Bad Penny Blues

by Barrie Roberts

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It goes like this,’ I said, and hummed it.

  A New Song of JAMES SIMMONDS

  My name it is John Simmonds,

  In Stafford I was born,

  From my place of habitation

  I now must leave with scorn,

  To leave my loving parents,

  That grieves my heart full sore,

  I am condemned for fourteen years

  To far Australia’s shore.

  *

  So early in the morning

  Before the break of day

  The warders they awaken us

  And to us they do say:

  Farewell you hapless felons

  We’ll never see you more,

  This is the day you are to stray

  To far Australia’s shore!

  *

  So we arose, pulled on our clothes

  Our hearts were filled with grief,

  Our friends who stood about the gate

  Could give us no relief,

  Our parents, wives and sweethearts

  Whose suffering was full sore,

  To see us leave our native land

  For far Australia’s shore.

  *

  Farwell my aged father,

  You were the best of men,

  And also my own sweetheart

  Kate Evans is her name,

  We’ll kiss beside the pleasant stream

  And wander there no more,

  For I must leave all that I love

  For far Australia’s shore.

  *

  Farwell my weeping mother,

  I’m grieved by what I’ve done,

  I pray God will protect you,

  Also my infant son,

  Kept always in my aching heart

  You shall be evermore,

  While I am labouring far away

  On far Australia’s shore.

  She looked at me with a puzzled frown. ‘That’s too good for you to have just made it up. How do you know it?’

  ‘I don’t know the song as such, but those verses are very close to a song called “Jamie Raeburn’s Farewell”.’

  ‘And how do you know that?’

  ‘Because my mother was a folk-singer — I’ve told you that. You know, that’s how she bumped into my father, at one of the Edinburgh Fringe shows. Well, I not only inherited her weird library, I also inherited her record collection. That’s why I recognise the song.’

  ‘You mean all those old LPs on the bottom shelves? Don’t you have to have one of those machines you wind up to play those?’

  ‘Not quite. Go and have a look, somewhere there is a record with “Jamie Raeburn” on it. It might be a record called Chorus from the Gallows.’

  She grimaced. ‘No wonder it never made the top ten.’

  An hour later I went looking for her to tell her dinner was ready. She was sprawled on the sitting-room floor listening to a record.

  ‘Hey! This stuff’s bonzer! Why didn’t you tell me you had all this great music?’

  ‘I didn’t know you liked folk.’

  She laughed. ‘When I was a kid in Oz, “folksongs” were what commos and subversives sang — all about downtrodden convicts and heroic bushrangers. There was something called “Australian traditional song” which was dead boring, and then there was something called “bush music”, which was sung by big, bearded blokes who knew how to drink and that was all about what fun it was being a swaggie out in the desert.’

  ‘The Great Cultural Desert?’ I suggested.

  ‘Not so much of it! You’re talking about the nation that gave the world Vegemite, Neighbours and Prisoner, Cell Block H.’

  ‘Not to mention Chips Rafferty, Sidney Bridge and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo.’

  She scowled and switched the stereo off. ‘Seriously though, did your mum sing all this stuff?’

  ‘A lot of it,’ I said. ‘She knew a lot of the people on those LPs. She took me to the Newport Festival when I was little. She sang there with Dylan and Baez and everybody, visited Woody Guthrie in hospital and everything.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘We came back and found that Captain Flambeau had vanished in a puff of smoke and she devoted her time to raising a brilliant little lawyer.’

  ‘If you had followed in her footsteps,’ she said, ‘I could have been sleeping with an international superstar. Did you really see Bob Dylan?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘I was two at the time. He didn’t make a great deal of impact on me. Come and get your dinner.’

  After dinner we opened the fan mail. There was not much and none of it was either amusing or useful. There was a small packet, with the label of a computer software firm in London. Sheila turned it over in her hands.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘I haven’t ordered anything.’

  ‘It’s probably one of those freebies from an Internet company, guaranteeing you hours of free time if you read all their adverts instead of their competitors’.’

  ‘I expect so,’ she said, and slit the wrapper open.

  ‘Well,’ she said, after reading the leaflets with the CD inside the pack, ‘it’s a freebie, but it’s a bit more specific. It’s a genealogical program.’

  ‘You’ve got one,’ I said.

  ‘So I have, but this one is supposed to do everything short of calling Great-Granny back from the dead. I’ve got to give it a whirl.’

  We went through into the study, where Sheila switched on the computer and loaded the disk. The screen came alive with a bright pattern of rising flames.

  ‘What’s that got to do with genealogy?’ Sheila commented.

  ‘Perhaps Great-Granny didn’t go where everybody expected,’ I suggested.

  The flames on the screen dropped away to reveal a deep blue sky with a moon and twinkling stars.

  ‘Very pretty,’ I said. ‘What else does it do?’

  Little rockets shot up from the bottom edge of the screen bursting into showers of multi-coloured stars. One large projectile soared to the top of the screen and exploded, showering the entire screen in rainbow-coloured stars, then the screen went black.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, tapping keys.

  Nothing happened. The screen stayed blank. No key produced any result. Sheila rapped keys more desperately and muttered in low Australian.

  ‘The damn thing’s crashed!’ she announced eventually, and switched off the power.

  ‘What now?’ I asked.

  She took the new disk from the drive and switched on again. ‘Try it again,’ she said.

  The screen remained blank for several seconds, then the pattern of flames appeared again.

  ‘What the hell?’ Sheila snarled and then they vanished suddenly, leaving the starlit sky, across which a message appeared:

  REMEMBER, REMEMBER, THE FIFTH OF NOVEMBER.

  We had just time to absorb the short legend before the screen darkened again. We waited. Nothing further appeared. Sheila took to the keyboard again, without result. Once more she switched off and on. Nothing happened.

  After several minutes she stopped. ‘It’s wiped everything!’ she exclaimed. ‘That bloody program has cleared my hard drive. Everything’s gone.’

  ‘You mean you’ve lost all that was on there?’

  ‘It’s all gone from the computer, but I’ve got back-up disks of all of it. It’s a damned nuisance. I’ll have to reload all my software.’

  ‘What about a thingy — a virus?’ I asked. Could it have left one behind?’

  She looked thoughtful. ‘Yes, it could. I’ll have to get Alasdair to take a look at it. What do you think that message meant?’

  ‘It’s Guy Fawkes,’ I said. ‘A kid’s rhyme — “Remember, remember the Fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot. Will you tell me a reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.’”

  ‘You don’
t have to tell a historian about Guy Fawkes, you galah! My dad used to have a bonfire and fireworks. The nuns at school hated it.’

  ‘You know where that disk came from, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I do! It’s from bloody Jack the Cat-Ripper, the bastard! But what did he mean? Is he going to do something on November 5th?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so — he doesn’t seem to hang about much and that’s months away. For all he knows your book might be in print by then. Maybe it’s a religious message. Fawkes and his pals were Catholics.’

  ‘Spare me days!’ she said. ‘Race, money, family pride — how many more motives can this drongo have?’

  ‘It’s a threat, anyway,’ I said. ‘I think he’s threatening an explosion. We ought to tell John Parry. And when Alasdair’s had at look at the computer, copy all your disks and let me put a set in the office safe.’

  ‘Good thinking,’ she said. ‘So after he’s got us there’ll still be a way of finding out who he was.’

  We’ll have to stay in at evenings and weekends,’ I said. ‘He only seems to operate round here when he knows we’re out. If we don’t go out he may be in difficulties.’

  ‘We can’t stay locked up for ever,’ she said.

  ‘No, but we don’t need to make things any easier for him.’

  ‘It doesn’t get any easier,’ she said. ‘He knows who we are; he knows where we are; he knows when we move and when we don’t move. And we haven’t got any idea who he is or what it’s about.’

  ‘We know where he is,’ I said. ‘He’s somewhere round here. Maybe we can draw him out.’

  ‘Great! And get incinerated in the interests of justice! What are you going to do? Tie me to a tree in the garden and sit on the roof with a shotgun?’

  ‘I’ll have to think about it,’ I said, ‘and talk to John.’

  I was still thinking about it in the small hours when Sheila woke up and prodded me.

  ‘Go to sleep!’ she commanded.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I keep thinking about this madman.’

  ‘Don’t worry about him,’ she said. ‘The worst thing he did was the spider, and he doesn’t seem to repeat himself. Spiders scare the bejeesus out of me — men I can deal with,’ and she reached between my legs to emphasise her point.

  Chapter 16

  There are parts of Wales where the local people are genuinely bilingual. You can hear them dropping in and out of their two languages, sometimes more than once in the same sentence. It drives English listeners crazy. If it was just Welsh they wouldn’t expect to understand it, but the mixture of English catches their ear and they wonder why it doesn’t make sense.

  I’m like that when I hear people talking about computers. At first it seems to make sense, then the bits about ‘glitches’ and ‘handshaking’ and ‘bauds’ and things begin to overwhelm me. On the other hand, my assistant Alasdair loves computers only slightly less than women. His eyes light up if he walks into a room and discovers a dusty old Amstrad PCW and in minutes he’ll have taught it to sing in Russian and leap through flaming hoops. Well — not quite, but you know what I mean.

  We had handed the sabotage disk to John Parry and invited Alasdair to come and vet Sheila’s machine. He had pronounced it clean and free from any virus so we were celebrating over a bottle. Alasdair and Sheila were deep into computer-speak and I was trying to stop my eyes glazing over.

  Up to that point I had not told Alasdair about the problems arising from Sheila’s research. It didn’t seem to touch the office and I had thought that one of us being distracted from working by a loony stalker was enough, but now Sheila had given him the whole story.

  ‘Have you done much of your work through the Internet?’ he was asking.

  ‘Yes,’ she nodded. ‘A few years ago it would have been all hard yakka in dusty archives and libraries, but there’s wads of stuff on the Internet that are useful. All the British censuses from the nineteenth century are there. They’ll tell you where people lived, what they did for a living, who else lived there, what their relationship was and so on. At “genuki.org.uk” you can find lists of surnames for a particular county and get in touch with groups and people researching particular names. You can even find nice people who’ll go and dig in the dusty archives for you if somebody has to. There’s “rootsweb.com” and the big Mormon database of world-wide records at “familysearch.org”. It’s a fantastic resource.’

  That might be how he’s keeping watch on you — at least partly,’ Alasdair said.

  ‘You mean people’s activities on the Internet can be traced?’ I asked, suddenly paying attention again.

  He nodded. ‘There’s a lot of sites that can identify you when you come back on to them. That’s because, when you first logged on to them, they sent a little text file back to your hard drive. Next time you go back to that site their file — they call it a “cookie” — tells them who you are. It can also, of course, tell them other things if they want it to. It can be constructed to prowl about your hard drive finding out all sorts of things about you.’

  ‘What a bloody liberty!’ Sheila said. ‘Can it be stopped?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Quite a lot of people don’t like cookies. There’s a site at “www.cookiecentral.com” that’ll tell you all about them and how to stamp on them if you don’t like them.’

  Sheila pulled a notebook from her shoulder-bag and jotted down the site address.

  ‘But surely,’ I said, ‘this cookie thing couldn’t tell our man when we were in or out and it couldn’t tell him that Sheila hates spiders, could it?’

  ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Not unless that information was somewhere in your computer. You haven’t got a list of pet hates somewhere, have you?’

  ‘Not likely,’ she said.

  ‘But would our loony know enough to manipulate a cookie?’ I asked.

  ‘He knew enough to set up that disk that crashed the machine. He might even be the operator behind one of the surname sites that Sheila’s visited. Anyway, since he cleaned your hard drive there’s no cookies in there now. Once you’ve re-installed your software, go to that cookie site and find out how to crunch them.’

  Alasdair wasn’t the only one we needed to tell about our problems. If the mystery man was likely to make an explosive attack of some kind, it seemed important to keep Mrs Dunk, who comes in three days a week to clean for me, informed.

  Gloria Dunk is the widow of a former regimental sergeant-major. Local rumour alleges that she married a shy little National Serviceman in the 1950s and drilled him into warrant officer rank and a reputation as the terror of the British Army. Having watched her at work I can believe it. Mrs Dunk believes that resting is a dirty habit, though I found her next morning taking a mug of coffee with Sheila.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Tyroll,’ she said. ‘Sheila’s been telling me about this man who’s been bothering her.’ Note that, after four years, she still calls me ‘Mr Tyroll’, but Sheila is on first name terms. The most familiar I’ve ever dared to be is to shorten her surname.

  ‘Yes, Mrs D,’ I said. ‘It looks as if he’s going to try something that explodes. Now he always seems to do something when he knows we’re out, so I don’t want anything happening to you by accident.’

  ‘Don’t you worry about me,’ she said, with a threatening scowl around the kitchen, as though the villain was hiding behind the vegetable rack. ‘I shan’t stand any nonsense from him.’

  ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t,’ I said (and I was), ‘but he’s a sneaky swine and I’d never forgive myself if you came to any harm.’

  ‘Well, I can’t get down to my work if I’ve got to keep one eye over my shoulder all the time,’ she complained.

  ‘That’s exactly it,’ I said. ‘How about if you don’t come in until we’re sure that it’s safe? I’ll pay you as usual, of course.’

  ‘You don’t want to be paying me for nothing,’ she said. ‘I’m not one to take money for what I’m not doing. There’s too much of that about.’


  She took a thoughtful swallow of her coffee. ‘I don’t know what the world’s coming to,’ she said. ‘When Dunk retired we moved up here because these were nice houses in a quiet area and most of the people were respectable, now it’s getting as bad as the town. Did you hear that Mr Hyde got mugged the night before last?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I know him.’

  ‘You must do, Mr Tyroll. He’s that man with the big moustache and the horn-rims that walks his dog down here every night,’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Sheila.

  ‘Well, he stays with my neighbour, Mrs Bradley at number 38. She only has one guest at a time and she’s careful about who they are, but she says he’s a respectable gentleman. He does reading in Belston Library. He’s looking into the life of old Wellinson, the man who started the big iron firm.’

  ‘They’ve got a big collection of papers about Wellinson at the library,’ said Sheila.

  Mrs Dunk nodded. ‘That’s right, and he spends his days there. Mrs Bradley says you wouldn’t want a nicer, quieter guest. Well, he came home the other night and he was shaking like a leaf and he had blood all down his face. Mrs Bradley asked what had happened and he said that three young lads had knocked him down as he was walking his dog. It was just about here, you know, by that gully that comes up the side of your garden.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ I said. ‘Was he badly hurt? Did they steal anything?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘They just knocked him down for fun, it seems. They never tried to take anything. They just ran out of that gully and tumbled him on to the pavement. He had a nasty bruise to his head and his hands was all full of grit from the road.’

  ‘Did he tell the police?’ I asked.

  ‘The police!’ she snorted. ‘What would they do? Here’s you not knowing if someone’s going to come and bomb you and that John Parry’s a friend of yours. He ought to be stopping it. This town is getting like America.’

  Another swallow of coffee fuelled her memory. ‘And there was Mrs Richards — you’ve heard me mention her, Mr Tyroll — she was mugged last week.’

  ‘Where was that?’ asked Sheila.

  ‘Down the hill, on the Whiteway Road. She was coming home from seeing her sister, about ten o’clock, and the same happened to her as to Mr Hyde. They jumped out of that gully by the White Lion and had her handbag away.’