Crowner and Justice

by Barrie Roberts

  The whole of the workforce was affected by the undermanning, and everyone was getting increasingly fed up with it. Several times, at Union meetings, it was suggested that we strike if there was no agreement by the management to adopt a proper manning policy. Mr Mulvaney always argued against striking.

  I did not believe that the undermanning would affect the Computer Department, as there was no way that they could make us use unskilled labour. In the end, however, it affected us the other way round. Because we could not get on with our work on the Retaliator software, the management started using staff from our department to carry out all sorts of computer work in other departments. On a number of occasions I was asked to help out in the Accounts, Progress and Stores Departments.

  The work we were asked to do instead of our own work was routine keyboarding of information into the firm’s management programs, work that could be done by anyone who can read and press keys. I am not a snob, but that is not the work that I trained for and took my degree for, nor is it the job that I was contracted for with BDS. I would not have minded assisting in an emergency, but these were not emergencies, they were situations created by BDS’ persistent undermanning.

  Things came to a head on the morning of Friday 15th May. Mr Swan came to me and asked if I was busy. He knew that I was not, that our whole department was just marking time, waiting until our software could be tested.

  I told him that I was just trying to refine the landscape recognition programs, but he knew we’d done that over and over again and that we couldn’t make any progress without testing.

  He said that they needed help in Accounts. I said that I had had enough of being used as supernumerary labour in the Accounts office and that it wasn’t what I had been employed to do. My Contract of Employment engaged me as a Computer Programmer and set out my duties in the Computer Department; it didn’t say that I had to work as an Accounts Clerk as well.

  Mr Swan said that he sympathised with me, but that Mr Greene in Accounts said that he had permission to borrow someone from our department. I said that I didn’t care, that I would not go.

  Mr Swan said that he’d have to tell Mr Greene that I had refused. I said that he could go ahead and tell him, that I was not doing work other than my own duties.

  Mr Swan phoned Mr Greene and told him what I had said. A few minutes later the phone rang and it was Mr Bailey, the Managing Director. He spoke to Mr Swan briefly, then Mr Swan put me on the phone.

  Bailey said to me:

  ‘I’m told that you refuse to help out in Accounts?’

  I said:

  ‘I’ve told Mr Swan that I was employed as a Computer Programmer, not an Accounts Clerk. I do not wish to work in Accounts.’

  Bailey said:

  And suppose I order you to go to the Accounts Department?’

  I said:

  ‘I am very sorry, Mr Bailey, but I am employed as a Computer Programmer and I will not go to the Accounts Department or any other department again.’

  He said:

  ‘Listen, young man. You were employed to work for BDS and to do what your superiors tell you. As far as I’m concerned, if you refuse to do as you’re told, you’re refusing a legitimate command of your employer and you can be sacked on the spot. Do you understand me?’

  I said:

  ‘I understand you perfectly, Mr Bailey, but what you are telling me to do is not a part of my work and is not a legitimate command. I have to tell you that I will not do it.’

  He said:

  ‘Right! I warned you and you wouldn’t listen. You can get off the premises. I don’t want to see you again. Any pay that’s due to you will be sent on. Just get out!’

  He put the phone down and I told Mr Swan what had been said.

  He looked uncomfortable and he said, ‘I’m afraid that there’s nothing I can do, Mohammed. You know what the Boss is like when he’s got one on him. If he says you’ve got to go, that’s it. Let it go a few days and I’ll see if he’ll have you back once he’s calmed down.’

  I cleared my desk and I went home. I told my father what had happened and he phoned Mr Bailey. He told me afterwards that Mr Bailey only said that I had refused to do what I was told and that he wasn’t interested in employing people who only did what they wanted to. My father then told me to talk to the Union.

  I phoned Mr Mulvaney at the factory and he said to come and see him at home that night.

  I went to see him and told him what had happened. He was very sympathetic and said that it was not a legitimate order to make me work in the Accounts Department. He said that it all came out of the firm’s undermanning and that he was sick and tired of trying to make them see sense. After he thought about it a bit, he said that he would get on to the National Secretary of the Union and see if he could think of something. Mr Mulvaney rang me at home on the Saturday and said that he was going down to London on Monday to see Mr Capstick, the National Secretary. He asked if I would like to come with him and I agreed to go...’

  I had got that far with Mohammed’s evidence when there was a tap at my door and Jayne, my secretary looked in.

  Tracy’s here,’ she said. Tracy Walton. She wondered if she could have a word. Said it was urgent.’

  I sighed and put down my dictation mike.

  ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Show her in.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Jayne was back in a moment, leading a large woman in her fifties, with bleached blonde hair and a face whose natural expression seemed to be one of slight wariness. When she was seated I offered her a cigarette.

  ‘How are you, Tracy?’ I said. ‘Your husband’s not in trouble again, is he?’

  She shook her head. ‘Oh, no, Mr Tyroll,’ she said. ‘Never again. He’s alright now. He’s working for the Council.’

  In the spring I had succeeded in overturning a long ago conviction which freed Tracy’s husband from prison. It hadn’t been much fun, and I was glad to hear she didn’t need the same service again.

  ‘It’s about Kathleen,’ she said, ‘Kathleen McBride.’

  ‘You know her?’ I asked.

  ‘She lives on our street. It was me as sent her to you, Mr Tyroll. She was that desperate to get something done about poor Sean and I told how you’d got my Alan out of jail.’

  ‘So you knew Sean?’

  ‘That’s right,’ she nodded. ‘He’d wouldn’t have done that you know, Mr Tyroll. He was a good-natured, cheerful sort of lad.’

  ‘So, what was it you wanted to talk about, Tracy?’

  ‘Kath come to see me after she’d been here yesterday,’ she said. ‘She give me a right going over. Said she day think you believed her.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About any of it. She said you kept asking how this could happen and how that could happen, how the door was locked and he had the only key and all that.’

  ‘It’s my job to test what people tell me, Tracy. If it ends up in a court, other people will test it hard, so it’s my job to test it first and see if it stands up.’

  ‘And did you believe her?’ she asked bluntly.

  ‘It isn’t up to me to believe or disbelieve her. The rules say that I’ve got to take what she tells me and do the best I can with it unless I actually know something’s not true. I don’t know any of it’s not true, Tracy, but there are bits I find hard to believe — like the door. If nobody else had a key to Sean’s garage, then no one else got in there to kill him. And the Coroner’s Officer, I find that hard to believe.’

  ‘What, about him shouting at her?’

  ‘Yes. He’s just not like that, Tracy.’

  She snorted. ‘He mightn’t be like that with you, Mr Tyroll, but he was bloody horrible to poor Kath.’

  ‘Really?’ I said.

  ‘He shouted at her, Mr Tyroll. He thumped on his desk. He was real nasty to her.’

  ‘You were there, then?’

  ‘Oh yes. I went along with her.’

  ‘Do you remember what started him off?’

/>   ‘He said that it was all very sad, but it looked like an open and shut case of suicide. Kath said as she couldn’t believe that and he asked her why anyone would want to kill Sean. She said that she reckoned it was something to do with Sylvia Wellington and someone ought to talk to her. That’s when he went off.’

  ‘When Sylvia Wellington was mentioned?’

  ‘That’s right. He said as Sylvia Wellington was only a schoolgirl and her father was an important man and nobody would thank Kath for getting Wellington’s daughter mixed up in a suicide inquest.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said as Sean had been seeing Sylvia for quite a while and if anyone knew anything about him, she ought to.’

  ‘Perfectly reasonable, but that’s what started the Sergeant off?’

  ‘That’s right. He went really wild at Kath. He said he wasn’t going to go bothering the girl, that she’d be upset enough already and he wasn’t dragging her into the Inquest. Kath said as it was his duty and he shouted at her that nobody was going to tell him his duty, it was a plain case of suicide and Kath should accept it. He was so angry I knew we wasn’t going to get nowhere with him, so I took Kath’s arm and I said, “Come on, love, we ay going to get nowhere with this man”, and we went.’

  No one was more believable than Tracy Walton. I was kicking myself for falling for racial stereotyping. An upset Irishwoman with tears in her eyes tells me something peculiar and I couldn’t believe it, but Tracy, sitting in front of me all solid and Black Country, was completely believable. Something about the Wellington girl really had freaked out the Coroner’s Officer. Was it just the power and influence of her father? A thought occurred to me.

  ‘Were you at the Inquest?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘I went along with Kath.’

  ‘Do you remember what was said?’

  She looked up at the ceiling. ‘Let’s see,’ she said. ‘There was Charlie Nesbit, he give evidence first. He said about how he and Sean was mates for years and how Sean had been missing all weekend and Kath had asked him if he knew where he was. He said he’d rung Kath to see if Sean was back and when she said he was still gone he’d thought he might be in his garage.’

  ‘Did he say why he thought that?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. He just said he thought he’d have a look, so he went there and it was locked up, but he got on the roof, where he could see in.’

  ‘Did he say why he thought that Sean would be in there if it was all locked up?’

  ‘He said as he thought Sean might be locked in there, he thought he might have had an accident or something, so he got on the roof. When he looked and saw Sean he called out to him, but there wasn’t any answer so he thought he’d better call the police.’

  ‘Not an ambulance? He thought his mate had had an accident but he called the police, not an ambulance?’

  ‘That’s all he said, Mr Tyroll, as he thought he’d better call the police.’

  ‘And nobody questioned him?’

  ‘Not about that, no. He said he went to a phone box and called them.’

  ‘Did anyone question him about anything?’

  ‘Yes. When the Coroner said that Kath could ask questions, she asked him if he hadn’t called at her house on the Friday night and gone off with Sean.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘He said he didn’t, it must have been someone else.’

  ‘Who else gave evidence?’

  ‘There was a copper, a uniform, I don’t remember his name. He said as they’d had a phone call from a phone box saying as someone had been found dead in a garage and he and another copper went to see what it was about. They went to the phone box on the corner of Wednesfield Road and Charlie Nesbit was there. He told them about how Sean had been missing all weekend and how he thought he might be in his garage, so he’d gone there and looked in through a hole in the roof and seen Sean’s foot in the front of his car. He took them round to the garage and showed them that it was locked. Then he showed them how to get on the roof and the copper climbed up and saw what Charlie had seen, so they forced the door open. When they got inside, Sean’s car was parked with the back to the door. The passenger’s door was open wide and the passenger seat had been taken out and put on the floor. Sean was lying in the back seat, slumped down with his right knee up behind the driver’s seat and his left leg where the passenger seat is usually.’

  ‘And he was dead?’

  ‘That’s right, Mr Tyroll. The copper said as he could see that Sean was dead, but he called an ambulance. Kath asked him if Sean had any marks on him, like, but he said he never saw any. Then there was a doctor, who did the thingy, the post mortem.’

  ‘That would have been Dr Macintyre, yes?’

  ‘That’s it. An old Scotch fellow with gingery hair. Looked like he liked a drop.’

  I smiled to myself at the description of my old friend Mac. ‘What had he got to say?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, he said as he’d done the post mortem, as Sean was a healthy young man. He said there was no injuries on him and that he thought he’d died of inhaling whaterdeye-callit — carbon dioxide?’

  ‘Carbon monoxide?’

  ‘That’s right. The Coroner asked him if he thought it was suicide and he said it wasn’t his place to say, as he was there to say how Sean died and that was by breathing in that carbon stuff, but wasn’t going to say as it was suicide or an accident or something else. Then Kath asked him what he thought and he said much the same, that it was up to the police to investigate all the circumstances and the Coroner to decide what had happened. She asked if there was any sign of Sean being ill and he said as he never found none, and that was him finished.’

  ‘Who was next?’

  ‘Kath was next. She said about how Sean had been getting ready to go away for the weekend and she had been ironing his stuff for him on the Friday night, and she said how Charlie had come to the door and Sean had gone away with him. The Coroner questioned her a lot about that and then he said, “So, you never actually saw Mr Nesbit at your door. You only thought as it was him, and it might well have been someone else”. She said as she was sure it was Charlie, but the Coroner wasn’t having it. Then she said about how she’d looked for Sean and asked Charlie and his other friends about him, but no one had seen him and she said that the police had come and told her he’d been found and she’d had to go and identify his body. That made her really upset and the Coroner excused her.’

  ‘Did the Coroner ask Kath anything about Sean’s health?’

  ‘Well, she said as he was alright, that there wasn’t anything wrong with him.’

  ‘She didn’t say anything about headaches?’

  ‘No. That was the Sergeant, the one who shouted at us. He was the last witness. He said as he’d talked to some of Sean’s friends and they said as he had headaches. He was the one that said Sean was being taken to Court over a breathalyser. He said it was in the records.’

  ‘So there was no medical evidence about Sean’s headaches?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, Mr Tyroll. Only that Sergeant said about headaches.’

  I reached for the file and pulled out some of the photocopies that Kath McBride had left with me the day before. One quoted the Coroner’s summing-up:

  ‘We have heard evidence that this young man was worried about his headaches, and that he was concerned about a prosecution for drink-driving. It is always difficult to fathom the mind of another person and particularly so with a teenager. I think it is fairly evident that, oppressed by matters which might not really have been of much concern, he took too black a view of his situation and, in a brief fit of depression, ended his own life.’

  I read it over to Tracy. ‘And that was it?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘That was what he said.’

  She stood up. ‘I just wanted you to know as Kath was right about that Sergeant. He was horrible to her, Mr Tyroll.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Tell Kath that I’m asking the Coroner’s Office for a copy of the notes of evidence and I’ll be in touch with her.’

  Tracy stood, thoughtfully, in the doorway, then turned back towards me.

  ‘Has Kath told you about the song?’ she asked.

  ‘Song?’ I said.

  She nodded slowly. ‘She was real upset last night, ‘cos she thought as you didn’t believe her, and we had a drink or two together and she said something she’s never said before. She said someone keeps ringing her up and playing a song to her on the phone.’

  ‘What song?’ I asked, still feeling completely bewildered.

  She shook her head. ‘She did say, but it was some Irish song I day know. She says it’s been happening ever since the Inquest, but she never mentioned it to you ‘cos she thought you’d think she was wrong in the head.’

  ‘Let me get this right,’ I said. ‘Since Sean’s Inquest, someone has been phoning Kath and playing a song to her?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Always the same song?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And they don’t say anything?’

  ‘That’s right. She said as they just play the song — not all of it — then hang up.’

  I stared at her for a moment. ‘You tell Kath,’ I said at last, ‘to keep a cassette recorder by the phone and bring me a tape of one of those calls.’

  ‘She’s got it on tape, Mr Tyroll, already.’

  ‘Then tell her to bring the tape in tomorrow afternoon. I want to hear this song.’

  ‘Righto, Mr Tyroll. I’ll do that,’ and off she went.

  I tried to settle down and dictate the remainder of Mohammed’s proof of evidence and carry on with the general task of the office, but little bubbles kept surfacing from my subconscious and bursting in my head — A locked garage? — No suicide note? — Headaches? — In the rear seat? — No hosepipe? — Songs on the telephone?

  I didn’t tell Sheila about the song when I went home, but I did suggest that we have Doc Macintyre round for a meal the next evening. Now I’d heard Tracy’s version of his evidence I wanted to hear what he would say about it.