Death of a Bovver Boy

by Bruce, Leo

  ‘Dead or alive?’

  ‘Either, as I see it. Probably dead. The boy came from Hartington. Father’s a foreman in a plastics factory.’

  ‘So you think the boy was murdered, stripped, and dumped in that ditch?’

  ‘Or vice versa. No idea yet. The doctor says he’d been dead for at least twenty-four hours when you found him. He could have been killed in Hartington on the Saturday afternoon, in fact, and brought across to Newminster, (that’s about thirty miles as you know) during the darkness of Saturday night.’

  ‘His ankles tied to the footrests of a motor-cycle and his arms round the rider’s waist. Wearing a helmet and goggles, perhaps?’

  ‘Yes. Obviously.’

  ‘But dead?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Why was he stripped then?’

  ‘Identification, I suppose. Or at least to delay identification. Actually, we knew on the third day that a Hartington youth known as “Dutch” Carver had been missing since Saturday afternoon. So the delay wasn’t of much use, was it?’

  ‘Not unless those two days were important to someone. They could have been.’

  Grimsby considered that.

  ‘Yes. I suppose so. The boy was a greaser. Had hair down to his shoulder blades. That, as you know, had been roughly cut.’

  ‘I saw that.’

  ‘And that’s about as far as I’ve got. Obvious suspects are the skinheads of the town, particularly one group. Doesn’t it seem a bit fantastic to you in this day and age that our murder suspects are quite often teenagers? It sickens me.’

  ‘Yes. How many of the group are there?’

  ‘About a dozen. I’ve questioned four without much satisfaction. You understand of course, that this conversation is in the strictest confidence, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course. I appreciate that. I’ll tell you what I’m considering. The facts begin to interest me and I think I’ll run over to Hartington. I don’t like the place, but it’s there that the core of this case would seem to lie. You needn’t be aware I’ve gone or show that you know me if we meet. I shall work on my own and if I get anything for you I’ll phone you here in Newminster.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll expect to hear from you.’

  ‘Don’t be too optimistic. I’m a bit out of my depths with all these young skinheads, greasers, hippies and muggers. But I shan’t keep anything from you. Facts, I mean. Theories are my own affair till they are strong enough to hand over. Agreed?’

  ‘Agreed. I’d like to see the D.S’s face if he heard us exchanging those words. He’s a sort of a caricature of a television Super. Has it ever occurred to you that Z Cars and the rest have materially influenced the Police Force? Life following Art, if you call them art.’

  ‘Television policemen are infallible, invariably infallible,’ said Carolus.

  Grimsby did not rise to that. He pulled out a notebook and began to give Carolus some more detailed and factual information about Hartington and its people. This Carolus noted carefully. Then, after Grimsby had refused a drink, the policeman prepared to leave.

  ‘I’ve purposely not given you any theories I may have, or am beginning to form,’ said Grimsby. ‘Because they’re not worth having yet. You’ll know more in an hour than I’ve been able to conclude in two days. I’m hoping you’ll go your own way. But you won’t be bored, Mr Deene. I can assure you of that.’

  ‘My name’s Carolus. And I’m not easily bored, especially by murder. It was murder, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes. The boy had been suffocated after being tied up.’

  ‘I rather thought that was how it was done. Poor little sod.’

  ‘Don’t be too ready with your sympathy till you’ve learned a bit more about him, Carolus.’

  ‘I’ll repress my kindly instincts.’

  ‘Until you know there is cause for them.’

  Grimsby smiled and left Carolus. His car was started and Carolus looked after its disappearing number plate.

  Mrs Stick came in almost at once.

  ‘I could see he was from the police,’ she boasted. ‘You can always tell. I suppose he’d come about the murder?’

  ‘He wanted some details about the finding of the body.’

  ‘I hope you told him what a nasty shock it was. Stick hasn’t really got over it yet.’

  She was stopped by a prolonged ringing of the front door bell. Her hand went to her heart with a rather exaggerated gesture.

  ‘Whoever can that be?’ she asked Carolus rhetorically as she went to the window. ‘Oh. Thank goodness. It’s only Mr Hollingbourne,’ she added, naming one of Carolus’s colleagues on the staff of the Queen’s School, Newminster, a philoprogenitive character whose children already numbered seven. ‘He won’t have come about anything to do with murders, that’s one sure thing.’

  But Mrs Stick was wrong, for once. Hollingbourne, tall, humourless and usually somewhat hostile to Carolus whom he regarded as a playboy, sat bolt upright in a chair and announced unnecessarily—‘I wanted to see you, Deene.’

  Carolus nodded. There was nothing else to do.

  ‘The Head tells me you are making enquiries about the young fellow found dead on Sunday night?’

  Carolus, who disliked Hollingbourne’s way of referring to Mr Gorringer as though he were an earthly deity, like a newspaper proprietor, again nodded.

  ‘I can tell you something about him,’ Hollingbourne said astoundingly.

  ‘You can? How on earth does that happen?’

  Hollingbourne got down to serious narrative.

  ‘As you may know,’ he said. ‘The wife and I are accustomed to take the children for a summer holiday to the seaside. We choose some place with a sandy beach where they can play cricket and so on. Those that are old enough, that is.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Three years ago it was to Kingsgate. Excellent sands and not too far away.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But unlike you, Deene, I was not provided by my parents with a large private income and in order to meet the expenses of a summer holiday for us all, I am forced to seek some form of additional remuneration.’

  ‘Coaching?’ suggested Carolus.

  ‘Not necessarily coaching, but adding to our numbers one or two young paying guests whose parents want to give them a healthy seaside holiday.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ Carolus could not repress the exclamation.

  ‘We have discovered that catering for increased numbers is comparatively economical. In a word, it pays.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘At first we agreed to limit the scheme to boys at the school whose parents found it inconvenient to keep them during the summer holidays. But lately we have found that parents from what the Head calls more plebeian backgrounds are those most able to afford to take advantage of the scheme. In the year we went to Kingsgate we had as a paying guest the son of a foreman in the All-Purpose Plastics Works at Hartington. His name was Carver.’

  ‘You’re not going to tell me that it was the boy whom Stick found dead on the Boxley Road?’

  ‘Unless I am very much mistaken…’ Hollingbourne’s tone made clear the near impossibility of this. ‘It was the same youth. In that case I advise you to have nothing to do with his death.’

  ‘But why not? It seems quite an interesting case.’

  ‘Interesting? Interesting? The boy was a dangerous schizophrenic. He induced my children to enter a cave in the cliffside and lit a fire in the entrance to imprison them there.’

  ‘All of them?’ Carolus asked.

  ‘Except the two smallest mites. They were fortunately with their mother. Had it not been for another family who heard my children screaming I shudder to think what might have happened. But that’s not all. He discovered a wardrobe dealer’s shop in Kingsgate and having pilfered the best part of the family wardrobe he sold it and spent the proceeds on going to the cinema at times when I usually organized games on the beach for us all.’

  ‘I used to do that,’ commented Carol
us.

  ‘He was rebellious and rude to my wife and even took advantage of my own holiday spirit to steal the light cigars I sometimes allow myself.’

  ‘Whiffs?’

  ‘That is their trade name. He was, in fact, a thoroughly unsatisfactory boy from start to finish of the holidays.’

  ‘Oh. He stayed with you to the finish?’

  ‘No,’ said Hollingbourne gravely. ‘He ran away. That is partly why I thought you should know something of the young wretch. He ran away during the night, or rather in the very early morning, and I had to report it to the police. Most disagreeable. We had never had any trouble of this kind before. They found him…’ Hollingbourne paused before bringing out his punch line … ‘They found him in London. In the West End. He was living on his…’ another pause which Carolus would like to have filled, then a concluding ‘wits’, from Hollingbourne.

  ‘How old was he then?’

  ‘Under fourteen years. A born delinquent. It horrifies me to think that he associated with my children. I feared for a long time that his influence might have proved corrupting. One of the girls, the wife told me at the time, used language that she can only have learned from him.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘It wasn’t so much the words she used. Children often use unpleasant words without understanding them. It was her whole manner towards her mother and me. Fortunately shortly afterwards she became a tennis enthusiast, playing in several competitions, and this seems to have given her a healthier interest. But you see the dangers when a young scoundrel of that sort enters a decent household?’

  ‘You haven’t seen him since, of course?’

  ‘Certainly not. I told his father to keep him away, explaining the anxiety he had caused us.’

  ‘What did his father say?’ asked Carolus curiously.

  ‘His remarks were unprintable. One saw at once where the influence came from, though I did not gather there was any love lost between father and son. One of his choicer threats was to “wring the little bleeder’s throat”. But I’m glad to say that from that summer onwards I have seen nothing of the family and only when the Head told me that you were interested in the boy’s death…’

  ‘He told you that? I wonder how he got hold of it.’

  ‘News travels fast in Newminster,’ said Hollingbourne. ‘You can’t hush things up. By the way, have you heard that Tubley’s getting married again?’

  ‘Tubley?’ repeated Carolus incredulously. Tubley was another colleague, the music master on the staff. ‘Who is…’

  ‘Another link with Hartington. She teaches at the Technical School there.’

  ‘Really? Then I shall probably meet her. I’m going to be in Hartington for the next week or two.’

  ‘I thought you might be, in spite of my warning. Snooping, I suppose? I doubt if the Head will approve of that but of course,’ conceded Hollingbourne, ‘it’s none of my business. I simply came to give you an idea about the young brute whose death you find it necessary to investigate.’

  ‘Not necessary. Interesting,’ said Carolus. ‘Which is where we came in.’

  Mrs Stick returning said—‘You haven’t offered Mr Hollingbourne a drink, sir.’

  ‘I’ve been so interested in what he has been telling me,’ said Carolus apologetically, ‘that I quite forgot my manners. Hollingbourne?’

  ‘A glass of sherry,’ said Hollingbourne cheerfully. ‘If you have a rather sweet one.’

  Carolus made a grimace.

  ‘I expect so. Mrs Stick?’

  ‘There’s the Amoroso,’ said Mrs Stick doubtfully.

  ‘That will do,’ said Hollingbourne. ‘You have a strange hobby, Deene. It would not do for me. So much else to do.’

  ‘I daresay you have. Your wife quite well?’

  ‘Splendid, thanks. She’s taking our oldest up to the oculist’s today. We believe in looking after their eyes. Here’s to your very good health.’

  Carolus responded suitably and soon afterwards Hollingbourne left.

  ‘I thought when I saw him coming to the door,’ Mrs Stick said, looking somewhat secretive, ‘that it was his wife again.’

  ‘But he wouldn’t come here for that,’ said Carolus anxiously

  ‘You never know. They haven’t got a telephone,’ said Mrs Stick.

  ‘I’m going to Hartington this afternoon,’ Carolus told her. ‘May stay over there for a few days. I’ll let you know where I’m staying if I do.’

  ‘I shan’t say anything,’ replied Mrs Stick ambiguously. ‘It’s no good, is it? I’ll just have to expect you when I see you. What shall I tell anyone who asks for you?’

  ‘No one will. Unless it happens to be Mr Gorringer.’

  ‘Well what shall I tell him? He’s bound to be round as soon as he hears that you’ve gone.’

  ‘Tell him that I’ve gone away for a few days. To see a man about a murder,’ Carolus added, and left Mrs Stick looking after him with evident disapproval.

  Chapter Three

  Among the pieces of information which Grimsby had given Carolus were some details about the dead boy’s father.

  ‘You’ll find Herbert Carver at 21 Crapper Place,’ he said. ‘Named after a former Mayor. Unfortunate as a street-name, isn’t it? Carver is living with a butcher’s wife, Mrs Farnham.’

  ‘What about the boy’s mother?’

  ‘Oh she’s living with a West Indian, Justus Delafont.’

  ‘I see. Then how about the butcher? I suppose he’s living with the West Indian’s wife?’

  ‘No. He’s queer,’ said Grimsby shortly.

  So as he drove through the outlying streets of Hartington, consisting of crowded little houses with mini lawns in front of them, Carolus pondered on these marital, and extra-marital complications. Then as it was early in the evening, the time at which a foreman in a plastics factory might be expected to be home, he decided to call on Herbert Carver, the boy’s legitimate father.

  The bell was answered by a bad-tempered looking woman in a chintz overall.

  ‘Yes. He’s in,’ she said sharply to Carolus’s enquiry. ‘I’ll see if he’s finished his tea. Wait a minute.’

  She was not long absent and said, ‘You can come in if you want, only you’ll have to excuse me. I’ve got work to do.’

  Carolus found Herbert Carver in a leatherette armchair. He was a solid-looking man in his late forties and smoked a pipe. He put aside an evening paper as Carolus entered.

  ‘Come to ask about my boy?’ he said. ‘I thought so. I’ve had a lot of them here earlier, waiting as soon as I got in from work, and the police yesterday and the day before. What is it you want to know? He was no good. I can tell you that, same as I told all the others. Not like his brother.’

  ‘I didn’t know he had a brother,’ Carolus said.

  ‘Oh yes he had. Older than him. Lives with his mother. See, we separated. No other way for it. She was one of those always fancying herself being chased by someone. You know—romantic. One day I’d come home and she’d say it was the man next door was after her. Another day it was the postman. At the last I told her, if you think they’re all chasing you, I said, you try being on your own and see how you get on. So that’s what she did and all she’s got is this black fellow.’

  ‘You were saying that you had an older son?’

  ‘That’s right. The two of them. Roger and Kenneth, only the lads always called Kenneth “Dutch”, I don’t know why.’

  ‘Kenneth stayed with you?’

  ‘I suppose you could call it that. He was out most of the time. Mrs Farnham—that’s my housekeeper as you might say—was always on about it. Out every night with a whole crowd of long-haired layabouts. I told her to let him get on with it. I wasn’t going to interfere. If he wanted to hang round the Spook Club…’

  ‘Is that a discotheque?’ asked Carolus.

  ‘Yes. Belongs to a fellow called Swindleton. They say he makes money out of it. I don’t know how, because none of them that hang round there
seem to have a ha’penny. But that’s where that boy of mine used to spend his time. I scarcely ever saw him and, to tell you the honest truth, that didn’t worry me, though he’d given up long ago asking me for money.’

  ‘You didn’t give him any?’

  ‘You must be joking. Give him any? To spend on pot and lousy little teenage tarts? I’m not that stupid.’

  ‘Was the discotheque you mentioned, the Spook Club, the only one in the town?’

  ‘There’s several of them. In a town like this where there’s plenty of work for the teenagers if they want it, there’s a lot of them got more money than they know what to do with. These discotheques are crowded at night just like the bingo halls for their mothers in the afternoons. People complain of the noise but they don’t seem able to stop it. Perhaps they’ll take some notice now, when one of the kids has been murdered.’

  ‘Your kid, Mr Carver.’

  ‘I suppose you’re going to blame me for it? I tell you I scarcely saw anything of him.’

  ‘There is a suggestion that one, or perhaps more, of the other youngsters was responsible.’

  ‘So they may have been. The short-haired lot. Skinheads they call them. I don’t know anything about that. One’s as bad as the other as far as I’m concerned.’

  A door at the back of the room, presumably leading to the kitchen, was suddenly opened and Mrs Farnham appeared. It was obvious that she had heard the men’s conversation and wished to make no secret of it.

  ‘No, and we don’t want anything to do with them,’ she said angrily. ‘If Bert’s son likes to get himself killed it’s no business of ours. He shouldn’t have gone about with a crowd like that, then perhaps he’d still be alive.’

  ‘I told him so, long ago when he first started it,’ said Carver.

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Well, he’s never been what you’d call a well-behaved boy. He’s got into no end of trouble even when he was no more than nine or ten years old. It’s like most of them nowadays, only he was worse. When he started doing things that the police took notice of, I left it to them. I’d got my job to think of and couldn’t afford to go on paying fines for the property he damaged and that.’