A Patient Man

by S. Lynn Scott

  My parents never spoke in my hearing about the drama that had unfolded at the end of our street. If the subject was broached with enthusiasm by my sister, my mother snapped that she was sick of hearing about it and my father quickly diverted the conversation. None too subtly either. He wasn’t at home much anyway. My brother just appeared disinterested, but then nothing but a short skirt or a splif ever raised anything in him at that time.

  I know that Vi and mum had a lot of urgently whispered conversations about it, but neither was about to confide in me and they were getting wise to my eavesdropping tactics. Anyway, I had a pretty good idea what Vi’s take on the whole business was, and I didn’t want to hear the poison she was spreading.

  This is the truth about what happened.

  Bert and Peggy, still shocked and confused at their sudden wealth were planning a short holiday on a caravan site in Devon, the same site that they had gone to for years. The plan was that they would rest up in their tiny holiday home where it was quiet and where they would not be bothered whilst they considered what to do with their sudden windfall. They had gone to bed happily planning to pack up the car on the morrow and drive down, perhaps even, if they dared, to stay the night in a nice hotel along the way.

  Their relaxed dreams had been rudely shattered when Bert was hauled out of bed in the blackness of night and when he struggled (he had been in the war remember) he had been coshed over the head, Peggy’s cries ringing in his ears. The next thing he remembered was coming to, feeling terrible and throwing up on Peggy’s lap. They were now in the living room where the dawn glinting through the drawn curtains shed an uncertain light on the comfortable chintz furniture. The intruders must have half-carried or dragged him out of the bedroom, then blindfolded and tied him to an upright chair as he began to come to. Peggy was not tied up and didn’t appear to be blindfolded as far as he could tell but she was in tears and clung to Bert even through the vomiting episode. Bert said that, through it all, her tears and her concern were all for him. She held his head and wiped his brow and gathered her dressing gown over the mess in her lap, bundling it up and out of sight. Then standing valiantly, close to him with her brushed nylon nightdress from Marks and Spencer pressed to his cheek, she demanded that she be allowed to get her husband a glass of water and maybe a cup of tea. Only then did Bert become fully aware that they were not alone. The blindfold had slipped under Peggy’s gentle ministrations and through the very corner of his eye Bert could make out shapes and movement.

  At the far end of the small room, where I and the Peppermint Copper were to stand much later that day, were two men. Two bulky men, Ern related, maybe slightly above the average height but stocky and muscular under their clothing. They were dressed in black and the taller of the two wore a heavy woollen balaclava and sunglasses. This was obviously to hide his eyes and make identification harder but it also, Ern reported with much satisfaction, made navigating the dim room cluttered with furniture so difficult that the thug tripped over the shag rug twice and caused himself considerable pain by crashing into the what-not. The other thug, so Ern related to his enthralled pub cronies, wore a scarf wrapped around his chin and mouth and had purloined one of Bert’s caps from the hat-stand in the hall. Once Bert started coming to his senses, this particular ne’er-do-well kept himself largely out of sight behind the open door to the hallway. They both wore gloves and everything they had on seemed to be ill-fitting as if they had borrowed the clothes from someone larger that they didn’t know very well. They had also been drinking. Not enough to make them inept but enough to make them dangerous and jittery. They did not speak whilst in the room with him and Bert never heard their voices but once. Bert was also never aware of the third person who played a part in this little tragedy, but then neither were any of us until much, much later.

  They had a weapon. A gun. It was held somewhat negligently by the thug wearing Bert’s cap.

  They gestured that Peggy should leave the room and the one behind the door went with her. Bert struggled in vain. The other stayed in the shadows of the room, the blank blackness of the sunglasses turned on Bert who, still sick and giddy, struggled to husband the strength he needed to deal calmly with the horror that faced him. He could dimly hear the kettle singing in the kitchen and Peggy’s usually soft voice raised in tremulous anger. He moaned, terrified that violence would be turned on her, but she returned clutching a cup of tea in shaking hands, followed silently by her captor. She fed Bert the tea, hot and sweet, teaspoon by teaspoon.

  “How do you feel, Bert?” she asked. “You got a fearful crack on the head from those cowardly brutes, indeed you did. Oh, my dear, it must have hurt awful bad.”

  “I’m fine, Peggy, fine. Don’t you worry about me, love.”

  “Cowards, your mothers would be ashamed, ashamed. I’d crawl willingly to my grave rather than have any son of mine turn to such things.”

  “Ssshh Peggy,” Bert had tried to calm her, fearful of violent reaction but the thugs were unmoved. They had long been immune to shame. Peggy apparently called them several other unwholesome names, but she didn’t swear because women like her didn’t.

  The clock on the mantelpiece struck 6 am whilst Peggy was still upbraiding them, and this was the signal they were waiting for. The taller one gestured for her to leave the room and, when both she and Bert protested, the thug grasped her by the arm and propelled her none too gently to the door where she was immediately grasped by the other. The one in the balaclava returned to Bert and tightened the blindfold so that from then on, he could see nothing. He could hear shuffling from the hall and Peggy’s intermittent protests. Recovered a little (the tea had worked magic it seems) he spoke to the sunglass-wearing assailant who remained with him.

  “You can have whatever you want. You can have all the money you want, just don’t hurt my wife.”

  Ern said that Bert made this offer over and over again in a hundred different ways and in a hundred different tones. He tried a reasonable approach, he tried an angry approach and, more than once, an abject begging approach. There was never any response at all. Bert could just about hear Peggy in the bedroom, he heard her voice protesting and the door closing. Then a thud as if it were being forced open again. After a few moments, he heard the sliding wardrobe door screech across its un-wielding tracks. He really must get around to fixing it, he thought. There was a rattle of wire coat hangers and Bert could imagine Peggy’s outrage at having to dress in front of a man, not her husband. And he imagined the glint of gunmetal and her fear, and his agony of impotence overwhelmed him. Then a slammed door, harsh and stark in the silence, muttered words that might have been an order and Peggy’s voice calling at the door. “Bert, he’s taking me to the bank…” Her thin voice was silenced abruptly, and Bert yelled out. “Give ‘em what they want, Pegs. Do what he says, whatever ‘e says.” There was silence and the front door closed quietly.

  “Pegs, Pegs!” he yelled, again and again, struggling in his chair as all reason left him. The other thug moved then. “They won’t give her the money, you stupid bastards…” Further words were strangled as a rag was stuffed into Bert’s mouth. He was blindfolded once more and gagged.

  Bert could do nothing but suffer the agony of impotence and anger. He tried to think, but the actions of the thugs mystified him. Bert was an intelligent man which was almost certainly the reason that he could not fully grasp the workings of the clumsy scheme.

  As it turned out it was simple enough. Peggy would, under threat of harm to her husband, draw the largest sum of cash that the bank would allow her to. The fact that without prior arrangement the bank would not release anything like a substantial sum either had not occurred to the perpetrators or there was some further plan of extortion. It was a seriously flawed scheme that relied almost entirely on Peggy being so frightened for Bert that she would do exactly what she was told but not so obviously frightened that she would instantly give herself away to the first person who sa
w her. Which seemed highly likely.

  Bert, understanding little of this on that terrible morning concluded, with no sense of relief at all, that the whole farrago was likely doomed to ignominious failure. His only anxiety was that Peggy, poor Peggy, should not be harmed in the execution of it.

  But the little party never got to any bank at all and that was the mystery.

  It could not have been much more than an hour or so later, as Bert related to Ern, when the silence of the little house was shattered by the harsh jangling of the telephone. Even the tall bloke in the sunglasses was taken by surprise and swore once in a low tone. Bert, still blinded, struggled against the gag but there was no movement to answer the call as far as he could discern.

  The phone clattered on, sounding increasingly urgent despite its measured tones. Bert struggled anew to release himself from his bindings. He could hear the creak of shoes on carpet as the thug took short paces and pondered. He didn’t expect a call. Or at least not yet. That much was clear. Half seven was far too soon. He decided to ignore it for a bit longer and his patience was eventually rewarded for it cut off abruptly and cast them back into silence. Bert heard him move back to the chair but no sooner did hear the old chair’s springs protest than the telephone jangled back to life again. This was a quandary for the kidnapper. Should he risk ungagging Bert to answer it and trust to his concern for his wife to keep him in line, or should he answer it himself and bluff his way through? Or should he just leave it to ring, and ring, and ring? After a few more moments of tense indecision, he made an impatient lunge for the receiver said “yes?” into it. It was said gruffly, and Bert could get nothing more than that. Normal voice he said, nothing remarkable or recognisable, deep and a bit breathy. “Oh, Christ…” were the next two words uttered. They were still low-toned but surprise forced the thug’s voice to a higher pitch and the ‘oh’ had the rise and fall of an Estuarine accent. “Yeah.” There was another pause. Another, “yeah, ok,” and Bert heard him wrench the phone lead from its socket. He then kicked something that was probably the small table next to Bert that held the teacup and the framed photo of Peggy in pink, so that tea-cup and photo and table hit the floor with a resounding clatter and Bert felt the remains of the tea seeping into the leg of his pyjama trousers. He must have thought his last hour had come but the villain just roughly checked and tightened all the bindings. Bert said there was a moment, as if the intruder into his life stepped back to look at him with hate and indecision, then, no longer able to contain his frustration and anger, aimed a heavy kick at his shin.

  The banks would not be open for another hour at least. That is how Bert knew that something had gone terribly wrong.

  6

  But if there is any further injury, then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

  Exodus 21:23-25

  In the days that followed, and while the little house remained cordoned off with a policeman stationed outside, the street, indeed the whole island, was abuzz with excitement. All the newspapers sent reporters who came and went and came again but more thrilling was the T.V. reporters who trundled down the little Canvey streets in their outside broadcast vans with their cameras and furry microphones.

  Mrs. B. was always first there of course but she overplayed her hand somewhat in relating what she thought she knew, liberally sprinkled with her own opinion, and so, much to her chagrin, nothing she declaimed was thought safe to broadcast. She carried that bitterness, along with quite a store of others, to her grave.

  And what was I doing in these thrilling times? I was everywhere…except at school. My mother had other things on her mind it seemed and provided I was not underfoot she did not attempt the struggle to get me to school. I rose early, at dawn sometimes, and raided the fridge for whatever I could find, and scavenged for discarded pennies in the kitchen or small coins that would not be missed from my mother’s purse or my brother’s trouser pockets.

  I found the gloves of course. They were on the hall stand, exactly where my dad always kept them. But then, gloves are gloves and there would have been hundreds of pairs sold to men other than my dad. I can’t deny that I searched for a gun, but I didn’t find one.

  I spent long days alternatively haunting the bushes, shrubs, and walls nearby to Bert and Peggy’s house, watching and listening. When all was quiet there, I, and sometimes Bones with me, would take off to the highways and byways of little Canvey and surreptitiously search the dilapidated boats, squint through the grubby windows of empty houses, scour the salt marshes and root through the back-street detritus of shops and businesses in our delicious quest for Peggy’s body. Of course, she was dead. She did not return and there didn’t seem to be much room for doubt, but dead or not it made little difference to me. I visualised bringing her home in triumph to a joyful Bert or much more likely being the bearer of the terrible news to police and news cameras. That poor Peggy was not still on the island was a probability that I chose to ignore. I dismissed all inconvenient certainties with the zeal of youth and improved on reality with hefty doses of imagination

  Kids came from miles around to look longingly at the crime scene and to try to get into the background of a shot when the crews were filming. I wasn’t one of them. In fact, I turned up my nose at doing anything that pathetic. I, after all, was a main player and I enjoyed my superior status by lording it over the other kids who clamoured for detail and to whom I was only too willing to exaggerate when describing the amount of blood and to elaborate on what I knew of the circumstances and events.

  It didn’t take long before I came to the attention of one of the news crews. One of the T.V. people pointed a camera at my head, another waved a microphone around in front of me while a slick man with a bad haircut asked me what had happened. I had an audience gathered around me, my contemporaries were open-mouthed in awe and envy, the women were agog to hear what I had to say and…I could not utter a word.

  My signal failure as a T.V. personality dented my confidence for years to come and, when recalled to mind by a mocking comment or a chance reference, caused me many, many moments of toe-curling embarrassment.

  In all the excitement however, my little tragi-comedy was instantly put aside by all but me. Women started taking long and circuitous routes past Hallam Road on the way to and from the shops, stopping to express their horror at such an event happening on little Canvey and, ‘no, they didn’t know the couple, but it was disgusting that this, whatever it was, should be allowed to happen and the government should do something about it.’ Or occasionally it would be someone who did know Bert and Peggy or someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew them, and they too were bold in their opinion that they were a ‘nice, quiet couple that kept themselves to themselves, but hadn’t they been stupid to stay in their modest little house when they had all that money. It was just asking for trouble, wasn’t it?’

  Nightly on the news our little street and all its little oddities, the strangely unfamiliar images of our neighbours, friends, and acquaintances were broadcast across the nation as Britain was gripped by the strange case of the missing millionairess. And still there was no sign and poor Bert suffered on, not knowing for certain but knowing in his heart.

  They were heady days indeed. If there was one small fly in my ointment it was that things were not right at home. Don’t get me wrong, things were never really right at home, at least I supposed not, having had limited experience to provide possible points of comparison. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that life was tenser at home, the atmosphere darker, voices either hushed or harsher than was usual but there were no longer any averages. To explain all this, I must introduce you to the members of my family.

  You have already met my mother briefly with her friend Vi. My mother was born and had lived all her life in the East End of London. They make gritty soap operas and tawdry dram
as now about the sort of life that my mother led then but in those early days not even progressive theatre dared to make entertainment out of women who frequented the rowdiest pubs, and both came from and created spectacularly dysfunctional families. From all that I could glean of my mother’s early life, the most dismal soap scenario would have been a walk in the park for her. She grew up poor, common as muck, loud-mouthed, brash and very, very pretty. Left alone her beauty would still have shone through but she felt the need to gild the lily and so her loveliness was converted into a pert, trashy sort of glamour.

  What I had learned of my mother’s early life had been discovered mainly by being present when she had forgotten my existence, let alone my presence, and which she did far more often than she should have. She was a careless mother. I know that now. She was not an intentionally cruel one though. She just brought up her children according to the same rules she had been subject to. Children came along, usually inconveniently, and you should love them when it did not interfere with your other interests or when you felt like it. I think my mother found, like millions of women before her, that life was hard enough and threw up enough mountains to climb without having a baby that wouldn’t stop crying or a brat that wouldn’t stop whining or a teen that wouldn’t stop demanding, dragging you back into penny-pinching, back-breaking domesticity.

  She’d given her first kid up for adoption and often loudly bewailed that fact to Vi and the others allowed into her drinking circle. The child had been a girl and, as I had heard my mother describe her, an angel. There was little chance of finding her and, although my mother regularly (after a drink or two) made the decision to hammer on the doors of the Social Services until they gave her back, I knew that she never would. The child would have been in her teens anyway and I’m fairly sure that this alone would have deterred my mother from chasing the shadows of the past.