The Attraction of Crime
by Mike Rogers
part 1
What controls us? mused former Detective Inspector Armleigh while he was taking his daily walk along the canal. Is it Chance? Is it Time? If the clock in that pub hadn’t been deliberately set wrong by the landlord to give the customers an extra fifteen minutes of drinking time, then he, Armleigh, would have been able to nab the robbers red-handed, instead of arriving ten minutes after the ambulance and five minutes after the uniformed squad.
Oh, how they’d sneered at him! Accused him of drinking on duty! All his planning and observation over those three months gone for nothing. And he didn’t dare look at his watch, or somebody would have suspected something... Ah well, not everybody is meant to be a Superintendent.
Now, having taken the early retirement option, which might have emancipated him from clock-watching in some ways, he always went for his walk along the canal at exactly the same time every day.
Some would have said there wasn’t much to see: run-down factories, ivy picturesquely prising the locally burnt bricks apart; and a scrap metal yard, cars brought in from the road at the front; and sometimes a load arriving in the traditional way, a butty towed along by a narrowboat. But there were trees coming into leaf, going out of leaf, and even flowers, unexpected, tenacious.
His friends in the pub — clearly not the one where he’d waited for the robbery — mocked him, but he said, “Canals are romantic.”
“In Venice, mebbe, but not in Brum!”
“You don’t know opera,” he said, which was true. The people he drank with thought Puccini was a kind of pasta; he didn’t bother to tell them about Il Tabarro — The Cloak, which was set on an ordinary, workaday canal boat, where the husband kills the wife’s lover and hides the body under the cloak of the title... Romance, he thought. Passion, murder! That was the kind of thing that might have made me a Superintendent...
It was murky stuff, as murky as the waters of the canal beside which he was walking. He raised his eyes from the almost motionless surface to look ahead along the towpath. You had to take care round here. Metal mooring bollards lurked in the tussocky grass.
He was coming up to the scrap metal yard, its ten-foot green-painted jagged-topped corrugated-iron fence surmounted by razor wire. There was a narrowboat moored there and, behind it, nearer to him, a rusty old butty piled high with all kinds of scrap metal, sheets of iron, mesh fencing, girders, radiators, gates — a whole industrial museum. He stopped to look at these fossils of the age of iron. Curiosity, after all, was what had got him into policing in the first place.
If he hadn’t stopped, he wouldn’t have noticed the raised voices from the narrowboat. He’d have been past it and away before the quarrel started. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he’d spent enough of his life listening to conversations he couldn’t quite hear to know that the two men didn’t like each other and that they were both local, like himself.
The altercation finished in a kind of grunt. Armleigh turned away from the corroded skeletons of gas stoves and bed frames to resume his walk. There was a man coming down a gangplank from the stern of the narrowboat. He was wearing a bulky Crombie overcoat, even though the day was warm. It bulged out round the pockets. He had a broad-brimmed hat on and was carrying a stick.
The moment he saw Armleigh, he put up a hand and pulled his hat down harder, so no one could see his face properly. Then, still on the gangplank, he turned back and called to someone invisible in the cabin: “See yer in a bit!” He didn’t wait for an answer, but scuttled down on to the towpath, just missing the former Detective Inspector, and shambled away, past the ferrous and ferric graveyard, the butty of old iron and the scrapyard.
Armleigh was used to observing sharply and thinking quickly; at least he had been, though he hadn’t had much chance to practise the skills recently. The cryptic crossword waited patiently to be solved, and the operas he watched came with surtitles in the opera-house and subtitles on DVD. But he had seen the way the man walked away: with a stick that he didn’t know how to use, because he didn’t need it, not to help him walk, anyway. First he limped on this leg, then he limped on that one, and then he didn’t limp at all. And he’d called back to the man on the narrowboat the moment he’d seen Armleigh — to give himself an alibi, to establish that the man on the boat was still capable of replying.
Three strides up the gangplank showed Armleigh that that wasn’t true. A crumpled bundle was visible at the bottom of the cabin steps. A greasy old peaked cap told Armleigh that it was the No.1; costume was always valuable in establishing character. It was also useful that the dirty t-shirt the man was wearing under his open donkey-jacket was still light enough in colour to make the blood show up bright red.
Two steps down put Armleigh on the towpath again and gave him another problem. He’d never been a good runner. His mind had always been quicker than his legs. So he called out.
“Hey!” he shouted, not pushy at all, trying to make his voice sound helpful and even more Brummie than it already was. “Hey! You dropped something!”
The man had speeded up at the sound of his voice — but Armleigh didn’t need him to stop. He just needed him to turn round for a moment. It didn’t matter if he carried on running — in fact, it would probably be better, because Armleigh had some assistance down there that the man didn’t know about.
The man turned, still moving, to check the towpath behind him and see if he really had dropped anything important, but what he should have looked out for was in front. His right foot caught the first iron bollard in the tussocky grass and, as he stumbled, his left foot caught the second, and down he went.
Armleigh came trotting up, alert. The man had rolled over on to his back and was trying to sit up, but moving his left leg made his face crumple with pain, even though he tried to smooth it out with a grimaced smile.
“You made me fall over, calling out to me like that!” he complained.
“That’s nothing, compared to what you did to the feller on the narrowboat,” said Armleigh.
“What? What are you talking about? I just told him I’d see him later — I didn’t even see him this time — just shouted as I went by.”
He tried moving his left leg again and squealed with pain.
“Sounds like you need some help,” said Armleigh. “Taffy!” he shouted, in the direction of the scrapyard. “Get over here! There’s a feller needs you!”
Armleigh walked there every day. He knew Taffy would be roaming round in that elephant’s graveyard of HGV’s, unscrewing and prising loose every bit and bob anyone might conceivably want that he could sell to them.
There was a rattle and a thump and the noise of a detached wheel falling down, then a section of the green corrugated-iron fence slid to one side and a monster in a greasy boiler suit appeared on the towpath.
“Where’s the feller needs me?” asked Taffy, in a voice nearer Coseley than Cwmbran. But since his surname was Thomas, everyone called him Taffy.
“On the narrowboat,” said Armleigh. “I’d make it quick, if I were you.”
“Poor old Charlie!” said Taffy and trotted off surprisingly fast for one of his bulk.
The silent staring-match between Armleigh and the man on the ground was interrupted by Taffy’s shout.
“He’s beyond any help from either of us, poor bugger!”
“I thought as much,” said Armleigh, as Taffy came up. “But you’d better call the ambulance, any’ow.”
“And the other buggers in uniform,” said Taffy, as he took the grimily fingerprinted white mobile out of his overall top pocket.
Taffy used to have a black mobile phone, but he had never been able to find it when people rang him, urgently asking for a passenger-side Mondeo sun visor while he was out in the scrapyard with his head up an exhaust manifold.
The man on the ground began wriggling again, perhaps hoping that the other two had forgotten about him.
“Who d’ya reckon did it?” asked Taffy, while he was waiting to be connected.
“That’s not my job any more,” said Armleigh, not taking his eyes off the man on the ground, who’d decided to lie as still as he could while he was being watched.
“Mebbe not,” said Taffy, glancing at the man on the ground with the same look he gave a car as it was pushed in through his gates. “Any road, I’ve told ’em to come down on to the towpath from the bridge.” He nodded past the butty and the narrowboat. “I’ve got the girl in to do the paperwork this morning, and I’d sooner not have her upset by anything she might see.”
He turned away briefly, muttering into the phone, then turned back with a smile and a laugh. “The other buggers are going to be here first. They were just round the corner. And one of them I think you’ll know.”
That was enough to make Armleigh look at him. And that, in turn, gave the man on the ground the opportunity to do something. He used the stick to pull himself to his feet, but at the first step he took his left leg gave way and he fell down again. The major result of his futile attempt at escape was that the stick flew out of his hand and into the canal, where it sank at once.
Armleigh took a step forward, as if he intended to straddle the figure on the ground but thought better of it. He opened his mouth to say something but thought better of that, too and closed it again. Taffy came up and stood beside him.
There was the sound of a car pulling up on the road that went over the canal, and four doors slammed in sequence, followed by running boots that came down the steps by the bridge and clattered on the towpath’s cobbles.
“Bet you never made as much noise as that, Jack,” muttered Taffy into Armleigh’s ear, and Armleigh smiled.
There was only one set of footsteps to be heard now. Steels at toe and heel, but leisurely, relaxed yet commanding. They stopped behind the two of them. There was the sound of a pair of leather gloves being slapped on a palm. An annoying gesture, Armleigh had always thought. He didn’t bother to turn round.
“I see you’re here ahead of us, for once, Jack,” said Superintendent Turner.
“Even though you got here pretty sharpish,” said Armleigh, still not turning round.
“Well,” said Turner, still slapping his gloves on his palm, “me and the boys were out for a drive together. You know how it is, a meeting, a training day and, when the call came in, I thought I’d take it on, for old time’s sake and to give them a look at what the real stuff’s like. Before the folk in the Noddy-suits get here, with the bags on their feet.”
Copyright © 2026 by Mike Rogers
