Goodnight, John-boy: Chapter 4
The cop never even asked how his mother got her black eye and perhaps that was just as well because his mum wasn’t a good liar and no one would have believed she walked into a door. Again.
Welcome to Book Two of my dark comedy thriller series, Read Em And Weep.
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If you’re new to the Read Em And Weep series, start with Book One: Serial Killer.
WHAT WAS the matter with the cop, thought Sam Morgan bitterly. He was just standing there – emotionless – in front of them. This was not how a ‘death message’ visit was meant to go. His robotic manner distracted the twelve-year-old from the success of his plan: the ingenious ‘accident’ he’d carefully planned and executed after reading The Caning Commando in The Spanker.
The cop should have been like the ones on TV, the boy felt. Like in Barlow; New Scotland Yard; Z Cars; or Dixon of Dock Green. The bereavement visit with the kindly and pretty WPC in attendance. It was a familiar scene to millions of viewers, and certainly to Sam. With a sad and sincere expression on his face, the cop should have said softly to his mum, ‘Mrs. Morgan, I’m sorry to tell you, I have some very bad news. Perhaps you’d like to sit down…?’
And then he would carefully break the terrible news that her husband had accidentally electrocuted himself. Meanwhile, the WPC would make his mum a cup of tea with plenty of sugar. And gently ask her if she was all right. And was there someone she could call? A neighbour? A close friend or relative? That’s how all the telly cops did it. It’s certainly how doddery old Dixon of Dock Green would have done it. That’s why he was so popular, with his cosy, kindly, ‘Evening All’ manner. Everyone felt safe knowing George Dixon was out there patrolling the streets, even if he was doing it in a bathchair these days.
But then, 1976 was the final year for octogenarian George Dixon. It was the end of an era, Sam had to remind himself, and The Sweeney was now the face of modern policing. So perhaps it was not actually surprising that this unsympathetic prick had turned up on his own with no WPC and no ‘I’m very sorry…’ by way of introduction.
He didn’t suggest his mum sat down before he told her the bad news. He just stood there, rattling off how her husband, Giles, had used a faulty power drill while working on their Summer cottage, with fatal consequences. And because he stood there, his mum also stood – in a state of shock – and Sam felt he had to stand, too. So they all stood there as the cop told her the graphic details in an emotionless, flat voice, like a robot. Far more information than his mum really needed to know. How his dad had been standing on a stepladder at the time, fell when he was electrocuted, and the drill bit cut through his throat and right up into his skull, killing him. And you couldn’t make the excuse he was a young, nervous, inexperienced cop on his first bereavement; he was a middle-aged sergeant.
So Sam sat his mother down and made her a cup of tea with plenty of sugar and put his arm around her and told her it was okay, she was going to be okay, everything was okay. The cop never even asked how his mother got her black eye and perhaps that was just as well because his mum wasn’t a good liar and no one would have believed she walked into a door. Again.
Sam had begged her to leave his dad and take shelter in a women’s refuge. But she was far too middle class to go into a battered wives hostel. And too afraid that Giles would come after her. There was madness in his family: his brother, Tristan, had been sectioned after he had set fire to a deserted house. Protecting their five-bedroom, double-garage, detached property standing in its own landscaped grounds was far more important to Mrs Morgan than Giles breaking half the bones in her body.
Her solution to his violence was to jam the vacuum cleaner across the bedroom window and run the cable down to the garden. She was desperate enough to abseil down it and run across the lawn and escape the next time he went into one of his rages. Only he beat her to it and that was how she ended up with the black eye. ‘You’re dumber than dog shit,’ he snarled, before he started.
That was when Sam decided enough was enough, and his dad had to go.
Still without a trace of compassion, the robot cop gave Mrs Morgan an incident number and explained the procedure: what would happen next, the coroner, the inquest and so on. Not that she was paying any attention. It hadn’t yet sunk in: that she was free of the monster who had made her life a living hell. The same was true for Sam. He had long ago lost any feelings of love for his father, who was violent with him as well. And everything had gone just as he planned. This cop seemed to think the inquest would be just a formality. Defective drill. Open and shut case. A tragic accident with no suspicious circumstances.
Sam had got the idea from a Caning Commando story where the hero, Victor Grabham, once more meets his deadly enemy, the Oberspankerfuhrer, leader of the feared Wackem SS. He was also known as the Blue Man, because his backside was frozen solid on the Russian front so he was invulnerable in caning duels. The story seemed pretty stupid, but there was a surprising amount of detailed instructions on how Grabham secretly sabotaged the Oberspankerfuhrer’s lethal electric cane, taken from an authentic commando manual.
It was easy enough for Sam to adapt the instructions to sabotage a power drill and, when his dad switched it on, the result was lethal.
The cop had barely been in the house ten minutes and, satisfied that he’d carried out his orders, was making a prompt exit, without so much as a ‘so sorry for your loss, Mrs Morgan.’ But that was all right, because Sam would take care of his mother. He might only be twelve years old, but he was the Man of the House now.
Sam opened the front door, ushered the cop out and watched as he got into his pale blue and white panda car and drove away. The boy resisted the temptation to call after him, ‘Evening All.’
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Detective Inspector ‘Fiddy’ Ferguson believed he was a good cop, although his superiors would have disagreed. That’s why they had insisted he take early retirement, and he’d ended up living on the Costa Del Crime, alongside many of the villains he’d done business with during his time on the Flying Squad. He was certainly a smart cop, his bosses never found his secret bank account, no matter how hard they looked. It was tucked away in Gibraltar, safe as the rock itself. He could see Gibraltar from his room in the Sol Tower Hotel, near Estepona, and it made him feel good to think that all that lovely money was only an hour’s drive away.
He was also a persistent cop, because he wouldn’t let that business of the Caning Commando go. When he’d seen his grandson’s comics with detailed instructions on how to construct a pipe bomb and administer a lethal poison, he knew he was onto something serious. It had taken him longer than expected to get to the bottom of it, though. And by the time he had, his daughter, son-in-law and grandson, Tim, were back in the UK. He blamed the delays on the Spanish phones. To make an international call, he had to book a slot through the Malaga operator and it took forever. Fiddy was a great admirer of Franco, but the Generalísimo really needed to do something about his bloody telephone system.
Eventually, he got through to his old mate on the squad, Harry Peters, and asked him to do some digging. Harry owed him big-time: when Fiddy was being investigated by A10, he’d made sure Harry’s name was kept out of the frame. It turned out that Harry knew the art editor on The Spanker: one Steve Barclay, and he went for a drink with him in the Hoop and Grapes, the pub over the road from Fleetpit Publications where the comic was produced.
‘He’s nicknamed “Deep Throat” Barclay for some reason,’ said Harry. ‘Kind of appropriate as he dished the dirt on that comic book character you wanted to know all about.’
According to Deep Throat, Harry revealed, the Caning Commando stories were scripted by a freelance writer known as The Major, but they were edited by a Dave Maudling. Maudling seemed to have a pathological dislike of his readers. Deep Throat’s studio was next door and he had overheard Maudling chatting to his assistant editor. He’d talk about The Spanker surviving a nuclear holocaust, but ‘We’ll have to chisel the comic out on a rock. We’ll have two-headed readers coming to buy it. We’ll be able to sell the little bastards two copies at once.’
Deep Throat said Dave was strange: he’d once disguised himself as the tea lady; there were rumours he was living in the attic at the top of the Fleetpit building, and something about him wearing a gorilla suit, only it was turned inside out. Fiddy decided Harry must have got that bit wrong. Why would anyone in their right mind wear an inside-out gorilla suit?
Harry reported that the teacher who had ‘mistakenly’ swallowed the tasteless and odourless poison had a criminal record for violence. And a priest had been ‘accidentally’ blown up by a pipe bomb: a chemistry experiment by his altar boys that had gone tragically wrong. Boys ‘messing about’ with their chemistry sets and blowing themselves or adults up were so commonplace, the story hadn’t made the nationals, but, as it involved explosives, it had still come to the attention of the Yard.
The dates fitted, all right. The altar boys could have read how to construct their bomb from the story in The Caning Commando. Apparently, the priest had moved parishes six times in the last eight years, and the cops knew what that meant.
Maudling was a wrong ’un, that much was certain. Even though they hadn’t yet met, Fiddy could just smell it. But what was his game? Was he trying to kill kids or save them? There was a contradiction there. Either way, he was playing with fire.
Fiddy looked at his calendar. Time was running out and he knew he would have to act fast. He got hotel reception to book him a taxi, then braved the journey on the lethal two-lane coast road, known as the ‘Highway of Death’, to Malaga airport.
He was on the next plane back to Blighty.
Goodnight, John-boy is the first book in the Read Em And Weep series and is on sale digitally or as paperback.