Robert Ryan: Signal Red

Nobody spoke until Roy put his head in his hands. 'What jolt will I get for all this, Mr Naughton?'

'I don't know, Roy. Four? Six, tops.'

He groaned. 'Don't talk to me about six. I can't do six.'

"Course you can,' said Bruce, placing a hand on his shoulder. 'You're still a young bloke.'

The movement was so quick, the arm a blur, it was as if

Roy was demonstrating that he still had the reflexes of a twenty-eight year old. He snatched up the pistol and had it in his mouth before any of us could stop him

'No!' I managed to shout as I lunged forward, but Bruce was there before me, grappling with Roy. I threw myself backwards as the gun went off, the discharge filling the room and traumatising my eardrums. A slow trickle of plaster came down from the ceiling, as if it had escaped from a snow-globe.

A graceful curl of blue smoke spiralled slowly above the table. We all watched it, transfixed, for a moment.

Bruce stared down at the weapon in his hands and tossed it to Bill, who caught it and slotted it into his overcoat pocket.

We all then looked at Roy, and at the thin trickle of blood running from the corner of his mouth. Bruce must have caught the foresight on the skin as he wrenched it from his mouth.

'I fuckin' hate guns,' said Bruce, handing him an immaculate, folded handkerchief. 'What you doin' with one, Roy? You could hurt yourself, you know?'

Roy dabbed at the wound and gave a small, hollow laugh. 'I bought that from a mate of Charlie's when I got out. I was going to shoot Dennis for pissing all my money away. Good, solid Dennis, stand-up bloke, developed a taste for the gee- gees and bimbo women. Who would have thought it?' He looked up at Bill. 'Only thing I got to show for the whole kit and caboodle was a house for my mum.'

'Must be easier ways of getting one of those,' said Bill.

'I should have stuck to motor-racing.'

'We all should have,' said Bruce. 'You're still bleeding, mate. Sorry about that. Keep the handkerchief.'

'We have to go,' said Bill. 'Someone outside will have heard the shot. They'll be in here like Bruce bloody Willis any minute.'

I shook my head and my ears popped and I was fully back in the room. 'We'll lock up,' I promised. 'Turn out the lights.'

'Thanks. And can you leave a dish of milk outside for next door's cat?' Roy asked.

This tickled Bruce and his thin frame shook as he laughed. 'Fuck me, Roy. Don't you ever learn?'

I remembered then that one of the prints that incriminated Roy had been on the cat's bowl at the farm.

Roy gave a lascivious wink. 'You haven't seen the neighbour.'

He stood, and first I, then Bruce shook his hand, a solemn moment with a strange feeling of finality, of the curtain coming down one last time.

'Thank you for your time, gents,' said Bill. 'I'll be in touch.'

'I'll always stand character witness,' said Bruce, breaking the gloomy atmosphere. 'I'm good for it.'

'Christ, only if Peter Sutcliffe's not free,' said Roy, with a grin that seemed to come from the old Roy James.

Bill Naughton smiled, placed a hand on the small of Roy 's back and propelled him into the hallway. As they headed for the front door, Roy 's arms were already going up above his head in the traditional gesture of surrender.

Bruce and I sat in silence for a few minutes. I poured the remains of Bill's whisky into my own glass and pulled back the curtains. The sky was growing lighter now, a very tentative dawn, no more than a few spirals of burnished copper in the east.

'How are you really, Bruce?' I asked, turning back to him.

A wave of weariness seemed to wash over him. For the first time, he looked his age. I probably did too. Staying up till first light was a young man's game. We needed our beauty sleep.

'Me?' he said. 'Since I got home, I'm an old crook living on handouts from other old crooks.' He began to build himself another joint. 'You know, when I got back from Mexico and put the word out, I thought there'd be dozens of young guns wanting to get involved with the famous Great Train Robber. Not a bit of it. They were like – "whoa, thirty years? I'm not having any of that". Still the same, even now. I guess that fuckin' judge knew what he was doing, after all.'

I suddenly remembered I needed a lift back home and that the cops owed me one. I didn't want to walk out to an empty road. 'We should go, too.'

He looked at the joint, made to light it and thought better of it. He tucked it into an inside pocket. 'And then there are those twats who think I'm still loaded. That I live in Croydon because I'm an eccentric millionaire. They only got about three hundred grand back, so they reckon we still have the rest. They have no idea. There's some right fuckin' villains out there, including the lawyers. They should look at how much those cunts charged us all.'

'I can do you a good deal on a BMW.' I handed over a card. 'Give me a bell.'

He took it and examined it. 'My BMW days are over, but thanks. If I get a second wind, I'll come down for one of those nice old Sixes. You must be doing OK.' He ran a thumb over the printing. 'Embossed and everything.'

I explained to him that after my run-in with Len Haslam, I'd gone to Germany with the money he had intended to plant on me, where I had bought ex-Post Office yellow VW vans and shipped them back to England. They soon became the favoured transport of the hippie generation, and I made enough, eventually, to come back and open a BMW and NSU franchise, one of which, at least, came good.

'So you landed on your feet, after all? You know, the only one of the rest of us who really did all right was Gordy. Served his time, came out, got his money, a hundred and sixty grand, and buggered off. Hardly a sniff since, apart from the odd wish-you-were here card from Spain. He did OK, did Gordy.'

'Him and Tiny Dave.'

'Ah, yes. The one who really coshed the driver.'

Jack Mills was dead now, killed by leukemia, although there were those – his family amongst them – who still reckoned it was the robbery that really did for him.

'It was Dave who hit him?' I asked. 'I always wondered.'

A shrug. 'I wasn't on the train. Bloody chaos it was, by all accounts. But yeah, that's how it went. With a lot of encouragement from Buster, so I hear. And if Dave hadn't done it, Buster would have. Like a bloody little Jack Russell with that cosh, he was.'

'Whatever happened to Tiny Dave?' I asked.

'Ah. Talk about Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Tiny Dave was last seen walking off into the night with his whack, thirty years ago.'

'Never heard anything?'

'Of Dave? Not a dicky bird.'

I remembered him talking about going to Bangkok. I wondered if he'd made it. 'Which means he is either the legendary One Who Got Away. Or…'

'Someone killed him and took the money. Wouldn't surprise me. That cash never brought anything but bad luck.'

I recalled Billy Naughton had said much the same thing when we were out on the rowing lake. 'Toxic', he had called it.

Bruce mistook my silence for disbelief. 'Look at the facts. Charlie dead, Brian Field dead, Bill Boal dead. Buster and Roy bloody basket cases. Ralph was coming back to give

himself up a few years ago. Been lying low in Belgium. Got a ferry back. The Spirit of Free Enterprise.'' I shook my head at the bad luck. The boat had capsized, killing 193 people. Clearly, Ralph, the dwarf signal man, had been among them. 'And Tommy Wisbey's in a bad way. You hear that? Strokes. Never the same after his sixteen-year-old daughter died in a car accident. And Bobby Welch a cripple. And for what? It was an eye-opener when I realised the poor sod of a train driver ended up with more than me in the end, after the great British public had a whip-round for him.'

That wasn't strictly true; Mills hadn't received anything like a hundred and fifty grand. More like thirty, as I recalled. But it was a fact that he held on to more of it than Bruce. 'You know the young fireman died too?' I asked.