Bad Penny Blues

by Barrie Roberts

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ I said. ‘It’s not much worse than any of the others we’ve thought about. Better than John’s dynasty of mad brain surgeons.’

  ‘Can’t be,’ she said, firmly. ‘If I can’t find any offspring, her descendants wouldn’t know who they are. Or, if for some reason they do know that they’re descended from Ginger Kate — ’

  ‘Ginger Kate?’ I interrupted.

  ‘That’s one of her trade names. Along with Red Kate and the Irish Cat. Don’t interrupt. I was saying that, if her descendants did know who they were they would also know that I couldn’t prove it. So it’s not the Vengeance of Red Kate.’

  ‘What about Patrick? Her brother?’ I asked.

  ‘Ah, well, here we have the dawning of a different breed. Patrick Daley does not appear in the museum’s records. He was never convicted of anything. He married Eileen Joyce and led a quiet life as a carpenter.’

  ‘His kids seem to have been just as unlucky as his forebears, though,’ I said. ‘According to your chart, his eldest son Patrick died at nineteen, his second son Eamon at thirty-one and their sister Eileen at twenty-five. Only one of them — Mary — survived to raise a family.’

  ‘I told you that this family of Daleys were a different breed. Patrick fought and died in South Africa and Eamon died in the Great War.’

  ‘And what about Eileen?’

  ‘Ah, yes, well, apparently the old traditions broke through in her case. She took after her Aunty Kate and went on the game in Brum.’

  I laughed. ‘Not so much the Old Adam as the Old Eve,’ I said. ‘So Pat and Eamon managed to sublimate their violent ancestral urges in fighting for their country, but Eileen got swept away on the lusts of the Sullivans.’

  ‘Not so much of the sexism!’ she complained. ‘It was the only way an uneducated single woman could make a living in those days.’

  She produced two more pictures. One was Eileen Joyce at seventeen. Like her Aunty Kate, over-dressed and over-painted, but beneath it all a really attractive young woman. The other showed a thinner, harder-faced woman, whose make-up was even heavier, presumably to cover the ravages of time or disease.

  ‘What did she die of?’ I asked.

  ‘The record says “consumption”.’

  ‘Tuberculosis,’ I said. ‘Another of the delights of slum life. But her younger sister married?’

  ‘Yes. She married another Joyce.’

  ‘A relative?’

  ‘I think he was a cousin. I’m checking into it. But neither of their kids survived. Patrick died when he was two — of “fever” again. Eileen took to her aunty’s trade — it seems to have run in the female side of the family — and only lived to be twenty-seven. I’ve got a picture of her when she was sixteen.’

  She showed it, another pretty but overblown girl.

  ‘And what killed her at twenty-seven?’

  ‘She did — she committed suicide.’

  I shook my head at this long story of transportation and murder, disease and accident, crime and vice. ‘Poor lass,’ I said. They really were unlucky, weren’t they, the Sullivan-Joyces?’

  ‘Not as unlucky as the Daleys. Have a look at that branch at bottom right. That’s Francis’s family, descended from my Jack’s nephew.’

  ‘My God! What happened to them? They all died in the same year. What was it?’

  ‘The luck of the Sullivans,’ she said. They decided to emigrate and they booked steerage tickets from Liverpool, but there was a coal strike on, so their bookings were changed. They were swapped to Southampton.’

  Southampton? 1912? The light broke. The Titanic?’ I asked.

  She nodded. The whole family.’

  ‘About two-thirds of the Irish immigrants on the Titanic died,’ I said. ‘If their bodies were recovered they’ll be buried in Halifax, Nova Scotia.’

  ‘Didn’t they recover them all?’ she said.

  ‘No. Less than a third. For months after the Atlantic liners used to avoid the area of the sinking in case their passengers spotted corpses. Why are we talking about this?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, cheerfully, ‘if you look on the bright side, it’s great stuff for the book. Not just transportation, but murder, suicide, vice, even the Titanic.’

  ‘You hard-hearted, mercenary wench!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘A poor girl still has to struggle to make a living on her own, kind sir, just like Red Kate and her niece.’

  ‘No you don’t,’ I said, ‘I’ll make an honest woman of you whenever you want. Then you can share my genteel poverty.’

  ‘Huh!’ she snorted. ‘If you’d have been alive in those days you’d have been defending the Sullivans and the Daleys and losing your cases and not getting paid.’

  ‘Not fair,’ I complained. ‘I win quite a lot of cases. Bearing in mind that I start off with a disadvantage — a lot of my clients are actually guilty.’

  ‘Yair, but you don’t get paid very much.’

  ‘I didn’t think you wanted me for my money.’

  ‘Just as well,’ she said. ‘Before we get hitched someone’s got to produce some rhino round here, and it looks like it’ll have to be me. Anyway, there’s another good thing about the Sullivan-Daley-Joyces.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘They’re all gone. They haven’t left any descendants to sneak around cat-murdering and sending bombs through the mail.’

  ‘No. I suppose not. Unless Patrick up the top of the chart there had kids.’

  ‘I told you — he emigrated.’

  ‘No. You told me that you thought he’d emigrated. Not clear evidence.’

  ‘Oh, come, Chris Tyroll! Next you’ll be saying that little Eamon Daley sank the Titanic by pulling the plug out and the descendants don’t want anyone to find out!’

  ‘One day remind me to tell you about the bloke who embezzled his company’s cash and booked on the Titanic. They never found his body after the sinking, but they never found anyone who saw him on board, either. Having been listed missing was the best thing that ever happened to him. I don’t suppose his descendants are very keen on owning up!’

  ‘Rubbish! You’re not suggesting that Francis’s mob survived and are still around?’

  ‘No, not really, but Patrick the emigrant’s might be.’

  Chapter 23

  We tried to follow John Parry’s advice. Sheila stuck to her computer, sometimes striving to track down the last of her six targets, sometimes drafting sections of her book. In the evenings we locked up and stayed in.

  Most days I still had to be in my office or in a court, and I disliked leaving Sheila alone at home, but there seemed no other solution. I suggested to her that she might work on one of the office computer terminals during the day, but she pointed out that our loony would soon catch on and make a target of the office. That seemed reasonable, but I was still unhappy with the alternative. I was always relieved to arrive home and find her present and unharmed.

  Claude dropped in to the office one afternoon and announced that he had some results for Sheila. He would have passed them on to me, but I had the feeling that she would never have forgiven either of us for depriving her of the pleasure so I invited him to eat with us and present his report.

  Sheila let him get as far as the dessert before she started pestering him. He took out a pocket notebook and laid it by his plate.

  ‘I had another job in Shropshire,’ he said, ‘with a fair amount of time to waste, so I went across to the village and hung about the village pub. Once we’d established that I wasn’t a plainclothes licensing nark, we all got along famously.’

  He stopped and attacked his dessert again.

  ‘Well, come on!’ Sheila urged.

  They don’t like Bradley much in the Crown and Cushion. They think he’s some kind of nutter. I heard all about how his wife left him — ’

  ‘He had a wife?’ Sheila interrupted.

  ‘Yes, he did. Apparently she left him a few y
ears ago.’

  ‘Why?’ Sheila demanded.

  Claude took another leisurely spoonful and savoured it.

  ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘I heard all sorts of reasons. Some said it was drink, but the landlord said he never set foot in the pub and the postman said he never saw empty bottles in the rubbish bin. Some thought she just left him because he was “crazy”.’

  ‘What kind of crazy?’ I asked.

  ‘I asked that. One bloke thought he was “music-crazy”, that he’d gone bonkers through pounding the piano. He said, “Any time you went past there — day or night — he was hammering away at the joanna. ’Tisn’t natural, that. I likes a bit of a tune as well as the next, but you dunna want it all the blooming time.”’

  ‘You can discount that,’ I said. ‘That’s just the English suspicion of art. They don’t like education very much, so they wouldn’t have cared for a schoolteacher anyhow, but there’s nothing upsets the English like painting or writing or playing an instrument. They think they’re all deeply un-English ways of going on. How else did they say he was crazy?’

  ‘The postman said that he called at the farm one morning and Bradley was in the garden — dancing.’

  ‘Dancing?’ Sheila and I said simultaneously.

  ‘Dancing is what the man said. He told me that Bradley was twisting about in the garden. He called to him, but Bradley took no notice of him, so he pushed the mail through the door and went about his business.’

  ‘Now there’s a deeply suspicious going-on,’ I said. ‘Dancing in your own garden. I’m surprised it isn’t a crime.’

  ‘Shut up and let Claude get on!’ commanded Sheila.

  Claude had finished his dessert, so he wound Sheila up a bit further, by carefully consulting his notebook.

  The generality of opinion,’ he said, at last, ‘was that it was either drink or child abuse that sent his wife off.’

  ‘So they had children?’ Sheila pounced.

  ‘A child. One son.’

  ‘When were they married?’ I asked.

  ‘In the mid-1980s. The boy was born soon after.’

  ‘There you are,’ said Sheila, triumphantly. ‘A wife and a young boy. The photos you saw. But I still can’t understand why I couldn’t find the marriage record.’

  ‘Probably because it wasn’t in Britain,’ said Claude. ‘He married her abroad. Majority of opinion said she was German. A few more discerning types reckoned she was Dutch or Scandinavian.’

  ‘What about the child abuse?’ I asked. ‘Do you reckon there’s anything in that?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘It seems that whenever anyone called there the lad was playing the piano, but that was so whether his father was there or not. Maybe he did it because he liked it. Apparently he was pretty good at it. They said he’d played at a couple of concerts for the village church. The first time they thought they were in for a boring session of classical music, but he surprised them with ragtime and boogie as well as classics. That’s about all I could find out from the pub — that Bradley’s crazy, that his boy’s a talented pianist, that his wife’s some kind of foreigner and that she left him and took the boy either through drink or child abuse.’

  ‘Not drink,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Claude. ‘I know he didn’t use the local, but a lot of alcoholics don’t. They’re too ashamed. They get their booze elsewhere and drink at home.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘but I get to meet a lot of alkies in my trade and he just didn’t come across as one. His house was cold and dusty, but it didn’t seem like an alky’s lair. What do you think, Sheila? You were in his kitchen, that ought to give him away.’

  She thought and shook her head slowly. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m with you, Chris. Whatever he is, he isn’t a lush. The kitchen was probably just like his wife left it when she shot through. He’s one of those guys who uses one cup and one plate each day and lives on cans and the microwave, but it didn’t look like a boozer’s kitchen.’

  ‘Did you get anything else?’ I asked Claude.

  He smiled. ‘Thought you’d never ask,’ he said. ‘I know what the wife says about it all.’

  ‘How?’ Again Sheila and I were simultaneous.

  ‘Because I’ve chatted to her, that’s how.’

  ‘I told you he’s the best,’ I said to Sheila. ‘Come on, tell all.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘after getting all I could out of the guys in the Crown and Cushion, it occurred to me that the postman seemed a pretty alert sort of bloke -’

  ‘You mean nosy,’ Sheila interrupted.

  ‘Well, yes, that as well. Anyway, I let on to him — in deepest confidence, you understand — that I was instructed by a solicitor who might have good news for Mrs Bradley if she could be traced. He huffed and puffed a bit about being a servant of the Crown and he was a bit suspicious that I might be up to something on the husband’s behalf.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Sheila asked.

  ‘I was able to assure him that I was not acting for Mr Bradley and, as to his being a servant of the Crown, well, those instructing me were prepared to make reasonable payments for information, but if he felt unable to accept I would quite understand. So we reached an agreement, money changed hands and he told me that she was living in Telford under her maiden name.’

  ‘How does he know that?’ I asked.

  ‘Because she still writes to Bradley and, as he put it, “puts her name and address on the back, the way they do abroad because their post isn’t very reliable”.’

  When we’d had our laugh he looked at the notebook and went on. ‘The former Mrs Bradley now calls herself Anna van Rijs and I’ve got an address here for her in Telford.’

  ‘But you said you’d talked to her,’ Sheila said.

  ‘So I did, and I was coming to that, but I thought it was coffee time.’

  Sheila scowled. ‘If you open your mouth while I’m making the coffee, I’ll brain you, Claude,’ she threatened, and stalked off to the kitchen. She was back in no time at all.

  ‘It’s instant,’ she announced, and poured. ‘Now, where were you?’

  ‘I was about to explain how, by an ingenious ruse, I gained the confidence of Mrs Bradley and got into conversation with her.’

  He sipped his coffee. ‘Delicious,’ he said. ‘It was coffee that was the clue. I got the impression that the postman had a soft spot for the lady. It seems she used to take pity on him when her husband was at work — no, not that kind of pity! — she used to invite him in for a mug of coffee. So I thought I’ll try the same trick.’

  ‘You disguised yourself as the postman?’ I said.

  ‘No, no. I waited for a really sweltering hot afternoon and called at her door as a market researcher. It worked like a charm. She took pity on this poor, sweaty bloke on her doorstep and invited me in for a cool drink. Once across the doorstep it was a piece of cake.’

  ‘So what did she say?’ demanded Sheila.

  ‘She told me about her husband, how he’d taken to drinking in secret.’

  ‘If it was in secret, how’d she know?’ I interrupted, because I still didn’t see Ian Bradley as a drinker.

  ‘She said he used to fall about and slur his words. She didn’t mind that so much — she thought he was under stress at work and that he was taking a few before he came home — but then he started getting jumpy and bad-tempered and taking it out on her and the boy.’

  ‘Did you see the boy?’ Sheila asked.

  ‘No. He was at school, but she showed me his picture. It must have been the same one that you saw, Chris, the one sitting at a piano.’

  ‘You really chummed up with her, didn’t you?’ I remarked, and perhaps it sounded more sarcastic than I intended it to be.

  Claude looked at me wide-eyed. ‘I assure you’, he said, ‘that at all times I kept the ethics of my profession well in mind.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘Bribing postmen to break confidences and misleading a woman on her own!’ I was beginning
to feel guilty about the whole Bradley episode. I couldn’t escape the feeling that Sheila had launched on an unwarranted invasion of Bradley’s life.

  ‘Shut up, Chris!’ commanded Sheila. ‘Whose side are you on? Tell us about the boy, Claude.’

  ‘Well, she’s very proud of her son, and with good reason, it seems.’

  He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a couple of pages of photocopies.

  ‘Look at those,’ he said, laying them on the table.

  They were copies of news stories and one carried the photograph of the boy pianist I had seen in Bradley’s home. They recorded the fact that fourteen-year-old Graham van Rijs had won the Midlands heat of a national musical competition and that he had gone on to win a place in the national final.

  ‘So he takes after his father,’ Sheila commented. ‘That must be the one talented kid he told us about.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s what the trouble was all about,’ I suggested.

  They both looked at me questioningly.

  ‘Bradley wanted a career as a musician, but decided he wasn’t good enough to make the big time,’ I said. ‘Then he discovered that his son had a superior talent and that he himself had arthritis and couldn’t even play. So, while his son was starting to win acclaim, he had lost the ability to play at all. Perhaps his bad temper was jealousy and frustration.’

  ‘Could be,’ Sheila agreed.

  I went to the sideboard and poured myself a large whisky.

  ‘I don’t really like any of this,’ I said. ‘Bradley’s a lonely, frustrated bloke who’s had enough dumped on him. His wife has had to make hard decisions and his kid’s just starting out on what might be a great career. I’m not at all sure you ought to be poking about in their affairs, Sheila.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ she said. ‘Though a juvenile musical genius would be good for the book. Anyway, it’s early days to be deciding what should be in and what shouldn’t.’

  Chapter 24

  John Parry came around one evening to tell us the results of the scientific examination of the remains of the stun bomb.

  ‘Nothing very special about it,’ he said. ‘As we said at the time, the cardboard box was a standard box for photographic paper, sold all over the world. The tin liner was cobbled together out of an old biscuit box, by someone with a minimal knowledge of metalwork.’