Born Guilty Page 4

  5

  Luton on a bright autumn morning, with the impartial sun gilding the tower of St Monkey’s, the dome of the Sikh temple, and the Clint Eastwood inflatable above Dirty Harry’s, was not a bad place to be, but Joe felt little of his customary filial pride as he drove to the office.

  ‘Whitey,’ he said, ‘there has to be something better than investigating things I don’t want to investigate for clients who ain’t going to pay. What say we run away to sea?’

  The cat sleeping on the passenger seat opened the eye in the white eye patch which, luckily or unluckily depending where you got your hangups, stopped him from being completely black, and fixed Joe with a gaze which said, you’re on your own, sailor!

  Maybe I set my sights too high, thought Joe. Maybe if I devoted myself to begging packets of cheese and onion crisps and ashtrays full of beer down the Glit, I’d be happy too.

  Whitey yawned widely. The message was clear. You don’t have the talent for it. Stick to what you know.

  A little while later they arrived at the office which was housed in the kind of building where small businesses went to die.

  Joe picked up his mail. It was junk except for Pius Thoughts, the journal of PIU, the Private Investigators’ Union. Ignoring the tiny lift which Whitey, who valued his skin above rubies, refused to enter, he laboured upstairs after the cat. In the office, he went through the ritual of checking his answerphone and his desk diary. No calls, no appointments. He wrote Galina Hacker 12.30 in the diary. It looked better, but he preferred the blank page.

  Next he filled his kettle in the tiny washroom, plugged it into the skirting board socket and nudged it on with his foot. While it boiled he improved the shining hour by cleaning out Whitey’s litter tray, a job too long postponed. The cat watched with the idle interest of a man in a bus queue watching a navvy dig a hole. Then, when Joe had finished, he stepped daintily on to the pristine litter and crapped copiously.

  ‘Why do you always do that?’ demanded Joe. ‘Time for that is before I clean things up.’

  Whitey gave him a look which wondered how an intelligent being, or even a human, could imagine he was going to use a soiled tray, jumped into the bottom desk drawer and went to sleep. Joe flung the windows open, cleaned the tray again, made a pot of tea, and settled down in his chair with Pius Thoughts. There was an article on ‘Combating Stake-Out Fatigue Syndrome’ which looked interesting. He got through two paragraphs and fell asleep.

  He was awoken by Aunt Mirabelle’s voice and looked around for her in disorientated panic till he realized he’d forgotten to turn off his answerphone.

  ‘I know you’re there, Joseph. I can feel it,’ she was declaiming. ‘So you come out from behind this ungodly machine and speak to me plain.’

  There was no point in pretending. He picked up the phone.

  ‘Morning, Auntie,’ he said.

  ‘Good morning to you, Joseph. How long is it since you seen Beryl?’

  ‘Saw her last night at the rehearsal, remember?’

  ‘Not likely to forget, the things you got up to, am I?’ retorted Mirabelle. ‘I mean, seen to talk to, take out? You’ve been neglecting that girl.’

  ‘Auntie, what’s to neglect? Beryl and me’s just friends, not a couple, courting or anything like that …’

  ‘Courting? You don’t know the meaning of the word! But that’s no reason not to be polite and pass the time of day instead of sneaking off to that sin-hole of yours to meet that trollop you’re making a fool of yourself with!’

  He’d been right. Even in the Glit, Mirabelle’s agents kept their eternal vigil.

  ‘Auntie, the Glit’s a pub, the girl’s a client …’

  ‘You her client, more likely! Joseph, you stick with Beryl. If it’s little Desmond who bothers you, he’s a nice kid and once you get two, three more of your own, you’ll hardly notice him!’

  ‘Auntie, I’ve got to go out. On business …’

  ‘Business? What business? Only business you and that cat have got is lying around all day seeing who can sleep the longest. Tell you what. You can pick me up, drive me to rehearsal tonight. Give me a chance to have a good close talk without you running off somewhere.’

  Joe desperately tried to think of an acceptable excuse.

  ‘Auntie, I’m not sure I can make it tonight …’

  He was saved the agony of invention by Mirabelle’s outrage.

  ‘You not thinking of missing rehearsal, I hope, Joseph? That voice of yours gets so rough from all that profane singing you do down that hellhole, it needs all the rehearsing it can get!’

  ‘Yes, Auntie,’ said Joe meekly. ‘I’ll pick you up. Bye.’

  He put the phone down and cleared his throat and tried a couple of notes. That wasn’t so bad, he thought. What did she mean, rough? He had a tape of The Creation in his radio cassette and he switched it on now. At first he only joined in the baritone line of the choruses, then he thought, guy who’s modest when he’s by himself must be really stuck up! And he started joining in the male solos too. When he got to Uriel’s words – with beauty, courage, strength adorned, to heaven he stands erect and tall, a man – an inbuilt sense of irony made him break into the little soft shoe shuffle which had them beating the tables at the Glit on Karaoke Nite.

  He wondered which would offend Mirabelle more – the outrage to religion or to music. Himself, he felt they were both big enough to take anything he could throw at them. But when he reached the partner for him formed, a woman fair and graceful spouse, his thoughts turned to Mirabelle’s attempts to marry him off, and to Beryl Boddington.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t like her. In fact, of all Mirabelle’s candidates for his hand, she was way ahead of the field. Not that this meant much when you considered many of the others didn’t even make it out of the starting gate!

  Thing was that Mirabelle’s hopes for his happiness, plus her real affection for him, plus her family pride, didn’t combine to dull her sense of reality.

  ‘Joe’s the kind of catch a one-armed woman might be glad to get a hold of,’ she opined to her coven of confidantes.

  And whenever a woman came her way who seemed in need of a man and not well placed to be choosy, Mirabelle pounced.

  Beryl’s ‘disability’ in Mirabelle’s eyes was the existence of a young son, Desmond, without benefit of clergy. In Joe’s eyes her only ‘disability’ was being elected by Mirabelle which, coupled with his own ‘disability’ of having got pretty near forty without getting caught, made him naturally wary.

  ‘Getting caught’ was, he knew, a deplorably politically incorrect way of looking at marriage, but it had been the received wisdom at Robco Engineering where he’d spent the first twenty years of his working life, and that was an indoctrination harder to throw off than a Jesuit education.

  To be fair, Beryl had shown little sign that she was interested in getting caught either, and so far their occasional dates had ended with nothing more than the swooning softness of a good night kiss, leaving him to soothe his frustration with the thought that once more he’d pulled back from the brink. Except of course there was no escaping the fact that it was her push rather than his pull which kept him from falling!

  Nevertheless, a relationship undoubtedly existed. He tried to imagine how he’d feel if Beryl took up with some other fellow, found he didn’t care for the feeling, so switched it off.

  Sometimes it wasn’t such a bad thing not having one of those creative minds.

  Galina was dead on time. As soon as he saw her Joe felt guilty. Last night he’d had no compunction about asking her to come to the office. But back in her building society mode she was a very different kettle of fish from the exotic alien of the Glit, and he came over all avuncular.

  Gallie wasn’t having any of that, however.

  She refused a cup of tea, settled down with the apple and low fat yoghurt she’d brought with her for lunch, and said, ‘OK, I’ve not got much time. This operative of yours find out anything?’

 
‘Something,’ said Joe.

  Omitting any reference to Piers or Butcher, he told her about the lists.

  She listened intently, her yoghurt ignored. Her face gave nothing away but Joe could feel the pain inside. She must have been hoping even more than him for an official blank.

  ‘So what’s it all mean, Mr Sixsmith?’ she asked.

  ‘My operative reckons the third list’s just there to make the numbers up,’ said Joe.

  ‘Why should anyone want to do that?’

  ‘It’s the civil service mind,’ he said. ‘Everything by threes.’

  ‘So there’s nothing to worry about?’

  He was desperate to give her reassurance but knew he mustn’t go further than the facts warranted. He’d fallen into that trap before.

  ‘We can’t get away from the fact someone’s asking questions,’ he said. ‘But there’s still nothing to say for sure it’s got anything to do with these lists.’

  It was the best he could do but he could see it was far from enough.

  ‘Just coincidence, you mean?’ she said doubtfully.

  ‘It happens,’ he said. ‘And even if it is connected, well, if there’s nothing to find out, then this guy will just give up and go back and say so.’

  ‘If?’

  Building society mode or exotic alien, the look she was fixing him with was cold enough to kill.

  You stupid git! Joe accused himself. Putting up the possibility that all her certainties are calculated to hide.

  He played dumb. It wasn’t difficult.

  ‘Yeah, you know, there’s no mileage in these guys making something up. He probably found out day one there was nothing to find and he’s been spinning it out a bit for expenses. He could be back in Whitehall now wondering who to bother next.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I don’t think so, Mr Sixsmith,’ she said. ‘I think he’s still around and he’ll keep on digging and digging till something shows up. I’ve read about these people. They don’t ever give up.’

  Joe looked at her with a heart-squeezing pity he didn’t dare show. It was herself she was talking about as much as the nosey stranger. Apart from lying in permanent ambush, Joe didn’t have a clue how he might get a line on him or what he could do if he did. But that didn’t matter. The real focal point of all this trouble was old Taras and the way he was reacting. That was where the doubt whose existence was too terrible to admit had started.

  He said, ‘It might help if I could get into the club, socially, I mean. Chat to Mrs Vansovich without making her curious.’

  ‘That friend who brought you there last time …’

  ‘A client, rewarding me with a drink,’ said Joe. ‘If I ask him to invite me back, that would really make him suspicious.’

  She frowned, then her face cleared.

  ‘There’s a family night day after tomorrow. Mum’s told Grandda he may not feel like going out, but he’s jolly well going to that! People often bring friends. I can invite you.’

  ‘As a friend?’ said Joe, thinking how most parents he knew would react to their little girl bringing home a ‘friend’ who was black, balding, and twice her age.

  ‘Why not? You are, aren’t you? Besides, people do turns. You’re a singer. Everyone down the Glit thinks you’re great. There you are. A performer, an important customer from the society, and a friend! Dead natural I should invite you, isn’t it?’

  She spoke with utter conviction. Oh the youth of the heart, thought Joe. All that innocence which loving parents think is at risk when their daughters go out into the world and start painting their faces and flashing their flesh. But guilt, like charity, begins at home. It’s in the genes. It’s an hereditary disease.

  ‘Yeah, dead natural,’ smiled Joe.

  6

  Aunt Mirabelle’s favourite reading in the Good Book was the Lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah, and she had his style off to a ‘t’. On their way to St Monkey’s that night, Joe could not but admire the way in which his lousy job, his squalid lifestyle, and his terrible driving, were woven into a seamless whole.

  The flow didn’t halt till the car did in St Monkey’s Square.

  ‘What you doing?’ demanded Mirabelle.

  ‘I’m going to drop you here then go find somewhere to park,’ he explained.

  ‘What’s wrong with that parking place back of the church?’

  ‘The Cloisters? I think that’s reserved for special permits.’

  ‘And I’m not special? You drive round there, Joseph. Good Baptist’s more special than a good Anglican any day!’

  There was one space left. As Joe backed in, the Visigothic verger appeared, wearing an expression that fell a furlong or so short of Christian welcome. But when Mirabelle eased her bulk out of the car and greeted him with a hearty ‘Good evening, brother!’ he remembered urgent business elsewhere.

  Pity he hadn’t been so conscientious the previous night, thought Joe. If the boy in the box had been found a couple of hours earlier, there might have been time to save him.

  No sign of Mrs Calverley’s Range Rover tonight. Maybe her peep over the edge had dulled her appetite for eavesdropping on The Creation. He guessed she might have a reputation for toughness, but last night’s experience had visibly upset her.

  The rehearsal went fairly well. As he sang, Joe studied the clarinettists and tried to guess which of the two young women was Mavis Dalgety’s ex-friend, Sally Eaglesfield. He settled for the smaller, darker girl who studied her music with unblinking intensity as though fearful it might blow away. He didn’t know what instrument Willie Woodbine’s wife played and as the Sinfonia was an equal opportunities orchestra with women puffing and banging and scraping everywhere, there wasn’t much hope of picking her out. Maybe the girl he thought was Sally would identify her by making a beeline for her after the rehearsal was over.

  He was distracted from this bit of great detectivery by Mirabelle, who materialized at his side while the last Amen was still trembling on the air. He guessed the little side door was probably nailed up too.

  ‘Now look who’s there,’ she exclaimed in a tone of surprise that rang as false as a cracked bell. ‘Beryl. We were just talking about you.’

  ‘Hi, Mirabelle. Hi, Joe. Sorry, can’t stop to talk. I’m on my way to work.’

  She was a nurse at the Royal Infirmary and, cap apart, was already kitted out in her uniform.

  Mirabelle said, ‘Joseph was just saying he’d run you there, weren’t you, Joseph? All them attacks, you don’t want to be walking round there by yourself.’

  There’d been a couple of recent incidents with a flasher in the hospital grounds and the police were advising extra caution till the intruder was caught.

  ‘Well, that’s very kind of you, Joe …’

  ‘No trouble at all,’ assured Mirabelle. ‘Now excuse me, I want a word with Rev. Pot.’

  She moved off and Joe found Beryl regarding him quizzically. He returned the look with pleasure. She was … he sought for the right word and all he could come up with was sturdy. This was why he had to invent answers for crossword puzzles and make up his own clues to fit them. On the other hand, what was wrong with sturdy when it expressed not just a physical but a spiritual characteristic? Strong, self-reliant, dependable, trustworthy …

  ‘What are you staring at, Joe?’ she asked.

  ‘You. You look great,’ he said. Smooth talker he might not be, but he knew better than to offer sturdy as a compliment. Not that sturdiness meant lack of shape. And those wide brown eyes and full red lips …

  The full red lips opened to show strong white teeth in a moist pink mouth as she yawned.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Nothing to do with you.’

  He looked even more closely at her and saw that as well as sturdy and great she looked tired.

  ‘You getting any sleep?’ he asked.

  ‘Surely. Between getting home in the morning, doing the chores, and picking Desmond up from school at three, I usually manage to snatch a
couple of minutes,’ she laughed. ‘Are you serious about this lift?’

  He led her out to the Cloisters.

  ‘Going up in the world, aren’t we?’ she mocked. ‘I thought only the nobs got to park here?’

  ‘I’m Tin Can’s token PI,’ said Joe.

  She laughed. He liked making her laugh.

  In the car he said, ‘You so tired, why don’t you let your sister pick Desmond up?’

  ‘Already she gives him his breakfast, drops him off at school. If I’m not there to pick him up, he’s going to start thinking I’m his auntie, Lucy’s his ma.’

  ‘At least you could duck the odd rehearsal till you’re off nights.’

  She let out a gasp of mock horror.

  ‘You want Rev. Pot to nail me to his penitent stool? No, the singing’s no sweat. In fact, when I hear that music and open my mouth, it’s about the only time I stop feeling tired. Gives you a bigger hit than ganja, don’t you feel that, Joe?’

  ‘You wouldn’t expect a clean-living boy to know anything about that, would you?’ said Joe.

  ‘This the same clean-living boy who’s running around with the Mutant from Planet X?’

  ‘Beryl, let me tell you about Galina …’

  ‘Joe, it’s OK,’ she said. ‘I’m only joking. It’s none of my business. Just like what’s mine is none of yours, OK? This’ll do.’

  Obediently he stopped the car and she was out of the door before he realized they weren’t at the Infirmary’s main gate but at a side entrance which ran between the path labs and research blocks. Beyond these buildings she could either follow the service road to the main block or take a tree-shaded pathway which curved through the grounds to the nursing wards, cutting off several miles of corridor.

  He didn’t doubt which way she’d go, and he didn’t doubt which way Mirabelle would go if she heard he’d let Beryl loose unaccompanied.

  ‘Hold on!’ cried Joe.

  From beneath his seat he took a heavy steel spanner about a foot long, with tape bound around the handle to provide a firmer grip. This had been a present from Merv Golightly whose constant companion in his taxi was a monstrous lug wrench called Percy. The mere sight of Merv’s lanky figure twirling Percy like a conductor’s baton was usually enough to subdue most troublemakers. In Joe’s line of business, a similar aid was very necessary, opined Merv, and Little Perce had been the result. Joe, who found violence either coming from him or aimed at him very scary, had never found occasion to use it. But there wasn’t much point offering himself as Beryl’s defender if all his defence consisted of was warding off blows with his head.