Born Guilty

‘So what was this guy you spotted doing then?’

‘Maybe the same as me, checking the kid’s pulse to see if he needed help.’

Chivers snarled a laugh and said, ‘Do you think Immigration knows about all these Good Samaritans flooding into the country? More likely he was one of those weirdos who get their kicks beating dossers up. So, a description.’

Joe gave him what he could. Finally Chivers said, ‘All right. Sod off. We’ll be in touch.’

‘And thank you too, Sergeant, for your courtesy. I’ll be sure to mention it to Mr Woodbine. I was real pleased to hear he’s been made up to superintendent.’

It was a low blow. Willie Woodbine disliked Chivers almost as much as Joe did, plus the new detective superintendent hadn’t been hindered in his elevation by the help Joe had somewhat fortuitously supplied in solving a recent big murder case.

Chivers was a nifty counter puncher and now he said, ‘You’ll be going to the celebration party at his house next Sunday then?’

He knows I’ve as much chance of being invited there as I have of being invited to stand for the Cheltenham Tories, thought Joe.

‘Hope I can make it,’ he said. ‘If I do, I’ll see you there, shall I?’

He saw the dart draw blood. Chivers and the CID girls might get a drink down the pub, but no way was Willie Woodbine going to take them home!

He took a last glance at the cardboard box before he walked away. No one should end up in a thing like that, especially not someone so young.

His musing on death’s indignities made him forget life’s perils.

‘There you are, Joseph Sixsmith. Now what you been up to?’

It was Aunt Mirabelle, lurking in the portico. At least her eagerness to be brought up to date made her forget Galina. But she showed more pertinacity than Chivers by suddenly asking, ‘What you doing sneaking out of that side door anyway?’

Time to go. He glanced at his watch which had stopped and said, ‘Auntie, we’ll talk tomorrow, OK? I got an appointment. Business.’

‘At this time of night.’

‘Crime doesn’t keep office hours,’ he tossed over his shoulder.

He’d seen that on the letterhead of a security firm he’d failed to do business with. He’d thought at the time it was a pretty crappy slogan. Now he got Mirabelle’s vote.

‘Don’t give me that clever dick crossword stuff,’ she yelled after him. ‘You never went to no college. Joseph Sixsmith, you get yourself back here!’

Joe had made it to the square. Freedom was at hand but old habits die hard and he’d been obeying Aunt Mirabelle’s commands as long as he could remember. He hesitated on the edge of the pavement. He who hesitates is sometimes saved. A dusty blue Range Rover came shooting out of the narrow lane that led to the Cloisters car park and swept by him at a speed that would probably have exploded his vital organs if he’d taken another step.

He glimpsed Mrs Calverley’s angular profile above the wheel. She gave no sign that she’d noticed him. Well, he supposed she’d had a nasty shock. And so had he.

There were two ways of taking this near miss. One was that God had used Aunt Mirabelle’s voice to save his life. The other was, a man who’s just been so close to death needs a drink.

He weighed the alternatives judiciously. On the whole, he reckoned that after all the eighteenth-century praise and thanksgiving God had been getting tonight, He wouldn’t be averse to a bit of modern secular music for a change.

Deafening his ears to Mirabelle’s unceasing commands, he set off for the Glit.

3 (#ulink_6da464d7-e2b3-59e1-8815-fe38bae3655d)

From time to time, Dick Hull, who runs the Gary Glitter public house in Luton, gets an acute attack of conscience. It seems to him that despite all he has done by way of decor, music and memorabilia, he is failing in his priestlike task of celebrating the one and only supernova of the British pop firmament.

Whenever this black mood comes upon him, he seeks solace in The Tape.

This is a recording he made at one of Gary’s legendary Gangshows by hurling a cassette recorder on to the stage and reclaiming it later under a savage assault by three stewards. Miraculously, the tape had kept on recording. The resulting sound in Hull’s ears was more than hi-fidelity. It was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Played full belt on the Glit’s PA system, it took him back to that glorious night in Glasgow, and all his self-doubt faded away.

It was playing tonight. Joe heard it several streets away. Legend had it that when fog blanketed Britain so bad that most airports were packing up and going home, at Luton planes still landed, homing in on the Glit.

Joe didn’t altogether believe this. But he did wonder how a God accustomed to the gentle murmurings of Hallelujah choruses might feel about this level of decibels.

Happily, he was able from long experience to detect that it was approaching its climax. This was not, great though it was, Gary’s valedictory rendition of ‘I’m the Leader of the Gang (I am)’ but the voice of a steward shouting ‘Awafokyerselyerweedickheed!’ and Hull’s respondent scream as a size eleven army surplus boot came down on his hand.

The scream peaked as Joe entered. No one was talking. Even the new generation of kids brought up in a sound environment which made the machine room Joe had worked in most of his adult life seem like a forest glade, couldn’t compete with this combination of frantic fans, stroppy stewards, and personal pain.

Then it was over. For a second there was a fragment of that rarest of things at the Glit, perfect silence.

In that moment Joe’s gaze met Galina Hacker’s across the crowded bar, and his heart sank. She’d been at the Oxfam shop again. At least the seventies flared trousersuit she wore covered those provocative legs (how could anything so skinny be so sexy?) but she’d given the tunic a bit of pazazz by cutting off the sleeves, and even from this distance Joe could see she was wearing nothing beneath it. The flesh missing off her legs had been redistributed up there with equally disturbing results.

First things first. He gestured to the bar and shouldered his way through, giving and returning greetings. Next best thing to anonymity for a PI was a place where everyone knew you, especially when it meant your pint of Guinness was already waiting, neat and welcoming as a vicar at a wedding.

‘Thanks, Eric,’ he said.

Eric, a young man whose habitually worried expression clashed strangely with the brash assertiveness of his diamanté-studded waistcoat, watched in respectful silence as Joe downed five inches, then said, ‘No Whitey?’

‘No. I’ve been rehearsing. He doesn’t care for Haydn.’

Whitey was his cat. No way you could get him into the chapel. Rev. Pot reckoned he’d got enough on his plate dealing with human crap. But St Monkey’s larger spaces had tempted Joe to bed Whitey down on a hassock in a remote pew at the first united rehearsal. He’d been all right through the introductory Chaos and the piano entry of the choir. But when they reached let there be light, and there was LIGHT, and the voices and instruments exploded in that most glorious of musical exultations, Whitey had shot upright and started a howling which had persisted long after the music had died away.

Most people had been amused. Aunt Mirabelle was not most people. According to her, Joe had let down himself, his family, Boyling Corner Chapel, and every decent Christian soul who’d ever had the misfortune to come in contact with him.

Memory of Mirabelle was so strong that when a hand grasped his arm he jumped guiltily and almost spilt some stout.

‘Thought you wasn’t coming,’ said Galina accusingly.

He turned and looked at her. Despite apparently being assaulted by a mad sheep-shearer and a myopic action painter, she was still a beautiful girl. But why not? Blacked out teeth and a raggedy suit hadn’t stopped Judy Garland of immortal memory from being the loveliest swell walking down the avenue.

‘Hello, Gal,’ he said. ‘Got a drink?’

For answer she held up a bottle. Joe winced. It wasn’t just the contents, winceable though they were, being something called Luger which the ads claimed ‘blows you away’. It was the way these young girls drank straight from the bottle that offended something deep down. When he’d mentioned this to his friend, Merv Golightly, his distaste had been submitted to a long and deeply unflattering sexual analysis. But so were most things that tugged at Merv’s consciousness, from Luton’s performance in the FA Cup to the way that John Major walked. As a taxi driver, Merv was used to a captive audience. An American visitor had once hired him to drive her to Leeds and back twice a week for a month. ‘It’s cheaper than my analyst,’ she said. ‘And it does me more good.’

‘Let’s sit down,’ said Galina.

She led him to a table where a bunch of her mates were protecting a couple of empty chairs by smashing their bottles down on any hand foolish enough to grasp them. They greeted Joe with their customary silent incredulity that one of his advanced years could still be moving with no apparent mechanical aid, then went back to their conversation which consisted of an interchange of staccato screams. The only alternative was to lean forward so that your lips were almost touching your interlocutor’s ear. This was the mode preferred by Joe and Galina, and if Aunt Mirabelle could have seen them in this position, the worst case scenarios hypothesized by her spies would have been positively confirmed.

A tape of the conversation would have been more puzzling.

‘You got anywhere yet?’ said Galina.

‘Give me time,’ said Joe.