The Victory Snapshot (A Chris Tyroll Mystery Book 1)

by Barrie Roberts

  He stood up. ‘I shouldn’t be hanging about here,’ he said. ‘Neither should you two. I’d get further away if I was you, Mr Tyroll.’

  I nodded. ‘Thanks again, Warren,’ I said. ‘Think nothing of it, Mr Tyroll. Like I said, you got to have loyalties, you got to stick to them as sticks to you. Tarra,’ and he slipped out.

  ‘Well!’ exclaimed Sheila, as the door closed behind him. ‘Is he for real?’

  ‘He’s very real,’ I assured her. ‘For all his bizarre and unattractive politics, you have just met an old-fashioned member of the English working class, who’s got a set of values that don’t work any more — be grateful that he believes in the virtue of loyalty. At least we know we were right and we now know we’ve misled the opposition.’

  ‘So what now?’ she asked.

  ‘Now we have a Gaelic coffee, you go back to Mrs Breadwell’s and tomorrow we go and pay a visit to another potential witness. I’ll pick you up around ten. Bring your Aussie Lady Bugger’s Kit and your baggage.’

  ‘Where are we off to?’

  ‘When we’ve seen our witness, we’re going to flee the country.’

  I hate driving. It’s such an appalling waste of time. You can’t do anything else while you’re driving, not even think about something else, or you end up dead. I learnt to drive in my youth and I’ve always tried to protect the public by not doing it, but I keep my licence for emergencies. This looked more and more like an emergency and I didn’t want taxi-drivers and railway stations giving our movements away, so I borrowed a car from Claude the Phantom. Claude’s real name is Gordon and he’s a rarity among private enquiry agents because he’s honest and bright. He got called ‘Claude the Phantom’ years ago, when he did a lot of divorce work and was always going about disguised as a gas inspector to gain access to adulterers’ premises and see if there were men’s socks in the lady’s bedroom. Somehow we got to calling him ‘Claude the Phantom’ after Claude Rains as the Phantom of the Opera. When he’s not enquiring he does socially useful tasks like repossessing unpaid-for cars, which means he’s got contacts who’ve always got repo’d cars on hand, which means I can always borrow a car that’s registered to someone else. Handy.

  We had no trouble finding Sergeant Reynolds’ place next morning, and his daughter-in-law took us into the garden to see him. It was warm and sunny and he was sitting reading under a mature apple tree. He stood up, with astonishing ease for a man of his age, as we walked down the lawn towards him. He was over six feet and showed no sign of an elderly stoop. As we got nearer I could see that his eyes were rheumy but he held his head erect. He motioned us to a cast-iron bench opposite his camp chair after I’d introduced us.

  He sat back, eyeing Sheila thoughtfully. ‘Walter Brown’s granddaughter,’ he repeated after a pause. ‘That was a terrible thing that happened to him, terrible. And they haven’t arrested anyone yet. In my day we used to say you have to catch a killer in forty-eight hours at most, and so we did. All the time I was in the old town force we never had a murder we didn’t clear up. And it wasn’t beaten out of them or done with faked papers. You know I knew your grandfather?’ he said to Sheila.

  ‘That’s really why we came to see you,’ I said. ‘Dr McKenna’s only here from Australia for a short time, just to put Mr Brown’s affairs in order, and she’s been trying to talk to anyone who knew him.’

  ‘Oh yes, I knew him,’ he said. ‘I can’t say we were great friends, because he was always a Labour Party man and a policeman has no politics, but we had quite a lot to do with each other, one way and another, him being at the Town Hall and me being the town centre sergeant for years. He used to get on to me about damage to corporation property, hooliganism and that. He was wicked with me about the school, when it was robbed. ‘Go and find ’em!’ he said. ‘That’s what Belston people pay their rates for!’ Well, we solved all our murders, but some things got away from us, and that was one. It was bombed, you know, the Fountain Street School, and the Town Hall used the ruins for a store afterwards. Damned silly idea, if you ask me. I said to your grandfather, I said, ‘If you hadn’t been keeping books in a damaged building they wouldn’t have been stolen. ’Tis the Council’s fault!’ but he wouldn’t let up on it. What he didn’t know was that we had other orders, ’cos of the war. ‘Get on with what matters,’ we was told, ‘Leave it alone.’ So we did, didn’t we?’

  ‘Were you already a sergeant by the war?’ asked Sheila.

  ‘Oh yes, my dear. I joined the old Belston Town force just after the other war. You had to pass examinations then, and be six feet tall and have the eyesight. I never wanted to be a copper, though. If I’d had the chance I’d have been a footballer, but you had to get a steady job if you could and there wasn’t the money in football them days. Do you know, when I heard I was accepted for the police, do you know what I did to celebrate?’

  We shook our heads.

  ‘I went to London for the Cup Final. Wolves was playing the Spurs. Beaten one-nil was the Wanderers. That was the year of the coal strike.’

  ‘The General Strike?’ asked Sheila.

  ‘No, no. The miners were out on their own in ’21. We had some rough old doings, I can tell you. Then we had it again in ’26 with the General Strike. Course we had lots of pits about here then, lot of colliers, so we saw some action. I was going again, you know. I’d made up me mind to see the Cup Final again in ’26. It was at Wembley by then. Bolton Wanderers was playing Manchester City. But I didn’t get to go. It was only days before the strike and I never got away. We was all on stand-by.’

  He looked into the past for a few moments, then turned to Sheila.

  ‘I used to see your grandfather then, in the pub sometimes. He’d say, ‘Been out attacking strikers again, have you?’ and I’d tell him, ‘No, but I’ve been out maintaining law and order and preserving the King’s Peace.’ And we were.’

  He smiled at the recollection. ‘There was Bert Fray. He was a communist, always all over the place before the strike, winding up working people. We had orders to look at him a bit careful. Our bosses reckoned that when the strike started he’d be setting bombs, but that wasn’t it at all. Just as the strike started he went and joined the Territorials. Well, his comrades was horrified, thought he’d betrayed them, joined the enemy.’

  He chuckled. ‘We had a big camp out on Cannock Chase, Territorial soldiers from all round the Black Country and police from all the towns. We was the reserve, ready to be rushed to wherever there was trouble. And there was trouble, here and there, but not so much as to need all the soldiers and police they’d got up at the camp. Most of the time we was putting out fires on the Chase. It was warm weather and every day the heath’d catch up there and we’d all be running about with brooms to put it out.’

  His daughter-in-law materialised from the house with tea and biscuits. When it was distributed he carried on as though there had been no interruption.

  ‘Well, one fine morning I was up early at our camp, taking a bit of a stroll before breakfast. I saw a soldier slipping out of his bell-tent and sliding into the trees. Now a good copper has an instinct, he knows when someone’s up to something, and I was a good copper, though I says it meself. So I went after him, quiet like, and what do you think I found?’

  We both shook our heads and he laughed.

  ‘Comrade bloody Fray,’ he said, ‘off in the bushes with a box of Vestas, setting the heather on fire. That’s what he’d been doing, every morning. Setting the Chase on fire so we’d be tied up putting it out and not go about bothering his comrades. Well, I had him and the magistrates gave him three months, the crafty little devil.’

  He sipped his tea. ‘But it wasn’t all a chuckle,’ he said. ‘It went on, you know, after the General Strike, the miners stayed out when all the others had given up. There were some terrible things that summer.’

  He fell silent, casting his mind back across the decades. ‘You know the Belsich Road?’ he asked me suddenly.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.
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br />   ‘There was a lot of pits up that way. After the General Strike was over there was hundreds of colliers and their families up around there — starving they were, that summer. They used to wait by the roadside, pitmen with pick-handles, and when a lorry came by they’d jump on it when it slowed for a corner or the canal bridge. They’d steal anything, but it was mostly food lorries, vegetables and that. The companies used to put chicken-wire on the windscreens to keep the stones off.’

  He shook his head. ‘We had to go out there and arrest ’em if we could. We had some bad fights up there, but we got numbers of them. I can’t say I ever cared for locking up fellows who was only trying to feed their kids, but it had to be done. And there was a bright side. The pitmen couldn’t get Relief while they was striking, but once we put ’em inside their families could go on the Relief. But they was bad times, bad all round,’ and he shook his head again.

  This was all fascinating stuff and another time I could have listened to him for days, but time wasn’t on our side. I tried to steer the conversation, but he wasn’t having it. Like Sergeant Crow had said, the memories were all there, but the old man’s mind jumped about like a CD player. Piece by disordered piece he led us through the twenties and thirties. After another round of tea he was zigzagging into the forties.

  I decided to focus things if I could. I put the Victory picture on the table. ‘Do you remember the people in this picture?’ I asked.

  He reached out for it with one hand while the other fumbled in his shirt pocket for his spectacles. When they were in place he scanned the photo silently for some time.

  ‘Well, well, my word. That’s the back bar at the Eagle and Pump,’ he said, after a while. ‘Jim, the gaffer there, had a good football team going, you know, a team from the pub. We had a regular competition between the pubs. Lady Belston gave us a cup we used to play for. I was a bit past playing by then, but I used to coach the lads from the Bull. We had the cup the first three years it was played for.’

  I tried to cut short the sporting reminiscences. ‘So you know the people in the picture?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘Know them? I’ve nicked most of them, one time or another. That’s the Cassidy brothers and their pals. When’s this? It must be the end of the war. Good reason they had to be celebrating, they must have made ten fortunes over on the black market. There’s Watson, and his oppo, Fred Thompson. They used to flog the stuff. Had a stall on the market for a while, taking bets and flogging black market gear. And there’s Norman Berry, sharp dresser he was, always thought himself smarter than the average, and there’s young Thorpe. Came to a sticky end, he did. I don’t see the gaffer there, Jim’s not in the picture.’

  ‘We think the picture was taken from behind the bar,’ I said.

  ‘Ah,’ he nodded. ‘That’d be Jim, then, he was always one for taking pictures. I’ve got loads of team photos as he took. The Eagle and Pump, the Engineers, the Station Hotel, the George, the Lamp Tavern, all of them. And the Bull of course, with the cup.’

  He fell silent again for a while.

  ‘But it stopped when the Bull was hit. That was when the second lot of flying bombs came in, the V2s.You could hear the old V1s, you had a bit of a chance. But them V2s, they just dropped straight down without a sound, then they went off.’

  His eyes misted. ‘That’s what happened at the Bull. Broad daylight, lunchtime. Some said it was a stray bomber, but if it was God knows what he thought he was doing. Whatever it was it hit the Bull and that was it. Half the team gone in a flash. It knocked the heart out of us. We never had another game after that.’

  He shook his head sadly. I feared he was about to drift into a reverie. ‘What about Francy Cassidy?’ I asked, which turned out to be a mistake.

  ‘Francy Cassidy? He’d a been the smart one if he’d kept away from the women and the drink. He had the brains. But they most of ’em came to bad ends except him and Berry. He’s still about, you know, Cassidy. He’s in an old folks’ home.’

  ‘Not any more,’ I said. ‘He died just the other day.’ I didn’t give him the details. His pals on the force could do that in due course.

  ‘Dead!’ the old man exclaimed, and he gave a short barking laugh. ‘Well, I never! So he’s gone and I’m still here. But he was a crafty one, you know,’ and he launched into his version of the copper theft.

  ‘So we was never able to nick him for it,’ he grumbled at the end. I was about to try and turn him back to the photograph, but a voice called down the lawn.

  ‘Father, your lunch is ready.’

  There was nothing to do but thank him and leave. As we walked down the side of the house I asked Sheila, ‘Have you actually got all that on tape?’

  ‘You betcha,’ she said. ‘Is any of it any use?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Somewhere in it all there may be something. Look on the bright side. If it doesn’t solve the case it’ll get you a professorship in Black Country crime from 1920 to 1945.’

  ‘It’s going to be a hell of a job going through these tapes,’ she said.

  ‘That’s one of the reasons we’re going somewhere quiet,’ I said. ‘If we don’t have to worry about the man in the sports jacket perhaps we can work out what the blazes is going on.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

  ‘Get in the car and I’ll show you.’

  14

  ‘I’ve told you — I can’t drive unless I’m thinking about driving and I can’t think about other things if I’m driving.’ I pointed the car west out of the conurbation and it was all right at first. Driving in traffic makes me concentrate, but once we got out of town my mind began to run on Sergeant Reynolds’ ramblings. Was there something in it all that would help?

  We had squeezed past a long line of lorries, each hauling a traveller’s trailer, when Sheila suddenly put her hand on my knee, which didn’t help my driving either.

  ‘Chris,’ she said, ‘the object of this trip is to protect me, I gather?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Somebody has killed two people over something and you look like a good bet for third place.’

  ‘Right,’ she said, slowly. ‘Well, if you really want me to feel safe, can I ask you a favour?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Will you pull up at the next lay-by and let me drive?’

  I risked a glance at her. She looked quite serious. ‘You can’t,’ I said.

  ‘Do you know, you never struck me as a male chauvinist ocker,’ she remarked, sharply.

  ‘I’m not,’ I said, ‘whatever an ocker is. It’s because you haven’t got a UK driving licence and you don’t know the way.’

  ‘Do you know the way?’ she demanded. ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Right,’ she commanded. ‘Pull up and change places. You can see we get to the right place and I’ll see we get there alive.’

  So we did it her way. I slumped in the passenger seat and let my mind play detectives and Sheila drove us fast and skilfully. From time to time she asked for directions but otherwise we said very little.

  We stopped for a late lunch in Shrewsbury and loaded up with groceries, before heading into Wales. By late afternoon we were deep in a remote part of the principality, winding along single-track roads flanked by hillsides thick with gnarled bushes.

  ‘When we’re over the hilltop,’ I told her, ‘you’ll see a lake. Follow the road round the lake to the dam and turn left across the dam.’ The crest of the hill showed us the lake, gleaming in the late afternoon sun. Soon we were across the dam and turning right along another narrow track which wound up the face of a hill. Half a mile up I told her to pull off in front of a bungalow standing by itself.

  Sheila climbed out and stretched and I followed her. ‘Whose is this?’ she asked. ‘Yours?’

  ‘No such luck,’ I said. ‘This belongs to the lovely Jayne. It was built for the manager when the dam went up, back in the fifties. Jayne’s auntie bought it and thoughtfully died and left it to her.’

 
‘And it has a road all of its own?’ she asked.

  I shook my head. ‘There’s a farm further up, around the shoulder of the hill.’

  We humped our bags and the groceries indoors and I showed her the layout. Across the front of the two-bedroom bungalow Jayne’s aunt had added a verandah that embraced the front bedroom and the sitting room and gave a marvellous panorama of the lake. When I’d phoned Jayne and confirmed our safe arrival we made a meal and sat long on the verandah with a bottle of wine. Sheila took her grandfather’s tin out and once again we spread out its contents and puzzled over them, but we got no further than the first time. Sergeant Reynolds’ tapes we agreed to leave for the next day.

  With a second bottle we simply sat, silent, watching the sun go down behind the hills beyond the lake. It became more and more difficult to believe the events of the last few days, and I kept looking at Sheila to convince myself she was real. We were only halfway through the bottle of wine when I began to believe that if she was, none of the rest mattered very much.

  The mountains bring the dark early and soon it was growing chilly. Sheila shivered.

  ‘It’s too cold for a colonial from a hot country,’ she said. ‘What do people do in rural Wales after dark?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘there’s not much on telly on a Saturday night and anyway the reception’s rotten because of the mountains, so they either listen to the radio or go to bed.’

  ‘Got a radio?’ she asked.

  ‘Only in the car,’ I said.

  ‘Not much of a place to take a nice, well-educated Aussie girl,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to go to bed,’ and she took my hand and we did.

  Afterwards we lay in the lamplight and I admired her long, shapely back. ‘You’ve got freckles all down your back,’ I said, just for the sake of hearing her reply.

  ‘That’s the distinguishing mark of SA girls,’ she said. ‘New South Walers have bristles and West Australia girls have scales. Tell me, Mr Tyroll, before you get started again, isn’t there a law against this?’