Born Guilty Read online

  Joe said, ‘I think Sally’s still in there.’

  ‘Oh God. I hope not,’ said Dalgety. At that moment Georgina Woodbine, who had stood miraculously unscathed and apparently unmoved as her gourmet buffet blizzarded by her, came running forward screaming in delayed hysterics and collapsed into Dalgety’s arms.

  On your own again, thought Joe, and stepped fearfully into the wrecked conservatory.

  His reward was instantaneous. A groan drew his gaze to the floor just inside the door. The girl lay there, eyes open, looking more frightened than hurt.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked in a bewildered voice. ‘I was coming out then I heard them all making speeches …’

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Joe. ‘Gas leak, maybe. Let’s have a look.’

  He ran his hands over her body, thinking such familiarity would probably have got him lynched in Louisiana or Cheltenham.

  ‘Any pain?’

  ‘No, nothing. Oh God, look at the mess. Georgie will be furious. Where is she? Is she OK?’

  ‘She’s fine. Let me help you out of here.’

  He raised her up and bearing most of her slight weight on his arm, he led her on to the terrace. Dalgety had similarly escorted Georgina to the lawn and was lowering her on to the grass. The sight seemed to reassure Sally who now pushed Joe aside and said, ‘Really, I’m fine. What’s happened to my friends?’

  Just at this moment the other members of the trio came hurrying up and Joe was able to leave Sally in their care with a clear conscience.

  At least, it was fairly clear. Ever since childhood he’d had a morally debilitating sense that he was at least partially responsible for any disaster which occurred in his vicinity. Perhaps Aunt Mirabelle’s habit of saying whenever she dropped a stitch or slopped her tea, ‘Now see what you’ve made me do, Joseph?’ had something to do with it. No way he’d caused this explosion, of course. On the other hand, he was here, and he had clapped …

  ‘Come on, make yourself useful,’ snapped Willie Woodbine, who’d got over his don’t panic routine. ‘Let’s check for fire.’

  You want to check for fire, you call the brigade, thought Joe. But he followed the superintendent into the house and didn’t protest when a small fire extinguisher was pushed into his hand.

  The source of the explosion was easy to find. It was the kitchen, which was a wreck. There was still a strong smell of gas in the air, confirming Joe’s initial diagnosis. There was a lot of smouldering debris but no actual fire.

  ‘Just had it done,’ said Woodbine. ‘Everything fire resistant, thank God. Look at that bloody thing! I told her it was useless, all style, no function. Built to leak!’

  He was referring to the huge hi-tech oven unit which even in ruins looked as if it had been built to explore the stars rather than cook the Sunday joint.

  ‘Must’ve been some leak,’ said Joe as Woodbine sprayed foam around.

  ‘Buy something that pricey, you don’t expect little holes,’ growled Woodbine. ‘Come on. Let’s have some work from you.’

  ‘I was just trying to save you having to replace this one,’ protested Joe, holding up his extinguisher.

  ‘Don’t be a nana. I won’t be replacing it. Insurance will. There you go. Always hated that thing.’

  Woodbine had sent a miraculously preserved tall blue coffee pot crashing to the ground with a well aimed jet.

  ‘At least check if that phone’s still working,’ he ordered.

  The wall phone was in an alcove formed by a tall cabinet and the fridge freezer. He got the dialling tone.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  ‘Fine,’ said Woodbine. ‘Dial Emergency. That’s 999.’

  ‘I know what it is,’ said Joe. As he dialled, his eyes ran down the kitchen wall calendar pinned alongside the phone. It was covered with scrawls indicating appointments, reminders, and messages in what was presumably Georgie’s elegant scrawl. One caught his eye partly because it was ringed, partly because it seemed an unlikely message, reminder or appointment for a policeman’s wife. Rob Vicar? He suddenly recalled he was supposed to be investigating Georgina Woodbine’s alleged double life. Perhaps it was a triple life!

  The phone answered.

  ‘Which service?’ enquired the operator.

  ‘Well, police,’ said Joe uncertainly.

  The policeman who came on didn’t seem much interested in the explosion, assuring Joe he should have got the fire brigade.

  ‘Give us your phone number and I’ll pass it on,’ he offered.

  ‘7829267,’ read Joe. Something about the number struck him as familiar which was odd as he’d never had occasion to ring Woodbine at home. Neither it seemed had the officer he was talking to, for there was none of the anticipated upgrade of urgency.

  ‘What’s happening?’ demanded Woodbine, returning from heaven knew what demolition exercise in a walk-in closet.

  Joe explained.

  ‘Give that here,’ snarled Woodbine. ‘Who the hell’s that?’

  Time to go, thought Joe, who didn’t like blood, not even at the other end of a phone line.

  He went down the passage which ran off the entrance hall. Not too much damage here. The arrangement of doors must have channelled most of the blast backwards towards the conservatory. The glass panel on the front door was cracked. Way Woodbine was going on, probably the whole thing would be off its hinges by the time the assessor got here. He opened the door and went out into the garden. You could tell this was a high-class neighbourhood. Anywhere else a bang like that would have had the neighbours thronging the streets in search of excitement. Nothing here to disturb the Sunday calm except a black and white mongrel trotting by in search of some pedigree pooch to ruin.

  ‘There you are,’ said Dora Calverley coming round the side of the house. ‘Unscathed, are you?’

  ‘Yeah. And you?’

  ‘Fine. And most of the damage back there is sartorial, I’m glad to say. This would be a rather good time to steal away, I think. Where’s your car?’

  ‘Came by taxi. But we can’t just bunk off …’

  ‘What else do you propose? Look for someone to give the kiss of life to? Or enquire politely of your hostess what time lunch will be served? Which reminds me, I’m starving. Come home with me, I’m sure I can rustle up a sandwich. And I’ve got a proposition I’d like to put to you.’

  ‘Yeah, but …’ said Joe, still feeling guilty at the thought of just sneaking off like this. ‘What about my jacket? I dropped it back there when the bang went off.’

  ‘Anything in it? Money? Credit cards?’

  ‘No,’ admitted Joe, who always carried what little he had in his back pocket.

  ‘Then you’re better off leaving it and claiming off Edgar’s insurance. Pity you couldn’t dump the trousers too.’

  This sounded dishonest to Joe, moulded in the Mirabelle school of morality. On the other hand, he was pretty peckish.

  He said, ‘This sandwich won’t have anything salmony in it, will it?’

  ‘Not likely,’ laughed Mrs Calverley.

  ‘Then let’s go,’ said Joe.

  On their way down the Heights, they met the emergency services coming up.

  ‘Bet you don’t get service like that on the Rasselas Estate,’ said Mrs Calverley.

  ‘Don’t have too many police superintendents living there either,’ said Joe.

  It wasn’t till fifteen silent minutes on that his detective software turned up the menu containing the question he should have responded with. By this time they were somewhere to the north east of the town, belting along a narrow country road.

  Joe said, ‘How come you know I live on Rasselas?’

  The woman suddenly swung the wheel violently in what seemed at first a suicidal desire to drive them straight into a hedge. But at the last minute the branches parted in a narrow opening through which they plunged into a long straight green lane.

  ‘I asked a few questions,’ said Mrs Calverley. ‘Like to know who I’m hiring.’


  Ahead the lane ended in what had presumably been a gateway. There was no gate now but an ancient rusty cattle grid between two massive columns, one of which had slipped out of the vertical and teetered drunkenly towards the other. It did not seem possible to Joe that there was room for the Range Rover either vertically or laterally, but Mrs Calverley showed no inclination to decrease speed.

  Joe closed his eyes. Mirabelle would have been glad to hear the fervour of his prayer. When he opened them again, quite ready for heaven, he found they were racing at undiminished speed up an unevenly gravelled drive towards a tall black house.

  ‘Hire for what?’ said Joe aiming at aplomb.

  ‘Let’s have a drink first,’ she said. ‘You look like you need it. Welcome to Hoot Hall.’

  It wasn’t in fact a very welcoming place. Maybe once it had been, with hordes of servants scooting around serving cocktails while far below relays of peasants stoked the boilers. Heat was of the essence with walls thicker than an Immigration officer’s skin. But the days of peasant stokers were long gone and in the high-ceilinged drawing room he was led into, damp was flaking the paint and bubbling the paper and the air was tinged with a miasma of swamp. Joe sat gingerly on the edge of an ancient sofa and looked up into the quizzical brown eyes of a young Jack-the-lad smiling at him from an ornate gilt frame hung above the empty fireplace.

  ‘Dickie,’ said Mrs C. to his unasked question. ‘My late husband, painted by a fond student when he still had hair and charm.’

  ‘Student …?’

  ‘He taught at the Varsity till circumstances and the lure of colonial riches persuaded him to leave.’

  She spoke with a faintly amused cynicism which mocked both the dead man and her own, by implication, disappointed expectations. He looked once more at Dickie Calverley, this time with sympathy. Mrs C. was not a woman he would care to disappoint. So softly, softly …

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said, shivering. ‘Just because the job I’ve got for you involves dead bodies, there’s no need for us to suffer mortuary conditions, is there?’

  She led him to a cavernous kitchen where an Aga took some of the chill off the air. Here she produced a bottle of Scotch and a couple of glasses which she filled.

  ‘Health,’ she said, knocking hers back. ‘Cheese OK for your sandwich?’

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘This job …’

  ‘It’s that boy in the box,’ she said, sawing at a loaf of bread which seemed to have the texture of an oak log. ‘As I said, I can’t get him out of my mind. Ah, that sounds like Fred.’

  Her ears were better than his. He had no sense of anyone approaching till the back door was suddenly thrown open and a young man entered. He was seventeen or eighteen, dressed in a long waxed jacket and carrying a shotgun. He had a narrow, unhealthily pale face, his mother’s dark blue eyes and long brownish hair which the light wind had wrapped around his neck.

  Hair colour and skin tone apart perhaps, Joe could see no resemblance between him and the boy in the box, but mothers, he knew, see with different eyes.

  ‘This is my son, Fred,’ she said. ‘Fred, this is Mr Sixsmith.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ said the youth indifferently.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Joe.

  ‘Where’ve you been, dear?’ asked his mother.

  ‘Potting a few crows,’ said the youth. ‘Black bastards get everywhere this time of year. I’m off for a shower, now. Hope there’s some hot water.’

  He strolled away whistling. Joe watched and waited to see if his mother would try to dilute his rudeness. She didn’t.

  Shoot, thought Joe magnanimously. Everyone needs someone to love them, even little twerps like that.

  Even boys found dead in boxes.

  ‘What’s the deal?’ he said.

  ‘I’d like you to find out who he is, who he was.’

  ‘But the police …’

  ‘They’re doing nothing!’ she exclaimed, emphasizing her point by banging a lump of cheese on the table with a crash that suggested it came from the same tree as the bread. ‘Edgar Woodbine says there’s nothing to go on. The boy had nothing on him, his prints aren’t on record, there’s no missing person description which fits. They’re ready to bury him and forget him. Worse, I get the impression that they don’t really want to find anything that might help. More trouble than it’s worth.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Joe, ‘but if the police can’t help, I don’t see what I can do …’

  ‘Do you always turn away business like this?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t take money for sitting on my thumb,’ he said.

  ‘That does you credit, though it can’t do much for your credit,’ she said. ‘But you must have channels the police can’t use.’

  ‘There’s still got to be a starting point,’ he replied.

  ‘How about the man you disturbed? What do you think he was up to? Mouth to mouth resuscitation?’

  ‘Checking out if there was anything worth lifting is my guess,’ said Joe.

  ‘And if he found something, a wallet say, couldn’t there have been some pointer to the boy’s identity in it?’

  ‘Yeah, could be,’ said Joe, thinking, I should have thought of that! Presumably the cops had. He went on. ‘But won’t the police …?’

  ‘They say the description you gave could fit almost anyone between the ages of thirteen and thirty.’

  ‘I only got a glimpse,’ protested Joe. ‘You saw as much as I did.’

  ‘But I don’t have a trained eye,’ she said. ‘Look, isn’t it worth a try? A few hours nosing around? Suppose I give you a cheque for a hundred, and when that’s finished, you let me know?’

  He hesitated a moment longer, then thought, what the shoot am I doing? She needs the gesture, I need the cash.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll give it a go. On one condition.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I don’t have to eat that sandwich,’ said Joe Sixsmith.

  11

  That same Sunday evening, Joe was watching a thriller in which the detective had been beaten, shot, tortured and lost his wife, but still looked set to get everything right, when the phone rang.

  It was Aunt Mirabelle.

  ‘Joseph, someone’s been telling me you almost got yourself killed. Thought I might see you at the chapel this evening after an experience like that.’

  ‘Yeah, well, thought I’d better take it easy …’

  ‘That’s your trouble. Taking things far too easy for your own good,’ she said sternly. ‘I spoke to Rev. Pot about you. He wants to see you first thing tomorrow. That means before nine. You be there!’

  Joe returned to his film just in time to see the detective having his clothes stripped off by a whore with a heart of gold.

  ‘I wish,’ he said enviously. But as the music swelled and the bodies writhed, his mind drifted off in contemplation of how Mirabelle could be pissed off with him for simultaneously putting his life at risk and taking things easy.

  ‘Women, eh, Whitey?’ he said. ‘No problem thinking two, three different things at the same time.’

  The cat gave him the one-eyed look which said this was rich coming from someone who found it hard to think one different thing at the same time, then went back to sleep.

  Joe, who’d had a hard day, was not long in following his example.

  Next morning he overslept by half an hour. Monday was laundry day so he shoved his dirty linen in a pillow case, made do (much to Whitey’s distress) with a cold sausage sarnie for breakfast, and on the dot of nine he pushed open the doors of the Boyling Corner Chapel. The Reverend Percy Potemkin, known as Rev. Pot wherever in South Beds the Word of the Lord was heard in sermon or in song, was tidying up.

  ‘What’s this, Joseph?’ he said. ‘You know I don’t do prodigals till after lunch.’

  ‘Mirabelle said you wanted to see me urgent, Rev.,’ said Joe.

  ‘Wanted is fanciful,’ said Rev. Pot climbing on a stepladder to take the hymn numbers
off the board. ‘Urgent is fiction. Here, hold this thing for me. It shakes like a soul in torment.’

  ‘What’s Auntie been saying, Rev.?’ asked Joe, steadying the ladder.

  ‘She says you’re wasting your time in a nothing job for which you’ve got no talent anyway. Now, I tend to agree with her. On the other hand, I told her, the boy is happy. Positive capability he may not have, but negative capability he seems to have got in plenty.’

  ‘Is that good?’ asked Joe cautiously.

  ‘Well, it means you may not have much idea what you’re doing, but you’re not going to let it fret you into a breakdown.’

  This negative capability sounded OK to Joe, like that other ‘ity’ some old lady had laid on him, what was it …? Serendipity. Finding things out by accident. Except of course if a man keeps on being in the right place at the right time, who’s to say it’s always an accident?

  ‘So what’s the message, Rev.?’ he asked.

  ‘From me? Avoid mixed drinks and carnal thoughts. Never be late for rehearsals. And remember the eleventh commandment.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Joe.

  ‘It’s the one says, honour your auntie and keep her off your pastor’s back; didn’t you learn anything at Sunday School?’

  ‘Praise the Lord. Ye heavens adore him,’ said Joe.

  ‘Joseph, you’re not having a revelation, I hope?’ said Rev. Pot. ‘I can’t stomach revelations before I’ve had my coffee.’

  ‘No, it’s hymn number 292,’ said Joe, looking up at the one remaining number on the hymn board.

  ‘So it is,’ said Rev. Pot, removing it. ‘And if we’d had the pleasure of your company last night we could have enjoyed hearing that beery baritone of yours singing it. Take heed, Joe. One day you will have a revelation, and you may not much care for what is revealed. You’d better believe it.’

  ‘Oh I do, I do,’ said Joe fervently. And he did, he did. For he’d already had it and, like Rev. Pot said, he didn’t much like it.

  292, the hymn number, was also the readable remnant of the number inked on the dead boy’s hand and was also the centre of Willie Woodbine’s telephone number. 7829267. So what? It meant nothing. And it was just his stupid imagination that was now confirming that the other almost invisible digits on the dead boy’s thumb were 78 and 67. Except, of course, as was often pointed out to him by his detractors, he didn’t have a stupid imagination. And also, as had been pointed out by Mrs C., Willie Woodbine seemed not only uninterested in but positively opposed to efforts to discover the dead boy’s identity …