I Am Gold (29 page)

I felt that since the truncheon and knuckle-duster had not been bought yet and were therefore present, they had, as it were, been allocated by Destiny, as foreseen in the horoscope, to deal with the interruption mentioned. I had decided that if either the truncheon or the knuckle-duster became bloodied during some incident, they could easily be washed under a cold tap and then returned to the Local History Artefacts tray for sale utterly unstained. During the 1950s I was in the Women's Royal Army Corps and we learned some unarmed combat, such as the weak spots on an attacker's body if male, particularly the temple and genitals. I met my future husband in the army.

When the man I now know to be L.S. Sparks came into the shop, with the woman I now know to be Veronica Susan Cleaver, I felt no fear because I saw at once that his arrival had been foreseen in my horoscope and I realized I would be able to deal with him, owing to mental preparedness and physical preparedness also – that is, my nearness to the truncheon and knuckle-duster. He was shouting and screaming the fuck, bastards and cunt words, as would be expected in this type of crisis, and I could tell it was all based on weakness.

These are words that do have meanings, but they are not used for their meanings in this type of occasion, only to frighten and abuse. I had the idea even then that the gunman had done something terrible before reaching the shop and he knew he would soon be called to account for it. Of course, I know now what he had done. I thought of the Bible verse, ‘Be sure your sins will find you out', and I picked up the truncheon and hid it in the sleeve of my woolly, with the strap around my wrist. I did not take the knuckle-duster because it would have been too obvious, and I was not trained in the WRAC to give upper-cuts, which is the best punch with a knuckle-duster.

It was important for me to keep the truncheon hidden because he told us all to get into the middle of the shop away from the counters. I think he realized there might be an alarm bell there. In fact, there
was
an alarm bell there, but I thought it best not to go for it because he would have noticed and maybe shot at me, so that having the truncheon would have been useless. I also thought that if I pressed the bell the police station
might
send someone around when they could, but it would be only one or two officers and unarmed. That's what usually happened when we have rung the bell previously. This would be no good against a man with a gun or guns. Occasionally, they didn't even have anyone at all to send around at once and we would have to wait as much as an hour.

Although Mrs South was trying to give me an eye signal to press the bell, I ignored her and considered it best to hang on until Sparks was distracted somehow and then really wham him with the cosh. In the WRAC we were trained to sum up all aspects of a situation and then arrive at a plan, with the objective very clear. Here the objective would be to flatten Sparks as soon as there was a chance. So I went out from behind the counter and joined the others in the middle of the shop. Veronica Cleaver looked very, very bad.

This time, Harpur skimmed the central parts of Maureen Hyde's statement. He knew they chimed pretty well with Beatrice South's version, except that Mrs Hyde claimed to have been going for Sparks' temple, not his jaw, with one of her hits, and said that launching the display stand against the window had been deliberate, not an accident. Her army training had told her to maximize chaos in this kind of set-to, so as to further confuse the enemy, ‘like the fireships at Cadiz,' she said. In none of the statements –South's, Hyde's, Ure's or Cleaver's – was it clear how Sparks' pistol had gone off. Nobody mentioned getting a finger on the trigger. Would Mrs Hyde have been trained to go for the enemy's gun, as well as to clobber him thoroughly at the temple and balls? Her right hand would probably have been wielding the cosh. And her left? She didn't mention it. And none of the others spoke of getting a hand on the gun, either. So, did Sparks do himself, maybe unintentionally in the struggle, maybe not? At the end of her statement, Mrs Hyde described Veronica Cleaver's rush towards Dodd, still prone on the ground.

This seemed to show true worry and love for him. She had cried out strangely when he first began running from the police caravan, speaking his name, Gary, saying she was sorry. She said it several times. I didn't know what she meant. While she was attending to Dodd on the ground another man seemed to ignore the cordon tape and come to talk to her. But she looked as though she really didn't want this, whoever he was. I had seen something like this when I was in the WRAC. A man was hurt during an exercise on Salisbury Plain and his girlfriend, who was also in the exercise, came running to see if he was all right. Then another soldier came and tried to pull her away from the one on the ground. He got up, although hurt, and there was a sort of fight, the three of them, until an officer came. This didn't happen with Veronica Cleaver, because the man on the ground didn't recover. But she looked as though she wanted the other man to get lost. And he did. In both these episodes it was like the woman had been carrying on a bit, and suddenly there's too many men around. But I don't suppose this is relevant to the siege and so on.

No.

3. Thomas Ure, fifty-two, of The Old Water Mill, Kaletree, private means.

I visit charity shops from time to time in order to ascertain whether what I would regard as unsuitable material is on sale there, with particular reference to books, CDs and DVDs. By ‘unsuitable' I mean of a sexual, violent or perverted kind. I know very well that I cannot prevent the sale of such material in commercial emporia, but I feel that for shops devoted to charitable work some sort of protest should be made. If I come across examples of this kind of degraded and degrading work, I draw the attention of the shop manageress to it. I do not in any respect damage the items on the spot, but, having spoken to the manageress, I offer to pay for the offending articles as long as I can have an assurance that they will be withdrawn and possibly destroyed. I certainly do not wish to take such dubious goods with me.

I do not care to think of folk in, say, the poorer areas of Ethiopia, receiving benefits from a charity shop which have in fact been paid for by the sale of improper stock. On the morning of 3rd June I had come across in the charity shop a copy of a book called
Torch
by someone called David Craig which, on a quick perusal, I deemed not to be right for purchase here. I was about to take the book to the manageress, who was attending to clothes on hangers, when the door was very abruptly thrust open from outside and a man holding a gun came in, dragging after him a protesting woman.

The man was shouting words which indicated, I thought, an uncommon degree of stress for a customer in a charity shop, such as ‘fuck', ‘twats', ‘cunt' and ‘bastards'. This sudden event seemed to mirror some of the speech in books, CDs, and DVDs, which I consider not altogether right for a charity shop's shelves. But this was a man actually using these terms as parlance and I could not at first see how to deal with it. This was acutely different from words on a page or spoken via electronic means by actors. I wanted to help him and said so.

Ure's description of what followed also tallied with Mrs South's and Mrs Hyde's, and Harpur skipped again. At the end, Ure's statement said:

Although it was comparatively easy in charity shops to complain about unsavoury exhibits for sale, I came to see that someone uttering gross language and with a gun in his hand –this, I think, was the important matter, I mean the gun in his hand – in those circumstances I decided that physical remedy was probably necessary and I was content to help the manageress and the lady with the truncheon in restraining the intruder, though death seemed excessive. This is often the trouble with guns. They go off.

4. Veronica Susan Cleaver, aged thirty-two, of 9 Larch Lane, IT consultant.

I had parked my car in a multi-storey and was walking towards the shops in Scourton Road on Wednesday, 3rd June at about 9 a.m. This was not a part of the town where I normally shopped, but a colleague had said there were bargains to be had here. I became aware of a man running towards me. Two police officers in uniform were chasing him and shouting at him to stop. He was carrying a pistol in his right hand. The policemen also had guns. I was so startled and afraid that I think I froze for a minute. I hoped he and the police officers would run past me. I have not been well lately and find it difficult to cope with stress episodes.

The man with the gun, who, I have since learned, was called Sparks, did not pass me, however, but when he was very close shouted to me to get into the charity shop. I obviously did not want to go in there if he meant to come in there also. I stood still. He grabbed me, by the shoulder at first, and stood behind me with the gun against the back of my neck and he screamed at the two officers chasing him to stop or he would shoot me. They did stop. They were yelling at him to let me go, but he didn't.

The two policemen got down and lay on the road, their guns pointing towards him, but they did not fire. I think they must have withdrawn to the cordon later. Sparks moved his hand from my shoulder. Instead, he took hold of me around the neck, so breathing became difficult. He kicked the door of the charity shop open and pulled me inside after him, then he kicked the door shut.

Her statement described the events in the shop, without much difference from the other three statements. She hadn't taken part in the fight with Sparks because she felt so weak and numbed by his attack on her. She concluded:

I had recognized my partner, Gary James Dodd, making his way from the police caravan towards the shop and then brought down by the man I have learned since was Assistant Chief Constable Iles. I realized Gary must have heard of the siege somehow and come to find me, if he could. As soon as Sparks fell, seeming unconscious or possibly dead from a gunshot wound, I left the shop and hurried to where Gary still lay. He seemed to be coming round and was able to speak my name. I was hugely relieved. Just then a stretcher party came and I went with them and Gary to an ambulance and the hospital.

Chapter Thirty

2009

Not very long after the wedding
^*
and honeymoon, Manse set off to London to see Joan Fenton again and check over the most recent amendments to his will and sign it. The divorce settlement with Sybil had been done OK, he thought – on the generous side, as Manse had always wanted. He hated meanness, even towards someone like Syb, who hadn't behaved at all proper, in his opinion. Anyway, now his new wife, Naomi, had to be properly looked after in some vital changed clauses.

Hubert drove him in one of the firm's Audis. Manse had wanted to leave him behind to do the school run with Matilda and Laurent, but Naomi insisted real hard that this had to be her duty. Although it worried him, he agreed. He could understand her thinking. She was their stepmother now and very keen to make this obvious. It was official, yes, but she also required people to recognize it, see it as normal, accept it. This seemed to Manse very lovable and strong.

He left the Jaguar for her so that up at the school they would know this was undoubtedly the new Mrs Shale, who absolutely had a right to drive this car and to be in charge of the children. Never would Manse have allowed Carmel or Patricia or Lowri to of ferried Matilda and

^*
See
Hotbed

Laurent in the Jag. It would not of been correct. Their role was not to drive the children to school. He had an idea Carmel, Patricia and Lowri would of recognized this theirselves. For Naomi, another thing about driving the children was it showed she was settling down much more here. She seemed to of almost given up going to London. Maybe the consultancy didn't matter so much to her now. Shale wondered, too, whether the ‘facilitating' had never really happened – just made up by that sod Lionel-Garth to bring trouble and nerviness. To Manse in these days and weeks and months, Naomi, Matilda, Laurent and himself seemed a true family, a happy household.

Naomi certainly deserved to be big in his will, even though she'd automatically get a good sackful if he went because a wife had certain entitlements via quite a law or two. The rotten idea that he could get snuffed at any time still hung about. It was even worse lately. Them two, Egremont Lake and Lionel-Garth Field, had been quiet since he saw them at the rectory or up near Bracken Collegiate, but that might not mean much. Why had one or other of them done that tracking and tracing? Perhaps Joan Fenton had been right when she said he ought to have a bodyguard always. It was definitely sensible to get the will tied up and neat.

He'd had Ralphy Ember as his best man for the wedding, but that might not mean much either. Always there was this pressure to get monopoly. Manse felt it often. And he guessed Ralph did, too. It could be dangerous. One reason he'd asked Ralph to be best man was that he'd have to stand close to Shale in church for some of the service. If Ember had been thinking the ceremony would put Manse nice and exposed and easy to blast by gunmen smuggled into the congregation, he'd have to ditch that plan because he might get hit hisself.

Manse and Hubert left early and would of been in London with at least an hour to spare, if they hadn't turned back. The appointment with Fenton was at noon. Manse asked Quentin Noss to keep in touch by mobile and let him know any developments on the patch. The call came at just after ten thirty. Noss said: ‘Manse, something bad, very bad.'

In the evening at the rectory Manse had three visitors and a phone call. Ralph Ember arrived first. ‘I didn't know whether to come or not – whether it would be intrusive, Manse. But Margaret said I should.'

Hi, Ralph. Matilda told me Laurent thought you sent the hired fucking murderer of my wife and child. He believed you wanted all the trade for yourself and your firm. However, I don't consider you stupid enough to pick the sort of bungler who kills two lovely people by mistake. But Manse did not say this. ‘Hi, Ralph. I'm glad you did come. Thank you, and thank Margaret.'