The Victory Snapshot (A Chris Tyroll Mystery Book 1)

by Barrie Roberts

  EAGLE & PUMP

  v

  THE BULL

  2.30

  PLEASE BE ON TIME!

  ‘Plausible,’ agreed Alasdair, ‘but it might still be a darts match.’

  ‘Oh no, it isn’t. L.B. was Lady Belston who sponsored the pub football teams league. The Eagle and Pump was the pub where the picture was taken and the Bull had the best team in the league. Ask Sergeant Reynolds, if you can stand listening to his sporting reminiscences.’

  ‘Could still be 1945,’ he said.

  ‘No, it couldn’t,’ I said, ‘because the Bull was bombed, around the time of the V2 rockets in 1944. I don’t think there were V2s around here, but that’s when Reynolds says it happened and the league broke up. They never played again because four of the Bull’s players were killed. That picture was taken about four in the morning in 1943!’

  He flung up both hands. ‘I concede, governor.’

  ‘Then whoever set it up, whoever is still covering it, is in that picture?’ said Sheila.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘That’s what your grandfather thought and he must be right.’ ‘But who is it?’ said Alasdair.

  ‘It has to have been Watson or Thompson or Berry,’ I said. ‘The rest are dead. Where are Pete’s pictures of those three?’

  28

  Total confusion reigned. Alasdair and I went backwards and forwards over Pete’s prints, straining to find anything recognisable in his gallery of old men.

  Sheila walked out, impatiently, but came back later with a tray of coffee.

  ‘You see!’ she said, as she deposited the tray on top of the gallery of aged faces. ‘You can’t get at it that way. That’d only work if you knew him, if you’d ever seen him. So far as we know, you haven’t. It’ll never work!’

  She was right and we knew it. We had narrowed it down to one of those three and now we couldn’t get anywhere. We weren’t even sure that all of them were still alive, we didn’t know where they were or what they had become or what they called themselves. It was the last and most important question. Unless we could answer it the mad, deadly game would go on.

  We drank coffee and stared despondently at the pictures. None of us had an idea.

  Jayne buzzed on the intercom to tell me John Parry was in the waiting room. ‘Send him in!’ I said, thinking that he might as well come and share our dead end.

  Acting Detective Inspector Parry has two basic expressions, a straight deadpan and a wide, self-satisfied grin. I wasn’t best pleased to see that he was wearing the latter.

  ‘Well, lady and gentleman,’ he announced, ‘the news gets better. Gibson has coughed it all. He’s charged with two murders which my bosses are prepared to prosecute now Naylor’s dead and Whitehall says it was an unofficial job anyway.’

  ‘Great,’ I said, without enthusiasm. ‘I bet he didn’t tell you who he was working for, did he?’

  ‘Well, of course not. He doesn’t know, does he? He’s done black bag jobs for Naylor for a good few years, but Naylor was never daft enough to tell him what they were about.’

  ‘Then we’re still stymied,’ I said.

  ‘But I thought you’d got a good lead through old Reggie Reynolds?’ he said. ‘That’s why I’ve come. So you brilliant amateur sleuths can tell a poor plod who to arrest.’

  ‘So I had. Thanks to Sergeant Reynolds we know exactly what it was about,’ and I told him.

  ‘Ach y fi!’ he exclaimed. ‘A quarter of a million wartime quids! Or half a million or maybe more! Whoever set that up, if he’s still alive, he must own the whole bloody country by now!’

  ‘He’s still alive,’ I said, ‘because if he wasn’t nobody would have set Naylor and Gibson on to Walter Brown and Cassidy and Sheila and me. And until we can prove who it is we’re still targets.’

  ‘Damn!’ he said, and shook his big head. ‘And you haven’t any idea?’

  I shoved the heap of pictures across at him. ‘Not unless you recognise someone among those. But then, maybe he doesn’t look like any of them. Perhaps he’s had a face-lift and dyes his hair and looks thirty.’

  The room fell silent again while John shuffled through the pictures, Alasdair rolled a cigarette and Sheila stared out of the window. I just went on drinking coffee.

  ‘That one’s a bit like someone,’ remarked Parry, after several runs through the prints. ‘Don’t you think?’

  He picked out a picture and laid it in front of me. It was a plump, round-faced man, with thick silver hair.

  ‘They’re all a bit like someone,’ I said, but I studied the picture. Somewhere at the back of my mind a faint bell rang, but I refused to be carried away.

  ‘What do you think, Alasdair?’ I turned the picture towards him and he leaned back, squinting at it through his cigarette smoke. ‘Could be,’ he said, after studying it, ‘could be.’

  He went on squinting at it, then suddenly leaned forward and swivelled my computer monitor towards him. ‘Give us your keyboard, governor!’ he demanded.

  Bewildered I pushed the keyboard across the desk. He tapped in a few rapid letters and figures and sprang out of his chair. ‘Don’t touch that!’ he said, and disappeared out of the door.

  The three of us looked at each other and the open door and shrugged helplessly. Alasdair’s feet could be heard, pounding up the stairs. I hoped that my quirky assistant had had a genuine inspiration of some kind.

  In three minutes he tumbled back downstairs and into my office, dropped back into his chair and punched more keys on the computer. A smile crossed his face and he swung the monitor back towards me.

  ‘What about him?’ he asked.

  Most of the screen was filled by a black and white photograph. It was, indeed, a plump, prosperous-looking individual with thick, expensively cut silver hair. I stared and my tongue fumbled for a name. I had seen that face — in the local press and in the national press.

  ‘It might be,’ I said. ‘It might well be.’ The longer I looked the more I saw the resemblance, but I was terribly afraid of misleading myself. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’ said Alasdair and touched the keyboard again. The photograph vanished upwards, to be replaced by a screen full of text.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked.

  ‘A biography from a computer Encyclopaedia of Biography. It’s on my machine upstairs.’

  I read while my mind was full of the thudding sound of things falling into place. Now I knew how that unholy alliance between Naylor and Kerrenwood’s Security was formed, and why a fifty-year-old crime was still important, and why it had been a serious mistake to give my name to Kerrenwood’s Personnel office and ask about Berry. That had only convinced them I knew more than I did. The words in front of me even explained why there wasn’t a Berry on the pensions list at Kerrenwood’s.

  ‘Lord Muckamuck!’ I exclaimed as I reached the end.

  ‘Who?’ they all asked.

  ‘It was little Mrs Cassidy’s nickname for him,’ I explained, and I read the screen aloud. ‘‘Lord Kerrenwood, born Anthony Norman Berry, 15th August 1920 at Belston, then in Staffordshire. After a number of employments as a young man he entered the chemical dyes business in 1948, purchasing an interest in a small company at Kerren Wood, Staffordshire. In the 1950s he became sole proprietor of the company and turned its output to plastics. The success of this change allowed him to open branches of Kerrenwood Enterprises in many parts of Britain. Further diversification into waste management in the 1960s made the company hugely profitable. The organisation has always remained privately owned under Lord Kerrenwood’s chairmanship. Although ennobled in 1980, and despite his friendships with prominent politicians, Lord Kerrenwood has never sought a political career, though he is known to have been an adviser on industrial, labour and financial matters to more than one Prime Minister. In recent years his company has attracted criticism through its large political donations and its controversial waste reclamation policies.’’

  They were still staring. ‘Lord M
uckamuck!’ I repeated. ‘Cassidy worked for him for years, his security thugs backed up Naylor, he advised Prime Ministers and bunged their party, and all out of the Renton Street ration book robbery! Now you know who to arrest, Inspector Parry.’

  The big Welshman shook his head slowly. ‘Too late,’ he said. ‘Too bloody late, boyo.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Sheila.

  ‘It was on the news this morning,’ he said. ‘Kerrenwood died late last night - — of a stroke. They said he was in bed, holding the telephone. Trying to summon medical assistance, they said.’ He shook his head again. ‘He wasn’t calling for any doctor. He’d just heard from his pals in Whitehall that you’d lumbered Naylor and Gibson.’

  He turned to Sheila. ‘You got them all, Sheila. Game, set and match to Australia.’

  *

  And that was it. After those frenzied days we were sitting round my littered desk, each trying to adjust to this sudden stop.

  I couldn’t prevent my mind from asking more questions, though I knew they would never be answered now. What about the deaths among that little bunch of bandits in the back bar of the Eagle and Pump? Were they really unconnected or was there some kind of squabbling over the spoils afterwards? Did that car go into a canal by accident or had its driver threatened Kerrenwood? Was it really an angry husband or boyfriend who got away with stabbing Alan Thorpe? Did Watson and Thompson move away? Were they peacefully dead or in comfortable retirement somewhere? Or down one of Kerrenwood’s chemical pits? Did Howard know who and what he was protecting? Or Saffary? Who put Naylor on the case? No answers.

  ‘Put the picture up again,’ I told Alasdair, and with a few deft keystrokes he did so.

  I sipped the last of my cold coffee while I sat and stared again at the photograph. It was hard to see in this plump, sleek baron any trace of the sharp-featured young man in the pub photograph, the devious young man ‘who always thought he was smarter than everyone else’. But so he had been — almost. He had merely reckoned without a Town Hall clerk with a different belief — a belief in doing what was right — and all his ill-gotten gains hadn’t saved him in the end from a lonely, frightened death.

  For more than fifty years he had used his loot to climb and grab, to make more money and to buy what only money can buy — power. And all the time he must have been afraid of the telephone call that had come last night, to tell him he was on the brink of being exposed.

  ‘Lord Muckamuck,’ I murmured again, and switched the screen off.

  We celebrated that night with the best meal the Jubilee Room could provide, Sheila and I, Alasdair, Claude, John Parry and Dr Mac, and I gave the last toast — to an honest, upright, fearless public servant called Walter Brown, who I had come to respect and who I think I would have liked if I’d got to know him better.

  Once the formalities were over, Sheila was able to arrange her grandfather’s cremation. Where she scattered his ashes she wouldn’t say. ‘It was his favourite place,’ she said. ‘I’ll take you there one day, but not now.’

  ‘One day’ — there weren’t many days left before her leave ran out. Far too soon we were at Heathrow, making awkward goodbyes. At the boarding gate she took something from her handbag and pinned it into my tie. It was an opal pin with a boomerang on it.

  ‘I can’t take that,’ I protested. ‘It was your grandfather’s.’

  She shook her head. ‘I gave it to him because I loved him,’ she said. ‘He’s gone and I love you, Christopher Tyroll. Besides, I know it’s your birthstone too and it’ll remind you about the boomerang in me. I’ll be back.’

  In minutes I was watching the big jet lift and vanish into the clouds.

  By late afternoon I was back at my desk. Darren Gormley’s committal was due in a couple of days and I needed to prepare for it. I had no intention of letting Saffary out of the Traffic Cone Stores.

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