Born Guilty

by Reginald Hill

  Joe hesitated. God decided. The door burst open and Merv Golightly exploded in.

  ‘Joe, my man! And the beautiful Ms Bodytone. Are you both glad to see me!’

  ‘What gives you that stupid idea, Merv?’ asked Joe.

  ‘Well, Ms B. certainly is, because with good-looking girls, it’s a condition of service to be glad to see old Merv. Talking of which, that Long Liz runs a mean laundry. She certainly knows how to spin a man dry, don’t she? You could do a lot worse for yourself, Joe, present company excepted!’

  ‘Merv,’ said Joe warningly. ‘We were having a private conversation …’

  ‘Say no more,’ said Merv with a huge wink. ‘But cast an eye on these, then carry on with your private conversation, feeling real mean and ungrateful!’

  He pulled a large brown envelope out of his donkey jacket and spilled its contents on to the desk.

  Joe looked at them aghast.

  From the doorway Merv said, ‘No need for apologies and thank you’s straight away, Joe. I’ll be down the Glit at opening time with all orifices open! Bye, Ms Bodytone!’

  He left explosively as he’d arrived.

  Joe said, ‘Sorry about that …’

  Beryl said, ‘No need to apologize for your friend, Joe. All this concern for mixed-up kids and trying to straighten them out had got me thinking that maybe I was being a bit hard on you doing your PI thing. But now I see what really makes up your bread and butter stuff. You telling me that this kind of shit’s better than drawing the dole? Time to look at your priorities, Joe boy.’

  She was making for the door.

  Joe said, ‘Beryl, it’s not like it seems, I can explain …’

  But she was gone, leaving him staring down at the scattered photographs.

  Merv had done well for an amateur. Joe laid out the photos in sequence. The man alone in the Wyatt House apartment. The woman coming in. The two meeting in a passionate embrace. Clothing falling to the floor, the couple too absorbed to care about the light or the curtains. Then, half naked and still locked together, the half naked pair sinking out of sight. The last print showed an apparently empty room.

  No problem with identification. The woman was clearly Georgina Woodbine, the man Andrew Dalgety.

  Joe shuffled the photos together, put them back in the envelope, reached over to the tape deck and pressed the start key.

  The angel Uriel’s fine tenor rang out.

  O happy pair, and always happy yet,

  if not, misled by false conceit,

  ye strive at more than granted is,

  and more to know than know ye should!

  ‘You got it, Uri,’ said Joe Sixsmith.

  27

  This all finished when Joe Sixsmith came sneaking out of the small side door at St Monkey’s.

  He’d taken the photos to Butcher and spread them out in front of her.

  ‘What’s this crap, Sixsmith?’ she said. ‘I don’t do divorce.’

  ‘You can see what it is. The woman’s your old schoolmate and temporary fellow traveller, Georgie Woodbine, who, when she was dropped by Dickie Calverley, didn’t just join the local Red Brigade because she’d been politicized, but because she wanted to show the world pretty quick she didn’t give a toss. There was this good-looking Party worker, Harry Hopegill, who set the girls swooning. Georgie got her teeth into him and when she’d got him good and hot, dumped him to show she was her own woman. She probably didn’t notice that there was this little teenager madly in love with Harry. Other people noticed though.’

  The cheroot miasma was impenetrable.

  ‘Is this going to take forever, Sixsmith?’

  ‘Not long. The man is Andrew Dalgety. His daughter thinks he’s Superdad, so when she finds out he’s having it off with Georgie, she reckons the woman’s all to blame and looks for a way of getting her out of the picture with maximum pain. What better than a corrupting-the-kids scandal? Maybe she got the idea when she told her best friend that Georgie was making it with her dad, and Sally told her she was making it all up because she was a jealous cow and Georgie was the best thing since Madonna in any form. I don’t know.’

  ‘What the hell is it you imagine you do know, Sixsmith?’ said a voice from the smoke.

  ‘I imagine Sally was so obsessed with Georgie she didn’t want to believe she could be involved with anything so sordid as sex with a man – husbands not counting, of course. But she’s a bright kid and she kept her eyes open. And when she caught Dalgety with his hand up Georgie’s skirt at the party, she had to recognize it was true. Her guru and goddess was banging away like an old bucket with her best friend’s father!’

  ‘This going to get any coarser?’ asked Butcher.

  ‘No, I’m nearly done. Sally gets so angry she decides to wreck the party by turning on all the gas taps. Result is a bit more spectacular and a lot more dangerous than she anticipates. So now we’ve got two mixed-up kids, as well as two mixed-up adults. Or do I mean three?’

  ‘That some kind of accusation?’

  ‘Just an observation. It’s OK letting your emotions get in the way of judgement when you’re in your teens. Us mature adults ought to look a lot closer at things before we go along with them, that’s all.’

  ‘So where do you go from here?’

  ‘Me? Nowhere. I’m out. End of case, report to client, collect fee. Only this time there’s no fee to collect and I’m letting you have the pleasure of reporting to the client. Maybe you can talk to her like you should have talked in the first place. The kid needs help, not encouragement!’

  ‘You can be really self-righteous when you try, did you know that, Sixsmith?’

  ‘No good, Butcher. You know you got it wrong. That kid’s hurting. Try to sort it. I’ll see you.’

  He’d left. When he got back to the office, he said, ‘This self-righteous stuff ain’t so bad once in a while, Whitey. Gives you a kind of glow.’

  Next night he’d gone to the dress rehearsal. There’d been some talk of black jackets and bow ties but Boyling Corner democratic principles had prevailed. ‘Like always, you’ll wear your best suits,’ Rev. Pot had commanded. But when he saw Joe in The Suit, his eyes rolled and he said, ‘When I say like always, no need to take me so literal, Joe.’

  ‘I got a new white shirt for tomorrow night,’ said Joe.

  ‘Great. Well, keep all three buttons fastened and don’t draw attention to yourself.’

  Keeping even one button fastened wasn’t in Joe’s game plan. His ribs still ached and he needed all the freedom of chest expansion he could get to sing without groaning.

  ‘Don’t you worry about me, Rev.,’ he said. ‘Excuse me now.’

  He’d just seen Sally Eaglesfield come in. He went towards her, smiled broadly and said, ‘Hi.’

  ‘Oh hello,’ she said unenthusiastically.

  Strictly speaking she was none of his business. What the shoot did he know about the pains and problems of growing up in the nineties?

  More than I did a couple of weeks ago, he told himself. And isn’t growing up what I’m still doing?

  ‘How are you keeping?’

  ‘Fine,’ she said.

  If he could have believed her, he’d have been pleased to leave it there. But she still looked so pale and drawn he couldn’t walk away.

  He said, ‘You talking to your friend, Mavis, again?’

  ‘We’ve spoken, yes. Why do you ask?’ she said suspiciously.

  ‘She needs a friend to talk to. Really talk to. She’s got real troubles.’

  This was the Aunt Mirabelle school of psychology. ‘You got the toothache? Find someone been run over by a bus, that’ll stop you moaning.’

  ‘What’s it got to do with you?’ the girl was demanding.

  Do I tell her I know she turned the gas on in Georgie’s kitchen? wondered Joe. Do I rely on honesty, truth, confession, getting in touch with your feelings, all that stuff?

  No, the answer came. What a kid this age really needs is magic.

 
He said, ‘Hey, I’m sorry. Just that in this place, all the atmosphere, you know, I sometimes hear these voices, not so much voices, more a message in my head. And tonight it said to me, that girl Sally is going to be all right, she’s going to come up smelling of roses, and I thought I should let you know.’

  She was looking at him as if he was mad. He couldn’t blame her. What did a middle-aged balding PI have to do with magic?

  Over her shoulder he saw Georgie Woodbine approaching.

  He said, ‘Shoot. Here comes that mouldy old schoolma’am of yours. Always makes me feel like I ain’t done my homework. I’m on my way.’

  And his reward for this entirely selfish and spontaneous remark was to see a sudden smile light up the girl’s pale face, giving it the life and colour it so required.

  Thinking about it as he moved away, it came to him that maybe a balding middle-aged PI didn’t rate very high as social counsellor or even magician. But when the same balding middle-aged PI saw the object of your desire and jealous rage as a mouldy old schoolma’am, it could produce a very helpful shift in perspective.

  A hand grasped his arm. He recognized the touch without needing to see the grasper.

  ‘You still chasing this young stuff, Joseph? And in God’s house. You ought to be ashamed of yourself!’

  ‘Auntie, I’m not chasing anyone,’ he protested.

  ‘No? Well, I believe you, Joseph,’ said Mirabelle. ‘But only because you don’t have the talent for it. These girls grow up too fast nowadays. They know how to take advantage of a simple soul who knows nothing of the world. Not like when I was a child. Then you stayed a child till you stopped being a child. Nowadays I swear some of them are born guilty!’

  ‘Thought we all were, Auntie,’ said Joe. ‘Isn’t that what it says in the Good Book?’

  ‘Don’t you start telling me what it says in the Good Book,’ she said fiercely. ‘All I want to hear from you is what you been doing to Beryl.’

  ‘Why? What’s she been saying?’

  ‘Nothing, that’s what. Mention your name and she says nothing. So what is it you’ve been up to?’

  Joe gently removed her hand from his arm and said, ‘Auntie, it ever occur to you that maybe sometimes Beryl could get things wrong? Or you could get things wrong? Or anyone else in the world but me could get things wrong? There’s Mr Perfect wanting us in our places. I’ll see you later.’

  He left her looking as close to dumbstruck as she’d ever come. As he joined the baritones, he passed Beryl looking very fetching in her white blouse and black skirt. She gave him a cool nod but didn’t offer to speak.

  Women! thought Joe. Don’t know whether they’re born guilty; they’re certainly born knowing more than they should!

  The baton rapped commandingly, the orchestra poised itself for Chaos, and Joe surreptitiously undid the three buttons on his jacket.

  The rehearsal went well. They went through the oratorio with scarcely an interruption and at the end Mr Perfect said, ‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Give me that on the night plus an extra ten per cent for the paying customers, and we will truly have given Luton a rare taste of heaven!’

  Joe suddenly realized he didn’t want to speak to anyone, not Aunt Mirabelle, not Beryl, not Sally Eaglesfield, not Georgie Woodbine, and certainly not Rev. Pot who was glowering accusingly at his flapping jacket.

  And his feet, without waiting for conscious command from his brain, took him into the side aisle, through the little chantry and out of the side door.

  It wasn’t till he was outside in the dank autumn night that the sense of having done this before hit him. Sensible thing to do would have been to go right back inside or at least turn towards the front of the church. But those bossy feet were taking him deeper into the darkness which lay in the other direction. He was hit by the certainty that once more he was going to find a large cardboard box by the wall with a figure stooping over it, so this minimalized the shock when that was precisely what he saw.

  Only it wasn’t exactly the same as before. This time the stooping figure belonged to Dora Calverley.

  She too showed little surprise as she straightened up at his approach.

  ‘You worked it out too,’ she said. ‘You’ve been a great disappointment to me, Mr Sixsmith. People should live down to their reputations.’

  Joe didn’t need to ask what it was he was supposed to have worked out.

  ‘Is he in there?’ he said fearfully.

  ‘No, but he has been. One thing he inherited from me was an overactive sense of irony.’

  Now Joe felt able to look in the box.

  It was empty except for a few old newspapers.

  ‘How can you be sure it’s him?’

  ‘You recognize the scent of your own child, Mr Sixsmith,’ she said. ‘I must confess that, like yourself, I had a moment’s fear that history was repeating itself.’

  ‘Not quite,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think you’d dragged him round here from the Cloisters.’

  She gave him her old cold stare.

  ‘You’re still persisting with that calumny?’

  ‘I’m not wired up if that’s what’s bothering you,’ said Joe.

  Her face relaxed and she gave a faint smile.

  ‘No, I don’t imagine that you are. Not your style. So I’ll tell you the truth. Robbie Vicary died naturally, Mr Sixsmith. If you can call pumping that stuff into yourself natural. I couldn’t let him be found at the Hall, of course. The police might have got nosey about Fred’s problem. Also, if the business of his parentage came up, that might have caused speculation. Fred was very upset, I think he quite liked the notion of a half brother. As always, I had to be the practical one and finally I persuaded him that dumping him here was for the best.’

  ‘Then Fred picked up the letter and suddenly you realized there might be money in this for you,’ said Joe.

  ‘For Fred,’ she corrected him. ‘I can’t benefit from the death of my dead husband’s bastard.’

  ‘So you hired me to trip over the truth which you personally laid out in front of me. Only when you realized I’d managed to go a lot further than you wanted, you got panicky and decided to dump me.’

  ‘It was pure accident, believe me. That grid has needed fixing for years. Why should either Fred or I wish to kill you? To stop you accusing me of not reporting Robbie’s death? Come now, Mr Sixsmith, that’s hardly reason for murder, is it?’

  ‘Not by itself, no,’ agreed Joe. ‘Which is my point exactly. There has to be something else. But none of it matters any more, does it? All’s well that ends badly, and even if you walk away from a murder charge, you’re not going to make a profit, are you?’

  ‘I really don’t understand what you’re talking about,’ she said helplessly. ‘What profit could there be in that unfortunate boy’s death?’

  ‘Robbie Vicary died a rich man,’ said Joe. ‘And the money’s got to go somewhere.’

  ‘So I gather. And if indeed it can be proved that he was Dickie’s son and the laws of inheritance say that his half brother is the legal heir, then naturally Fred will claim his inheritance.’

  ‘Nice one, Mrs C.,’ said Joe with a smile. ‘Except there’s one little problem. Don’t see how you’re going to prove Robbie was Dickie’s son without drawing attention to the fact that Fred isn’t! Which means that not only does he miss out on the Vicary loot, he’s not even legally entitled to be playing the Squire up at Hoot Hall!’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she said softly.

  ‘It’s all down to dominant genes and recessive genes,’ he said with the confidence of one who’d popped into the library and checked out Butcher’s information in the Children’s Medical Encyclopaedia. ‘You see, you got blue eyes and Fred’s got blue eyes, and Pam Vicary had blue eyes. But Dickie had brown eyes, at least he’s got them in that painting hanging up in your house. Now this would explain why Robbie’s eyes were brown. But no way can Dickie be the father of blue-eyed Fred.’

  In fact, there were ways
which the encyclopaedia had spelt out, with the odds against them. But they weren’t into odds here. All he wanted was to test his notion that Dora Calverley hadn’t hesitated to play around when she found that dear old Dickie wasn’t the catch she’d hoped for.

  One look at her face told him he’d hit the nail on the head.

  A second look suggested that maybe it hadn’t been one of his better ideas. Not at this particular time, in this dark coign of St Monkey’s, with the rising mist forming a barrier in the mind which lent assurance to the delusion that whatever happened here at this place in this time had nothing to do with the world of light and life and people only a few dozen yards away.

  She took a step towards him. He could see something in her eyes which an animal psychologist might have interpreted as the maternal instinct to defend her young but which looked like plain murder to Joe. He opened his mouth to speak, perhaps to remonstrate, perhaps to yell for help, but something – the mist, or pure terror, or maybe (worst of all!) simple embarrassment – clutched at his throat and reduced his words to one of Whitey’s silent miaows.

  And then it was too late. She brought the heavy rubber-bound torch up into his crotch. He doubled forward in agony and she smashed the torch into his face. The glass broke. He staggered back, something caught at his legs and he fell over backwards into the graveolent depths of the cardboard box.

  So this was what it was like, to drop through the holes in society and have nothing left to catch you but the discarded container of someone else’s consumer durables. Could be OK if the alternative was having your head beat in by a mad woman. Maybe that’s what they thought when it all started back in the eighties. And maybe they found, like he was finding, that not even a cardboard box could hide you from the mad woman’s revenges.

  The torch bulb was shattered but he could see the club-like shape silhouetted against the light grey mist as Dora Calverley raised it to finish him off. No point in her stopping now. All the rest she might brazen her way out of, but she knew Fred’s future was finished if she left him alive. Not that any such logical thought was troubling her mind. Could be it would be a conscience-saving rationalization later, but at the moment sheer blood lust was enough.