Bad Penny Blues

by Barrie Roberts

  ‘Probably, but don’t ask him. It’s illegal. Get Claude to do it for you.’

  Chapter 20

  We were cautious about opening the post next day, as John Parry had warned us to be, but there were no further bombs. Only a white envelope with a printed label, exactly like the one on the incendiary package. Inside was a single slip of paper with a message:

  MCKENNA, MCKENNA,

  FLY AWAY HOME.

  THINGS WILL START BURNING AND SOON YOU’LL BE ONE.

  ‘“Soon you’ll be one,”‘ Sheila read. ‘Does that mean the package wasn’t meant to catch me?’

  ‘No. It means that, if you hadn’t been burned by his damned parcel, you soon would be. That means that, as soon as he finds out you weren’t caught, he’ll try again.’

  Things weren’t much better at the office. My first client of the day was Sawney. The Crown Prosecution Service had supplied a summary of their case and a copy of the statement which he was alleged to have made.

  ‘Look,’ I said ‘I’ve got a copy of the statement here that they say you made.’

  I read it to him: ‘I have been cautioned and told that I do not have to say anything but that if I do not now mention anything which I later rely on in my defence it may be to my disadvantage. I wish to make a statement and I want someone to write it down. For six months I have lived in a boarding house at 43 Sandyway Lane, Belston. I occupy a single bed-sitter on the second floor. On the same floor is a room occupied by a woman in her twenties who is called Jane Gardner. We have become friends and sometimes visit each other in our respective rooms. On the first floor a man called Thomas lives in a bed-sitter at the back. I do not know his full name. Thomas is his surname. He works for the Council. Some weeks ago he bought a stereo radio/cassette machine. I remember that he showed it to us in the lounge on the day that he bought it. It looked like quite an expensive machine. I have been out of work for some time and I was short of money. One night I was in Jane Gardner’s room and she mentioned the radio/cassette that Thomas had bought and said something about him not being short of money. I said to her that if his radio/cassette was stolen I could sell it. She said that he was careless and sometimes left his door unlocked when he went to work. I told her to keep her eyes open and see when he left his door unlocked so that she could steal his radio/cassette. A few days later she invited me into her room and showed me the radio/cassette which she had hidden under the bed. I told her that she should keep it hidden in her room and that I would find someone to buy it. I am sorry now that I led her into stealing the radio/cassette. I have made this statement consisting of two pages of my own free will. I have read it over and I have been told that I can add, alter or delete anything which … ’

  I looked up. That last bit,’ I said, ‘the caption, as they call it, appears to be written in your handwriting. After that it’s signed, by you and by two police officers, Sergeant Brown and Constable Allen. Is it true?’

  ‘What do you mean, “Is it true?” Do you mean are the facts true, or do you mean did I make that statement?’

  ‘Either,’ I said.

  ‘It isn’t true and I don’t know if I made it.’

  I sighed and turned the document around on the desk. ‘Have a look at the writing, Mr Sawney,’ I invited. ‘Is that last bit written in your handwriting and is that your signature at the bottom?’

  He took a pair of glasses from his breast pocket and peered at the paper for a long time. At last he said, ‘I don’t know. It might be my writing, but it can’t be true.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I told you, Mr Tyroll. I can’t read handwriting, but it says here that I’d read it over. I couldn’t have done that.’

  ‘Are you saying that you did make this statement, but that you didn’t read it over?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How come you don’t know?’

  ‘I told you before,’ and the note of indignation in his voice was rising to a hysterical pitch, ‘I really can’t recall what happened at the police station’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘It’s just some kind of a blank. I might have had an epileptic attack.’

  ‘Do you have epilepsy? You mentioned that last time.’

  ‘I had brain damage in a car accident, Mr Tyroll. I have fainting spells — black-outs.’

  ‘Did you black out in the police station?’

  He shook his head. ‘I really don’t know. Sometimes I can’t remember when I’ve had one.’

  ‘Are you being treated for this? Do you have medication?’

  ‘My doctor gives me pills for the fainting spells.’

  ‘What are they supposed to do? Do they prevent them, or are they for afterwards?’

  ‘He says that they reduce the frequency of the attacks but I’ll still have them if I’m very upset or strained. I was very upset at the police station.’

  Do you carry your medication on you?’

  ‘Yes, usually, in case I have an attack.’

  ‘Have you got it on you now?’

  ‘Well, no. I didn’t think you were going to upset me, Mr Tyroll.’

  Or he’d just invented the idea of medication, I didn’t know. I summed up.

  ‘So, when you were arrested you would have been carrying your pills?’

  ‘I expect so, yes.’

  ‘And when you were interviewed you might have blacked out?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you may have written the caption on the statement and signed it?’

  ‘Well, I think I remember copying something out from a card.’

  ‘But you don’t recall making the statement while PC Allen wrote it down?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And what it says about you and Jane Gardner and the radio/cassette — is that bit true?’

  ‘Certainly not. I wasn’t particularly friendly with her. I asked her out, but she refused. I was never in her room, ever.’

  They’ve got a statement from her saying exactly the same as yours — that you suggested she steal the radio so that you could sell it. Why did she say that if it’s not true?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps she doesn’t like me, but she’s got no reason.’

  Not much, I thought. ‘Well then,’ I said, ‘you’d better tell me who your doctor is, so that I can get a medical report.’

  The address he gave me was in Warwickshire.

  ‘That’s the other side of Brum,’ I remarked.

  ‘Dr Glenn is my family doctor,’ he explained. ‘He’s known me since I was a child.’

  ‘Tell him he’ll be hearing from me with a request for a medical report. You’d better sign one of these consent forms.’

  He signed the form and left. I dictated a letter to Dr Glenn and tried to forget him but no day is long enough to forget Sawney.

  Sheila, by contrast, was full of bounce when I got home, bringing me a drink almost before I was through the door.

  ‘Do I owe you any money?’ I asked, suspiciously. ‘Or do you want to borrow some?’

  ‘Oh, cheers to you, you miserable Pommy wowser!’ she said. ‘I take it you’ve had a hard day at the office?’

  ‘No, but I had Sawney in to see me first thing, and I’m getting lost in his evasions. You, I take it, have had an absolutely splendid day?’

  ‘Too right,’ she said. ‘This morning I rang John Parry and told him about the letter, so he came round and collected it to take it away to be forensicked.’

  ‘And we all know what they’re going to find;’ I said, ‘Absolutely nothing. Laser print, which can’t be identified, on cheap chain store stationery which can be bought all over Britain, and no fingerprints.’

  ‘That’s what he said,’ she agreed, ‘but this one did have a postmark.’

  ‘Did it?’ I said. ‘I was too taken up with the message this morning to notice. What was it?’

  ‘Belston,’ she said.

  ‘So he probably posted the fire-parcel in Belston as well.’

  ‘Not
necessarily,’

  ‘Well, it would be pretty pointless to post them both in separate places. Anyway, why are you so pleased that we now know that our nutter hangs about Belston — which we knew before — and nothing else?’

  ‘It wasn’t that. I had a late breakfast with John and we talked about my research.’

  ‘Oh yes! I’m slaving away over wretched clients and you’re living it up with friendly coppers.’

  ‘He’s not my type,’ she said. ‘I prefer little dark blokes like you.’

  ‘Only because you know you can beat me up.’

  ‘Very likely,’ she said, ‘but anyway, John says they’ve got a police museum in Birmingham that’s got a huge collection of photographs of Victorian villains, going right back into the 1850s.’

  ‘But you haven’t got a JS from Brum, have you?’

  ‘Oh yes I have. Jack Sullivan. He was tried at Warwick, but he lived in Birmingham.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘They still commit cases from the Chelmsley Wood area of Brum to the Warwick Crown Court.’

  ‘So I rang the museum,’ she continued, ‘and a very nice man there said that he’d got what might be a photo of my Jack Sullivan before he was transported.’

  ‘That’s amazing,’ I said. ‘What’s more, I think that Warwick Crown Court still sits in an eighteenth-century court-house and uses the old original octagonal courtroom where Jack Sullivan would have been told the bad news.’

  ‘Really?’ she said. ‘Why octagonal?’

  ‘There’s an octagonal chamber underneath the dock, with stairs up the middle into the dock, and eight sets of irons in the angles of the walls. When things were very busy, they could weigh them off faster by starting the day with eight prisoners in the hold under the dock, then feeding them fast up the stairs to be sorted out. The place was obviously designed by a time-and-motion man.’

  She grimaced. ‘You lot really took this populating the new colony seriously, didn’t you?’

  I refused to rise to her bait. ‘What’s for dinner?’ I enquired hopefully.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s your turn.’

  I groaned.

  ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘Neck that drink and I’ll bring you another while I take over the cooking.’

  ‘Bless you!’ I said, and I meant it. ‘So, what’s for dinner?’

  ‘Goat or galah,’ she announced.

  ‘Galahs talk, don’t they? I don’t think I could face a talking dinner.’

  ‘Have to be goat, then.’

  The goat turned out to be duck in plum sauce, which almost expunged the recollection of Mr Sawney.

  ‘So,’ I said, when I was lolling back overstuffed, with another glass in front of me, ‘when are we going to this police museum?’

  ‘I,’ she said, emphasising the pronoun, ‘am going tomorrow.’

  ‘I can’t go tomorrow.’

  ‘You don’t need to go,’ she said.

  ‘Do you think it’s a good idea — going alone?’

  ‘For heaven’s sake!’ she snapped. ‘It’s at the Police Training Centre. The place is probably crawling with coppers.’

  ‘And how will you know whether one of them is Jack the Cat-Ripper? Anyway, it’s a museum, most of the coppers will be stuffed ones, with top hats and rattles. I was merely trying to follow John Parry’s advice.’

  ‘You were merely trying to imply that I’m not safe out on my own. Kindly remember that it took your help to get me kidnapped!’

  ‘That’, I said, ‘is not fair.’

  ‘True, though.’

  ‘Look, I just don’t think you ought to be … ’

  ‘ … wandering about helplessly in the big wide world without a bodyguard,’ she finished. ‘I am going — tomorrow — alone.’

  ‘You look wonderful when you’re angry,’ I said.

  ‘That’s not even original,’ she said. ‘It’s Louis Hayward to Joan Bennett in Son of Monte Cristo, about sixty years ago — and it probably wasn’t original then, and it’s not true now. When I’m angry, I’m angry — and I’m angry, Chris Tyroll!’

  With which she made a dramatic and door-rattling exit, leaving me wondering what I’d done to bring that on. It occurred to me — rather too late — that I spent a lot of time worrying about how I felt about the threat against Sheila and probably not enough time worrying about how she felt about it.

  Chapter 21

  For some women, nagging is a substitute for sex. My ex-wife was an Olympic standard nagger. The year that I told her she couldn’t go Christmas shopping in New York she bent my ear at every available opportunity, including all our friends’ Christmas parties, for a straight month, with occasional replays all the way up to our divorce eighteen months later. Still, it’s some kind of a relationship, I suppose.

  Sheila, as I might have guessed, was different. She was the silent type. The day after our spat she went to the police museum — on her own. I was already at home when she came back. We had a brief conversation.

  ‘How was the museum?’ I asked, in as neutral a tone as I could muster.

  ‘Absolutely dreadful,’ she said, with complete conviction. ‘I was attacked by a herd of rampaging rhinoceroses and had to be rescued by a boy scout!’

  So I shut up, and we stayed that way for three days, confining ourselves to ‘Please pass the salt’ conversations. I know lots of couples go through these periods, but lots of couples don’t have an unknown, clever, violent loony after them. It was not a very good time at all and we both drank a lot.

  We were at breakfast in the kitchen one morning. I was flipping through the morning paper and wondering if this deadlock was going to last until Sheila went back to Australia in the following spring, when the postman arrived.

  Sheila fetched some letters and a package to the table. If relations had been normal I would have looked at the package with her and tried to work out whether it was too risky to open. As it was I looked across, saw a shallow, rectangular parcel, noted the ‘West Midlands Police Museum’ label on which the address was written and left her to it.

  Sheila had taken a knife to the brown tape sealing the end of the envelope. As she turned the packet in her hands I glimpsed a flash of bright colour. She had already inserted the point of the knife, but I reached across, snatched the packet from her hand and flung it into the sink, catching her hand and trying to drag her down behind the table as I did so.

  We had just reached the floor amid a welter of spilled coffee and broken crockery when the sink erupted. I thought the world had blown up. A loud, sharp explosion hit my ear-drums like a blow from a cricket bat — in stereo. Dust blew up from the sink in a grey fountain that drifted all over the room. Sheila and I lay on the floor, stunned, our ears ringing like a carillon from the blast. It was probably a loud crash, but it sounded like a soft thud when the bottom of the sink fell out on to the tiled floor. After that everything went quiet — apart from the ringing noise — while we lay and shook all over.

  How long it was before we pulled ourselves together sufficiently to crawl up from the floor and cough our way to the phone I don’t know. The explosion’s impact had left me feeling totally gutted and weakened. Severe shock, I suppose, though you shouldn’t really be shocked when something you think is a bomb goes bang.

  We had barely time to wipe the crust of grey dust from our faces and pour ourselves a stiff drink before John Parry was with us. While his subordinates swarmed over the kitchen, we sat out in the garden, cautiously sipping whisky and trying to tell him what had happened. That wasn’t easy. Neither of us could hear properly and John had to ask his questions slowly and loudly in order to make himself understood.

  ‘What did you think the package was?’ he asked Sheila.

  ‘I followed up your tip,’ she said. ‘I went to the police museum and they were going to send some copies of photographs. That’s what I thought it was. It had a label on it — “West Midlands Police Museum”.’

  He nodded. ‘And what made you suspic
ious?’ he asked me.

  ‘Like Sheila, I thought it was OK at first. Then I caught a glimpse of the stamps. I suddenly thought that was wrong — it should have been franked, not stamped.’

  ‘And,’ he said, wearily, ‘instead of leaving it on the table and summoning your friendly neighbourhood policeman, you elected to fling it in the sink, where it went off.’

  ‘Sheila had already started to slit it open,’ I said. ‘I thought it would go off anyway.’

  ‘Was there a particular reason why you were both being bloody careless and not paying attention?’

  ‘We had had a little falling out,’ I said, embarrassed.

  ‘You had some difference of opinion between you?’

  We both looked uncomfortable. ‘We were not being the best of mates,’ Sheila said.

  ‘Children, children,’ he said. ‘Don’t you know that when the redskins are on the prowl you’re supposed to pull the wagons into a circle — not engage in sulks and personal disputes?’

  ‘More to the point,’ I said, anxious to change the subject, ‘are you making any progress with tracking this loony down?’

  ‘Not really,’ he admitted. ‘I have one good piece of news. I know who it wasn’t.’

  ‘It wasn’t most of them,’ said Sheila.

  ‘It might have been,’ he said. ‘Murder on the Orient Express — that’s a murder by committee. So’s Service of All the Dead.’

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Even Agatha Christie wouldn’t stretch it as far as the descendants of six convicts from different places who happened by chance to be on the same ship all getting together to stop somebody writing a book about their ancestors!’

  ‘Doesn’t have to be all of them, boyo — just some.’

  ‘Are you serious? Why, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘A group of several members of the same family might have a common interest in suppressing some piece of information about the family,’ he suggested.

  ‘Like what?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, bach. Perhaps they’re a dynasty of brain surgeons and they don’t want the public to know that there’s hereditary insanity in the family.’