3. 9 At the funeral
PETER’S MEMOIRS 3: “OUR BERNIE” (PART 9)
Bernie was surprised that so many people turned out for Richard’s funeral. Although he’d never attended, pretty much everyone from the church that Bernie and Angie belonged to was there, and there was a big police contingent. My biggest surprise was seeing DCI Jonah Porter in the congregation. He had been a junior colleague of mine in the old days, long before Bernie met Richard, but he’d moved away to South Oxfordshire to take up an inspector’s post and I hadn’t seen him for years. He’s the same age as Bernie, which means seven years younger than I am. However, he was much better at getting himself noticed – and to be fair, much better at making those unexpected leaps of imagination that can sometimes be crucial to solving a case – so he got promoted ahead of me. He thinks I resented that, but I didn’t really, even though in the early days I taught him a lot about basic investigation work.
Anyway, he turned up from nowhere at the wedding and asked me to introduce him to Bernie. Basically, he was curious to see what sort of woman old Richard had taken up with after having been a bachelor for so long. Well, whatever else, he couldn’t complain that Bernie was ordinary! I could see he hadn’t been expecting a loud-mouthed scouser or an Oxford don – and certainly into both rolled into one! However, Jonah is never wrong-footed for long and soon they were getting on like a house on fire. It rather annoyed me at the time to see young Jonah even managing to outshine me with one of my (or rather Angie’s ) oldest friends.
After Bernie went off to circulate among the guests again, Jonah got me to promise that I’d let him know when the baby was born – so he could send a card. At least, that’ what he said he was going to do …