‘Yeah, dead natural,’ smiled Joe.
Aunt Mirabelle’s favourite reading in the Good Book was the Lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah, and she had his style off to a ‘t’. On their way to St Monkey’s that night, Joe could not but admire the way in which his lousy job, his squalid lifestyle, and his terrible driving, were woven into a seamless whole.
The flow didn’t halt till the car did in St Monkey’s Square.
‘What you doing?’ demanded Mirabelle.
‘I’m going to drop you here then go find somewhere to park,’ he explained.
‘What’s wrong with that parking place back of the church?’
‘The Cloisters? I think that’s reserved for special permits.’
‘And I’m not special? You drive round there, Joseph. Good Baptist’s more special than a good Anglican any day!’
There was one space left. As Joe backed in, the Visigothic verger appeared, wearing an expression that fell a furlong or so short of Christian welcome. But when Mirabelle eased her bulk out of the car and greeted him with a hearty ‘Good evening, brother!’ he remembered urgent business elsewhere.
Pity he hadn’t been so conscientious the previous night, thought Joe. If the boy in the box had been found a couple of hours earlier, there might have been time to save him.
No sign of Mrs Calverley’s Range Rover tonight. Maybe her peep over the edge had dulled her appetite for eavesdropping on The Creation. He guessed she might have a reputation for toughness, but last night’s experience had visibly upset her.
The rehearsal went fairly well. As he sang, Joe studied the clarinettists and tried to guess which of the two young women was Mavis Dalgety’s ex-friend, Sally Eaglesfield. He settled for the smaller, darker girl who studied her music with unblinking intensity as though fearful it might blow away. He didn’t know what instrument Willie Woodbine’s wife played and as the Sinfonia was an equal opportunities orchestra with women puffing and banging and scraping everywhere, there wasn’t much hope of picking her out. Maybe the girl he thought was Sally would identify her by making a beeline for her after the rehearsal was over.
He was distracted from this bit of great detectivery by Mirabelle, who materialized at his side while the last Amen was still trembling on the air. He guessed the little side door was probably nailed up too.
‘Now look who’s there,’ she exclaimed in a tone of surprise that rang as false as a cracked bell. ‘Beryl. We were just talking about you.’
‘Hi, Mirabelle. Hi, Joe. Sorry, can’t stop to talk. I’m on my way to work.’
She was a nurse at the Royal Infirmary and, cap apart, was already kitted out in her uniform.
Mirabelle said, ‘Joseph was just saying he’d run you there, weren’t you, Joseph? All them attacks, you don’t want to be walking round there by yourself.’
There’d been a couple of recent incidents with a flasher in the hospital grounds and the police were advising extra caution till the intruder was caught.
‘Well, that’s very kind of you, Joe …’
‘No trouble at all,’ assured Mirabelle. ‘Now excuse me, I want a word with Rev. Pot.’
She moved off and Joe found Beryl regarding him quizzically. He returned the look with pleasure. She was … he sought for the right word and all he could come up with was sturdy. This was why he had to invent answers for crossword puzzles and make up his own clues to fit them. On the other hand, what was wrong with sturdy when it expressed not just a physical but a spiritual characteristic? Strong, self-reliant, dependable, trustworthy …
‘What are you staring at, Joe?’ she asked.
‘You. You look great,’ he said. Smooth talker he might not be, but he knew better than to offer sturdy as a compliment. Not that sturdiness meant lack of shape. And those wide brown eyes and full red lips …
The full red lips opened to show strong white teeth in a moist pink mouth as she yawned.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Nothing to do with you.’
He looked even more closely at her and saw that as well as sturdy and great she looked tired.
‘You getting any sleep?’ he asked.
‘Surely. Between getting home in the morning, doing the chores, and picking Desmond up from school at three, I usually manage to snatch a couple of minutes,’ she laughed. ‘Are you serious about this lift?’
He led her out to the Cloisters.
‘Going up in the world, aren’t we?’ she mocked. ‘I thought only the nobs got to park here?’
‘I’m Tin Can’s token PI,’ said Joe.
She laughed. He liked making her laugh.
In the car he said, ‘You so tired, why don’t you let your sister pick Desmond up?’
‘Already she gives him his breakfast, drops him off at school. If I’m not there to pick him up, he’s going to start thinking I’m his auntie, Lucy’s his ma.’
‘At least you could duck the odd rehearsal till you’re off nights.’
She let out a gasp of mock horror.
‘You want Rev. Pot to nail me to his penitent stool? No, the singing’s no sweat. In fact, when I hear that music and open my mouth, it’s about the only time I stop feeling tired. Gives you a bigger hit than ganja, don’t you feel that, Joe?’
‘You wouldn’t expect a clean-living boy to know anything about that, would you?’ said Joe.
‘This the same clean-living boy who’s running around with the Mutant from Planet X?’
‘Beryl, let me tell you about Galina …’
‘Joe, it’s OK,’ she said. ‘I’m only joking. It’s none of my business. Just like what’s mine is none of yours, OK? This’ll do.’
Obediently he stopped the car and she was out of the door before he realized they weren’t at the Infirmary’s main gate but at a side entrance which ran between the path labs and research blocks. Beyond these buildings she could either follow the service road to the main block or take a tree-shaded pathway which curved through the grounds to the nursing wards, cutting off several miles of corridor.
He didn’t doubt which way she’d go, and he didn’t doubt which way Mirabelle would go if she heard he’d let Beryl loose unaccompanied.
‘Hold on!’ cried Joe.
From beneath his seat he took a heavy steel spanner about a foot long, with tape bound around the handle to provide a firmer grip. This had been a present from Merv Golightly whose constant companion in his taxi was a monstrous lug wrench called Percy. The mere sight of Merv’s lanky figure twirling Percy like a conductor’s baton was usually enough to subdue most troublemakers. In Joe’s line of business, a similar aid was very necessary, opined Merv, and Little Perce had been the result. Joe, who found violence either coming from him or aimed at him very scary, had never found occasion to use it. But there wasn’t much point offering himself as Beryl’s defender if all his defence consisted of was warding off blows with his head.
Fearful of the woman’s ridicule, however, he took the precaution of slipping Little Perce up his jacket sleeve before pursuing her.
‘Joe, what are you doing here?’ she demanded as he