I was no longer part of the ‘A’ team and I was kept well away from Screwtop and Ozzy Desmond, I suppose because of my connection with Lucy. They were always afraid she was going to tell the police about them. They needn’t have worried, because Lucy may have slipped into dishonest ways but grassing was not one of them. In fact she kept to the code of ordinary decent criminals as though it was something she’d been brought up to since her school days.
So I was sent out with what was definitely a ‘B’ outfit, with Romeo Robinson and Alfie Barnet, who could be relied on provided they weren’t asked to do anything unexpected and the instructions were brilliantly clear. What led Mrs Robinson to call her child Romeo I can’t imagine. I suppose some African mums living round the East End of London have romantic ideas about their children, but this Romeo looked less like a heart-throb than a lightweight boxer grown old before his time. He’d been put into a number of fights to entertain the paying customers when he was younger and his nose had been well broken and his ears well cauliflowered before he gave it all up for the safety of life as a thief.
Alfie had probably, like me, never followed any entirely honest occupation. He was small, cheerful, able to squeeze through small windows and climb drainpipes. He could deal with simple burglar alarms and locks. Faced with anything more complicated, he would shrug his shoulders and grin as though it had all been a big joke anyway.
They weren’t highly qualified for what seemed like a routine job. It was a house on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Romeo had been keeping observation and listening to neighbours and he was sure the family were away on holiday. The back door could probably have been forced by an intelligent child with a penknife, but Alfie seemed to expect a round of applause when he managed it. The burglar alarm was also no problem. So we made a routine entrance in search of such routine articles as silver, television sets, money and other possibly valuable pieces.
I told the others I’d take the bedrooms and walked up the main staircase. Oddly, there was a light on in the corridor and I remember wondering vaguely why. But the main thing for me was that the feeling I’d described to Lucy, the excitement of being in someone’s house wondering if you were going to get caught, had gone completely. Quite honestly, if I felt anything at all it was boredom. I was sick and tired of the whole business. And then I heard the soft sound of music coming from an open doorway.
It seemed that I was past caring what happened, because I went to the doorway and looked. There was enough moonlight for me to see an old man with wispy grey hair fast asleep. The radio at his bedside was still playing long after he’d fallen asleep. Of course I could have gone in and nicked the radio, but you know what I did? You won’t believe this, and I hardly believed it of myself. I went in and switched the radio off for him.
Then I went down the stairs and out of the front door while the others were still at work in the dining room. I was away across Hampstead Heath, away from the crime I didn’t want to commit, and then I was back in Notting Hill Gate, still amazed at the change that had come over me.
Most of all I was looking forward to telling Lucy about it.
31
Terry came as early as possible that next visiting day. He seemed full of himself and very excited and said he had something important to tell me. When I asked him what, he said, with a sort of worried face I thought he’d put on for the occasion, ‘I’ve been thinking.’
‘Thinking about what?’ I always feel a certain amount of dread when people say they’ve been thinking.
‘Since you told me that I’d introduced you to crime.’
‘Well, you did.’
‘And of course I feel bad about it.’
‘You needn’t. It was quite exciting while it lasted. And Robin deserved to lose that picture anyway.’
He looked a bit nervous, as though he had a confession to make.
‘I told Mr Markby I felt bad.’
‘Do you tell Mr Markby everything?’
‘Most things, yes. So I told him I felt badly.’
‘Well, you needn’t.’
‘And now I’m going to tell him the big thing. But I’m telling you first.’
‘What big thing is that?’
It was then he began to tell me a long story about being in a Hampstead house at night and turning off a radio beside an old man sleeping and then leaving suddenly. Just clearing off home.
‘Why did you do that?’
‘Because I was bored with it.’
‘Bored with what?’
‘Crime. And then I made the big decision.’
‘What decision was that exactly?’
‘Just to get out of it. Once and for all.’
He looked at me with what I thought was a superior sort of smirk, as though he’d moved into a higher, better world and left me far below him in Holloway Prison.
‘Oh, that’s fine, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘That’s just great! I get into all this to understand you. To bond with you. To feel like you. So we could be together. So now you’re giving it all up, are you, to become Mr Markby’s favourite good boy, and leaving me in this dump!’ Well, it was what I felt and I had to say it.
‘I don’t want to leave you,’ Terry said. ‘I want to be with you. Always.’
‘We’ll have to see about that.’ I got up. ‘I’d better get back to the girls. They’ll be needing help with the laundry.’
So I left him looking completely surprised and ten minutes before the visiting time was over.
Later that day, I was in Recreation with Martine, watching television. I suppose I must have looked a bit down in the mouth because she asked me what the trouble was. I told her, ‘I’ve just fallen out with my boyfriend.’
‘It’s difficult to keep things like that going when you’re inside,’ she said. ‘That’s why a lot of the girls here are “prison bent”.’
‘What’s that mean exactly?’
‘They’re heterosexual with their boyfriends when they’re out. But like when they’re in here they, well, do it with each other. Have you ever thought of that?’
I promised her, as we watched Big Brother, that I’d keep it in mind.
32
It was clear that Lucy and me had drifted apart and, quite honestly, I couldn’t work out the reason why.
If anyone was to blame for our troubles I should have said she was, for taking part in a burglary which, of course, was a complete cock-up. From what she told me, and from what I heard around about Screwtop being connected with the job, it was pretty obvious that Detective Sergeant Ishmael Macdonald was on the case from the start. So what Lucy did was to walk straight into the arms of the law. But when I visited I couldn’t blame her for it. I was very careful not to lay any blame at all. That’s not what you want to hear when you’re behind bars, believe me.
But what was it all for, for God’s sake? During an earlier visit Lucy had told me what she took was a picture of a naked woman drying herself after a bath, which Robin Thirkell kept in his bedroom. What he kept it in there for I don’t know, unless perhaps he got his rocks off looking at it, which I wouldn’t put past the type of person he undoubtedly is. But was the amount of trouble she’d got into worth it? When I said that, she told me that I really didn’t understand anything about her. She was probably right.
I had looked into her Milton book, which seemed to be written in a foreign language at first, but I began to read it with the help of the notes Lucy had written out. So I got to read about the old devil who turned himself into a snake to tempt the first woman to steal. I think the first woman must have been a bit like Lucy, she was so easily tempted to steal an apple which must have had even less value than the picture of the bint just out of the bath.
I was, quite frankly, gobsmacked when I told Lucy this and, far from being impressed, she brought my visit to an abrupt end. I mean, this was exactly what she had wanted to happen on the day she met me coming out of the Scrubs and she took me for a giant burger. Admittedly I wasn’t all that proud of the way
I carried on, but she worked hard on my case.
But now all that work had paid off and all she seemed to be was angry with me and disappointed. She seemed to be happier with the women she lived with in Holloway - them that set fire to sleeping husbands and all that sort of thing. When we discussed that Lucy’s case might not be heard for around six months, at the start of the next year, Mr Bethell said he’d apply to a judge this time for bail, but Lucy didn’t want it. She said her friend Martine was due to have her baby at any moment and she didn’t want to leave her.
Whatever she thought about it or me, I was going to do my best to help Lucy. I couldn’t believe she planned a job like that by herself. She must have been forced into it, or tricked into it, by the old firm I used to work for, or, come to think of it, I’d been working for ever since I first met Chippy McGrath all those years ago.
I thought I should be a bit more sure of my ground before I accused Chippy. Then I remembered that a picture was the cause of all the trouble. I had the number of all Chippy’s associates, so I rang his art expert, a bit of an old fart called Hughie Whitcombe. I got an invitation to a drink with Hughie at his club in Pall Mall. To get in there I had to look respectable and remember to wear a tie.
The Gainsborough was nothing like the old Brummell Club or even the Close-Up, where I’d sometimes been with Lucy. The Gainsborough seemed to be a place mainly used for sleeping. The old bald-headed porter was asleep behind his desk in the marble-tiled entrance hall. He thought Hughie was in there somewhere, but having been asleep he couldn’t be quite sure where he’d got to. He led me across the hall and we had a peep through the half-open door of the ‘smoking room’, but there was no sign of Hughie there. Finally we discovered him wide awake alone at the bar, where the bloke in charge was leaning back against the shelf of bottles, his arms crossed, one hand clutching a dishcloth and his eyes closed. The few members at the tables talked quietly, afraid of waking this person up. Only Hughie sat with his eyes wide open, a grey-haired man whose glasses were continually slipping down his nose, wearing a tweed suit that looked as if it had lived with him for a long time and a spotted bow tie.
‘You’d like a drink,’ he welcomed me. ‘Guests can’t pay but I know you lot are always stuffed with folding money. Slip me a bit of it and we’ll do our best to wake up Clive.’
I slipped him a tenner in a way which he didn’t seem to mind the other members noticing. He then called ‘Clive!’ loudly so that the barman opened his eyes, looked startled and delivered a couple of whiskies quite quickly.
‘Thank you.’ Hughie gulped his and then asked me, ‘How is Leonardo de Medici?’
‘I don’t know him.’
‘No, of course you don’t. I’m sorry. I always think of our friend Leonard as like the great Medicis of Florence. A brigand, of course, but deeply interested in art.’
The words came tumbling out of Hughie, high-pitched and quite excited. I knew he’d written for one of the posh papers and then been sacked, to be replaced by some girl he always said ‘thought art was all about people videoing their own bottoms’. He’d got involved in the stolen picture business, first of all as a go-between, agreeing ransoms for stolen stuff, and then as Chippy’s adviser on what was worth stealing or how to turn stolen art into money.
‘Did Chippy ever say anything to you . . .’
‘You mean Leonardo?’ he corrected me. ‘Let’s show the greatest respect for an important patron of the arts.’
‘All right, Leonardo.’
‘Leonardo de Medici.’
‘If you want. Did he say anything about a picture of a woman drying herself after a bath?’
‘Oh! You mean the little Bonnard.’
‘Is that what I mean?’
‘Pierre Bonnard. Leonardo was going to “find” one for us. Picture of the painter’s wife, Marthe, having got out of the bath. As Leonardo said, it would have been worth more if she’d been in the bath, but all the same it would have been a nice little earner.’
‘Chippy . . . sorry, Leonard said he was going to get this picture?’
‘It was going to come to us through the system.’
‘But it never came?’
‘I suppose there must have been some hitch.’
‘Yes, I suppose there must.’
I didn’t tell him that the hitch was that the thief in question had landed up in Holloway Prison. Hughie woke Clive the barman up and ordered more drinks. Then he said, ‘Do stay for lunch if you can. It’s very reasonable here, and if you’d like to contribute a little of your folding money . . .’
‘You’ve done it all my bloody life. We did all the stealing for you and then we did the prison for you. All for you, you jammy bastard. We did the prison while you sat in that fucking maisonette and got richer and more respectable, and we all worked for you so you could become “Leonardo” - that’s what Hughie calls you. The great soon to be Sir Leonard who does good work for poor misguided prisoners. You just used me. All my life. But this time you went too fucking far. You used Lucy to do your stealing and now she’s in prison because of you, Chippy.’
I had caught him at work in SCRAP and, in spite of the protests of a worried-looking woman in the main office, when I got to him I didn’t, as you can see, mince my words. I gave it to him absolutely straight.
‘Don’t ever use that word in here.’
‘What word is that?’
‘Chippy!’ He scarcely whispered it.
‘Chippy!’ I said quite loudly. ‘I’m going to use it. And I’ll make sure Lucy uses it in court. She’ll have to explain why she went out stealing to get a picture for you. You organized the entire fucking job.’
‘She volunteered. She made sure I’d help her do it. She threatened to make trouble if I didn’t lay on a team for her.’
‘Screwtop and Ozzy. That was the team, wasn’t it?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘No perhaps about it. And Hughie was going to get the money for it.’
‘I meant her to have her share.’
‘Well, you’ll get your share, Chippy. She’s going to tell them the whole story in court.’
Chippy was sitting at his desk. He looked hunched-up, smaller than usual. He stared up at me, pleading.
‘What can I do about it?’
‘I don’t know. Give her some sort of a defence. She was with other people. Can you find someone to say they forced her to do it? Threatened her? You think of something. You’ll find someone else to take the blame. That’s your special subject, isn’t it, Chippy?’
He still looked up at me and said quietly, ‘I ought to get you killed, Terry.’
‘That wouldn’t do you any good.’ I managed to sound cheerful. ‘She’ll tell the story in court anyway. So you just think of a way of helping her out. Think about it, Chippy.’
I left him then. He did think about it, and he found a way out which was no help to Lucy. No help at all.
33
EXTRACT FROM THE MINUTES OF THE COUNCIL,
SOCIAL CARERS, REFORMERS AND PRAECEPTORS
Special meeting held at SCRAP offices, King’s Cross
Present:
GWENDOLEN GERDON, Executive Director (ED)
LADY DOUGHBERRY, representing the Bunyan Society for
Prison Reform
PROFESSOR MAXWELL HEATHERINGTON, Reader in
Criminology at the University of East Surrey
CAMPBELL DYSON, Chair of Dyson Soft Furnishing
IVY SINCLAIR, BBC Today programme
PETER BETHELL, partner in the firm of Bethell, Sherman and
Pensotti, Solicitors
THE REV. HARVEY TYLER, Rector, St Barnabas, King’s Cross
ALEX MARKBY, representing the Probation Service
Gwendolen Gerdon (the ED) read out the letter received from the chair, Leonard McGrath.
To the members of the council of SCRAP. My doctors have informed me that the British climate is seriously damaging my health and it is essential that I move to a place ab
road where I can enjoy the benefits of sunshine and warmth. To delay my departure would have risked further damage to the condition of my chest and lungs, so I’m sorry to say that I shall be out of the country when the council receives this letter.
I would like to add that it has been a pleasure and an honour to have been chair of SCRAP. I wish you all success under your new chair. Carry on with the good work!
Yours sincerely,
Leonard McGrath
The Rev. Harvey Tyler asked if Leonard McGrath had given any address of his residence abroad so that messages of sympathy and gratitude might be sent to him. The ED told the meeting that she had no information as to the whereabouts of our former chair, except it was clearly ‘a place in the sun’. She had made enquiries and discovered that his maisonette in Connaught Square was ‘up for sale’.
A motion was proposed by the Rev. Harvey Tyler and seconded by Lady Doughberry thanking Leonard McGrath for his inspirational leadership of SCRAP, to be sent to him as soon as the ED discovered his address.
Professor Maxwell Heatherington suggested that the meeting should proceed to elect a new chair. Various names were suggested, including Princess Anne, Mr Terry Wogan and Dame Judi Dench.
After further discussion, Peter Bethell said that we need look no further than this room to find an excellent chair, one with huge experience of the problems of prison and prisoners, and he proposed Mr Alex Markby and he was seconded by Mr Campbell Dyson. Mr Markby said he was taken aback at being offered such a great honour and his first instinct was to refuse, but after further thought he was persuaded that his long experience of the reform of ex-prisoners and finding them a useful place in society would be of value in a chair. ‘Leonard McGrath,’ he said, ‘would be a hard act to follow, but I can only do my best.’
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