Crime Writers and Other Animals (14 page)

Then the awareness faded from Juanita Rainbird's eyes.

Tilson Gutteridge waited until the drug – still almost unknown in Harley Street – released its hold and the girl's body slumped in death. Then he sat Juanita Rainbird in the swivel chair behind her desk.

By the time she was found after the Christmas holiday, the building's central heating had melted the obstruction in her throat. Except for a small needle puncture in her upper arm and the symptoms of asphyxiation, there seemed no obvious explanation for Juanita Rainbird's death. Many of her colleagues put it down to overwork. Keith Chappick was happy to go along with this diagnosis; it made the rest of his staff even more paranoid.

The managing director did not mind about the death. Once Juanita had sorted out the Eunice Brock copyright trouble, he'd been intending to sack her anyway. Thwarted in this ambition, on New Year's Eve he sacked the publicity director instead. That cheered him up enormously.

And Keith Chappick remained cheerful, until he got a call from Pete Crabbett's solicitor, staking his client's claim to the estate of Eunice Brock.

In the event the case didn't go to court, but if it had, Juanita Rainbird's meticulously detailed dossier would certainly have ensured that the verdict went in Pete Crabbett's favour. Realizing this and unwilling to add legal costs to the amount they already owed him in back royalties, Krieper & Thoday grudgingly accepted the actor's claim.

With his rights thus established, Pete Crabbett settled down to enjoy his good fortune. He could afford as many pints of Guinness as he wanted now. He even had enough to pay an upmarket nursing home to look after his beloved ninety-year-old natural mother.

And of course he'd long since destroyed the costumes and make-up he'd worn as Tilson Gutteridge and Horace Breen.

He couldn't help feeling rather pleased with himself for how well it'd all worked. The invention of the public school ‘Whittinghams' was one of the details that gave him most satisfaction.

And he couldn't really feel much regret for the fact that Phyllis Townley's illegitimate son Terence had been killed in the Blitz.

Peter Crabbett might, at some point, be moved to ‘discover' more Eunice Brocks. But he decided, at the risk of anachronism, he'd make any subsequent typescripts a bit more politically correct than the first one. It'd probably save time in the long run.

Parkhurst

16th June, 1986

Dear Boy,

I am sorry to hear the Fourth of June celebrations was a trial. I've used that agency before and they never give me no trouble, but I will certainly withdraw my future custom after this lot, and may indeed have to send the boys round. Honest, Son, I asked them to send along a couple what would really raise you in your fellow-Etonians' esteem when they saw who you got for parents. I had to get Blue Phil to draw quite a lot out of the old deposit account under the M23/M25 intersection, and I just don't reckon I got value for my hard-earned oncers.

OK, the motor was all right. Vintage Lagonda must've raised a few eyebrows. Pity it was hot. Still, you can't have everything. But really . . . To send along Watchstrap Malone and Berwick Street Barbara as your mum and dad is the height of naffness so far as yours truly is concerned. I mean, doesn't no one have any finesse these days? No, it's not good enough. I'm afraid there's going to be a few broken fingers round that agency unless I get a strongly worded apology in folded form.

For a start, why did they send a villain to be
in loco parentis
? (See, I am not wasting my time down the prison library.) Are they under new management? Always when I used them in the past, they sent along actors, people with no form. Using Watchstrap, whose record's as long as one of Barry Manilow's
sounds
, is taking unnecessary risks. OK, he looks the toff, got the plummy voice and all that, but he ISN'T THE GENUINE ARTICLE. Put him in a marquee with an authentic Eton dad and the other geezer's going to see he's not the business within thirty seconds. Remember, in matters of class, THERE'S NO WAY SOMEONE WHO ISN'T CAN EVER PASS HIMSELF OFF AS THE REAL THING (a point which I will return to later in this letter).

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 of 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.