Martello Towers by A E Hammond

Synopsis

Cyril Grieveson, an Inspector in the Northshire Police force, is seeing out the final two years of his long and distinguished service. An unfortunate accident to his boss results in a new man taking charge; a man who was once a protégé of Cyril’s; a man who should never have been a policeman in the first place. The new boss makes deliberate changes that affect Cyril's work and Cyril realises he will probably spend his last two years getting revenge for the way his new boss treats him.

The new chief enlists Ces Pitt, a sergeant in the pay of a local drug dealer, to help him make Cyril Grieveson's life hell. Ces Pitt seizes the opportunity for he can not only frame Grieveson but also a Sergeant from the drug squad who is the main witness against his criminal paymaster in a forthcoming trial.

If the trial fails, the man who will escape justice plans to pay Pitt off and fund a long retirement on the Spanish Costa del crime by selling a crucifix that his father brought home as booty after World War Two; a hidden treasure trove that was previously considered valueless but is actually worth a great deal of money to an American gangster who wants to return it to the church it came from as atonement for his criminal sins.

Few things go according to plan as too many people get involved in the deal. Greed starts to show its hand and it seems there can never be a successful outcome.

Taster ...

It was a bad day for Taffy Armstrong.

In truth, most of his days were bad. Long, backbreaking hours spent down a dank, wet coalmine had never been an easy way to earn a living. Before mechanisation in 1929 the work had been harder but it was a raw choice: either work or starve. Now even that choice was about to be taken away. The pit, for some years in terminal decline, was to close at the end of the shift and then Taffy would join the other unemployed miners, most of whom had families to support but no wages to support them with. Yes, this was a bad day, possibly the worst Taffy had known.

But he suspected more bad days were to come. Whichever way he looked at it, life seemed to hold only the promise of standing around on street corners in the northern pit village of  New Lonnen – his home ever since he left his native Wales all those years ago. Standing and waiting. Waiting for handouts and waiting for death.

As he emerged half-crouched from the low unlit gallery that led to the coalface, stripped to the waist with sweat and coal dust staining his face and body, he entered a small cavern where the pit ponies were stabled; the dumb animals who had laboured alongside him and his fellow miners for many years. Pausing for a moment, he was at last able to stand upright and straighten his back for the first time in nearly eight hours. As feeling and movement returned to his sore, cramped muscles, he turned and looked back down the dark subterranean hell hole for what he knew would be the last time. Then, with a dreadful curse in his native Celtic tongue, best left untranslated, he hurled his shovel down into the dark void with as much strength as his squat muscular form could muster. He would not need it again.

The tool flew into the darkness as swiftly and truly as an Olympic javelin. About twenty feet into the tunnel its flight was halted as the iron blade, honed to a razor sharp edge from years of hewing coal, penetrated the joint between a cross beam and a prop. The beam was displaced slightly as the blade forced its way into the joint. It would have fallen away altogether, causing a minor roof fall, had not the short Beech handle wedged against the rock above.  Now the shovel formed part of the tunnel's structure, supporting the weight of everything above it. Taffy didn't realise what had happened but it was of little consequence anyway as he had already started the slow upward journey to the other world where he would see daylight, breath fresh air, and feel the cool clean rain wash the grime and dust from his body and face. But the last journey still gave him time to reflect on the alternatives, trying to decide which was worse - hard labour at the living hell of a coal face two hundred feet below him or the threat of impending starvation.

Below, the first drip of water landed on beech handle of the shovel and trickled slowly down to the blade. Then another. And another. The first of many millions that would drip on the same piece of iron over the coming years.

*

Several decades later, Inspector Cyril Grieveson of the Northshire Constabulary was standing by the window in his third floor office at Stanley Street police station gazing pensively at the world below as streaming rain driven by a harsh north-easterly wind struggled in vain to clean the urban grime from the double-glazed, hermetically-sealed windows of the cold featureless building. The strange turn that recent events had taken demonstrated just how fickle life could be: his immediate future was looking bleak.

Cyril, a six-foot tall, leanly built, single man in his mid-forties could have had a promising sporting career; instead, he had chosen to devote his life to the police service, having joined as a cadet at the tender age of sixteen. After more than thirty years service, man and boy, he was rapidly approaching a well-deserved retirement. In recognition of his long service, he had recently been given the most coveted position in the station, and indeed the whole division: that of aliens officer. The post simply involved monitoring and checking any foreigners living within the divisional area. Not a particularly demanding job, either from a physical or administrative viewpoint, but the holder was allowed to organise things to suit himself or herself, as the case maybe. So it was invariably given as a form of reward to those officers who had served long hard years at the sharp end of policing, providing them with a safe, comfortable haven during their last few years in the force. And they didn't really have to get too involved with other day to day matters. Well, that was the theory.

Martello Towers: Copyright © 2003 Alan Hammond