I was enjoying a little drink in the Dog and Blanket in Nether Sodbury.
“Hey, Scruples, I want a word with you.”
I recognised John Donaldson. He frequented the Dog and Blanket and after a skinful, he would entertain them with the IRA anthem “The Merry Ploughboy”.
John is not licensed to kill. He is licensed to sell guns. I had raised a few questions about his licence and insisted on a background check. When it turned out he had done nothing more deadly in Northern Ireland than repair cars, he had been awarded the licence. He had never forgiven my scruples, hence the greeting.
“I’ve been robbed and the Insurance say I need something called a crime number.
Apparently John would be ‘fecked’ and indeed ‘beggered’ if he would go all the way to Scoresdale to get a crime number.
“Fecked and beggered in the same morning?” I inquired politely.
He made no response.
He was distinctly put out when I insisted on visiting the scene of the crime.
“You don’t need all that palaver.”
“We do if we are to verify the theft.”
He gave me a withering look but I declined to wither.
The crime scene was interesting.
He had the paperwork to show he owned the gun and had all its details. What was noteworthy was that the thief had taken the time to draw a picture of the gun on the wall and the slogan “DOWN WITH THE IRA”.
I gave Constable Colin Burgos the tedious job of checking all the guns in the shop against the records. It was just possible that John was engaged in insurance fraud. It was not credible that he had written the slogan on the wall though. It did explain his reluctance to have me around the premises and to photograph the scene for our records.
The photograph did not make its way into the Nether Sodbury Observer but the story was all over the village by lunchtime anyway.
Colin and I called on Abel Milter in his council flat. He had several convictions for theft but none involving firearms. He also had an alibi for the time of the robbery which we were able to check out.
Brian Round was our next call. He was widely regarded as the village ne’er-do-well.
“Do you have nothing better to do than to bother me?” he demanded truculently.
“Have you heard about the robbery?”
“Donaldson? I don’t think anybody would dare rob him unless they wanted a kneecapping.”
“So you know nothing about it?”
“Only what everybody in the pub was saying. It was a political theft. Now I know that I was a bit of a bad lad in my youth.”
“Like the charge for taking a driving away last year?” I suggested.
“Okay. In my recent youth but nothing political. You’ll admit that, Sergeant.”
Charlie Sawyer was the nearest thing Nether Sodbury had to a fence. He had a cast-iron alibi for the time of the robbery as you would expect. Nothing could be proved.
Then we had a stroke of luck.
A young man — we later found out he was actually still in school — had made an amateurish attempt to rob the post office in West Scoresdale. Maria Sewell was behind the counter at the time.
“He came in, the cocky wotsit, and demanded all the money in the till. ‘Give over,’ I says. ‘I’m not giving you any money, you whippersnapper.’“
“Then he produces this gun. Of course, I didn’t know if it was real or not.”
“‘You should be ashamed of yourself waving your toy gun around in here. I am going to tell your mum all about it if you don’t pack it in right now.’”
“Then the silly little so-and-so pulls the ruddy trigger. Well, it made a mess of the glass but it is actually bulletproof. I told him I’d come round there and give him what for. Well, he ran away with his tail between his legs.”
“Can you give us a description?” I asked.
“I can do better than that. I’ve got the CCTV footage for you. And the gun, by the way; he dropped it.”
Maria opened the drawer and there was the gun wrapped in tissue paper. We found it even had fingerprints on it.
We found the owner of the face and fingerprints was a teenager called Max Bull. He lived in Nether Sodbury. Once in custody he sang like a bullfinch. The gun matched the stolen one and he said he had bought it from Charlie Sawyer for £500. The little charmer had stolen the money from his father.
After due process, which took the best part of a year, we were able to return the gun to John Donaldson senior.
Charlie Sawyer would not reveal his sources, of course.
“You will get a lighter sentence if you tell us.”
Well, he um’d and ah’d for a while and said ‘no’ then he um’d and ah’d a bit more and said, “John Donaldson.”
Seeing our looks he added, “Junior.”
John Donaldson had had the imaginative idea of calling his son and heir by his own name. Junior was due to inherit the shop and was used, as he put it himself, as slave labour until he did.
“Why did you do it?”
“I was sick to death of the old man rabbiting on about the IRA. I thought this would stop him.”
John Senior disinherited his son on the spot.
John Junior got a non-custodial sentence as it was his first offence. He got a paying job in a local shop two doors away from the gun shop. it was hardly a fortune but it was enough to rent a room.
And the first time John Senior tried to sing the ‘Merry Ploughboy’ at the Dog and Blanket the bar room crowd started laughing at him. He shut up.
Derek McMillan is a writer in Durringon in the UK. His editor is his wife, Angela. He has written for print and online publications in the UK, USA, Australia and Canada. His latest book is the audio-book “Murder from Beyond the Grave” which is available on eBay.
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