Free The Garden Party by Peter Turnbull

wrong path. Prison does no good to no one. You know, even the copper who arrested me said that he thought it was a harsh sentence. I’d been fined once and he said he thought I’d get another fine or a period of probation, but not three months in juvenile detention.’
    â€˜For . . .?’
    â€˜Shoplifting.’ Bonner looked up at the ceiling. ‘Shoplifting.’
    â€˜It does sound a bit harsh, I have to agree,’ Tom Ainsclough commented.
    â€˜And it was a pair of jeans. I just wanted a new pair of strides to impress the girl I had a date with that evening. I got arrested after leaving the clothes shop, then taken to the cop shop, charged and allowed to go to await summons to the Magistrates Court, and the richest thing was . . . do you know the richest thing of all? She didn’t turn up for the date; she stood me up. I mean . . . is there justice? Me on the wrong track, and all for a girl who didn’t turn up anyway. I mean, it was all for nothing, all for sweet Fanny Adams, and if someone had given that magistrate her raw meat that morning I wouldn’t have been sent down. But she needed a victim . . . hungry people need victims . . . her and the other two beaks. Mind you, in the East End you’re nothing if you’re not a villain, so I would have gone down for something sometime, and I was running with the wolves. One old copper, not the one who nicked me for half-inching the jeans, a geezer called Carris, Mr Carris . . . Police Constable Carris . . . never got promoted, never got out of uniform. He was close to retiring when I was still a teenager. He was an old-fashioned copper and he would take me down an alley, clip me across the ear and he’d say, “Look here, Claude, I know you, you’re not a bad lad so don’t run with the wolves. Get home and take care of your old mum. No good will come of running with a pack like that . . .” and was he right or was he right?’ Claude Bonner fell silent, then he said, ‘He died, Mr Carris, the old copper. I didn’t think his family would want me at his funeral but I went up to the cemetery the next day, I mean the very next day, and laid some flowers on his grave. I did that for him.’
    â€˜That was good of you, Claude.’ Yewdall beamed at him.
    Claude Bonner shrugged. ‘There was a few of us did that; went to the cemetery the day after he was planted. We didn’t plan it as a gang, just all acted as individuals, and we didn’t buy the flowers anyway, we picked them from the park didn’t we? But it’s the thought that counts. Wrapped them in a rubber band the posties drop as they do their walk; if you want a rubber band they say all you have to do is walk along the pavement, before too long you see one. So that’s what I did, left the house and walked towards the park and before too long I saw a rubber band. Walked into the park and I picked a nice bunch of daffodils and carried them down the road to the cemetery. There were quite a lot of daffodils in the park the day of his funeral and not many the day after. All the lads who had had their ears clipped by Mr Carris and then sent home, they paid their respects to him. Nice old copper he was, Mr Carris, nice old geezer; based at Clapton Road Police Station.’
    â€˜So, Claude,’ Penny Yewdall brought the conversation into focus, ‘Desmond Holst aka Ralph Payne?’
    â€˜Yeah, Des or Ralph, two geezers in the same body but not like the lunatics, you know; those split personality types you read about, I don’t mean that.’ Claude Bonner paused. ‘I mean he was born Desmond Holst and married Pearl Harley, then after that he began to call himself Ralph Payne, like it made some difference to him, and he became a blagger . . . like it made it possible to go ducking and diving with a new name . . . like it made it all right because it wasn’t Desmond Holst that was doing it, it was Ralph