Robbery with Malice

by Barrie Roberts

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but I know that’s what she said. I told Arnold when I came home. We was furious.’

  I couldn’t make head or tail of that, but it was clearly the case that Glenys had disappeared. We finished our tea and Mr Simpson called us a cab. His wife escorted us to the door.

  As I shook her hand she leaned forward and said, ‘I’m glad you came, Mr Tyroll. You told Arnold just what he wanted to hear.’ I still don’t know if that meant what I think it did.

  33.

  Claude was in the office next morning. I told him that Glenys Simpson was a waste of his time, that she was gone. As an afterthought I asked him to work his insurance connections and find out if any kind of reward had been paid on the Belstone Lane case. If Glenys really did have half the reward, I wanted to know who had the other half.

  Then I phoned Grady’s solicitor. Without Legal Aid or private funds, he was unable to do anything with his client’s case.

  ‘Tell me,’ I asked him, ‘you didn’t ever get Grady’s alleged confession statement ESDA tested, did you?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘If we’d got through the first hurdle in the Court of Appeal and had our Legal Aid Order renewed, I was going to do that, obviously. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because I’m pretty certain now as to who carried out the Belstone Lane job, so your man’s statement must be a fake. Get it ESDA’d and charge it to me. My client will pay.’

  Out of the whole mess I had at last established a fact — that the Trumans robbed the Mantons van and killed the driver’s mate. Now, perhaps, there was a chance of doing Alan Walton some good. Still a little whisper reminded me of Alasdair’s analysis — that the significant pattern was the repeated failures of the police — and I still couldn’t explain those.

  Jayne my faithful secretary stuck her head round the door. She had been with me ever since I set up my own practice, graduating from a rickety desk with an old upright typewriter to the latest and glossiest of word-processors. Apart from her typing skills, she imposed order on drunks in the waiting-room with a single flash of her eyes, found long-lost files, buttered up angry clients and ordered me and Alasdair about.

  ‘There’s a lady in the waiting-room with an insurance problem,’ she said, ‘but there’s no one to see her — unless you will.’

  She looked at me with an expression that dared me to turn away the business.

  I was beginning to feel good about Walton’s case, so I gave in gracefully. ‘Send her in,’ I said. ‘Send her in.’

  Mrs Treasure White was black, in her late thirties, strikingly attractive and knew it.

  ‘What can I do for you, Mrs White?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, you see, my brother died and he made a will for me to have everything of his.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Now, he didn’t have much, but when we was small our mother had insurances on us. I don’t suppose it’s very big, but I know Momma paid it all up and I should be entitled to it.’

  ‘So what’s the difficulty? Have you been in touch with the insurance company?’

  ‘Well, I came down from Manchester for my brother’s funeral and I brought the insurance papers that I had from Momma and I went to the brokers who fixed it all up for Momma when we lived in Belston.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘They weren’t much good. They said I’d have to prove he was dead and prove that I was his next-of-kin and so on. I don’t think they wanted to know, Mr Tyroll.’

  I nodded. ‘Insurance brokers make their money selling policies for insurance companies. They don’t make anything out of helping people to claim against insurers.’

  She smiled. ‘The people I’m staying with here in Belston said I should get a lawyer and they said you was good.’

  ‘Kind of them,’ I said. ‘But it shouldn’t be much trouble.’

  I reached for a green Legal Advice form and started to fill it in. That done I began collecting particulars from her. The penny only dropped when I asked her if she’d got a copy of her brother’s death certificate. She produced one from her handbag and passed it across.

  George Cook, with an address on Wolverhampton Road, murdered — she was Banjo Cook’s sister! With a few questions I established that she had married Benjamin White’s younger brother and was now divorced from him. I could scarcely contain myself but I managed to go on jotting down particulars, dictated the necessary letters, explained what would happen and buzzed Jayne to organise coffee for me and my new client.

  ‘I’ve done all that needs doing for the moment,’ I said, ‘and I don’t imagine there will be any problem. Eventually we’ll get the money out of them, but there’s something else, something where you may be able to help me.’

  She looked surprised.

  ‘Obviously,’ I said, ‘you know how your brother died.’ She nodded. ‘What you probably don’t know is that I was the person who found him.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘You were?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, Mrs White. I had gone to Bert’s Café to interview your brother.’

  She looked cautious. ‘What was that about?’

  ‘About something that happened a long time ago — about the Belstone Lane robbery.’

  I had been watching her closely and I saw it — the flicker of reaction before she suppressed it.

  ‘What was that?’ she said as though she had never heard of it.

  ‘It was the armed robbery of a security van, Mrs White, in which one guard died and another was crippled.’

  Again the slight flicker. ‘I don’t know why you should think George would know about that,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s stop beating about the bush,’ I said. ‘Your brother is dead. Nothing I do can harm him but if he’d lived he might have been able to help me and a client of mine.’

  I told her Alan Walton’s story while she sipped her coffee and said nothing. When I had done she put the cup down and looked sideways at the wall for a long time. Then she shook her head.

  ‘He wouldn’t have helped you, Mr Tyroll. He was my own brother and he’s gone, but he wouldn’t have helped you. Georgy only did things for money. Anything — bad things.’

  She picked up the cup again and spoke across its top. ‘He was a bad man, Mr Tyroll. That’s why we went to Manchester — to get away from him.’

  ‘How was he bad?’ I asked.

  ‘When he was a boy he started smoking ganja — you know, cannabis? But that wasn’t enough for him. He started on other things and he couldn’t stop. Then he never had enough money. He stole off everybody, he stole off me, he stole off Momma. He started going with crooks, like the Truman brothers. Then he got caught.’

  She looked me in the eyes. ‘You don’t let down your own, do you, Mr Tyroll? But Georgy did. When the police caught him he gave up his friends for money. It got so he couldn’t buy drugs in the Midlands, he had to go to London, because people was afraid to do business with him.’

  ‘Who was the policeman?’ I asked, crossing my fingers under the desk.

  She shook her head slowly. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He was a big man. Most times he’d give Georgy money for names, but sometimes he’d give Georgy drugs and let him deal. Then the policeman would take money from Georgy. He used to come round late on a Friday night and sit out in his car.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘He was big, tall and he dressed very well. Too good for a policeman. And he wore spectacles, not proper shades, but tinted like.’

  Hawkins! I picked up the Walton file and riffled through the photocopies of newspaper items at the back. One was an obituary of Hawkins. I pulled it out and showed her the photograph.

  ‘That’s the man,’ she said, without hesitation. ‘That’s him.’

  ‘Do you know anything about the Belstone Lane robbery?’ I asked quietly.

  A weary look passed across her face. ‘I know about it, Mr Tyroll. Georgy was there and the Trumans and my stupid brother-in-law.’

  ‘What happe
ned to the money? I’ve been told that your brother had it all.’

  She shook her head again. ‘Oh no!’ she said. ‘He thought he was going to have a big share, but Mr Big — your policeman there — he had most of it. Georgy only got a little bit.’

  ‘Didn’t the others complain?’

  ‘Oh, yes! They complained at Georgy. That was when they got arrested. After that they didn’t complain no more. They went away.’

  ‘Where did they go? I’ve been looking for them.’

  She smiled. ‘You won’t find them, Mr Tyroll. Not in this country. Do you need to find them?’

  ‘Not really, Mrs White. In the light of what you have told me, they’re not going to speak if I do find them, or they’re not going to tell the truth. I’m grateful to you and so will my client be — I hope.’

  She stood up. ‘I hope that helps your man in prison, Mr Tyroll, but I think that’s all I can tell you about poor Georgy.’

  She turned back at the door. ‘I would have spoken up before,’ she said, ‘but I never knew. After the boys was acquitted that was it. I went to Manchester and I tried to put it all away.’

  I saw her out and returned to my desk. I picked up the obituary cutting and looked at Hawkins’ big head with the narrow-framed, tinted glasses — Mr Big! Now I understood the police failures to catch the Belstone Lane killers.

  Something in the text caught my eye. I read on. At one point I had wondered how Hawkins had died and here it was, lying unnoticed in my file. He had indeed dropped dead in his garden from a heart attack, but not alone. He had been drinking with two old chums — Watters and Saffary! Had they shared the loot? Of course they would have done. They were as thick as — as thick as thieves. Had they fallen out? Had one of them slipped him a deadly Mickey in his lager? I guessed I’d never know.

  34.

  I was almost there. If Peter Grady’s solicitor got a good ESDA report on the statement — if it was a provable fake — we were home and dry. We could go back to the Court of Appeal with a chance. I hoped.

  I kept Treasure White’s information to myself, waiting to see the ESDA report and reveal to the world what a clever boy I was. Sheila turned sarcastic about the ‘I know something you don’t know’ looks that she detected on my face occasionally but she was up to something as well. There were a lot of phone calls to London and a couple to Sydney which she passed off as ‘research’. I was too excited to pay much attention.

  The report on Grady’s statement reached me within days. It was all that I had hoped for. It even confirmed what Hughes had told me:

  *

  Not only does the evidence show that the pages of Exhibit GH/2 were written out of sequence, Page 3 has an impression on it of an alternative version of Page 5, implying that there may have been several ‘dummy runs’ at creating the desired text or that there was more than one version of the document.

  *

  Jayne came in and caught me skipping round the room with the report in my hands.

  ‘Good news!’ I said. ‘I was just a little bit excited.’

  She fixed me with a cold eye. ‘Well, ah,’ she said.

  I invited Alasdair, John Parry, Claude and Mac to dine. Mac was there by way of an apology for abusing his friendship. Once again we settled down with the whisky after dinner.

  ‘Well come on, then, bach,’ urged Parry. ‘You’ve been going about for days looking like the cat that got the cream. What’s on?’

  I lowered my glass solemnly on to the coffee table and leaned forward. ‘I have solved’, I said, ‘the mystery of the Belstone Lane robbery.’

  That caught the audience. Sheila mouthed ‘Ratbag!’ silently at me, but the others waited my explanation.

  ‘Firstly,’ I began, ‘Billy Simpson augmented his income by spotting opportunities and planning jobs for the Payday Gang. One of his ideas was the Mantons van which was begging for it, always using Belstone Lane to go to Bellsich. But the Payday Gang didn’t fancy it, so he offered it to Banjo Cook.’

  ‘Did he know that Cook was a police informer?’ asked Sheila.

  ‘I guess not. It’d have been pretty silly if he did. But Cook went to his mentor — Mr Big, Chief Inspector Hawkins — and Hawkins saw a chance to make some real money. So he let the job go ahead, certain that it would be blamed on the Payday Gang. But it all went pear-shaped and there was a killing.’

  ‘It makes sense,’ said Sheila. ‘Remember we thought that Grady might have been there because his statement referred to a woman screaming — either that or the police who forged the statement knew what had happened in Belstone Lane.’

  I nodded and took a drink. ‘Hawkins was nothing if not an opportunist. Once there was a killing in the picture and life sentences in the offing he knew that nobody could fall out about the robbery. So he swiped the loot and when the Trumans started to grumble about it, he let them have a little taste of being on trial just to shut them up. It worked — when they were acquitted they went abroad.’

  ‘But at that point,’ said Alasdair, ‘he’d got it made. He’d got away with the loot. He’d side-tracked Miss Callington, the one witness who knew that it was a black gang that robbed the Mantons van, and he’d frightened Cook and the Trumans off. So why mess with Walton and Grady?’

  ‘Good question,’ I said, ‘and I can only guess the answer.’

  ‘Here we go,’ said Parry, ‘lawyer’s guesswork. It’s no substitute for evidence, you know.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ I said, ‘it fits. When Billy Simpson found his wife was having a long-term affair with somebody, he used his intercom thing to bug the sitting-room and tape their conversation and he told his mates he knew who the boyfriend was.’

  ‘And he was a fellow who liked to score off his enemies,’ said Macintyre, ‘so he was going to do something about it.’

  ‘Right!’ I said. ‘Now — I believe he let his wife know that he’d identified her boyfriend.’

  ‘And who was the boyfriend?’ asked Alasdair.

  ‘Hawkins,’ I said. ‘She told him that Billy had rumbled them. Hawkins couldn’t take a chance — Simpson might know about his connection with Banjo Cook as well. Billy Simpson had to be stopped.’

  ‘Why didn’t he just arrest him for the robbery?’ asked Sheila.

  ‘Because Billy Simpson was deadly dangerous. If he could connect Cook and Hawkins he just might have done it in court. So Billy Simpson had to be neutralised and the Belstone Lane job laid to rest for ever and here was the lovely Glenys, a tool ready to hand, willing to put her husband and his mates away for Hawkins’ sake.’

  ‘You said “neutralised”,’ said Parry. ‘Did you mean “killed”?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps Hawkins had him killed. I think that’s likely. But perhaps Billy caught on that he could only get his pals out of trouble by getting himself and another bunch of pals into it. Maybe he topped himself. I don’t know.’

  ‘But why Walton and Grady?’ said Alasdair.

  ‘That’s easy. Because they were close mates of Billy Simpson, and because Saffary hates Walton. So they leaned on all of them and finally it worked. Grady cracked, signed a fake confession, and it was enough to nail both of them.’

  ‘Why does Saffary hate Walton?’ Sheila asked.

  ‘That’s another thing I don’t know.’

  ‘Ha!’ snorted the big Welshman. ‘This remarkable solution has slid from lawyer’s imaginings to “don’t knows”. It’s not worth the paper it’s not written on!’

  I thought he was serious for a moment, and it brought me up short. Then he grinned.

  ‘I’, he said, ‘can now reveal the truth about Saffary’s down on Walton. I have been hanging about police clubs and other unsavoury locations, keeping my big copper’s ears flapping.’

  ‘Well, fire away, old cock,’ said Alasdair.

  ‘Less of the old,’ said Parry. ‘Saffary, as you know, has certain personality problems, only one of which is drink. Just when he was about to be raised to the dizzy heights of an insp
ectorship, than which there is no greater honour, he fell from grace. What’s more, he was caught — bang to rights, as they say in the cheap novels.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘Somebody sent the chief superintendent a photograph of …’

  ‘… Saffary and his mates, piling out of the back door of a pub into a police car,’ I finished for him. ‘But it wasn’t Walton who sent that!’

  ‘There was an anonymous letter with it, referring to Walton’s conviction.’

  ‘So there was, but it was Billy Simpson who sent it!’

  ‘Duw, duw,’ said Parry. ‘You mean that Saffary’s been wasting his malice on the wrong man?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. He also jailed the wrong man.’

  ‘That never bothers him,’ said Parry.

  I shook my head and returned to my explanation.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘everything had worked, Simpson was out of the way, the Trumans had vanished, Hawkins — and Watters and Saffary, no doubt — had the loot, and Grady and Walton were inside. Then Walton appealed again so Hawkins admits to his bosses that there’s been a bit of corner-cutting, and that’s all right, they don’t mind a bit of lying to the Court of Appeal to cover up over-enthusiasm in a senior officer, so it’s all right again until little Mrs Cassidy bungs a carrier bag on my desk and asks me to spring her son-in-law. Then it’s open season on Banjo Cook and appellants’ lawyers.’

  Parry was shaking his big head slowly. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Lovely, in fact. All fits together, doesn’t it? But it rather depends on whether Hawkins and Glenys really were lovers, and you can’t prove that. You can’t find her, and if you do, she’s a hard case — she’s not going to burst into tears and say, “Yes, we dunnit! My lover Gerry Hawkins and I conspired to frame two men!” Not likely, is it?’

  It was the weak point. I had a good guess, but no evidence. I couldn’t answer.

  Claude intervened. ‘Might I have a word?’

  ‘Ha!’ snorted Parry. ‘I wondered when we’d hear from the gentleman amateurs.’

  Claude grinned. ‘If you don’t want early retirement and a fat pension, John, I’ll take you on any day. Then you can spend your old age tramping round housing estates in the rain and getting arrested by the duly authorised forces of law and order.’