Robbery with Malice

by Barrie Roberts

  ‘Electronic Static Deposition Analysis — it’s a technique for discovering pressure marks on documents where another sheet of paper has lain over it and something else has been written on the top sheet. ESDA brings up the image of the pressure marks so that it can be photographed.’

  ‘You mean like kids’ secret writing when you write the message on the top sheet and send the blank underneath sheet. The person who gets it just has to rub it with cigarette ash and the outline of the letters comes up?’

  ‘Very much the same, only being expensive and important scientists they do it with complicated machines to create an electro-static field around the paper and use iron-filings instead of cigarette ash.’

  ‘So Hawkins and Watters were done for tampering with interview evidence?’

  ‘Right — and the police lied about it and the court pretended that the press had never reported exactly what Watters and Hawkins had done. There’s got to be something very dirty about the case for the force to have lobbed that letter into court.’

  Over coffee she asked, ‘What do you think about Walton’s innocence now?’

  ‘If it’s any satisfaction to you, I now think he may well be innocent, but it doesn’t help.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he’s served twelve years and it looks like he’s going to have to do the other eight — innocent or not.’

  9.

  Despite Sheila’s presence beside me, I slept badly that night. Vanloads of masked judges and policemen swept through my nightmares, brandishing shotguns. At some point in the night I must have woken and extracted something rational from my fantasies, for when I woke in the morning I found I had scribbled a note on my bedside pad:

  *

  The Payday Gang?

  Freddy Hughes?

  Glenys Simpson?

  When/How did Hawkins die?

  Ring magazine.

  *

  Sheila had her own business that day. She had extracted some information from the Public Records Office on convicts transported from the Midlands, and now she was delving into local records to see if she could trace their families.

  ‘I’ll bet’, I suggested, ‘that when you turn up on some self-made double-glazing millionaire’s doorstep in Little Aston, he’s going to be really delighted to learn that his great-great-great-great-grandfather was transported for sheep-shagging!’

  ‘They didn’t,’ she said. ‘They hanged you for that. You only got transported for stealing them.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, sadly, ‘the Permissive Society has a lot to answer for.’

  I had a dull morning in Belston Magistrates’ Court filled with four guilty pleas in a row, the hopeless kind where what you really ought to tell the court is that anyone who repeated the same offence as often as your client, did it so badly and got caught so often, deserved the court’s sympathy and a cosy place in a funny farm.

  Late morning found me in a back booth of the Rendezvous Café, across the square from the court, polishing off a buttered Chelsea bun with a mug of Ruby’s orange tea, and musing idly over my bedside note. John Parry found me there and joined me with more Chelseas and his own mug.

  ‘Whatever happened to the Payday Gang, John?’ I asked him.

  ‘Ah!’ he exclaimed. ‘Nostalgia trivia — I love that! What was Adam Ant’s first hit? What was Tiny Tim’s only hit? Who was the first Minister for Sport?’

  ‘Seriously,’ I insisted. ‘What happened to them?’

  He swallowed a gulp of tea. ‘The duly authorised forces of law and order tracked them to their lair, took them into custody and they were all locked up.’

  ‘Really? When was that?’

  ‘Oh, round about Royal Wedding, urban riots time — early eighties. ‘81 or ‘82.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The Regional Crime Squad had them. About twenty of them went up at Birmingham Crown Court. Huge indictment — umpteen robberies and attempts. So far as I know, all of them went down for years and years.’

  ‘How would I find out more about it?’

  ‘Local papers, I suppose. Express and Star, Evening Mail, Birmingham Post files. The trial had a lot of coverage.’

  He looked at me over his tea. ‘This got anything to do with your trip to London?’

  ‘Good grief!’ I said. ‘Can’t a bloke take his girlfriend to London without your lot taking an interest?’

  He tapped his broad nose with a forefinger. ‘Not a sparrow falls, boyo, and don’t give me that innocent trip to London bit. You were in the Court of Appeal. Not many tourists in there — particularly not in January.’

  ‘All right, guv. It’s a fair cop! I was asked to go and watch an application on behalf of an interested party.’

  He nodded. ‘The Belstone Lane case. Went down, didn’t it?’

  ‘What’s your interest?’ I asked.

  He looked exaggeratedly innocent. ‘Mine? None at all, except keeping you around and in business to buy me buttered Chelseas and pursue your vendetta against Saffary till you bounce him and open my road to the Chief Constable’s desk.’

  ‘Who says I’ve got a vendetta against Saffary?’

  ‘Well, he does, for one. And you’d better have, ‘cos he’s certainly got one against you. He’s always hated you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Obvious, innit, boyo? You’re a lawyer who defends people, you’re some kind of leftie or anarchist or whatnot and you look as if you might be foreign. Any one of them would be enough for Saffary, but it’s worse than that. Ever since he made Sergeant he’d had a perfect record to hear him talk, commendations and all, until you put the boot in last summer. Got a brooding, vengeful, sort of personality, he has. Says he’s a Christian, but he seems to forget the bit about forgiving your enemies.’

  ‘He said so?’

  ‘Yes. He and a tableful of his cronies were making life hideous in the Police Club last night. They were celebrating the appeal going down.’

  He swallowed tea again. ‘I hate that. Police officers have no legitimate interest in the outcome of a case. It’s our job to put suspects in front of the courts. After that it’s up to the courts.’

  ‘What did he say about me?’

  ‘I asked what they were celebrating and he told me. Then he said, “Your pal Tyroll was at the hearing with his Australian bit. Next time you see him, tell him to keep his nose out of the Belstone Lane case.” So, here I am, delivering his message.’

  ‘There’s something very rotten about the Belstone Lane thing, John,’ I said.

  ‘What a surprise, bach! With Hawkins, Watters and Saffary in it I’d be bloody surprised if there wasn’t!’

  Mention of Hawkins reminded me of my notes. ‘What happened to Hawkins?’ I asked.

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Hawkins’, he said, ‘took early retirement on grounds of ill-health after his name had been splashed all over the tabloids.’

  ‘What ill-health? I remember him as a big, well-set-up looking bloke. Always wore handmade suits and smoked little cigars. Didn’t look as if he’d ever had a day’s illness in his life.’

  ‘That’s the man. All sharp suits, yellow-tinted specs and monograms on his silk shirts. Dropped dead, he did, just after retiring. They found him dead in his garden. Heart attack, they said.’

  He shook his head. ‘It really surprised some of us. We never knew the bastard had a heart.’

  ‘Anything suspicious about it?’ I asked.

  ‘Come on, now!’ he said. ‘Just because you and Sheila found me a murder last summer doesn’t mean you’ve got a nose for ‘em. Hawkins dropped dead in his garden. End of story. Anyway — who’d kill him?’

  ‘It was two murders last summer,’ I said, ‘and just because you’re a police officer doesn’t mean you’ve got a properly suspicious mind. Anyone might have killed him. Half the wrongful convictions in the Midlands must have been down to him and anyway he could have been killed by a partner in crime — he must have had plenty of them.’

 
‘His regular cronies used to be Watters and Saffary. D’you reckon one of them had him with that untraceable poison that we never come across except in novels? I’d have you know that us guardians of law and order only kill each other for promotion.’

  ‘I take it’, I said, ‘that you weren’t involved in the Belstone Lane case at all?’

  ‘Not me, boyo,’ he said, with a mouth full of Chelsea, ‘I was otherwise engaged at the time. In fact, I thought it was a Payday Gang job till now.’

  ‘Could it have been?’

  ‘Apart from the shooting, yes — but the shooting’s always accidental in these things, anyway. You go tooled up long enough and sooner or later a gun’s going to go off, innit?’

  He finished his Chelsea bun and looked surprised that it was the last. ‘It occurs to me,’ he said, ‘that you already have a contact with someone who knows about the Payday Gang.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ I said.

  ‘Malcolm Raikes — didn’t you use to defend him?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, slowly. ‘I got him off three times — but he was never anything to do with the Payday Gang.’

  ‘While we were trying to put Raikes away for receiving stolen gear,’ he said, ‘the Regional Crime Squad thought he was a planner for the Payday Gang. It just so happened that we got him first, he dropped you as his brief — ’

  ‘That’s right!’ I interrupted. ‘And paid the price of his folly by getting five years for receiving. What’s he doing now?’

  ‘Doesn’t seem to have learned his lesson — he’s an antiques dealer, importing and exporting.’

  10.

  You might have thought that Malcolm Raikes was pure public school — that’s if you hadn’t seen him through three acquittals in the Crown Court and read the probation and antecedent reports. In fact he was pure Walsall, out of a council house in Harden. In his youth he took to the local trade — stealing — and wasn’t very good at it. He graduated via the juvenile courts to a spell in Borstal and on to Winson Green. A short stay there seemed to convince him that he was misapplying his talents. Suddenly he stopped.

  It was not, of course, because he was going straight, merely because he’d had the wit to withdraw to a less exposed area of the profession — receiving. No police officer for miles believed he was straight and they continued to arrest him, but they didn’t get convictions. I’d like to think that his immunity was down to my forensic skills but it rested entirely on Raikes’ fertile and creative imagination.

  He would call me to say that he’d been arrested and charged. Since the charge was always some form of dishonesty, he always had the right of trial in the Crown Court. ‘Put it up for trial by jury,’ he’d drawl, ‘and I’ll tell you about it when you’ve got the prosecution evidence.’

  So the case would be adjourned for committal to the Crown Court, the Crown Prosecution Service would supply me with copies of their witness statements and I would have a meeting with Malcolm and read over them. He would listen, gravely, and without breaking sweat or batting an eyelid would answer each point in the Crown evidence so reasonably that it was hard to imagine why he’d ever been suspected.

  When he’d done there would be a complete and reasonable answer to the prosecution case — and he did it all in his head as I read over the statements. If there were slight rough patches in his account those would be smoothed over by Crown witnesses suddenly losing their memory in the witness box or even failing to show up. That was how he got acquitted.

  Then he got pulled for receiving the proceeds of a robbery in Shropshire. For reasons I never understood, he took his business elsewhere and his creative powers must have failed him. Two old ladies had been badly rough-housed in the robbery and he went down for five years. His last address known to me was a farm, a few miles out of Cannock. I rang him and told him that I wanted to discuss something better kept off the phone. He was used to that approach and invited me over.

  The cab dropped me in a secondary road, alongside a painted wooden sign that said ‘Melford House’. I had wanted to get a look at the house and it was worth it. It stood behind the trees that screened it from the road, a perfect medium-sized eighteenth-century manor. If it was bought on the proceeds of antiques dealing, he must have been specialising in Crown Jewels.

  Malcolm was waiting for me at the door, supporting his image with cavalry twill slacks, a cream linen shirt (with obligatory monogram on pocket), and paisley cravat. With his deep tan and carefully cut grey hair he looked as distinguished as he intended.

  ‘Mr Tyroll!’ he exclaimed. ‘What a pleasure to see you again! Do come in.’

  He led me through a large hall, hung with paintings of which I only caught a glimpse, and into a study that looked out over a wide lawn to Cannock Chase.

  I looked around me as he poured me a whisky. The room was lined with bookshelves. They say you can tell a lot about a man from his books. All I could tell about Raikes was that he had bought his books by the yard. They were all beautifully bound Victorian editions of standard works of literature and I don’t imagine he’d ever opened one of them. On the corner of his desk stood a pile of his real reading — antiques guides, telephone directories and airline timetables.

  ‘You’ve done well,’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘after that last unfortunate affair I decided to move upmarket. It was buying from the wrong people that got me into trouble, you know. Now I have no doubts where the goods come from because I only deal with the best. In fact, I’m just helping to furnish a house for … ’ and he mentioned a minor Royal.

  ‘That was the beginning of my good fortune,’ he went on. ‘I’d just walked out of Winson Green when I got a message that he wanted my help. Well, I couldn’t go and see him fresh out of prison and looking like it, so I sent him a note from my non-existent secretary saying that Mr Raikes had been abroad for a while but would rush back to deal with his enquiry. Then I shot off to Spain and lay on a beach for days until I was brown enough to look as if I’d been in Australia.’

  I chuckled and he sipped his drink. ‘It was very well worth it,’ he said. ‘That introduction made me what I am today. But enough about me. You were very mysterious on the phone. What can I do for you?’

  It suddenly occurred to me that this was embarrassing. To sit in a bloke’s posh study, drink his whisky and then ask him if he wasn’t the brains behind a bunch of armed robbers — let alone going on to ask if they hadn’t committed murder. I decided to approach obliquely.

  ‘Do you know a man called Alan Walton?’ I asked.

  He seemed genuinely puzzled. ‘I don’t think so. What does he do?’

  ‘At the moment he’s doing twenty in the Scrubs.’

  He winced. ‘That must have been for something pretty bad.’

  ‘It was. Armed robbery in which one man died and another man was crippled.’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘The Belstone Lane robbery,’ he said. ‘What on earth makes you think I know anything about that, Mr Tyroll?’

  ‘You’ll remember that there was an armed gang around at the time, known as the Payday Gang.’

  His eyes narrowed further. ‘Ye-es,’ he said, slowly.

  ‘The Payday Gang, or most of them, were rounded up by the Regional Crime Squad and weighed off at Birmingham.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, a little bird tells me — a very authoritative little bird — that back in the bad old days you had a connection with the Payday Gang.’

  He smiled slowly. ‘The police always thought so,’ he said. ‘They had a race — Regional Crime Squad versus the County CID — to see who could nail me first. What’s your interest in the Payday Gang?’

  ‘Alan Walton,’ I said, ‘is my client. He’s one of two men serving twenty years for the Belstone Lane job. He says he didn’t do it.’

  ‘Don’t they all say that?’

  ‘Well, you said it to me three times,’ I said.

  He smiled again. ‘Touché. And you believe him?’

  ‘No
rmally it’s not my job to believe or disbelieve, but in this case I’ve got a good reason for believing that there’s something wrong.’

  He nodded. ‘And if I did know anything about the Payday Gang, what would they have to do with it?’

  ‘The Payday Gang had operated so long and so successfully in the Midlands that it seems unlikely to me that anyone else would have muscled in on their act. The Belstone Lane job was exactly like a Payday Gang job. It seems to me that they’re the people who are most likely to have done it.’

  ‘Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,’ he smiled.

  ‘But suppose for a moment that it was the Payday Gang. If I had the kind of connection you mentioned, do you really think I’d give you the evidence to hang a murder rap on old colleagues? You’re a lot smarter than that, Mr Tyroll.’

  It was my turn to smile. ‘So are you, Mr Raikes. That’s not what I’m asking for. Let me put a few theoretical questions and let’s see where it goes.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Do you think it could have been the Payday Gang?’

  He nodded again.

  ‘Is there anything you can tell me which will lead me in the right direction?’ He thought for a moment then he nodded once more and pulled a notepad towards him. He scribbled on it and passed me the torn-off page.

  ‘George Cook,’ I read. ‘He can help me?’

  ‘If you can find him and if he will.’

  ‘Where will I find him?’

  ‘He hangs about your area, Belston and around. He’s also known as Banjo Cook.’

  ‘Because he banjoes people?’

  He looked hurt. ‘No, because he plays it.’

  ‘Is there anything else you can tell me?’

  He shook his head. I finished my drink and stood up. As he walked me to the door, I asked, ‘What made you change solicitors? I’d played three and won three.’

  ‘Embarrassment,’ he said. ‘I was so stupid over the Shropshire job that I knew they’d have me. I didn’t want you to think I was an idiot.’

  I laughed. ‘Never!’ I said.

  ‘Don’t you be an idiot either, Mr Tyroll,’ he said at the door. ‘There’s some hard people about. Just remember I’m not the only antiques dealer in the world and I’m not the only one that the Royals deal with.’