Singing the Sadness

by Reginald Hill

  It got better. As he spotted the sign saying Snips, the salon door opened and Bronwen came out, looking very attractive in a plastic Hollywood kind of way. She spotted him immediately. Not surprising. The streets of Caerlindys weren’t exactly crowded with short, black, balding PIs.

  ‘Joe,’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Looking for you,’ he said.

  She didn’t seem surprised, more shamefacedly guilty.

  ‘Joe, I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean it like that, you know, to make a fool of you. It was just my da said it was worth a tenner to find out just how much Welsh you really spoke. I never thought you would say what I said in company.’

  Joe worked it out almost instantaneously.

  ‘Wain told you what happened, did he?’

  ‘Yes, when he gave me a lift here, we got to talking about you …’

  ‘Yeah? How come?’

  She put her hand on his arm, fluttered her (new?) eyelashes, and said huskily, ‘Well, you’re the most interesting thing to happen round here for a long time, Joe.’

  Must show a lot of old movies on Welsh telly, thought Joe. Maybe that explained all the lookalikes, strong impressions made during pregnancy.

  ‘More interesting than burning down houses with people in them?’ he said.

  He wished he hadn’t as the pouting lips started to tremble and he saw tears moisten her eyes.

  ‘That was really terrible,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean … I was just joking … I hope with all my heart she’ll be all right.’

  ‘I’ve just been up to the hospital,’ said Joe. ‘No change, but she’s still hanging in. Thought I saw Wain up there. Did he say anything about going to see how the woman was doing?’

  ‘No, he did not,’ she said with indignant anger. ‘And if he had, I wouldn’t have believed him!’

  Joe tried to look as if this made some sense to him.

  ‘Say anything about giving you a lift back later?’ he asked.

  ‘Said he wasn’t sure what he was doing, the lying sod. Men, you can’t trust them. Like my rotten da, said I could have the pick-up, and then he just buggered off, never a word to anyone. My ma’s right, you got to get your retaliation in first, else they’re all over you.’

  Ella Williams on last sighting had certainly been trying to get her retaliation in first, thought Joe, but it hadn’t stopped the man in question from being all over her.

  Then he felt ashamed of himself for thinking so frivolously about something which could have a devastating effect on this girl. Mature for her years she might appear, but we’re all kids when it comes to crises between our parents.

  He said, ‘So you’re not meeting him?’

  ‘Said I’d be in the Dragon lounge lunchtime if he was still around.’

  ‘And how would you get home if he wasn’t?’ Joe asked.

  ‘Council meeting on, isn’t there? No shortage of good-hearted gents willing to give a girl a lift ‘long as she votes the right way. And now there’s you as well, Joe. You must be getting back somehow and you wouldn’t see me stranded, would you?’

  She tucked her arm through his and leaned up close against his side, urging them back across the square towards the hotel. The traffic warden was still on guard there and Joe was glad her duties didn’t extend to monitoring moral as well as traffic violations, else he’d have had tickets stuck all over him.

  The lounge of the Dragon was empty, though the proceedings of the council meeting which a stranger might have mistaken for the noise of a lively office party were clearly audible through the wall behind the bar.

  ‘Sounds like they’re enjoying themselves,’ said Joe. ‘Maybe we should join them.’

  ‘In your dreams,’ said Bronwen. ‘That’s a private room with a buffet bar and Big Eddie, the disco bouncer, on the door.’

  She didn’t sound critical.

  ‘Doesn’t bother you then?’ said Joe.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Elected officers enjoying themselves on public money.’

  She giggled as if he’d made a joke, or at least said something silly.

  ‘Need their perks, don’t they? Else why would they do it?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘The job. Mending roads, collecting rubbish, taking old folk on trips, building schools, all that stuff.’

  ‘Lot of bin men and navvies in there, is there?’ asked Joe.

  ‘Don’t be silly. They’re the ones who see it gets done, and you can’t expect people to do that for nothing, can you? Not telling me you’re all Holy Joes back in England, are you, Joe?’

  Joe considered. Plenty of noses in the public trough back home, he couldn’t deny it. But on the whole it was done with discretion, they covered their tracks, and when they went over the top, they got done for it. Though, to be fair, there was that place in Yorkshire a year back where the troughing had been going on pretty blatantly for a decade or more before someone blew the the whistle. It must be geography, he decided. The North as he understood it was very like Wales. Great wodges of emptiness filled with sheep and trees, and so near the edge of things that when a comet passed close, bits fell off into space.

  He said, ‘None of my business. And how does a Holy Joe get a drink round here?’

  This made her laugh, a pleasant bubbly contralto accompanied by the treble of the bell on the bar which she shook vigorously.

  After a moment, a door opened behind the bar to admit an increase of the party sound effects, a glimpse of the civic fathers of Caerlindys at their deliberations, and a harassed-looking barman.

  ‘Hello, Bron,’ he said. ‘Not been ringing long, have you? There’s enough noise in there to wake my Auntie Mag and she’s stone deaf.’

  ‘Not long,’ said Bronwen. ‘This is my friend Joe. Joe, meet Shorty, my favourite barman. Joe? You taking a nap?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Joe, staring at the door which had closed behind the barman. ‘Hi, Shorty. Good to meet you. Pint of Guinness and whatever Bron drinks.’

  ‘Don’t really want a pint of crème de menthe, do you?’

  ‘If she can drink it, I’ll buy it,’ said Joe gallantly.

  Shorty pulled the drinks. He wasn’t all that short, in fact he was a good three inches taller than Joe.

  ‘Anyone been asking for me?’ asked Bronwen.

  ‘No,’ said the barman. ‘But then we don’t stock you, do we?’

  Joe laughed as he paid. It was a good rule of life to appreciate a barman’s jokes.

  There was an upsurge of noise from next door and Shorty said, ‘Better get back in there before they start on Any Other Business.’

  He went back through the door, and its brief opening and shutting confirmed what Joe thought he’d spotted before.

  The tall angular figure with the heavy whisky tumbler in his hand was in civvies rather than the uniform he’d been wearing in the college sports day photo. But unless there was a specially rich crop of strawberry noses in Caerlindys, Deputy Chief Constable Penty-Hooser was present at this private council meeting, in deep confabulation with Electricity Sample.

  ‘Penny for them, Joe,’ said Bronwen.

  ‘What? Oh yes. Just wondering how come Shorty when he’s not so short?’

  ‘Not his size, silly,’ she said. ‘No, what’s short is the pint in your glass and the change in your pocket.’

  Joe started to check and she added, ‘Not now, not when there’s just the two of us, and you’re with me anyway. But Saturday nights when there’s a rush on, I reckon he makes a hundred in short change and another in short measure.’

  Again that easy acceptance. Again Joe made the comparison with back home in Luton. Barmen looked for the perks there too, but anyone so blatant he was named for it would soon be even shorter by dint of being driven into the ground.

  He said, ‘Why’s his boss not do something about it?’

  ‘Mr Feathers? None of his business, is it? I mean, it’s not like someone’s dipping his hand in the till. Try that and Mr Fea
thers would soon chop it off at the wrist.’

  ‘So what if someone complains?’

  ‘Big Eddie sorts out troublemakers and you get banned.’

  ‘So go somewhere else.’

  ‘Nowhere else to go, is there? Need a licence from the council to hold discos.’

  These are murky waters you’re swimming in, Joe, he thought. He longed to be strolling along Luton High on his way for a drink with Whitey on his shoulder, the traffic purring by, the spring sun bouncing off the green marble of the KL restaurant, the Clint Eastwood inflatable over Dirty Harry’s bobbing in the breeze, the jets high overhead unwinding their long, long trails to far-away places across the sky.

  ‘You OK, Joe? You’ve gone funny on me again,’ said Bron.

  ‘Just thinking. You and Wain, him and you were making out, right?’

  The directness of the question surprised him as much as it surprised her. Must’ve been thinking about home that did it, and realizing that tomorrow was his last day here and he was still a million miles from finding anything out, or even understanding what in fact there was to find out.

  So no more Mr Polite Guy, he told himself ferociously. Straight to the point, don’t make no matter how people take it, the lies they tell are just as revealing as the truth they don’t to a good PI, according to Endo Venera.

  Bronwen said, ‘Joe, you’re not going to turn out to be one of these old guys who like to talk dirty, are you?’

  He said, ‘I don’t think a pair of nice kids loving each other is dirty, do you?’

  She shook her head fiercely, then said, ‘Not the way some people see it round here, though.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  She looked at him over her glass of crème de menthe (straight out of the movies again) and said, ‘So why do you want to know?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ said Joe honestly. ‘Just I’m working on something and the more I know about what’s going on round here, the better.’

  It didn’t sound all that persuasive, but she nodded and said in a rush, ‘We’ve known each other since we were kids. Couple of years ago I, you know, filled out and he started acting different and I was curious, so after a bit of, you know, nearly doing it, one day we did it, and after that we did it a lot, it was like we felt this was just the start of us being together for ever.’

  ‘But it wasn’t.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘We got caught. There was a row. I wasn’t sixteen, see? And she said Wain could go to jail, it was the law.’

  ‘She? Your mother caught you?’

  ‘Not mine. Wain’s. She said she wouldn’t tell his father, or mine, but we had to stop, at least till we were old enough to make our minds up.’

  ‘And this persuaded you?’ said Joe dubiously. His own observation of teenage behaviour was that the only pressures they took notice of came from brute force and blatant bribery, and not always then.

  ‘Well, I was scared, and so was Wain. She may not look it, but Mrs Lewis can be pretty scary when she wants.’

  Joe tried to imagine this without much success, but then he wasn’t a teenager caught with his pants down.

  ‘How old are you now, Bron?’ he asked.

  ‘Seventeen.’

  ‘Old enough to make your mind up?’

  ‘Legally, maybe,’ she said, managing a smile. ‘I turned sixteen a couple of weeks after Mrs Lewis caught us, but Wain had finished his A levels then and he got sent straight off to America, so I didn’t see him for over a year, and when he came back he went off to university almost straightaway. It wasn’t really till the Christmas hols that we had the chance to talk.’

  ‘So you talked,’ Joe prompted.

  ‘Yes, and we did the other, if that’s what you’re interested in,’ she said coldly.

  ‘But you didn’t stay together, I mean, not as an item?’ said Joe. ‘Was that because Mrs Lewis still didn’t approve?’

  ‘Oh no. Not scared of her any more,’ said Bron dismissively. ‘It was because I didn’t approve, see?’

  ‘Sorry? Thought you said …’

  ‘I said we slept together, no commitment, just for the fun of it, OK? But there are rules. Rule One is, you go to a party with a boy, you don’t expect to find him halfway through the evening with his arm up someone else’s skirt. Different in America and at university, maybe, but round here, that’s the rule. He said it meant nothing, and she always looks like butter wouldn’t melt, but I told him where to get off. So if anyone tells you he gave me the push, you can tell them you know different, can’t you?’

  She spoke with the vehemence of remembered hurt.

  Joe said gently, ‘Anyone can see he’d have been mad to do that, girl. But this morning I got an impression you were back together, sort of …’

  She took a long pull at her drink then said in a rush, ‘That’s what I thought … he came to see me the night before last and it was just like it was before … better … and I thought … but then he’s gone all funny on me … and now you tell me he’s been up at the hospital … don’t know why I’m telling you this.’

  The world, or at least South Bedfordshire, was full of people who weren’t sure why they’d told Joe Sixsmith all this. Joe didn’t know either, but he wasn’t complaining. All he wished was that God would have fitted him with a decoder up to the same standard as his receiver.

  ‘Not working out then?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know. Why should I know anything? Like everyone keeps telling me, I’m just a kid.’

  Many a true word spoken in anger, thought Joe.

  He said, ‘Shouldn’t let it worry you. Nice, bright, beautiful kid like you, I bet there’s lads standing in line to get their names in your appointments book.’

  ‘You in the line, Joe?’ she said, smiling at him.

  ‘Couldn’t stand the competition,’ he replied. ‘Much going off in the way of drugs round here?’

  This was meant to be casually slipped in on the back of this wave of intimacy. Instead it acted like a breakwater.

  ‘Who you been talking to, then?’ she demanded, anger back tinged with deep suspicion.

  ‘No one,’ he said. ‘Just a sort of professional interest.’

  ‘Oh yes? Fancy keeping in with the pigs, is that it? Well, you’d better not expect favours back, believe me. Pigs round here eat their young.’

  ‘Hey, I’m not trying to get no favours from the cops,’ protested Joe. ‘Just making conversation. But maybe you shouldn’t lump them all together anyway. There’re still some good cops around, even here!’

  ‘You reckon? Name three.’

  ‘Well, DI Ursell. And Sergeant Prince …’

  The only other he knew by name was Pantyhose and he didn’t think he was going to impress by putting his name on the list, but it didn’t matter as Bron laughed as if he’d already gone one cop too far.

  ‘Tom Prince? That the best you can manage, Joe?’

  ‘Why? What’s wrong with Prince?’

  ‘Oh, nothing proved or he wouldn’t still have his stripes. But you don’t get moved from being a detective in Cardiff to being in uniform here without there’s something going on. Know what I mean, hand in the till, everyone knows but he left no prints.’

  ‘Who told you this, Bron?’ asked Joe.

  ‘Oh someone, I don’t know. Everyone gossips round here, forget what time you’re meeting your mate, just ask the first person you see in the street and they’ll be able to tell you. I’ve seen him myself in here having his drink in the snug with Phil Feathers half an hour after proper closing time except to residents. So don’t tell me to put my trust in the police.’

  Joe said, ‘I’m sorry. Listen, you’re reading me wrong. All I want …’

  … is to find out how close Wain is linked to the stolen Decorax and whether there’s a direct link between the Decorax he’d found in the Lady House cistern and the traces they’d found in the burnt woman’s system. That was all he wanted, but it wasn’t easy to explain.

  But as so o
ften, inarticulate confusion worked better for him than eloquent explanation.

  Bronwen suddenly smiled at him and shook her head in mock-exasperation, as if he were the troubled teenager and she the mature man.

  ‘Joe, you’re a nice man, kind of man who’d take a girl home and not expect favours along the way, and that’s pretty rare in these parts. And you’ve only been here no time at all but you’ve managed to do a good thing, which is more than most of them who rate important round here will manage in a lifetime. And that’s got them taking notice of you which is not always a good thing, believe me. So why not rest quiet and go home safe and sound soon as the festival’s over? But first of all, why not take me home and maybe we’ll find a little favour for you along the way even if you don’t expect it?’

  Now Joe saw strong what he hadn’t been able to see before, the resemblance between Bron and her mother.

  He grinned and said, ‘Love to. Only there’s a problem.’

  He explained about the Morris being blocked.

  She said, ‘Big silver Jag, is it? Fluffy skeleton in the window?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Andy Quilter. See his name everywhere. His firm does most of the big building contracts round here.’

  ‘Including the new council offices?’ Joe guessed.

  ‘Of course.’ She looked at him as if he’d said something naive, which he supposed he had.

  ‘So will he move it if I ask him nicely?’

  ‘Not if you ask him nicely, no way,’ said Bron. ‘You got your mobile with you, Joe?’

  He produced it, she took it from him and went through the door marked Ladies.

  A few minutes passed, then the phone behind the bar began to ring and after a while Shorty emerged to answer it.

  The conversation was in Welsh but the consternation on the barman’s face needed no interpreter.

  He banged the phone down and went back into the meeting room. Bronwen came out of the toilet and slipped the phone back to Joe. The door behind the bar burst open and a fat man, his face flushed with drink and anger, emerged, followed by Shorty who was gabbling, ‘Only a scratch, Mr Quilter, that’s what she said, nothing that a bit of polish and a smidgeon of filler wouldn’t hide …’