After a lot of deliberation, which involved studying all the possible methods of tackling this problem, it was decided that the four of us, Connolly, Wharton, Shackleton and myself, would enter the farm buildings via the village; there was a footpath across the fields. Under cover of darkness, we could achieve that without being seen, and we would take portable radios. We would leave the car on the pub car park; it was unmarked and would not attract attention there.
At the farm, we found a large and beautiful dwelling-house in a splendid setting, remote and, in the day time, with staggering views across the valley. All the doors were locked and the windows were secure; it was in very good condition in spite of its lack of use. In the adjoining yard, which had a concrete base, was a row of looseboxes and sundry small buildings. This had clearly been a stable block, and all the stable doors were closed and in good condition. There was a large barn but the doors were closed and secured with a huge padlock, while the Dutch barn did contain some bales of straw. In the darkness, we silently inspected the layout and ascertained, beyond all doubt, that the farm was totally deserted.
‘Right,’ said Gerry Connolly, ‘I reckon they’ll do the switch in that stable yard; the ground before the Dutch barn is too soft for a large vehicle to linger on it for long, and I doubt if they’ll break into the barn. There are no other open buildings. And that stable yard has two ways in, or one way in and another way out. The surface is good, the buildings around it will offer some security and there’s always the looseboxes to dive into if necessary.’
We listened to him and agreed with his comments.
‘I think we ought to be in the Dutch barn,’ he said. ‘It’ll provide us with cover, and we can see into the yard area of the stable block; we can also see the lights of any vehicles approaching. And we can move about fairly quietly.’
Once more, we all agreed. We adjourned to the Dutch barn and settled on the bales of straw, whereupon Connolly produced a flask of coffee and some chocolate biscuits. It was only ten o’clock in the evening, a chill autumn night, and there was a long time to wait.
Hardly had we sipped our taste of coffee when things started to happen. Lights appeared across the fields; a vehicle of some kind was coming down the lane from the main road.
‘To your posts,’ hissed Connolly. ‘Radios on, but very low volume. And if there’s only one vehicle, we take no action — we need two, and we need to catch them exchanging the stuff. Wait for the word from me . . .’ and we all slipped into the darkness to adopt our pre-arranged observation positions.
Due to the roughness of the track, it took the oncoming vehicle a few minutes to reach the farm buildings, but its lights swept the scene as it swung into the stable yard. There it dowsed its headlights as three men climbed out. One of them opened the door of a garage next to the stable block, and the car quickly reversed inside. All the lights went out and the door was closed by the driver, then all four disappeared into one of the looseboxes. That door was closed behind them, although the top half of the door remained open. They were now waiting as we watched them. They were awaiting vehicle No. 2.
My position was in an old implement shed among a lot of disused junk, spare parts of ploughs and harvesters, old bins and tools and so forth, but I had a fine long view of the yard. Now I could see nothing. Was that hidden car full of loot, or was it waiting to collect the loot from the other?
My heart was thumping as I waited; I found this session of observation far more exciting than Operation Phrynia, for there was going to be a dramatic and positive finale. And then came trouble.
As a second set of lights burst across the far horizon to hurtle down that road to the farm, a third set appeared from the direction of the estate entrance. Two sets of lights were therefore heading towards the farm. But there was a problem — each was flourishing a flashing blue light.
They were police cars — we were later to learn that the estate gamekeeper had seen the arrival of the first car with the men who were then in the loosebox. Suspecting them to be poachers, he had alerted the local police. And no one had told them about this operation — a selection of other operational teams had been informed, but not the local police. And so these two cars, operating very strategically, were rushing into the farm to block both exits and contain the supposed poachers and their vehicle. I knew Connolly would be tearing out his blond hair, for there was no way of halting them now. Our radio sets were not on their frequency, and our car was a long way off, in the village . . .
I groaned. Unless that car in the garage contained the stolen silver, the whole exercise would be wasted.
Both police cars drove into the yard, each parking so that their headlights flooded the area, and I realised that other cars would be blocking the exits at their distant points. It was a superb operation — but it was so pointless and ruinous.
Then my old colleague from Ashfordly, Sergeant Blaketon, splendid in his uniform, emerged from one of the cars. Its blue light was still flashing as other uniformed constables climbed from the second car. And then a gamekeeper appeared.
‘In there,’ I heard him say, as he pointed to the garage and looseboxes.
At this stage, Detective Sergeant Connolly revealed himself to Blaketon, and so I thought I would do likewise; my two CID colleagues also appeared.
‘Rhea!’ cried Blaketon. ‘What are you doing here . . . oh, and Gerry . . .’
‘Oscar, you great oaf!’ snapped Connolly. ‘You’ve probably ruined my operation. This is a set-up. We’re waiting for a cache of stolen silver to be transferred . . .’
Oscar Blaketon drew himself up to his full height and majesty and said, ‘And I am here to catch poachers. Now Vincent,’ he addressed the gamekeeper, ‘where are they?’
‘In that loosebox, Mr Blaketon, and their car’s in yon garage . . .’
At this, the door of the loosebox burst open and out came three men, whose leader strode across to Blaketon.
‘You rustic buffoons, you crass idiots, you utter bloody fools . . . you have just ruined our operation!’ he snarled. ‘There’ll be hell to play over this. We nearly had ’em, the best tip in years, the top operators nearly trapped and you country bloody bumpkins go and blow the lot . . .’
‘And who are you, pray?’ growled Blaketon, eyeing the three scruffy individuals in their jeans and heavy sweaters.
‘Regional Crime Squad, Detective Inspector Jarvis based at Durham,’ and he showed his warrant card to Blaketon. ‘And look what you have just done. You’ve just blown a major operation; you’ve just alerted some of the region’s top villains to our plan . . .’
Jarvis did his nut, as the expression goes, while Blaketon, true to form, insisted he was seeking poachers and promptly took his men on a tour of the estate to find them. Gerry Connolly remained.
‘If you bastards would tell us what’s going on, this wouldn’t have happened . . .’
‘And if you woolly-backs let real detectives do their jobs, we’d have nailed this lot . . .’
They argued and fought for half an hour as Blaketon and his team crunched and crashed through the woodland around the farm.
‘Come on, lads,’ said a depressed Connolly. ‘Back to Eltering. Back to local housebreakings and petty theft. Back to minnows instead of salmon . . .’
Leaving the Crime Squad to lick their wounds, we travelled back to Eltering in silence, each with his own thoughts. I felt sorry for Gerry Connolly, for, whoever his informant was, he had given superb information. As we pulled into the car park, we had to avoid a white 30-cwt van parked there. I saw it had a broken rear-light cluster.
‘That’s all we’re good for, lads,’ said Gerry, stepping out of his car, ‘nicking speeders and people with duff lights on their motors!’
But inside, PC John Rogers was waiting for us with a huge smile.
‘Sarge!’ he said as Connolly entered. ‘Thank God you’ve come! Traffic have stopped that van that’s outside, a duff light . . . it’s full of silver, nicked from a job in Durham . .
. they’ve got two blokes. I was just going to give Headquarters a ring, to get them to alert the Crime Squad.’
‘No need,’ Gerry beamed. ‘This is one for us, I think, eh lads?’
‘Yes, Sarge,’ we chorused as we followed him into the CID office.
Chapter 5
For when the One Great Scorer comes
To write against your name,
He marks, not that you won or lost
But how you played the game.
GRANTLAND RICE, 1880—1949
UNTIL 1968, MANY OF the crimes which involved breaking into houses and other buildings were classified by the type of premises entered in this felonious way. For example, there were schoolhouse-breaking, warehouse-breaking, Government, municipal or public building-breaking, office-breaking, counting-housebreaking, garage-breaking, factory-breaking, storebreaking and others. To break into a church or other place of divine worship to steal or to commit any other serious crime was called sacrilege, and because those places were considered the House of God, the crime was regarded as extremely serious and, until 1968, carried a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.
To break into someone’s private dwelling-house was called housebreaking if it was done during the daylight hours and burglary if it was done during the night hours, i.e., between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. Burglary was a very serious offence, and it was classified as a felony (and so was sacrilege); other felonies included crimes like murder and rape. Housebreaking, on the other hand, was considered a lesser crime because it was common law misdemeanour, although it was made into a statutory felony by the 1916 Larceny Act. Nonetheless, criminal folklore continued to ascribe it with a lesser status, and it was infinitely more desirable to have a series of housebreakings than a series of burglaries.
The difference between the two was often a matter of timing by the burglar/housebreaker. For example, if a man woke up at 7 a.m. to find his house had been broken into during the night, how could anyone prove it had been burgled? No one knew if the villains had entered before 6 a.m. — they could have got in at 6.05 a.m., and so that crime would be logged as housebreaking, not burglary. After all, no one wanted a burglary logged in their records! As a consequence of this thinking, the volume of burglaries was kept at a minimum, while housebreakings chugged along at a fairly high rate.
With the passing of the Criminal Law Act of 1967, the distinction between felonies and misdemeanours was abolished, and so these terms became obsolete — instead we had a category of crimes known as ‘arrestable offences’ or, more simply, just ‘crimes’. And then, in 1968, the Theft Act scrapped all those old ‘breaking offences’, as we called them, and placed every type of breaking offence under one heading — burglary. From being a crime which had carried the death penalty for over 700 years (from around 1124 until 1838), it was now no more serious than breaking into a henhouse to steal an egg.
Older policemen were horrified, because it meant their burglary figures would soar. They could not see that the change had reduced the status of burglary instead of elevating the status of housebreaking. They couldn’t see that the artificial differences between felonies and misdemeanours no longer mattered.
Another change was to call stealing ‘theft’ instead of larceny, and I do know these changes did alarm the elder police officers, albeit without reason.
But my period as an Aide to CID was in those halcyon days when burglaries were burglaries and felonies were felonies, and the statisticians were delighted to be able to juggle with the crime figures thus produced.
In common with most small towns, Eltering did have its outbreaks of crime. These were hardly crime waves, but they did come in identifiable types — there would be a spate of thefts from motor cars, for example, or a spate of shop-breakings, a run of thefts from public houses or a sequence of con men leaving hotels or boarding-houses without paying the bill. It was odd how these continuing crimes occurred because, quite often, a sequence of crimes was not perpetrated by the same person or gang. It almost seemed as if there were fashions for crime, fads that came and went just like any other passing craze.
But there would be outbreaks of crime that could be attributed to the same person or gang, a fact easily ascertained by the MOs of the criminals.
Such a spate involved a series of housebreakings on small estates at Eltering, but also at other small towns in the district. They had been occurring for some months and followed a similar pattern. Bungalows on small estates would be entered through ground-floor windows that had been left partially open. Country folk liked to have fresh air circulating their homes, and so they left the windows open; sensible though this might be from a health viewpoint, it is an invitation to a passing and opportunist thief or burglar. As the term ‘breaking’ included opening windows as well as smashing them, this series was termed ‘housebreaking’ because the crimes occurred during the daylight hours. The ordinary citizens, of course, did not know of these subtle categorisations, and they would report they had been burgled.
The housebreakers, to give them their official name, seemed to know when their victims were away from the premises, and a feature of their work was that they seldom caused any damage inside the houses. They rifled the premises for cash and also took valuables that were not easily identifiable, such as radio sets, binoculars, cameras, ornaments of silver and pewter and other disposable things. Cash seemed to be their main objective, however; we felt they only took those other things if cash was not quickly found. In some cases, the means of entry, through small windows high off the ground, such as toilet windows or pantry windows, suggested someone of agility and youthfulness.
Added to this was the fact that their area of operation indicated they had transport, but in every case no one had seen the villains and no one had reported a suspicious vehicle. It seemed that our crooks were invisible.
‘Nick,’ said Gerry Connolly one quiet morning, ‘get the files on those housebreakings and go through all the reports. See if you can find any common factor we might have missed. I feel sure there’s something glaringly obvious that we’ve overlooked. Find a quiet corner somewhere and give them your undivided attention for today.’
I enjoyed this kind of research and took all the files into the court house, which was not in use. There I began my reading and drew a chart on some lined paper; on that chart, I listed the day, date, time and estates in question, the mode of entry and all the other basic factors of each crime. I did not come to any particular conclusions, although I did discover that the earliest crime had been discovered at 11.30 a.m. and the latest at 4.30 p.m. Most had been committed on a Monday, although others had occurred on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. The victims could not be categorised either, because they included pensioners, young people, married couples, single people, rich and poor. A lot of the attacked premises were bungalows but the attacks did include semi-detached houses, terrace houses and detached properties. The majority, however, were on fairly new estates where the residents might not know all their neighbours. There, a stranger was not unusual.
I decided I would look at similar crimes in the neighbouring market towns too; while I could not obtain as much detail about them from the circulars we received, I knew I could get facts such as the dates and times, a description of the stolen goods and an idea of the kind of premises. If I needed more facts, I could obtain them from the police stations in those towns. As I worked, Gerry Connolly came in to see how I was progressing and brought me a mug of coffee; he looked at my charts and asked if I had come up with anything new, and when I said, ‘No,’ he smiled.
‘We’ve tried too. Anyway, keep looking, Nick. There’s nowt happening just now, so you’re as well doing that. Something might click.’ And he left me to my piles of paper and charts.
As I worked, nothing of note emerged until I listed the towns where the crimes had been committed together with the days when the attacks occurred.
The odd thing about Ashfordly’s handful of crimes (twenty-one in the past year) was that they had al
l occurred on a Friday; when I checked those at Brantsford (fifteen in the year), I found they had all been committed on a Wednesday, But that did not apply to Eltering, because different days have been utilised there, and the same applied to the reported crimes at Malton. Saturday had featured prominently in Mahon’s tally, but so had Wednesday and Friday. Eltering’s crimes had been committed on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. There were no such crimes on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays in those towns.
That seemed odd, I felt, but why? Why was it odd?
I ended that day’s studies without any firm conclusions, and then the following day, Friday, I got a call from Connolly. It was half past three in the afternoon.
‘Nick, there’s been a housebreaking in Heather Drive, No. 18. Name of Turnbull. Cash taken. Can you attend? You’ll be on your own.’
‘Yes, of course.’ I was a little nervous but anxious to show that I could investigate this kind of crime.
No. 18 Heather Drive was a brick-built, semi-detached bungalow on a corner site; it was on a new estate, completed only two years earlier, which occupied a sloping site on the northern edge of the town. I walked to the address and knocked; the door was opened by a solidly built man in his early sixties, and his wife stood close behind.
‘Detective Constable Rhea,’ I said, showing my warrant card. ‘You called the office . . .’
CONSTABLE NICK BOX SET 6-10 five feel-good village cozy mysteries Page 62