Don’t ask. Even now
“So – who did kill Walter Williams?” thought Amy as
she walked up the riverside path. “I mean, I posed the question in the
headline. And I wrote the article. And I bet I’ll be asked.”
She looked at her watch. It was just on ten, and she was not
expected at the studio until eleven. And it was one of those beautiful bright
October mornings when, just for a day, summer fights back, refusing to yield to
mellow fruitfulness. It was a weekday and schoolday and there were few people
about, but the odd paddleboarder passed by. A family of swans splashed past;
the cygnets were getting flying lessons. They weren’t doing very well. “Pull
back on the stick! Hard!” thought Amy, and giggled. She sat down on one of the
benches. On the City bank opposite, there were still a few old warehouses and
workshops, some dilapidated, others cleaned up and still in use. But
Pepperdine’s had long been razed and where the factory had been there were
blocks of luxury flats.
Mike Robbins
She gazed across at the site where Pepperdine’s had been,
and where her grandfather, a lathe operator, had once worked; and his father
before him. Back then small sea-going coasters had come this far up the river;
it seemed too small for them, yet they’d come. with coal from the North-East and
timber from Sweden, and newsprint from the Baltic for the printworks farther up.
In fact they had come for a thousand years, bringing stone from Normandy for
the medieval Cathedral, textiles from Bruges, salted herring, cereals from
Prussia and German beer, and furs – sable and ermine from Russia; and amber;
much of it bound for the Hanseatic League’s warehouse that had once stood not
far from Pepperdine’s, where the crash and hum of machinery had once marked it
as one of several engineering shops along the river that made machine tools,
and fabricated aircraft parts and forged beams and trusses.
Then forty years ago the ships had gone; the works buildings
had closed and, in time, been torn down, and now there were paddleboarders and
luxury flats. That was the only river Amy had known.
She stood and walked slowly towards the city centre, trying
to look at the river as Walter Williams would have seen it on that last day of
his life – 94 years ago, 70 years before she was born.
*
She was sat in front of a microphone and had a heavy pair of
headphones clamped over her long brown hair. A big mug of coffee steamed on the
desk. Slightly to her alarm, there was a webcam pointing at her. “I know it’s
radio,” said the presenter, a bubbly woman in her 40s called Carly. “But
nowadays people follow us on YouTube sometimes, or listen later on Spotify and
they can see you too. Are you ready?”
She faded out the music that had been playing and said: “I’d
like to welcome Amy Tyler from the Daily Press. Amy, it’s lovely to have
you.”
“Thank you.”
“And Amy has come to tell us about a murder. In today’s
paper she has a feature on a death in the city 94 years ago – an unsolved
murder that was notorious once, but has now been forgotten; that of Walter
Williams. Amy, how did you stumble across this?”
“I was looking for interesting stories about our city,” said
Amy. “In the newspaper archives in the British Library. Every now and then
we’ve made the national papers. But people today often don’t know. About us
having an early woman MP, for instance.”
“Yes, I remember your story on her,” said Carly. “That was
fascinating. So is this. But it’s a bit grisly, isn’t it? Tell us about the
Pepperdine’s murder.”
“Well, in the spring of 1933, they were dredging the river
just downstream of the city,” said Amy. “Today it’s done very carefully, and
only in the winter, to do minimum damage to fishing and to nesting birds and
riverbank mammals. They weren’t so fussy then.
One day in April a dredger was at work a few miles downstream, near Westham
Bridge. It was a steam-powered bucket dredger, a big boat that dredged the
riverbed with buckets that ran on a continuous loop. The mud was dropped into a
barge moored alongside. And of course stuff came up with the mud…”
“Old bikes,” said Carly. “Prams.” She chuckled.
“Of course! But that day, something nastier dropped into the
barge. It was the bloated, partially decomposed body of a man, unidentifiable
after many weeks in the water. At first the crew thought it was a large dog, or
a farm animal. Then they realised otherwise.”
“But the police found out who he was,” said Carly.
“Oh yes,” said Amy. “They suspected it was the body of
Walter Williams, an overseer at Pepperdine’s who had disappeared just before
Christmas. “
“But they didn’t have our ways to check then, did they?
There was no DNA analysis.”
“No,” said Amy. “But they had plenty of other tools. Believe
it or not they could take fingerprints from a badly decomposed body, even then.
They matched them up with prints from Williams’s home. And they checked with
his dentist. It was him. He was 42 and had been apprenticed at Pepperdine’s in
1904. They were doing war work so he had been exempt from conscription when it
was first introduced, but later the Army needed men badly, and he had to go to
the Western Front. But though he had a head wound, he got back. Not everyone
did, of course, so he was promoted. He became a chargehand, then in his 30s a
foreman. He’d have had a lot of power over the workmen in his shop.”
“And someone made away with him?”
“Yes. On Thursday December 22 1932, he went into work as
normal. He was still in the plant when the whistle blew at 5pm. No-one saw him
leave. But he never came home. His wife had his tea ready as normal – they had
no children – but she never saw hide nor hair of him. She thought he might have
gone to the pub. But when he didn’t come in after closing time, she went and
spoke to the night watchman at the works, but there was no trace of him. And
there never was. Until the following April.”
“And did the police establish how he’d died?” asked Carly.
“Yes. A blow to the back of the head with a blunt object. I
suppose now we’d call it blunt-force trauma.”
“Oh my goodness. So someone came up from behind him?”
“It looked like that,” said Amy. “A heacy implement, maybe a
hammer or spanner. Of course the blow could have been due to a fall. But if so,
why was the body in the river, weighted with a heavy chain? The inquest
concluded that this might or might not have been murder, but was either that or
manslaughter. As no-one knew, the coroner recorder an open verdict. The case
has never been closed.”
“My goodness,” said Carly. She gave an involuntary shiver.
“Listeners, an unsolved death from long ago. Has anyone heard of this death,
maybe from older relatives? Does anyone have memories of Pepperdine’s? Do tell
us. If you’re watching on YouTube, do comment below, or on our website, or call
us on….”
She had cued up a Paloma Faith track. While that was
playing, a call flooded in.
“And here’s a caller – it’s George from West Badger’s Neate.
Hello George!”
“Hello Carly,” said a deep, slow voice with a strong local
accent. “I wanted to say something about Walter Williams.”
“Do go ahead.”
“I was born a year or two later,” said the voice. “But I
knew about this when I were growin’ up. And I’ll tell you, Walter Williams, he
was a right shit.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“Oh dear,” said Carly. “George, perhaps we shouldn’t use
that word on air. What did folks say to you about him… George?”
There was a dialling-tone sound.
“We seem to have lost George,” said Carly, her voice bright.
”Let’s go to our next caller. David from Westfield. Hallo David!”
“Hello Carly.” Again, it was a local accent. “I were born ’bout
then mesself. Walter Williams was a piece of work. Everyone hated him. And
everyone knew who’d done ‘im in. Everyone in the city knew. But they just never
said. Not then. Not later. Not now.”
Amy saw Carly’s jaw dropping.
“Now, we shouldn’t make accusations,” she said. She looked
worried.
“Don’t you fret,” said David. “All three men long dead. Last
one’s sixty year gone now. And may they rest in peace. He were a bad man. And
don’t you tell me your lady writer there don’t know who killed him. Whole city
knew. She does.”
“I don’t,” said Amy. She bit her lip. Oh God, I think I’ve
opened a can of worms, she thought.
“Time for some music,” said Carly, a little brittle. “And
here’s some nostalgia. The Beatles, with – “ she gulped slightly – “Maxwell’s
Silver Hammer.”
The music began. Carly looked through the window at the
producer. “Great choice of track, genius,” she muttered.
*
The studio was in the smart civic centre that loomed above
the market square. The square was packed with stalls selling everything from
books to cookware, spicy sausages and local cheeses. It had been there many
hundreds of years. Sometimes Amy thought how a 12th-century trader from Lübeck or Bruges would feel if they
landed in the city today; at first they would be bewildered, but then they
would come to the Market Square and understand at once the place and feel at
one with the people who worked there. She usually felt very at home in the
Market.
But after the interview she felt an odd disquiet.
She lunched on a takeaway from one of the market stalls; she
often did this and today she had fish and chips, but it did not agree with her
as it usually would. She sat eating on the terrace overlooking the market, in
front of the Town Hall, where the War Memorial was. Many people did that, and
it was busy and cheerful.
“What have I missed?” she asked herself. “What should I have
known?”
Her phone chirruped and she opened the text. It was from her
mother.
Will you go and see
grandad today
She texted back: Yes
in visiting hours after four. All good?
Her mother replied: Tests
inconclusive. He is comfortable
Then: He rang just
now. He wants to see you today
She frowned as she put her phone away. She looked out across
the square. It was the same as ever.
*
Sometimes Grandad put on his dressing-gown and sat in the
easy-chair beside his bed, but today he was lying back on the bed itself,
propped by pillows. His face was thin. She kissed him on the forehead, then sat
down in the easy-chair herself. They were on the first floor; outside a knot of
children were playing a ball-game of some kind, and their voices could be
clearly heard. The early-evening sun streamed in through the big modern window
and cast an apricot light on Grandad’s face.
“Heard you on the radio today,” he said.
“You listened to me?”
“Oh yes. Feel quite proud really. Silly old sod, I am. But
that’s how I feel. That’s our Amy on the radio.”
They smiled at each other.
“Didn’t know you’d be talking ‘bout Walter Williams, though.
I’d’a told you no. Don’t you talk ‘bout him.”
She frowned.
“You another person going to tell me what a bad man he was?”
she asked.
“Oh yes,” he said. “I knew. He was 15 years dead when I was
born. But I knew. And I knew who killed him.”
“Do you? I wish you’d tell me,” said Amy. Her frown deepened.
“All these hints, here and there, like – OK, who killed Walter Williams,
Grandad?”
“Your great-grandfather,” he replied.
She stared.
Outside, a ball hit a car. The children were laughing. “Ha!”
yelled one of them. “You ain’t joining the England squad.” The sun was getting
lower and it caught the steel rings that held the curtains around the bed, and
they shone.
*
“Dad was 22 then,” said Grandad. “When he was five his own dad,
your great-great-grandfather, went off to war. He never did come back and Dad
was the breadwinner. He’d been apprenticed at Pepperdine’s when he was 14. In
the machine shop.” He thought for a minute. ”He’d have done about seven years
as an apprentice, so by the time this happened he’d have been a journeyman. Had
been for about a year. You know what was happening then? Around the world?”
“The Depression,” said Amy.
“Yes.,” said Grandad. “’Cept they didn’t call it that. The Slump,
they always called it. You had a job, you held on to it like dear life. Well,
in them days a machine shop was run on piecework. You know about that? There’d
be a rate for the bits of work you did. And the fights they had over fixing
those rates. You don’t want to know. But it wasn’t just that. You heard of
ca’canny?”
“What?” asked Amy.
“No, you’d not have heard of it,” he said. “Mind you by the
time I grew up the worst of all this was gone. Well, ca’canny – it’s a Scots phrase
– it was the workers balancing their speed so they didn’t make the piece rate
look too high, or too low. Very careful they were. And if the foreman saw a
skilled man slowing his lathe to keep the piecework rates high, he’d quite
likely hand him his cards. He’d be out. Foremen could do that then. You’d be
out on your ear. Fourth winter of the Slump, you didn’t want that. You didn’t
want it. You didn’t, didn’t, didn’t want to lose your job.”
“So what happened, Grandad?”
Mike Robbins
“There were three of them. Dad, Josh Spencer and John Crowe.
Williams’d been picking on all of them. Dad was too fast so he’d slowed down to
protect the piecework rate, and Williams noticed. Spencer was a Bolshie and
Williams hated him. Crowe – well, he was a nice enough lad by all accounts, but
he was never very fast. Dad had to look after his mother and his younger
sister. Spencer had three children and Crowe had two. Williams called them in
at the end of the shift – it was the last shift of the day, everyone was
leaving – and told them they’d be getting their cards. He was pretty nasty
about it, from what Dad said. Thirty years later, he were still angry. Crowe
started crying. Walter Williams was a braggart and a bully. Always was, always
had been. Scum who crawled on his belly.
“Well, Williams turns toward the filing cabinet to get their cards. And Dad, he had this hammer in his hand, he’d been fixing something when he’d been called in. Big heavy hammer it was, he said. They never did find that. Didn’t think about it, he said. Red mist.You’re not going to swing for that miserable bastard, Spencer said, and he wasn’t joking; you could hang then. They got a chain off the shop floor and weighted the body with it, and tossed it in the river outside the factory. Truth be told, I think they panicked; it wasn’t the best place to put it. But the current dragged it downstream, and it wasn’t found till spring.”
He stopped talking and looked away. Voices came from the
children outside, and from around the ward. “Mr Clark, it’s time for your
medications,” a nurse was saying to someone. “Dad, you’re looking a bit
better,” said someone else’s visitor. There was a grating sound as the curtains
were drawn round a patient’s bed.
*
“He told you all this?”
“Yes,” said Grandad. “He died in 1961. He told me not long
before. He knew he was going. He was only 51. But he’d not been the same since
– well, he said he never thought there’d be foremen as bad as Williams. But he
bloody well met them on the Burma Railway. He wasn’t going to be old. Not after
that.”
“I’ve got some tissues,” said Amy. She opened her bag.
“Thank you,” said her grandfather.
“What happened to the others?” she asked, after an interval.
“Josh Spencer was killed in Spain,” he replied. “They said
he died fighting, but I heard he fell off a lorry. Crowe stayed at
Pepperdine’s. He was in a reserved occupation. So he was still in the machine
shop when the Germans bombed it. He was crushed under a steel roof truss. Dad
was the last to die. But people knew, you know. I don’t know who talked. Not
your great-grandad. Maybe Spencer. But I reckon it was Crowe. It was a burden,
like. He wasn’t a strong man.”
“People seem to know,” said Amy.
“Yes,” said her grandfather. “But it’s funny, you know,
people often do but they don’t talk. Walter Williams wasn’t unusual. When times
are hard, the scum always float to the surface by looking after the powerful’s
business. But people have a way of sticking together.”
A nurse in scrubs approached. She was young and vital but
tired.
“It’s time for your pills, Mr Tyler,” she said. She looked
at Amy. “Maybe he should rest now.”
“You kicking me out?” asked Amy.
“In the nicest possible way,” said the nurse. She grinned.
“Scram.”
“I suppose she’d better then,” said her grandfather. He turned towards Amy. “Do you ever walk along
the Riverside?”
“Yes, often. Did this morning,” she said.
“Remember what was there,” he said. “The ships and the
forges. And what we were. Walter Williams was scum but let the dead bury
the dead. But don’t forget who we were and where we’ve been. Or we lose our
soul. Do you understand?”
“I think so,” she said.
She kissed him, stood and then paused for a moment beside
his bed. Then she went out through the hospital’s main entrance. The children
had gone and it would soon be dark. Autumn was on the air and the season would
soon change, as it had so many times before.
More short fiction from Mike Robbins
The End A gun on a brownstone roof
The Last Time A figure skater leaves the ice
After the Flood An end? Or a beginning?
Remembered Time The past is a dangerous place
A Train Journey One's sister comes to visit
Time After Time When you have to warn the children
Fashion Wokeness and subversion. With style
A Time of Darkness History doesn't repeat itself. But it rhymes
Another Time A tear in the fabric
Evolution The world is turning
When Time Stands Still A hurricane lashes Pershing Square
Parallel Worlds Heat pumps and lentils. And a nice glass of Marsala
A Man for All Seasons Net zero. The Stranger's Bar. And a three-line whip
A History Lesson Why do we study it? So we can spot it happening
The Creatives Meeting a tech bro
Cold Everything is cold here
Homecoming A sort of love story
Solitude A Cold War memory
Rhodri Hactonby's Maps A question of social geography
Hiraeth A yearning…
Strange Places A spirit in the sky
A Sideways Journey Things might have been different
Displaced Encounter on E94th Street
Belonging Do you? Where?
Leaving Home A house has memories
Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or as paperbacks or e-books from Amazon and other on-line retailers.
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