Bad Penny Blues Read online

  Bad Penny Blues

  Barrie Roberts

  © Barrie Roberts 2000

  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 2000 by Constable & Robinson Ltd.

  This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Author’s Note

  The Metropolitan Borough of Belston does not exist. If it did, it would probably be one of the so-called ‘Black Country Boroughs’ that lie north-west of Birmingham; since it doesn’t, it isn’t! All characters, events and organisations in this story are completely fictitious.

  Tokens like the penny in the story did, however, exist. Some of them have survived to this day and are much sought after by people who understand what they are and the tragic histories they commemorate.

  Web-surfers may be interested to know that the website addresses quoted were genuine at the time of writing.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 1

  Sheila switched on the light before I could stop her. As I reached her, I heard her choked gasp of dismay, then she turned quickly towards me, burying her face in my shoulder, panting and cursing under her breath. Behind her I could see the pool of bright, fresh blood glistening on the pale stone.

  I never imagined it would come to blood on my own doorstep. It had seemed a good idea, one that couldn’t do anyone harm — except maybe to their pride. I imagined it as just a sort of historical jigsaw puzzle if I imagined at all. From the beginning I sometimes tried to imagine the people who had been involved.

  *

  Sawney was sitting the other side of my desk, banging away about his suspended sentence. It was late in the afternoon after a night’s celebration and I wasn’t in the mood for any ungrateful client, let alone Julian Nugent Sawney. He was the youngest son of a decent family in Warwickshire and had been set adrift in his teens when his father finally faced the fact that his offspring was a compulsive thief. I could forgive that — after all, if there were no repetitive criminals lawyers would be pushed to make a living. What I couldn’t forgive was that he was one of my clients and a nasty little git. Apart from thieving, he had three other bad habits — endless moaning that it was somebody else’s fault, dyeing his thinning hair ludicrous colours, and living.

  I had got him off a number of petty dishonesty charges (and nothing was too small for him to steal) and I reckoned he had been lucky to catch a suspended sentence last time around. I also shared the court’s vain hope that a suspended sentence would make him stop and think, in which case I might never see him again. Apparently we were both wrong.

  The trouble is, Mr Tyroll,’ he whined, ‘if I am accused of anything else while the sentence is suspended, I’ll have to serve the sentence.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘If you’re convicted of something else while the sentence is suspended you’ll have to serve the suspended sentence and a sentence for the new offence. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. If you don’t commit any other crimes, the suspended sentence won’t operate.’

  ‘But that’s the whole point,’ he exclaimed. ‘I have been accused of something new!’

  ‘You didn’t do it, of course,’ I said, deadpan.

  ‘No, of course not,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ I said wearily.

  ‘I live in a boarding house,’ he said. ‘One of the other lodgers had a very expensive portable radio and it went missing. He called the police and they found the radio in another lodger’s room.’

  ‘Not yours?’ I interjected.

  ‘Certainly not!’ he said, huffily. ‘It was a girl on the ground floor.’

  ‘I don’t see what this has got to do with you.’

  ‘She said I asked her to steal it, Mr Tyroll. Can you imagine that? She told the police that we had a relationship and that I asked her to steal Mr Thomas’s radio. Now they’ve questioned me about it.’

  ‘And what have you said?’

  ‘Me? That I don’t know anything about it, of course.’

  ‘Did you have a relationship with this girl?’

  ‘Good Lord, no! Well — I asked her out once or twice.’

  ‘Did she go?’

  ‘Well, no.’

  ‘Then, Mr Sawney, you have nothing to worry about. They cannot convict you on the unsupported evidence of an accomplice.’

  ‘But I’m not her accomplice!’

  ‘But you would be if she had told the truth, wouldn’t you? As things stand, I doubt if they’ll charge you. There’s no point — they’ve got an admission from her that she stole it, why mess about with a dodgy charge against you?’

  If I thought I’d wrapped the thing up, I was wrong. He went into a long tirade about how the police had harassed him since his teens, how he was always being wrongly arrested and so on. I let him babble on while my mind drifted … to a Dorset beach in the early morning.

  It was bitterly cold on the beach, where she had slept all night because an inn was too expensive and local people wouldn’t take in the visitors who came to see the ships off. She had travelled a long, long way, tramping and hitching rides on carts, desperate to be there before the Lucy Collins sailed. Now she sat up stiffly, wakened by the first rays of the sun, and huddled her shawl about her shoulders. Stiffly she clambered to her feet and went down to the water’s edge to rinse the sleep from her eyes and shake the sand from her hair.

  Her toilet made, she drew from her big basket a fresh dress. She had only worn it the once — the day before he was arrested. Now she must look her best for him so that he might remember her down the years ahead. Smoothing the dress down and tying a fresh ribbon in her hair, she hefted the big basket that held her last gifts to him and set off along the beach towards the jetty.

  Hours later she stood on the jetty, her empty basket at her feet, watching the Lucy Collins turn across the harbour. The cold breeze was catching the ship’s sails, flicking them grey and gold in the sunlight, and the outward bound flag — the Blue Peter — fluttered at the foremast head. She could see figures moving about the deck, but he was not among them. He would be down below in the darkened holds, not permitted even a last look at his native land, nor a farewell glimpse of his lover.

  She snatched her shawl about her as the ship made for the open sea and tears streamed down her face. Unthinkingly she clasped in her right hand the small gift he had thrust into her fingers as the guards drove them apart. She did not know the sailor’s superstition, that to watch a departing ship out of sight always brings grief, and if she had known it, she would still have watched because she already had all the grief in the world …

  Sawney had stopped moaning and was looking at me expectantly. I came back to reality with a bump.

  ‘Mr Sawney,’ I said, ‘I’ve told you what I think, that you won’t even be charged. If you are, let me know and we’ll see where it goes. Good afternoon.’

  *

  I always imagine th
e sailing of the Lucy Collins like that, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I see it like that because of what happened afterwards. Psychometrists believe that objects become steeped in the emotions that have surrounded them, and that these can be detected years and years later. Sometimes I wonder about that little piece of copper she clutched in her hand as she watched the Lucy Collins sail away. Was that why it brought us so much trouble a century and a half later?

  I would never have heard of the Lucy Collins but for Sheila McKenna. My name is Tyroll, Chris Tyroll, solicitor of the Supreme Court by profession. The downside of the job is meeting people like Sawney The upside is meeting a person like Sheila McKenna. She arrived in my office one day, having come from Australia to visit her only surviving relative. He happened to have been recently murdered, after which life for Sheila and me got dangerous and unpleasant. At least once — when things were very unpleasant — she saved my life. It seems she saved it because she wanted it, which is very nice and explains why she was back in Britain on a year’s sabbatical leave from the University of Adelaide, doing historical research for a book. That was what led her to the story of the Lucy Collins.

  She sprang it on me over dinner at the Jubilee Room, which is the nearest thing my home town of Belston has to a good English restaurant. We were celebrating the end of the Walton and Grady case when she took something out of her bag and passed it across the table.

  It was an old-fashioned copper penny, beaten out flat and wide and with one side polished. On that side there was a decoration and some words.

  ‘It came up for auction in London,’ she said. ‘As soon as I read about it I knew I had to have it. That’s what I’ve been fixing up, raising some extra cash from the publishers and arranging for someone to bid for me, and there it is.’

  She smiled triumphantly, and a triumphant smile from Sheila’s grey eyes with their mask of freckles is something I’m normally prepared to wallow in but she had me puzzled.

  ‘But what is it?’ I said.

  The smile turned to a frown. ‘Come on, Tyroll. Use the grey matter. What does it look like?’

  I looked at it again. ‘It’s a sailor’s love token — a keepsake for his girlfriend.’

  She shook her head firmly. This guy was going away for ever,’ she said.

  I strained to read the verse inscribed under the little decoration of a ship in full sail. It read:

  Driven beyond all sight of your sweet face

  By Lucy Collins harsh embrace

  No more to gaze in your blue eyes

  But labour under distant skies

  Far from my heart’s Desire for ever

  Until we meet by Grace to dwell for Ever.

  Underneath the verse were the initials ‘JS’, flanked by the words ‘FOR EVER’ and underneath that the date, 1865. A small hole had been punched in the top, piercing the ship’s sails. From the smooth edges of the hole you could see that someone had carried it on a string or worn it around the neck.

  ‘Who was Lucy Collins?’ I asked.

  ‘Not who — what!’ she said. ‘Lucy Collins was a transport ship.’

  The light dawned. ‘And this was a convict’s love token — not a sailor’s?’ I said. ‘I never knew there were such things.’

  She nodded. ‘There are. They’re usually earlier than that one but it’s a good one, nevertheless. It’s particularly good for my purposes.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Well, my book is supposed to be about the convicts, right? Who they really were and so on, and now I’ve got something that one of them had made to leave with his wife or his girl. What’s more, I’ve got the name of the ship and the year of sailing, and his initials. Almost all of the convict files are in the Public Records Office. I should be able to track him down.’

  ‘How many times did the Lucy Collins sail to Oz in 1865?’ I said. ‘You may have to look at a number of voyages to find him.’

  She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It was a four-month trip each way.’

  ‘Four months!’ I said. ‘What about the tea-clippers? How fast were they?’

  ‘Cutty Sark used to make Sydney Heads in about one hundred days out from London, but the Lucy Collins wouldn’t have been built for speed. She’d have taken about four months. She’d only have made one trip in 1865. And that’s another thing, it’s not back in the Dark Ages — it’s not even in the early days of transportation. It’s near the end. It packed up a couple of years later. It’s the mid-Victorian Empire with all its records — ship manifests, convict files, birth certificates, baptismal registers, log books, censuses — there’ll be lots of material.’

  I looked again at the medallion. ‘JS?’ I said. ‘Pretty common initials, then and now. How many Jim Smiths or Jack Smiths were there on board your average convict transport? And apart from Smiths, S is a very common surname initial in England anyway.’

  ‘Don’t be a wowser,’ she said. ‘If I can locate the ship’s convict manifest, I’ll find out, won’t I? Then I can try and trace where he came from and who the girl was — track down her descendants — maybe his descendants, if they had kids before he went. He might even have been one of the few that made it home again. There’s a whole new chunk for my book in it — maybe a whole book, in fact. It may be a lot of yakka, but it’ll be worth it.’

  I grinned at her enthusiasm. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Even if there were a dozen JS’s on the Lucy Collins, you’ll be able to work out which one.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Because the bloke who wrote that inscription must have been an engraver or something like that.’

  ‘No marks,’ she said. ‘It was probably made for him by another convict — most probably a forger who was used to fine engraving. But don’t you think it’s a great idea?’

  I did and I said so, and I really meant it, but if I’d known what was coming I’d have skimmed the damned thing out of the window.

  Chapter 2

  It went all right at first. Sheila got stuck into her research with great enthusiasm and I went back to running a solicitor’s office, that is worrying about clients and staff and whether the Legal Aid Board would pay before I went bust and so on. We didn’t realise it at the time, but it all started to go wrong with what we called the ‘Briefcase Incident’. We didn’t catch on that the Briefcase Incident was more than peculiar — it meant something nasty.

  Sheila’s first target was the ship’s sailing particulars. That was no problem. She soon knew that the Lucy Collins cleared from Portland, Dorset, in November 1865, with a cargo of convicts, bound for Fremantle, by Perth in West Australia. Next she went looking for a list of the convicts on board.

  I recall her coming home from London one day with a photocopy of the Home Office warrant to the owners of the Lucy Collins to ship one hundred and forty-three convicts to Australia.

  ‘Look!’ she commanded, and pointed at the list. ‘James Simmonds. I told you I’d find him.’

  ‘So you did, but is James Simmonds your JS? You’ve got John Smythe here, and a Jonty Sowden. There’s a Jan Satton and a Jack Sullivan. That’s five.’

  ‘Great!’ she said. ‘I told you — I’ll track all their families down and do a whole book about them.’

  ‘You’ll have to find out more than just their names,’ I said.

  ‘Sure, but there’s about ninety-eight per cent of the convict files in the Public Records Office. The odds are on my side. And those files tell you where a bloke was sentenced. Never worry — I’ll find them.’

  I was still looking at the list. ‘You’d better look for his file as well,’ I said, pointing. ‘Just because a Home Office clerk thought he spelled his name with a ‘G’ doesn’t mean he did.’

  ‘Gerry Sommers?’ she said. ‘OK, you might be right.’

  She disappeared to London for a few days, to delve into the PRO files, but her evening phone calls told me she was finding what she wanted. When she came back she had a briefcase stuffed with photocopies.

  After dinner she
unloaded her case carefully on to the cleared dining-table, setting the copies out in six separate bundles.

  ‘Voilà!’ she announced. ‘All six files of the JS’s aboard the Lucy Collins in 1865.’

  I picked up the top sheet of the first stack. It was the personal particulars of James Simmonds, written in a mixture of the beautiful regular hand of Victorian clerks and semi-literate scribbles.

  ‘Why the difference?’ I asked Sheila, pointing to the writing.

  ‘There was always a shortage of educated labour,’ she said. ‘Any convict who could write at all could get himself a soft job as a clerk. I suppose the good bits are the professional clerks and the scribble is the convicts.’

  I looked again at the details of James Simmonds and saw that he was a Midlander sentenced at Stafford Assizes. When I was first in articles the old Crown Court in the centre of Stafford was still in use and I must have been many times in the room where Jimmy Simmonds received his sentence. I read the record:

  JAMES SIMMONDS No 2318

  tried 24th July 1865, arrived Fremantle Barracks March 1866.

  Born 19th March 1843

  Trade: None

  Height: 5 ft. 7 in.

  Complexn: Fair

  Head: Large

  Hair: Brown

  Whiskers: None

  Visage: Broad

  Forehead: M. Ht

  Eyebrows: Brown

  Eyes: Grey

  Nose: Medium

  Mouth: Wide

  Chin: Broad

  Remarks: Scar over l. eyebrow, tattoo r. forearm, Anchor & HOPE on scroll.

  Convict 7 years’ transportation

  Tried at Stafford, transported for robbery

  Character: Bad

  ‘This one was very short,’ I remarked, thinking of him standing in the high old dock at Stafford.

  ‘They all were. Rotten Pommy diet stunted them. The average height in these files is about five foot eight.’

  The personal details were followed by sheet after sheet of a wearisome record of Simmonds’ years in the penal colony — six years in all. He might have served much less with good behaviour, but the record didn’t show good behaviour. It was an endless repetition of petty offences — ‘having tobacco’, for which he got a week’s solitary confinement, ‘improper possession of boots’, another week in solitary, ‘indecent behaviour in church’, another week, ‘assaulting fellow prisoner’, twenty-five strokes.