Читать книгу The Roar of the Butterflies - Reginald Hill - Страница 11

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 title 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 title – 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 Gods? 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.