Bad Penny Blues

by Barrie Roberts

  ‘Are they both all right?’ asked Sheila.

  ‘Well, they’ll live,’ said Mrs Dunk. ‘Mary Richards is a solid body, but Mrs Bradley says that her lodger isn’t a well man anyway. He’s always drinking tea and he has about six meals a day. He’s never said so, but she reckons he’s got that, whatdye-callit — you know, Mr Tyroll — where your sugar goes funny?’

  ‘Diabetes,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right. She says he never puts on weight, but he’s always snacking. Takes sandwiches and one of them double Thermos flasks with him to the library.’

  If I’d carried on listening, Gloria Dunk would have rehearsed every crime committed in Belston since the Vikings came, but I had an office to run so I left her to Sheila.

  That night Sheila asked me about Mrs D’s opinions. ‘Do you think those kids in the gully might have anything to do with our situation?’

  ‘Do you?’ I said. ‘Some people know there’s a short-cut up from the town and come that way. They were probably doing that and they just came across old whatsisname and his dog.’

  ‘They’ll be damned sorry if they try it on with Jack the Cat-Ripper when he’s delivering a bomb, won’t they?’ she grinned.

  Chapter 17

  People come to lawyers because they’re worried and they expect their lawyer to wipe away all their worries like magic. I can’t count the number of times I’ve told a client, ‘Don’t worry about it, Mr Bloggs.’ ‘But I can’t help worrying about it,’ they say, I give them a confidence-inducing smile, ‘I can’t stop you thinking about it — that’s perfectly natural — but there’s really no point in worrying about it. That won’t get you anywhere.’

  Nor is there and it won’t. If you can do something about a situation, then think about it and do whatever it is; if you can’t — well, forget about it. So after giving my clients that very sound advice I go home and worry about what I’m going to do about their case. Which is fair enough, really, because that’s what my job is. The trouble comes with my own problems. I haven’t got anyone to smile warmly at me and say, ‘Don’t worry about it, Chris Tyroll — it’ll all come out right in the end,’ and if I did have I probably wouldn’t believe them anyway.

  The more time that passed after we received the bomb threat, the more I worried. I didn’t care at all for Sheila’s image of herself staked out like bait to lure our madman out of the undergrowth, because when he crawled out of the brush he’d be wielding a bomb.

  Sheila and I had been bombed before and I didn’t much fancy another go. Anyone with any sense has a strong strain of cowardice. Nor did I fancy just sitting around waiting for it to happen. As the days passed and nothing went bang, I got more and more tense. Whether Sheila was equally worried I simply couldn’t tell. Much of the time she spent staring at an Internet screen as though it was a crystal ball and would somehow reveal the entire history of all her JSs. Much of my time I spent worrying about our situation instead of my clients’ cases, smoking too much and drinking a little extra. Every night, before I had a chance of sleeping, I had to patrol the street, the alley alongside the garden, the back lane and the garden itself. Stupid really, because our maniac had always struck when we were away from home. It wasn’t at all likely that I’d bump into him in the alley toting a large black spherical object with a smoking fuse. Still, I had to do it.

  I was lying sleepless in bed one night when my partner poked me in the behind.

  ‘What are you doing on Sunday?’ she asked.

  ‘Why? Do you want a date?’

  ‘Not the way you are at the moment,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks a million! It may have escaped your notice that I’m somewhat concerned about the real possibility of losing you to the machinations of some explosive nutter!’

  ‘We’ve been bombed before,’ she said.

  ‘If you say that once more, I’ll scream,’ I said. ‘You also appear to have forgotten that last time we ended up being chased across a mountain by a bunch of uniformed banditti with evil intentions towards us.’

  ‘Yair,’ she said, ‘but we came out of it, didn’t we? Anyway, what about Sunday?’

  ‘What about Sunday?’

  ‘I want to go to Shropshire. I think I’ve tracked down Jonty Sowden’s family.’

  ‘The Shrewsbury bloke?’ I said. ‘Whereabouts in Shropshire?’

  ‘Somewhere called Randstrow.’

  ‘It’ll be difficult to get there by train,’ I said, ‘particularly on a Sunday.’

  ‘I,’ she said, ‘have persuaded Claude to find us a motor.’

  Claude, the Phantom, whose real name is Gordon Raines, is the best private enquiry agent in the Midlands and does a lot of ferreting for me. One of his less savoury occupations is repossessing cars that people haven’t paid for, as a result of which he gets first choice when they’re sold cheap, though I do occasionally feel guilty about riding in a motor that some poor bloke sweated to pay for and lost to a finance company.

  Randstrow turned out to be deep in the heart of Shropshire, well over towards Wales and secreted in a network of deep lanes. Eventually we found Breckberry Farm, a small farmhouse surrounded by well-maintained fields. When we turned into the gate we realised that it wasn’t the occupant of Breckberry Farm that tilled those fields. The yard was an empty area of old, broken concrete, spotted with clumps of weeds, and hadn’t seen a tractor for years. The vigorous smell of a working farm was entirely absent and the barns and outbuildings were beginning to fall down. Even the dog-kennel by the farmhouse door was untenanted and had no dish beside it.

  As Sheila pulled up the farmhouse door opened and a tall, slim man stood there, blinking slightly in the sunlight. Sheila had led me to expect a man in his forties but, at first glance, this man seemed older, mainly because of his severely thinned hair.

  He introduced himself as Ian Bradley and led us into the building without offering his hand. Inside it was a typical English farmhouse with a latched door leading off the hall into a large sitting-room that occupied one side of the building. It was low-ceilinged and panelled with match-boarding. One window looked out on a small, unkempt garden and another latched door led to the kitchen. The room was dusty and smelt stale and the furniture was well worn. Despite the warmth of the afternoon it was cold — not just chilly as stone buildings can be, even in summer, but cold as though it was a long time since it had been warm.

  Bradley placed us in two armchairs and dropped on to a settee.

  ‘I have to admit,’ he said when introductions were over, ‘that letter astonished me, Dr McKenna. I hadn’t any idea about this person you say was my ancestor. Are you sure you’re right?’

  He spoke with the soft accent of the Welsh border.

  ‘Pretty certain,’ Sheila said, and pulled her file from her shoulder-bag. ‘Look,’ she went on. ‘The man I’m interested in is Jonty Sowden. He was tried at Shrewsbury and shipped out in 1865. Now the census return for 1861 shows a Jonathan Sowden living at Grasslea — that’s the next village, isn’t it? — and he’s not there in the ’71 return. In 1861 his age is given as nineteen and my man was twenty-five when he was transported, so it looks like he was the same bloke, doesn’t it?’

  Bradley nodded. ‘It looks like it,’ he agreed, ‘but how do you connect him with me?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘Sowden was a single man, so there’s no wife or children that I can trace, but the census shows two brothers and a sister, Matilda Elizabeth. I’ve traced one brother’s marriage and his three children. One died in childbirth, one died at the age of ten and the last one lived and died unmarried, so there’s no descendants from that branch. The other brother never married but died a bachelor in 1894. The only line of descent I can find is from the sister. Matilda married in 1869 to George Bradley the tenant of this very farm. Does any of that sound familiar?’

  Bradley nodded again. ‘It does,’ he said. ‘My great-great grandmother was Matilda, but I don’t think I ever knew her maiden name.’

  ‘Beauty,’ s
aid Sheila. ‘We’re on the right track then. Now Matilda and George had only one son, another George, right?’

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘My great-grandfather. He married another local girl. My great-grandmother was Emmeline Flowers from Randstrow. They married about 1890 and had one son, my grandfather Jack Bradley.’

  ‘Spot on,’ said Sheila. ‘I’ve got John Bradley from the 1891 census return, but after that the returns aren’t released yet, so it gets a bit difficult. What happened next?’

  ‘My grandfather,’ said Bradley, ‘didn’t fancy a farming life. He ran off to sea in his teens and knocked about the world a bit. He finally came home just before the Great War.’

  ‘And he was married?’ asked Sheila. ‘I couldn’t find a marriage certificate for him.’

  Bradley smiled faintly. ‘Oh, yes. He was married. You needn’t worry about stumbling on to our family skeleton there. He brought his wife back with him.’

  ‘A Spanish lady?’ asked Sheila. ‘I’ve got the name Consuela from your father’s birth certificate, but there’s no place of birth.’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘Not Spanish, Dr McKenna — Venezuelan. After being at sea for a while, Grandad fetched up in South America and that was where he met his bride.’

  ‘Do you remember her?’

  ‘Not very well. She died quite young, you know, in her fifties, while I was still very small. My mother told me that Grandma went a bit funny in her later years.’

  Sheila had been jotting notes on a shorthand pad. She made another and then went on.

  ‘And you father — Edward Bradley — was an only son?’

  ‘Yes. My grandad served in the navy in the Great War and when he came home it seemed to have finished his wanderlust. He settled down quietly and ran the farm. My father was born in 1920 and he grew up to run the farm as well,’

  ‘But you don’t?’ said Sheila.

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Even if I had wanted to, my arthritis wouldn’t let me now. But before we get to me, can I offer you both coffee?’

  ‘How nice,’ said Sheila. ‘Can I help you make it?’

  She rose and dropped her notepad into my lap. As Bradley showed her through to the kitchen I looked at the top sheet on the pad. Scrawled across it was a command:

  TAKE A QUICK SQUID IN THE DRAWERS TO YOUR LEFT.

  I had no idea what prompted the message, but on the basis that the coffee might be instant I had to move quickly. To my left was a nondescript sideboard with two cupboards topped by two drawers. Standing up, I pulled each drawer out quickly, glimpsed the contents and shut them, then did the same for each of the cupboards.

  I moved quickly across to a large bookcase, fronted with unpolished glass. It was impossible to find a theme in the books on the shelves. There were textbooks of physics and chemistry, an English grammar, a history of jazz, the Opies’ Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, a book on recreational maths, a Dutch grammar, a biography of Chopin, a volume of local ghost stories, a range of modern novels from about the 1940s down to the ’70s and a shelf of boy’s adventure stories — Stevenson, Buchan, Dumas and the like.

  I was still standing in front of the case when Sheila and Ian Bradley returned from the kitchen. It’s absolutely not on to sneak a peek into a man’s drawers and cupboards when you’re a guest in his house, but for some reason it’s quite all right to pore over his selection of books. Some people believe that you can tell a lot about someone by the books they keep, but Bradley’s shelves only confused me.

  ‘Not all mine,’ he said, when he saw what I was doing. ‘The novels mostly belonged to my late mother.’

  He sat down and Sheila doled out coffee from a tray. I saw why Bradley had not shaken hands on our arrival, when he took his coffee from Sheila in a large mug, holding it between two clenched hands that trembled slightly

  Sheila sat down, took a long draught of coffee and delved into her shoulder-bag.

  ‘So you definitely are the present generation of Jonty Sowden’s family,’ she said. ‘I’ve got his convict records here.’

  Bradley smiled his faint smile. ‘I’m not just the present generation of the family,’ he said. ‘I’m the last generation,’

  ‘You’re not married?’ said Sheila, though both of us had concluded that shortly after arriving.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been married. It never seemed to be the right time for it.’

  He picked up the photocopies of Sowden’s records and scanned them.

  JONTY SOWDEN No 6913

  tried 12th June 1865, arrived Fremantle Barracks March

  1866.

  Born 2nd January 1846

  Trade: Farm labourer

  Height: 5ft. 7 in.

  Complexn: Fair

  Head: Medium

  Hair: Fair

  Whiskers: Small fair moustache

  Visage: Round

  Forehead: M. Ht

  Eyebrows: Fair

  Eyes: Grey

  Nose: Medium

  Mouth: Wide

  Chin: Rounded

  Remarks: 4 in. scar on r. thigh, tattoo r. upper arm — Crown & Anchor.

  Convict 7 years’ transportation

  Tried at Shrewsbury, transported for arson

  Character: Fair

  He shook his head slowly. ‘I never heard anything about him,’ he said. ‘I suppose they were ashamed of him. Particularly the Bradleys — they were real respectable farmers, never put a foot out of line. Do you know exactly what he did?’

  ‘No,’ said Sheila. ‘I haven’t checked the trial records yet, but arson in the countryside in the last century was usually political, wasn’t it? Rick-burning and that?’

  ‘It might have been,’ he agreed. That did happen round here more than once.’

  Sheila sipped at her coffee. ‘You were going to tell us about yourself, Mr Bradley,’ she said.

  Chapter 18

  ‘There’s not much that would interest you,’ he said. ‘As you know, my father was Edward Bradley Unlike Grandad, my father stuck to the farm and led a dull but worthy life. He expected me to do the same, but I’m afraid I wasn’t cut out for it. I had other things in mind.’

  ‘What were they?’ I asked.

  ‘Music,’ he said. ‘I was crazy about music when I was young. I couldn’t get enough of it, of any kind. Mother used to say that I got it from my grandmother. Apparently she was a singer when Grandad met her in South America, but I didn’t sing. I played any instrument I could get my hands on.’

  He pointed into the shadows at the darker end of the room, away from the window. An old-fashioned, robust upright piano stood there. I thought about his hands now, hands that he couldn’t or wouldn’t open.

  ‘My mother bought the best instrument she could afford, and made sure I had lessons. Then I went on to the guitar, and wind instruments and strings. I may not have been equally expert on all of them, but I could get a melody out of almost anything. And I played any kind of music. My teens were in the late 1950s — rock and roll, the jazz revival, country music — I played them all, as well as the classics.’

  He paused and gazed away out of the window, his hands trembling more vigorously.

  ‘By the time I left school I knew I wasn’t a farmer. I had terrible rows with my father about it, but I knew it had to be music. When he wouldn’t let me go on to study any kind of music, I ran away. There must have been a bit of my grandad in me, as well as my grandmother.’

  ‘How old were you?’ asked Sheila.

  ‘I was sixteen,’ he said. ‘Everybody knows everything at sixteen. I had a good time actually. It was the Swinging Sixties, there was a lot of music about, and once people found I could play I could always find a home and an income. I wandered about, not just Britain, but Europe as well. I spent a long time in Amsterdam. I mixed with all sorts of people. I could write you a book about the real sixties, about sex and drugs and rock and roll and petty crime and booze. But you grow up in the end — if you’re lucky you do.’

&nb
sp; He paused and lifted his coffee mug with his awkward two-handed grip. ‘I grew up when I realised something very important.’

  ‘What was it?’ asked Sheila.

  ‘I realised one day that I was a good instrumentalist on three or four instruments and a passable player on half a dozen more — but there was no instrument on which I was outstanding. I was a good session man, in rock, in pop, in jazz, in the classics; I was a useful member of a band or an orchestra, but I was not a soloist. I simply didn’t have whatever it is that makes some people’s music ring out and catch the hearts of an audience so that they can’t hear anyone else.’

  ‘What did you do?’ said Sheila, quietly.

  ‘Do? Don’t you know what they say? Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. I came home. I did not even know that my father had died of pneumonia while I was away. There was no farm any more. My mother had sold off the land and just kept the buildings. There was money from the land, so I could go to college, and I trained as a teacher.’

  Awkwardly he lifted his mug again.

  ‘I went to work in a private school. I taught maths and science and music. Maths comes easily to some musicians but it was the music that I took the job for. I taught the boys, I conducted the orchestra and trained the choir and I loved it. I really think I’d found what I was meant to be — someone who could spot and nurture a talent that might one day be the soloist I never was.’

  ‘And did you spot any?’ I asked.

  ‘One, at least, one definitely. He’ll be great someday.’

  He smiled at the recollection, then shook his head as though to clear it away.

  ‘The rest I’m sure you can guess, Dr McKenna. I developed arthritis in my hands. I cannot play an instrument of any kind any more, so my musical years are over.’

  He said it without apparent bitterness, but his face belied his tone.

  That’s why I said I’m the last of the Bradley’s. When it gets worse I shall have to leave here. Did you know this farm has been in the Bradley family for two hundred and fifty years? Well, I shall have to move when I get beyond helping myself and that won’t be very long.’