Guilty Parties by Martin Edwards (ed)

Author:Martin Edwards (ed)
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: detective, mystery, anthology
ISBN: 9780727883872
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2014-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

THE LAST GUILTY PARTY

Phil Lovesey

Phil Lovesey was born in 1963, and is the son of Peter Lovesey. He studied art and took a degree in film and television studies, later working as a freelance advertising copywriter. He is the author of four crime novels and is a past winner of the CWA Short Story Dagger.

Looking back, Eric Trimble couldn’t remember exactly when, or how, the first Guilty Party ever happened. Save to say, it was probably sometime during their second year at university, far too many years ago. And, of course, it was also certain to have been Geoff’s idea. What idea wasn’t, in those days …?

Eric looked in the mirror, pulling gently on his Windsor knot, noticing how his neck seemed to sag ever more grotesquely on to the top of his stiff shirt collar these days. Age the great leveller; mortality the inescapable sentence.

‘Guilty,’ he muttered, trying not to take in the lines in his face too much. Instead, he distracted himself picking idle threads from his tweed jacket, and inspecting his shoes – both having seen better days, too.

He wondered how many of the others would be there. How many were still alive, even. Each year, the annual meeting of the Guilty Party played wearisome host to fewer and fewer members. Last year, it had been just five of them, and he knew for sure that Bob had passed on in October, and he hadn’t had a Christmas card from Stan either – Death’s dark warning for folk his age.

Which would leave just himself, Tim and, of course, Geoff. The three of them, the last three, all of them guilty …

Not that all had died, of course. Some members had drifted in and out over the years, or simply quit what they considered to be little more than an annual university reunion that merely offered the chance to impress the others with exaggerated tales of their successful lives, careers and families whilst drinking far too heavily in a cheap seaside hotel.

All activities which Eric knew far too well he was guilty of himself. But wasn’t it precisely what folk did at these reunion dos? Sugar the old pill a bit, tell a few whiskied whoppers to anyone still sober enough to listen? It was form, Eric suspected, and certainly almost de rigeur in the Guilty Party.

As he drove to the Welsh coast, he was glad of the finality of this last occasion. Geoff had written to him in the spring as always, informing him that, due to dwindling membership and increasing infirmity, this September’s meeting would be ‘the last Guilty Party’. Something Eric was secretly (guiltily?) more than pleased about. For it wasn’t simply the driving, the cost of all the drink and staying in the hotel …

It was Geoff.

And how had it started, all those many years ago? Quite simply, with the words, ‘Ah, here comes the guilty party,’ muttered by an irate lecturer as a bunch of them had stumbled late into a morning seminar nursing obvious hangovers from a heavy night on the sauce the previous evening.

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