That’s good. Let’s hope it goes to somebody who deserves it. Not a real hero. First time I got my hands on a real hero.’
‘You the district nurse or something?’ enquired Joe.
This produced a cascade of laughter.
‘No way! You try that wrestling trick on Gladys Two-bars and she’d snap you like a twig, hero or not.’
‘Gladys …?’
‘Two-bars. Gave her a lady’s bike when she started, but twice out and the frame buckled under the weight of her, so they had to get her a man’s, and even then she needed a double crossbar.’
Joe offered up a prayer of thanks he’d been spared that encounter and asked, ‘So who are you, then?’
‘Bron, that’s Bronwen, Williams. My da’s caretaker here at the college, and when your friends had to go off, they asked if we’d keep an eye on you. I would never have said yes if I’d known what sort of man you were going to turn out to be.’
Joe didn’t enquire what sort of man that was, but asked instead, ‘So where’ve they gone, my friends?’
‘Down into Llanffugiol, silly. Festival proper starts tomorrow and they got to register, see what’s what, more rules than a lawyers’ union these choir contests, my da says.’
‘Yes, but it’s the singing that counts,’ said Joe defensively.
‘You think so? Easy to tell you’re not from round here. Could sing like an angel and they’d disqualify you for not having wings if they felt like it. Here, lie down, will you, else I’ll be doing my own back in.’
Obediently, Joe stretched prone on the bed and next thing the girl was straddling him, her bum warm against his buttocks as she leaned her fingers deep into his back.
‘You trained for this?’ he croaked.
‘No. You complaining? Send you back to that fancy hospital if you like. But you won’t find any of those puffed-up little nurses can give you this treatment. Nothing but a bunch of skivvies, that lot, just about fit for cleaning bedpans. Chuck you out before you can hardly walk, too. ‘Spect they’ll be chucking that woman out you rescued any time now.’
‘Don’t think so,’ said Joe, wondering what experience of Caerlindys Hospital had given Bronwen such a jaundiced opinion of the place. ‘She looks to be in a pretty bad way.’
‘You talk to her then?’
‘Not me. Police are trying but she’s in no state.’
‘Police are useless,’ she said dismissively. She was, thought Joe, a very dismissive young woman. ‘So they don’t know who she is, then? What she was doing there?’
‘Not yet. What’s the word locally?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Back home, everyone would have a theory,’ said Joe. ‘Can’t be much different here, I shouldn’t have thought.’
‘Mind our own business round here,’ she said sharply. ‘Got enough to do looking after ourselves without wasting time on strangers.’
In the circumstances, which were that her bare thighs were gripping the bare back of a complete stranger, this seemed a questionable disclaimer, thought Joe. But he wasn’t about to raise the objection.
The massage, temporarily suspended, now resumed, with the girl sliding back and forth above him like a rower pulling on an oar, as she let her hands run in long slow strokes the whole length of his back from bum to shoulders.
‘How’s that feel?’ she asked
‘Lot better,’ said Joe, his voice now husky with more than just smoke damage.
‘Turn over and I’ll do your front then,’ she said.
‘No,’ he said explosively. ‘Front’s fine, really.’
‘You sure?’ she said, her voice husky as his own. ‘It’s all down to tension, you know, get rid of the tension and you get rid of the pain …’
She’s taking the mickey, thought Joe. She knows exactly what’s going on and she’s taking the mickey.
Before he could decide how to respond there was a sound like the polite cough well-brought-up folk use when less well-brought-up folk would shout, ‘Oy!’
The girl dismounted like a pro jockey. Joe turned his head to see what had made the sound and rather to his surprise, because being right first time wasn’t something he was used to, he saw what looked like the very model of a well-brought-up polite cougher in the doorway.
It was the silver-haired man with the eagle’s beak he’d seen in the group by the ruined cottage.
‘Mr Sixsmith, I presume,’ he said, advancing. ‘I’m glad to see Bronwen’s looking after you. I’m Leon Lewis, High Master of Branddreth.’
He approached the bed with his hand outstretched. Joe, though already gratefully acknowledging the deflating effect of the interruption, was not yet in a position to do more than flap his hand out sideways.
‘Please,’ said the newcomer, brushing his fingers against Joe’s. ‘Don’t disturb yourself. I just wanted to check that all was well, and of course congratulate you on what from all accounts must have been a spectacular act of courage, worthy, I would say, of one of our country’s official awards for gallantry.’
His gaze moved from Joe to Bronwen.
What’s he thinking? thought Joe. Medal or maiden?
He took the chance to pull the bedspread over his bottom half, roll over, and sit up.
Lewis was smiling benevolently at the girl, who was looking at the same time resentful and embarrassed.
Good, thought Joe. Bit of embarrassment won’t harm you, my girl.
‘Best be off now,’ she said abruptly. ‘They’ll be wondering where I am.’
She left the room without a glance at Joe.
Story of my life, he thought. One minute they’re sitting on top of you, next they won’t give you the time of day.
‘So, Mr Sixsmith, well done, and welcome to Wales in general and Llanffugiol in particular.’
Lewis had a fine voice, musical and rich-timbred. Headmaster needed a good voice, thought Joe, remembering his own at Luton Comp. who in full throat could drown a departing jumbo.
But this guy hadn’t called himself a head.
‘Thanks,’ said Joe. ‘Glad to be here. High Master same as headmaster, is it?’
He’d never discovered a better way of finding out things than asking, but Lewis viewed him narrowly for a second as though in search of satire.
Then he smiled and said, ‘Indeed. Such a variation of title is not unknown even beyond the border, I believe. May I ask what the medical prognosis is, Mr Sixsmith?’
Sounded to Joe like something that doctors shoved into you.
He said, ‘You mean, how’m I doing? Pretty well. In fact, very well.’
To demonstrate he slipped out of bed. The embarrassing effects of Bronwen’s massage had vanished, but happily the therapeutic effects remained. Though not feeling completely back to normal, normality now felt like a gainable goal.
‘Like you can hear, voice is no good, though,’ he said. ‘Won’t be able to sing.’
