Kissing the Gunner's Daughter Read Free Page B

bizarre. The act which Mrs Weaver described he had read of somewhere, or been taught, or gleaned from some lecture. It was a classic Mafia technique. He even said to her that they must have read the same book.
    Michelle Weaver insisted. She had seen the gun skid across the floor. The others had crowded round Martin but she had been the last in the line of people the gunman had directed to stand against the wall, so therefore the furthest from Martin who had been at the head of it.
    Caleb Martin had dropped the gun with which
    he made his brave attempt. His son Kevin later
    ^Identified it as his personal property, taken from
    %im by his father in the car that morning. It
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    was a toy, a crude copy, with several design inaccuracies, of a Smith and Wesson Model 10 Military and Police Revolver with four-inch barrel.
    Several witnesses had seen Martin's gun fall. A building contractor called Peter Kemp had been standing next to him and he said Martin dropped the gun at the moment the bullet struck him.
    "Could it have been Detective Sergeant Martin's gun that you saw, Mrs Weaver?"
    "Pardon?"
    "Detective Sergeant Martin dropped the gun he was holding. It skidded across the floor among people's feet. Could you be mistaken? Could it have been that gun which you saw?"
    "I saw the boy throw it down."
    "You said you saw it skid across the floor. Martin's gun skidded across the floor. There were two guns skidding across the floor?"
    "I don't know. I only saw one."
    "You saw it in the boy's hand and then you saw it skid across the floor. Did you actually see it leave the boy's hand?"
    She was no longer sure. She thought she had seen it. Certainly she had seen it in the boy's hand and then seen a gun on the floor, skating across the shiny marble among the people's feet. An idea came that silenced her for a moment. She looked hard at Burden.
    "I wouldn't go into court and swear I saw it," she said.
    In the months that followed, the hunt for the men who had carried out the Kingsmarkham
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    bank robbery became nationwide. Gradually, all the stolen banknotes turned up. One of the men bought a car for cash before the numbers of the missing notes were circulated, and paid out six thousand pounds to an unsuspecting secondhand car dealer. This was the older, darker man. The car dealer furnished a detailed description of him and gave, of course, his name. Or the name the man had given him -- George Brown. After that, Kingsmarkham Police referred to him as George Brown.
    Of the remaining money, just under two thousand pounds came to light wrapped in newspapers in a town waste-disposal dump. The missing six thousand was never found. It had probably been spent in dribs and drabs. There was not much risk in doing that. As Wexfdrd said, if you give the girl on the check-out two tenners for your groceries she doesn't do a spot-check on the numbers. All you need to do is be prudent and not go there again.
    Just before Christmas Wexford went north to interview a man on remand in prison in Lancashire. It was the usual thing. If he cooperated and offered helpful information, things might go rather better for him at his trial. As it Was, he was likely to go down for seven years. f His name was James Walley and he told Wexford he had done a job with George Brown, & man whose real name was George Brown. It fNs one of his past offences he intended to ask
    be taken into consideration. Wexford saw the George Brown at his home in Warrington.
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    He was quite an elderly man, though probably younger than he looked, and he walked with a limp, the result of falling off a scaffold some years before when attempting to break into a block of flats.
    After that, Kingsmarkham Police started talking of their wanted man as o.k.a. (otherwise known as) George Brown. Of the boy with acne there was never any sign, not a whisper. In the underworld he was unknown, he might have died for all that was heard of him.
    O.k.a. George Brown surfaced again in January. He was George