Soon, however, I was approaching the cluster of buildings but the yard was at the far side of the complex; I could not see from this approach whether or not Joe’s van was there, but soon I was rounding the corner past the eastern end of the house and noticed Joe’s distinctive green van in the yard. It appeared to be parked perfectly normally, but as I eased to a halt beside it, I saw that its rear doors were standing wide open and it contained a solitary box of groceries. But I could not see Joe anywhere. My first reaction was that he was inside the house, perhaps chatting after having had lunch with the Applebys; inviting visitors to stay for a meal was a perfectly normal gesture by the farmers of this region, but it was odd that Joe had not notified his wife and odd that he had left his van doors standing open.
I went to the back door of the farmhouse — farmers of this region rarely used their front doors — and it was standing open. Then I saw the signs of a break-in. A jemmy had been used to force open this door and its marks were in the woodwork.
“Dick? Grace?” Without touching the evidence on the woodwork, I hurriedly stepped inside and called their names. There was nothing, merely a deathly silence. “Joe?”
A feeling of impending doom swept over me at that stage and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end; I had no idea what I might find although the only vehicle in the yard was Joe’s little van. It seemed the villains had departed — there was no other vehicle in the yard and I’d not passed any on the drive up to the farm. There is always a feeling of helplessness in these cases, but I knew I had to make a provisional search of the premises, just in case the thief or thieves were hiding. First, though, I radioed Ashfordly Police Station from my van. They had to know my location just in case I suffered some form of attack. When I explained the situation, Sergeant Blaketon said he would come immediately and bring PC Alf Ventress with him. He’d also notify the Scenes of Crime department and instruct them to attend.
As it would take about twenty minutes for Blaketon to reach the farm, I knew I had to make an immediate search of the house on my own. It was, of necessity, a cursory inspection because the full scientific examination would be done by the Scenes of Crime officers, but I had to try and establish what had happened here, then find Joe, Dick and Grace. I had to know if this raid had been completed or whether Joe had interrupted it.
With a range of concerns on my mind, that hurried search told me the raiders had succeeded in entering the house; drawers were standing open, cupboard doors were standing wide, clothing was scattered across the floors, glass cabinets had been forced . . . there was a lot of damage and distress but no sign of Joe, Dick or Grace.
At this stage, I had no idea what had been stolen — judging by the intruders’ areas of search, it looked as if the thieves had been targeting jewellery or money, but the furnishings of this farm included some fine pottery and glassware, both antique and modern, and there was some beautiful antique furniture, large and small. I had to try and locate the owners as soon as possible, but human life is more important than goods and chattels and so I turned my attention to the outbuildings. As I hurried across the yard where I’d parked, I noticed an odd thing — a smashed bottle of tomato ketchup lying on the ground, but I left it alone for the time being as I continued my search. Minutes later, I found Joe. He was lying on a bed of hay on the floor of a loose-box with his hands and feet bound with rope, and a gag over his mouth.
“Joe!” I called his name and quickly went to him, realising he was conscious. As rapidly as I could, I loosened the gag, then the ropes.
“Thank God . . .” he croaked. “I thought I was a goner, Nick. I thought nobody was going to come . . .”
“Rub your hands and feet,” I said before quizzing him. “Stand up and stamp around for a minute or so, get your circulation moving.”
“I was getting pins and needles . . .”
“How long have you been here?” I asked, wondering how long a lead the villains might have gained.
“Just before twelve,” he said. “I thought I’d get this last delivery done, then get back in time for lunch.”
“They’ll be miles away by now, but you need a hot drink,” I told him as he stomped and marched around the place, clapping his hands and stamping his feet.
“We can’t use the farm’s kitchen, we might contaminate the scene of the crime, but I’ve some coffee left in my flask. Come and sit in my van until the others get here, and tell me what happened. What about seeing a doctor, Joe? Are you injured at all?”
“No, just a bit shaken. I got a thump on the head but it hasn’t drawn blood. No, I don’t need a doctor. Thanks for asking.”
Under my gentle questioning, Joe told me that he’d driven into the yard and noticed an old ambulance standing there. Thinking something had happened to Dick or Grace, he was about to approach the back door when two men rushed out of the house carrying chairs. Within seconds, they had been placed in the ambulance which was parked close to the back door. As Joe was endeavouring to make up his mind whether these were legitimate furniture removers or not, he saw the break-in marks and realised he had stumbled upon a couple of housebreakers in action. He’d then decided to stop them, but they had regained their vehicle, started the engine and were moving off. In a desperate attempt to stop them, he’d grabbed the first available thing and threw it.
It happened to be a bottle of tomato ketchup from the box of groceries in the back of his van and he flung it after the departing vehicle; it hit the side and smashed, but at that point, instead of continuing to race away, the ambulance stopped. Both men got out and came for him. He tried to gain the security of his own van, but they caught him, thumped him over the head and hauled him into the loose-box where they managed to tie him up.
“Did they say anything?” I asked.
“One of them said they had to get away before the alarm was raised. That’s why they tied me up. I couldn’t do anything, couldn’t ring anybody but I got their number and think I would recognise them again if I saw them.”
“It’s probably carrying false number plates,” I said. “Was there anything unusual about their truck?”
“Just the fact it looked like an old ambulance, a sort of pale-tan colour,” he said. “With all the rear seats and internal things removed.”
“And it will have a tomato ketchup stain on it now!” I laughed. “Where did the bottle hit it, exactly?”
“The nearside, near the window closest to the back. It hit the frame of the window, and I saw some run down the side of the window and onto the bodywork.”
“Even if they clean it off,” I said, “there might be residue in the window seals. Let’s hope so. Now, let’s see if our patrols can come across the ambulance, although I think it will have gone to ground by now. You’ll have put the wind up them!”
I wrote down the registration number he had provided and then radioed Ashfordly Control Room with a request that an immediate search be made for the old ambulance and the two men, whose descriptions I obtained from Joe. I reminded Control about the Starling brothers and suggested an immediate visit to their premises at Galtreford, albeit knowing it would be difficult to prove they were in possession of stolen property when we did not, at that stage, know what had been taken. We must also establish whether or not either of the brothers owned an old ambulance. While speaking to Ashfordly Police, I suggested the duty constable ring the secretary at Eltering Cattle Mart and make a tannoy appeal for Mr and Mrs Appleby. If they responded, the message was to return home immediately; I did not want the contents of the message to be made public. The kind of trauma generated by such a vague message was best left to the individuals to deal with.
Sergeant Blaketon and Alf Ventress arrived very quickly and I briefed them on my actions. After convincing himself that Joe was not in need of immediate medical attention, Blaketon had a chat with him about his role in these events, and then a message on my radio announced that the Applebys had been traced at Eltering market and would be home within half an hour. They arrive
d around the same time as the Scenes of Crime teams and suddenly the farmhouse was a whirl of activity as the unfortunate couple began to realise the full extent of what had happened in their home. It was then that Blaketon came over to me.
“I think you’d better take Mr Steel home, Rhea,” he said. “We can fetch his van along later. And I’d get a doctor to see him, just to give him a brief examination, we don’t want any broken skulls or concussion to go unchecked. Better to be safe than sorry.”
Joe agreed. He was now feeling rather shaken as the shock of his experience began to intensify and so I placed him in my Minivan and returned him to Aidensfield. As I pulled up outside the post office, his wife rushed out to meet us, looking harassed and distraught. During all the fuss, I’d forgotten to ring her to say what had happened or even to tell her I’d found Joe, but I did say that her husband had been a hero and he’d tell her all about his adventure. I suggested she called a doctor to give Joe an examination and she assured me she would do that. Having returned him to his beloved, I went back to the farm where Dick and Grace were doing their best to make an assessment of what had been stolen. Once their list was complete, my job would be to circulate details to all local police officers, neighbouring police forces, antique dealers and second-hand shops and any other outlet which might deal in stolen property.
I was there for a while as the couple made their tearful assessment of the loss and it seemed that most of the stolen property comprised of antique furnishings like chairs and side tables, along with pottery and glassware, but some of Grace’s jewellery had also been taken — a diamond ring, a pair of diamond earrings and six necklaces. The total value of the haul began to approach £1,000, an enormous loss in the 1960s.
But there was a happy outcome. Thanks to Joe’s timely and spirited intervention with a bottle of tomato ketchup, a team of detectives visited the smallholding of the Starling brothers and there they found an old ambulance, albeit not bearing the registration number that had been noted by Joe at Aspen Hall. The Starling brothers denied being at Aspen Hall, and the number borne by the vehicle seen by Joe, we were to discover, had been allocated to a motorcycle in Lincolnshire. It began to look as if we’d be unable yet again to prove their involvement.
However, when our detectives examined the side of the ambulance, they found traces of tomato ketchup. Although the metalwork had been washed, traces were adhering to the rubber surrounds of the rear nearside window, and that residue was later found to match the control sample from Joe’s well-aimed bottle. A tiny amount had oozed down between the glass and the rubber surround — and we found it. Thus we could prove that that particular vehicle had been at the scene of that crime and afterwards, when news of the raid hit the local papers, an anonymous tip-off came from someone who’d been angry at their treatment of Joe. That call revealed the whereabouts of an old barn used by the Starling brothers. And there, most of the stolen antiques were recovered — the thieves had not dared to dispose of them due to our intervention and the resultant publicity. The only objects we did not trace were Mrs Appleby’s jewellery. Later, Joe identified the thieves during an identification parade. The Starlings were convicted of the Aspen Hall raid and several more, evidence of which was also recovered in the barn, and each was sentenced to three years in prison.
And it was all due to Joe’s bottle of tomato sauce.
I was talking to him some time later and he said, “You know, Nick, I’m not cut out for that kind of excitement. I’ve made my mind up — I’m definitely going to retire so if Sergeant Blaketon wants a post office to keep him busy until he’s an old age pensioner, ask him to give me a call.”
A couple of days after that chat with Joe, I met Sergeant Blaketon. He congratulated me yet again on my part in the conviction of the Starlings and said he was going to see Joe, too, to pass on the chief constable’s gratitude for his actions.
“While you’re there, Sergeant,” I said, “Joe has something else to tell you.”
“Really, Rhea? What’s that?”
“I think he should be the one to reveal it,” I smiled.
“You’re being too mysterious for my liking, Rhea, but if it’s anything to do with publicising the forensic value of a bottle of tomato ketchup, I don’t want to know . . .”
* * *
Apropos a sauce bottle being involved in the detection of a crime, there was another persistent and rather frustrating series of bottle-associated thefts in Aidensfield. It wasn’t so much the bottles that were being stolen, however, it was their contents, although I must admit that we did not recover either the stolen bottles or their contents.
Late one autumn, I received reports that a thief was stealing bottles of milk from the doorsteps of the village houses during the early hours of the morning.
The crimes were by no means committed on a regular basis and in spite of keeping observations whenever I could, the bottles continued to disappear. Other officers who patrolled occasionally through Aidensfield also kept observations as did the villagers themselves, especially the victims. In addition, I received great cooperation from the milkman who delivered the bottles, but in spite of these joint efforts, the milk continued to disappear.
From my point of view, the difficulty was that the thefts did not follow any identifiable pattern. If the milk had been stolen, say, every Wednesday morning between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m., it would have been easy to arrange the necessary surveillance to catch the culprit red-handed, but I received one report of a bottle vanishing on a Monday, another on a Wednesday and another on a Friday. These were all within the same week. Then the following week there were no thefts. Two further weeks followed with no reported thefts and I thought the epidemic was over, then a bottle vanished one Tuesday. There were no more thefts that particular week and none the following week either and the erratic nature of the crimes made detection almost impossible. Even if I lurked in the main street every morning to watch for the culprit, it seemed only a slice of luck would bring him to justice. It was arguable whether the thefts were serious enough to justify the expense of maintaining police patrols in the main street every morning for weeks on end for the sake of one or two missing pints of milk, and, besides, even a permanent vigil could not guarantee supervision of the entire length of the street. There was no static position from which I could secretly observe everyone who used it at that time of day.
And, of course, my presence, however carefully I tried to conceal myself, could alert the thief and so he’d refrain from committing his crime that day. While that would prevent the crime, it would not catch the thief. That eventuality was, of course, a possible option — the prevention of crime is an important part of our duty, but there is great job satisfaction in actually bringing a culprit to justice. That is what I wanted to do.
Our milkman, Harry Fletcher, began his deliveries at the western end of the village at 6 a.m. and worked his way along the entire length of the main street to conclude that section of his deliveries around 7 a.m. or just afterwards. During that time he did, of course, divert from the main street many times to deliver along narrow alleys and quiet lanes, or to hurry around to houses tucked away behind those which fronted the street. This routine meant he was not on the main street during the whole of that critical hour. In fact, when we worked out just how much time he actually spent on the main street each morning, it amounted to little more than half an hour during which, of course, he was fully occupied.
His frequent absences, however short, allowed sufficient time for the thief to zoom into Aidensfield, commit his crime and vanish without anyone seeing him. It took a matter of seconds to pick up a bottle of milk. It was clear to us that when Harry was in the street rattling his crates, the thief would be aware of the fact and would refrain from committing his crimes if he was within possible sight of the milkman. Another factor was that it was dark between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. on those mornings.
Harry had no idea who the thief might be — several cars and vans passed through Aidensfield in those early h
ours but apart from the local people, he did not know any of them and none of the vehicles stopped when he was around. It might be that Harry was himself an unwitting deterrent because, in the darkness, his milk float was well illuminated and he made a good deal of recognisable and acceptable noise with his bottles. People certainly knew when he was around.
I was not sure how long this series of crimes had been running because, in the first few cases, the vanishing bottles were not regarded as thefts. Harry was accused of forgetting to leave the required milk and, in order not to antagonise his customers, he simply apologised and replaced the missing pints. At the outset, those early crimes were not reported to me and so they were not recorded even though Harry insisted he was not at fault.
Eventually, he came to see me and I suggested that every time he received a report of a missing bottle, he asked the loser to report it to me. From that point, most of them did report their losses although some did not want to make an official complaint about such a small matter. I suspected I did not have the complete picture. I was sure milk was being stolen without me knowing about it and that did not help me solve the problem. However, I appreciated that someone was persistently stealing pints of milk from the doorsteps of Aidensfield. Due to other duties, it was impossible for me to spend every morning on Aidensfield’s main street but I was determined to detect this nuisance and bring the crimes to an end, if only for my own satisfaction and, of course, to maintain my professional image!
As autumn turned into winter, with Harry and me maintaining our observations whenever we could, the crimes continued at unpredictable intervals and with frustrating success. I decided to analyse the reports. I had a record of every pint which had been reported stolen and started work with a large-scale map of Aidensfield. Every house was marked upon it and I stuck a red paper dot on every address from which milk had been taken. Perhaps I ought to add here that the pint bottles of the 1960s were shaped differently from those we used in the 1990s — they were taller with longer necks and not so dumpy as the latter ones.
CONSTABLE IN THE FARMYARD a perfect feel-good read from one of Britain’s best-loved authors Page 6