The Victory Snapshot (A Chris Tyroll Mystery Book 1)

by Barrie Roberts

  ‘Get up!’ I shouted. ‘Put your hands up and stand against that wall!’ I’ve never felt more like killing someone in my life. The man who’d frightened me was two floors down and out cold, but I needed something to compensate for my terror.

  There was a fusillade of loud knocks at the front door. An amplified voice yelled, ‘Armed police! Open up!’ Two police cars shot into the yard, blue lights flashing and sirens yelping like hounds.

  ‘Switch all the lights on,’ I told Sheila, ‘and open the front door — slowly and carefully so they don’t shoot you. I’ll look after this little bastard.’

  Heavy feet sounded on the bottom of the fire escape. ‘Don’t!’ I shouted. ‘The top handrail’s broken. It’s not safe!’ They stopped. There were voices down below, inside and out, and more feet coming up the stairs.

  John Parry’s voice sounded behind me. ‘Citizen’s arrest is it, Mr Tyroll? I think you can give me the gun now.’

  I passed it over my shoulder to him and my hand began to shake as I released the weapon.

  Parry slipped past me into the room. ‘What’s your name?’ he snapped at the man in the leather jacket.

  ‘Gibson,’ he said, ‘Frank Gibson,’ at a second attempt when he had got his voice working. I felt a nasty satisfaction at knowing that other people were scared when someone pointed a big ugly pistol at them.

  ‘Frank Gibson,’ recited Parry, ‘you are under arrest for breaking and entering with intent to commit an indictable offence and for possible other offences including murder or aiding and abetting murder. You do not have to say anything, but your defence may be harmed if you do not mention anything which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’

  He slid the gun into his pocket and turned away. ‘Take him, lads,’ he said to two officers who stood in the corridor.

  ‘Now,’ he said brightly, ‘since that’s a crime scene, is there somewhere we can have a chat about all this?’

  I led him and Sheila down to my own office, sat them down and went in search of the Birthdays Bottle in Jayne’s desk. Parry eyed it when I returned with three glasses.

  ‘Don’t give me the ‘No thank you, sir — I’m on duty’ bit,’ I said.

  ‘I was about to remark,’ he said, ‘that I was just off shift when Sheila’s call came in, so I am here voluntarily, which I think permits me to accept an offer of refreshment.’

  I poured three large ones. Sheila was white, her freckles standing out like paint, but a treble whisky, swallowed without pause, restored her colour. Parry took his in three gulps and stood up.

  ‘Have a rest,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to go and talk to my lads.’

  When he’d gone, I lifted my glass to Sheila. ‘You saved my life,’ I said.

  She grinned. ‘I told you,’ she said. ‘No one’s going to shoot you and stuff you except me, Chris Tyroll.’ Then she came round the desk at me and suddenly all the fear and anger was disappearing as she wrapped herself about me.

  Some time afterwards John Parry coughed at the door. ‘Wonderful,’ he remarked, ‘the effects of alcohol on the inexperienced.’

  He dropped into a chair. ‘Tell me about it,’ he said.

  We explained about the rambling discussion at my home, Alasdair’s input and the decision to visit the office.

  ‘And you were so full of Al Thayne’s wine,’ he said, ‘that when you found you’d got a couple of Her Majesty’s killers on the premises you decided to sort them out yourself?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I just meant to lock the fire escape door so as to delay them till you got here.’

  He shook his head. ‘A long time ago,’ he said, ‘I warned you to leave it alone. What’s the use of me making Inspector if the public goes about arresting killers?’

  He was serious again. ‘The man with the gun,’ he said. ‘Do you know his name?’

  ‘He never introduced himself,’ I said.

  ‘No. Well, he wouldn’t. According to the majority of the identification he had on him, his name’s Naylor.’

  ‘What department?’ I asked.

  ‘That,’ said Acting Inspector Parry, ‘is an Official Secret, Mr Tyroll, the answer to which I cannot give you. Suffice it to say that his superiors have been informed already and have already said that they can’t imagine why he was in Belston.’

  ‘What’s he saying?’ asked Sheila.

  Parry gazed at her. ‘He’s not saying anything, love. He broke his neck when he hit the yard.’

  I looked quickly at Sheila to see how she took the news. Her grey eyes widened slightly, but her voice was steady.

  ‘Good,’ she said, ‘exactly what he did to Grandpa. Now your bosses can’t let the murdering swine off.’

  We settled down to making statements while one of John’s DCs supplied us with coffee. It was daylight by the time we finished.

  Parry slid the statement forms into his document case and stood up.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘You’re not going to have any bother over this. When Naylor’s DNA has been checked I shall put him on the file as the killer of Walter Brown. Gibson will confess to me his part in the Cassidy murder.’

  ‘You’re sure he will?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, yes, I’m very sure. When he does I shall charge him with aiding and abetting the murders of Walter Brown and Francy Cassidy. No one’s going to stop me doing that.’ ‘What’ll he get?’ asked Sheila.

  ‘Life,’ he said, ‘twice over. We charge accessories as principals. Killing two old men should guarantee a judge’s recommendation for a minimum of twenty years. Now go home to bed.’

  We did, and lay sleepless. After a long time Sheila began to cry silently until at last she slept.

  27

  It seemed to be only seconds before the alarm woke me. I banged it off and willed myself to stay awake until I could phone Jayne at home. I managed to make it and warn her that there would probably be coppers crawling all over the filing room and the fire escape all day, that the press would be making her life a misery, and that I wasn’t coming in to the office and I wasn’t taking any phone calls before sleep overcame me again.

  It was late morning when I woke again. Sheila was ahead of me, showered and in the kitchen brewing up.

  After breakfast I stretched my legs luxuriously under the kitchen table. ‘I have told Jayne,’ I said, ‘that I am not appearing in the office today. We can have a day of rest.’

  ‘No chance!’ she exclaimed. ‘Aren’t you forgetting a couple of things?’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘In the midst of all the drama last night, we never did get to see if Grandpa left anything in the deeds cabinet, did we?’

  ‘True.’

  ‘And you’re expecting a parcel from Pete the computer genius, aren’t you?’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Well, get your shoes on, cobber. There’s work to do.’

  As we arrived at the office a motor-cycle courier was walking out to his machine.

  Jayne had put the package from Pete on my desk. I opened it and began to sort through it. The first item was a typed schedule of figures. A note at the bottom said, ‘Figures, apparently scores, extracted from blackboard, left side of dartboard, left-hand wall.’ I admired his thoroughness and turned over. Next was an enlarged print with a typescript clipped to the back. The print showed part of the dartboard and the right hand scoreboard adjacent to it. Something was scrawled there in large chalked capitals. I couldn’t read it, but the attached note read, ‘Writing on blackboard, right side of dartboard, left hand wall, apparently darts fixture.’ Pete had tried hard to decipher it and transcribed it as:

  L.B. LEAGUE

  T — — — SUNDAY

  — AG — E & P — M —

  v

  T — B — LL

  2.30

  PL — S— — — — — — — — E!!

  I didn’t see anything in that either, but underneath it was a thick wad of prints of faces. He had really gone to
town on those. He had taken Watson and Thompson and Berry as they appeared in the photograph and tried every way of ageing them by fifty years. There were several versions of each face, thin old men with bald heads, thin old men with thick silver hair, wrinkly-faced old men, smoothy-chops old men, fat-faced old men, old men with moustaches and beards, old men in every variety of spectacles — the variety was bewildering.

  I was passing the face prints across to Sheila, but she was scarcely glancing at them.

  ‘While you’re playing Photofit,’ she said, after a bit, ‘do you think I could look for Grandpa’s will?’

  I gave her my keyring and pointed out the deeds cabinet key. ‘They’re all in alphabetical order, each in a sealed brown envelope. It should be near the top being a B. When you’ve got it, lock the cabinet again and bring it down.’

  My desk was awash with Pete’s adventures in physiognomy when Alasdair walked in, back from court.

  ‘I hear you had quite an exciting night after I dropped you off,’ he said. ‘Sorry I didn’t stay, but I didn’t know there was going to be any fisticuffs.’

  ‘There wasn’t,’ I said. ‘There was a lot of creeping about in the dark by myself and Sheila, a certain amount of waving guns and making threats by Mr Naylor and then he met with an unfortunate accident.’

  ‘Naylor must be the government chappy? The spy or whatever?’

  ‘He was,’ I confirmed. ‘He was also the swine who killed Walter Brown, and Sheila had the considerable consolation of chucking him off the fire escape and breaking his bloody neck. Not that she meant to,’ I added, ‘she was saving my neck at the time.’

  ‘Nice lady, Sheila,’ he said. ‘Does you good, governor. You really ought to keep her about.’

  ‘If people are going to go on bombing me and shooting at me, I shall.’

  ‘And are they?’

  ‘Are they what?’

  ‘Going to go on with the bombing and all that? Do you know any more about it?

  ‘No,’ I admitted, ‘but Sheila’s upstairs looking for her grandfather’s will. That might tell us something.’

  I extracted another clip of documents from Pete’s package. This time it was another set of ration book covers, full-page size. Across the top one he had scribbled, ‘Not a trace on any of them — these books have not been written on.’

  I showed it to Alasdair. He riffled through them for a moment, then said, ‘Forgeries, then. You were right.’

  ‘But are a few forged ration books that important after fifty years? And it can’t have been more than a few. Either they nicked some of that special paper or — most unlikely — they managed to imitate it. Either way, it can’t have been a big operation.’

  Sheila came back and laid a sealed envelope on my desk. I broke the seal and drew out Walter Brown’s original will. As I unfolded it a paper dropped out, written in the old man’s clerkly hand.

  I picked it up and gave it to Sheila. ‘There it is,’ I said. ‘You read it.’

  She read it to herself with a look of growing puzzlement, then she read it aloud, slowly:

  My dear Sheila,

  If you have received this from my solicitor then it will only be because time has caught up on me too soon or because events have gone wrong. Since I began what I have been doing I have had some funny phone calls and once or twice I’ve thought I was being followed, but maybe I’m just old and imagining things.

  I told you that I wanted to put something right if I was spared. It was something from the war, when I was at the Town Hall. I was blamed for the robbery at Renton Street, despite the fact that there were fire-watchers on that building every night, but they were knocked out when it was robbed and I was blamed. Perhaps it was my fault, but in the war we had to do a lot of things in a hurry and sometimes they went wrong.

  What was even worse was that the government wouldn’t let the police take any action, so that the public wouldn’t know. That was quite wrong. Those that did it should have been brought to justice, but they never were.

  Sergeant Reynolds had a suspicion that a man called Francis Cassidy drove the lorry, but his superiors wouldn’t let him do anything about it. Now I know two things. I have a picture of the men who did it and I have found out where Cassidy is. Perhaps, after all the years, I can see that the world knows who was the rotten traitor that did it. He must have made a fortune. I suppose he is long gone, but that isn’t the point. He should never have been allowed to profit by it. In other countries he would have been shot or hanged.

  That’s what it has been about, Sheila. The photograph is in my ‘Tunny book’ as you used to call it and young Tyroll will be able to tell you all about Renton Street if he checks up.

  I am sorry that we shall not meet again in this world, my dear, but you have always had,

  All my love,

  Your grandfather.

  Her cheeks were wet before she finished and silently handed the letter back to me.

  ‘He wrote that because he was becoming frightened,’ I said. ‘They knew that he was trying to rock somebody’s boat.’

  ‘But it had been years,’ said Alasdair. ‘They can’t have kept watch all that time! How did they know he was going to dig it up again?’

  ‘Francy Cassidy,’ I said. ‘He was in an old folks’ home. He might have gone gaga at any time and started babbling about it. They must have taken precautions against that. All they had to do was bung a few quid to the underpaid kids who do all the work there. You know, a concerned member of the family wants an eye kept on him, who comes to visit him, asks about him, that sort of thing. Nothing mattered till Walter found Cassidy, then it was killing time.’

  ‘But why didn’t they stop then?’ asked Alasdair. ‘They were going to,’ I said. ‘Even if Sheila came over from Oz, they didn’t think she’d catch on. But she got here too soon and she came to see me. So they watched us. They took a swipe at me in an anonymous sort of way by way of discouraging me, but they really went wild when we caught on to Cassidy and tried to see him. After that we were targets. When they lost us in Wales they got Howard and Saffary to do their dirty work on me if I showed up. That would have discredited me and probably put me inside. Then they could work on Sheila.’

  Alasdair nodded, but Sheila grimaced. ‘But what is it all about?’ she said, exasperatedly. ‘I don’t know what that letter means and I can’t see that a few forged ration books fifty years ago is worth all the killing!’

  ‘Someone talked about Renton Street,’ I remembered. ‘Mrs Cassidy? No! Sergeant Reynolds! That’s it!’

  I snatched up the phone, then realised that I had neither a phone number nor an address for the old copper. I didn’t even know his daughter-in-law’s surname.

  A moment’s thought gave me an idea. I rang Belston CID office and got John Parry.

  ‘John,’ I said, ‘I need a phone number for Sergeant Reynolds, you know? The oldest surviving Belston copper? If you can get me one, I might finally be able to work out what this is all about.’

  He rang back in minutes. I don’t know if it came from the confidential directories to which the police have access or the Belston Police Club membership list, but it didn’t matter.

  I punched out the number, praying that no one had won the sweep on Reynolds since we talked to him.

  His daughter-in-law answered. She remembered me and agreed to take her cordless phone down the garden to Reynolds. I drummed my fingers while I listened to her footsteps leaving the house and crossing the patio. Voices in the background, then the sergeant’s tones in my ear: ‘Mr Tyroll, what can I do for you?’

  A few questions from me and he told me, all of it except the name of the perpetrator. I thanked him warmly and put the phone down. Alasdair and Sheila were staring at me.

  ‘It wasn’t forgeries,’ I said. ‘It was far, far bigger than that. Renton Street School was wrecked in the big raids on the Midlands, but half of it was still standing. Your grandfather, at the Town Hall, needed somewhere to store unissued ration books and he
used the standing part of the school. Like he said in his letter — there was a fire-watch team on the building every night, he thought it was secure, but one night in 1943, someone laid out the fire-watchers and stole a quarter of a million new ration books!’

  The audience gaped. ‘A quarter of a million!’ Sheila exclaimed. ‘But Mrs Cassidy said they fetched eight to ten quid on the black market! That’s up to two million quid — in the forties — that’s, that’s God knows how much now — billions probably!’

  I nodded. ‘They wouldn’t have sold them piecemeal, they’d have had to shift them in bulk, but if they only got a pound each, they still netted a huge fortune. What’s more, they got clean away.’

  ‘Why?’ said Alasdair. ‘What did the letter mean about that?’

  ‘The government wouldn’t let the police do anything about it because they didn’t want to shake public faith in the rationing system. So they let two hundred and fifty thousand bent books go out and the blokes who did it walked away with the loot. No wonder your grandfather was sick about it, Sheila. It was everything he hated. Dishonesty, a blow at the war effort, a cover-up by the government, and he got blamed by those who knew and the guys who did it got away!’

  ‘And who did it?’ she said. ‘Who lived on to set the dogs on Grandpa and Cassidy and us?’

  ‘If he’s right about the photo, it can only be one of three people.’

  ‘Is he right about the photo?’ Alasdair asked, playing Devil’s Advocate.

  ‘He is,’ I said. ‘Pete thought it wasn’t a Victory party, and noted that the clock said five to four. He thought it was illegal afternoon boozing, but I’ll bet that’s four in the morning. They’ve just finished the job and they’re celebrating!’

  ‘Can’t prove it isn’t VE Day or VJ Day,’ said Alasdair, and for a moment I thought I couldn’t. Then I raked among Pete’s papers and found it. The blackboard transcription.

  I showed it to him. ‘It’s not a darts fixture,’ I said. ‘It’s a football match. Look!’ I rewrote it:

  L.B. LEAGUE

  THIS SUNDAY