From the branch of an oak tree, the ginger cat watched the coming and goings of the Retreat.
Chapter 4
SOON after the pregnancy saga, the ‘doc’ resumed his twice-a-week surgery with Mary Murphy’s help. The Last Retreat’s owners are the Local Authority Welfare Department under the management of Harriet St Clare. Many of her male colleagues and others had tried, without success, to determine her age. The general opinion was she was aged more than thirty, but less than fifty. Still, she was a strikingly attractive woman with her natural, blonde, waist-length hair usually tied up in chignon.
She was prone to sweeping into a room, saying in welcome. “Hi, guys. Good to see you’re all well,” waving her right arm about for no particular reason. This form of welcome applied to men or woman. She had little idea about the names of the residents. Before anyone answered her friendly greeting, the tap-tap-tapping of her four-inch high heels were the only sound as she departed in her trade mark pseudo-regal styled hips swaying, leaving some of the older men bordering on heart failure. Any questions became just a noise blowing in the breeze.
Lenny Smith, who had launched his criminal ‘career’ when he was aged fourteen, had a predilection of describing any official as a look-a-like for any movie star of TV. To him, Harriet St Clare was Amanda Redmond doing her regular job. According to Lenny, her acting was just moonlighting.
The other three usually nodded sagely when he made such an identity announcement. They had found it best to avoid any extended explanation and to have Lenny getting more agitated when anyone scoffed ‘at this dead cert information’.
Sitting in the day-room late one afternoon, before their early evening visit to the Talbot, the four paid their fifty-pence each and half-listened to the chatter around them. The vicar and his wife sat watching the others. Then, a rare visitor to afternoon tea arrived. Glynis Carswell, a former showgirl and entertainer sat in the only empty seat next to the vicar and Mary, who was dressed all in white, with calf-length tight trousers and a tightfitting blouse. A string of large, blue beads strung around her neck, which helped to disguise her formidable cleavage, even at the age of seventy-two.
The vicar began his usual grumble about the number of worshippers. He told the wife, “I’ve got to think of something that will increase the congregation.” He sat in silence. “I’ve got an idea. It’ll need some research, though.”
Mary interrupted his contemplations, and said, “We could get at least four hundred in the church hall to watch a show.”
The vicar leaned back in his chair. He nodded, pursed his lips and held his hands together as if praying and touching his pursed lips with his two index fingers.
He took his hands down and leaned forward, looking at his wife and was about to say something when he was interrupted by Glynis Grimble. “Forgive me interrupting. Maybe I can help. I used to manage a theatre and was in showbiz for many years. You could stage a very good entertainment gig. You could charge a small entrance fee for the benefit of church funds.”
As the three leaned over the table, Reg commented, “Don’t see her too often. I bet she was a stunner in her younger days. Wouldn’t mind time with her,”
Lenny replied, “Leave it out, Reg. You know you’re past it. You couldn’t even raise yer left toe. Never mind anyfin else.”
The Colonel added, “That’s Glynis. She lives in number eight. She used to be something in showbiz. She’s one of the women’s secret society lot.”
Reg stood up holding the handles of his four-wheel trolley. “Getting me legs ready fer the off,” he said.
As the Colonel folded that day’s edition of the Daily Mail and stuck it in the side pocket of his jacket, a face adorned with a flat, brown cap appeared in the doorway. Bent over at an angle, it appeared to have no body attached. By the time the four had reached the door, the mystery face had vanished.
The four left for their regular visit to the Talbot, leaving the vicar, his wife and Glynis huddle in conversation. Reg asked, as he walked with the others, “D’ think she’ll come for a drink with us sometime? Wouldn’t mind that; she a bit of alright.”
Lenny replied, “Dream on, Reg. She needs someone with a bit of umph in em. You ain’t got umph. In fact, yer umphless, even useless,” he chuckled at his own humour.
No one else said anything.
As the four sat in the pub, Glynis was giving the vicar and his wife a very sanitised version of what could be expected if she organised a burlesque-style show. The three agreed to meet a week away and flesh out the idea.
Glynis left with a smile on her face. The vicar was enthusiastic and smiled at Mary. “We could invite the Woman’s Guild, members of the WI, plus those from the Old Soldiers Club and the British Legion. We could raise some funds if we charged a fiver a time.” He rubbed his hands in glee and left the building alone, not having an inkling of what was in store.
Glynis vowed to talk to the ‘women’s secret society’ when they next met.
The ‘Face’ sat in a pub, dreaming up his latest offerings of scandal and gossip in the Brighton area. He believed the tabloid newspapers would buy his ‘exclusives’. He only dealt with the nationals. “They pay better,” he told friends. The local evening and weeklies had no dealings with him. ‘Cheapskates with no imagination’ he called them. Hardened newspaper staff ridiculed his ‘fantasy’ efforts.
It was a dry time for him and his exclusive tips that never seemed to see the light of day. Muttering to himself, he said, “These modern reporters have no idea what real stories are all about.”
He downed the last of his pint of lager. He was looking furtively around him. Bernie ‘Bent’ Buckle ambled out of the bar. He pulled is anorak around him and tugged his hat tighter onto his head.
Meanwhile, back at the Retreat, Carol Smythe had arrived to meet her four new charges. “Well, hello boys. How are you?” “Gettin’ there,” the Colonel responded.
“Yeh, sortin’ fings out,” Lenny added.
She looked at Jock, who said nothing, just nodded his head and smiled in acknowledgement.
“No probs,” Reg added, as he gripped the handles of his trolley.
“Well, OK, well done. Alright, lads, I’ll see you next month.” She suddenly looked up and saw a Caribbean Rastafarian walk past with plaited, blonde, hip-length hair.
The Colonel also saw him.
Carol Smythe continued, “Ah! The veg man has arrived. I need some greens.” She said goodbye and walked out of the rear door of the lounge. The Colonel saw her collect a plastic shopping bag from the man that he was told later was also an ex-con who had turned into a gardener.
The four decided they would try a new pub. Walking down Woodland Road at the junction with Coppice Way, they discovered a shop that appealed to Lenny. Sitting on a high stool outside the Fine Tune was a dummy dressed in a gorilla suit, playing a guitar with no strings. “Cor, Guy and the Gorillas, they were some act.” The other three walked on, leaving Lenny entering the second-hand music shop.
Fifteen minutes later, he joined his colleagues, saying, "I’ll have a pint. That’s some memory lane place. That shop. All sorts of stuff from the sixties. I’ll go there agin. What memories!
Bleedin’ marvellous."
None of the others joined in his musical enthusiasm.
Chapter 5
RASTAFARIAN Gardener Sonny Summerton had a side-line of selling vegetables from the garden and ‘specials’ from the blacked-out greenhouse, which he kept pad-locked whilst away from the garden. He usually held a meeting of ‘like-minded’ friends every Saturday, Carol Smythe included.
The Retreat had more than its fair share of idiosyncratic and peculiar residents. One of these was eighty-one-year-old retired farmer, George Goodchild, who lived in fear of Martha Samuels, but wouldn’t say why. He was less fearful of newly arrived Mary Murphy. “Too small to bother,” he told friends.
He still dressed in brown hobnail boots and brown leather spats, threadbare clothes and a brown smock tied up with
old-style hessian baler twine. His attire owed more to the style of the nineteen-twenty’s rather than those of the early part of the twenty-first century.
Every Thursday night, he followed a social pattern created by his grandfather. He visited many pubs in town until ‘throwing out time’, returning to the Retreat in a cheerful disposition.
He regaled against modern baling techniques and any ‘newfangled’ farming methods. When asked why string was tied around his smock, he replied, “Ah, that be good hessian baler twine, none of yer plastic rubbish. It be the best.” This question of his belt usually led him to say, “Today’s ways be rubbish.” He would announce with gusto. None of the ‘townies’ had any idea what he was on about.
Adding, somewhat conspiratorially, he said “Oh, I do miss me, Fergie, I do miss her.” He’d been in the home for many months when his son and daughter were visiting and were asked why his girlfriend, Fergie, didn’t visit him.
Those who asked were soon told that ‘Fergie’ was a tractor, a grey-painted Ferguson from the nineteen-fifties. No one asked again.
His other pet subject, particularly to a female audience, was, “D’ yer know the right way of milkin’ a cow?” When his listeners, who probably had never been near a cow, said a collective ‘no’, he would pause, shuffle in his seat and continue, “Well, yer see, if you’re pulls their titties, they be wantin’ to kick.”
He paused, as if ensuring his audience were attentive. “Now, wocha gotta do is tease the milk out.” He told them in his distinctive, rural Hampshire burr.
He looked at his female audience, sat back in his chair and announced with a grand wave of his right arm, “Now, you wouldn’t like it with some weirdo tuggin’ your titties, would yer?”
“Gotta be gentle,” he emphasised with a glint in his eye and a cheeky grin.
The women present usually giggled and told him he was rude. The men scoffed, usually telling him, “Belt-up.”
He was desperate to escape the regime of the Retreat, but was always thwarted by his son and daughter, who were anxious to keep him away from their prize herd of Jersey milking cows.
Full of the local brew, as was inclined to be, did little to impair his memory as the two, who had purloined the plants and furniture of the garden from the neighbouring town, were to later discover. He had little time for the ‘doctor’. It was to be some time before anyone knew why.
His early attempts to disgrace himself so he could be evicted came to shuddering halt in the shape of the Klassy Kare Kompany’s thirty-year-old, worldly, wise carer, Karen Dodds.
George Goodchild had developed a habit of sitting naked whilst any of the all-girl team pottered around the flat, cleaning up and cooking his breakfast and other meals. They all ignored him as he told of the vigorous activities of his favourite bull. Karen decided to ‘put him out of his misery’. Taking a pint jug of cold water from the fridge, she feigned a trip and poured the water on his ‘ready for action’ manhood.
His bull and young-heifer stories ended. He avoided the cold-water treatment by being dressed when the girls came. Karen became something of a heroine with her colleagues.
Early in their stay, Jock had dubbed the rural rogue, a tallyboggle. Len was asked to explain at the time. He said Jock had described the retired farmer, using Scottish slang, as a scarecrow. No one disputed this description.
Also, in the home’s executive section was the doddery old police chief, who thought he was still in command of a small West Country Police Force. He believed his stay at the Retreat was part of a secret assignment to catch a ‘flasher’ in the road leading to the beach. No one at police headquarters paid attention to the Assistant Chief Constable’s father’s rather dubious surveillance reports.
He avoided any social interaction with other residents. He had no idea he shared a building with members of the ‘gang of four’, the gardener of dubious background, plus a bizarre ‘doctor’ and a suspect ‘bishop’.
To anyone who cared to listen, he had been the best English chief constable. Most ex-colleagues, family and visitors remembered him sitting naked whilst interviewing female police recruits. He specialised in targeting slim and attractive females. He was eventually sacked. He said he wanted to ensure the women were ‘worldly wise’.
Rumours abounded that he was finally banished from his office and kicked out of the force because of an incident with an attractive, new woman constable, a former WREN, who was summoned to his office only to find to him naked, sitting at his desk and began inquiring about her love life in the Royal Navy. This saga was embellished with telling.
Carers wouldn’t visit him because of, what he described as, his hobby. He insisted he was a naturist and as such spent time sans clothing. Whilst in such a state of being undressed, he made suggestive remarks to any good-looking girl sent to look after his twice-a-day cooking and household cleaning. The care company had taken to sending obviously gay men or big women.
He now spent much of his time sitting naked and watching the world go by through powerful binoculars, believing that anyone walking down the road to the beach was an arch-villain. He would regularly telephone his son, who had risen to the dizzy height of Assistant Chief Constable in the local force. Young constables, fresh from college, were usually sent to deal with his observations. Female members based at the Crabby nick avoided such visits.
To add to the potpourri of residents was an aged lady shoplifter, who only stole from Tesco. The store would, a couple of hours later, send a shop assistant to her flat to ‘rescue’ the pilfered goods. She only ever ‘nicked’ tinned items.
Jessica Creswell, the lady from number twelve, occasionally met the ‘doctor’. The speed, with which he avoided her, was quite astonishing. When they did cross paths, she would shout at him and tell him he was ‘a dirty pervert’ and brandish her heavy cane walking stick at him.
There was a strange assortment of other types, including two women who once ran different types of ‘men-only club’s’. One was in an up-market part of Brighton, the other housed on a down-market council estate on the outskirts of Crabby. Many men were left frustrated when they were both closed on council orders for not having the appropriate licence.
The local press uncovered the council’s action and printed a tongue-in-cheek article on the leader page, seeking information on: “How do you licence a brothel?”
Two other tenants of the private wing were retired bank managers, who were secretly friendly with the lady who kept the up-market club. No one saw the way the two eighty-year-olds smiled at each other.
It transpired they had been lovers when they were both in their late teens and lost touch when her parents moved to Ireland. Both were trying to relive the glory days of youth when they met for the first time in more than sixty years.
The gardens of the Retreat were unkempt with a prolific crop of weeds and the green house unused until the arrival of Sonny Summerton. The Brixton-born son of a family was originally from Jamaica. He sported plaited hip-length, blonde dreadlocks and been let out of Ford Open Prison on licence, following conviction of drug-related offences.
In the two months, he’d been the gardener-cum-handyman at the Retreat. He created a ‘business’, cultivating cabbages, carrots, potatoes, onions and lettuce in a well-tended plot. He then sold these products from a stall at the local weekly farmer’s market. One of his regular ‘veg-and-specials’ customers was Carol Smythe.
The padlocked green house had been lined with black polythene, powerful heaters and lights connected to the main electric at the council’s expense. All this was to protect, what Sonny claimed to be, his ‘geraniums’ and other exotic plants. Most gave out a distinctive aroma and were, he said, ready for sale or harvesting. His business partner was an insipid-looking, white fellow, Rastafarian, who came to see the contents of the green house every few days. No one questioned these arrangements.
Lenny left the Retreat early morning a few days after visiting the Fine Tune Music Store. He was on a mission. Half-an-h
our later, he returned carrying a large parcel wrapped in brown paper.
Chapter 6
GUY ‘Colonel’ Granger had adopted a dress code he thought any retired man of military bearing should be seen in – Cavalry twill trousers, county-style checked shirt, gold-coloured waistcoat displaying a pocket watch, hacking jacket and a cravat, brown brogues and a flat cap. His horn-rimmed spectacles setoff the image. To him, it marked him out as a ‘gentleman’. It was this sartorial rig that earned him the sobriquet, the Colonel. His moustache added to the image.
When Lenny Smith first teamed up with him, he had become known as the ‘Colonel’ rather than unpleasant nicknames. He likened him to a replica of the character, Foggy Dewhurst, in the long-running TV series, Last of the Summer Wine. Lenny was convinced the creator of the series. Roy Clarke had based the character on Guy Granger. The fact was that Roy Clarke and Brian Wilde, the actor, had never met Guy Granger, the serial bank robber. This fact didn’t alter Lenny’s ‘dead right info’. He never mentioned the likeness again after Brian Wilde died in 2008.
Care-workers visiting the home came in many shapes, sizes and ethnic groups. Some were attractive; others would never strut the cat-walk of a beauty contest. If they did, it would probably collapse under their weight.
Sylvia Clissold was reaching her fiftieth year. Once a cabaret dancer she was, by any standards, still attractive with her easy-to-remove dress, faux-fur coat and six-inch high heels, with her long, flowing, blonde locks. She specialised looking after the needs of elderly widowers. She was often mistaken for being a care-worker employed by Executive Care, who only catered for private clients.
The Final Heist Page 4