Michael Allen - A Writer's Guide To Everything Important - The Omnibus Edition Of Seven Essential Guides For Fiction Writers

Sid and Dick were the town’s nearest approach to professional criminals. But they were professional only in that they had been inside several times; in all other respects they were your average brain-dead morons.

Sergeant Perkins rang the Chief Constable and explained the position. Possible bank robbery in progress at Unibank, Town Square. The Chief Constable briefed his ARSes, the PR man organised the local TV crew, several people rang Emily, and events moved rapidly to a conclusion.

Sid and Dick were indeed found inside the local branch of Unibank. Bertie’s Dad, the manager, having being threatened with all kinds of shocking things in relation to his wife, had opened the rear door for them, but had then invented all sorts of delaying tactics. Forgotten code words. Time locks which would not open until the day after Boxing Day, and so forth.

Sid and Dick, it turned out, didn’t really have guns. Well, they did. They had replica pistols, the kind that used to be sold quite legitimately in the UK but now aren’t. And once Sid and Dick realised that the ARSes were outside, with real guns and live ammo, they wet themselves with panic, put their hands high in the air and promised to come quietly so long as nobody shot them.

This, of course, was no good at all for Emily, the Chief Constable, the local TV guys, and the force’s PR man. So, with a bit of negotiation, the abject surrender of Sid and Dick was miraculously parlayed into a tension-filled stand-off crisis situation, involving skilled negotiators, stun grenades, tear gas, and, finally, the arrest of two desperate men.

What with all the uproar, everyone forgot about Bertie’s Mummy. But fortunately PC Moreton was a thoughtful man. He was the one who realised that she had not been accounted for. And it was he who decided that Sid and Dick were quite thick enough to be keeping her on their own premises. So on his own initiative he went round to their terraced house in Railway Cuttings, and it was there that he found her.

Bertie’s Mummy had been tightly bound, hand and foot, and had been gagged with heavy black sticky tape wrapped repeatedly around her head. She been dumped on the floor of an old cellar cum coal store, dropped so hard that she thought her skull had cracked open, and had been left in the dark and the cold. She had twisted and squirmed against the ropes until she was exhausted, and had almost choked from the coal dust. She became convinced that she was going to die, and she gave up all hope of rescue; she wondered who would look after Bertie. But then PC Moreton broke open the cellar door and found her.

It was PC Moreton who cradled her head in his lap, and who tore off the black tape as gently as he could. It was he who held her and soothed her while she coughed and vomited up black muck from her lungs. And it was he who comforted her while she wailed and sobbed with relief. It was he who stroked her hair, and told her that everything would be all right again soon, it really would, he promised. And, just to begin with, he lifted her up in his arms and carried her out into the light. He sat with her in the ambulance. He rubbed her hands and wrists to restore the circulation.

The consequences of The Town’s Great Bank Robbery were numerous and, to most participants, advantageous.

The following day’s edition of the Sun was something of a classic. ‘XMAS KIDNAP PLOT FOILED BY BERTIE, 3’ sang the front page. And there was, inevitably, a cute picture of Bertie in a Santa hat and a champagne glass in his hand.

The front page was followed by 5 pages of ‘world-exclusive’ material, most of it dictated over the phone by ‘our new star reporter’. Yes, the pneumatic Emily had made it to Fleet Street in one bound. And, once there, it didn’t take her long to make her mark.

Emily soon displayed a widely admired facility for inventing interviews with ‘eyewitnesses’ which, while entirely spurious, were sufficiently flattering to those quoted to ensure that they weren’t going to complain. Within months she rose to be number two on the crime desk, and it was not long before she was spoken of as the new Rebekah. Saloon-bar gossip had it that she was thinking of dyeing her hair red. Which she wasn’t. Blonde, maybe.

The Chief Constable got an MBE. He was interviewed on Newsnight and got a profile in The Observer (‘A Policeman for the Modern Age’). Scotland Yard beckoned.

Mr Jackson, Bertie’s bank-manager father, received an award for bravery and was promoted to Area Manager. He then had even less time for his family than before.

Sergeant Perkins got a commendation.

Nobody said thank you to PC Moreton. Except Bertie’s Mummy, of course. She thought he was wonderful.

Bertie, for his part, soon overcame any trauma that might briefly have followed his separation from his Mummy. And in the following weeks he and Mummy received a large number of invitations to tea.

On arrival at such tea parties, Bertie took to announcing to the world, ‘I’m the little boy that woz kidnapped.’ Which was a blatant lie, but inevitably elicited numerous cries of, ‘Ah, bless him.’

What is more, Bertie soon learnt that a loud announcement about his victim status would often lead to Mummy being asked, ‘Do you think he could manage a piece of chocolate cake?’ And Bertie always could. Usually a second one too.

Much as she loved her son, Bertie’s Mummy soon began to resent this hero worship. ‘What about me?’ she wanted to shout. ‘I was the one who was really kidnapped! I was the one who was tied up and had tape round my mouth so that I was terrified of choking, I was the one who was dumped on a hard cellar floor and left in the dark and the cold, with rats scratching in the walls and felt as if the world had forgotten me and thought I was going to die. So why don’t you ask me how I feel? What about me, eh?’

But she never did give voice to any such thoughts. She was much too well brought up.

So Bertie’s Mummy would sit there in posh living rooms, pinning a hard thin smile to her face while Bertie polished his chocolate-cake shtick, and wondering how long she could hold out before something inside her snapped.

Occasionally she would find her hostess and guests looking at her strangely, and she began to realise that, while Bertie was being worshipped, she was breathing fast and making odd whimpering noises. And she was going to have to watch that, she realised, because if people noticed that she wasn’t quite right in the head they would take her away to the bin, and put her in a straitjacket and dump her in a cold dark place, and this time she would never get out.

Ever.

And then, one Tuesday morning, whatever it was that was holding Bertie’s Mummy together finally unravelled.

Bertie was at nursery school (or kindergarten, as he insisted on calling it) and his Mummy was out shopping. Then she noticed PC Moreton.

PC Moreton was in civilian dress, on his day off, and when she saw him Bertie’s Mummy suddenly found herself gasping for breath. The world began to spin on a different axis, and she reached out for something to hold on to, but failed to find it.

When PC Moreton finally glanced across the road, and caught sight of the young woman he had rescued, his face lit up with pleasure, and he immediately began to cross the road towards her. And at that point Bertie’s Mummy knew that whatever it was that she had been keeping battened down, somewhere deep inside her, had at last broken loose and would no longer be contained.

‘Hello!’ said PC Moreton with a smile. ‘How are you?’ And he said it with such genuine concern and affection that Bertie’s Mummy could no longer speak. But she didn’t need to speak, because he could see how she was. He could see that she was trembling from head to foot, and a tear was running down her left cheek.