Born Guilty

by Reginald Hill

  ‘But when you got better, why not tell the truth?’ urged Joe.

  ‘That I was Colonel Pacher’s personal cook? That I had married a German woman and murdered her lover? Where do you think that would have got me? No. Better to be Taras Kovalko. Finally, I came to England. I found work. I met an English girl and courted her. Victor Maksimov, the murderer with a wife in Germany, could not do this, but Taras Kovalko could. I put Maksimov right out of my mind and he did not return till they came to me in the seventies to check if I could be Kovalenko, the camp guard. That frightened me, but I thought, at least if they were still looking for Kovalenko that meant his killing was not on record. Perhaps I was not officially a murderer after all! That was a small comfort. But not much. In my heart I knew what I was. So when they went away, I was glad to return to being Kovalko again. At last I felt safe forever.’

  He turned his head to look at Docherty for the first time.

  ‘Then just when it seemed it was all between me and God, you came along, young man. Who you were, I did not know. All I knew was that here, at the end of my life, my beloved daughter and her family would perhaps find out that her father was a murderer, her mother was a dupe, and she herself was a bastard.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ stuttered Dunk. ‘I didn’t realize … I mean …’

  ‘No!’ cried Gallie. ‘There’s no need for you to be sorry. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t a fault at all. Grandda, can’t you see all this is nothing now? It’s dead, it’s in the past. All that matters is that you had nothing to do with any of this!’

  She pointed at the book which had slipped to the floor, still open at the photographs.

  ‘That is what your friend here says,’ said the old man. ‘I am so very very sorry …’

  He was close to breaking point and the girl knelt before him and put her arms around him. Joe motioned to Docherty to follow him out of the room. He intended to escape and leave the Hacker family to their own soul searching, but as he stepped into the entrance hall the front door opened and George and Galina Hacker came in.

  So everything had to be gone through again. The elder Galina was splendidly matter of fact.

  ‘Crime of passion,’ she said dismissively. ‘You get probation nowadays. And probably your wife divorced you straight off. Or maybe you weren’t properly married in the first place. You ever think to ask her if she didn’t perhaps have a husband in the army somewhere? At the most, it just means I’m a bastard and I’ve been called worse things. Dad, I see you’ve been at the firewater of yours; George, dig out that bottle of Scotch. I think we all need a decent drink!’

  What was it Dora Calverley had said? ‘A woman’s secrets and a man’s secrets are very different things. What one will bury beneath the sea, the other won’t give a toss about!’

  When he’d finally left, he’d stood in the front doorway with Dunk Docherty and said, ‘You won’t be writing about any of this, I take it?’

  ‘No!’ the young man had exclaimed with indignant emphasis. Then he had grinned his charm-the-birds-from-the-trees grin and added, ‘Of course, I may have to be persuaded.’

  ‘Dunk! Got a moment?’

  Gallie had followed them to the door.

  Joe said, ‘Good night. See you over the counter, eh?’

  The girl ran forward, put her arms round his neck and gave him a long, hot kiss.

  ‘Thanks a million, Mr Sixsmith,’ she said.

  ‘Won’t cost you as much as that,’ said Joe.

  ‘I’m going to pay you,’ she said. ‘I mean it. I earn good money, better than you from the look of your account!’

  ‘Hey, I wasn’t hinting,’ protested Joe. ‘But you can start by making sure when the next phone bill comes, you pay your dad for those calls I made tonight. Long distance costs a fortune.’

  ‘It’s worth a fortune, the way you’ve put things right,’ said the girl, embracing him again.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Dunk, clearly eager to interpose his own body. ‘I second that. Next time Tony Sloppe puts you down, I’ll tell the old sod!’

  ‘Well, thanks for that,’ said Joe. ‘Good night.’

  He left them in the doorway together and walked away, full of both pity and envy.

  They would learn that putting everything right was beyond the scope of anyone, let alone a balding, middle-aged redundant lathe operator.

  But as their arms went round each other and they drew each other close, oh, how very very right everything must seem!

  Meanwhile, good old put-it-right Joe Sixsmith was firmly back in the old creaking upright world with miles to go before he’d get to sleep.

  The miles, he realized, were passing at a rate considerably over one a minute.

  He recalled the perilous archway with the creaking cattle grid that lay ahead. Familiarity may have bred contempt in the Calverleys so that they could send their Range Rover hurtling through it without troubling the brake. Ordinary folk like the Sixsmiths were a bit short on contempt. He began to slow down.

  Even so, when suddenly it was before him in the headlights, he was still going a lot faster than he cared to be.

  He hit the brake hard, got a little skid going, corrected it, dabbed the brake a couple of times more, and was down to under ten m.p.h. when the Morris’s nose bisected the arch.

  That deceleration probably saved his life, though it didn’t feel like it at the time. What it felt like was the driveway ahead of him suddenly flipped up like the handle of a stepped-on rake and hit him smack in the bonnet. He was flung forward against the steering wheel but saved from fatal collision by his seat belt, which likewise felt more like being lassoed from behind by a mad cowboy than salvation.

  At the same time the thin drizzle turned to huge hailstones which battered against the roof of the car.

  Wrong! cried the part of his mind which was still desperate to see facts as facts, before all the facts stopped together.

  What had happened was the old cattle grid had given way, plunging him into the pit with such force that the decaying stonework of the arch had finally collapsed too and was now avalanching over the Morris. Two things crossed his mind. First was relief that he’d not had time to get the damage caused by his trip to the Scratchings repaired. The second was renewed gratitude to Lord Nuffield that he’d made the shells of these old buses so strong.

  He tried to open the door but found it was wedged tight. Same on the passenger side. Nothing for it, he was going to have to break glass to get out of this one. He could smell petrol and the resemblance between cattle grid and a barbecue pit was strong in his mind.

  He twisted round with his feet against the dash to look up at the rear window which was almost over his head. This was the only glass which hadn’t crazed. Through the spatter of rain and dust he could see the blackness of the sky. The window wouldn’t be easy to smash, he realized, and cast around for something to use. Then suddenly there was something between him and the blackness – a head, then a face pressing close against the glass. He cried in terror for in that brief glimpse it seemed to him that the boy in the box was peering into his eyes.

  Then the face withdrew and next moment the window exploded in, peppering him with tiny shards. Joe shook his head and blinked. His face felt like it had suffered a massive course of acupuncture, but his eyes were OK. He pushed his head through the gap. The figure was still there, hovering over him, and to his great relief he realized it wasn’t the boy in the box but young Fred Calverley. In his hands was the large stone from the fallen arch which he’d used to break the window. He raised it again.

  ‘It’s OK,’ gasped Joe. ‘I think I can get through now.’

  But the young man didn’t seem to hear and for a terrible moment Joe thought the stone was going to come crashing on his head.

  Then a beam of light hit Fred full in the face and Dora Calverley’s voice said, ‘It’s all right, darling. I think help’s on its way.’

  Something was on its way, certainly.

  The distant headlights of a car
had appeared moving fast down the long straight lane.

  Then behind them, another set. Then a third. And as they watched, a blue light began to pulsate on the roof of the leading vehicle.

  Joe pulled himself from the wrecked Morris. His legs felt like somebody else’s. He touched his face and when he looked at his hand the whorls of his fingers were contoured in blood.

  He said to the boy who was still standing with the stone raised high, ‘You can put it down now.’

  And to Mrs Calverley, he said, ‘I invited Willie to the party. I honestly thought there was a real chance he’d come by himself, but he’s brought his friends and that’s bad news for you, Mrs C.’

  She smiled at him and said, ‘No need to apologize, Mr Sixsmith. I’m very good at coping with unexpected guests. No, it’s I who should apologize to you. I should have had this grid repaired ages ago. Poverty’s my only excuse. We all try to make do and mend, don’t we? Till finally something gives. Edgar, thank God you’ve come. There’s been a dreadful accident. Perhaps some of your men could assist poor Mr Sixsmith up to the house. As a matter of interest, what brings you out here so opportunely? Not poachers again, I hope?’

  Willie Woodbine, who had got out of the first car, looked across at Joe with puzzlement and interrogation in his eyes. Like the good book says, there’s a time to every purpose under heaven. This seemed a very good time to faint.

  Joe fainted.

  25

  ‘Let’s get this straight,’ said Willie Woodbine incredulously. ‘You told Mrs Calverley you reckoned I might have murdered that boy in the box?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Joe.

  He was sitting on the edge of one of the ancient sofas in Hoot Hall drinking a mug of very sweet tea. Over Woodbine’s shoulder he could see the portrait of Dickie Calverley, in every sense the father of his woes, regarding him with a knowing, amused, now-get-out-of-this expression.

  It hadn’t been so bad when he came round. A pretty little WPC had been leaning over him to pick bits of glass out of his face.

  ‘Looks a lot worse than it is,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Can’t find much else wrong apart from a bit of bruising, but they’ll check you out properly at the hospital.’

  ‘Hospital?’ he’d said, struggling upright. ‘I’ve done hospital. I ain’t doing it again.’

  ‘Now listen here, sweetie,’ she said, very serious. ‘The ambulance is on its way and that means coming across two fields because of the mess you made of that gateway. I reckon if you tell them you don’t need to go back with them, they’ll soon put you in a state where you do!’

  Then Woodbine had come in bearing the mug of tea.

  ‘Off you go and join the others,’ he told the WPC. ‘I’ll take care of the invalid now.’

  But when he started asking questions he didn’t look much like a carer to Joe.

  ‘Now why would you tell her a thing like that?’ he now pressed.

  ‘To make her think I didn’t suspect her,’ said Joe.

  ‘But why should she think you suspected anyone of anything?’

  ‘No reason. But I wanted her to think I did,’ said Joe.

  Woodbine covered his face with his hands. When he removed them he looked disappointed to see that Joe was still there. Joe, on the other hand, felt merely relieved to have confirmed once more that the policeman’s eyes were bright blue. Like Pam Vicary’s. Jeremy Greenhill, the Australian lawyer, had been very helpful for a man dragged from a breakfast meeting by Joe’s call from the Hackers’. Unfortunately, Pam had never told him the name of Rob’s putative father. If only Joe had been able to remember the colour of Willie Woodbine’s eyes, he might have saved himself a lot of hassle!

  The policeman was now asking with the reluctance of a man unsure whether he really wanted to know, ‘Why should you want her to think that?’

  ‘So that if she was up to something, she’d get worried that when I found out whose son the boy really was, I’d get on to her,’ said Joe. ‘You see, how it worked was this. I spelled it all out, what I thought might have happened. How the boy came over here looking for his real father. How his real father, who I said was you, didn’t fancy having an Australian bastard dumped in his lap, so when the boy died, he decided to get rid of him by letting him be found dead in a cardboard box, like he was some common or garden drop-out who’d taken some bad stuff. So he, that is, you, put him in the back of his wife’s – your wife’s – estate car and dumped him round the back of St Monkey’s while the choir was rehearsing. Only all the time, of course, it was her and Fred who did it, using the Range Rover which they parked in the Cloisters. You see, Mrs Calverley said she’d been listening to the music, but your wife, who, incidentally, gave Robbie Mrs C.’s address when he rang her, said she, that’s Mrs C., had a tin ear. And I got Butcher – you know Ms Butcher – to check it out. She was at Meegrims too, you see. And it did check out. So she certainly wasn’t there for the music. So there you are.’

  Woodbine was looking shell shocked. Great, thought Joe. He didn’t mind the cop thinking he was two rhymes short of a limerick so long as he didn’t get within smelling distance of how very real Joe’s suspicions of him had been!

  Joe had rung him from the Hackers’ too, offering the same theory as he’d outlined to Mrs Calverley, only with her name headlined instead of Woodbine’s. He’d finished by saying he was heading out to Hoot Hall now and put the phone down before there could be any questions. Guilty, Joe reckoned Willie would come out by himself in an effort to put a gag on him. What he hadn’t reckoned on was how far the Calverleys might go in their efforts to keep him quiet. It was a large failing in a PI, not being able to grasp just how wicked folk could be!

  ‘So what else did this Ozzie brief tell you, Joe?’ asked Woodbine.

  ‘Just confirmed what I knew or had guessed,’ he said immodestly. ‘Pam and Vicary got married when they both got postgrad scholarships to come to SBU for a year. No need to. They could have just come and shacked up together, but Australians were still pretty conventional back in the seventies. Things were a lot looser over here and Pam found herself having an affair. From what she told the lawyer, she thought it was the real thing and was willing to throw Vicary over and go the whole hog, but the guy had different ideas and dumped her. So she stuck with what she’d got, and when she realized she was pregnant, pretended it was her husband’s.’

  ‘But it was Dick Calverley’s, that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Had to be,’ said Joe with the firm confidence of a man who hadn’t been sure of anything till half an hour ago. ‘Seems that Robbie and his assumed dad never really hit it off and ever since he reached adolescence, they’d been in a state of open war. Pam finally broke and thought she might defuse the situation by confessing that Robbie wasn’t Vicary’s child. Robbie took off.’

  ‘And Vicary?’

  ‘He wasn’t happy. But they’d been married a long time. Also, he found out what Pam had just had confirmed, that it wasn’t just the hassle of family trouble that was making her feel so lousy, it was cancer.’

  ‘Then he gets himself killed, and she dies, and the kid … Life can be a shit,’ said Woodbine.

  ‘You’re not wrong,’ said Joe, relieved to find that even a cop could forget his personal niggles in face of other folks’ larger grief.

  But not for long, it seemed!

  ‘Still don’t see how Georgie got into this in the first place,’ said Woodbine.

  Time for the famous soft shoe shuffle!

  ‘I think Mrs Woodbine – Miss Barnfather she’d be then – was a student of Dickie Calverley’s, and somehow Pam Vicary got the idea that she, your wife, was the reason Calverley had dumped her. So all Pam’d be able to tell Robbie about his real dad was that he’d been a lecturer at SBU and had possibly been involved with, maybe even married, another student called Georgina Barnfather. Robbie broke into the admin records office, couldn’t find anything about his father, but in the old student files, he tracked down your wife with her family address
and phone number.’

  Woodbine was regarding him like he was trying to sell him a VCR in a pub.

  Why the shoot am I so worried about his feelings? thought Joe, suddenly fed up of it all.

  ‘Listen, Robbie had your number scribbled on his thumb. OK, so it may have got rubbed off during the PM, but it was there, and he rang your good lady ’cos Hoot Hall is ex-directory and there aren’t any Calverleys in the book, and she gave him Mrs C.’s address. And if you don’t believe me, ring her now and ask her.’

  ‘She’s up in town tonight, staying with a friend,’ said Woodbine.

  ‘In town. Oh yes,’ said Joe noncommittally, except he wasn’t very good at noncommittal, and Woodbine’s face darkened with new suspicion.

  Time to attack.

  ‘Listen, Willie,’ he said. ‘Any way we can speed this up? I mean, my lovely old car’s been wrecked, I’m battered and bruised, and I’ve got enough broken glass about my person to build a greenhouse, so can’t you just take Mrs C. down to the cells and bang her up till she coughs everything?’

  ‘I’d like nothing better,’ said Woodbine. ‘Except we got rules now, and one of them says you’ve got to have reasonable grounds for holding a suspect. Where’s the grounds, Joe?’

  ‘I’ve told you …’

  ‘You tell me you had pancakes for breakfast, that’s not evidence,’ interrupted Woodbine. ‘In fact, there’s plenty in this town would reckon that most likely you had porridge and just can’t tell the sodding difference!’

  Joe took a deep breath and said, ‘I know I’ve not come to you with a barrow full of proof …’

  He paused to let the policeman get a cynical snort out of his system, then went on,’ … but what I think she’s done is too disgusting not to turn over every stone looking for ways to prove it. This ain’t no middle-class tax fraud. She murdered her own husband’s son!’

  ‘So you say,’ said Woodbine. ‘But how are you going to get a court to believe it?’