Author’s  Foreword  -   2B or not 2B

 ‘You can always rely on a murderer for a fancy prose style.’

                                  Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Lolita’

This book is in one sense the record of a friendship, if friendship can be held to include death threats. To this day I cannot sharpen a pencil – and as a writer I sharpen a lot of pencils - without experiencing a frisson of fear. Roy is once again thrusting the pencil’s needle-sharp point towards my retina, threatening to ram it through my eye and into my brain, as he helpfully informs me ‘This’ll kill you outright, you cunt!’

Medical experts I have subsequently consulted tell me he was right: that is indeed a very effective way of killing someone. One of the many strange things about Roy is that though he may have been a pathological liar, in his own peculiar fashion he was a stickler for the truth.

Despite the fact that a sharp object through my eye would have been a very literary way to go (oh so Christopher Marlowe) I realised even then that the finality of the act would greatly outweigh any posthumous glamour.

That was to be the first of many threats Roy would make, either in person or through surrogates.  Other threats were less anatomically precise but no less frightening. Once, late at night, I saw that the light on my home phone’s answering machine was blinking. I had a message. I pressed the play button, only to hear ‘Pender, I’ll have your balls for garters!’ delivered in a rasping, guttural and strangely other-worldly voice, reminiscent of the Devil in The Exorcist. Fear mingled with admiration as I marveled that Beelzebub had somehow managed to adapt his cloven hoof to the delicate art of dialing.

I do not wish to tax your patience, dear reader, by speculating on the feasibility of converting balls into garters.  Fortunately, at the time of writing my testicles are mercifully intact. Suffice it to say that such threats take on extra credibility when they are made by a man who, with no sign of remorse, has killed and killed again.

Why was it, then, that ten years later, safely ensconced in California, at the other end of an ocean and a decade, I felt genuinely saddened when I read of Roy’s death? I had expected to feel only relief, yet I remembered him with something like affection.

I realized that I missed our conversations, which were quite unlike those I have had with anyone else, before or since. California was in the midst of a heatwave, and as I looked out on the parched landscape, Roy’s death made me reflect that in our society of spin, doublespeak and political correctness, an authentic conversation between two people is as rare and as welcome as desert rain.

I left my office and walked along Santa Monica beach, where I picked up a large flat stone, thinking fondly of our discussions about skimming the flat stones we called ‘skiters’ in Rothesay bay on Scotland’s Isle of Bute, the lost paradise of Roy’s childhood and of mine. The fun we’d had, generations apart, the simple joy of making those stones dance defiantly across the waves.

‘This is for you, Roy,’ I thought, as I threw the stone with all my might. It skimmed the surface of the Pacific seven times before it sank. ‘You danced across the waves, Roy!’ I said to myself with a smile, ‘Just like you said you would.’  I turned back to my office and went to my writing desk.

I had a promise to keep. 

I braced myself and sharpened a pencil.

             Chapter One              The Bogie Man 

                Polonius: What do you read, my lord?

                Hamlet:  Words, words, words.       

                          (Hamlet, Act 2 Scene 2)

As the taxi meandered through a leafy English lane in the sleepy cathedral town of York, I felt my pulse racing. Soon I would be face to face with him. I was excited and a little nervous.  I'd never met a murderer before.

I hope you found those opening sentences arresting, dear reader. Arrests and sentences feature largely in the narrative which follows. But I jump ahead of myself.  I hate to drag that sweet English rose Julie Andrews into this tale of death, deceit and debauchery, but as she so memorably trilled, ‘let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.’

As in all Good Books, in the beginning was the Word.

When this adventure began, I was gainfully employed as a television script editor in the Drama department of BBC Scotland. My job was to work with writers, unknown and established, in an effort to get their scripts into shape for broadcast as TV drama. Since I myself had written some plays, I was to an extent a poacher turned gamekeeper. The job enabled me to revive my own dormant career as a writer.

I had spent the low dishonest decade of the nineteen eighties in London trying to write the Great Novel. The book was Moby Dick to my Captain Ahab, and I was sinking fast. It was to be about the rise of Hitler, and humanity’s apparent inability to resist the glamour of evil. When I’d spent longer researching the book than Hitler took to lose the war, I began to suspect that I was backing a loser too. But I persevered, trying to convince myself, like the little mustachioed man in the bunker, that tomorrow belonged to me.

I would be the great writer or bust.

For the bulk of the decade I was on the verge of going bust. When I ran out of money for the electricity meter (a regular occurrence), I would sit freezing in the dark, pondering the unsolved mystery of why my bedsit smelled of cat’s piss and gas leak, even though the room was all-electric and I didn’t have a cat. 

As I sat in pitch darkness pondering this profound mystery, the one consolation was that I could no longer see the peeling wallpaper.

The nadir came when I found myself taking mouldy bread out of my rubbish bin, scraping off the mould and toasting it to make it more palatable. My early love affair with London had rapidly turned sour. The bright metropolis had become the City of Dreadful Night.

So it was with joy, pride and a reborn sense of purpose that I finally swallowed my artistic pride, got real, applied for the Script Editor’s post at BBC Scotland, and to most people’s amazement, landed the job.

I was lucky. Bill Bryden, who ran BBC Scotland’s Drama Department, was brave enough to take a risk on me. I vowed I would finish off Adolf later. After years lost in the Teutonic Twilight, it was time for me to throw away the cyanide capsule and climb out of the bunker.

By that fateful January of 1993, the nation was recovering from its collective New Year’s hangover and I had settled into my job. The zealous Stakhanovite who had filled the post before me believed in working ridiculously long hours, preferably 7.30am till 7.30pm, with a short lunch-break. To those of us of a more Dionysian persuasion, this of course was anathema.

Convincing myself I was striking a blow for the Romantic tradition, I dedicated myself to what I called ‘Shaving the day’. This idealistic enterprise could easily have led the casual observer to mistake me for a skiving lazy bastard. For my international readers, a definition of ‘skiver’ from the rich lexicon of Scots words is ‘one who avoids tasks or work in general: a shirker.’

A shirker? Moi? Surely some mistake.

I defined my working day as beginning at ten. I would work till twelve thirty then have lunch with a writer at the Trattoria Trevi, the delightful Italian restaurant around the corner from my office. Of course, to truly release the creative energies of the writer, I recommended that such lunches were at least an hour and a half long, and preferably two. Genius, I was fond of slurring, cannot be rushed.

When I got back to the security of my office, I would ensconce myself in my swivel chair, prop a script up on my desk and instruct my secretary that I was only to be interrupted if the call were urgent. This was euphemistically known as my ‘afternoon read.’

I swiveled so that my back was to the door. By placing the waste-paper bin at a strategic angle, anyone entering would clatter it. This was usually enough to arouse me from the sleepy penumbra into which I would inevitably have drifted as a result of my long liquid lunch. Startled into consciousness, I would immediately resume my pose as a dedicated reader of scripts.

On particularly cold days, such as that icy January morning, I would wallow in a compensatory fantasy which involved me, an unspecified Mediterranean island, and Maria, the island’s most beautiful and sensuous woman. No doubt the fine Italian wine I had imbibed induced balmy thoughts of the sunny Med as the icy winds of the west of Scotland bit into my flesh and soul. When you live in an Arctic wilderness you develop a rich inner life. If you lived in Glasgow, life, inevitably, was elsewhere.

Now let’s be absolutely clear: though Maria did not in fact exist, to me she was the very touchstone of authenticity. Ah, Maria. Say it loud and there’s music playing, say it soft and it’s almost like praying. Maria. A sultry golden-brown Latin beauty, she was all I had to look forward to on that long lonely walk back to the BBC through the sleet and snow of the Scottish winter, my quotidian trudge through the sludge.

In the comfort of my warm room I would slip pleasantly into a consoling reverie, daydreaming that I had morphed into a hugely successful writer, a kind of heterosexual Somerset Maugham, now living abroad for tax purposes. Maria, who combined the literary sensibility of FR Leavis with the body of a Playboy centerfold, would mop my creatively fevered brow as she gently critiqued my day’s literary output.

I would show my gratitude by rubbing copious amounts of sun lotion onto her voluptuous breasts, accompanied only by the chirruping of the cicadas in the Mediterranean haze.

But on that fateful morning the cicadas were chirruping longer and more loudly than usual – so much so that they pulled me out of my dream state – and I realised that it was not the cicadas which were chirruping, but my office telephone.

I lunged towards the offending implement, cleared my throat and tried to sound businesslike. The voice at the other end of the line had a cut-glass, clipped accent: ‘Hello, may I speak to Paul Pender?’

‘Oh no,’ I thought, ‘It’s the Director General of the BBC, about to reprimand me over his memo on the great shit/ shite debate.’

A few weeks earlier I had received a memo from BBC headquarters in London, from the office of the Director General himself. Such memos were met with a degree of enthusiasm hitherto matched only by those receiving the black spot in ‘Treasure Island.’ They always began with the dread phrase ‘In the opinion of London.’

Whenever BBC Scotland employees received an ‘ In the opinion of London’ memo we felt as we were meant to feel – like humble functionaries in a distant  outpost of Empire, receiving a command from Caesar to be obeyed on pain of death. The subtext was ‘Listen, Jocks. We know you enjoy your delusions of independence, but never forget we are your Lords and Masters. Yes, wear tartan skirts. Paint your faces blue if you like. But never forget who’s running the show! Tug your forelock and do as we say, or the crucifix awaits.’

The memo concerned a script I was editing - a working class TV drama very much in the then fashionable tradition sometimes described as ‘prolier than thou.’  You know the kind of thing. Every Scotsman is hard, angry, drunk, drugged and violent, given to slashing men with razors and pummeling women with his fists. The anti-heroes of these dramas spent their lives shooting up, throwing up, or beating up. Such dramas gave our effete Lords and Masters in London a frisson of danger, the literary equivalent of a bit of rough. The lives of Glaswegian hard men seemed to offer an authenticity their own safe, soft little button-downed lives lacked.

My memo from London read as follows:

‘In the opinion of London, the language used in the drama in question may be deemed offensive by the majority of the viewing public. Although we appreciate that the language must reflect the harsh life of the characters, it is the opinion of London that 1 ‘shite’ is as offensive as 2 ‘shits.’ Using a points system on that basis (1 point for a shit, 2 points for a shite) the script must contain no more than 10 points worth of the offensive material.’

My job was to communicate this profound insight to the writer whilst maintaining credibility, not to mention a straight face.

I had found this memo so entertaining that in a well-oiled moment of Festive exuberance I had passed a copy round at the Christmas party. Now I assumed some quisling had leaked it and I was about to be fired.

When I said ‘This is Paul Pender speaking’, in what I hoped was an educated Scots accent, to my amazement the voice on the other line instantly became working class and guttural. It was as if Begbie from Trainspotting had just headbutted the Director General and grabbed the phone from his hand. I was, to say the least, confused.

‘Ah knew ye must be a Glesga Boy!’ the voice on the other end raved. The words poured out in a torrent. ‘Ah loved yir film the Bogie Man. That Robbie Coltrane’s some actor, so he is! Funny as fuck! You’re the boy to write my story! None of thae English wankers can get it right! I’ll tell you all about all my fantastic scams, my stings, my cons. The Sting was a great film, but none of their scams were as good as mine. I pulled off one of them a week. My name’s Roy, by the way. Roy Fontaine.’ After a short pause, he obligingly spelt it for me. 

‘Oh, hello, Roy,’ I said, nonplussed. This was to be the beginning of a very peculiar friendship.

The Bogie Manwas a TV film which I had adapted from the graphic novel of the same name. (Remember when we use to call graphic novels ‘comics’, before we started pretending they’re literature?)

The film, which had been broadcast over the Christmas season on BBC2, brought together in comedic form the themes of criminality and madness, and featured a flamboyant, charismatic character who was convinced of his own genius. 

Its hero, Clunie, played by Robbie Coltrane, escapes from a Glasgow lunatic asylum, in the belief that he is Humphrey Bogart. He thinks that everything that happens to him is part of a Bogart movie. Hence The Bogie Man.

I wrote lines like, ‘Clunie had a troubled childhood. His father was a heather beater. Unfortunately, Heather was his mother.’

OK, I never said it was Citizen Kane, did I?  It was never intended to be anything more than a bauble on the BBC’s Christmas tree, a little Christmas present to the nation.

Clunie the Looney was a madman with a swaggering style, a mastery of accents and an unshakeable belief in his own destiny. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the story of Roy’s life.

‘You’ve probably heard of me,’ he said, as if the name Roy Fontaine were famous. ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t, Roy.’ I replied.

After a brief pause to massage his bruised ego, he continued.

‘I was Britain’s top jewel thief and confidence trickster,’ he said proudly, ‘until I was detained permanently at her Majesty’s pleasure. Looking at Her Majesty’s sour old face I’d say I’ve given her a lot more pleasure than Prince Philip.’

I smiled at the thought. Whoever this Roy might be, he was already entertaining me.

‘My story’s funny’, he added. ‘Funny as fuck.’  I just need somebody to write it. Somebody who gets the humour. I’m convinced you’re the man for the job. Come down and see me in the next week or two.’

Telling him this was all a bit sudden, I said I’d do a little research and call him back in a day or two. After a brief pause (was there something he wasn’t telling me?) he agreed. We set a time for me to call him back and bade each other a fond farewell.

I was intrigued. I wanted to find out if his story was as promising as he’d claimed. I needed what Auden called A Shilling Life to give me all the facts. I called down to the BBC library, one of the research wonders of the pre-digital world. This was 1993, remember, and though it now seems incredible, Google did not exist and the Information Superhighway was still a dirt track. Fortunately the BBC library was its very own Ministry of Information.

A couple of hours later Moira the librarian called back, apologising for the delay. ‘Sorry it took so long. He was filed under Archibald Hall. It took us a while to work out that Roy Fontaine and Archibald Hall are the same person.’  That was my introduction to Roy’s Universe, where nothing is what it seems.

Moira delivered a buff-coloured folder bulging with press cuttings. I untied the red ribbon like an excited kid opening a Christmas present, and saw a bunch of headlines screaming out at me: I had my shilling life all right, and some golden guineas to boot.

I stared at the photographs of the man to whom I had just been speaking. His forehead was high, suggesting intelligence, and he had the full, sensual lips of a libertine. He was handsome, and looked self-confident, even arrogant, with a rakish grin and an undeniable charm.  The headlines made it clear that everything he had told me was true.

Yes, he was a great confidence trickster. Yes, he brought panache, imagination and (I can’t resist it) sparkle, to the world of jewelry theft, pulling off several of the most inventive, ingenious and funny scams in the history of crime. He was, up to a certain point in his criminal career, a loveable rogue, a real-life Raffles.

Roy had, however, left out one tiny but significant detail.

He’d murdered five people.