Sunday at the Cross Bones. John Walsh

beside me comes the parson geezer, still in his long coat despite the warmish fug in the place. He only comes up to my shoulder, but he signals to Bella with a show of impatience, as if he’s seven foot tall.

      ‘Two large Johnnie Walkers, please,’ I say, since it’s my shout. ‘Ice in the glass and water on the side.’

      He looks at me as if I’d just spat in his eye.

      ‘Bella,’ he says, his voice commanding and surprisingly deep for such a small man, ‘has Dolores been in tonight?’

      His voice was like chocolate, smooth, low, melting, oddly caressing.

      ‘Dolores?’ says Bella, yanking the Bass pump so the maternal bosom inside her drawstring blouse wobbled like a milk pudding. ‘Haven’t seen her for three days.’

      ‘She should be here by now,’ he says, his fleshy lips working themselves into an extravagant pout. ‘I specifically asked her to join me here by seven o’clock.’

      ‘Sorry, Reverend,’ says Bella, ‘but brasses don’t keep strict working hours.’ Her lips were pursed like a cat’s arse.

      ‘She is a troubled young woman,’ says the parson with a hint of asperity, ‘and is worthy of your respect, if not your sympathy. Will you let me know if Miss Knight comes by this evening? I may be occupied in the snug.’

      ‘Mm-hmm,’ says Bella, disapprovingly. ‘If she comes swannin’ in here, I’ll make sure you hear about it.’

      I picked up the glasses. I wanted to say something, but he’d gone by the time I turned his way. Back to the little cubicle where he stayed, hunched and preoccupied, for an hour over little bits of paper spread before him. I took the drinks back to Benny, and we shot the breeze about the stable boys, the politician and the errant wife.

      ‘How’s tricks at home?’ said I, changing the subject. ‘Married life going well?’

      ‘Oh, that’s all fine,’ said Ben, leaning back and stretching expansively. ‘Me and Clare are snug as moles in a hole. She goes to ballet Tuesdays and Thursdays, night class in fine art on Wednesdays, we stay in and play French horn together Friday evenings, and most Saturdays we head for the Dog in Dulwich and have a few laughs and bit of a sing with her sister and brother-in-law. Every marriage should have, you know, a structure.’

      ‘French horn?’ I asked. ‘What’s that, some kind of polite term for it?’

      ‘What? Oh, I see. No no no.’ Benny was laughing now, a bit pissed. ‘You silly sod, no, I don’t mean that. We first met playing actual French horns together in the Vintage Musick Ensemble in Whitechapel. You knew that.’ He chuckled, man to man. ‘No, believe me, we don’t have to make a special evening of the old how’s your father. Christ, we’ve only been married six months. She’s still keen as mustard, she is.’

      ‘Benny,’ I said, waving a hand, ‘spare me the details, old son.’

      ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘she’s always on for a touch. Sometimes, in the mornings, it’s all I can do to pull her off the old –’

      Nice chap, Benny, but I really didn’t want to have to visualise his larks in the morning. Seeking a distraction, I looked around the pub.

      The vicar was still in the snug, his pint of squash dangerously low. He wasn’t alone any longer. There was a boy beside him, about ten, with a dozen evening papers under his arm. He was a last-edition runner, the kind employed for tuppence ha’penny an hour to take the final round of the Standard to pubs and railway stations around town when the street vendors have packed up for the night and gone home to their lady wives. I assumed the kid was trying to flog the news to the old geezers, but there was something about his pinched demeanour which made me think he was waiting for something more.

      I know these runners. They’re little more than urchins and strays, most of them, trying to make a few bob before heading home to their alky dads and their vicious mothers and their yowling siblings wandering around eating dripping sandwiches at nine o’clock at night. They should be in bed, after a day when they should be in school, but aren’t because they’re hanging around Smithfield Market, hosing down the stalls for a tanner or pinching offcuts of scraggy veal for their supper. Those that have homes, I mean.

      I don’t have a social conscience, most of the time. I just report on things. But sometimes I get a bit hacked off about kids that age selling newsprint, with their dirty little faces and their weirdly deep voices, like they’ve been smoking Players since they were two.

      Benny was still on about married bliss. He felt I should know that his wife sometimes cooks him lamb chops standing in the kitchen wearing an apron and nothing else. Now I’ve met Clare, just once. A nice girl and a whizz on the French horn, no doubt, but she wouldn’t start a riot at the peepshow. I tried to shake the vision of her aproned rear out of my head.

      ‘We should go out in a four some time,’ I said, not really meaning it. ‘You and Clare, me and Sal. One Friday, we could meet in town and have a bit of a carouse.’

      ‘Ooh. I see the rector’s making friends.’

      I looked. The clergyman and the boy had been joined by an older man, a churchy greybeard in a black suit, side whiskers and droopy eyebags. Man of the cloth or manager of a chapel of rest, there was a whiff of the mortality business about him. The kid stood between them, as awkward as a bullock in a fishmonger’s.

      ‘What they up to, Benny, you reckon?’

      ‘Couldn’t say, old son. The kid’s flogging newspapers, but our friend hasn’t bought one. The old cove looks like a headmaster, so maybe the kid’s been bunking off school and the rector’s rounded him up. Either that or he’s selling him into white slavery.’

      ‘Be serious, Ben, this is interesting.’

      ‘Go and find out if you’re so keen. Go on. I’ll still be here. I got my paper.’ He tapped my arm. ‘But don’t get bogged down. Half an hour of bollocks about the Undeserving Poor and Homeless, you’ll wish you never started.’

      So I went to the bar again, but this time I passed by the snug and hovered until the men stopped their chat and turned to me.

      ‘Can I help you?’ said the vicar.

      ‘I’ve had a bit of a windfall,’ I said, using an ancient ploy, ‘and I’m standing everyone in the pub a drink. Would you gentlemen care for a tipple on me?’

      They looked at each other.

      ‘No thank you,’ said the whiskered loon, ‘I don’t care to be bought drinks by strangers.’

      Well, excuse me, I thought. I looked at the kid, who just stood there, the fingers of his right hand the colour of beetroot because of the weight of the newspapers he carried. His head was bowed, poor chap, because it would never have occurred to him that he might be included in a round.

      ‘Yourself, sir?’ I nearly called him ‘Reverend’.

      ‘Come now, Mr Forsyth,’ the vicar said, turning to his surly chum, ‘surely every impulse of philanthropy should be encouraged, no matter how random its provenance.’ He talked like a Victorian gent, though he couldn’t have been all that old, and he smiled at me, his piercing eyes suddenly fixing on mine. ‘Thank you, my friend. I will take another orange cordial with a slice of lemon and plenty of water.’ He was so fastidious in his order – like a man demanding Angostura bitters in his gin Martini.

      I came back with the drinks into an awkward silence.

      ‘Can I just ask you a question or two?’ I asked him.

      ‘My time is limited,’ he said. ‘I have many affairs to transact. What would you like to know?’

      ‘I won’t pretend with you, Vicar –’ I began.

      ‘– Rector, if you don’t mind.’

      ‘Rector.