I Am Gold (28 page)

‘Listen, Manse, she has two pictures hanging in that style you like – the Pre-Raphaelites. But, of course, stupid of me, I expect you've seen them there. Quentin says it would be a good notion to take both and then this break-in would only look like an art robbery, not someone being charted, which could lead to awkward inquiries. Obviously, you wouldn't be able to receive the pictures, Manse, because she's living in the rectory and would recognize them. Quentin says he knows someone who will buy high quality art, and not make too many queries about where it came from. It seems an idea – he's bright, greaseball or not – but I tell him any proceeds must go to you, because the art has been lifted in the firm's time.'

Suckholing bastard. ‘They're posters,' Manse said. ‘The frames are worth more than the pictures. Twenty quid would cover the lot.'

‘Posters? Like pop star rubbish for kids' walls?'

‘Prints. By the million. Sink them somewhere.'

‘Really, Manse?'

‘You're not going to take them back and hang them, are you?'

‘Quentin will be disappointed.'

‘Oh, dear, I'll blub, shall I? When do you think she spotted you?'

‘Not sure. Is it important, Manse?'

‘Of course it's fucking important. If she noticed she was followed from here she'll know who sent you, won't she?'

‘Well, I thought she'd guess that, anyway. Are there other interests who might tail her?'

‘That's what I wanted to find out,' Shale said.

When Naomi came home next day, Manse said: ‘So how did it go?'

‘Great – and many compliments on the ring.'

Chapter Twenty-Nine

2009

There were four statements. Harpur read them again.

1. Mrs Beatrice South, aged fifty-two, of 11 Masterman Avenue, shop manageress.

As was usual, I opened the shop at 8.30 a.m. on Wednesday, 3rd June 2009. Mrs Maureen Hyde, a voluntary worker who helps on three days a week, arrived at 8.35. At about 8.50 the first customer, a middle-aged man, entered the shop and went to look at items on the Books, CDs and DVDs shelves. Just after 9 a.m. the shop door was pushed open violently from outside and a man and a woman came in. The man had a pistol in his right hand and was holding the woman with his left hand around the neck. She seemed to be trying to free herself by tugging at his hand with the fingers of her right hand. But he pulled her with him into the shop.

I thought the man was in his late twenties, the woman older, early thirties. The man slammed the shop door shut and began shouting at the four of us in there. It was something like, ‘Don't anyone try anything. You'll be all right.' There was swearing among these words, which I don't want to repeat here. I now know the man to have been Lance Stanley Sparks and the woman Veronica Susan Cleaver.

Sparks shouted at us to get to the middle of the shop and keep still. ‘This is loaded,' he said. He put the gun against the woman's head for a moment. The man customer shouted, ‘No, no, we'll do what you say.' Then Sparks let go of the woman's neck and pushed her towards the centre of the shop. He screamed at the rest of us again to get there, too, and not ‘to try anything'. I believe we were all too frightened to ‘try anything'. I'm usually reasonably calm, but that morning I felt terrified. I was standing, but feared my legs would go.

It was impossible at the time to know why he acted like this. It was obviously not a robbery. There's not much worth taking in a charity shop. So, it was as though he'd gone mad and unpredictable. Nobody could tell what he might do next. This was the frightening part of it. I wondered whether Sparks and Cleaver knew each other. Maybe this was some kind of lovers' quarrel or a domestic crisis that had spilled into the street, and then into the shop.

There is an alarm button behind the main counter in case of trouble. It links to the police station. But I had been arranging clothes on one of the racks and could not get to it. I thought Sparks must have guessed there'd be an alarm somewhere, which was why he wanted us all in the middle of the shop where he could watch us. I was scared to make a move towards the button and, in any case, my legs felt too weak to take me there. For a couple of minutes I had to hold on to the clothes display stand for support.

Mrs Hyde was behind the counter near the Local History Artefacts display and not far from the button and I tried to signal to her with my eyes that she should get to it and press it. But she was not looking at me, she was looking only at the man with the gun. And after a couple of moments she came out from behind the counter and joined the other two in the middle of the shop. I decided after a little while that my legs would do it and I also went into the middle of the room.

Sparks told us to sit on the floor. He stood behind us with the gun held up across his chest. He could look out over us through the shop window to the street. He seemed to think people would come in pursuit. His breathing was noisy and fast. I could see some of the street from where I sat but there didn't seem to be any movement out there. The man customer spoke to him – asked him what had happened, what it was all about.

Sparks sounded in a rage when he answered. I thought the accent sounded like the Midlands or Northern. He said it was about him getting away from trouble, ‘very big trouble'. I recall those words –'very big trouble'. The male customer didn't say anything more for a few minutes. (I now know him to be Thomas Ure.) He seemed to realize that if he kept on asking questions Sparks might get more ratty and go wild with the gun. I had an idea that what had happened had something to do with that gun. It was not a fake gun. When he said it was loaded I thought he meant it was
still
loaded although some shots had been fired from it. He seemed to believe we could tell what had happened earlier with the gun and might think all his ammunition was gone. I wondered if what had happened was so big and terrible that it took up nearly all his mind, and it was so dominant in his thinking that he assumed everyone else knew about it, too. Of course, that would be crazy. But he might be crazy, and crazy with a pistol.

Thomas Ure asked what very big trouble he meant, and said we might be able to help. He said he was sure everyone here would agree with that. I said, ‘Certainly.' And Mrs Hyde said, ‘Oh, yes.' Veronica Susan Cleaver didn't say anything. She was crying and most probably in shock. All Sparks said with more swearing was yes we were a help, by being hostages. He said nobody would fire into this shop while they knew he had prisoners in case of hitting them, so we'd better not try anything because we were a weapon, just as the gun was a weapon. The one weapon, his gun, would make sure the other weapon, us, didn't try anything. What he said was ‘any fucking thing' but I have cut out most of the swearing. That's how some people talk when they are tense and scared and desperate – they think the swearing makes them sound hard and not easy to beat.

Then he asked if there was a back door to the shop. I didn't know why he asked this – whether he thought he could get out that way and disappear, or whether he feared he could be attacked from that direction. I said yes there was a back door on to a service lane. I told him I had a key to the door, of course. I hoped he would decide to get out and leave us. I wanted to make it easy for him to go.

But just then we heard cars, a number of cars, driven very fast outside. I could see some of the street through the shop window. Most of the cars and vans were marked police vehicles, and the unmarked ones might have been police, also. I could hear other vehicles at the rear of the shop. Sparks saw and heard, too. ‘They're here,' he said. ‘All round me.' I wondered then whether Mrs Hyde had been able to press the alarm, after all. But I felt pretty sure she hadn't. There probably would not have been as big a response as this if she had. It appeared that this flock of cars and vans had come because of whatever it was had happened earlier. Sparks had been chased here. I saw a big caravan towed into place in front of the shop.

About a quarter of an hour after this the telephone rang. It was on a shelf near the cash desk. Sparks moved backwards with the pistol pointing at us until he reached the shelf and picked up the receiver. I could tell it must be the police speaking to him. He would not tell them his real name but said to call him John.

The statement broke off here and the interviewing officer had inserted an explanatory note. ‘The conversations between Sparks (‘John') and the negotiator are as recorded and included in the siege log, and Mrs South's version of the Sparks side of these exchanges has been omitted as superfluous, resuming on the final sentences.'

Towards evening I saw a man emerge suddenly from the police caravan and begin to run up the road towards the shop. He wore civilian clothes. Veronica Cleaver was also looking from the window and when she saw the man she gave a little scream of shock. She said, ‘Oh, God, it's Gary. Oh, God, sorry, sorry, sorry, Gary.' They are the sort of words that stick in the mind. I didn't understand them properly. What did she mean – ‘sorry'? She did not sound well, but that could have been just the trauma and fear. Very shortly afterwards another man, but in police uniform, came from the caravan and began to pursue the civilian. He ran much faster than ‘Gary' and about halfway to the shop caught up with him and threw himself on Gary from behind, the way a buzzard might come down on a rabbit. They both lay there still. It looked to me as though Gary had been knocked unconscious when he hit the ground with the policeman's weight on top of him.

The policeman's uniform didn't look like an ordinary policeman's, but of superior material. I learned later that this was Assistant Chief Constable Iles. It was unusual to see an Assistant Chief Constable chasing someone in the street and flinging himself on to him – Gary James Dodd, as I later discovered. In the shop, Sparks had seen these two men running towards us and he seemed to get very agitated and worried. He was shouting over the telephone about these men being a decoy. He kept on about that.

He yelled at Veronica Cleaver, ‘Gary? Who's Gary? Is he police?' He seemed to think that what had happened in the street was to get his attention while other people attacked from the back of the shop. He turned to look that way, swung his gun that way, the phone in his other hand. I believe it was the first time he had pointed the gun away from us. He was standing near Mrs Hyde and she suddenly stood up and hit him on the head with something, a real swinging blow. At first I couldn't see what it was she used.

The blow made him stagger and she hit him again. He dropped the phone and half steadied himself. But Thomas Ure and I both stood and tried to grapple with him and get the gun out of his hand. We had to fight him. Mrs Hyde hit again with the thing in her hand, this time to his jaw. I saw she had picked up from the Local History Artefacts display an old-style, plainclothes officer's pocket truncheon made of lead with a heavy rounded tip and a wrist strap. It was thought to have been used to deal with a street riot during a factory strike in 1901. I felt Sparks go weak but he would not let go of the gun. We still tried to get it free and Veronica Cleaver joined us now.

We must have struggled with him for more than a minute. Mrs Hyde kept striking him and as he tried to twist away from us the gun went off, the sound muffled by clothes, his and ours, but very clearly a gunshot. All strength went from his body and he slid out of our grips towards the ground. Mrs Hyde hit him once more as he fell, in the genitals this time, but I think he was already dead. She didn't seem to believe this, though, and moved around so she could get at his head again.

When Mrs Hyde stood up she had accidentally pushed one of the full, wheeled display stands and it rolled forward and into the front window bringing it down. Very shortly after this, and the struggle and gunshot, Assistant Chief Constable Iles and other police arrived from the front and back of the shop. Veronica Cleaver ran from the front door towards Gary James Dodd who still lay unmoving on the ground. Coming in the other direction – that is, towards us – I saw four people, a male and a female police officer, a man and a young girl. I now know the man to be Mr Mansel Shale and the girl, his daughter, Matilda. Mr Shale's name is, of course, well known in the city owing to the type of business he runs, but I wasn't certain I had ever seen him before. Matilda was crying. She held Shale's arm as they walked. He himself looked very distressed, though at the time I did not know why. As well as his name being familiar, I thought I recognized Mr Shale as someone who had recently donated some Pre-Raphaelite posters, but, as I've said, I wasn't certain.

They passed Veronica Cleaver and Dodd. I saw a crowd of watchers behind police tape near what seemed to be the caravan incident room. Another man ducked under the tape and ran to talk to Veronica Cleaver. She seemed embarrassed or angry with him. Two paramedics came with a stretcher and took Dodd away to an ambulance. Veronica Cleaver went with them. The other man returned to the crowd and I lost sight of him.

Shale and the policeman entered the shop. Shale's daughter waited outside in the street with the woman police sergeant. I think Shale had been brought there to see whether he could identify the gunman – Lance Stanley Sparks. He still lay where he had fallen, face down. Assistant Chief Constable Iles bent and took a handful of Sparks' hair so as to pull his head back and make his face visible. Shale bent forward and looked at it very briefly. He said: ‘No.' Assistant Chief Constable Iles asked him whether he was sure and Shale straightened up and turned away. He said he'd never seen the man before.

2. Mrs Maureen Hyde, aged seventy-nine, of 23A Frame Street, widow.

Luckily I had read my horoscope for the day before going to the shop. I don't remember all the words exactly but I know it warned me of a possibly unexpected ‘and not necessarily or entirely pleasant' interruption to the normal course of things. Therefore, I tried to remain close to the Local History Artefacts tray where a small truncheon made of lead was on show as well as a knuckle-duster, both of which were apparently used by the police during a riot at the beginning of last century. We have had trouble in the shop previously from openly defiant thieves and rough, misbehaving child gangs, and I wondered if the horoscope referred to such intrusions. I thought it would be irresponsible if I did not prepare myself to deal with troublemakers, because, this being a charity shop, its good work for unfortunates should be protected in every available fashion.