‘OK … anyway, Oliver sees it and tells me to stop and put the car’s headlights on full beam to blind anyone coming from our front, and he pulls the boy’s body out of the car and carries it into the dark. I hear a bit of a splash and then he returns and we drive off. Oliver said we had to dump the brass’s body a long way off so the police wouldn’t connect the two murders – which we did and they didn’t. Until a couple of days ago.’ Cassey paused. ‘So that’s what happened and that’s why I asked to talk to you. You got there and you’re easier to talk to, not like those younger Chelmsford coppers, shouting into both my ears at the same time. All that made me do was say “no comment” to all their stupid questions. I was only storing them for a few weeks.’
‘What?’ Ingram asked. ‘Storing what?’
‘The goodies taken by the burglars I know. They gave me a handy-sized wedge to let them store all that stuff for a month before they could move it to a more secure lock-up. If you’d called one week earlier … or three weeks later, the police wouldn’t have found it all and I wouldn’t have been in here lying awake all night, thinking. Lucky you, eh?’
‘Lucky us,’ Ingram replied. ‘And you know you’re on your way to making a statement on the record?’
‘And we’ll need Oliver Hardy’s name,’ Mundy added. ‘If you want to help yourself you’ll have to do what you said and get him into a fine mess, Stanley.’
‘I know … I’ll need to think about it.’ Cassey stood and banged loudly on the door of the agent’s room with the flat of his hand. ‘Let me have a day or two to think about it.’
‘Or a night or two,’ Mundy replied. ‘It seems to be the case that you do all your most useful thinking at night. But yes, we can do that, although we are obliged to notify Chelmsford police of what you have just told us.’
Cassey shrugged. ‘Tell the world, because, like we all know, it’s still meaningless without a signed confession.’ A rattle of keys was heard and the door to the agent’s room was silently opened. ‘But do give my regards to the Chelmsford cops. You can tell them that you got their man … they didn’t. You can tell them it took a couple of old, grey boys in the autumn of their lives to do in a few days what they couldn’t do in ten years. You tell them that, from me. Bless their little cotton socks.’
‘My … our grandmother, lovely, lovely lady that she was, had eight pregnancies, from which she had twenty-two grandchildren. And every last one of them turned out all right except me.’
Maurice Mundy smiled warmly at Horace Tweedale. In him, Mundy thought that he saw an honest man. He liked the look in Tweedale’s eyes, he liked the softness of his voice and he liked the man’s frankness.
‘I am the black sheep of the Tweedale family.’
‘Sorry to hear that,’ Mundy replied. ‘I am sorry that you feel that way.’
‘Well, it helped you find me, didn’t it?’ Horace Tweedale shrugged. ‘My criminal record?’
‘Yes, it was useful. For theft, I noticed, but only one conviction and that was quite a few years ago.’ Mundy read the room. He found it basic, lacking in comfort and luxury, the home of a single man on a low income. The heating was turned down, causing Mundy to shiver.
‘I don’t put the heating on until my breath condenses,’ Horace Tweedale explained. ‘I wrap up well indoors and if it gets too cold I climb into my bed … but yes, I have just the one conviction – sufficient to ruin my life. I found it difficult to get a job and I have been on the dole for so long now that I am unemployable. As you can see … my little rented flat is not much to show for my years. I’ll be sixty-five soon and then I’ll be a pensioner … I’ve never worked in my life. Not to speak of, anyway. The great disappointment of the once-proud Tweedale family …’
‘You must be able to find some positives in your life,’ Mundy suggested. ‘It can’t all be doom and gloom.’
‘Oh, yes.’ Tweedale nodded. Mundy saw a short, slightly built man dressed in a thick yellow pullover and brown corduroy trousers, both of which items he recognized as having ‘charity shop’ stamped on them. ‘I have good health for my years. I get out for a walk most days; it’s only very bad weather keeps me at home. Just around the area but it gets me out … I did steal a few thousand pounds and that was a few thousand pounds a good few years ago. You could quadruple that to get today’s equivalent value. It was enough to buy a new mid-range motor car … a new Volvo saloon or a new Audi … so it was a tidy sum, all right. Very tidy.’
‘What happened?’ Mundy asked. It was not the reason for his visit but he’d become curious.
‘I dipped my hand in the till,’ Tweedale explained matter-of-factly. ‘Same old story.’
‘It must have been quite a deep till,’ Mundy observed.
‘I was employed as a gofer by one of my other cousins,’ Horace Tweedale explained. ‘My cousin, Margaret. She married a man in the licensed retail trade and he was given the stewardship of a working man’s club. She persuaded her husband to employ me as a gofer. You see, the Tweedale cousins, all twenty-two of us, were very close … more like brothers and sisters. Nothing and nobody could get between us. Tweedale brothers and sisters fall out but no Tweedale cousin ever quarrelled with any other Tweedale cousin.’
‘I see. So you knew your cousin Anne very well?’ Mundy clarified.
‘Yes.’ Horace Tweedale smiled. ‘Yes, my cousin Anne was the top cousin, the one who had achieved the most in life with her acting. We were all very proud of her, although it was my cousin Sandra who became the kingpin. She keeps us all notified of any family news. Anyway … to cut a long story short, I had a gambling problem. I still have, in fact. Being a gambler is a bit like being an alcoholic … an alkie is either wet or dry but he’s always an alkie.’
‘Yes, so I believe,’ Mundy replied.
‘And a gambler is either active or inactive but he’s still a gambler,’ Horace Tweedale explained. ‘A dry alcoholic can’t take a single drink without starting to drink again and an inactive gambler can’t walk into a betting shop without starting to gamble heavily again. It is just the way of it.’
‘Again, so I believe.’ Mundy glanced at the double-decker bus as it drove slowly past the building in which Horace Tweedale rented a flat.
‘So, my sad tale,’ Horace Tweedale continued, ‘was that each weekday morning I took the previous night’s takings to the bank and paid it in.’
‘You held a position of trust?’ Mundy observed.
‘Yes.’ Horace Tweedale sighed. ‘But I was family and I wasn’t going to steal from family, or my cousin’s husband, Roy. He and I hit it off together … I really got to like Roy.’
‘I see,’ Mundy replied.
‘Anyway, I’d been doing that for a few years,’ Horace Tweedale took a deep breath before he continued, ‘and the walk took me past a betting shop.’
‘Oh, no …’ Mundy put his hand to his head. ‘I think I can see where this is going.’
‘Yes.’ Horace Tweedale glanced out of the window. ‘Anyway, on that fateful day two or three things happened. The first is that it was, by coincidence, just sheer coincidence, my birthday and I was well out of sorts. I was really down in the dumps because I felt I had not done anything with my life. I had no trade or skill to offer on the job market. I had won and then lost a lot of money through gambling. I hadn’t had a serious long-term girlfriend in my life. The same depressed attitude that can lead a man to drink can also lead a man to gamble.’
‘Yes,’ Mundy offered by way of condolence, ‘I can understand that.’
‘So, anyway … the next thing was that that morning was the first working day after a four-day weekend, so I had four nights’ bar takings to pay in instead of the usual one night, or three nights in the case of Monday mornings, and the final nail in the coffin was that there was a delay in making up the bag that day.’ Again Horace Tweedale paused to take a deep breath. ‘So when I walked past the betting shop, which was normally closed when I passed it, the wretched thing had opened for the day’s b
usiness.’
‘The temptation was too great,’ Mundy anticipated.
‘Yes. If it had been open and I was feeling better about myself I probably wouldn’t have gone in to it … but in I went.’ Horace Tweedale hung his head. ‘And all the gamblers’ logic just clicked in, all that self-delusion … I’m only borrowing it … I’ll make a profit and pay back what I borrowed so no one will notice … And you know, the rich thing was that I did that – just that. I turned a profit, not much, sufficient for a night in the pub … but I got greedy.’
‘Fatal.’ Mundy nodded.
‘You don’t have to tell me … almost quite literally fatal.’ Horace Tweedale spoke in a low voice. ‘I was suicidal at the end of it, but … I was greedy. I wanted more and I bet and began to lose. But I had tasted a win so I started chasing it … and the upshot was that by the end of the day I had only some loose coins left so I jumped on a bus, went north to the river and put them into slot machines in a Soho amusement arcade. I had just ten pence left in my pocket when I went into Tottenham Court Road Police Station to give myself up.’
‘Have you gambled since?’ Mundy thought it a very sad tale.
‘No. I was sentenced to six months in prison, ordered to attend Gamblers’ Anonymous and to pay the money back,’ Tweedale explained.
‘Have you,’ Mundy asked, ‘paid the money back?’
‘Oh, yes … like how?’ Tweedale appealed to Mundy. ‘The words blood and stone spring to mind. No, the money was never recovered. Roy lost the stewardship of the working men’s club and the whole business … well, it put a terrible strain on their marriage. But they pulled through and Roy obtained another stewardship.’
‘Fortunate,’ Mundy commented. ‘He was lucky.’
‘Yes.’ Tweedale nodded. ‘But he could argue he hadn’t done anything criminal, that the practice of allowing me to carry the money to the bank had worked well for years and he’d learned a valuable lesson – that being if you want something done properly, do it yourself.’
‘Yes.’ Mundy sat back in his chair. ‘It’s often good advice.’
‘And the post he was offered was difficult to fill – a rough club in a rough area – but of all the cousins it was Anne that was the most supportive.’ Horace Tweedale smiled briefly. ‘Good old Anne … and it is, of course, Anne who you want to talk about.’
‘Yes, but it is interesting to hear how supportive she was to you.’ Mundy once again glanced round Horace Tweedale’s cell-like room in Plumstead.
‘That was Anne all over.’ Horace Tweedale sighed again. ‘She kept telling me that I mustn’t blame myself. She even offered to let me have the money to give to Margaret and Roy but I felt I couldn’t accept it.’
‘Noble of you,’ Mundy commented.
‘Possibly.’ Horace Tweedale shrugged. ‘But I felt I had to rescue something. We were middle church as an extended family … lower middle class … upper working class, spread about Catford and Forest Hill. The girls left school to work in banks, the boys took apprenticeships, all very self-respecting … and our Anne rose up above that and became a film star, in a small way, but she worked in Hollywood for a while. I was quite close to her despite a twenty-year age gap. I met the boy who murdered her on a few occasions … He doted on her. I couldn’t believe it when he was convicted of her murder. I just could not believe it. He just wanted to please her, so it seemed to me. I thought he was very child-like in many respects.’
‘Yes.’ Mundy shifted his position in the chair in which he sat. ‘I understand there was a rift between Anne Tweedale and her sister?’
‘Anne and Phyllis … like I said, no two cousins ever fell out but brothers and sisters did. Anne and Phyllis quarrelled, all over Phyllis’s choice of husband,’ Horace Tweedale explained. ‘Their father, my uncle Edward, disapproved of the match so much that he said he’d disinherit Phyllis if she married him, and she had an awful lot to lose by being disinherited. Uncle Edward was a successful businessman who saw the value of property and he built up quite a portfolio of houses, about ten or twelve, which he rented out to young, professional people. It wasn’t like this shot-through-with-damp pile I have to live in which the owners rent to the chronically unemployed, but they were, in fact, good, solid houses, let to the sort of people who respected the property – mainly young, professionally employed females because he believed that they would be more house-proud, and he had retained a gardener to look after the gardens.’
‘Nice,’ Mundy commented. ‘It sounds a very safe place for his money.’
‘It was. It was a nice little earner for him. The rents provided a steady income and of course he owned the houses … so yes, it was a nice little empire he had built up. But … the threat to disinherit her didn’t stop my cousin Phyllis from marrying the man of her choice,’ Tweedale opened his left palm, ‘and my uncle Edward followed through with his threat and rewrote his will, leaving everything to Anne. He was a widower by then, you see.’
‘Ah.’ Mundy nodded. ‘I was going to ask.’
‘So the rift followed upon Uncle Edward’s death. Phyllis and her husband were struggling on his salary and Phyllis asked if she – Anne – would give her and her husband a proportion of their father’s estate. Anne wouldn’t consider it. She explained it wasn’t that she was being heartless and selfish and that she wanted it all for herself and all the rest of it, but the issue was that she had to honour her father’s wishes out of respect to his memory. So Phyllis got nothing. I mean that she still got nothing while Anne kept everything. And then Anne made herself even wealthier from her acting career.’ Tweedale paused. ‘But that didn’t spoil her. She never forgot her Forest Hill roots and she always had time for her family – it was just that she and Phyllis became estranged.’
‘I see. Did you ever meet Phyllis’s husband?’ Mundy asked.
‘Oh yes, a couple of times. I attended the wedding, in fact … it was a proper church do. Her father paid for it and gave her away in the traditional manner, but he still disinherited her.’ Tweedale once again glanced out of the window of his small flat. ‘But I did see what her father didn’t like in him. Her husband had cold, hard green eyes. He was a policeman and … I don’t know if this makes sense but I felt that if he wasn’t a police officer he’d be a felon. He had that look of evil about him.’
‘Oh,’ Mundy raised his head, ‘yes, I know what you mean … I know exactly what you mean. Do you recall his name?’
‘Spate,’ Horace Tweedale replied. ‘She married a geezer called Spate.’
Mundy paused, then said, ‘I knew you were going to say that. I was very afraid that you were going to say that, but at the same time I knew that you were going to.’
‘Duncan Spate,’ Horace Tweedale continued. ‘Spate … like a river in flood … same spelling. Why? Is that significant?’
‘Probably.’ Mundy decided to be circumspect. ‘It probably is significant but only probably. I don’t want to rush any fences. I understand that Anne Tweedale had quite a collection of brass artillery shell casings from the Great War?’
‘Yes, she had quite a few … thirty or forty of them. They had been brought back from France by a relative of our grandmother. You know, you hear stories of such bad luck from that war … of soldiers being killed after being at the Front for just a few hours, and the statistic that the life expectancy of a junior officer in the infantry once he had arrived in France was just ten days. But my grandmother’s relative went through all the four years of it without so much as a scratch. He collected the shell casings and brought them home each time he had a period of leave. As I said, I think there were about thirty-plus all told,’ Tweedale informed. ‘All kept well-polished.’
‘He was “KH”,’ Mundy asked, ‘being the initials scratched on the shell casings?’
‘Yes, Keith Hammond, Hammond being my grandmother’s maiden name, but what relative he was to her I don’t know. She inherited them and my uncle Edward inherited them from her, and when he died they became Anne Tw
eedale’s possessions, as did the rest of Uncle Edward’s estate.’
‘And Anne’s house was cleared and then it was sold,’ Mundy continued. ‘Do you know what happened to her wealth?’
‘Nope.’ Horace Tweedale shrugged. ‘No one knew where it all went … her house, her savings, her possessions … None of the Tweedale clan saw any of it – not to my knowledge, anyway.’
‘Are you in contact with your cousin, Phyllis?’ Mundy asked.
‘I can contact her if I need to. My cousin Sandra will be able to tell me where she lives, but Phyllis, she seems to have drifted apart. And now with respect of all the cousins it’s a case of “no news is good news”. If we don’t hear that any of us are seriously ill or have died then it means that they’re still alive and kicking somewhere … Cousin Sandra will know where.’ Horace Tweedale forced a smile. ‘That’s what it has come to. The Tweedales are fading – we are such a shadow of our former selves. We are but a pale shadow of our former selves.’
‘It is often the way of things, sadly.’ Mundy stood up. ‘Great families fade. But thank you for your information. It’s been useful, very useful indeed.’
Horace Tweedale also stood up. ‘Look, I don’t like saying this, I don’t like asking … but I really have run out of grub, not even a can of beans left, and I don’t get my dole for a day or two.’
‘Of course.’ Mundy took his wallet from his pocket and gave Tweedale a twenty-pound note.
‘Thanks, squire. It’ll all go on food, I promise.’ Tweedale smiled as he took hold of the money. ‘Like I said, I didn’t like to ask but you seem a good-hearted young geezer.’
‘Long time since anyone has called me “young”.’ Mundy smiled as he replaced his wallet. ‘A long, long time.’
‘You’re younger than me.’ Tweedale held warm eye contact with Maurice Mundy. ‘But thanks again. I’ll spend it on food, not squander it down the bookies. You have my word.’
A Cold Case Page 16
