REGINALD HILL
BORN GUILTY
A Joe Sixsmith novel
Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain in 1995 by Collins Crime
© Reginald Hill 1995
Reginald Hill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN: 9780007334810
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2015 ISBN: 9780007391905
Version: 2015-07-27
Contents
This all started when Joe Sixsmith came sneaking out of a small side door at St Monkey’s.
The reason he was in St Monkey’s was to rehearse Haydn’s Creation.
The reason he was sneaking out was that on arrival his Aunt Mirabelle had seized his arm in a grip like a council bailiff’s and said, ‘What’s this I’ve been hearing, Joseph?’
Only the impatient rattatooing of Mr Perfect’s baton saved him from immediate grilling.
Joe had no problem guessing what it was Mirabelle had been hearing. Galina Hacker, that’s what. Normally his aunt, a firm believer that any bachelor butting forty and not an alto needed a wife, would have been delighted to hear her baritone nephew was keeping company. But in this case, as well as being an affront to her own preferred candidate, Beryl Boddington (who gave Joe a little wave from the sopranos as they took their place), rumours about Galina must have hit the Rasselas Estate like word of Mrs Simpson reaching Lambeth Palace.
Joe, a reasonable though not always a rational man, could see how it might be a shock to the auntly system to learn he’d taken up with a spiky-haired seventeen-year-old with a stud in her nose, no bra, and a skirt like a pelmet. But he saw no reason to explain himself. On the other hand, he saw every reason to avoid interrogation.
If the Boyling Corner Concert Choir had been on its home ground, he wouldn’t have stood a chance. Mirabelle had the few exits from the square-built chapel more tightly covered than a nun’s nipples. But the choir’s growing reputation had led to an invitation to join with the South Bedfordshire Sinfonia and St Monkey’s Chorale in a performance of the oratorio to mark the five hundredth anniversary of the granting of Luton’s Royal Charter. After token resistance from some of the older members, Boyling Corner had agreed that