Robbery with Malice
Barrie Roberts
© Barrie Roberts 1999
Barrie Roberts has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1999 by Constable & Company Ltd.
This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
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35.
1.
‘Young man!’ called Miss Callington. ‘Young man, put down that gun at once! Do you hear me?’
She had gone out to bud her rose bushes, making her way carefully along the brick path between her lawns to where her two favourites bloomed beside the gate. There she could lay aside her walking-sticks and lean on the gate while she paid her attentions to the plants.
It was just before twilight on a hot, still evening in midsummer. The end of a scorching day, one of twenty days of heatwave. There were no neighbours to call to in the adjacent gardens. The heat had driven them indoors. There was no traffic in Belstone Lane. The only sound was a distant radio playing in a back garden.
As Daphne Callington eased herself against the gate to shift her position she noticed a large white van coming down Belstone Lane towards her. She barely glanced at it, knowing well what it was and where it had been. It was the security van from Mantons returning from making its rounds of the chain of comer shops on almost every estate nearby. It crossed her mind that its collection of the weekly takings would be up this evening, swollen by heatwave purchases of ice-cream and soft drinks.
She had turned back to her roses when she heard the squeal of tortured tyres. She looked up in time to see a smaller, dark blue van hurtle around the corner of the lane and slew to a halt right across the path of the Mantons vehicle.
As the Mantons driver cursed and braked, a red saloon following his van also stopped at an angle which blocked the road. The doors of the blue van and the red saloon burst open and two men leapt out of each. Apart from size, they were all alike. Each wore a dark tracksuit top, despite the heat, and the faces of all four were concealed by ski masks. Two brandished shotguns and two revolvers as they gathered around the front of the security van and snarled commands at its driver and his companion.
The Mantons men were not paid to be heroes. Both doors of the van opened and they slid out, hands held high. Miss Callington heard an order barked at the driver and saw him lean back into his cab and operate the release on the rear doors. Now two of the attackers moved to the back of the security van and began to bundle cash bags into the car and the blue van.
Daphne Callington cursed her disability. In the time it would take her to hobble back along her path and reach the telephone by her armchair the robbery would be over and the bandits escaping. She strained over her gate to try and read the number plates of their van or their car, but both were out of her line of sight.
By now her neighbours must have heard the shouts and looked out of their windows. Somebody must be phoning the police. Miss Callington wondered if she could delay the robbers long enough for the police to arrive. At the moment they were concentrating completely on the van and its crew, totally unaware of her presence, though the nearest of them stood on the grass verge, only fifteen feet from her gate.
‘Young man!’ she called. ‘Young man, put down that gun at once! Do you hear me?’
The man jumped at her command and swivelled towards her, pointing the shotgun at her and backing its threat with a stream of obscenities. Behind him the Mantons driver still stood with his hands in the air.
Daphne Callington had been a mission teacher in Singapore when the army of Imperial Japan had cycled in and captured the city. The years of internment that followed had not only broken her health, they had taught her not to be afraid of aggressive little foreign men with guns.
‘Don’t speak to me like that!’ she commanded. ‘Put down that ridiculous gun at once!’
The robber burst into fresh obscenities. Behind him the security van driver smiled slightly to himself and began to lower his hands. The movement caught the edge of the robber’s vision. He whirled again, swinging the shotgun with him.
There were two booms and a sharp crack that all sounded as one and a red rose of blood and tissue spattered and bloomed on the white side of the van. Belstone Lane filled with shouts and curses and a long high-pitched scream.
2.
Eighteen years later it wasn’t the third week of a heatwave. It was a black, bitter morning in early December, made worse by driving sleet. I hate driving at the best of times and this wasn’t the best of times. They say that the M6 through the West Midlands is the worst-congested stretch of road in Europe and on that morning they were right. As I turned on to the motorway the northbound traffic was at a standstill, cluttering their side of the highway like a huge herd of patient beasts waiting to be slaughtered.
Southbound was not much better. It was moving, but only just. I settled down to crawl behind an enormous container wagon, which favoured me with showers of recycled sleet in the form of a grey-brown sludge thrown up by its rear wheels.
One of the reasons that I hate driving is that you can’t think about other things and drive. Well, you can, and lots of people do but they don’t live long. The exception is when you’ve got a hundred miles of sleet-shrouded crawl ahead of you. Then you have to think about something else or the beat of the windscreen wipers pushing through the sludge will put you to sleep.
I thought about the pleasures of being a solicitor of the Supreme Court, sole practitioner supporting an assistant, two secretaries, an articled clerk, a receptionist and a bookkeeper while the Legal Aid rates fell further and further behind the cost of living and every day the Chairman of the Legal Board woke up and thought of something else he wasn’t going to allow solicitors to charge for.
That depressed me, as it always does, so I thought about Sheila instead. Dr Sheila McKenna, social historian at the University of Adelaide who had walked into my office six months earlier, involved me in being burgled, fire-bombed and shot at, proposed to me, saved my life and then flown off back to Lucky Oz after a couple of weeks to go on teaching spotty Aussie youths the difference between a bodgie and a widgie or something.
Sheila McKenna was the principal reason I had dragged myself out of bed on this vile morning and set out down the motorway. For a man who had spent most of the last ten years recovering from his first and only marriage it must mean something — something to do with six months of frustrating international phone calls and recollections of grey eyes, ash-blonde hair and freckles, under the eyes, across the bridge of the nose and down the middle of the back.
She had faxed me yesterday morning — ‘Arriving Heathrow’ and a time and flight number. When I rang Australia, an electronic voice told me that her number had been discontinued so I had borrowed a car and set the alarm. Now it was dropping sleet out of thick grey clouds and her flight was going to be diverted to sunny Manchester and I’d have to drive back and find her sitting on my doorstep surrounded by pokerwork boomerangs a
nd foam-rubber kangaroos.
The other reason for the journey was a pink file on the back seat, but there would be time enough to think about that.
To my surprise the sleet dwindled away, the clouds thinned, tentative streaks of sunlight began to appear and I arrived at the airport in time for the flight.
When she saw me waiting on the Arrivals concourse, Sheila abandoned her luggage trolley and flew at me. We grappled shamelessly and wordlessly for several minutes while luggage trolleys skirted around us or banged into us.
At last we came up for air. ‘Come on’ she said, ‘we can’t stand about pashing here. We’re blocking the flow of Arab millionaires.’
As we loaded the car I noted with appreciation the quantity of her luggage. She had not just come for a short stay. She took a pink stuffed kangaroo from the trolley and placed it carefully on the rear seat.
‘Ah!’ I said. ‘The great Australian sex symbol — a stuffed kangaroo.’
‘That’s a gift for your secretaries — and anyway, all those kangaroo jokes are made up by Pommies.’
‘I thought that the convicts started it all. That they had a choice between each other and the kangaroos and they chose the roos.’
We were in the car by now and she glowered at me at close range. I reached out for her and made peace.
As we threaded our way out of the airport I asked her the question that was uppermost in my mind. ‘What, if I may enquire, is a nicely brought up Aussie girl doing in a place like this? And why the short notice?’
‘Because I wasn’t sure it would come off,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to disappoint you if it didn’t work, so I didn’t tell you.’
‘And what is the “it” which has come off?’
‘It’s two “its”. One is a commission from a posh publisher to write a book on the convicts. The other is a sabbatical year from the Uni to write it. So here I am!’ she said, triumphantly.
‘And I wouldn’t want you anywhere else except by my side’ I said. ‘But didn’t Robert Hughes write the definitive history of transportation?’
She shook her head. ‘Hughes wrote a brilliant book about transportation, but he wrote about the system. What I want to write about is the convicts themselves — the actual people who were transported.’
‘Wouldn’t that be better done in Oz?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘The records are here. Britain shipped about a hundred and forty thousand convicts to Australia. Most of their files are still around — a hundred and thirty-eight thousand of them, all in your Public Records Office. So I’m here for a year, at least.’
‘Sounds good to me,’ I said, and it did.
She glanced around her. ‘Your turn to come clean,’ she said. ‘Why aren’t we going to Belston?’
‘How do you mean?’ I prevaricated.
‘I can understand maps and road signs,’ she said. ‘We’re heading for London.’
‘Ah well, yes,’ I began. ‘You see, when I got your fax I thought I could kill two birds with one stone. There’s a little job I have to do in London and I thought I could pick you up and fit it in. I was going to tell you about it while we ate.’
‘Food! Yecch!’ she exclaimed.
‘You may have been floating through the skies enjoying steak, egg and veggies courtesy of Qantas. I’ve had two cups of black coffee at home and two cups of pale grey coffee on the motorway. You can sit and watch me eat while I tell you about this job.’
We threaded into the west side of London and eventually I parked near a railway bridge. Sheila got out and looked around suspiciously.
‘What’s here?’ she demanded.
‘Food,’ I said and headed across the street to where the steamy windows of a small café showed.
Sheila, despite her figure, has a robust appetite and the aroma of chips convinced her it was lunch-time. Soon we were sitting over heaped plates in a corner of the narrow, crowded café. When we’d cleared our plates and turned to the large mugs of tea, she lit a cigarette and said, ‘Right, Mr Tyroll, what’s this little job you have to do?’
‘You remember Granny Cassidy?’ I asked. ‘We met her in the summer.’
‘So we did,’ recalled Sheila. ‘A sweet lady. How is she?’
‘She’s very well, and a lot better off since her husband was murdered, but she came to see me the other day about a problem.’
3.
Ever since I opened my office I had benefited from the criminal activities of four families in particular — the Beales, the Waltons, the Kennedys and the Parsons. They were not big-time villains — no bank robbers, no swish drug dealers, no classy con men among them. More a dynasty of small craftsmen, you might say, and their craft was usually burglary and despite generations of tradition they weren’t actually very good at it.
One of the Beales once devised a skilful plan to burgle a sub-post office by making a hole in the rear roof. He got in unobserved, he quietly and expertly blew the safe, and then he sat there with the loot, unable to work out a way of climbing back from the floor to the hole in the roof. He was still sitting, pondering on his problem, when the postmaster unlocked the front door and made a citizen’s arrest — the glass front door which he could have smashed and walked out of!
Having acted for two generations of the families I was aware of their tradition, but only in the previous summer, investigating the death of Sheila’s grandfather, had I come across the third generation back and realised that they were all interrelated. All four families descended from the daughters of Francis Cassidy, a deep-dyed villain whose activities went back to before World War Two. Cassidy had been murdered but we had met his ex-wife who had explained the relationships to me.
Despite the stream of her descendants that flowed through my office, Mrs Cassidy had never favoured me with a visit and I was intrigued to see her name in my diary one afternoon.
She came in slowly, stooped over a walking-stick, but her eyes were as bright as ever as they roamed around my room. She was followed by a tall and broad woman of about fifty, hair originally blonde, now whitening and coloured blonde, who said nothing but was introduced by Mrs Cassidy as ‘My Tracy — Tracy Walton, that is.’
While Tracy settled her mother into a chair I busied myself with pouring tea. Her stick placed against my desk and a teacup in her hand, little Mrs Cassidy gazed round again.
‘It’s not a very big office, Mr Tyroll,’ she remarked.
‘The biggest I can afford,’ I answered not quite truthfully. It always seemed to be more than I could afford.
‘Well, you cor say as my lot ay doing their best for you,’ she said and laughed heartily.
She returned to her tea for a long sip, then leaned forward. ‘I’ve brought you another case,’ she said and motioned to her daughter.
Tracy lifted a plastic carrier bag from the floor and gave it to her mother. The old lady placed it on my desk. I looked at it but did not reach out for it. Experience had told me that plastic carrier bags full of ill-assorted documents were the beginning of cases that went nowhere and hours of work that went unpaid.
‘Did you ever hear’, asked Mrs Cassidy, ‘of the Belstone Lane robbery?’
It rang a dim bell. I had been a student then with other things on my mind, but I vaguely recollected that there had been an armed gang working the Midlands. They specialised in security vans — cash collections and payroll shipments. The press called them the Payday Gang. In Belstone Lane they had opened fire for the first time and a security man had been killed and another dreadfully injured.
I nodded. ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘The Payday Gang, wasn’t it?’
She shook her head. ‘No, not according to the police. They never catched anybody for it at first. Then years later they had four — Billy Simpson, Freddy Hughes, Peter Grady and Tracy’s Alan.’
‘They got a long time, if I remember,’ I said.
‘Only two of them. Billy Simpson topped himself before they had him. Freddy Hughes they let go and it came down to
Peter Grady and Alan. They got life, Mr Tyroll, and the judge said it was to be no less than twenty years.’
‘Did they appeal?’ I asked.
She nodded. ‘But they was turned down.’
‘So what can I do now?’ I asked, sensing the answer only too well.
She motioned to the carrier bag full of papers. ‘Alan and Peter have got new appeals in. Since there’s been all this investigation of coppers they reckon they’ve gorra chance.’
I was well aware of the long-running enquiry into the Central Midlands that was producing new and to me unsurprising revelations every week. ‘Who were the coppers in the case?’
‘Detective Chief Inspector Hawkins — he’s dead now. Then there was Watters, the inspector, and a sergeant, an Irishman, looks like a toad.’
‘Saffary?’ I suggested.
‘Ah, that’s him — Saffary. He’s an inspector now.’
‘What was the evidence against Alan?’
‘There weren’t any,’ she declared stoutly. ‘Peter Grady, he confessed, though he said after as the coppers made it all up, but Alan never said a word except that he hadn’t done it and he didn’t know anything about it.’
You don’t get twenty years without evidence against you, I thought. A desperate try by two men who’d got literally nothing to lose. An appeal launched because they’d read in the papers that Hawkins and Watters had been detected in improper practices. And it was eighteen years on. Witnesses would be dead or disappeared. Documents would have been lost. Recollections would have faded. I really didn’t want to open that carrier bag.
Mrs Cassidy must have read my face. ‘I can pay you, Mr Tyroll,’ she said. ‘Since Francy went I’m quite well off. I can pay.’
‘It’s not the money I’m thinking about, Mrs Cassidy. It sounds like a very difficult case. If you want my advice now, I’ll tell you — keep Francy’s legacy in the bank or spend it on luxuries, but don’t throw it at the Court of Appeal.’
Tracy spoke for the first time. ‘But he never done it, Mr Tyroll. My Alan’d never hurt a fly. He never robbed nobody and he never killed nobody.’
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