He'd noticed the Cavalier had gone but the Metro was still outside.

"Mary likes to sleep late when she's on holiday. And Dad drops Mum off at work when he's on days."

"Your mum's got a job, has she?"

"She does some book-keeping. Just mornings. Used to be full time but now things are easier, she don't really need to work at all. Only she's like me, independent."

Joe turned his coffee stagnant with sugar then said, "Didn't hear you independently ringing the cops out there."

"You want an affidavit saying you're right or what?" she snapped.

"Well, I'd have plenty of room for one of those," he said, grinning.

After a while she grinned back and said, "OK, so I suppose I should be pleased I'm not wasting my money on a dumbo. You're right. I'm worried in case it turns out Mary, or Eddie, is mixed up in this."

"You didn't just think to ask them?"

"Listen, if they're frightened enough to leave that note, then they'd be too frightened to give me a straight answer," she said fiercely.

"What makes you think they'd be frightened?"

"What other explanation would there be?" said Zak. "Someone must be really squeezing them hard. If it is one of them, I mean. Which basically I hate myself for even suspecting."

Joe could think of one or two other reasons why either of her siblings could have got involved in this caper, but he saw it as no business of his to chip away at her shining, if rather naive, faith. Not unless he had to.

He said, "Could be one of them was simply conned into leaving the note. Thought it was a joke, or a love letter or something."

Her eyes lit up with hope.

"I never thought of that," she said. "I must be really thick."

"No. Just worried. Let me talk to them. I need to if I'm going to earn my money."

She thought a moment then said, "You're right, of course. Go ahead. But whatever you say, don't mention the threats. No need for anyone else to get worried."

She couldn't bring herself to believe they might know all about the threats already. He hoped she was right.

They won't feel a thing," he promised. I'll start with Eddie. By the way, I noticed you only put him and Mary in the frame."

She didn't understand for a moment, then she said disbelievingly, "You don't mean Mum or Dad? Come on, Joe! That's so way-out, I couldn't even have nightmares about it! Listen, we're OK now, Mary's earning and I'm starting to pull it in, but they really had to work hard to bring us up the way they wanted. Everything was for us, nothing for themselves. This house, when we moved here Dad was just a junior officer, something like this was way out of his range. But Mum worked full time then. Dad moonlighted in his time off, and the only reason why was they wanted to live in the Grandison Comp. catchment area. OK, the government makes a lot of noise about parental choice, but living on the spot makes a h.e.l.l of a difference. So I can tell you for certain, either of them would rather chop their hands off than do anything that would hurt any one of us."

She was magnificent in her fierceness. Put this into her running, thought Joe, and they were right, she was going to be a world-beater.

He said, "Sorry, just asking, no offence."

But as he went up the stairs he was working out ways in which a pa.s.sionate and protective parental love could be twisted to produce an apparent betrayal.

He tapped lightly at Eddie's door and went straight in without waiting for an answer. The boy, as antic.i.p.ated, was crouched before his screen. Without looking round he said, "Give me a minute, OK?"

"Sure," said Joe, his eyes drawn irresistibly to the cork bulletin board which stretched along one wall. There in the middle of it in glorious colour was a familiar face. His own!

He went closer to examine it and saw that it was surrounded by a print-out which lived up to Zak's description of it as a life history. There was stuff about himself which he'd long forgotten. At first he was too interested to be indignant. Also there were some laughs here, such as the words QUERY: SUBVERSIVE? alongside the account of his presence on a trip made by the Boyling Corner Choir to a Singfest in Potsdam before the reunification. Also a list of KNOWN a.s.sOCIATES which included both Butcher and Beryl Boddington, neither of whom would be flattered by the description.

But there were also details of his financial standing (if a perilous teetering between survival and insolvency deserved such a highfalutin phrase) which disturbed him, and an a.n.a.lysis of his medical condition which made him resolve to go on a diet.

He turned away to find Eddie watching him.

"Where'd all this come from?" he demanded.

The boy shrugged, a touch smugly.

"It's all out there to pick up if you know where to look," he said vaguely.

Try a bit of technical flattery, thought Joe.

"You must have had to hack into half a dozen systems at least," he said.

"No. Just the one."

This was really disturbing. It was bad enough to think that there were all these agencies all over the place who recorded the bits about you that were relevant to their needs and functions. But for someone to think it worthwhile to collect together all these bits was downright sinister.

"So which one was that?" he asked.

The boy shrugged again and did not speak.

Joe changed tack.

"You realize this is against the law," he said sternly. "You could be fined, jailed even. Have your gear confiscated."

He wasn't sure about this last, but thought it might be a good lever.

Ill The boy said, "So what're you going to do? Fetch the fuzz?"

"Maybe," said Joe.

"Off you go then. Only this stuff won't be around by the time you get back."

I'll take it with me then," said Joe, offering to tear the print-outs off the wall.

That case, how're you going to prove you got it here?" said Eddie. "From what I read between the lines, you're not the kind of PI the police are going to take the word of, are you?"

"So maybe I'll just ring the cops from here and invite them round," said Joe, becoming irritated by this smarta.s.s kid.

"Don't think Zak would like that," said the boy.

Not just smarta.s.s, but smart. Joe knew, and did not resent, that smart folk could run rings round him. Only choice was to scare them or lull them and as he didn't have the torso or the temperament for being scary, he'd better start lulling.

"No, she wouldn't," he agreed. "What she would like is for you to give me a helping hand, Eddie. She's got a spot of trouble which is why she's hired me."

"And here's me thinking you were her financial adviser," said Eddie.

Perhaps he should have gone for scary, thought Joe. Offer to push his face through his monitor so he could start seeing both sides of the question.

Instead he laughed and said, "No way. With you and your box of tricks in the house, I guess she can have the best up-to-date financial advice she wants."

"She could if she wanted it," agreed the boy.

"But she doesn't?" said Joe. "I'd have thought she'd have jumped at the chance."

"She can please herself," said the boy indifferently.

Joe observed him keenly. Smart folk still had feelings which sometimes they weren't smart enough to hide. Beneath this indifference he felt an undercurrent of resentment. Of what? Zak's success and high profile? Zak's top place in the family pecking order?

The boy was picking his nose, and suddenly this naive gesture stopped Joe from over complicating things. This was a kid, bright, certainly, but a long way from mature. Maybe all he resented about his beautiful and famous big sister was that she still treated him like a troublesome kid brother going through the computer-nerd stage. All this stuff he kept on digging out, the drug-test results on her compet.i.tors, Joe's own background, all this was Eddie's attempt to impress her. He thought she was great and all he wanted in return was a recognition that he was sort of special too.

This didn't mean that he couldn't have been conned or coerced into dropping the note on her pillow. But coming in hard on that might drive him deeper into denial as he realized just how much it had bothered Zak.

Joe said, There's something you could do which would really please your sister. Could be it's too hard, so don't be afraid to say you can't manage it."

"What?" demanded Eddie.

This race Zak's running at the Plezz, there's probably a book on it.."

"Betting, you mean? It'd have to be on who's coming second then!"

He spoke with such proud confidence Joe was convinced that whatever else he knew, he had no idea about the threat to Zak. Perhaps the thing to do was let him have full details so that if he had been conned into leaving the note, he'd come out with the truth. But Joe was hog-tied by his promise to Zak.

Joe said, "Any chance you could find out which bookies are offering odds, what they are, and who's betting on what? I should warn you, this is likely to involve organizations outside the UK, maybe even in the Far East."

"You mean Clacton?" said the boy with the scorn of one for whom the remotest quarters of the globe were but an e-mail number away. "I'll need to work at it. Since that scam in the States where someone hacked into a bookie's system and programmed his bet to register the winning horse's number the second the race finished, most of them have really gone in for deep protection."

"So how'd this guy get caught?" asked Joe, interested.

There was an objection, upheld. The computer had already printed out the list of winners on the disqualified horse. Now it put the new winning number into the system, printed a new list, and this guy's name was still there. So they checked."

"He could have said he backed both horses."

"No. Just the one bet registered. His own fault. If it had been me I'd have fixed it so that any change because of disqualification registered as a separate bet. The guy didn't think it through."

He turned back to his keyboard. Joe left the room thinking, this boy could eventually rule the universe. If they let him have a computer in his prison cell, that is.

As he crossed the landing to the stairs, the bathroom door opened and Mary came out. She was wearing only bra and pants and Joe's gaze ran down the athletically muscled body to the ma.s.s of scar tissue round the left knee.

"You want I should take the rest off so you can get a really good look?" she snarled.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to ... I came up to see Eddie ..."

"Prefer young boys, do you? In that case what are you staring at?"

"Sorry," repeated Joe, turning his head and peering out of the landing window. "Look, I wonder, would you mind, maybe we could sit down and have a bit of a talk "If this is your subtle technique for getting into my pants, I suggest you go back to the correspondence course."

"No, really, I meant downstairs when you're ..."

"Decent? You want to talk, talk now."

She opened her bedroom door and went inside.

Joe didn't move. She turned round and said impatiently, "You coming in or what?"

As she spoke she undid her bra.

"Oh shoot," said Joe Sixsmith. And heard the door slam behind him as he hurried downstairs.

Twelve.

Later he decided he should have called her bluff. This had been a pretty unsubtle way of avoiding his interrogation and a PI in the true tradition wouldn't have let himself be fazed by it. Would have gone into the bedroom and watched her getting dressed. Or, if she'd insisted on playing the game all the way, bedded her, then started asking questions.

But it was a tradition he didn't yet belong to. And though the picture of himself bouncing away on top of Mary Oto was not altogether displeasing, the picture of the door opening and Zak finding them at it was.

"How did you get on?" Zak asked when he joined her in the sitting room.

"Spoke to Eddie. Nothing," he said.

"Didn't imagine there would be. And Mary?"

It came out casual but he thought he detected a something. It wasn't surprising. Mary, angry and resentful that her own sporting career had been nipped in the knee, must be Number One Internal Suspect.

He said, "b.u.mped into her on the landing but it didn't seem a good time to talk."

There might never be a good time," said Zak, frowning. "Mary's a pretty private person."

Joe imagined those brown bombs slipping out of their cradles and thought, Yeah, private like a B-29 over Tokyo.

Out of the window he could see Starbright still looming by the gate.

He said, "How long's Jones been with you?"

"Starbright? Just since I came home a couple of weeks back. Douglas fixed it. I thought it was over the top at first, me having a minder. I mean, in the States, I'm just another college jock, but when I got off the plane and saw the cameramen and reporters, I was glad when Douglas came out to meet me and said he'd fixed for me to be taken care of."

"That's the sort of thing agents do? Thought they just made money."

"Maybe he thinks of it as protecting his investment," said Zak.

"Been with him long?"

"Week short of three years," said Zak.

Joe noted the precision but couldn't think of any reason why it should be noteworthy.