The Miracle Inspector by Helen Smith

Author:Helen Smith [Smith, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Tyger Books
Published: 2010-05-16T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen ~ No Goatee

Jason Prince would have liked to grow a goatee beard. He suspected it would have sharpened his chin and made him look more intelligent. But he couldn’t really do that, he had to be clean-shaven, out of solidarity with the girls. Still, he sometimes stroked the area on his chin where a goatee might have been. He believed it helped him think.

Jason was thinking about the people in the club the night Jesmond was killed, and which of them might have been spies. Unfortunately, it was like April Fool’s Day; as soon as he remembered it was April 1st, everything everyone said or did on that day seemed absurd, and now the more he thought about it, the more likely it seemed that anyone in the club might have been a spy. But surely the audience that night had only been made up of poets, poetry-lovers, artists and eccentrics. That old bat with the funny hat, for example, had looked properly old school, a performance artist with nowhere left to perform. The organisers had been taking a risk letting in someone who was so obviously a woman after the curfew, although there would have been several of them in the audience incognito. You got to recognise them after a while; their studied cowboy way of walking from side to side with shoulders high, legs apart and arms held wide, their jeans and black T-shirts too perfectly male, their faces too soft, their eyes too big, their chins too smooth.

He didn’t blame himself for running when he came out of the club and saw what had happened to Jesmond. He had stepped over his hero’s body and run away. After all, a vicious gang who had beaten one poet to death might easily have had enough rage left over to beat other poets. He hadn’t wanted to hang around to find out, obviously. Others – either they were not poets or they were not cowards – had crouched around the body, checking for ID, a wallet or an item of jewellery to save and return to the family before the police arrived and dragged the body away. He doubted Jesmond had anything on him beyond his bus fare home. A life on the run made men cautious. It was, notoriously, one of the reasons why Jesmond had memorised his poems, so that there were no notebooks about his person with lyrics insisting that the reader should rise up, which would have given him away if he should ever have got stopped by the security forces or the police – although his face was so well-known, by now it must have been more a case of convention than prevention that made him travel so lightly.

Rise Up… Jason choked up at the memory of them all singing that song together that night. He felt he ought to try to do something to compensate for what those thugs had done to Jesmond. There was no question of him going after them, to get revenge.

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