Crime Writers and Other Animals

by Simon Brett

  And, anyway, if they was going to send a villain, least they could have done was to send a good one. Watchstrap Malone, I’ll have you know, got his cognomen (prison library again) from a case anyone would wish to draw a veil over, when he was in charge of hijacking a container-load of what was supposed to be watches from Heathrow. Trouble was, he only misread the invoice, didn’t he? Wasn’t the watches, just the blooming straps. Huh, not the kind of form suitable to someone who’s going to pass themselves off as any son of mine’s father.

  And as for using Berwick Street Barbara, well, that’s just a straight insult to your mother, isn’t it? I mean, I know she’s got the posh voice and the clothes, but she’s not the real thing any more than Watchstrap is. She gets her business from nasty little common erks who think they’re stepping up a few classes. But no genuine Hooray Henry’d be fooled by Barbara. Anyway, that lot don’t want all the quacking vowels and the headscarves – get enough of that at home. What they’re after in that line is some pert little scrubber dragged out of the gutters of Toxteth. But I digress.

  Anyway, like I say, it’s an insult to your mother and if she ever gets to hear about it, I wouldn’t put money on the roof staying on Holloway.

  No, I’m sorry, I feel like I’ve been done, and last time I felt like that, with Micky ‘The Cardinal’ O’Riordhan, he ended up having a lot more difficulty in kneeling down than what he had had theretofore.

  But now, Son, I come on to the more serious part of this letter. I was not amused to hear what your division master said about your work. If you’ve got the idea in your thick skull that being a toff has anything to do with sitting on your backside and doing buggerall, then it’s an idea of which you’d better disabuse yourself sharpish.

  I haven’t put in all the time (inside and out) what I have to pay for your education with a view to you throwing it all away. It’s all right for an authentic scion (prison library) of the aristocracy to drop out of the system; the system will cheerfully wait till he’s ready to go back in. But someone in your shoes, Sonny, if you drop out, you stay out.

  Let me clarify my position. Like all fathers, I want my kids to have things better than I did. Now, I done all right, I’m not complaining. I’ve got to the top of my particular tree. There’s still a good few pubs round the East End what’ll go quiet when my name’s mentioned and, in purely material terms, with the houses in Tenerife and Jamaica and Friern Barnet (not to mention the stashes under various bits of the country’s motorway network), I am, to put it modestly, comfortable.

  But – and this is a big but – in spite of my career success, I remain an old-fashioned villain. My methods – and I’m not knocking them, because they work – are, in the ultimate analysis, crude. All right, most people give you what you want if you hit them hard enough, but that system of business has not changed since the beginning of time. Nowadays, there is no question, considerably more sophisticated methods are available to the aspiring professional.

  Computers obviously have made a big difference. The advance of microtechnology has made possible that elusive goal, the perfect crime, in which you just help yourself without getting your hands dirty.

  For this reason I was particularly distressed to hear that you haven’t been paying attention in your computer studies classes. Listen, Son, I am paying a great deal to put you through Eton and (I think we can safely assume after the endowment for the new library block) Cambridge, but if at the end of all that you emerge unable to fiddle a computerized bank account, I am going to be less than chuffed. Got it?

  However, what I’m doing for you is not just with a view to you getting au fait with the new technology. It’s more than that.

  OK, like I say, I been successful, and yet the fact remains that here I am writing to you from the nick. Because my kind of operation, being a straightforward villain against the system, will never be without its attendant risks. Of which risks the nick is the biggest one.

  You know, being in prison does give you time for contemplation, and, while I been here, I done a lot of thinking about the inequalities of the society in which we live.

  I mean, say I organize a security-van hijack, using a dozen heavies, with all the risks involved (bruises from the pickaxe handles, whiplash injuries from ramming the vehicle, being shopped by one of my own team, being traced through the serial numbers, to name but a few), what do I get at the end of it? I mean, after it’s all been shared out, after I’ve paid everyone off, bribed a few, sorted out pensions for the ones who got hurt, all that, what do I get? Couple of hundred grand if I’m lucky.

  Whereas some smartarse in the City can siphon off that many million in a morning without stirring from his desk (and in many cases without even technically breaking the law).

  Then, if I’m caught, even with the most expensive solicitor in London acting for me, I get twelve years in Parkhurst.

  And, if he’s caught, what does he get? Maybe has to resign from the board. Maybe has to get out the business and retire to his country estate, where he lives on investment income and devotes himself to rural pursuits, shooting, fishing, being a JP, that sort of number.

  Now, I ask myself, is that a fair system?

  And the answer, of course, doesn’t take long to come back. No.

  Of course it isn’t fair. It never has been. That’s why I’ve always voted Tory. All that socialist rubbish about trying to ‘change society’ . . . huh. It’s never going to change. The system is as it is. Which is why, to succeed you got to go with the system, rather than against it.

  Which brings me, of course, to what I’m doing for you.

  By the time you get through Eton and Cambridge, Son, the world will be your oyster. Your earning potential will be virtually unlimited.

  Now don’t get me wrong. I am not suggesting that you should go straight. Heaven forbid. No son of mine’s going to throw away five generations of tradition just like that.

  No, what I’m suggesting is, yes, you’re still a villain, but you’re a villain from inside the system. I mean, think of the opportunities you’ll have. You’ll be able to go into the City, the Law . . . we could use a bent solicitor in the family . . . even, if you got really lucky, into Parliament. And let’s face it, in any of those professions, you’re going to clean up in a way that’ll make my pickaxe-and-bovver approach look as old-fashioned as a slide-rule in the days of calculators.

  Which is why it is so, so important that you take your education seriously. You have got to come out the genuine article. Never relax. You’re not there just to do the academic business, you got to observe your classmates too. Follow their every move. Do as they do. You can get to the top, Son (not just in the country, in the world – all big businesses are going multinational these days), but for you to get there you got to be the real thing. No chinks in your armour – got that? Many highly promising villains have come unstuck by inattention to detail and I’m determined it shouldn’t happen to you.

  Perhaps I can best clarify what I’m on about by telling you what happened to old Squiffy Yoxborough.

  Squiffy was basically a con-merchant. Used to be an actor, specialized in upper-class parts. Hadn’t got any real breeding, brought up in Hackney as a matter of fact, but he could do the voice real well and, you know, he’d studied the type. Made a kind of speciality of an upper-class drunk act, pretending to be pissed, you know. Hence the name, Squiffy. But times got hard, the acting parts wasn’t there, so he drifted into our business.

  First of all, he never did anything big. Main speciality was borrowing the odd fifty at upper-class piss-ups. Henley, Ascot, hunt balls, that kind of number, he’d turn up in the full fig and come the hard-luck story when the guests had been hitting the champers for a while. He sounded even more smashed than them, but of course he knew exactly where all his marbles was.

  It was slow money, but fairly regular, and moving with that crowd opened up other possibilities. Nicking the odd bit of jewellery, occasional blackmail, a bit of ‘winkling’ old ladies out o
f their flats for property developers, you know what I mean. Basically, just doing the upper-classes’ dirty work. There’s always been a demand for people to do that, and I dare say there always will be.

  Well, inevitably, this led pretty quick to drugs. When London’s full of Hooray Henries wanting to stick stuff up their ancestral noses, there’s bound to be a lot of openings for the pushers, and Squiffy took his chances when they come. He was never in the big league, mind, not controlling the business, just a courier and like point-of-sale merchant. But it was better money, and easier than sponging fifties.

  Incidentally, Son, since the subject’s come up, I don’t want there to be any doubt in your mind about my views on drugs. You keep away from them.

  Now, I am not a violent man – well, let’s say I am not a violent man to my family, but if I hear you’ve been meddling with drugs, either as a user or a pusher, so help me I will somehow get out of this place and find you and give you such a tanning with my belt that you’ll need a rubber ring for the rest of your natural. That sort of business attracts a really unpleasant class of criminal what I don’t want any son of mine mixing with. Got that?

  Anyway, getting back to Squiffy, obviously once he got into drugs, he was going to get deeper in and pretty soon he’s involved with some villains who was organizing the smuggling of the stuff through a yacht-charter company. You know the sort of set-up, rich gits rent this boat and crew and swan round the West Indies for a couple of weeks, getting alternately smashed and stoned.

  Needless to say, this company would keep their punters on the boat supplied with cocaine; but not only that, they also made a nice little business of taking the stuff back into England and flogging it to all the Sloane Rangers down the Chelsea discothèques.

  I suppose it could have been a good little earner if you like that kind of thing, but these plonkers who was doing it hadn’t got no sense of organization. The crew were usually as stoned as the punters, so it was only a matter of time before they come unstuck. Only third run they do, they moor in the harbour of this little island in the West Indies and, while they’re all on shore getting well bobbled on the ethnic rum, local Bill goes and raids the yacht. Stuff’s lying all over the place, like there’s been a snow-storm blown through the cabins, and when the crew and punters come back, they all get nicked and shoved in the local slammer to unwind for a bit.

  Not a nice place, the jail on this little island. They had to share their cells with a nasty lot of local fauna like cockroaches, snakes and mosquitoes, not to mention assorted incendiaries, gun-runners, rapists and axe-murderers.

  Not at all what these merchant bankers and their Benenden-educated crumpet who had chartered the yacht was used to. So, because that’s how things work at that level, pretty soon some British consular official gets contacted, and pretty soon a deal gets struck with the local authorities. No hassle, really, it comes down to a thousand quid per prisoner. All charges dropped, and home they go. Happened all the time, apparently. The prisons was one of the island’s two most lucrative industries (the other being printing unperforated stamps). A yacht had only to come into the harbour to get raided. Squiffy’s lot had just made it easy for the local police; usually the cocaine had to be planted.

  Well, obviously, there was a lot of transatlantic telephoning, a lot of distraught daddies (barristers, MPs, what-have-you) cabling money across, but it gets sorted out pretty quick and all the Hoorays are flown back to England with a good story to tell at the next cocktail party.

  They’re all flown back, that is, except Squiffy.

  And it wasn’t that he couldn’t raise the readies. He’d got a few stashes round about, and the odd blackmail victim who could be relied on to stump up a grand when needed.

  No, he stayed because he’d met this bloke in the nick.

  Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean he fancied him. Nothing Leaning Tower of Pisa about Squiffy.

  No, he stayed because he’d met someone he thought could lead to big money.

  Bloke’s name was Masters. Alex Masters. But, it didn’t take Squiffy long to find out, geezer was also known as the Marquess of Gorsley.

  Now, I don’t know how it is, but some people always land on their feet in the nick. I mean, I do all right. I get all the snout I want and if I feel like a steak or a bottle of whisky there’s no problem. But I get that because I have a bit of reputation outside, and I have to work to keep those privileges. I mean, if there wasn’t a good half-dozen heavies round the place who owe me the odd favour, I might find it more difficult.

  But I tell you, I got nothing compared to what this marquess geezer’d got. Unlimited supplies of rum, so he’s permanently smashed, quietly and happily drinking himself to death. All the food he wants, very best of the local cuisine. Nice cell to himself, air conditioning, fridge, video, compact-disc player, interior-sprung bed. Pick of the local talent to share that bed with, all these slim, brown-legged beauties, different one every night, so Squiffy said (though apparently the old marquess was usually too pissed to do much about it).

  Now, prisons work the same all over the world, so you take my word that I know what I’m talking about. Only one thing gets those kind of privileges.

  Money.

  But pretty soon even Squiffy realizes there’s something not quite kosher with the set-up. I mean, this Gorsley bloke’s not inside for anything particularly criminal. Just some fraud on a holiday villa development scheme. Even if the island’s authorities take property fiddling more seriously than cocaine, there’s still got to be a price to get him released. I mean, say it’s five grand, it’s still going to be considerably less than what he’s paying per annum for these special privileges.

  Besides, when Squiffy raises the subject, it’s clear that the old marquess doesn’t know a blind thing about this ‘buy-out’ system. But he does go on about how grateful he is to his old man, the Duke of Glammerton, for shelling out so much per month ‘to make the life sentence bearable’.

  Now Squiffy’s not the greatest intellect since Einstein, but even he’s capable of putting two and two together. He checks out this Gorsley geezer’s form and discovers the property fraud’s not the first bit of bovver he’s been in. In fact, the bloke is a walking disaster area, his past littered with bounced cheques, petty theft, convictions for drunkenness, you name it. (I don’t, incidentally, mean real crimes, the ones that involve skill; I refer to the sort people get into by incompetence.)

  Squiffy does a bit more research. He’s still got some cocaine stashed away and for that the prison governor’s more than ready to spill the odd bean. Turns out the marquess’s dad pays up regular, never objects when the price goes up, encourages the governor to keep increasing the supply of rum, states quite categorically he’s not interested in pardons, anything like that. Seems he’s got a nephew who’s a real Mr Goody-Goody. And if the marquess dies in an alcoholic stupor in some obscure foreign jail, it’s all very handy. The prissy nephew inherits the title, and the Family Name remains untarnished. Duke’s prepared to pay a lot to keep that untarnished.

  So it’s soon clear to Squiffy that the duke is not only paying a monthly sum to keep his son in the style to which he’s accustomed; it’s also to keep his son out of the country. In fact, he’s paying the island to let the Marquess of Gorsley die quietly in prison.

  It’s when he realizes this that Squiffy Yoxborough decides he’ll stick around for a while.

  Now, except for the aforementioned incendiaries, gun-runners, rapists and axe-murderers . . . oh, and the local talent (not that that talked much), the marquess has been a bit starved of civilized conversation, so he’s pretty chuffed to be joined by someone who’s English and talks with the right sort of accent. He doesn’t notice that Squiffy’s not the genuine article. Too smashed most of the time to notice anything and, since the marquess’s idea of a conversation is him rambling on and someone else listening, Squiffy doesn’t get too much chance to give himself away.

  Anyway, he’s quite content to listen, t
hank you very much. The more he finds out about the Marquess of Gorsley’s background, the happier he is. It all ties in with a sort of plan that’s slowly emerging in his head.

  Particularly he wants to know about the marquess’s school-days. So, lots of warm, tropical evenings get whiled away over bottles of rum while the marquess drunkenly reminisces and Squiffy listens hard. It’s really just an extension of how he started in the business, pretending to get plastered with the Hoorays. But this time he’s after considerably more than the odd fifty.

  The Marquess of Gorsley was, needless to say, at one of these really posh schools. Like his father before him, he had gone to Raspington in Wiltshire (near where your grandfather was arrested for the first time, Son). And as he listens, Squiffy learns all about it.

  He learns that there was four houses, Thurrocks, Wilmington, Stuke and Fothergill. He learns that the marquess was in Stuke, that kids just starting in Stuke was called ‘tads’ and on their first night in the dorm they underwent ‘scrogging’. He learns that prefects was called ‘whisks’, that in their common room, called ‘the Treacle Tin’, they was allowed to administer a punishment called ‘spluggers’; that they could wear the top buttons of their jackets undone, and was the only members of the school allowed to walk on ‘Straggler’s Hump’.

  He learns that the teachers was called ‘dommies’, that the sweet shop was called the ‘Binn’, that a cricket cap was a ‘skiplid’, that the bogs was called ‘fruitbowls’, that studies was called ‘nitboxes’, that lunch was called ‘slops’, and that a minor sports colours tie was called a ‘slagnoose’.

  He hears the marquess sing the school songs. After a time, he starts joining in with them. Eventually, he even gets a bit good at doing a solo on the School Cricket Song, traditionally sung in Big Hall on the evening after the Old Raspurian Match. It begins,

  Hark! the shout of a schoolboy at twilight

  Comes across from the far-distant pitch,