Reginald Hill - Born Guilty

First the druggies had taken over till nightly sweeps by the police had driven them to further, fouler venues, like the infamous Scratchings. Then the new homeless, expelled by commercial indignation from the comparatively warm doorways of the shopping centres, had moved their boxes here. The police had started their sweeps again, leaving the Reverend Timothy Cannister teetering uneasily between his duty of Christian charity and the demands of the uncharitable Christians who made up most of his congregation. Vincent, his Visigothic verger, had no such doubts. Set your cardboard box up in St Monkey’s and you could be rudely awoken by a bucket of dirty water.

But still they came. Create a society which didn’t offer help to the helpless or hope to the hopeless, and where did you expect them to go?

So mused Joe as he made his way cautiously along the dark flagstones between the church wall and the graveyard. A gust of wind tore a hole in the seething clouds to permit a welcome glimpse of the moon. In its chill bone-light he glimpsed a little way ahead, in the angle of the great corner buttress which marked the far end of the building, one of these pathetic boxes. Over it stooped a figure.

Joe hesitated, unwilling to risk disturbing the poor devil. Anyone desperate enough to brave the verger’s wrath deserved as much peace as he could find. Except that this figure didn’t look like it was preparing to kip down. More like it was leaning into the box to …

Suddenly light stabbed into his eyes, cutting off further speculation. And a woman’s voice cried, ‘You there! What do you think you’re doing?’

Joe threw up his hand to catch the glare. The torch beam swung away to the box just in time to catch the figure taking off, dodging away between the headstones to the high boundary wall and going over it with the ease of fear.

Then the light came drilling back into his eyes.

‘All right. Who are you? What are you doing here?’ demanded the woman. But there was a note of uncertainty there too. She sounded like what Aunt Mirabelle designated a real lady, and Joe guessed that the first thing real ladies learnt at their real ladies’ seminaries was, you meet a black man in a black churchyard, you run like hell!

‘My name’s Joe Sixsmith,’ he said, pulling a battered business card out of his pocket and holding it up in the beam.

‘Good Lord. A detective. You here on business?’

‘No, ma’am. I’ve been in the church rehearsing, and I was just taking a short cut …’

‘Me too,’ she said. ‘Listening, I mean, not singing. I just crept in and sat quietly. Lovely music, isn’t it?’

‘It surely is,’ said Joe, a long admirer of the English upper-class ability to indulge in small talk in any circumstances. ‘Listen, that guy who ran off …’

‘Yes. Who was he, do you think? Did you get a good look at him?’

‘Not really. Could be he’s one of those derelicts who sleep in cardboard boxes …’

‘Ah yes. Dreadful, isn’t it?’

He couldn’t make out from her tone what precisely she found dreadful. He went on, ‘Only he moved a bit nimble for a down-and-out. And he looked more like he was looking into the box than getting into it.’

‘You think so? Perhaps we’d better take a look.’

She began to move forward, the torch beam running over the flags and up the side of the box. It had once contained an Alfredo fridge freezer. Joe wondered about warning her that if there was anything in it now, it was unlikely to be white goods. But he didn’t fancy trying to take a torch off a real lady so he could have first look.

She reached the box and peered in.

‘Oh Lord,’ she said.

And Joe, coming to stand beside her, saw that it had been white goods after all.

‘You all right, mate?’ said Joe.

It was a redundant question but at least it showed you didn’t need to attend a seminary to pick up the vernacular. If a Brit tourist had stumbled on the Crucifixion, first thing he’d probably have said was, ‘You all right, mate?’

There was no reply. He didn’t expect one. The figure curled at the bottom of the box was male, blond, hazel-eyed, young – fifteen to twenty maybe – and not going to get any older.

Gingerly he reached in to confirm his diagnosis. The boy’s left hand was folded palm up against his shoulder, as though in greeting. Or farewell. Something was written on the ball of his thumb … a long number faded almost to invisibility except for the central three digits … 292 … at least it wasn’t tattooed like in the death camps … The association of ideas made Joe shudder.

‘Is he dead?’ demanded the woman impatiently.

I’m just putting off touching him, thought Joe. Boldly, he grasped the wrist. Temperature alone told him what he’d already known. Waste of time looking for a pulse. His time, not the boy’s. He had no more to waste.

‘I’m afraid so,’ he said.

The torch beam jerked out of the box and she cradled it against her chest, letting him glimpse her face for the first time. Fortyish, fine boned, slightly hook nosed, with her skin more weather-beaten than an English sun was likely to cause. Lit from beneath, the face looked rather more cadaverous than the boy’s in the box, except that her narrow blue eyes had the bright light of intelligence in them.

‘Listen, we ought to get help, the police, an ambulance …’

‘Yes. You go. You know the ropes and you’ll move faster …’

‘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?’

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.