“I doubt it. It’s all too easy to get sucked into something dodgy, especially if you’re a bit hard up and can’t afford to be picky about jobs.” Sam saw my look, and sighed. “Yes, Dad, I’m talking from experience. But it’s all history now, and I’ll tell you about it another time, OK?”
I could see that there was no point in trying to push it further. Another note for my mental file.
“Anyway, does this help us much?” Sam moved the conversation on. “Knowing who the fake Adi really was?”
“It helps me. But I don’t suppose it gets us any closer to exposing this scam.”
“We could go to the police?”
“And say what? Here’s a person who looks a bit like Adi Varney and who fell off a building yesterday, then vanished?”
“Right. Still a bit thin. All the same…”
I sighed. “You don’t let things go, do you?”
He flashed me a Sam Smile. “I can’t help it. Genetics, Dad.”
I snorted. “All the same what, then?”
“I would have thought that having a person like Rocco Lonza in the country would be of interest to somebody. There’s probably an entire police unit tracking people like him. Chances are, they already know he’s here. But do they know what he’s up to? It might be worth passing on a bit of information – without going into all the details, of course. Anonymously, even. Just to make sure he’s on their radar.”
“You might be right. But who would you contact? You can’t just drop by the local nick and ask to speak to their secret intelligence unit or whatever.”
“I’ll see if I can find out who to talk to.”
“Alison, you mean? Would a CSI have access to that sort of information?”
He shrugged. “I can try. In the meantime, what do we do now?”
I shook my head. “I’m all out of ideas. We need a change of pace. A different perspective, perhaps. Shall we go and get some fresh air?”
“Go where, exactly? Bearing in mind I’ve had my instructions from Mum.”
“Nowhere dangerous, I promise. Just a quick trip into the past.”
CHAPTER 8
“When I was a kid, we didn’t have a TV, there were no computer games, so we climbed trees, read books, or played football. I didn’t like heights and I hated reading, so I mostly played football. Good call, as it turned out.”
Adi Varney, TV interview
We took the same route as we had the previous day, but instead of taking the turning up towards the sports centre, carried on south until coming off onto a small country lane, which wound through some trees and eventually into a rather exclusive little suburb of large detached houses, set well back in their own grounds. Some were so far back that they were invisible from the road.
“This was all open fields when I was a kid,” I commented. “Go a bit further south and west of here and you’re in Castle Vale.”
A side road led to a quiet little car park with a sign announcing that it gave access to the “Quarry Spur Walkway”.
“Walkway? Why can’t they just call it a footpath?” I wondered aloud.
“And what’s ‘Quarry Spur’?” Sam asked as we got out of the car.
“Oh, I know that one!” We walked over to the edge of the car park and through a gap in the fence. Beyond, a strip of grassy land ran away and out of sight to the left and right of us. About ten feet wide and rimmed with trees and bushes, it had a gravelled pathway running down the centre of it. “Here’s the history lesson. Back in the late 1700s – before Delford Mills was built – there was a quarry just west of here, near a village called Burrowdell. With all the building that was going on, there was a good market for its product, but transporting it was expensive. So the owners invested in a canal – all the rage at the time – and built a link from the quarry to join the main canal over to the east.”
“That’s the one that runs through town?”
“Yes. The Central Navigation. Goes across the north of the town, then swings southwards just past the Castle. The Quarry Spur meets it along that stretch. Or did. As you can see, it’s no longer a canal; just the memory of one.”
We walked along the path, heading west. It was a bright day, sunshine filtering through the leaves and spattering over the grass. Birds whistling at each other, and a faint, indefinable scent of something sweet from someone’s garden. The best of British summertime.
I didn’t recognize anything, but there was something familiar about the atmosphere all the same, and a pressure started to build in my chest.
After a hundred yards or so we came out of the wooded area, and the northerly view opened up on our left.
“See that hill, Sam? Those buildings right on the top of it – that’s the sports centre. Between here and there, where all those nice semis are now, was The Dingles. Don’t ask me where that name came from, but everyone called it that. Rows and rows of terraced housing. Me and Adi lived on Hoskin’s Street, which ran almost all the way up to the hill. Adi was number 45, about halfway up, next to Burrows’ Corner Shop.”
It was vivid in my mind. Old Mr Burrows, a round little man, always in shirtsleeves but with a bow tie that all the kids made fun of. Except when we were in the shop buying sweets, of course.
“Where did you live, Dad?”
“Number 82. Down near the bottom end. The street ended two houses further along, and then it was just a bit of wasteland, and the canal.”
The wasteland was still there. The soil was poor stuff and full of stones, no use for agriculture. But no one had built on it either, which surprised me. It had been a very long time since I’d been this way, and I was surprised to find that some things hadn’t changed at all.
The tightness in my chest increased. Not my heart, I said to myself firmly. That’s fixed. It’s just memories.
The path took a long, gentle curve to the right. On our left, a rough pathway cut through the waste ground, meandering through the scrubby bushes. Dry and dusty now, I remembered it being all mud and puddles most of the year. My school shoes were regularly caked with it.
“That could even be the same path we used when we came down here,” I said, half to myself.
“They let you play by the canal?”
“Oh yes. By the canal or sometimes in it! That was forbidden, but it still happened often enough, by accident or design. And all over the wasteland and the fields as well. No such thing as an adventure playground in those days. Not much ‘health and safety’ either. You came home from school, had your tea, and went out to play. Often didn’t get back until it got dark. It didn’t bother our parents much it was pretty much what they’d done, after all.”
Ahead of us, the ground rose. The incline was sharp enough that rough wooden steps had been installed to make the climb easier.
“The Lock,” I explained. “It had a name, I suppose, but it was the only lock on the Quarry Spur, except at the end where it joins the Central. So we just called it the Lock.”
The massive old lock gates with their great black timbers had long gone. So had the crumbling brickwork and the rusty metal of the winding gear.
Instead, at the top of the stairs the path continued on, with a wooden bench offering a rest for the weary. Next to it, a timber post held a metal plaque.
“So they kept that.” I stared at it from a distance, then went and sat on the bench. My chest felt very tight now. Perhaps it was my heart. That would be ironic, I thought.
Sam came over and read the sign out loud. “In memory of Benjamin James Crowley and David Michael Deeson, who died on or near this spot as a result of a terrible accident, 19 May 1979. May their souls find eternal rest in the Grace of God.”
He sat beside me. “That was Uncle David?”
“Yes. They put the plaque up before the canal was closed and filled in. By the towpath then, of course. I hadn’t realized that they’d kept it. If I had, I’d have asked them to change it. Ben Crowley didn’t die as a result of the accident. His death was the cause of it.”
As a reporter, I’d had to learn when to ask questions and when to keep quiet and let people talk. Sam seemed to have a natural instinct for it, and said nothing as I struggled to find the words. Struggled to get them out against the pressure in my chest. Which wasn’t my heart, I realized. It was grief.
“Actually, there were several causes. By themselves, they would have been small things. But they all came together. Nowadays, we’d call it a perfect storm.”
A small brown dog ran past, then came back and sniffed at our legs. I reached down to give it a stroke and it licked my hand. The owner came past, called his dog away, and gave us a nod as he carried on down the steps. He looked to be about my age. I wondered if he’d lived round here then. If he remembered.
Probably not.
“The first thing that went wrong was the canal itself. And the lock gates in particular. It wasn’t a good time for canals in general; they were run by the government through British Waterways, and of course there was never enough money to do everything that needed doing. What there was went mostly to the main canal routes. The Quarry Spur was well down the list, and it showed. Towpath overgrown, banks crumbling, the metalwork on the lock gates was rusting and the woodwork was rotting. In the lock chamber, the brickwork was cracked and some of the masonry had fallen out altogether.”
“Why didn’t they just close it down?” asked Sam.
“They wanted to. That was the plan. But there was a problem with that – it was still in use. Must have been one of the last commercial barges in operation. The Madeline, it was called. We just called it the Maddy. It had a one-man crew, and that was old Ben Crowley.”
“Him on the plaque?”
“Yes. Old Ben had been working the canals all his life, and he was in his eighties by then, with no plans for retirement. He had a contract to shift aggregate from Burrowdell Quarry to a cement factory about twenty miles away, on the Central. And when British Waterways tried to shut him down, a newspaper heard about it and ran an article on how the government was destroying a way of life, etc.”
“The power of the press.”
“Exactly. Governments are very sensitive to bad publicity, so the plans were put on hold and old Ben and the Maddy carried on as before.”
I looked around, overlaying the view I saw with an older one. The canal full of water, the old barge chugging down towards the lock with a trail of diesel fumes behind it. Ben at the tiller, with his pipe in his mouth, leaving its own fumes, almost as strong as the engine, touching his cap in acknowledgement as we ran alongside, waving, easily keeping up with the Maddy’s slow progress.
“But of course, they weren’t going to spend any money on a canal they were going to close,” Sam said.
I shook my head. “No. They weren’t and they didn’t.”
“So what else went wrong?”
“Well, Ben wasn’t the only person on the canal. The canal leisure industry wasn’t anything like it is today, but there were a few private boats using it. On this particular day, there was a little cabin cruiser coming down from moorings near the quarry. It had just been sold to someone from Birmingham, who had taken a couple of his mates along to help him bring it home.
“Trouble was, they didn’t know much about boats, or canals. And particularly about locks. It probably didn’t help that they’d had a few beers each by the time they reached that point. Apparently they had some trouble getting the lock doors open – well, they were in poor condition, as I said – but one of them managed to fall in while they were doing it. He climbed out OK, no doubt a little sobered by the experience, but then they crunched their boat against the side of the lock, smashed up the gunnel – no fenders out, of course. And rammed the lower lock gates as well.”
“Sounds like a comedy act.”
“Yes. Except these idiots were a major contributing factor in what happened next. Because they then had even more trouble emptying the lock out and opening the lower gates to get out again. Perhaps because of the damage they’d caused. But in any case, they decided they couldn’t be bothered to shut them again. Or perhaps they were just unaware of proper canal etiquette. Either way, they sailed off with the lower gates wide open and the paddles up.”
I got up off the bench and went back to the stairs, looking down.
“The next factor in the tragedy was us. Me, Adi, and… my brother.”
Sam came to stand beside me, and I pointed. “We were down there. About fifty yards or so from the lock.”
“Did you come a lot?”
“I did. Adi not so much. He’d always rather be doing something football-related – playing, practising, reading about it. But even he couldn’t be playing football all the time. And that particular Saturday, for some reason there was no one around. None of the usual kids we played with, that is. I don’t know why. Sick, or away for the day, or helping their parents with something. Either way, it was just me and Adi, with David tagging along behind. Couldn’t get much of a game going with just us, especially as I was never any good. Davy was actually better, and Adi was ‘coaching’ him, showing him some moves. Ways to tackle or dodge a tackle, I think. Whatever, it was winding me up. I was feeling pushed out by my little brother. Or I think that was it – it’s hard to remember exactly what I felt. But for that reason or another, I wanted to give football a break, so I suggested we go down to the canal. ‘Down the Spur’ is what we used to say. ‘The Canal’ or ‘the Cut’ was what we called the Central Navigation.
“Adi wasn’t keen. He had a big match coming up – his youth team were in a regional cup final the next day. So he wanted to practise. But – as I pointed out – there wasn’t much practice to be had. And I told him about my raft.”
“You had a raft?”
“Built it myself, out of scrap wood and plastic barrels. A lot of stuff got dumped in the wasteland below our street, and a bit of imagination could always make something out of it. In this case, a raft. Not the most seaworthy craft, as you might imagine, but I could paddle up and down the canal on it.
“I hadn’t told anyone else about it. Adi could be quite scathing about anything he wasn’t interested in – so anything that wasn’t football or at least sport of some sort – and I didn’t want to share it with Davy. But I took the risk and this was one of the rare occasions when Adi was open to something different. The downside was that of course Davy wanted to come as well. I tried to dissuade him, but Adi took his side. He always did. So the three of us came down together.”
I paused for a moment. It was a long time ago, I reminded myself. It was strange how the memories had dulled with age but the emotions remained sharp.
“I had the raft in bushes a bit further down. We pulled it out, got it in the water, and me and Adi started paddling it up towards the lock, with Davy following us along the bank. I hadn’t been sure if it would take the two of us, I’d only used it on my own before, and the water was splashing through the planks, but it held together. Our jeans were soaked, but that wasn’t a problem. It was a warm day, very warm for the time of year – about like it is now, I think – and we knew that they’d dry off before we got home.
“Of course, Davy wanted a go. I said he was too young, but he said he could swim as well as I could, and Adi told me to let him have a turn. So we pulled into the bank just below the lock – and I swapped places with my brother.
“He took a while to get settled. First he wanted to stand up, but the whole thing started rocking, so then he sat down. And complained that his bum was wet, so he had to get up and kneel… While all that was going on, I heard this sound in the distance, getting louder. An old diesel engine, which had to be the Maddy, coming down from the quarry.
“I told Adi, ‘Better get the raft out of the water till she’s past. Old Ben gave me a rollicking when he saw me on the water with it.’
“But Adi would have none of it. ‘What’s it to do with him, anyway? Not his canal! And in any case, he’ll be ages getting through the locks. ’Specially as someone left the gates open!�
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“And the noise was getting closer, and louder, and while I was arguing with Adi I was thinking, somewhere in the back of my mind, that Ben should have throttled back by now, getting ready to moor up while he opened the lock gates.
“What we didn’t know was that Ben wasn’t at the tiller.”
Sam gave me a puzzled look. “So who was driving?”
“Nobody. That was the point. That was the last link in the chain.”
I walked back up the path. “This, where we’re standing – this was about twenty foot deep. The upper gates would have been about… here.”
Sam stood next to me and we looked up the path together.
“There was a sort of basin here, space for boats to moor up while they waited for the lock. Then – you can see where the path runs – it’s a straight stretch for over a mile before the next bend. Straight and quite wide. Ben used to use that to nip down into the cabin, pour himself a cup of tea, something like that. Never more than a minute, and he had a bit of rope that he’d slip over the tiller to keep it straight. There was rarely any other traffic – he’d have seen if there was anything coming out of the lock – and if the wind was light the Maddy would keep on as straight as a ruler for as long as it took him.
“At the inquest, several people testified that they’d often seen the barge running along, apparently unmanned. Then Ben would stick his head up out of the cabin and wave, so all was well.”
“But not this time?”
“No.” I closed my eyes, listening for that put-put-put growing steadily louder. “Ben hadn’t been to a doctor in twenty years, it seemed, so nobody knew he had a heart condition. He probably didn’t even realize it himself. But it caught up with him all of a sudden that day. He slipped the rope over the tiller, went down into the cabin, and never came back.”
“Oh. Oh, crap.”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“It hit the lock?”
“Dead on. There was no wind at all that day, nothing to push the Maddy off course. I suppose that was another factor… She ran straight and true. Not fast, of course. Three miles an hour, perhaps three and a half, flat out. But she was carrying a full load, about thirty tons of aggregate, and that’s a lot of momentum.
Local Legend Page 10