Occupation: Insurance broker
*
Then there was the bit about it all being true, then:
*
I live at 23 Belstone Lane, Bellsich. It is a detached house standing on the east side of the lane in between numbers 21 and 25.
Yesterday was very hot and I spent the afternoon in the garden until it got too hot to stay out. I then went indoors and watched sport on television until tea-time.
After my wife and I had tea we watched a bit more television then I decided to go out and have a drink. I went upstairs to the bathroom to shave and change.
The bathroom is at the head of the stairs, at the front of the house. As I was standing in the bathroom shaving I heard a squeal of brakes outside in the lane. I could not see what had happened because the bathroom window is frosted but I thought that someone had turned off the roundabout on the main road and come into Belstone Lane too fast, as they often do.
I carried on shaving and then I heard shouts outside so I walked through to the bedroom, from where I could look down into the lane.
When I looked out of the bedroom window I saw that a big white transit van was stopped in the lane slightly left from our house. In front of the white transit was a smaller blue van that was stopped at an angle across the front of the transit as though to prevent it getting past. I could also see that there was a red saloon parked behind the white transit, but I could not see all of this vehicle across the top of the transit.
Two men in dark uniforms were standing in the road near the front of the transit. They had their hands in the air because two men were pointing guns at them. The men with the guns were both dressed in dark clothes and wore ski masks. One had a pistol and the other had a shotgun.
The man with the pistol was standing on the far (west) side of the lane. The man with the shotgun was on the near side, standing on the grass verge. When I looked out he was turned around and seemed to be shouting something at someone I couldn’t see.
There were other men, I’m not sure how many, taking bags out of the back of the white transit and putting them into the red car.
I knew that the white van was a security van and I realised at once that it was being robbed. I picked up the bedside phone and dialled 999 straight away.
While I was giving the particulars of what was happening I heard a woman’s voice call out. Then I heard a big bang and a lot of shouting. As soon as I had completed my call I went straight back to the window.
One of the uniformed men was lying in the road in a pool of blood and there was a big splash of blood across the near side of the white van. I could not see the other uniformed man.
The masked men were jumping into the blue van and the red car. When they were in, both vehicles went off very fast in different directions.
I shouted down to my wife and told her not to go outside and I phoned 999 again to tell them that an ambulance was needed.
A few minutes later the police and an ambulance arrived.
*
Barrett’s neighbours were no more help. Some were indoors, some in their back gardens. None of them actually saw the robbery and the shooting. Most of them only realised that something unusual was happening when the shotgun went off.
Which meant that the prosecution didn’t have the best evidence. There was no witness who could point to Walton or Grady and say, ‘I saw that man committing robbery and murder.’
Next came a statement from the surviving guard telling how they had been ambushed in Belstone Lane and describing the killing of his partner and the injuries to himself. There were doctors’ statements from St Agnes’ Hospital in Belston where the guards had been treated and a pathologist’s report on the post-mortem. Again — all of it irrelevant, but marvellously prejudicial to a jury.
There were statements from the police officers who were first on the scene. When they got there the robbers had vanished. The driver of the security van was in a bad way after taking both barrels of the shotgun in his hip and thigh. His partner was already dead, killed by a single pistol shot. No witness could identify the robbers or either of their vehicles and no one had a vehicle number.
Road-blocks had been set up, but no vehicle connected with the robbery was stopped. The following day a picnic party on Cannock Chase found the red car parked in a copse, doors wide open. Mantons paperwork scattered inside identified it. It carried false registration plates and a check on the engine block number revealed it to have been stolen from West Bromwich some months before. The blue van was never found. This section of the evidence ended with a statement from a Mantons accountant that the money had never been recovered. Mantons had been reimbursed by their insurers.
That had been the point at which the enquiry jammed eighteen years ago. I put the bundle down and rubbed my eyes. None of it harmed Walton, but none of it helped him. The robbers might have been anyone.
I was about to read on when Sheila returned from shopping. ‘It’s bejeely cold out,’ she said, ‘and starting to snow again.’
I stood up. ‘Take this pre-warmed chair,’ I invited, ‘while I make us a warm drink.’
‘Beauty!’ she exclaimed and fell into the chair while I made off to the kitchen.
‘You know something?’ she called after me.
‘What’s that?’
‘I suppose I could learn to live in a country where it sleets and snows if all the blokes warm a girl’s chair for her.’
I returned with two Gaelic coffees. ‘Ah, but it’s only public schoolboys who do it,’ I said. ‘They’re trained by having to warm the stone bog seats for their seniors.’
She grabbed a glass, gulped and shivered as the mixture went down. ‘On the other hand,’ she said, ‘some of your ancient traditions are so bizarre as to be perverse.’
‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘You can’t have chaps who are going to spend the rest of their lives on the benches of the House of Commons, the Lords or the courts being disabled by a premature bout of piles or pneumonia.’
‘And what about the poor bloody juniors?’ she demanded. ‘How many of them get premature piles?’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘The traditional Aussie support of the underdog. It’s a selection process. The weakest go to the wall, the rest go on to serve the nation. Anyway, they’re all modernised now — that’s why Britain’s bankrupt and a third-class power.’
She grimaced at me and began flipping through the bundle of evidence while she drank her coffee.
‘Tell me about witness statements,’ she said, after a few minutes.
‘What about them?’ I asked.
‘How are they taken?’
‘Well, the first police officers at the scene will have checked to see if anyone around saw anything useful. If it had been a small incident they would have taken the witness statements. Since there were a lot of people who saw part of the robbery, they called in a support unit the next day to interview all the witnesses.’
‘And how would they have taken them? Were they typed out then?’
‘No. The interviewing officers would write them out by hand and the witnesses would sign them on the spot.’
She frowned. ‘But these copies are typed.’
‘Yes. When the case was prepared for trial they would prepare typescript copies and have the witnesses re-sign them. It’s easier on everybody’s eyesight not having to peer at policemen’s scribbles.’
She looked puzzled. ‘What’s the problem?’ I asked.
‘So the original manuscript statement is made and signed on the day after the robbery, eighteen years ago — yes?’
‘Yes. That’s why they all refer to “yesterday”.’
‘And then Walton and Grady are charged and the statements are typed up, re-signed and redated — right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Six years after?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then it’s wrong,’ she announced. ‘Look!’
She showed me, turning through the pages and pointing out each date. All of the
statements of the Belstone Lane witnesses had been re-signed and dated in the October following the robbery — months after the incident and six years before there was a chance of a trial.
‘That doesn’t make any kind of sense,’ I said. ‘It looks as if they were expecting a trial that autumn — but they weren’t.’
I pulled out my slip of notes and added one:
*
Check re-signing of witness statements.
14.
That night was ‘Macintyre’s thrash’ as we called it — a private dinner for a few friends at the Victoria Hotel in honour of Scotland’s greatest poet, Robbie Burns.
Apart from Sheila and me, my assistant Alasdair Thayne was there, Claude the Phantom, John Parry, and a spattering of other local disreputables whose company amused Mac. He, of course, attended in full regalia — velvet jacket, kilt, lace ruffles, the whole lot except that he wore a scalpel down his stocking-top instead of a knife.
Among the guests I was pleased to see David Lyon, my predecessor as the town’s principal legal irritant. After decades of magistrates’ court crime and alcohol he had retired to somewhere on the Mediterranean a couple of years before to concentrate on the alcohol.
‘Good to see you, David,’ I said. ‘They told me you were drinking yourself to death in Cyprus or somewhere.’
He smiled. ‘It wasn’t Cyprus, it was Tunisia, and as to drinking myself to death I’ve never felt so well in my life.’
‘What brings you back to Belston in midwinter?’
‘A hankering for the sight of the Black Country under snow? No — once in a while I have to come and shout at my broker in person or he stops taking me seriously. But what are you doing and who’s that delightful freckled lady who came in with you?’
I introduced Sheila and the conversation became more general. Soon Macintyre summoned us to the table, where the Victoria’s chefs had done justice to Scottish cuisine by providing huge dishes of mashed potatoes and swedes.
‘And now … ‘ declaimed the Scots doctor, ‘ … the entry of the haggis!’
He flung open the door. Unearthly groans poured into the room, followed by a piper in full dress followed in turn by two of the Victoria’s waiters bearing haggis on silver trays and trying hard not to laugh, drop the haggises, or both.
We charged our glasses and Macintyre toasted the haggis, then whipped an unpleasantly large scalpel from his stocking and bent over one of the trays with a determined eye.
Sheila whispered, ‘What’s the murder weapon?’
‘It’s a Victorian horse lancet,’ I said. ‘Belonged to Doc’s grandfather.’
She shuddered. ‘I hope he wasn’t using it this afternoon,’ she said.
In rolling Scots tones Macintyre began to declaim the ‘Address to the Haggis’ …
*
‘God bless thy honest, sonsy face,
Great chieftain o’ the pudding race …’
*
In a near perfect imitation of Mac’s tones, Alasdair Thayne recited quietly, ‘Deceased weighed some twenty pounds and was plump and in apparent good health. When examined he was still steaming and was surrounded by what appeared to be mashed potatoes and swedes. Cause of death was not immediately apparent.’
Macintyre shot him a fierce glare but rumbled on to the end of the address, when his skilled knife slit the steaming haggis from end to end and we lifted our glasses.
Lyon leaned over the table as the haggis was served around. ‘John Parry tells me you’re lumbered with a late appeal in the Belstone Lane robbery,’ he remarked.
‘Lumbered’s the very word,’ I said, and outlined the position. When I told him about the odd dating on the statements he nodded.
‘That would be from the trial,’ he said.
‘But the trial wasn’t for six years,’ I protested.
‘No, no,’ he said, ‘not the trial of your fellows — the first trial.’
‘What first trial?’
‘A few months after the robbery they nicked three blokes and charged them — not with the robbery and murder, because they couldn’t place them at the scene. But they charged them with conspiracy to rob.’
‘What happened?’ I asked, amazed at his news.
He smiled. ‘I represented them and they got off, of course.’
I gaped. ‘But who were they?’
He frowned. ‘Now you’re asking,’ he said. ‘It was a long time ago.’
He gazed past my head, straining to recall. ‘They were all black,’ he said at last, ‘but I can’t put names to them.’
‘Black!’ I exclaimed. ‘Was one of them Banjo Cook? George Cook?’
He shook his head. ‘Doesn’t ring any bells,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you what, I sold out to Graham Lillington. He should still have my old file register. The names’ll be in there.’
‘What about the file?’ I asked, hoping for a miracle.
‘Only obliged to keep crime files for two years,’ he said.
‘But everyone keeps them longer,’ I said, still hoping.
‘But I had a thorough clear-out before I sold up. Couldn’t have Graham acquiring dark secrets he hadn’t paid for, could I? There won’t be a file, but Graham should still have the register.’
We turned back to our haggis and the evening pursued its usual course. Macintyre recited reams of Burns, then we sang the unexpurgated versions of ‘John Anderson, My Jo’ and half a dozen other Burns songs before Mac brought proceedings to a melodramatic climax with a recital of ‘Tam O’Shanter’ with lantern slides. Usually I relaxed and enjoyed Mac’s bizarre entertainment on Bums’ Night, but Lyon’s information kept dancing among the whisky fumes and whispering possibilities.
Back at home, Sheila slid quickly into bed and dragged me after her. ‘I’m cold,’ she complained.
‘Turn the heating up,’ I suggested.
‘There’s better ways to warm up,’ she remarked and proceeded to demonstrate.
Afterwards we lay and smoked. ‘Penny for ‘em,’ she said.
‘Are you implying that my mind wasn’t on what we were doing?’ I demanded.
‘It was then,’ she said. ‘It isn’t now. You’ve been thoughtful all evening.’
I told her about Lyon and the trial of his clients. She looked puzzled. ‘Does it help?’ she asked.
‘I’m damned if I know. The Payday Gang are the obvious suspects, but apparently they didn’t do it. Lyon’s clients were accused of planning to do it, but they were acquitted, and Walton and Grady say they didn’t do it, but they’re serving the time.’
‘Was George Cook one of Lyon’s clients?’ she asked.
I shook my head. ‘He didn’t seem to think so. None of it makes any sense. I’ll have to check with Lillington on Monday.’
The bedside phone rang. I groaned. Sheila had been around me long enough to groan with me. A call at this time was most likely a police station calling to summon me to attend a client.
I reached out and switched the answering facility to the speaker. When the recorded message had played there was a pause, then an unfamiliar voice spoke. It was a male, probably middle-aged, and it spoke with a slight accent but without much emphasis.
‘Mr Tyroll,’ it said, ‘you don’t seem to understand why Banjo Cook is dead. Let me make it quite clear — if you carry on messing about with the Belstone Lane case, you’ll end up the same way — and your Aussie girlfriend.’
My phone number is in the book and I’ve been phoned and threatened before — usually after pubshut by former clients or their friends. They get heavy and ramble, but this quietly undramatic, sober voice frightened me. This was someone who meant every word.
The caller disconnected. As quickly as I could I dialled 1471, but the caller had withheld their number, of course. Sheila and I looked at each other silently. I rewound the cassette and played the message again.
‘What’s that accent?’ she asked, when we had heard the message again.
‘North Midlands, I would guess. The Pott
eries, somewhere round there.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Report it to John Parry and take good care of you.’
She shivered. ‘It’s made me cold again,’ she said and grinned.
15.
Next morning the whisky had evaporated. I woke to find Sheila sitting on the bedside playing the cassette quietly. She looked thoughtful.
‘You’ve no idea who this is?’ she asked when she saw that I was awake.
I shook my head. ‘The voice means nothing to me, and as to who might threaten us — well, somebody topped George Cook to stop him talking to me. Whoever it is must be the same.’
‘So you’re going to take it seriously?’
‘Sure I am, but it’s a bit difficult when you don’t know who’s attacking. I can’t stay in bed and pull the blankets over my head. I’ve got a living to make and an office to run. All I can do is stay away from dark, lonely places and stop taking sweets from strangers — and you can do the same.’
I dawdled over the Sunday papers as long as I could, but in the end I forced myself back to the boxes of papers on Walton’s case. I had read as far as the end of the original incident. Now I wanted to know why it took six years to bring charges and how Glenys Simpson became involved. I had a feeling that I was about to be disappointed and I was.
The story simply started anew after six years. There was no explanation from anyone of how Glenys got into the act, just statements from three Crime Squad officers who had interviewed her when she volunteered to make a statement. I was not surprised that they were Hawkins, Watters and Saffary. Then came her statement:
*
Name: Glenys Mary Simpson née Whitethorne
Age/DOB: 43. 09101942
Occupation: Housewife
Who states: This statement, consisting of two pages, each signed by me, is true to the best of my knowledge and belief and I make it knowing that if it is tendered in evidence I shall be liable to prosecution if I have wilfully stated in it anything which I know to be false or do not believe to be true.
Dated: 19041986
Signed: G. Simpson
I am a divorced woman formerly married to William Arnold Simpson. We separated in 1981 and have been divorced for about three years. I have not remarried.
Robbery with Malice Page 6