Bad Penny Blues

by Barrie Roberts

  ‘What are you doing today?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m in court all morning,’ I said. ‘Why? What have you got on?’

  ‘I thought I’d run up to Staffordshire and see Aunt Katy.’

  The name didn’t register for a moment, then, ‘Ah! Your maiden lady who’s descended from Jimmy Simmonds?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I can’t come with you,’ I said. ‘I really am stuck.’

  ‘Don’t let’s have another blue about it, Chris. It’s my problem and I’ve got to risk it.’

  ‘It’s my problem as well,’ I said. ‘And I don’t like you going alone.’

  ‘I know you don’t and I’m grateful. But it’s my fault he’s after us, and you shouldn’t be involved.’

  ‘But I want to be involved. How do you think I’d feel if something happened to you and I wasn’t there?’

  ‘About as bad as you’d feel if you were there, I hope,’ she said, with maddening logic. ‘I’m going, Chris, and you’ve got your show to run.’

  So I gave in, but I wasn’t happy. I couldn’t keep my mind off her all day and several times I had to pull myself up to avoid elementary errors in court. I was hugely relieved when I got home and found her already there. The smell of something exotic being cooked met me as walked in.

  ‘It’s my turn in the galley,’ I said.

  ‘I’m taking Doc Macintyre at his word,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t want to eat your cooking.’

  ‘He’s eaten it before. Anyway, Mac wants to eat anything that he hasn’t had to cook himself. Tell me, why does Mac always warrant you cooking something special?’

  ‘Because he’s a nice old man who lives alone and drinks too much. I just want to give him a treat.’

  ‘I’m a nice young man who lives alone and would drink too much if you’d let me.’

  ‘You don’t live alone. You have a beautiful and witty woman to share your bed, board and bath, not to mention cook your meals now and then.’

  I changed tack. ‘I take it, from your good mood, that Aunty Kate came up trumps, then?’

  Too right she did. You should hear about it!’

  ‘I’m waiting.’

  ‘Wait on. If I’ve got to tell Mac the whole rigmarole you can wait till then.’

  Mac arrived with his customary bottle of Laphroaig. After a glass or two we sat down to one of Sheila’s Pacific-rim specials and, over the food, she brought him up to speed on her researches and the backlash they’d provoked.

  Dessert done she disappeared into the kitchen and returned, not with coffee, but with a bottle of champagne and glasses.

  ‘We’re celebrating?’ I said. ‘What are we celebrating?’

  ‘That I’m a clever girl — that I’ve done it — that I’ve hit the bull’s-eye — that I’ve solved the mystery!’

  ‘You know who our nutter is?’ I said.

  ‘No!’ she jeered ‘Not that mystery! The real mystery!’

  She popped and poured the champagne without another word of explanation, then produced her shoulder-bag and drew out a packet of photos. She laid one on the table. It was of a finger ring, apparently plain gold.

  ‘That’, she announced, ‘is a ring which Kate Lewis inherited from her great-great-grandmother.’

  ‘Who must have been Kate Evans, Jimmy Simmonds’ sweetheart,’ I said.

  ‘Precisely, Watson. And this,’ she said, laying down another photograph, ‘is the inscription on the inside of that ring.’

  The wording in the photograph said, ‘My Kate — For Ever — J.S.’

  Sheila laid her convict token down beside it ‘That’, she announced, ‘is the ring that Jimmy Simmonds made and gave to his girl. That’s his inscription inside it, and that is the writing and the work of the man who cut the token. Kate Lewis let me take her into Stafford to have the ring photographed and I took her to the Salt Library. I got her a copy of the song about Jimmy and we looked up his trial. He was done for stealing gold from his boss — he was a jeweller’s apprentice — and the reason he was transported was probably because they never got the gold back and he wouldn’t tell them where it went. My guess is that that’s where it went,’ and she pointed to the picture of the ring.

  It didn’t need an expert eye to see that she was right, about the inscription at least and maybe about the source of the gold ring. We toasted her.

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘I never believed you’d actually find out who gave the token to who, but you made it.’

  ‘Better yet,’ she said, and put down another picture. It was a copy of a Victorian portrait of a middle-aged woman, with a small round face and large eyes. I guessed who it was. Now I could see the real face of the girl who slept on a Dorset beach.

  ‘That,’ Sheila confirmed, ‘is Kate Evans, after she became Kate Lewis. This all puts the cherry on top of my book.’

  ‘Doesn’t it just!’ I exclaimed. ‘Mrs Wainwright will be disappointed, though.’

  ‘So she will, but Kate Lewis was delighted. That ring has come down through the women of her family and was always said to have belonged to Kate Evans, but they could never understand the inscription because they knew her husband was called Thomas Lewis.’

  We took another round of champagne for the picture, then Mac said, ‘All ye’ve got to do now is stop your loony, lassie,’ which brought us back to reality.

  ‘Mac,’ I said, ‘have you had any further thoughts on what sort of illness our man might have?’

  He shook his head. ‘There’s a whole heap of peculiar conditions of the brain that it might be, and any one of them would make you depressed. I was thinking last night if I’d ever dealt with someone who’d been taking those two drugs, but I canna recall a case.’

  If Mac couldn’t recall it, he hadn’t had it. ‘Do you think his disease might be the thing that’s driving him on?’ I asked.

  ‘It may well be what makes him crazy enough to do what he’s doing,’ he said, ‘but I can’t see that he would be that anxious to keep it a secret.’

  ‘John Parry suggested a family of brain surgeons who’ve gone bonkers,’ Sheila said.

  ‘He would,’ Mac grunted. ‘If policemen had less overheated imaginations we wouldna have to have a Court of Appeal. I suppose if you were a wealthy surgeon or a top-class airline pilot or the President of the United States, you wouldnae want people knowing you’d got some kind of brain-rot that sent you doolally and made you twitch. Have you got any such among the people you’ve ferreted out, Sheila?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, but she went and fetched her files.

  Soon we were all poring over a table full of family trees, looking for any signs of hereditary madness.

  Mac pointed to the Lewis/Jones chart. ‘There’s two there that ended up in a funny farm. What about them? Do you know any more?’

  ‘Kate Lewis says they were harmless. They just exposed themselves and talked nonsense, so they got locked up. She says one of her distant cousins is the same. He’s in Burntwood Hospital now.’

  ‘That’s not necessarily reliable evidence,’ I said. ‘That family hid the fact that Kate Evans’ son was illegitimate and that his father had been transported.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Sheila, ‘but I’m sure she told me the truth about the recent one. She knew him, used to play with him as a kid. She says he’s harmless.’

  Mac was peering at the Bradleys. ‘There’s a bit of peculiarity here,’ he said. ‘His granny went funny in her old age and his dad died young.’

  ‘Yes, but from pneumonia,’ Sheila said.

  ‘Pneumonia kills little kiddies and old folks. It only kills hale adults if they’re damned careless.’

  ‘But he hasn’t gone funny — Ian Bradley. He’s only got arthritis,’ protested Sheila.

  ‘If you had it, you wouldnae say “only”,’ said Mac. ‘Still, you’re right. There’s no pattern of illness or death there.’

  We peered a lot and argued a lot and drank a lot, but even with Mac’s hel
p we couldn’t evolve any useful information from Sheila’s charts.

  Mac called a cab and departed eventually. We washed up and Sheila turned in. I made my nightly security round. In the sitting-room the smashed window had been replaced, but we had not used the room since the attack. Somehow it seemed too vulnerable, though the kitchen windows faced the garden as well. I ambled round, checked the locks on the repaired window and noted how well Mrs Dunk had cleared up the glazier’s messy traces. The record that Sheila had been about to play was where Mrs Dunk had put it, on top of the player, so I slid it back into the right shelf.

  We fell asleep quickly, probably because of the amount of champagne, wine and whisky we’d put down. I woke up about an hour later, from a nightmare. I saw myself as a little boy, back with my mother at the Brooklyn Hospital where she and I had called on Woody Guthrie. We had sat on a sunlit balcony, above tree-tops, and this nice little smiling man had sung me some of his famous children’s songs. In my dream he wasn’t smiling, he was scowling, and he wasn’t singing funny songs, he was leaning forward, counting my toes, which for some reason were bare, and singing:

  ‘This little piggy was nosy,

  This little piggy wouldn’t stop,

  This piggy wouldn’t be warned,

  This little piggy got the chop.’

  All the time he was singing I was terrified of what would happen when it ended. It ended when he shouted the word ‘chop’ at me and leapt across the space towards me. I woke up sweating.

  As I lit a cigarette I wondered about the dream. With the door to my subconscious still half-open from dreaming, images and phrases began to pop into my memory. I took the pad that I keep beside the phone and started to scribble. I filled several pages and went back and forwards over them.

  It still didn’t quite make sense, but I had a strong feeling that there was a pattern in my scribbles. After two more cigarettes I slid quietly out of bed and padded down to the library. In criminal law you never know what you’re going to need to look up, so my shelves were crammed with all sorts of reference books. I knew the facts I needed were there somewhere.

  It took half an hour to find it and another hour to make it slot into the gaps in my scribbles, but in the end I had it. The only bit I still didn’t understand was about the spiders.

  Sheila woke up as I clambered back into bed. ‘Where have you been? What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘Why can’t you sleep?’

  I told her about my nightmare.

  ‘I thought you said you liked him, that he sang funny songs to you.’

  ‘I did, and he did. But I know now what it was. I’ve got it.’

  ‘What? Indigestion?’

  ‘No — the answer! I know who it is and why it is. I know how he’s doing it and why he’s doing it! What’s more, I think I know how to catch him.’

  ‘Well, tell then.’

  ‘It’s too late,’ I said. ‘And I’m tired and still half-drunk. I’ll tell you in the morning. You’ll have to write him a letter.’

  ‘Ratbag!’ she said.

  Chapter 29

  I woke to find Sheila sitting on the side of the bed studying my notepad.

  ‘I don’t understand this,’ she said when she saw that I was awake.

  I struggled to get a grip on what had blossomed from slippery suggestions to absolute certainties the night before, and started to explain my jottings.

  ‘And this was because you had a dream?’ she said at one point.

  ‘Martin Luther King had a dream,’ I said.

  ‘Yair,’ she said, ‘and they shot him.’

  ‘Dreams’, I said, ‘are the way your subconscious tells you what you’ve forgotten you know.’

  ‘Just suppose you’re right,’ she said. ‘What happens next? Did you say I should write to him? What does he do then — write back saying, “Dear Dr McKenna, I’m frightfully sorry”, and then flush himself down the dunny?’

  I took the pad and scribbled a draft of a letter. She looked at it suspiciously.

  ‘“I have been reviewing my computer files after our interview and find that there are aspects of your family’s history, especially the question of your son, which seem to require clarification”,’ she read. ‘Why don’t I just ask him for another meeting?’

  ‘That’s the whole point,’ I said. ‘I don’t like you being a target. This way he’ll think you know what he’s hiding and that you’ve got the info on your computer.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So, he’ll come after the computer. Then we can nail him — red-handed. Make John’s case for him.’

  ‘A bit less of the red,’ she said, but she wrote the letter before I left the house.

  I had no intention of telling John Parry about my ideas until I had set the game in motion. After that he could join in or not.

  As soon as I reached my office I called in Alasdair and Jayne, my long-serving secretary, and outlined the situation to them. Alasdair was critical at first, but gradually came round to my way of thinking. That was a big plus. Jayne didn’t pretend to follow the argument but was prepared to give it a go and loves dressing up anyway.

  Detective Inspector Parry was a tougher nut to crack. He heard me out over a sandwich lunch in my office, with an almost immovable expression of disbelief.

  ‘And this started with a dream?’ he said, when I’d finished.

  ‘Freud and Jung were both pretty excited by dreams,’ I said.

  ‘Neither of them,’ he said, ‘were detectives, as I recall. There’s no way of checking any of this, is there?’

  ‘You might try Interpol,’ I suggested.

  He nodded. ‘And if they’ve never heard of him?’

  ‘It doesn’t invalidate my argument, does it? If they have, then it may be a little support.’

  He picked at the crumbs in his sandwich paper. ‘I don’t like it,’ he said. ‘It’s dangerous.’

  ‘If I’m wrong,’ I said, patiently, ‘then there’s no harm done. If I’m right, he’ll wait till the first time he knows Sheila and I are out, then he’ll go for her computer. If he thinks that the secret he’s trying to hide is on her machine, he won’t dare attack her until he’s destroyed the machine.’

  He was silent for a long time. Then, ‘If you’re right — and I’m not saying you are — why don’t I search his two addresses?’

  ‘Because, for all we know, he’s got a third — or a fourth, or a fifth. Where’ll we be if we tip him off and don’t catch him? The beauty of my way is that he’ll have to make a try. It’s back to tethering a goat under a tree to draw him out of the jungle, only this time the goat isn’t Sheila. She can stay well away from it.’

  ‘Fat chance!’ he snorted. ‘Keeping that girl away from a fight would take rhinoceroses. And you expect me to go along with this — officially?’

  ‘I don’t care whether you go along with it officially or not. I’d prefer you to go along with it, though.’

  ‘But if I don’t — you’ll do it anyway, won’t you?’

  ‘Think of another way,’ I challenged.

  He heaved a long sigh. ‘All right, boyo,’ he said at last. ‘I must be almost as daft as you. But it will be unofficial. I can’t go around entrapping people. I’d have all the lefty lawyers in Britain on my back. You get our man bang to rights and I will charge him, but the charge will arise out of the success of routine police precautions, won’t it?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely,’ I agreed.

  He was right about the rhinoceroses. I gave Sheila’s letter time to reach the suspect before setting the trap. When I finally explained the set-up to her she asked, ‘Where do I fit into all this?’

  ‘You don’t,’ I said. ‘That’s the good part. You can stay well clear.’

  ‘No way!’ she said. ‘You forget, I have got some serious defongerating of this ratbag to do.’

  ‘I’m trying to set him up for John and his boys.’

  ‘Good!’ she said. ‘They can have what’s left!’

  ‘I’ll
arrange so you can be close at hand when he’s nicked,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘You’ll arrange it so that I’m right there.’

  We began with the equipment arriving in the afternoon, in the same van that brought Alasdair and Jayne up the back lane to the back garden gate. While Alasdair and I set up the gear, Jayne and Sheila prowled through Sheila’s wardrobe.

  At last we had everything in place — an infra-red video camera mounted inside the sitting-room window, feeding a videorecorder and a small black and white monitor. We stood a large draught excluder behind the monitor and drew the curtains, so that the screen’s glow would not be visible from outside after dark, then Alasdair went upstairs and shaved off his moustache.

  I had left the kitchen door open and one by one John arrived, followed by a detective sergeant and a constable. ‘There will be a couple of plain-clothes lads front and back once it’s dark,’ John said. ‘We’re only here because Interpol says you guessed right — convictions for theft and arson in West Germany and the Netherlands in the 1960s. Maybe you’re right about the rest.’

  ‘I don’t want him frightened off,’ I said.

  ‘Never fear, bach. They’re highly trained officers who can melt into the landscape. He won’t spot them. Have you laid on refreshments?’

  ‘After dark,’ I said. ‘Meanwhile, take your blokes in the sitting-room and see if you approve the set-up.’

  Jayne and Alasdair came downstairs, Alasdair moustacheless with his hair ruffled to resemble as nearly as possible my thick curls, Jayne in Sheila’s safari suit and an ash-blonde wig. Sheila had even loaned her hefty leather shoulder-bag to aid the deception.

  ‘Do you think we’ll pass?’ Jayne said, pirouetting in the hall.

  ‘He’s only going to get a glimpse of you getting into the car and maybe passing by in the car. He’ll swallow it,’ I said.

  ‘And all we have to do is drive away?’ Alasdair checked.

  ‘Right, and stay away until I ring you on the mobile. We can’t have you arriving back at the wrong moment.’

  ‘What if you haven’t rung by the time the pubs shut?’ Alasdair asked.

  ‘I don’t know! Go to a night-club or something! Just stay away until you get the all-clear from me!’