Bad Penny Blues

by Barrie Roberts

  ‘Was twenty-five strokes a bad flogging?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, I don’t suppose it was much fun, but they used to give a lot more. They must have been going soft by this time. In the early days you read about two or three hundred lashes. Twenty-five was about the minimum. They used to call it a “tester” or a “Botany Bay dozen”. The guys who stood up to two or three hundred were called “pebbles” or “iron men”.’

  The record went on — ‘possessing turnips’, ‘singing in cell’, ‘indecency in cell’ (probably the only pleasure they couldn’t take away from him), each of which cost him seven days’ solitary.

  I looked through the other files. While James Simmonds was sent from Stafford Assizes, they were a mixed bunch geographically. John Smythe was sentenced at Winchester, Jan Satton at Bridgwater, Jonty Sowden at Shrewsbury, Jack Sullivan at Warwick and Gerry Somers at Oxford.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ I remarked. ‘Out of six, you’ve got three Midlanders and one in Oxfordshire. That should cut down on your mileage a bit.’

  ‘That’s if they came from the towns where they were tried,’ she said. ‘They might have been strangers in the area, which’ll make them hard to find. I thought, since I’ve got their birth-dates, that I’d try the Family Records Centre for birth certificates first. That might be a short cut and save me going through the trial records.’

  Chapter 3

  Next evening I got home to find Buggalugs the cat rampaging around the kitchen door, howling for food. You might ask why we didn’t have a cat-flap. Largely because — officially — we didn’t have a cat.

  My house is one of a number of villas built in Whiteway Village in the 1880s and ’90s by local manufacturers, but at the bottom of the back garden a narrow lane divides the posh villas from the old craftsmen’s workshops. The one immediately behind my gaff is a little brass-founder’s shop where they knock out fake Victorian horse brasses and Boer War money-boxes and things. Buggalugs is their cat — or he was. One warm evening we left the kitchen door open to let the heat of cooking out. Suddenly we realised we were being observed by a little triangular black face with huge pointy ears. Sheila fed him, and there you are. All of a sudden he became her devoted slave.

  ‘Listen,’ I commanded him, as I filled a bowl with premium grade Rabbit and Steak cat-food, ‘you used to subsist on bits of old sandwich from the brassworkers across the road and the odd fieldmouse or two. Don’t get above your station, mate.’

  He looked at me without expression and then tried to claw the dish out of my hands as I laid it on the back step.

  Sheila came into the kitchen behind me. ‘What’s he done?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s developing the idea that he’s a middle-class cat, not a factory moggy,’ I complained. ‘It’s your fault — all these Aussie ideas about equality.’

  ‘He’s not equal,’ she said. ‘He’s a superior moggy. Those big pointy lugs are Egyptian. He could be the reincarnation of a priest of Bubastes.’

  ‘Priests,’ I said, ‘are not supposed to be greedy and arrogant — they’re supposed to be poor and humble and obedient.’

  ‘Yair!’ she said. ‘Like the Pope and the Archbishop of Where-dyecallit, you mean? I take it you haven’t had a good day?’

  ‘Not so’s you’d notice. Bad Penny turned up.’

  ‘Who is Bad Penny?’

  ‘Bad Penny,’ I said, ‘is properly known as Miss Penelope Wenton but is known to the entire legal profession of this area as Bad Penny.’

  ‘Because she just turns up?’

  ‘Precisely. And when she turns up she always produces a carrier bag full of dog-eared photocopies and tells you that she wants you to prove that she’s the rightful Countess of Warwick and has been cheated of her inheritance.’

  ‘And is she? Has she?’

  ‘Of course not! No — not “of course not” — probably not, and anyway she can’t prove it.’

  ‘So what do you do?’

  ‘Spend lots of wasted time explaining to her why all her photocopies won’t prove she’s the rightful Countess of Warwick. Then she comes over all Countessy and says you’re no use and can you recommend a really good lawyer. Then you think of the colleague you like least and give her his address and off she goes. Then, months and months later, when you’d completely forgotten her up she pops again, some kindly colleague having given her your address and she having forgotten she’s ever spoken to you.’

  ‘Sounds fun. And could she be the Countess of Warwick?’

  I shrugged. ‘Who knows? Daisy Warwick put herself about a bit a century ago. She had a bad attack of Socialism and went bust and they say she tried to blackmail the Prince of Wales over some indiscreet letters. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if there were unacknowledged Warwicks littering the country. We know there’s lots of unacknowledged Royals.’

  ‘Well then, why don’t you prove her claim to the throne of England and make a fortune in fees?’

  ‘Because the royal descent doesn’t pass through the female side. I could only make her a Princess at best.’

  ‘Bloody Pommy chauvinists,’ she sneered.

  ‘Hang on a bit! It was immigrants what did it. The British used to elect their kings. It was the Anglo-Saxon mob who changed the rules.’

  ‘Don’t try and weasel out of it by blaming it on the immigrants! I used to think Oz was a man’s country, but they only learned it from you lot.’

  ‘Have you had any luck at finding your convicts’ girlfriends?’ I said, changing the subject.

  ‘Not bad,’ she declared. ‘I’ve found some of my convicts,’ and she pulled a roll of photocopies from her shoulder-bag. ‘See these?’

  ‘You got their birth certificates?’

  ‘Not all of them,’ she said, ‘but four out of six. Not bad, eh?’ She grinned triumphantly and went in search of her briefcase.

  I looked through the copies of birth records. ‘What’s the chance,’ I called, ‘of tracking these blokes down at the other end? In Australia?’

  ‘About Buckley’s,’ she called back. She reappeared with her case. ‘They usually changed their name once their sentence was over. You ever heard of Jim the Penman?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘He was a lawyer and forger in the 1850s. He got himself transported.’

  She nodded. ‘That’s right. He was pretty famous in his day. Because he kept his identity as Saward apart from his identity as Jim the Penman, the fuzz couldn’t find him for years, sort of Jekyll and Hyde stunt. When they did lumber him it was big news — a prominent barrister going down for life. So he was shipped out and served his time as a convict. Then, when he was released into the Colony, he disappeared. No trace of him. That’s what most of them did. That’s why there’s more chance of tracking the families this end.’

  ‘Where did that token come from?’ I asked. ‘Wouldn’t that help?’

  She came back with her briefcase, shaking her head. ‘No chance. It came out of a drawer in a London junkshop and he couldn’t remember where he got it. Said it was probably in a house-clearance.’

  I was still mulling over the copies of birth certificates when an exclamation from Sheila made me look up. She had her briefcase open and was staring into it.

  ‘My oath!’ she said. ‘I must be shickered.’

  ‘I’d be sure you were,’ I said, ‘if I knew what it meant.’

  ‘Drunk,’ she snapped. ‘You Pommy galah! If you’re going to be the great love of my life, you’d better learn to talk Strine.’

  ‘Right-o, cobber,’ I said. ‘Why are you shickered?’

  Without a word she spun the briefcase around on the table and pushed it across to me. It seemed to be full of newspapers.

  Why’d you take a bag full of newspapers to London with you?’

  I didn’t,’ she said. This morning that case had the copies of the convict files in it.’

  ‘You mean you’ve lost them? Some idiot’s picked them up on the train?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. L
uckily I scanned all the copies on to the computer and I made text copies as well to save reading all those different handwritings. I can print them out again. But look at this.’

  She pushed the lid of the briefcase shut and pointed to three parallel scrape marks that slanted across the front.

  ‘Mine had marks like that on it. This one’s nearly identical.’

  ‘Do you have any idea where it could have happened? Did you see anyone with this kind of briefcase?’

  She shook her head again. ‘Could have been on the train,’ she said. ‘It was pretty crowded and I was standing to Coventry.’

  ‘You could ask at the station, but they charge an arm and a leg for lost property nowadays.’

  ‘No point,’ she said. ‘My address is in the case. If the galah who took it wants his newspapers back, he’ll get in touch.’

  And we thought no more of it. Bad move. We should have wondered why someone took a case full of old newspapers to London.

  Chapter 4

  It didn’t take Sheila long to find the other two birth certificates at the Family Records Centre, once I’d reminded her that Satton was probably Sutton pronounced with a West Country accent and that Somers had several spellings.

  Once she had them, she could back-track in the records for their parents, and after that came the publicity. Now she had some idea of the families that she was looking for, she needed publicity to help her find them. My computer-mad assistant, Alasdair, put her on the Internet and local television put her on screen, which was picked up by national TV and caught the eye of newspaper editors who don’t actually publish pin-ups but aren’t averse to stories with a beautiful woman in them.

  All of which brought in tons of mail by post and e-mail. Almost every night we sat round after dinner and laughed our way through the bizarre letters that she received. Some of them were helpful, though, like one from a lady in Somerset:

  Dear Miss McKenna

  I was deeply interested to learn from our local newspaper that you are researching the family of a Jan Sutton who was transported to Western Australia in 1865.

  I am by way of being an amateur genealogist, and have, for some years, been researching my family’s past. Some of my ancestors were Suttons and lived in this area in the 1860s.

  I now have an extensive collection of papers about my family and if you think there may be anything among them that will assist you, perhaps you would like to telephone and arrange a time when you could call and see them.

  Yours sincerely, Dorothy Wainwright

  By this time we had developed a filing system — six box files labelled ‘Relevant’, ‘Interesting’, ‘Possible’, ‘Pointless’, ‘Boring’ and ‘Barking Mad’.

  ‘Interesting,’ I said and passed the letter across.

  ‘More than interesting,’ she said. ‘Intelligent, well-educated, right area — Relevant, I think.’

  ‘What’s more,’ I said, ‘Sutton isn’t a Somerset name. There shouldn’t be many there. If she’s got Suttons in her family tree she probably is some kind of relative to our Jan.’

  Sheila reached for the phone. ‘Don’t come over all Australian at her,’ I said. ‘From the style of her letter she’s probably elderly.’

  I have seen Sheila shoulder-charge a man with a loaded gun and watched her kick a knife-wielding killer in the crotch but when she sets out to make herself agreeable to somebody she knows how to lay it on. She introduced herself on the phone in her poshest accent and, in minutes, she and Dorothy Wainwright were chatting like old pals.

  She put the phone down, purring like a cream-fed cat. ‘Doing anything Sunday?’ she said.

  ‘You know what we do on Sunday,’ I said.

  ‘Sure,’ she said, ‘but we’ll have to leave it out if we’re going to Norton Stavey.’

  ‘Only if a) you drive there and back, and b) we can make up now for a lost Sunday morning.’

  ‘Like how?’

  ‘Like by dragging me off to bed and tearing my clothes off.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘You’ll find instructions on the inside of my underpants if you can’t remember.’

  I was lying about that, but once we got that far she managed to remember from the time before.

  Chapter 5

  Sunday started well enough, when Sheila and I agreed to renegotiate our agreement, but that made us a little late, so we pushed it down the M5.

  Beyond Bridgwater we had to navigate through the back lanes of what they call the ‘levels’ to find Norton Stavey, a tiny hamlet near absolutely nowhere. Mrs Wainwright had told Sheila on the phone to look out for the one telegraph pole in the place, as it stood in her garden.

  Sure enough, the telegraph pole stood in a garden which lay in front of a small, red-brick cottage, garden and house showing signs of long and loving care. As we drew up outside, the front door opened and a small, silver-haired woman in cream and brown came down the path to welcome us.

  Soon we were seated in her front room, being pressed to make a choice from a tall cakestand loaded with crustless sandwiches of cucumber, egg and cress and a dozen other fillings. The crustless sandwiches went with the furniture, heavily flounced in vivid floral prints, and the diagonal lead strips on the windows to imitate seventeenth-century panes. Mrs Wainwright seemed to believe that she lived in a different Britain or to have a rose-tinted vision of the one she did occupy.

  ‘I’m only a Wainwright by marriage,’ she told us, when the refreshments had ended. ‘My father was a Prust, but Mother had Sutton blood, and that’s the family you’re interested in, isn’t it, Dr McKenna?’

  Sheila explained her project, in more detail than she had on the phone, and produced the token from her shoulder-bag. Mrs Wainwright took it carefully, as though it were precious porcelain, and carried it to the window where she stood and examined it closely. Eventually she put it back into Sheila’s hand just as carefully.

  ‘How absolutely marvellous!’ she said, her face shining. ‘To hold an object with such a history fills one with awe. And so you believe, Dr McKenna, that there is a real possibility that the poor man who made that token was one of my ancestors?’

  ‘I hope you may be able to tell us that, Mrs Wainwright. At the moment I know that six men with the initials JS sailed on the Lucy Collins and that one of them was a Jan or John Sutton.’

  She drew from her shoulder-bag a copy of the convict file.

  ‘We know that Jan Sutton was tried at Bridgwater, which is why we started looking in this area.’

  She spread the papers on the coffee-table and Mrs Wainwright began to pore over them.

  JAN SATTON No 7014

  Tried 17th July 1865, arrived Freemantle Barracks March 1866

  Born 22nd April 1848

  Trade: Farm labourer

  Height: 5 ft. 6 in.

  Complexn.: Dark

  Head: Small

  Hair: Black

  Whiskers: None

  Visage: Round

  Forehead: M. Ht.

  Eyebrows: Black

  Eyes: Black

  Nose: Medium

  Mouth: Small

  Chin: Small pointed

  Remarks: Scar on back l. shoulder, tattoo l. forearm heart and MOTHER on scroll

  Convict 7 years’ transportation

  Tried at Bridgwater, transported for robbery

  Character: Fair

  Our hostess read every word, the description and all the long, miserable catalogue of petty offences punished by floggings and lockings-up.

  ‘Poor man!’ she exclaimed at last. ‘Do you know anything else about him, Dr McKenna? Do you know the details of his trial?’

  Sheila shook her head. ‘I’m trying to find out about the men and their families before I get involved with what they were supposed to have done.’ She reached into her capacious shoulder-bag again.

  ‘Here’s his birth certificate,’ she said. ‘This shows him born at Rendwary — ’

  ‘But that’s only just up the road!’ interrup
ted Mrs Wainwright.

  Sheila nodded. ‘His parents were Mary Jane Thompson and Caleb Sutton, who is described as a farmer.’

  Mrs Wainwright took the certificate and read it silently, but with a gleam of suppressed excitement in her eyes. When she had done she stood up.

  ‘I do believe,’ she said, ‘that I can identify your John Sutton for you. Excuse me just one moment.’

  She left the room but was very soon back bearing three large coloured loose-leaf folders. She deposited them on the coffee-table and selected the red one, laying it on her lap.

  ‘These,’ she said, ‘are the fruits of my researches.’

  ‘You must have been very busy,’ I remarked. ‘Those are thick files.’

  She smiled. ‘I started before I married, Mr Tyroll. Then marriage and a child slowed me down, and I had a sick husband in his last years, but since my husband died I’ve really applied myself to it.’

  She opened the file on her lap. ‘Now,’ she went on, ‘you’re looking for a John or Jan Sutton, born in Rendwary on 22nd April 1848 to Caleb Sutton and Mary Jane Thompson.’

  ‘Right,’ we both said simultaneously.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘my records show that he was the youngest of four brothers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, born in 1842,1845, 1847 and 1848 respectively.’

  Sheila and I looked at each other, amazed. ‘You’re sure?’ asked Sheila.

  ‘Almost entirely certain,’ Mrs Wainwright replied. ‘You see, we have family records of him but I never could learn exactly what happened to him. Let me show you.’

  She reached for a blue folder and turned the plastic-covered pages in it, stopping at last at a photocopy.

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘That’s the flyleaf of a family Bible that my cousins own.’