Bad Penny Blues (A Chris Tyroll Mystery Book 3)

by Barrie Roberts

  He stopped and stared past us again. The silence stretched. His trembling had increased.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last. ‘You didn’t come here to listen to my troubles, did you? But I’m afraid I haven’t given you much to write about. Just a family of farmers ending with a former session man and music teacher. Nothing very exciting there. It looks like whatsisname — Jonty Sowden — was the most exciting member of the family, except maybe Grandpa.’

  With difficulty he heaved himself off the settee and crossed to the sideboard by my chair. One of the drawers had been filled with bottles of pills. He took a bottle out and fumbled it open, dropped two capsules on to the top of his clenched fist and swallowed them.

  Sheila got up and signalled to me to follow.

  ‘I think we’ve taken up too much of your time,’ she said. ‘You were very kind to see us and help me.’

  ‘I don’t think I can have helped you very much, Dr McKenna.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘once I’ve confirmed that I’ve got the right families I shall research them back as far as possible so as to try and give as complete a picture as possible.’

  He dropped the pill bottle back in the drawer and shut it.

  ‘It’s been a pleasure meeting you,’ he said. ‘And quite novel, learning that someone in my family was transported. Perhaps he was like Grandad and me — didn’t fancy life on the land.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he intended to get transported,’ Sheila said.

  He gave his thin smile. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Suppose not.’

  We were silent for a while once we got into the car. The sad, lonely man in his dusty, cold farmhouse had brought us both down.

  ‘Pub?’ queried Sheila, after a few miles.

  ‘Why not?’ I said and we were soon settled behind a table in the back garden of a village pub, sandwiches and drinks on the table.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Come clean! What was in the drawers?’

  ‘You saw what was in the drawer,’ I said. ‘Medicines.’

  ‘One drawer,’ she said. ‘Give!’

  ‘Only if you tell me why you wanted me to look.’

  ‘Because the top of that sideboard had something standing on it which he put away before we came. You could see the lines in the dust. My guess is two photo frames, one single and one double. I just wanted to know what he was hiding from us.’

  ‘Spot on, Sherlock,’ I said. ‘The right-hand drawer had two photo frames in it — one double and one single. The double had pictures of a young blonde woman with a baby — ’

  ‘Taken when?’ she demanded.

  ‘Hold on, hold on. About mid-seventies, I’d guess. The single had a professional shot of a boy about fourteen. White shirt and bow tie, sitting by a piano and smiling at the photographer. Maybe a print of a newspaper picture.’

  ‘Taken when?’ she demanded again.

  ‘Difficult to tell. He was all dressed up for some event. Quite recent, I think.’

  ‘Was he the baby in the other photo?

  ‘I don’t know. Have a heart, I only took a quick glance and they all look alike as babies — boys look like Winston Churchill and girls look like Queen Victoria.’

  ‘And I kept Bradley in the kitchen as long as I could, to give you plenty of time. I couldn’t ask him to bake us a bloody cake, could I?’

  ‘Well, now you know what was in there what does that tell you?’

  ‘That he wasn’t coming clean about not being married.’

  ‘He might have been. That may have been somebody else’s wife, or a girlfriend. It might be someone else’s baby.’

  ‘Come on!’ she said. ‘How many blokes do you know who keep photos of someone else’s rug-rats? And what about the piano picture? Is that somebody else’s kid?’

  ‘That might be his prize pupil,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yair!’ she said. ‘I thought people had caught on to schoolteachers who got fond of the pupils. You mark my words — he’s got a wife and at least one kid somewhere.’

  They might be dead,’ I suggested.

  ‘He said he’d never been married. He’s got a wife. He’d have told us if they were dead.’

  ‘He might feel it’s too personal.’

  He didn’t mind telling us about his wild youth and his frustrated ambitions — why should he mind telling us about a dead wife and kid? No, Chris, Bradley’s got a wife and kid somewhere.’

  ‘And I suppose you’re going to find them?’

  ‘Too right I am.’

  ‘Hang about a bit,’ I said. ‘Aren’t you in danger of invading Bradley’s privacy?’

  She snorted. ‘I’m not going to write about anything that’ll embarrass him. I just want to know the truth. If it’s simply that he divorced her because she’s tone deaf, or she divorced him because he played his ocarina in the bedroom, that’s their business.’

  I’ve learnt not to argue with Sheila unless it’s important and I’m right. Even then I quite often lose, so I tried to change the subject.

  ‘Hold on,’ she commanded. ‘You haven’t told me what was in the cupboards.’

  ‘You didn’t ask me to look in the cupboards.’

  ‘Don’t come the raw prawn with me! Of course you looked in the cupboards.’

  ‘All right! They were both stacked with sheet music. Anything suspicious there? After all, the guy’s a former pro musician and teacher.’

  After that she let me change the subject.

  It was well after dark when we got home. I left Sheila sitting in the car while I inspected the house inside and out. There was nothing there. Once we were both inside Sheila put coffee on while I picked up the messages from the telephone answering machine. The last one was from John Parry.

  ‘Chris?’ he said. ‘Sheila? This is John calling at 16.45 on Sunday afternoon. Whenever you get in, ring me on my mobile,’ and he added the number. He sounded serious. I picked up the phone.

  Chapter 19

  There are some police officers you can trust and some you can’t. In my job you meet too many of the second kind. You usually find out which is which in the witness box. I met John Parry in the witness box, nearly ten years ago — at least, he was in the witness box. We had a little exchange about the arrest of one of my clients.

  ‘It says in your statement, sergeant, that when my client answered the door, you handed him a sheaf of thirty-two summonses. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  He paused and looked as though he was trying to remember. ‘I can’t rightly recall, sir.’

  ‘Let me help you, sergeant. Did he not say, “Fuck me, sergeant! I’ll need bleeding Perry Mason to get me out of this lot!”’

  John Parry paused again then, deadpan, he said, ‘Yes, sir. I do believe that those are the exact words he said.’

  ‘And might I ask why they are not recorded in your statement?’

  ‘Only because I didn’t think anyone would believe them, sir.’

  After that we got to know each other and I developed a great affection for the big Welshman. I never saw him give way to anger (though I was told that he could, and did) and I never saw him deal with crises with anything other than a heavy Celtic irony.

  When he arrived at my home that night he had a folder tucked under his arm and he looked more serious than I could recall. As I opened the door to him he said, urgently, ‘Did you search the place when you got home?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘And the garden?’

  ‘Yes — and the garden. All quiet.’

  ‘Nothing delivered while you were out?’

  I shook my head. ‘No. Look, what is this all about?’

  ‘You know what it’s all about,’ he said. ‘Where’s Sheila?’

  ‘She’s in the kitchen. Making coffee.’

  ‘Good. I’ll go and help her drink it,’ he said and strode through to the kitchen.

  ‘Good-day, John,’ she greeted him. ‘What brings you out
on a Sunday night?’

  ‘The smell of coffee,’ he said.

  She poured the coffee and all three of us sat around the kitchen table.

  ‘All right, John,’ I said. ‘What’s on your mind?’

  ‘Where have you two been?’ he said.

  ‘We’ve been in the wilds of Shropshire,’ I said, and outlined our day for him.

  ‘There’s been an incident at the Royal Mail sorting office in Wolverhampton,’ he said.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Put an envelope in the right bag for a change, did they?’

  ‘No joke,’ he said. ‘They had a fire last night.’

  ‘A fire!’ Sheila said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A package caught fire in one of the sorting bins.’

  ‘What? Spontaneously?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It was specially devised by the sender to catch fire.’

  ‘And you think it was meant for me?’ asked Sheila.

  ‘I don’t think, Sheila. I know it was meant for you.’

  ‘You’d better tell us about it,’ I said.

  ‘In the early hours of this morning,’ he said, ‘one of the sorting bins at Wolverhampton burst into flames. Well, there were a few people working near it and fire extinguishers handy, so they had the fire out very quickly, but when they looked to see what had caused it they thought they’d better call in West Midlands police. They had a look and decided it was an arson device.’

  ‘A fire-bomb?’ I said.

  ‘That’s it. It was a package wrapped in one of those padded envelopes, a bit bigger than A5 and about half an inch thick. The Post Office lads had put it out so quickly that quite a lot of it survived. The police could see how it was meant to go off and what had gone wrong.’

  ‘And that was?’

  ‘Well, there’s various ways of detonating a letter-bomb, some of them quite complicated, some quite simple. You can do it with the banger out of a Christmas cracker if you know how, but this was a bit more complicated. The body of the package was sheets of newspaper that had been impregnated with a combustible chemical and dried out. In between two layers of that was the ignition device embedded in a layer of chemicals. That had a sort of spring-loaded button on top that stuck up through a hole in the top layer of paper. When the button was released it fired a little charge and set the paper off.’

  ‘That sounds quite complicated,’ I said. ‘How was it set?’

  ‘He must have pressed the button down and held it with his fingers while he slid it into the padded envelope, then held it in position while he put enough paper underneath it to jam it up against the top of the envelope and stop it going off.’

  ‘Dodgy,’ I said. ‘It might have gone off in his hands.’

  ‘And what a pity that would have been!’ said Sheila.

  ‘When he’d got it in place,’ John went on, ‘he sealed the envelope and strapped it well with sticky tape, to keep the pressure on the ignition button.’

  ‘So what went wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘It looks as if it got folded across the middle somewhere in the post, before it was slung in the sorting bin. Then something else was thrown in and moved it. It unfolded and released the button, so it caught fire.’

  ‘Nasty,’ said Sheila. ‘And I was meant to … ‘

  ‘You were meant to slit the envelope and start to pull out the papers. As soon as the pressure on the button decreased the whole thing would have gone pop. At the very least you’d have had badly burned hands and possibly your face, and there’s another thing.’

  ‘What’s that?’ she said.

  ‘The chemicals had been mixed with soap flakes.’

  ‘Soap flakes?’ I said. ‘What was that for? A whiter than white bomb?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘They melt in the explosion and stick to whatever they touch, so that they make it burn.’

  ‘That sounds pretty sophisticated,’ I said, thinking about an explosion of flame scattering sticky, burning droplets around it.

  ‘The West Midlands bomb boys said it was ingenious but not made by a professional,’ he agreed.

  ‘Well,’ said Sheila, ‘at least I haven’t got the Continuity IRA or the Basque Separatists after me. Anyway how do you know it was for me?’

  He opened his folder and took out some A4 laser copies of colour photographs. They were close-ups of the charred remains of the packet. The address label had been laser printed, so that beyond the charred area the rest could be read clearly:

  ENNA,

  Y ROAD,

  TON,

  LANDS.

  ‘Dr Sheila McKenna, 55 Whiteway Road, Belston, West Midlands,’ I recited.

  John nodded. ‘That’s right. As soon as West Midlands saw it was for Belston they got on to us. Not many names that end in E-N-N-A, so it didn’t take long to tie it up with a certain Aussie who was being targeted by a nutter.’

  ‘How did they know it wasn’t Wolverhampton?’ she demanded.

  ‘The town name is too short, isn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘Which brings us to where it was sent from,’ I said. ‘Any ideas?’

  ‘Sadly, no,’ he said. ‘If you look at the remains of those strips of transparent tape on this side of the envelope, you’ll see that they would have passed right over the area of the stamps, so that the postmark ink wouldn’t take and it would get wiped off. He wasn’t taking any chances, but it got burned off anyway.’

  ‘Any ideas from the bits of newspapers?’ I asked.

  ‘Ah, Sherlock Holmes stuff — “By examining the typeface I can see that this came from the early West Highland edition of the Scotsman and was cut out by a short-sighted, red-headed man with a squint and two gold teeth, Watson.” No such luck. All the surviving bits are from the Independent.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that narrows it down to about a quarter of a million.’

  ‘And their cleaners and their landladies and their friends and their kids,’ he said gloomily.

  ‘Fingerprints?’ I suggested.

  ‘Have a heart, boyo. No self-respecting villain has left fingerprints since the Great War. Only the amateurs and the idiots. Whatever our man is, he isn’t an idiot.’

  ‘But the remains were checked for prints?’ I persisted.

  ‘Yes, and there aren’t any.’

  ‘But’, I said, ‘you said he had to hold that button down hard while he slid the device into the package, then keep holding it while he pushed more paper underneath it. Then he taped the envelope tightly and stamped it.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘So what?’

  ‘So, he managed all that without leaving prints?’

  He stared at me wide-eyed for a moment, then said with exaggerated patience, ‘Because he wore gloves, boyo, I told you.’

  ‘So his prints may be on file, then. That’s what I was trying to say. If he went to that much trouble to conceal them, maybe he knows they’re on record.’

  ‘Right, right. That could be, but I checked all the suspects that Sheila listed for me. All those who might be alive and a few who turned out to be dead. Nobody.’ He shook his head. ‘No convictions among them, apart from motoring and one for not paying a National Insurance contribution. Got any more suspects, Sheila? What about this bloke you’ve been to see today?’

  ‘Bradley?’ I said. ‘He taught science. He’d know how to make it, but he couldn’t even lift a coffee mug properly because of his arthritic hands. I can’t see him painstakingly putting that bomb together.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘So you’re really no further forward?’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘We now know that he means it when he threatens, we know he’s escalating the violence, and we know that he’s changed his pattern.’

  ‘In what way?’ said Sheila.

  ‘Because he’s always acted in person before. He could just as well have walked up your garden and dropped his bomb through a window with a timer instead of his press button, but he didn’t — h
e sent it by post, even though you were away. Why was that?’

  ‘Perhaps he was away from Belston as well,’ suggested Sheila. ‘After all, he can’t sit around all the time, watching us. Presumably he has to do other things.’

  John nodded. ‘Yes, and it would have been nice to know where this came from,’ he said, rapping the photographs. ‘This man worries me.’

  ‘He’s not giving Chris and me a lot of joy,’ said Sheila.

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ he said, ‘but what worries me is that this is the first time he’s got it wrong. What’ll he do now? Will he try the same trick again? Or a variation? I don’t like the thought of him trying harder. You could have been badly burned or blinded by this thing. What’s he going to try next?’

  He left us with that gloomy thought. In bed later we both lay and smoked.

  ‘Penny for them?’ said Sheila after a while.

  ‘It was a penny that got us into this,’ I said. ‘I was just thinking about what John said. What’ll he try next?’

  ‘No point in worrying about it,’ she said. ‘All we can do is be careful.’

  ‘You’re not worried?’

  ‘Of course I’m worried, you great galah! But what can we do? I’m not going to stop. Even if I did we don’t know that he’d believe it. How could we tell him, anyway? Take an ad in the Independent?’

  She smoked silently again for a while, then, ‘Bradley,’ she said.

  ‘What about him? He’s not a bomb-maker.’

  ‘So you said, but I’m not sure.’

  ‘Why not? What about his hands? If he can’t play an instrument or hold a cup, he’d never risk mucking about with that bomb.’

  ‘I suppose not, but suppose he hasn’t got arthritis?’

  ‘Why do you say that? You saw the way he was with his hands.’

  ‘Yes, right, but when he got up to get his pills I noticed something. He spread both hands open on the arm of the settee as he levered himself up. If his hands are that bad, that’d hurt like hell.’

  ‘He was trembling like a leaf,’ I said.