The Roar of the Butterflies. Reginald Hill

      

      REGINALD HILL

      THE ROAR OF THE BUTTERFLIES

      A Joe Sixsmith novel

      Copyright

       Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      Copyright © Reginald Hill 2008

      “Roar of the butterflies” extract copyright © P G Wodehouse Reproduced by permission of the Estate of P G Wodehouse c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN

      Reginald Hill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

      Source ISBN: 9780007252732

       Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2015 ISBN: 9780007292936

       Version: 2016-01-28

      Contents

       Cover Page

       Title Page

      Copyright

      Dedication

      1 ’Fonlies

      2 Enter a YFG

      3 A Willie Day

      4 Blackball

      5 Tiger

      6 Pastures New

      7 A Fortunate Lie

      8 Trust

      9 A Royal Summons

      10 Favours

      11 Knobbly Scones and Lipton’s Tea

      12 The Hole

      13 Legal Advice

      14 What’s Become of Waring?

      15 Twitch

      16 Wondrous Regiment

      17 A Message from Frank

      18 A Patch of Oil

      19 And in my nightmares!

      20 Lightning Strikes Twice

      21 Frozen Broccoli

      22 The Right Price

      23 Pillow Talk

      24 A Saving Bell

      25 Last Breakfast

      26 Pain

      27 End of Play

       Keep Reading

       About Reginald Hill

      By Reginald Hill

      About the Publisher

      Dedication

      For

      WRECKING CREWS

      the world over.

      (You know who you are!)

      ’Fonlies

      Joe Sixsmith was adrift in space.

      Light years beneath him gleamed the tiny orb he was supposed to make contact with, but he knew it was an impossible dream.

      His muscles had melted, his lungs were starved of oxygen, and the only part of his mind not paralysed by terror was the bit that dealt with ’fonlies.

      ’fonly I’d done this…’fonly I’d done that…

      ‘No use messing with ’fonlies,’ Aunt Mirabelle used to say. ‘’fonlies don’t get your homework done, Joseph. You miss your football Saturday morning, you’ve got no one to blame ’cept yourself.’

      How right she was! No one to blame ’cept himself…except maybe Willie Woodbine for being such a social climber…and Beryl Boddington maybe for standing him up…and definitely Merv Golightly for having a mouth like the Channel Tunnel…but first and last and as usual, himself, Joseph Gaylord (even Mirabelle kept quiet about that) Sixsmith for always going boldly half-assed where nobody had ever come back from before!

      Enter a YFG

      Way it started was this.

      Monday afternoon, day before yesterday, though it seemed a lot longer ago, he’d been sitting in his office, minding his own business, which didn’t take much minding this time of year. Summer had parked its anticyclone firmly over Luton and fused the days and nights of July together with a heat too enervating to start a race riot in, let alone perpetrate any of the crimes that might send the distressed citizenry in search of a PI. Ice creams melted before they could reach your mouth, birds huddled beneath cats for shade, and flies buzzed with relief into spiders’ webs whose owners felt the tremor along the line and thought that maybe next Friday they’d stroll down there to take a look.

      The plus side was that Joe too felt as energetic as a poached egg and couldn’t whip up much concern at the lack of client incentive to head off down the mean streets.

      So clad in an off-white singlet and Bermuda shorts patterned with scarlet parrots sinking their beaks into rainbow-striped pumpkins, Joe sat at his desk and relaxed with his favourite book, Not So Private Eye, the reminiscences of Endo Venera, the famous Mafia soldier turned gumshoe. This was Joe’s bible. Everything you needed to know about being a PI was here, except maybe how to stay awake.

      His head nodded, and he slipped into a dream in which he and Beryl Boddington were sliding naked down an iceberg, and he wasn’t at all pleased to have his descent interrupted by a voice saying, ‘Mr Sixsmith? Would you be Mr Sixsmith?’

      He opened his eyes and found he was being addressed by a Young Fair God.

      He was thirty at most, tall, boyishly handsome, with hair that shone pale gold against the darker gold of skin glowing with a proper