Bad Penny Blues

by Barrie Roberts

  ‘What about the explosives?’ I asked.

  ‘Again, simple stuff. Routine ingredients you can buy in chemists and hardware stores if you know what you need. The trigger was a version of the one he used on the incendiary bomb — a pressure button that would move once you released the wrappings — so it’s definitely from the same sender.’

  ‘As if we doubted it,’ I said.

  ‘Have you found any more suspects for me?’ he asked Sheila.

  ‘Well, there’s a very long shot,’ she said, and outlined the sad saga of Jack Sullivan’s family.

  ‘Won’t be them,’ John said, shaking his head.

  ‘You sound pretty sure,’ I commented.

  ‘Stands to reason, boyo. Our man, we reasonably believe, has been researching the same areas as Sheila and finding the same results.’

  We both nodded.

  ‘Right, then. If he’s looking in the same places he’s only got the same information, so he won’t know what happened to Patrick Sullivan either.’

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ Sheila said. ‘If he is — himself — a descendant of Patrick Sullivan, he will know that his branch of the family is still alive and well, won’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ said John, patiently, ‘but he will also know that you don’t know that. What’s more, if he were a descendant of Patrick he’d have to be daft to draw attention to himself. He might be the cause of you catching on that his family still exists, mightn’t he?’

  ‘True,’ she agreed. ‘So we can rule that whole lot out as suspects.’

  ‘What about your Staffordshire bloke?’ John asked. ‘Have you tracked him yet?’

  ‘I’m pretty certain,’ she said. ‘Hang on, I’ll get the papers.’

  She disappeared and was back quickly with a folder.

  ‘Look,’ she said, laying papers on the table. ‘This is Jim Simmonds’ convict record.’

  It was the now familiar format:

  JAMES SIMMONDS No 7172

  Trade: Apprentice engraver

  Height: 5 ft. 6 in.

  Complexn: Swarthy

  Head: Long

  Hair: Black curled

  Whiskers: None

  Visage: Narrow

  Forehead: High

  Eyebrows: Black

  Eyes: Black

  Nose: Small

  Mouth: Wide

  Chin: Rounded

  Remarks: Burn scars on both hands. No tattoos.

  Convict 7 years’ transportation

  Tried at Stafford, transported for theft as servant

  Character: Good

  There was very little record of punishments. Jim Simmonds had been a model prisoner and had been released at the first opportunity.

  ‘Description could be you,’ John remarked

  ‘I’m taller,’ I said, ‘but the character might be me.’

  ‘What’s “theft as servant”?’ Sheila asked. ‘It says he was an apprentice. Surely they weren’t servants?’

  ‘To all intents and purposes, they were,’ I said. ‘But “theft as servant” merely means that whatever he stole belonged to his boss. It just meant stealing from an employer. They took a dim view of it, in fact the courts still do. It’s treated as a breach of trust.’

  ‘So what have you got on his family, Sheila?’ John asked.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it didn’t take me long to find out that he was the third and youngest son of John Simmonds and Martha Whitton of Stafford. I had been going to follow the Simmonds family down until I got that broadsheet ballad about Jim. That says he had a sweetheart and a son by her.’

  ‘They were awful liars, broadsheet writers,’ I said. ‘Remember the one about Jack Smythe’s hanging that never was.’

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘But I had to check it out, and there in the 1871 census is a Katherine Evans, daughter of Daniel Evans and Bronwen Morgan, living in Great Wyrley.’

  She pronounced it ‘Great Wirely’.

  ‘It’s Great Wurley,’ I said. ‘Evans and his wife must have come up to the Staffordshire coalfield from Wales.’

  ‘Right again,’ she said. ‘Evans is described as a miner and his place of birth and his wife’s is in South Wales.’

  ‘But how can you tell that this Katherine Evans is the Kate Evans in the song?’ I asked. ‘It’s not an uncommon name.’

  ‘No, but the census shows a five-year-old boy sharing the Evans family home and he is listed as “James Simmonds”. Am I right or am I right?’

  ‘It certainly looks as if you’re right,’ I agreed. ‘So what then?’

  ‘That’s when things turned a bit difficult. I thought I’d solved the awkward bit, but I hadn’t. I couldn’t find Kate Evans or little Jimmy Simmonds in the next census.’

  ‘She’d left the area?’ John suggested.

  ‘That’s what I thought at first. I had visions of trawling through marriage records at the Family Centre and never finding her because she hadn’t married or she’d emigrated or something, but then I found her again. She had married. To a bloke called Thomas Lewis, another miner. What confused me was that in the 1881 survey there’s no fifteen-year-old James Simmonds.’

  ‘He’d died?’ I asked.

  ‘No. He was alive and well, but living under a new name. Kate married Thomas Lewis in 1873 and they had four children — Thomas, David, Bronwen and Alan — but the census showed them with another child, James Lewis aged fifteen.’

  ‘So, Lewis had done the decent thing and given Jim’s child his name,’ I said.

  ‘That must be the answer,’ she said.

  ‘And then what?’ I asked.

  ‘James Lewis married in 1888 to a Jennifer Wilde, and they had four kids — Thomas, Katherine, Richard and John. Thomas was a miner, Katherine married a miner, Richard died as an infant and John stayed a bachelor.’

  ‘What about Thomas?’ John asked.

  ‘He produced three offspring — John, Thomas and Elizabeth — and his sister Kate had four — Daniel, Luke, Mark and Katherine.’

  ‘So, we’ve got two lines of direct descent from your Jim Simmonds and proliferating offspring,’ remarked John.

  Sheila nodded. ‘Right,’ she agreed. ‘Now John Lewis, the bachelor, you can ignore if you like. He ended up in a funny farm.’

  ‘An asylum?’ I said.

  ‘Right. He was born in 1892 and was locked up in 1928.’

  ‘Maybe we can’t ignore him,’ said John. ‘What was his trouble? Do you know?’

  ‘The death record says “General paresis of the insane”. What’s that?’

  ‘Syphilitic insanity,’ I said.

  Sheila went on. ‘John, Thomas and Elizabeth Lewis all married. John’s marriage was childless, luckily for us — and for the family. He was another who was certified, in 1942. Thomas Lewis had two kids — Katherine and Elizabeth — and his sister Elizabeth Lewis had three — Richard, John and Mary.’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ I said. ‘We’re well into this century by now, and there’s the cousins — Daniel Lewis and that lot — there must be masses of them around now.’

  ‘There are,’ she said, glumly. ‘What’s more, most of them are called Jones. They’re scattered all over Staffordshire and the West Midlands. Look!’

  She produced a family tree with addresses jotted on it.

  ‘You’re not going to interview all these, are you?’ I asked.

  ‘Not unless I have to,’ she said and laid down another paper. ‘That’s a simplified version,’ she said. ‘I thought I might start with that lady,’ and she pointed to a name.

  ‘Katherine, born 1934,’ I read ‘She never married?’

  ‘Right. She’s still alive, and I’m hoping she’ll have been maiden aunty to the whole clan for decades. If so, she can tell me anything that anyone else can, and probably lots that the others can’t.’

  ‘Sounds better than going through the whole extended clan,’ I said. ‘What do you reckon John?’

  ‘I reckon that I shall have to check the whole lot out f
or criminal tendencies,’ he said, gloomily. ‘Let us have a list of full names, dates of birth and addresses will you, Sheila, and I’ll run them on the computer. What about your other dead end — John Lewis, the one who was certified?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘What was his problem?’

  ‘Schizophrenia.’

  ‘Isn’t that hereditary?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re still arguing about that one,’ John said. ‘Still, two of them certified in two successive generations is strange.’

  ‘Different causes,’ I observed

  ‘If the shrinks were right,’ he said. ‘Have you ever known them right? I take it you haven’t found any more maniacs in this tribe?’

  ‘To be honest, I can’t be sure. There’s so many of the Jones branch that I haven’t sorted them all out yet.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ he sighed. ‘A tribe of homicidal nutters, all called Jones.’

  Chapter 25

  You can’t stay scared all the time. Well, at least, not full pitch, hysterical, trembling scared. You walk through snake country and at first you look about you carefully, but after a while you get distracted by other things.

  Days passed and Jack the Cat-Ripper left us alone. We still stayed close to base, but I began to be a bit less wary. I imagine Sheila was the same. Sometimes I caught myself at it and reminded myself of what our man had already done and what he might yet do, but it doesn’t work. You really cannot stay one hundred per cent alert all the time.

  Evenings when we had no visitors we sat around and stared at television until we’d reminded ourselves how bad most of it is, then gave up. Sheila’s discovery of my mother’s record collection kept her endlessly amused. A lot of nights we sprawled on the sitting-room floor with a bottle of wine, while Frank Crumit or Billy Bennett or Bob Dylan or Cisco Houston warbled away on the stereo.

  For the umpteenth time she asked me to remember when my mother and I met Bob Dylan at the Newport Festival.

  ‘I’ve told you,’ I said. ‘He was just some bloke at the time, and I was a toddler. Of course, if I’d only realised he was going to be an international superstar I’d have got myself photographed with him and had it autographed.’

  ‘All right, all right! Don’t get off your bike, I’ve just never met anyone who’s met Bob Dylan before.’

  ‘You might as well not have done now, since I can’t remember a damn thing about him. I remember Woody Guthrie, though. We went to see him in hospital and he sang songs to me.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘What did he do? Inspired Bob Dylan, that’s what. What do you think “Song to Woody” is about? He wrote about a thousand songs of which you probably know several, like “This Land Is Your Land” or “Grand Coulee Dam”.’

  ‘What was he in hospital for? Booze or drugs?’

  ‘What a cynic you are! He had a rare condition that killed him in the end. For years people thought he was drunk when he wasn’t, but it didn’t make much difference when they diagnosed it. It’s always fatal. He died of it in his fifties.’

  ‘Nasty,’ she said and rolled over to shuffle through the record shelves. She slid out a Guthrie album and clambered up to put it on the player.

  She was half-way across the room when the window exploded inwards. At the same time something whirred across the room and struck the furniture with a thud.

  I grabbed Sheila’s ankle and dragged her back down to the floor.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ she gasped.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but we know who. Lie there while I get the lights out.’

  I reached up and switched off the table lamps that were the room’s only lights. It was full dark outside and it took a little while for our eyes to get accustomed to the blackness. When they had I managed to find the phone and dial 999.

  ‘What now?’ Sheila hissed in my ear.

  ‘Now we lie here, keep quiet and don’t show any light or movement till the fuzz arrive.’

  ‘What smashed the window? A bullet?’

  ‘I don’t think so. It was too slow, but it was pretty powerful, whatever it was.’

  She raised her head and peered towards the window. ‘He must be outside,’ she said.

  ‘If he’s got any sense he’ll be gone,’ I said. ‘He must know the police will be here soon.’

  ‘But he might still be out there,’ she persisted.

  ‘He might,’ I agreed. ‘He might still be lurking in the shrubs at the far end, then when we look out of the window he’ll have a marvellous target — two pale blobs inside a dark rectangle. Then he can whang whatever it was came through the window straight into your pretty face. Which I’d really rather he didn’t do.’

  ‘Good on you,’ she said, ‘but the swine will get away before the police get here. It’s our best chance to nail him.’

  ‘Since he hasn’t tried again,’ I said, ‘I’m willing to bet that he’s made off by now. Anyway — listen!’

  Somewhere a dog was barking, but the distant honking of police sirens announced that two or more cars were on their way up the hill.

  ‘He’ll certainly be on his way now,’ I said.

  Within seconds we heard three police cars pulling up in front of the house. I switched the lights on again and opened the front door. A handful of uniformed officers led by a sergeant swarmed in, while others deployed around the garden.

  Briefly I explained to the sergeant the nature of the attack.

  ‘What was it, sir? You said you didn’t think it was a bullet.’

  ‘No, sergeant. I’ve been shot at before and it didn’t sound like a bullet. It sounded slower and heavier, but whatever it was it took out the window at one go.’

  I showed the sergeant the sitting-room, both of us standing at the open door so as not to disturb any evidence.

  ‘You can see where the window broke from the pattern of the broken glass,’ I said. ‘Whatever it was went somewhere over there.’ I pointed towards a bookcase. ‘That suggests to me that he was either standing on the lawn to the right of the pond or in the shrubs by the back gate.’

  The sergeant nodded. ‘We’d better leave this room till the Scene of Crimes officer gets here. Is there somewhere else we can sit?’

  I led him through to the kitchen and Sheila put the coffee pot on.

  ‘DI Parry’s on his way, sir,’ said the sergeant. ‘He’s off duty, but there’s a standing order in the Control Room that he’s to be called in to any emergency involving this address or either of your names.’

  He had hardly spoken when John ambled in from the front door. ‘One large coffee, please, Sheila,’ he said. ‘Evening all, or is it morning?’

  He dropped into a chair at the table. He was wearing a grey tracksuit, a garment that he only adopted when scrambling out of bed in the middle of the night.

  ‘Hello, John. We got you up,’ I remarked.

  He nodded. ‘The Scene of Crime bloke’s in your sitting-room,’ he said. ‘Tell me about it.’

  Briefly I outlined what had happened.

  ‘And you wanted to go after him?’ he said to Sheila.

  ‘Well, for the first time we could be sure that he was somewhere near. It seemed like a good chance to get our hands on him. Anyway, I’ve got a strong urge to defongerate the bastard.’

  ‘De-fon-ger-ate,’ John repeated, rolling each syllable around. He widened his eyes and sipped his coffee. ‘Does it ever strike you, Chris, that she invents these colourful colonialisms to entertain us simple Brits?’

  ‘For your information, you big Pommy plod, defongerate is a perfectly decent Aussie word. Our gardener used to use it when I was a kid.’

  ‘Gardener!’ he exclaimed. ‘And I thought that — ’

  Sheila banged her coffee mug down so hard that the table shook. ‘It may have escaped your notice, Inspector Parry,’ she said, ‘but some crazy galah is out there trying to do me harm, and I had the silly and perhaps mistaken idea that you were trying to arrest him. Instead, you�
��re sitting here swilling coffee and making snide Pommy jokes!’

  ‘While I sit here swigging coffee,’ he said, calmly, ‘my officers are searching the area in the dark for the aforementioned crazy galah, notwithstanding his possession of an unknown but apparently dangerous weapon. My Scene of Crime officer is in your sitting-room, trying to develop clues that will help to identify our man, and two uniformed officers and a detective constable are annoying all your neighbours by knocking them up late and asking them if they know anything that will help. If you can think of anything I can usefully do apart from co-ordinating their efforts I shall gladly go away and do it.’

  While he made this speech I had got up, fetched a bottle of brandy and topped up everyone’s coffee — generously.

  ‘I shouldn’t,’ he said. ‘Not on duty.’

  ‘You’re not on duty,’ I said. ‘The sergeant told us.’

  ‘Damno!’ he exclaimed. ‘That’s the excuse I’d forgotten. I am not required to notice things when not on duty.’

  Sheila, who had been pale with anger while she sounded off at John, was now blushing. She got up and flung her arms around him from the back.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I know you’re doing your best.’

  They were still in that pose when a plain-clothes detective walked in.

  ‘Sorry, John,’ he said. ‘Should I have knocked?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said the big Welshman, quite unruffled. ‘Dr McKenna was merely easing the strain in my shoulders. Have you got anything?’

  The officer held out a plastic evidence bag. John took it, examined the contents and laid it on the table. ‘Where was it?’ he asked.

  ‘It was embedded in the far end of a bookcase to the left of the fireplace. Stuck in about an inch.’

  Sheila and I were both peering at the bag’s content. It was a metal shaft, only a few inches long, with moulded fins around one end and a viciously sharp point at the other.

  ‘A quarrel!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘A what?’ said Sheila.

  ‘A quarrel,’ said John. ‘A crossbow bolt.’