Born Guilty

A little while later they arrived at the office which was housed in the kind of building where small businesses went to die.

Joe picked up his mail. It was junk except for Pius Thoughts, the journal of PIU, the Private Investigators’ Union. Ignoring the tiny lift which Whitey, who valued his skin above rubies, refused to enter, he laboured upstairs after the cat. In the office, he went through the ritual of checking his answerphone and his desk diary. No calls, no appointments. He wrote Galina Hacker 12.30 in the diary. It looked better, but he preferred the blank page.

Next he filled his kettle in the tiny washroom, plugged it into the skirting board socket and nudged it on with his foot. While it boiled he improved the shining hour by cleaning out Whitey’s litter tray, a job too long postponed. The cat watched with the idle interest of a man in a bus queue watching a navvy dig a hole. Then, when Joe had finished, he stepped daintily on to the pristine litter and crapped copiously.

‘Why do you always do that?’ demanded Joe. ‘Time for that is before I clean things up.’

Whitey gave him a look which wondered how an intelligent being, or even a human, could imagine he was going to use a soiled tray, jumped into the bottom desk drawer and went to sleep. Joe flung the windows open, cleaned the tray again, made a pot of tea, and settled down in his chair with Pius Thoughts. There was an article on ‘Combating Stake-Out Fatigue Syndrome’ which looked interesting. He got through two paragraphs and fell asleep.

He was awoken by Aunt Mirabelle’s voice and looked around for her in disorientated panic till he realized he’d forgotten to turn off his answerphone.

‘I know you’re there, Joseph. I can feel it,’ she was declaiming. ‘So you come out from behind this ungodly machine and speak to me plain.’

There was no point in pretending. He picked up the phone.

‘Morning, Auntie,’ he said.

‘Good morning to you, Joseph. How long is it since you seen Beryl?’

‘Saw her last night at the rehearsal, remember?’

‘Not likely to forget, the things you got up to, am I?’ retorted Mirabelle. ‘I mean, seen to talk to, take out? You’ve been neglecting that girl.’

‘Auntie, what’s to neglect? Beryl and me’s just friends, not a couple, courting or anything like that …’

‘Courting? You don’t know the meaning of the word! But that’s no reason not to be polite and pass the time of day instead of sneaking off to that sin-hole of yours to meet that trollop you’re making a fool of yourself with!’

He’d been right. Even in the Glit, Mirabelle’s agents kept their eternal vigil.

‘Auntie, the Glit’s a pub, the girl’s a client …’

‘You her client, more likely! Joseph, you stick with Beryl. If it’s little Desmond who bothers you, he’s a nice kid and once you get two, three more of your own, you’ll hardly notice him!’

‘Auntie, I’ve got to go out. On business …’

‘Business? What business? Only business you and that cat have got is lying around all day seeing who can sleep the longest. Tell you what. You can pick me up, drive me to rehearsal tonight. Give me a chance to have a good close talk without you running off somewhere.’

Joe desperately tried to think of an acceptable excuse.

‘Auntie, I’m not sure I can make it tonight …’

He was saved the agony of invention by Mirabelle’s outrage.

‘You not thinking of missing rehearsal, I hope, Joseph? That voice of yours gets so rough from all that profane singing you do down that hellhole, it needs all the rehearsing it can get!’

‘Yes, Auntie,’ said Joe meekly. ‘I’ll pick you up. Bye.’

He put the phone down and cleared his throat and tried a couple of notes. That wasn’t so bad, he thought. What did she mean, rough? He had a tape of The Creation in his radio cassette and he switched it on now. At first he only joined in the baritone line of the choruses, then he thought, guy who’s modest when he’s by himself must be really stuck up! And he started joining in the male solos too. When he got to Uriel’s words – with beauty, courage, strength adorned, to heaven he stands erect and tall, a man – an inbuilt sense of irony made him break into the little soft shoe shuffle which had them beating the tables at the Glit on Karaoke Nite.

He wondered which would offend Mirabelle more – the outrage to religion or to music. Himself, he felt they were both big enough to take anything he could throw at them. But when he reached the partner for him formed, a woman fair and graceful spouse, his thoughts turned to Mirabelle’s attempts to marry him off, and to Beryl Boddington.

It wasn’t that he didn’t like her. In fact, of all Mirabelle’s candidates for his hand, she was way ahead of the field. Not that this meant much when you considered many of the others didn’t even make it out of the starting gate!

Thing was that Mirabelle’s hopes for his happiness, plus her real affection for him, plus her family pride, didn’t combine to dull her sense of reality.

‘Joe’s the kind of catch a one-armed woman might be glad to get a hold of,’ she opined to her coven of confidantes.

And whenever a woman came her way who seemed in need of a man and not well placed to be choosy, Mirabelle pounced.

Beryl’s ‘disability’ in Mirabelle’s eyes was the existence of a young son, Desmond, without benefit of clergy. In Joe’s eyes her only ‘disability’ was being elected by Mirabelle which, coupled with his own ‘disability’ of having got pretty near forty without getting caught, made him naturally wary.

‘Getting caught’ was, he knew, a deplorably politically incorrect way of looking at marriage, but it had been the received wisdom at Robco Engineering where he’d spent the first twenty years of his working life, and that was an indoctrination harder to throw off than a Jesuit education.

To be fair, Beryl had shown little sign that she was interested in getting caught either, and so far their occasional dates had ended with nothing more than the swooning softness of a good night kiss, leaving him to soothe his frustration with the thought that once more he’d pulled back from the brink. Except of course there was no escaping the fact that it was her push rather than his pull which kept him from falling!

Nevertheless, a relationship undoubtedly existed. He tried to imagine how he’d feel if Beryl took up with some other fellow, found he didn’t care for the feeling, so switched it off.

Sometimes it wasn’t such a bad thing not having one of those creative minds.

Galina was dead on time. As soon as he saw her Joe felt guilty. Last night he’d had no compunction about asking her to come to the office. But back in her building society mode she was a very different kettle of fish from the exotic alien of the Glit, and he came over all avuncular.

Gallie wasn’t having any of that, however.

She refused a cup of tea, settled down with the apple and low fat yoghurt she’d brought with her for lunch, and said, ‘OK, I’ve not got much time. This operative of yours find out anything?’

‘Something,’ said Joe.

Omitting any reference to Piers or Butcher, he told her about the lists.

She listened intently, her yoghurt ignored. Her face gave nothing away but Joe could feel the pain inside. She must have been hoping even more than him for an official blank.

‘So what’s it all mean, Mr Sixsmith?’ she asked.

‘My operative reckons the third list’s just there to make the numbers up,’ said Joe.

‘Why should anyone want to do that?’

‘It’s the civil service mind,’ he said. ‘Everything by threes.’

‘So there’s nothing to worry about?’

He was desperate to give her reassurance but knew he mustn’t go further than the facts warranted. He’d fallen into that trap before.

‘We can’t get away from the fact someone’s asking questions,’ he said. ‘But there’s still nothing to say for sure it’s got anything to do with these lists.’

It was the best he could do but he could see it was far from enough.

‘Just coincidence, you mean?’ she said doubtfully.