Born Guilty

‘We’ll both go.’

‘No. You’ll move faster without me. To tell the truth, I feel a bit wobbly. It’s just beginning to hit home … that boy in there … he is no more than a boy, is he? … I’ve a son of my own … What is the world coming to?’

‘An end, maybe,’ said Joe. ‘OK, I’ll go. You sit down over here. I won’t be a minute.’

Leaving her perched on a plinth of monumental masonry under a weeping angel, he hurried away.

Naturally, because even in a churchyard, God’s Law and Sod’s Law are only a letter apart, he was just in time to meet Mirabelle coming out of the main entrance arm in arm with Rev. Pot of Boyling Corner Chapel, and the Reverend Timothy Cannister of St Monica’s.

‘Where’ve you been, Joe?’ she cried, hurling aside the pastoral pair and seizing him with both hands. ‘I said I wanted a word with you.’

‘Not now,’ said Joe. ‘I’ve got to go.’

‘What’s so urgent you can’t talk to your old auntie?’ she demanded with the indignation of one who knows there is no possible answer.

Except one.

‘Death,’ said Joe. ‘Excuse me, Vicar. You got a phone in the vicarage I could use?’

2 (#ulink_4c6d4572-f868-5c7a-b55d-8626edbf44b7)

It must have been a quiet night on the mean streets of Luton because by the time Joe finished his phoning and came out of the vicarage, a police car was already belling its way into the square.

Out of it leapt a fresh-faced young constable he didn’t know followed by a fat-faced one he did.

His name was Dean Forton and he rated the Sixsmith Detective Agency lower than Wimbledon FC.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he said ungraciously as Joe approached.

‘I found the body.’

‘Must have tripped over it then,’ said Forton. ‘OK, let’s take a look at it.’

He seemed quite pleased at the prospect. First on the murder scene can get a chance to shine. But when he realized it was just a dosser, his enthusiasm faded.

‘More bother than they’re worth,’ he said to his younger colleague. ‘Here, Sandy, seeing we’ve got him in a box in a boneyard, why don’t you whip back to the car, get a shovel, and we’ll save everyone a bit of time and trouble.’

‘You’re a real riot, Dean,’ said the youngster, his Scottish roll of the r’s exaggerated by a slight tremor as he looked down at what Joe guessed was his first corpse.

‘All right then,’ said Forton. ‘At least keep the ghouls off till the girls get here.’

The ghouls were a growing group of spectators led by Mirabelle. The girls, Joe guessed, were CID. Forton hung his emergency lantern on the outstretched arm of the weeping angel under which the real lady was no longer sitting. In fact, she was nowhere in sight. Joe wasn’t too surprised. Not getting involved was a kneejerk reaction of the English upper classes, particularly when what you weren’t getting involved with was a dead dosser, a black PI and Luton’s finest in a cold and gloomy churchyard.

The girls arrived led by DS Chivers, another old acquaintance and even less of a fan than Forton. Joe gave him a bare outline of his discovery of the body, not bothering at this juncture to complicate matters with reference to the woman. He was immediately punished for this economy by her reappearance.

‘Ah,’ she said, cutting across Chivers’s questioning. ‘You came back then.’

Joe felt she was stealing his lines. Chivers felt she was undermining his authority.

‘Who the hell are you?’ he asked irritably.

She gave him a look which would have stopped an assegai in full flight. The image popped into Joe’s mind fully formed and he realized it came from a certainty that this was a good old-fashioned English colonial lady. Her dun-coloured skirt and shirt derived from the practical rather than the fashionable side of safari, but it was her complexion which was the real giveaway. That could only come from long exposure to the sun which used never to set.

She said to Chivers, ‘Kindly don’t interrupt. Mr Sixsmith, after you left, it struck me the quickest way to summon help would be to use my car phone, therefore I made my way round to the Cloisters and phoned Emergency.’

This told Joe a lot.

First, it explained the speed of the police response.

Second, it confirmed the woman’s status. The Cloisters was a paved area at the back of the church. Folklore claimed it was all that remained of the original medieval abbey. Archaeology proved it was merely a pavement laid down by the Victorian contractors to stop their material and machines from sinking into the Lutonian bog. Now it provided space to park a few cars, a convenience in the gift of the Reverend Timothy Cannister and only doled out to top people. Joe didn’t anticipate being invited to park his Morris Oxford there.

Third, he recognized the explanation as apology. Perhaps her houseboys hadn’t been big on civic responsibility. Whatever, she’d doubted if he’d go near a phone and this was her way of saying sorry without admitting there was anything to be sorry about.

He said, ‘That was good thinking. Sometimes they need a couple of calls to get them out of the canteen.’

She rewarded him with a not unattractive smile, then overpaid him by turning to Chivers and saying, ‘Now, Constable, why don’t you trot off and fetch one of your superiors?’

Chivers went red as a radish, but before he could explode into real trouble, a voice cried, ‘Mrs Calverley, I thought it was you. I do hope you haven’t been inconvenienced.’

The Reverend Timothy Cannister had broken past the young Scots constable. Known to the compulsive punsters of Luton as Tin Can because of his fondness for rattling one in your face, his reaction to the woman confirmed she belonged to the cheque-in-the-post set rather than the coin-in-the-slot class.

Also the name meant something to Chivers whose indignant response withered on his lip.

‘No inconvenience, Tim,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I’m just helping this constable with his enquiries.’

‘It’s sergeant, ma’am, and at the moment I’m senior officer present. So if you could just spare a moment …?’

‘Why on earth didn’t you say so? Let me tell you all I know about this dreadful business.’

It took less than a minute of admirably terse narrative. Chivers didn’t interrupt or ask any questions, and then Mrs Calverley accepted Tin Can’s invitation to step into the vicarage for a warming potation, though she winced visibly at his preciosity.

‘All right for me to go and get one of them too?’ asked Joe.

‘Not before you answer a few questions, Sixsmith,’ snarled Chivers.

‘Nothing I can add to what the lady says.’

‘You’re supposed to be a detective, aren’t you? How about trying to give me a description of the perpetrator?’

‘What perpetrator?’ asked Joe. ‘Perpetrator of what?’

‘Don’t get clever with me, sunshine. There’s a body in that box, remember?’

‘I know. And I think you’ll find he’s been dead an hour or so.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I felt for a pulse and he was cold enough not to have died just that minute,’ said Joe.