Reginald Hill - Born Guilty

‘I suppose so,’ said Joe in a depressed voice. ‘I mean, yes, of course we have. I make a bargain, I stick to it. Don’t know how I’m going to set about it but I’ll try to take a look at this randy schoolmaster of yours.’

‘Ah,’ said Butcher. ‘Didn’t I say? Not a school master exactly.’

It took Joe a moment to register this.

‘You mean, a lady teacher?’ he said aghast. ‘But women don’t do things like that!’

Butcher sighed and said, ‘I’d need notice of that remark to decide if it’s sexist or not. Listen, Joe. Don’t be deceived. Anything a man can do, a woman can be cleverer at, and this Georgina Woodbine is a real operator. Couple of years back there was a Grandison girl, Eileen Montgomery, fell off an edge during a school expedition to the Peak District. There were rumours of emotional upset, suicide attempt, and so on, but the teacher in charge, deputy head Georgie Woodbine, came out squeaky clean. So take care. It’s the same in a comp as in any business. You don’t get to the top without knowing how to cover your tracks with other people’s careers.’

But only one word of all this was really registering with Joe.

‘Woodbine?’ he said. ‘You keep on saying Woodbine. Nothing to do with …’

He didn’t even like to voice the idea. But Butcher had no such qualms.

‘Oh yes,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Georgina Woodbine, dearly beloved wife of Detective Chief Inspector, no, I beg his pardon, Superintendent Willie Woodbine. Didn’t I mention it? Sorry, Joe. It must have slipped my mind.’

Luton on a bright autumn morning, with the impartial sun gilding the tower of St Monkey’s, the dome of the Sikh temple, and the Clint Eastwood inflatable above Dirty Harry’s, was not a bad place to be, but Joe felt little of his customary filial pride as he drove to the office.

‘Whitey,’ he said, ‘there has to be something better than investigating things I don’t want to investigate for clients who ain’t going to pay. What say we run away to sea?’

The cat sleeping on the passenger seat opened the eye in the white eye patch which, luckily or unluckily depending where you got your hangups, stopped him from being completely black, and fixed Joe with a gaze which said, you’re on your own, sailor!

Maybe I set my sights too high, thought Joe. Maybe if I devoted myself to begging packets of cheese and onion crisps and ashtrays full of beer down the Glit, I’d be happy too.

Whitey yawned widely. The message was clear. You don’t have the talent for it. Stick to what you know.

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.