Born Guilty Page 9

  For a moment Joe felt sick to his stomach, but the old negative ‘ity’ soon got to work and shoved the troublesome revelation into a limbo file, and he was able to sing The heavens are telling the glory of God as he drove on to the office to see what else this unpredictable world might have in store for him.

  What it had was a ginger-headed young man in a lilac anorak leaning up against his office door.

  ‘Joe Sixsmith?’ he said. ‘Hi, I’m the Bugle’s crime reporter.’

  ‘No, you’re not,’ said Joe. ‘Not unless you’ve had a hair graft and lost forty pounds.’

  ‘What? Oh, you mean Tony Sloppe? No, I’m Tony’s assistant. Well, not assistant exactly. I do most things on the paper, but I’m hoping to make crime my speciality and Tony lets me help out. Can we talk?’

  There was an engaging frankness about the young man which, coupled with the kind of Scots accent which sells whisky rather than threatens mayhem, had Joe beginning to agree before he recalled the first rule of his profession: Trust God, and only on Sundays.

  ‘You got ID?’ he asked.

  ‘No!’ said the young man indignantly. ‘Oh, sorry. You mean identification. Hang about.’

  He started a search of his multi-pocketed anorak which involved unfastening half a dozen zips before he found the right compartment.

  ‘Here,’ he said triumphantly, producing a press card in the name of Duncan Docherty. ‘My friends call me Dunk.’

  ‘Come inside, Mr Docherty,’ said Joe.

  He took his seat and put on his best steely expression but the effect was spoilt by Whitey rubbing up against Docherty’s legs and purring like this was love at first sight. The young man looked immensely flattered as he stooped to stroke him.

  ‘Bet he does this to everyone, eh?’ he said, inviting the disclaimer which would make him special.

  ‘You got your lunch with you? Cold pork sarnies maybe?’

  Docherty’s hand flew to a bulge in his anorak.

  ‘Hey, that’s real Sherlock Holmes stuff,’ he said admiringly.

  ‘No trick,’ said Joe. ‘Whitey can smell a packed lunch at two hundred metres.’

  Secretly he felt rather pleased about the pork. Tesco’s had been pushing rolled shoulder, fifty pence off, on Friday, and he’d guessed that most of Luton’s landladies would be serving it up as the traditional Sunday roast.

  ‘So what can I do for you?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s about this explosion up at Superintendent Woodbine’s house yesterday. You were there, right?’

  ‘What makes you think that?’ asked Joe.

  ‘We’ve got our sources,’ said Docherty smugly. ‘Now, what did you make of the explosion, Mr Sixsmith?’

  Joe thought a moment, then said, ‘Bang!’

  ‘Yeah, funny. But what do you think caused it?’

  ‘You talked to Mr Woodbine yet?’

  ‘Tried, but couldn’t get near him,’ said the youth. ‘There’s an official handout says it was a gas leak.’

  ‘So what’s the problem?’ said Joe.

  ‘First thing you learn in this job is, always look beyond the official statements,’ said Docherty confidently.

  ‘That’s the first thing, is it?’ said Joe. ‘When do you get on to the second?’

  The young man looked hurt.

  ‘I’m just trying to get at the truth,’ he protested.

  ‘So how come you’re asking me when there’s all those other guests?’ demanded Joe.

  ‘Well, they’re all police brass and establishment figures,’ explained the youth. ‘You’re different, sort of, well, different. And with your training and experience, if it was a terrorist attack, you’d be the one most likely to spot it.’

  Joe wanted to laugh but he’d been brought up not to tread on people’s susceptibilities long before this crazy political correctness stuff made rudeness a hanging offence.

  He opened his mouth to disabuse the boy but instead he said, ‘The Cally!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I bet you’re a member of the Cally.’

  Back in the sixties when MacMurdos, the Kilmarnock shoemakers (By Appointment, Cordwainers to the Queen), had built their new factory in Luton, presumably to be a bit nearer to the royal feet, there had been a large influx of Scottish workers, partly for their expertise, partly because in those long past, never-had-it-so-good days, there was little surplus workforce in the south east. Like all good Celtic exiles they had felt the need of a place to be properly homesick in, and thus the Caledonian Club had been formed. Thirty years on, its race base had spread, and Joe’s rendition of ‘My Luve is like a Red Red Rose’ last Burns Night had brought cheers and tears in equal floods. But it never lost its basic Scottishness and was the first place any new arrivals from the North headed for.

  ‘Aye, sure I am.’

  ‘And Police Constable Sandy Mackay, I bet he’s a member too.’

  He saw he’d hit the bull. The cold pork and now this. Maybe he’d cracked this deduction business at last!

  ‘Yes, the name’s familiar …’ said Docherty trying to recover ground.

  ‘Come on,’ said Joe. ‘First thing you’d do when you got this half-baked notion in your head was contact your police contact, i.e. Constable Mackay, and ask him if he’d heard anything funny. And he said, no, looks like a gas leak, but I do happen to know that this weird PI fellow was at the party, so he might be a good bet to check it out with. Right?’

  ‘Yes, all right. Something like that. So if there was anything …’

  ‘Does your editor know you’re groping around asking questions like these? Or Tony Sloppe?’

  ‘No. It was my own idea …’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ said Joe. ‘It was a gas leak. I was there. I saw the kitchen. Nothing suspicious …’

  Except that how many gas taps did you need turned on for a cold buffet? A picture of the mangled oven console had flashed across his mind, and on it all the taps … He shook his head. Forget it. Overactive imagination disease must be contagious.

  He concluded, ‘… and if you’re going to start getting up Willie Woodbine’s nose, you could end up being sneezed all the way back to Scotland. Fancy a cup of tea?’

  It wasn’t just his natural hospitableness which made him put the kettle on. Joe would never have admitted to being superstitious but he knew beyond doubt that existence was like a huge Persian carpet. Looked at from close up, your little square might just seem a mess, but stand back far enough and you’d see for sure it was all one carefully patterned weave. Trouble was, like a photographer on a cliff, it was hard to get the right focus without falling off. But God was good and gave you little nudges, like things going in threes. He’d had the pork and the Cally. The third was due. It had something to do with Dunk Docherty, so make the tea and wait for inspiration.

  ‘Take sugar?’

  ‘No, it’s bad for you.’

  ‘You sure are full of stupid ideas,’ laughed Joe. ‘Your body’s a dynamo, needs all the energy it can get to generate electricity for the brain.’

  ‘Is that so? Maybe that’s why I’m dogsbody on the Bugle instead of editor of The Times,’ grinned Docherty.

  He had a nice grin. In fact he was a very good looking boy, despite a certain puffiness about the nose …

  Oh shoot! thought Joe. Here it was. Number three.

  Galina Hacker’s last description of the man bothering her granddad had included the details, red hair, busted nose, lilac jacket, and big feet. He threw a glance at Docherty’s feet. Even allowing for the magnifying properties of modern trainers, these looked like at least elevens.

  Now, Joe, he admonished himself. Don’t go rushing at this thing. It all fits, sure – nosey (ha ha) young reporter looking to make a name for himself, right description and all – but how many sure things have you seen nosedive at the final fence? So go easy, be subtle.

  Whitey looked up from his saucer of very sweet tea and made a noise which an anthropomorphist might have interpreted as a disbe
lieving groan.

  ‘Is your cat OK?’ asked Docherty anxiously.

  ‘Yeah. He just bolts his food. I mean, your food. Gets dyspepsia. You a boxer or something, Dunk?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Just you look like you do a bit of fighting. You know, the nose.’

  ‘Hey, you’re doing it again, this Sherlock thing,’ said Docherty admiringly. ‘I think Tony Sloppe’s got you figured all wrong.’

  Joe knew better than to enquire how Sloppe had characterized his detective abilities.

  He said, ‘So you do a bit of boxing then?’

  ‘No, but I’m thinking of taking it up. You need to be able to take care of yourself in our game,’ said the youngster disconsolately. ‘Ask a few polite questions and some folk are more ready to give you a knuckle sandwich than a nice cup of tea.’

  He raised his cup in acknowledgement of Joe’s humanity.

  ‘So what happened?’ asked Joe, offering his last Kit Kat and feeling guiltily relieved when the reporter refused it.

  ‘I had this idea for a piece about homelessness, the bottom end I mean, people sleeping rough, that sort of thing. And there’s a growing problem here, you know. You get the local input, plus, as the Smoke gets more crowded, a lot of folk are spreading out into surrounding centres where compassion fatigue hasn’t reached such a level and there’s still some hope of making a living begging …’

  He was getting launched into his proposed article. Joe didn’t have time to be rehearsed on, so he interrupted, ‘So you got duffed up for your trouble?’

  ‘Aye, that’s right. I was just asking this guy in the park a few questions and suddenly he busts my nose. Just like that. Made me feel homesick for Cowdenbeath, I tell you.’

  Joe, still not able to see a way of bringing up Taras Kovalko without arousing suspicion, was suddenly struck by another idea.

  ‘Did you finish this piece?’

  ‘Not yet. A couple of other things came up, so I put it on the back burner.’

  ‘But you must have made a few contacts.’

  ‘As well as fists, you mean? Yes, I suppose so. Why?’

  ‘You heard about the dead kid they found in the box outside St Monkey’s?’

  ‘Aye. I did the story. Could have been OK too, but the editor didn’t care for the picture.’

  ‘A picture? You mean you’ve got a photo?’

  ‘Aye, one of the snaps the polis took. Only he looks a wee bit dead on it and my editor says this is a family paper, we don’t have pictures of corpses in it.’

  ‘Well, that could be very useful,’ said Joe. ‘You see, Dunk, I want to find out who this kid was.’

  ‘Why so?’

  Joe saw no reason to mention Mrs C. so he said, ‘It was me who found him. I feel sort of responsible.’

  ‘You found him? Hey, you don’t need to advertise, do you? Work just comes looking for you!’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it,’ said Joe. ‘Now, there was no ID on him, but I saw someone running away from the box. Don’t go misty eyed, he was long dead. But this guy might have lifted whatever he had in his pockets. Find him and maybe we can get a lead to the boy’s identity.’

  ‘And you’d like to use my contacts?’ said Docherty, making it sound like he ran the Luton Mafia. ‘So what’s in it for me?’

  ‘Could be a story.’

  ‘Dead youth named? Real Pulitzer stuff,’ he scoffed.

  ‘And I’d owe you a favour,’ said Joe. ‘If there was anything you’re working on where an extra pair of hands or a new face might come in useful …’

  He said a little prayer and waited.

  ‘Well, there might be,’ said the reporter. ‘But you’d need to keep it under your hat till I’m ready to publish.’

  ‘My first duty’s always to the client,’ said Joe, jesuheritically as Aunt Mirabelle liked to classify any form of misleading speech.

  ‘OK,’ said Dunk Docherty, leaning forward and lowering his voice. ‘There’s a chance, just a chance, I may be on the track of a World War Two concentration camp guard who settled down here in Luton.’

  ‘Now that,’ said Joe, ‘is really amazing.’

  12

  It wasn’t all that amazing actually.

  The leaked lists referred to by Piers, the Wet Wykehamist, had reached among others the desk of an old mate of Tony Sloppe’s on the Sun. His attention was naturally focused on the short ‘A’ list. His assistants were delegated to do some deep checking of likely names on List ‘B’. And the ‘C’ list was relegated to a bottom drawer. Sloppe, hearing of the investigation and wanting to know if there was anything in it for him, was told that the only name in his area was on the ‘C’ list. Deciding it wasn’t worth wasting his own precious time upon, he gave it to the eager beaver, Dunk Docherty.

  Dunk had plugged into the Gaelic mainframe which he confidently asserted controlled most of the English media.

  A friend working for Radio Manchester had checked out Kovalko during his long stay up there. As a chef, a citizen and a family man, his record was excellent. But a friend of the friend who was a member of the local Ukrainian Club recalled that sometime in the seventies there’d been a couple of grey suits (which meant official snoopers) asking questions of and about Taras.

  ‘And?’ said Joe.

  ‘And nothing. Seems it’s not too rare for naturalized foreigners and no one takes much notice. Anyway, I passed it all on to Tony who told me not to waste any more time on it.’

  ‘But you ignored him. Like with the gas leak. It’ll get you into trouble one day.’

  ‘Oh aye, but it might get me on to a national too,’ laughed Docherty. ‘Anyway I just worked at it in my own time. I got the idea from this guy in Manchester. Why not try the Uke Club here? So I did. And I hit it lucky.’

  His luck had consisted of making contact with Mrs Vansovich who had been happy to retail to him Kovalko’s story of his loss of memory and her own failure to stimulate its recovery by throwing recollections of Vinnitsa at him.

  ‘She clammed up when I went to see her a second time,’ admitted Dunk. ‘I think maybe she was beginning to smell a rat.’

  A whole nest of them by the time I got to her, thought Joe.

  He said, ‘So what else have you got?’

  ‘Well, I spoke to the guy himself. He lives with his daughter and she left him in a car park while she went shopping so I took the chance and confronted him. I told him I was doing a piece about displaced people who’d settled here and would be interested in hearing about his background.’

  ‘And what did he do? Confess to being Martin Bormann?’

  ‘No, but he certainly looked worried.’

  Joe said, ‘I was taught to be worried if strange men spoke to me in car parks. So are you going to keep on harassing the poor sod? How old is he? Over seventy?’

  ‘Now hold on there,’ said the reporter indignantly. ‘I’m not harassing anybody. If he’s got nothing to hide, he’s got nothing to worry about, has he? And if he has got something to hide, what difference does it make how old he is? At least he’s lived long enough to get old.’

  ‘OK,’ said Joe. ‘But you’ve got to watch the innocent don’t suffer too, like the Hackers.’

  Shouldn’t have said the name, he thought instantly. Docherty hasn’t mentioned it. But the youngster was too heated to notice.

  He said, ‘The victims who died in those camps, they were innocent too. And their families. Don’t we owe something to them?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Joe. ‘But we’re ahead of ourselves. You were going to say how I could help.’

  ‘Oh aye. Look, I do want to tread carefully till I see where I am. The trouble is, I’m known now and I think next time I show, it could get confrontational.’

  ‘Which you’re not ready for,’ said Joe.

  ‘Not yet. But there’s something there,’ said Dunk obstinately. ‘What would be great would be if you could somehow get a line on the family, find out what he’s told them about his past. May
be he’s got some souvenirs, that sort of thing …’

  ‘And how do you propose I’m going to manage that?’ asked Joe.

  ‘Hey, I thought I saw something about detective on the door,’ grinned the young man. ‘And meanwhile, I’ll be out on those mean streets seeing what I can dig up about your boy in the box. Deal?’

  Joe considered uneasily the moral implications of all this. Ethics were a maze. Secret of a maze was keep turning left. Or was it right?

  Oh shoot! Ethics could look after themselves.

  He said, ‘Deal.’

  After Docherty had left, Joe picked up the phone and dialled the Bullpat Square Law Centre. He got through to Butcher surprisingly quickly.

  ‘So you’re still with us,’ she said. ‘I hear the party went off with a bang.’

  ‘Fairest way of sharing a buffet I ever did see,’ said Joe.

  ‘You really OK?’

  ‘Fine, apart from mousse stains all over my shirt. And I may have lost a jacket. How will I be for insurance?’

  ‘If it’s the one with the sickbag lining, you should pay them.’

  ‘It’s OK for rich lawyers with toyboys. Talking of which, is your friend Piers good for another favour? Or are you rationed to one a visit?’

  ‘Don’t push it, Sixsmith,’ she said warningly.

  ‘Sorry. Look, do you think Piers could find out why Kovalko was on that list?’

  ‘I explained all that to you,’ she said patiently. ‘List “C” is the barely possibles, the ones who make up the numbers.’

  ‘Yes, but there has to be a reason why he figures even as a barely possible. This interest in him isn’t official, by the way, I’ve found out that much.’

  ‘Really?’ she said. ‘Sixsmith, you don’t catch the service bus but somehow you still get there.’

  ‘We all have our own methods,’ said Joe. ‘There was some official interest way back though. In the seventies. Be nice to know what that was all about.’