The Inspector Walter Darriteau Murder Mysteries - Books 1-4 by David Carter (best finance books of all time .txt) 📕

on the front row of the congregation with her mother. A position from where the older boys would inspect her, as they concentrated on pronouncing their vowels Dwell, Hallelujah, and Praise, as in Praise Him! Praise Him! gazing across at Machara with a mixture of curiosity and excitement, pondering on those naturally pink lips, as she silently mouthed her words, the boys wondering what she might wear beneath that thick tartan skirt, and wondering too where that might lead.

After the coming of the McGowans the choirboys relaxed.

They came to adore Blair McGowan who, with his three sons, would play football with them on the green, pretend matches between his beloved Raith Rovers, and Everton or Liverpool, or their own local Rovers, Tranmere. But more importantly, for the choirboys, on Sunday afternoons before evensong, he would invite some of them home for tea, ensuring that through the course of a term, each boy took his turn. It was an invitation no one refused.

Armitage’s opportunity arrived one hot sunny June day. Fresh strawberries and cream were served in fancy blue glass dishes, the boys eyeing them through wide eyes, the berries picked by Machara’s fair hand, from the extensive fruit patch at the rear of the vicarage. Red salmon sandwiches made from real tinned salmon, and best English butter, not scrimped with either, the sandwiches cut neatly into fours, the faint aroma of a woman’s perfume upon them, as if they had been cut and prepared by Mrs McGowan, or better still, Machara.

‘The crusts cut off!’ exclaimed Armitage. ‘Can you believe that?’ as he later told Dennis about it. ‘All the crusts cut off!’

Armitage wasn’t alone in wondering what happened to those crusts. He’d liked to have taken them back to Saint Edmond’s, but he still hadn’t finished his gleeful descriptions.

Homemade sugar topped fruit scones with raspberry jam, and more cream, and gallons of hot steaming tea, served in cups and saucers, the good stuff too, Typhoo. Not the dishwater muck we have to drink, with a large bowl of sugar lumps parked in the centre of the table where the boys were encouraged to take as many lumps as they liked.

‘Sugar isn’t rationed here, you know,’ grinned the Reverend Blair, ‘not in this house,’ through his jovial red face, remembering as he did his own childhood from long ago when sugar was worth more than gold.

The boys took him at his word, and every week the bowl was picked clean, many of them secreting extra lumps into their pockets to eat later as sweeties.

‘And afterwards he put on the record player and played records,’ recalled Army, perhaps getting a little carried away at the beauty and warmth of it all, of being in someone else’s happy home, something that Armitage remembered all too well, but something that Dennis could not relate to. It might as well have been in far off Hollywood, for all he knew.

Dennis was interested in the descriptions of the food and drink; and envious too, that went without saying. The mere mention of it made his mouth water and his stomach rumble, but there was something else that interested him far more.

‘Tell me about Machara!’

‘Well,’ said Armitage, thinking about her, and trying to remember what she wore and what she said and did. He hadn’t paid that much attention. ‘Well, she’s very clean, and quiet, and pink, and smells of scented soap, with black shiny hair in a helmet sort of style, and she was wearing a white top, and a green tartan skirt with a large silver pin in it, and long green tartan socks.’

‘Yeah, that’s all good, but would you fuck her?’

Armitage flushed.

He had never considered such an outrageous idea. It had never entered his head. He had been far too preoccupied with the strawberries and cream. He was about to stammer out a no idea reply, only to halt himself as he remembered how the other boys always acted when they talked dirty, and he copied them.

‘Yeah, yeah, course I would!’

‘I knew it,’ said Dennis, leering, ‘I bloody knew it! You dirty bugger!’

‘I saw her knickers,’ said Armitage.

‘What! Did ya? When? How?’

‘When she sat down on the settee, when she took her strawberries to eat, after she’d made sure we all had ours, as guests, as her dad had asked her to do. They were green.’

‘Were they? Yeah? Green?’

‘I only saw them for a second before I looked away.’

‘Looked away?’ asked Dennis, not believing what Army had said. ‘What did you do that for, ya limpet?’

‘It’s rude to look up women’s skirts.’

‘Is it? I don’t think it is. I look up women’s skirts all the time, it’s only natural, not that I get much opportunity.’

Armitage glanced across at him, thinking him a little weird, though he didn’t say, for Dennis was the only genuine friend he had in the whole world.

SAINT JUDE’S CHURCH choir had built up a fine reputation. While church attendances across the country were plummeting, Saint Jude’s was packing them in. It wasn’t unusual for the place to be full. Word went round the Wirral and beyond. There was a singer there, a treble who was better than those celebrity singers you heard on the TV at Christmastime. Far better! I kid you not. Well better, as the local boys might have said. You should listen to him. See and hear for yourself while you have the chance.

People did. Hundreds of them.

Saint Jude’s was a chunky red stone church with a straight and skinny steeple. It continued to sell out, not that they ever charged anyone to attend. Though Blair McGowan with his Scottish roots, had considered doing so when he saw the queues of excited people hurrying through the lichgate, talking excitedly as if they were going to a music concert at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall.

Blair resisted the temptation to charge, contenting himself with a Please Give Generously plea, at the end of his brief sermon. He realised many folks had not come to hear him, as the