Born Guilty. Reginald Hill
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but best of all to a desperate man, a much greater variety of escape routes.
Joe waited for the final Amen. He glanced towards the contraltos. Mirabelle’s eyes were fixed firmly on Mr Perfect’s – that is to say, the conductor, Geoffrey Parfitt’s – raised baton. As it came down, he took a step backwards into the taller men behind him. His heel came down on someone’s toe and a voice shot up an anguished octave.
‘Sor-ry!’ sang Joe.
Then he was off like a whippet. He’d spotted an outer door in a small side chapel. He’d no idea if it would be open, but if you couldn’t trust God in a place like this, what’s a heaven for? As he reached the door he heard the conductor saying, ‘Not bad, but still a way to go. Wrap up well. It’s a raw night and we don’t want any sore throats, do we?’
He grasped the handle, turned it, felt resistance, said a prayer, and next moment he was safe in the darkness of the night.
Mr Perfect was right. The air was cold and dank, but Joe sucked it in like draught Guinness. His first instinct was to turn left and head for the bright lights of St Monkey’s Square from which it was only a short step to the real Guinness at the Glit. But that could be a fatal error. For a woman of her age and bulk, Mirabelle was no slouch over fifty yards. Better safe than sorry. He turned right and headed into the gloomy hinterland of the churchyard.
Though it had a Charter, Luton didn’t have a cathedral. The rich burghers of the last century had set about compensating for this oversight by commissioning the erection of the largest parish church in the country. The money ran out before it quite reached that stature, but it was big, and The Lost Traveller’s Guide, the famous series devoted to places you were unlikely to visit on purpose, described St Monkey’s as ‘a splendid example of the controlled exuberance of late Victorian Gothic’.
Joe, like most Lutonian kids, had found its cypressed grounds and the dark nooks formed by its many buttresses very convenient for the controlled exuberance of early sexual adventure. But that had been a good twenty years ago, before the sand got in the social machine and civilization started grinding to a halt.
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