Lestrade stared. “Sergeant Harry... Watson,” he said slowly. “Well, it’s a common enough name, so I’m not surprised it didn’t register with me.” He stood up. “Fancy a drink, Harry?”
“I’d enjoy that, sir. Thank you.”
“Good. And Harry... I’ve settled the score now, so I don’t care if my constabulary ancestors do spin in their graves. Just call me Guv.”
Some Sunny Day
Julian Rathbone
On more than one occasion Baz has abused her great reputation as a criminal investigator for very dubious ends. The ‘murder’ of Don Hicks was a case in point. On our return from Las Palomas we quarrelled quite bitterly on the subject. Then, as she has also done on subsequent occasions, she produced a line of reasoning, which, were it not put into practice with remarkable results, I would find endearingly old-fashioned — a naïve amalgam of Hobbes and Nietzsche with a few other ‘philosophers’ like de Sade filling in the harmonies.
Standing with her back to the forty-eight-inch TV screen which plays continuously but always silently in her living-room, and which serves the social purpose of an open fire, she rocked back and in her Tibetan snow leopard slippers came on like a pompous don.
“My dear Julia,” she said, full of smug self-satisfaction because things had gone so well, in spite of my efforts to put them right, “there wis only one personal morality that deserves more than a moment’s consideration. Follow your own individual star, the promptings of your innermost soul — be true to that and nothing else—”
I interrupted as mockingly as I could: “Do it my way?”
Baz went on, unruffled.
“The morality you appeal to, the communally shared sense of what is right and wrong, is a fiction, a tissue of lies invented by man in his short aspect to allow society to function, to regulate the transactions we make one with another in our social lives.” She sipped ice-cold Russian vodka — neat with a scatter of freshly ground black pepper. “My dear Julia, you are not ill-educated, and you are trained in the social sciences — you are therefore perfectly well aware that all societies hold their own moralities to be the only good ones, yet all societies swiftly and hypocritically change their moralities as soon as their survival is threatened it they do not...”
I attempted an interruption: “I cannot recall a society which condoned or encouraged wholesale robbery on the scale perpetrated by your friend Hicks.”
She froze, then gave me that long cold stare which she knows I hate because of its element of Olympian scorn for the foolishness of a mere mortal.
“You forget Ruskin’s truism that the wealth of Victorian England was built on the loot of empires.”
“And you forget”, said I, pleased to find a rejoinder on the spot and not half-way down the stairs, “that he also said you cannot put an unearned sovereign in your own pocket without taking it from someone else’s.”
Well, enough of that, I leave the reader to judge between us.
I am well aware that Hicks’s demise was well-aired in the media at the time, and that a couple of hacks have since cobbled together books about the whole affair, but I am also aware that such sensations are less than seven-day wonders and the more intelligent readers of these memoirs will have quite rightly by now forgotten all but a hazy outline of the sordid business. If however you have that sort of mind that does retain in detail the trivia of what passes for news, then I suggest you skip the next page.
In 1970 a gang of three evil hoodlums carried out the Grosswort and Spinks bullion robbery. In the process they killed a security guard but got clean away with thirty million pounds’ worth of gold bars which were never recovered. Their getaway van had been stolen for them by a petty London car thief called Don Hicks, who also drove it in the second stage of the robbery. He was arrested for the car theft and later accused of being an accessory — but the prosecution on the major charge was later dropped and he went down for only two years. The three hoodlums were arrested almost certainly on evidence supplied by Hicks, and they got twenty years each.
When Hicks came out he sold up his south London assets, a garage and a terrace house in Tooting Bec, and opened a small car workshop in Marbella, where he claimed to be providing an essential service a Spaniard could not supply — talking English to the English residents who needed their cars fixed.
Six months later he met and married María Pilar Ordoñéz, who was working as a hotel maid and cleaner. Two months after the wedding they moved into a luxury pad in Las Palomas, the smartest little bay between Marbella and Gibraltar. They had won the big one, the fat one the Spaniards call it, the Christmas lottery — six million in sterling at the then rate of exchange. No one believed them, nobody doubted that the money was the Grosswort and Spinks bullion, but no one could prove it, least of all Detective Inspector (as he was then) Stride, who had been in charge of the case. He was furious at this outcome — that Hicks should get off lightly for turning Queen’s evidence was one thing, that he should end up seriously wealthy was quite another.
Sixteen years well-heeled contentment followed, but then Hicks’s paradisaical life took two nasty knocks. First, his first wife, Sandra, went to Stride and said she was prepared to tell him all about Hicks’s part in the Grosswort and Spinks robbery, including how he had masterminded the whole thing, but most important of all, where what was left of the bullion was, and so on. Second, the three hooligans he had shopped were let out. No one had any doubt at all they would head straight for Las Palomas — in the dock eighteen years before they had promised Hicks, in song, that don’t know where, don’t know when, we’ll meet again some sunny day. The only question was: would Strike get there first?
It turned out not to be a coincidence at all that Holmes and I were also on our way, club BA Gatwick to Málaga. I passed her the plastic ham from my plastic tray and she gave me her orange.
I asked her, “Why?”
“Because,” she said, smoothing her immaculately glossy, sleek black hair behind her small perfect ear, “Don is a very old friend. A very good friend.”
“You made a friend out of a robber?”
“He has wit, charm, and he is very, very clever.”
“But I thought you occupied yourself with putting criminals behind bars.”
“I occupy myself solving human problems whose ironic intricacies appeal to the intellectual side of my personality.”
And she terminated the conversation by turning her head slightly away from me so the bony profile of her remarkable nose was silhouetted against the flawless empyrean of space at thirty thousand feet.
We were met at Málaga airport by an urchin in an acid house T-shirt which also carried the slogan Don’t Worry, Be Happy. He wore jeans and trainers and locked every inch a Spanish street Arab until you saw his eyes which, beneath his mop of black hair worn fashionably stepped, were deepset and blue. He shook hands very politely with me, but to my surprise was awarded a kiss on both cheeks from Baz.
“¡Madrina!” he cried, “¿Cómo estás?”
“Madrina?” I asked, as he picked up our bags.
“Godmother,” Baz replied.
I was stunned. I was even more stunned when Juan Hicks (‘Heeks’) Ordoñéz led us out to the car-park, threw our bags into the trunk of a large silver-grey, open-top Merc, and himself settled, with keys, into the driver’s seat. I made rapid calculations.
“Baz,” I said, “this lad cannot be more than sixteen.”
“Sixteen next September.”
“But he’s driving. Isn’t that illegal?”