Robbery with Malice

by Barrie Roberts

‘It was,’ I said. ‘But it wasn’t a good idea to tangle with those two thugs.’

  ‘Surprise,’ she said. ‘They thought they’d got you up a dark corner and they could do what they liked. When we came round the corner it shook them, so we had to take advantage of the surprise.’

  I shook my head wonderingly, and wished I hadn’t. ‘Did you get a look at them?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Claude. ‘Once we came on the scene they were very interested in getting away. I marked one of the bastards and the other one’s going to remember Sheila every time he thinks about sex.’

  I looked enquiringly at her. ‘Nothing much,’ she said. ‘I just gave him the Adelaide Virgin’s One-Step.’

  ‘The police’, said Claude, ‘are going to be looking for a six-footer doubled over and clutching his crotch, and I took a couple of teeth out of the other one before he got past me.’

  I laughed and really wished I hadn’t. ‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘both of you. Those sods might have killed me.’

  ‘Somebody’s got to look out for you, Chris Tyroll,’ she said. ‘You’re the guy who worried about me being mugged in the Public Records Office and you go wandering about dark yards on your own.’

  ‘The security lamps should have been on,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and you should have used the front door, you galah.’

  She bent and kissed me. ‘You’ll have to do it from the other side,’ I said. ‘That’s the side where they kicked me. I can’t feel anything with my lips.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, and kissed me from the other side. That one I felt.

  A doctor came along and told me the good news. I’d got no serious injuries, only bruising and cracked ribs. He gave me painkillers, warned me about the symptoms of concussion, told me not to jump, laugh or sing for a while and said I could go home. Sheila and Claude packed me into a wheelchair and trundled me out to Claude’s car.

  Back home they bore me, wincing, to a couch and Sheila departed to the kitchen, muttering about the lengths to which some men would go to avoid cooking a meal. Claude poured himself a large malt and brought me an orange juice.

  ‘Are you interested in how it’s going?’ he asked.

  ‘If I’m going to get worked over,’ I said, ‘I might as well know if there’s a reason.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t found White or the Trumans yet, and Glenys Simpson has left town.’

  ‘I’m told he’s still in the licensed trade, but I can’t find him yet. He’s not in Belston and none of the local landlords know where he is. I’ve checked the licensing registers at Belston, Wolverhampton, Walsall and Birmingham but he’s not listed.’

  ‘So if he’s not in Brum he’s left the area. He could be anywhere in Britain.’

  He nodded. ‘Fraid so. Still, there is some good news. I’ve found Billy Simpson’s parents.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘At least they ought to know something about the relationship between Billy and the lovely Glenys. Maybe they can explain why her conscience didn’t hurt her until long after the divorce. But I can’t go and see them looking like this.’

  Claude grinned. ‘Give it a day or two and you’ll look even worse. At the moment you’ve just got a split lip and a great big footprint down the side of your face. Just wait till it all turns green and purple and yellow.’

  ‘Just do me a favour, will you? Give John Parry a ring and let him know what happened.’

  The big Welshman arrived in minutes and stayed to drink my whisky and eat my steak while I drank soup and more orange juice. He took statements from all of us and managed not to say, ‘I told you so.’

  There was a question that bothered me and I asked it.

  ‘Why tonight?’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that they delivered their threat on Saturday night. It’s Monday — how the hell do they know that I haven’t written to Mrs Cassidy saying, “Dear Madam, I’m now quite convinced that Alan is innocent but a nasty man from Stoke on Trent has phoned me so your son-in-law can stay in jail for me”?’

  ‘The easiest answer is Claude,’ he said. ‘They sent their threat — after that they’re going to keep tabs on you to see if you’re playing ball. They’ve only got to see you call him in and find out that he’s looking for the Trumans and Ben White and they know you’re still in play.’

  ‘You mean they’re watching me?’

  ‘How else did they know you were alone in the office this evening? You don’t just need to keep away from lonely places, you need to keep an eye over your shoulder — and you, Claude.’

  21.

  If ‘they’, whoever they were, watched me for the next few days they must have got pretty bored. Unable to speak intelligibly to strangers, then unable to speak without wincing, then covered in coloured blotches like a psychedelic panda, I kept to my home. Alasdair called early each morning and we discussed the day’s cases in court and any other urgent business. Sheila wanted to abandon her researches and nurse me, but honesty compelled me to admit that it wasn’t necessary.

  So I spent a lot of time sitting around at home. I tried television, but you have to be sad or mad or both to enjoy daytime TV. It’s full of programmes where gloating presenters introduce members of the public whose lives are profoundly and bizarrely dysfunctional and who are delighted by the opportunity to tell millions of housewives about it. I must be getting old, I keep thinking it was better in the old days, when all they showed in the daytime was the test card and colour test programmes.

  I could have read books or listened to music or written the book I was always going to write, but I didn’t. I sat around and fretted about Walton’s case. Nothing fitted, nothing made any sense. I swung backwards and forwards over the facts in my mind and no patterns emerged, no pointers, no explanations that fitted. I got wound up tight over it so that Sheila complained that I talked about nothing else when she came home.

  Then Alan Reilly arrived one morning, having emerged from his searches in newspaper files. He had done me proud, bringing me sheaves of photocopies of the coverage of the robbery, the trial of the Trumans and White and the Payday Gang.

  The Payday Gang’s activities had guaranteed that security van blags were always headline news in the Midland papers and the Belstone Lane job was very big headlines because of the shootings. Happening on a Saturday evening, it gave the press plenty of time to put their stories together before Monday’s editions and they filled pages with it.

  The front page of Monday’s Express and Star was decorated with a photo of a fine-featured elderly woman with a commanding look in her eye. The caption said, ‘Former POW Daphne Callington, 63, who tried to stop the robbers’.

  Daphne Callington meant nothing to me, but the press had made her a heroine. According to them, this disabled sixty-three-year-old had been the only witness to the whole episode and had tried to argue one of the robbers into putting down his gun. I was disposed to believe that the papers had made most of it up, looking for a touch of brightness in the violent horror of what happened in Belstone Lane, but then I read the quotes from Miss Callington:

  *

  ‘I was standing at my gate, and he was only a few feet away from me, pointing his wretched gun at the driver. I knew I couldn’t get to my phone so I tried to distract him, to delay them until someone else could call the police.’

  *

  She had called out to the robber, told him to put the gun down. She had succeeded in distracting him, but the driver had taken advantage of the intervention to try and move. That was when the robber had swung round and loosed both barrels. At the same time someone else’s pistol went off. It hadn’t been the ruthless, callous slaughter that the judge had called ‘an act of evil, conceived in greed and malice’; it had been the kind of stupid cock-up that happens when nervous idiots carry loaded guns.

  I looked again at Daphne Callington’s photograph. The articles said she had been a mission teacher in her youth, captured by the Japanese at Singapore. She had s
pent the war in an internment camp. She wasn’t making it up and the newspapers hadn’t invented her. Why hadn’t the prosecutor called her as a witness?

  I added another note to my list:

  *

  Find Daphne Callington (if she’s still alive).

  *

  Daphne Callington was interesting, but my next discovery among Alan’s photocopies was bizarre. The trial of the Trumans and White had not been widely reported, presumably because they weren’t the Payday Gang and they weren’t charged with murder, only conspiracy to rob. There had been a few pieces in the press, the kind of pieces that make it nearly impossible to understand what happened in court. You know — a reporter sits in long enough to hear something that will make a headline out of the prosecutor’s opening speech. Any barrister worth his wig knows that he’s got to say something melodramatic in the first few sentences of his opening. That way he’ll get his name in the papers. Then the reporters go away and only come back to hear any witness who they think will make another headline. If there’s a conviction, they come in for the sentencing, and the judge says something worth a headline, so he can justify his seven grand a month. When there’s an acquittal it often passes unreported.

  Piecing together the acquittals of the Trumans and White from that kind of reporting was not easy. The prosecutor had got his opening headline by going as far as he dared to suggest that these were the men responsible for the murder of the Mantons guard, but after that his case fell apart. Policemen’s notebooks contained contradictory entries, expert witnesses were not as expert as they seemed and it all went pear-shaped. The Trumans and White walked, with Benjamin White catching a fine for possessing a shotgun without a certificate.

  I added another note:

  *

  Why were Trumans/White charged?

  *

  My old Granny used to say that bad things or good things came in threes. I’d had Miss Callington and the Truman trial; I didn’t expect much more, but I turned to the Birmingham Post coverage of the Payday Gang trial. There was a lot of it, but it was more thorough than most and it included a complete list of the long indictment that had faced them.

  There it was — staring at me in cold print — a charge relating to the Belstone Lane robbery. I shook my head and looked again but I hadn’t imagined it. Near the bottom of that long list of charges was one which specified, ‘at Belstone Lane, Bellsich, in the Metropolitan Borough of Belston, robbed a vehicle belonging to Mantons of Stoke on Trent …’

  I groaned. The whole thing was becoming crazier by the minute. Three groups of alleged villains had been tried for the robbery! The Payday Gang can’t have been convicted, or the charges against Walton and Grady would never have been made.

  I read on. The gang had been convicted, after a long trial, of most of the robberies charged, but the jury had been unable to find verdicts in one or two cases and Belstone Lane was one of them. The only evidence presented on that charge was that a sum of money equal to the proceeds of the Belstone job had passed through an Irish bank account days after the robbery and that the account in question was operated by a character called Holland, who had laundered the other robbery proceeds. I imagine the jury decided to give the benefit of the doubt to the Payday Gang on the basis that Holland might have been taking in someone else’s dirty money.

  It reminded me of something that Malcolm Raikes had said — ‘Just remember that I’m not the only antiques dealer in the world and I’m not the only one that the Royals deal with.’ Had he meant that the Payday Gang used a number of ‘experts’ or that other gangs used the same people as the Payday Gang? Or both? Had he been referring to Holland? Or Cook? I groaned again and looked for Raikes’ phone number.

  ‘Mr Tyroll!’ he exclaimed when we were connected, with the same brightness with which he had greeted me. ‘They tell me you’ve had a little trouble with burglars.’

  ‘It wasn’t burglars,’ I said. ‘It was to do with the Belstone Lane case. And who was the “they” who told you?’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ he said. ‘One hears these things. What can I do for you today?’

  I reminded him of his parting remark when we met. ‘There was a man called Holland who laundered money for the Payday Gang,’ I said. ‘He may have laundered the Belstone Lane cash for somebody else. Is that what you meant?’

  ‘Something like that, Mr Tyroll. Something like that. But I really must go — the doorbell’s ringing,’ and with that he cut off.

  I was still scribbling on large sheets of paper, trying to construct patterns that made sense, an hour later when my doorbell rang. It was Claude and he looked depressed. I insisted on brewing coffee before I heard whatever bad news he brought.

  ‘Some bad news — some good news,’ he said, when I asked him what he’d got.

  ‘Go on, then. Bad news first.’

  ‘The bad news’, he said, ‘is that the Trumans and White have disappeared. Rumour has it that they split for Manchester or somewhere as soon as their trial was over. Nobody round here has seen them for years.’

  ‘Difficult to blame them,’ I said. ‘The evidence against them seems to have been really poor. If they were tried for conspiracy to commit a robbery that they didn’t commit, especially with a murder at the back of it, you can see why they might not hang about to see what happened next.’

  Claude nodded. ‘And the good news?’ I asked.

  ‘Old pals of the Trumans and Ben White’, he said, ‘tell me that the late Banjo Cook was a great pal of the Trumans and Ben White. Is that good news?’

  ‘It is — insofar as it’s the first piece of information in this bloody case that connects with any other piece. On the other hand, Cook’s dead and even the bloke who killed him has vanished, so we’re never going to find out what the connection means. My good news is that you can find me an elderly lady called Daphne Callington who used to live in Belstone Lane. I know what her connection with the case is.’

  I was wrong about that.

  22.

  I looked in the mirror one morning and discovered that I was only as frightening as usual, so I went back to work. There was a pile of stuff to get through before I could get back on to Walton’s appeal, but after a couple of days I’d cleared it.

  The next thing I did was write to the Crown Prosecution Service and ask for a copy of any statement made by Miss Daphne Callington. Nowhere in the papers I had could I find a reference to her, let alone a statement. Back when the Belstone Lane case was tried there was no Crown Prosecution Service. The case would have been handled by the Central Midlands police solicitors and they wouldn’t have felt obliged to hand over a statement from a witness they didn’t intend using, but even then there was a rule that they should inform the defence of witnesses that they weren’t using. It looked as if they hadn’t done so, and I couldn’t believe that there was no statement taken from Daphne.

  Then I sat back and recalled what the solicitor I did my articles with used to say — ‘Read every piece of paper and knock on every door. If you don’t understand the case then, read every piece of paper again and knock on every door again.’ Well, I’d read every piece of paper available to me, so it must be time to knock on some doors.

  I started in Belstone Lane, calling on Barrett the insurance man first. He turned out to be a roly-poly, balding bloke with a moustache. He seemed worried at first that I was going to get him involved in something he didn’t want to know about, but I explained that I was just going over the ground again for a possible appeal and he simmered down.

  We went over his statement to the police and he confirmed that it was correct. He had not been called at the trial; the defence had not argued with any of the evidence that there had been a robbery and murder in Belstone Lane. Then I asked him about Miss Callington.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I remember her. She was living next door when we first moved in here. Nice lady — a bit posh and strict, but nice when you got to know her. She had a walking-stick when we first knew her, but then
she went on crutches, but she was always trying to do things for people.’

  ‘Do you remember her on the evening of the robbery?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, yes. If it wasn’t for her I probably wouldn’t have known anything about it till the guns went off, but I heard her shouting at them and that made me look out of the window.’

  I looked at his typescript statement again. ‘In here,’ I said, ‘it just says that you heard a woman shout.’

  ‘Yes. he said. ‘In my first statement I said all about hearing Miss Callington shouting at them, but when it was redone the coppers said to leave it out.’

  ‘Did they say why?’

  ‘Yes. They said that Miss Callington was old and disabled and it wasn’t right to bother her as a witness and what mattered was what I saw.’

  ‘Who took your first statement?’

  ‘That was the day after — the Sunday. It was two uniformed coppers, a PC and a woman.’

  ‘Then there was this version,’ I said, lifting the typescript.

  He nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That was — oh, I don’t know — months later. Two detectives came that time and they had it already typed out. They said it had to be typed out for the court. That’s when I asked them about Miss Callington.’

  ‘Miss Callington doesn’t live next door now,’ I remarked. ‘Is she still alive?’

  He shook his head. ‘I can’t say. About a year after the murder she got really bad in the legs and had to have a wheelchair. She had family and they moved her away and the house was sold.’

  ‘You don’t know where she went to?’ I asked.

  He shook his head again. ‘Somewhere in the Potteries, I think, but I don’t really know.’

  ‘These detectives who brought your second statement, you don’t happen to remember their names, do you?’

  ‘It’s a long time,’ he said. ‘I don’t know their names. I remember thinking they were a funny pair.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘Well, you weigh people up in my trade, look them over to see whether they’ve got any money, what’s the best approach to make and so on. You can’t help it. And you get a certain idea of coppers, from the telly, I suppose, but these two were different. One was a big bloke, all fancy suit, posh haircut, tinted specs — looked too well off for a copper. The other was a squat sort of bloke, thick neck, curly hair, looked quite a nasty bit of work where the other was all smooth and posh.’