Grounds for Appeal

TWELVE

Markby Road in Winson Green was one in a series of long parallel streets lined with terraced houses, branching off Handsworth New Road like ribs from a spine. They were tidy dwellings, most with small front bay windows and were a cut above many of the streets in less attractive parts of the area.

At ten o’clock that morning, the two detectives drove their grey Standard Vanguard slowly down the street, looking at the numbers on the doors. They found No. 183 almost at the end, a slightly shabbier house, but otherwise indistinguishable from scores of others. Sergeant Rickman had to park outside the house next door, as there was an old green van in front of their destination. It was a large Bedford of pre-war vintage, with ‘Franklin’s Fish and Chips’ painted on the side and a tin chimney poking from the roof.

‘Looks as if he’s swapped inn-keeping to become a chippie,’ grunted DI Hartnell, as they went through a rusted gate into the small concreted area in front of the door. There was no bell or knocker, so Rickman rapped on the glass pane with the edge of a half-crown coin.

After a delay, a large shadow appeared inside and a disgruntled face appeared in the gap when the door was opened a bare six inches. Long experience told the sergeant that a direct approach was best in these circumstances and he thrust his warrant card towards the beefy, red features.

‘Oliver Franklin?’ he said briskly. ‘Police, we’d like a word with you.’

The door opened a little wider, revealing a very large, pot-bellied man dressed in baggy trousers and a zip-fronted corduroy lumberjacket. He had a round, flabby face with sagging pouches under his watery eyes and a bulbous red nose. His coarse cheeks had the scars of old acne and Hartnell thought that he had rarely seen such an unattractive man.

Franklin glared at the officers with undisguised dislike.

‘Bloody rozzers, is it? Look, if it’s about the van out there, I sent for the tax disc last week, but bugger all’s come back yet.’

The sergeant put a large hand on the door and pushed it further open. ‘Nothing to do with your licence — not yet, anyway.’ There was a hint of a threat in his words.

The detective inspector spoke again. ‘We’d better come in, sir, unless you’d like to answer some questions on your doorstep.’

‘Or down at the police station,’ added Rickman, menacingly.

Olly Franklin got the message that these particular coppers were not ones to be messed with and opened the door wider.

‘Come on then,’ he growled grudgingly and shuffled back down the passage, his swollen feet encased in plaid slippers, the backs trodden flat by his heels. They squeezed past an old-fashioned bicycle propped against the stairs and walked down the worn linoleum to the kitchen at the end of the passage. Franklin went to stand with his back to a blackleaded fireplace, in which a small pile of coal was burning with more smoke than heat.

‘What’s all this about, then?’ he demanded, standing with his brawny arms folded defiantly across his chest.

Hartnell took his time in answering, looking around first at the gloomy kitchen lit by a grimy window that looked out on to a brick wall. The room had a table and chairs, the former carrying a couple of used teacups and a half-full bottle of milk, together with several newspapers opened at the racing pages. There was another door in the corner leading into a scullery, from which came an intermittent chopping noise.

‘Who’s that in there?’ he asked, being cautious about who might overhear their conversation.

‘Only the missus, cutting spuds for today’s frying,’ grunted Franklin. ‘I hope you ain’t going to keep me long, I got a living to make!’

‘You don’t make it now from being a licensee, I hear,’ said the sergeant. ‘Fish and chips pays better, does it?’

‘Does it hell!’ snarled Olly, his face suffusing with anger. ‘One pub knocked down from under me, then the bloody brewery fired me from the other, thanks to you lot who objected to the renewal of my tenancy.’

‘That’s partly what we’ve come about, your career in the local pubs,’ said the detective inspector.

‘What the hell for, that was years ago? Water under the bridge!’ snapped Franklin.

Hartnell decided to chance his arm a little. ‘We’ve been hearing that you were a bit too pally with Mickey Doyle,’ he said. ‘There’s a real villain for you!’

Olly’s hooded eyes flicked from one to the other. ‘Mickey Doyle? What the hell’s he got to do with anything? Haven’t seen him in years, honest.’

His denial sounded genuine to the detectives, but Hartnell persisted.

‘So you say, Olly. But we want to know about the famous head you used to keep for him.’ Again he was making a guess, but it seemed to strike home, given the confused flush that spread over Olly’s unlovely features.

‘What head would that be?’ he growled unconvincingly. ‘I don’t know nothing about no head!’

‘The head you used to keep in the cellar of the old Barley Mow,’ snapped Tom Rickman. ‘Did you take it with you to the other pub when you moved?’

‘I dunno what you’re talking about,’ replied Franklin, but the slight quaver in his voice and the way his piggy eyes flicked from one officer to the other gave the lie to his denial.

‘Listen, we know you had a head pickled in a bucket,’ rasped the DI. ‘Whose was it — and where is it now, eh?’

‘How the ’ell would I know who it belonged to? And anyway, it weren’t in a bucket.’ The former publican was not over-endowed with intelligence and his reply caused the two officers to grin at each other in triumph.

As Franklin slumped on to one of the hard chairs, a woman suddenly appeared at the door from the scullery.

‘Best tell them, Olly! That bloody thing has plagued us for years.’ His wife was a hard-faced woman with straggling grey hair falling about her shoulders. She wore a faded wraparound pinafore and her thick legs ended in a pair of man’s boots. In one hand she carried a wicked-looking knife and in the other, a large King Edward potato.

‘Tell us what, missus?’ demanded the sergeant, seizing the moment.

‘About that ’orrible thing in the shed out the back,’ she grated. ‘I told him, he should have got rid of it down the council dump years ago.’

Trevor Hartnell stepped towards Franklin and grabbed him by the arm. ‘Come on, Olly, show us where it is.’

Muttering under his breath and giving his wife a poisonous glare as he passed her, the man led the way through the scullery, the floor piled with pans full of raw chipped potatoes. The back door opened into a small yard cluttered with junk, where a heap of coal lay next to a dog kennel, in which a grubby Alsatian was chained. The houses were all back to back, with no lane separating them from an identical street beyond. A dilapidated shed stood against the dividing wall, with a rusted car engine leaning against its side.

With leaden feet, Olly took them to its door and went in first, throwing an empty potato sack with what he hoped was a nonchalant gesture over a pile of new-looking cartons of Gold Flake cigarettes which lay on a workbench. The rest of the space was filled with a chaotic collection of tools, discarded domestic items and assorted junk.

‘Go on, show them, Olly!’ shouted his wife, waving her knife dangerously as she stood behind the policemen, as they stood in the doorway.

Reluctantly, he pulled aside a broken Ewbank carpet-sweeper, a gas-mask case and an ARP steel helmet.

Beneath the pile of old newspapers below was a metal drum about a foot wide and eighteen inches high. The remnants of a label stuck on the lid alleged it contained cooking oil, but the sloshing sound when Olly dragged it out suggested that there was a more watery fluid inside.

‘What about possible prints?’ murmured the sergeant to his senior officer, as Franklin appeared to be about to pull off the lid. However, a shrill voice from Olly’s wife solved the problem.

‘You’re not opening that here!’ she shrieked. ‘I had nightmares for weeks last time I saw it. Take the bloody thing away!’

Hartnell laid a hand again on Franklin’s sleeve.

‘Leave it to us,’ he said. ‘Better get your coat, Olly. You’re coming to the station with us. I’m afraid it’s your wife that will be doing the frying tonight!’

They found an empty cell back at the station where they put the drum while Tom Rickman went to get a pair of rubber gloves from the scenes-of-crime bag that they kept in the CID room. The former publican was placed in an interview room and given a cup of station tea, while Hartnell and his sergeant decided what to do about investigating the container. They had carried it carefully to and from the car by holding the drum with fingertips under the rim that ran around the top, though Hartnell felt that probably so many people had handled the thing already, that fingerprints would not be all that important.

Now they sat it on the bare bench that served as a bed in the cell and stared at it while deciding what to do.

‘Should we open it or wait for the forensic lab to come?’ asked Rickman.

His boss was of a more impulsive nature, anxious to get on with matters.

‘We’ve got to have a look, Tom,’ he said decisively. ‘For all we know there may only be a dead cat inside — or even just a few pints of home brew!’

The sloshing sound certainly confirmed that there was some sort of liquid in the container, which was obviously of some age, as its greenish paint was badly scratched and there were several small dents in the side. Rickman felt in his pocket for a large clasp knife and pulled out a blade like a screwdriver. With the DI holding the drum in his gloved hands, the sergeant levered off the lid, which was held on firmly, but not too tightly.

‘Phew, what the hell is that smell?’ demanded Hartnell, recoiling more from surprise than from nausea.

‘That’s methylated spirits, surely,’ replied Rickman, who ran a Scout Troop in his spare time and was used to lighting Primus stoves which were primed with the stuff.

They looked into the drum, which was almost full of a murky, pale purple liquid. Beneath the surface was a layer of fabric, which looked like a coarse dishcloth.

Cautiously, the inspector pushed it aside with his rubber-covered fingers and looked below the surface.

‘That’s hair, surely,’ muttered the sergeant, pointing at some floating black strands. Gingerly, Hartnell slid his hands down each side of the container and lifted the contents above the level of the fluid.

‘Jesus, it’s horrible!’ he muttered, echoing Mrs Franklin’s opinion, as he held a human head between his fingers. It felt hard, like a motor tyre, and the colour was a washed-out grey. The features were like those of a shop-window dummy, apart from the eye sockets, which had sunk back under the collapsed lids.

The two detectives stared at it for a long moment, then Hartnell let it subside back into the liquid, where the black hair again swirled under the surface.

‘Anyone you know?’ asked Rickman, only half-joking.

His inspector put the metal lid back on the drum and, peeling off his gloves, made for the door.

‘Let’s have a few words with Olly,’ he said grimly. As they went out of the cell corridor towards the interview room, he told the custody sergeant to lock the cell door and let no one inside without his permission.

‘Right, Olly, let’s be having you,’ he snapped, as they entered the room where the flabby ex-publican was sitting at the table, smoking a Player’s Navy Cut.

He looked up owlishly at Hartnell, trying to paste a look of innocence on his coarse features.

‘Look, I don’t know nothing about that thing. It was in the cellar at the Barley Mow, then got took to the White Rose when I was moved, along with a load of other stuff. When I got kicked out of there, everything was just dumped in my shed.’

‘Tell that to the Marines!’ sneered the sergeant. ‘Your missus knew damn well what was in the drum.’

‘Nothing to do with me. Some blokes left it with me in the Barley Mow years ago,’ said Olly stubbornly.

The two officers sat down heavily opposite the man, where Tom Rickman ostentatiously took out his notebook as his DI began the interview.

‘Olly, you’re in deep shit already, so don’t dig yourself in any deeper.’

‘But I ain’t done nothing!’ said Franklin in an aggrieved tone.

Hartnell extemporized as to the nature of the offences, as he was not sure himself what they were.

‘You have concealed knowledge of a death, you have obstructed the coroner in the furtherance of his inquest and you have offended against the Death Registration and Burial Acts — and are probably an accessory to a felony, perhaps a murder!’

Franklin’s usually red face blanched and beads of sweat suddenly appeared on his forehead as he realized the implications of what he could be charged with.

‘I tell you, I don’t know nothing about it!’ he croaked.

‘Come off it, Olly! How did this head come to be in your possession? Who gave it you and why? And who is it, anyway?’

The former innkeeper looked wildly about the room, as if either looking for escape or someone to help him in this sudden crisis. ‘Why you asking me all this, after all these years?’ he moaned.

‘Because the rest of this bloke may have turned up, that’s why!’ snapped the inspector. ‘Now stop messing me about and answer the questions. Who is he?’

‘I don’t know, guv! I swear to God that’s true. It was already in the pub when I took over. I was in the Merchant Navy until forty-six and when I went to the Barley Mow, that drum was already there. It must have been there when the previous licensee ran the place.’

‘Who was that?’ demanded Rickman.

‘Fred Mansell — but he’s been dead for years.’

Hartnell looked at his sergeant, then murmured into his ear. ‘I think this is getting too heavy for us. Better kick it upstairs for now, see how the brass want to play it.’

He turned to Franklin, whose shaking fingers were groping for another cigarette.

‘Right, Olly. For starters, you’re going to be charged with concealing a death, so you’ll be locked up for tonight, until it’s decided tomorrow what’s to be done with you. We’ll notify your wife; maybe she can bring in some fish and chips for you!’