by Lisa Cutts
I wasn’t concentrating on the train crash. The words weren’t sinking in. I found myself reading about how the lorry that had caused the train to derail had been one used for carrying fruit and vegetables and marvelling at how, in 1964, no one would have heard of internet shopping. Back then, my Great-Aunt Lou’s head would have exploded if someone had told her that one day she would be able to tap on a keyboard and a van would deliver whatever groceries she wanted, straight to her door.
Interrupting my daydream, the door burst open, revealing a white-faced Jim, red-faced Harry, and Wingsy, whose expression I couldn’t fathom.
Harry kicked the door shut. The force of the kick caused it to ricochet against the frame, catching Wingsy’s arm. He rubbed the back of his upper arm. ‘It’s lucky the door hit me and not him, Harry,’ he said, closing the door again with a little more restraint. ‘If it had been this grass here, you’d be getting nicked for assault.’
‘Fucking pack it in, you two,’ said Harry, cheeks still red. Then, lowering his voice to a rumble and pointing at Wingsy, he said, ‘You, John, I expected better from.’ The use of his first name rather than his nickname was a sign that this was serious. He turned his attention to Jim. I watched Harry’s facial muscles contract and his mouth tighten as if he was about to yell something abusive at him. The three-second pause led me to believe that he was holding himself back for some reason. Wingsy was looking like the guilty party. I hoped it was something funny.
All Harry could manage to say to Jim was, ‘I’ll speak to you in a minute. Go and put the kettle on while I speak to this tosser.’
Jim skulked out of the room. For the first time, Wingsy and Harry turned to acknowledge me.
‘Do I dare ask?’ I risked.
‘It would seem that Jim left his terminal logged on yesterday before we all went out to the shooting,’ said Harry. ‘Wingnut here accessed the “Question the Boss” forum on Jim’s log-in and asked the chief constable if he was any good in a fight.’
I laughed really loud at that. Wingsy was keeping his eyes on the ground but I saw a smile on Harry’s face. ‘I’m your sergeant, so don’t think for one minute that I’m taking this lightly. Chief Inspector Halliday’s going to be speaking to you about your behaviour, too.’ The smile was gone by the time he said this part.
‘Hang on, though, Harry,’ I said. He looked at me. ‘What about Jim – he may have had no choice but to grass Wingsy up, but he shouldn’t have left his terminal unlocked either.’
‘She’s got a point, Harry,’ said Wingsy. ‘What about him?’
‘Just be grateful it’s me dealing with you and that Kim Cotton’s on leave for a couple of weeks,’ said Harry, before finding a free computer to log on to.
I went back to my file, flicking through the crash scene photos and wondering what had happened to all the fruit and veg.
7
On Wednesday morning I got to Pensworth prison early to see Joe. I queued up with the families and friends of loved ones locked up in prison, along with the legal representatives. It was easy to tell them apart: the legal reps tended to have bags and files of paperwork and weren’t standing around in groups looking as if their world had come to an end.
Inside the entrance for visitors, I walked over to the prison officer behind the glass partition. I dropped my acceptance letter approving my visit, along with my warrant card, into the box below the counter.
‘Do you have a mobile phone or any recording equipment?’ he asked through the glass, bending slightly to get closer to the slotted part for speaking through.
‘No,’ I said, automatically also stooping slightly even though I was on a level with it. I’d left my mobile phones in the car; it made life easier.
‘Go on through the doors when they open,’ he said, checking my ID. He pushed the paperwork back to me and I went over to the doors where three other people were waiting.
Having gone through the security procedures, and been searched by a female prison officer, then beckoned forward by another officer, I was led to a desk where a third officer took my photograph. I had to admit, I wasn’t expecting that. On none of the prison visits I’d made before had I ever had my picture taken.
I was pointed across the hall, which was full of purple easy chairs and low tables, giving it the appearance of a low-budget coffee house but without the appealing smell of freshly ground coffee. Oh, yes, and it had bars at the windows. Along the far wall, stretching the length of the room, were cubicles. Each one had a window and half-glass door. All but one were empty.
I made my way to number six as instructed, and waited. Several minutes later, I spotted Joe Bring as he sauntered towards me, hands tucked inside the Viagra-blue bib he was wearing over his grey sweatshirt and joggers. He looked as though he’d put on a few pounds since I’d last seen him, but he was still gangly.
He reached the door of the cubicle, stopping short of entering. The prison officer behind him kept a discreet distance to ensure that Joe made it to the correct room.
‘Hello, miss,’ said Joe.
‘Hello, Joe,’ I said, standing up. I’d been about to shake his hand when I realised that he’d removed it from resting inside his bib and it was now rummaging inside the front of his joggers. I waved instead. It seemed very inappropriate to wave when only a two-foot-wide table separated us, but it was the sensible thing to do.
I heard a chortle from the prison officer, who said, ‘Well, I’ll leave you two to it, then. Shout if you need anything.’ He made to shut the door, forcing Joe to move inside the room with me. We both watched as the officer noisily sealed us in and went back to escort the next waiting visitor to an inmate.
Joe and I sat down at the same time on the black plastic chairs. ‘How have you been, Joe?’ I began.
‘I’m good, thanks, miss. You?’
‘You don’t have to keep calling me “miss” now,’ I said. ‘We’re alone.’
Joe grinned at me. His teeth were terrible. Drugs did that to you. On a positive note, he smelt a lot better than he used to.
Many times, I’d practised what I’d say to Joe when I saw him next. I’d gone over in my mind how I would tell him I was grateful that he’d saved my life, but, truth be told, now I had the opportunity I was struggling to find the words. I wriggled in my plastic chair, the fabric of my blouse threatening to stick to my back.
‘Thank you, Joe. You saved my life.’ As I said the words, I realised how trite they sounded.
Joe shrugged and flashed his barcode grin at me again. ‘S’right, Nina. You turned a blind eye to me living in your shed and didn’t even call the Old Bill when I let myself in and put your telly on…’
He broke off as I started to laugh. I hadn’t been aware he’d been living in my shed until he’d got arrested by the patrol officers responding to his 999 call, and until now I had never been too certain it was Joe who’d entered my house in the weeks leading up to me being attacked. The smell that lingered had certainly suggested he’d been there, but I had always been reluctant to point the finger of blame at him, particularly since his presence meant he’d been there to save me when a serial killer decided to make me his next victim.
Whether it was my burst of laughter or Joe’s revelation that cleared the air, it didn’t matter, as we both let our shoulders drop and got to the matter I’d driven forty miles to discuss.
‘What did you want to see me about?’ I asked.
Joe scratched his pointy, stubbly chin with the hand that had been around his genitals. He paused to sniff his fingers. I forced myself to remember that this man had saved my life.
‘The Wickerstead Valley train crash in ’64,’ he said, frown line creasing his brow. ‘I saw on the news that the police are appealing for new information as it’s now fifty years since it happened. My dad, the fucking idiot, was the lorry driver that caused it. He left his lorry on the crossing. But it was no accident: he deliberately derailed the train. He killed them people.’
‘How do you know this?’<
br />
‘He told me a couple of years back. He’s dead now, the useless twat. Some dad he was. Know how I got hooked on heroin?’
I raised my eyebrows at Joe’s miserable face.
‘I was fourteen when he first injected me. Didn’t stand a fucking chance, did I? Everyone’s supposed to want better for their kids than they had themselves. He fucked up his life and mine with it.’ He looked down at his hands, now in his lap but mercifully outside his pants. ‘He started on puff when I was a kid, then he upped his game to cocaine before moving on to heroin. He told me a few years back that he’d derailed the train on purpose. Said it caused him so much grief that he turned to drugs. He could still hear the screech of the train and the thud when it hit the lorry.’
At this point, Joe paused, I thought somewhat dramatically given that what he’d said so far wasn’t of much use. His dead dad had left his lorry on a crossing, derailing a train nearly fifty years ago. Quite what I was supposed to do with this information was escaping me right now.
‘Did he say why he did it?’ I asked Joe, wondering how much access to drugs he had inside.
‘No, he didn’t, but he knew a bloke called Leonard Rumbly. Used to be a small-time villain. Fancied himself a bit. He owned several of the local bookies. My old man, the fuckwit, was a gambler. He couldn’t resist a bet – on the horses, dogs, boxing… anything that was legal and a few fights that weren’t. The dozy prick owed a fortune. Apart from being so far in the cack, up to his neck in debt, it was illegal in them days to run up credit for gambling. The thing my dad told me was that Rumbly had him by his nuts.’
‘Go on,’ I said.
He leant across the table, eyes flitting in the direction of the glass panel in the door before saying, ‘Rumbly was always up to stuff. The Wickerstead train had three footballers on their way to a match. One drug-and booze-filled night my old man started talking about how much Rumbly would gain from delaying the train to get the match cancelled or at the very least postponed. You much of a football fan?’
‘No, Joe, I’m not.’
‘You wanna take a look at what was going on in the 1960s around the beautiful game. Very interesting stuff.’
Joe slung himself back in his plastic chair before pushing himself off from the edge of the table so he was leaning back on the two rear legs. He kicked his feet out in front of him as he rested back against the wall. He was looking pleased with himself but I failed to see why. He clearly thought that this was the big reveal, but I wasn’t getting it.
‘Thanks, Joe,’ I said, falling short of sounding overwhelmed. ‘You going to put that in a statement?’
There was that barcode grin again. ‘Not yet, Nina. You’ve got to promise to do something for me. My son’s fourteen next week.’
He paused to let the information sink in. I thought he might be expecting me to make him a cake or take him to the zoo or whatever you did with fourteen-year-old boys whose fathers were in prison for burglary. Again.
‘You’ve got to look after my boy.’
As he said this, he pitched himself forward, the metal-studded ends of the chair legs clanking on the hard floor.
‘I don’t mean like going and babysitting him. You’re still the Enemy at the end of the day. You’ll have to work out how to do it on the quiet.’
Clearly someone was serving up in prison and Joe was scoring better gear here than he ever had on the outside. Why would I keep an eye on his son and heir for shaky information on a train collision fifty years ago?
‘You’re wondering why you should do this?’ said the perceptive Joe.
I rubbed my eyes, sighed and said, ‘That’s one way of putting it. Exactly why would I look after your boy?’
‘Luke,’ he said, ‘his name’s Luke. And you gotta be subtle,’ said the world’s worst burglar. To date, Joe had left his DNA at sixteen crime scenes. Sometimes he left his fingerprints instead. His current stretch was looking like a couple of years. But still I liked him.
‘And why should I subtly look after Luke?’ I asked, growing weary of this conversation.
‘Because one of his older mates, Daryl, has just died of a heroin overdose and I don’t want him going the same way as his mate – or me.’ As he said these words, Joe seemed to grow taller in his chair and look less like a colossal moron. Some sort of parental responsibility seeped through his pores and gave him a purpose in life. The kid was probably doomed anyway with genes from the Bring family; I’d met the mother and she wasn’t much better. Still, if you couldn’t help the masses, why not try to help an individual?
‘And besides,’ continued Joe, ‘Rumbly’s still alive and he’s branched out. He’s gone from gambling to drugs now. It’s where Luke’s dead mate got his gear. It’s a family business mainly run now by Rumbly’s son, Andy, and grandson, Niall, but it’s Leonard who’s behind it. Though from what I hear it’s not all happy families. The son has had some sort of a fallout with Leonard over Niall, so I’ve heard in here. I’m only telling you this because I’m worried about Luke and can’t do anything else to help him, from here.’
The information Joe had given me was a totally different matter from what I’d thought I was coming here for. I opened my notebook and began to write down everything Joe told me about his father Malcolm Bring and his son Luke, and everything he could tell me about Leonard Rumbly and his line. When he finished talking, I put down my pen, flexed my fingers and wondered what Harry Powell and DI Dandy were going to make of all this.
‘Thing is, Joe…’ I began, pausing to get my words right.
‘Thing is, Nina,’ interrupted Joe, ‘you’re about to tell me how this information won’t get me a reduction on my sentence. I know that. I’ve got nowhere to go anyway. Missus kicked me out. That’s why I was living in your shed. Luke thinks I’m a loser and he’s quite right about that. In here – ’ he gestured at the bars on the windows ‘ – they’ve got workshops and stuff. Fucking saddest thing of all is that I’m more use in here than out there. Know what I’ve being doing?’
He put his hands back inside the waistband of his joggers. My eyes were drawn to his groin.
‘No, you saucy cow.’ He grinned, flashing his manky molars at me. There weren’t many other teeth still in his head. ‘Not that. Not with three-man bang-up in my cell. I’m sharing with Jingo George and Fat Frank. You know ’em?’
Sadly, I didn’t. They sounded like just the kinds of losers Joe should share a cell with. I bet some deep and meaningful conversations went on in their snug room at night.
‘I’m building bird boxes,’ he said.
This I hadn’t seen coming.
‘You any idea how much the tree sparrow population has declined since the 1960s?’ Without waiting for a reply, which was for the best, as I was struck dumb at this point, he gave me the answer. ‘It’s dropped by ninety-seven per cent. That’s incredible. The RSPB – have you heard of
them?’ I managed to utter, ‘Uh huh.’
‘Well, they’re doing this project, see and they want us to build, like, fifty boxes for the southeast of England. They may get us to build more. See how it goes. It’s well good, well good.’
The only birds I’d ever known Joe be familiar with were the chickens he tried to shoplift from the supermarket. He might have been tempted to branch out into turkeys, but his modus operandi was theft by gusset. Turkeys might have been that tiny bit trickier to fit down his joggers. Perhaps it was an urban thief’s type of primitive birdwatching and he’d managed to move on to better things in prison. Here he was, getting animated at the thought of saving the tree sparrow. It was actually good to hear, if a little unexpected.
We said our goodbyes shortly after that and I made my way outside, via another strict security check, to where I’d parked the car. As I turned on the air-conditioning and waited for it to clear the windscreen, I took both my work mobile and my personal one out of the glove compartment. I had missed calls on both. Making a decision whether to listen to personal messages first or work o
nes, I threw my job one up in the air a couple of times before going for the one in my hand.
The first missed call was from Wingsy. His message simply said, ‘Nin, think you need to call me. It’s your mate Annie Hudson. I’m with her now.’
Annie wasn’t exactly a friend but a battered wife I’d met years ago, couldn’t quite let go of and visited from time to time. Very little rattled Annie, apart from the time her husband had held an iron to her face and tried to strangle her. If she needed my help, then my help she would get.
Swapping phones to hear the other message, I listened to Annie shouting as she demanded to know ‘why the fucking useless police haven’t had the fucking decency to tell me that not only have they released Patrick from prison so he can come and finish me off but he’s been shot and has been in hospital under armed guard for two fucking days?’
Annie wasn’t the only one who would have liked to know that. Patrick Hudson had dislocated my shoulder and knocked my head against several household surfaces the last time we’d met. I was hoping he’d regain consciousness so he could feel the pain of dying.
8
My usual routine, when I visited Annie every couple of weeks, was to pull up around the corner in my old BMW so that her neighbours weren’t aware the police were at her door. But there was no hiding the police being in her house on this occasion. A marked police car was across her driveway with a uniformed occupant, and an unmarked police Škoda parked behind that. What made it perfectly clear that it was a police car was a large sign in the window on the dashboard that told anyone passing by to call DC John Wing if it needed to be moved.
As I walked up to the front door, it opened and Wingsy came out. He rolled his eyes at me and said, ‘Annie wants to see you.’
Annie’s face appeared behind him. Her bottom lip trembled and her eyes moistened. Just when I thought she might crack, she shouted, ‘About fucking time, young lady. Where have you been?’
I knew it was bravado but I didn’t let on. Why would I? This was Annie.
She turned and stomped back to her living room. I followed her, giving Wingsy’s shoulder a quick squeeze as I passed him in the hallway. He was tense. I didn’t usually make a habit of touching my colleagues – unless I was having sex with them, and that definitely wasn’t the case as far as Wingsy was concerned.