‘That’s about it,’ he said.
‘You’ve got permission to live here?’ I asked.
‘No, but we don’t need it. We’re squatting. We can squat in empty houses and no one can throw us out. I’m sure you know that,’ he smiled. ‘Besides, this old spot is derelict, falling down, full of holes and no doors. We’ll fix it for ourselves.’
I stayed a few moments chatting to this man without seeing any of his friends, and decided they were harmless out here. Indeed, they might make some repairs to William’s old house.
It was a further two or three days before I came across William Barr. He was collecting his pension from the post office/shop at Aidensfield and I took the opportunity to chat to him.
‘Bill,’ I said, ‘that old house of yours, Owlet Hall. I was driving past earlier this week and see you’ve got visitors. A bunch of flower-power people, by the look of it. Your old home’s been turned into a hippie commune.’
I explained what I had seen, and he thought for a while.
‘They’ll not be harming anybody?’ he said.
‘No, I think not,’ I had to admit. ‘They’re supposed to be a friendly lot, a bit weird by our standards, but they’re not likely to plan bank raids or kill moorland sheep for meat.’
‘Then they can stay,’ he said. ‘T’awd spot might as well be useful to somebody.’
And so he allowed them to remain. In fact, it wouldn’t have been easy get rid of them for, if pressed, they would surely claim squatters’ rights, but because I was aware of their presence, I recorded the matter in my files.
I told the CID, with a special note to the Drugs Squad, for it was known that similar communes had cultivated cannabis plants, and I made a mental note to call at the house every three months or so, with a view to enforcing whichever of our laws they might be breaking. I would let them know of my continuing official interest, for I had no wish for the local youngsters to experiment with drugs of any kind.
By the time of my next visit, things had changed. The old cars were still there, still untaxed and still in their gaudy colours, but there was much more. That extra stuff was rubbish. It was everywhere. The exterior of the hitherto tidy old house was cluttered with every conceivable item of junk — old prams, bedsteads, chairs, a rusty oven, bikes, bottles, lengths of timber, flower pots — it looked like an itinerant trader’s encampment of the very worst kind. I picked my way through the miasma to peep at the cars, and the man I’d first met appeared once again.
‘Hi, Constable,’ he beamed. ‘You’re back.’
‘Yes, and I’ll keep coming. This is part of my patch.’
‘We’re not criminals, man, we’re friends to everyone.’
‘Is this rubbish all yours?’
‘Sure. The council doesn’t collect it, so it stays.’
‘You might try to remove it, or even burn some.’
‘No hassle, man, no hassle. It’s ours; we’ll deal with it if we want; if we don’t want, we won’t. So who cares?’
‘The people who live round here don’t like their area looking like a council tip,’ I said. ‘They’re proud of their countryside and don’t like it to be desecrated.’
‘Dr Johnson said that fine clothes are good only as they supply the want of other means of procuring respect,’ said the fellow. ‘External appearances don’t matter. It’s the soul that matters, man. So what’s a bit of rubbish? Superficial, that’s all. Unimportant in the real world . . .’
‘You should try to keep the place neat, tidy and clean,’ I tried again.
‘Why, Constable, why? To get respect? False respect? People must take us as we are or not at all. Why pretend? We mean no harm, we just want to live our lives in peace.’
‘And so do the villagers,’ I said. ‘Their rights and opinions are as valid as yours.’
‘Sure they are.’ He beamed and vanished indoors.
I was powerless to prosecute them under the Litter Act, because this was not a public place — it was private land. And the Civic Amenities Act was not then in force.
Over the following months, the hippies made themselves increasingly unwelcome. With no known form of income, they did require certain commodities, and one general store, not in Aidensfield but in Ashfordly, made the mistake of trusting them by supplying them with groceries on credit. The commune members took full advantage of that generosity — they never paid, although they did offer to perform some work in lieu. One of their plans was to offer to deliver groceries to the surrounding villages, but timely advice by one of our constables soon alerted the grocer to that risk. For every delivery they made, they would probably help themselves to a few items.
The great British public would find itself supporting these parasites. In addition to their known activities, they were suspected of helping themselves to the occasional bottle of milk from doorsteps, they had filled their cars’ tanks with petrol at local garages and not paid their bills, they had persuaded the coal merchant to deliver a ton into their coal house and had not paid him . . . and so the problems began to multiply.
Within a year, every small business in the area found itself involuntarily supporting the commune. As one businessman said to me, ‘If they’d come and asked for a basket of apples, I’d have given them one, but to pretend to buy one and then not pay — well, that’s dishonest.’
His words did sum up the general attitude of the villagers. If the commune had genuinely wished to establish itself with the good will of the local people, that good will was available, but these hippies had abused it. They had resorted to cheating, and that was unforgiveable. Had they pleaded they were honest but poor, voluntary support would have been forthcoming, perhaps with a request for some kind of return assistance in and around the village.
A secondary aspect was their suspected involvement in drugs. We did receive information that some of the hippies were involved with soft drugs, cannabis being named. We heard rumours of parties at which the cannabis was smoked, these being weekend affairs when dozens of like-minded people flocked to Owlet Hall to take advantage of its remote location. Our drugs officer did raid the place from time to time, but no drugs were ever found. We never did know with any certainty whether or not drugs were being used, but the rumours persisted, and so our drugs officers continued with their raids. This did make the public uneasy, many of the local parents being concerned that their children might be tempted to try the drugs at discos or in the pubs and cafés of the district.
The combination of unsettling rumour and established facts meant that poor old William Barr found himself very unpopular. Several villagers blamed him for their problems, claiming, in their ignorance, that he should never have let the property to them. But William was helpless. There was nothing he could do to remove them; few seemed to understand that. There was nothing in criminal law to make their occupation illegal, and therefore nothing I could do to help him. The hippies knew their rights — William could never force them to leave. But they must have sensed that he was contemplating some kind of action, because they succeeded in boarding up the windows and fixing their own locks to the doors. The house was never left empty — one of them was always present.
Eventually, poor old William came to see me.
‘Mr Rhea,’ — he looked weary and worried — ‘them hippies ’ave been in Owlet for more than a year now, and ’ave you seen t’state of it? Terrible! You’d think they’d ’ave a bit o’ respect for other folks’s property. My pigs never made such a mess. Isn’t there owt you can do?’
‘Sorry, Bill, I can’t. They know I can’t, which makes it worse! Tenancy problems are not a police matter. I don’t think you’d get a court order to evict them either, because if you claimed they’d damaged the place, they’d say they’d improved and repaired it, which in some ways they have. Have you got a solicitor who might advise you?’
‘No, but the NFU gives advice. They said t’same as you.’
He stood behind the counter of my tiny office, and I felt sorry for hi
m. I wished there was something someone could do, but at that time there was a gap in the law which permitted squatters to take over empty houses and live in them rent-free and to the detriment of the owners. The Labour government then in power refused to change the law, and by the 1970s this was a very common problem for property-owners. Poor old Bill was a victim of this uncaring attitude.
‘Folks is blaming me,’ he said. ‘They owe money here, there and everywhere, they’re pinching things, they’ve turned the house into a rubbish dump . . . now, t’locals is saying it’s all my fault.’
And then, as he spoke, I remembered reading of a similar case in a village in some remote part of England. I could not remember precisely which village or even the date, but I did remember the story.
‘Bill,’ I said, ‘I remember a similar case, a few years back. This farmer had squatters in his hand’s cottage, down a lane. They took it over, just like yours.’
‘And what did ’e do, Mr Rhea?’
‘He put a swarm of bees through their kitchen window,’ I said. ‘And then, when the squatters all rushed out of the place, he put his bull in. He made the house into a home for his prize bull. That cleared ’em out,’ I chuckled.
‘I ’aven’t got a bull,’ he said seriously, then added wickedly, ‘but I ’ave a useful awd tup.’ A tup is the local name for a ram. And off he went, chuckling to himself. As he reached the gate, he turned and called, ‘Awd Robbie Mullen owes me a favour.’
Robbie Mullen was a retired railway man who lived at Elsinby, and I knew he kept bees; I’d called upon his services from time to time when a local swarm had required attention.
I awaited developments, but nothing happened until the following May, which, I was to learn, was the time most swarms of bees occur. When a young queen bee is ready to leave the hive, half the resident workers swarm around her, and as she leaves, they cluster about her, going wherever she goes. The others remain with the resident queen. After leaving, the new queen settles on a tree or a fence to wait while several of the workers find her a new home, whereupon she joins them to establish a colony.
Awd Robbie, being an expert, waited until his bees were swarming. As luck would have it, he captured two swarms. He and Bill, with the ram in his pick-up truck, drove out to Owlet Hall early one morning and thrust the two buzzing swarms into the open windows of the house. The result was pandemonium. Eight or ten hippies, with angry bees buzzing around their long hair, bolted nude from the house, whereupon a huge ram, seeing the open door, bolted inside.
Quite suddenly, and with a minimum of legal bantering, Owlet Hall had a different family of squatters.
Bill was on hand too and swiftly replaced the locks, later throwing from the windows the tatty belongings of his unwanted guests. I did not turn up that day, for I had no wish to delay their departure by having to deal with two untaxed cars on the road — I wanted to see no psychedelic cars at all and no long-haired alternative members of society. I just wanted rid of them.
And so they vanished, to inflict their unwelcome presence upon someone else. Bill recovered his ram, which, it seemed, had a propensity for rushing headlong into open doorways, but Robbie left his two swarms of bees in the old house. They did not stay.
‘I reckon t’smell put ’em off,’ he said with all seriousness.
All the belongings left behind were burned, and Bill sold the house to a builder who wanted to demolish it so that he could acquire the stone. And so, within a further year, Owlet Hall disappeared without trace.
In gratitude for my unofficial advice, Bill gave me a pot of honey which, according to Awd Robbie, was made by the very bees who did such a good job on those flower people.
8. Grave Problems
I love to lose myself in a mystery.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE, 1605–82
Many police officers conclude their careers without ever having been involved in a murder investigation. I’m sure that some never cherish the desire for that experience, but because murder is constantly regarded as the worst of all crimes, there persists within many officers an ambition to arrest a murderer. If the satisfaction of making that arrest is never achieved, they wish to be a small part of the investigation; there is a certain pride at being part of a murder inquiry team, especially a successful one.
During my time as the village constable at Aidensfield, I never achieved that distinction. If murder had been committed on my patch, the mighty CID would have been called in. Many experienced detectives would have descended upon the locality to take over the investigation, and I might have been co-opted because of my local knowledge, but my role would not have been a primary one, only one of support.
Nonetheless, from time to time murders committed in distant parts did involve me. Occasionally a death in a far-off town would have links with my patch and, for example, I might have to interview the driver of a car who had driven past the scene of the killing at or about the material time.
One infamous crime which involved me on its fringes was the notorious ‘Moors Murders’ case. Although these crimes are forever associated with the Yorkshire moors, the moors in question are about a hundred miles to the west of those upon which I worked. They were spread across the borders of Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire, while I served in the North Riding of Yorkshire. These ‘Yorkshires’ were two distinct counties, each with its own county police force; Lancashire was regarded as foreign territory.
The victims of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley had been buried high on those Pennine moors and there seemed little or no connection with my quiet part of Yorkshire. After the couple’s conviction, however, I found myself involved in the aftermath. A man and wife whom I shall call Matt and Peggy Copeland had been watching television when a programme about the Moors Murders was shown. One of the photographs was the highly publicized full-face portrait of Myra Hindley, taken when she was looking at her most gaunt and ghastly. Upon seeing that photograph, Peggy Copeland felt sure she had seen that woman accompanied by a man; she was utterly convinced she had seen Myra Hindley digging somewhere upon the North York Moors at least a year prior to her arrest. She could not swear that the man on the moors was Ian Brady, but she never doubted she had seen Hindley.
The time had been early October, the day had been a Sunday, and the Copelands had been alone. As they had parked their car beside a lonely moorland road to enjoy a picnic, so the haunting face of a woman had appeared above a slight hillock. It was swiftly followed by a man’s, and both of them stared briefly at the parked car, then vanished down the other side of the moorland mound. The man had had a spade in his hands and appeared to have been digging.
Mrs Copeland thought nothing more about this curious incident until much later, when that face of Myra Hindley had stared from her television screen. She was convinced it was the face of the woman she’d seen on the moors. She discussed her worries with her husband, and for a few days the couple lived with the awesome suspicion that they might have been parked near a murder victim’s grave on the North York Moors. Uncertain what to do next, they read as much as they could about the case, to see if there were any known links with the North York Moors, but none was mentioned. Eventually they decided to visit their local police station to air their concern; this was at Peterlee in County Durham.
After exhaustive interviews, the detectives in Durham were sufficiently convinced by Peggy’s story to launch an investigation. The snag was that, by this time, many months had elapsed since Peggy’s sighting, and furthermore, neither she nor her husband was sufficiently knowledgeable about the North York Moors to pinpoint the precise location. They had toured the moors that Sunday without any pre-arranged plan; they did not really know their way round; neither could recall any particular village or viewpoint. Following a meeting about the situation, Durham CID decided that the Copelands should revisit the moors in an attempt to find both the place where they had halted for their picnic, and the mound behind which the suspicious man and woman had disappeared.
But the point
of search was within Britain’s largest area of open heather: there are 553 square miles inside the national park boundaries, with hundreds of miles of roads and an enormous variety of viewpoints. It was therefore decided that the Copelands should describe, as best they could, the route they had taken and the sights which remained in their memories. From that, an officer who was familiar with the moors would attempt, with their co-operation, to trace their picnic site.
I was selected for that job. In an unmarked police car, I had to tour the moors with the Copelands, and we had to do all within our power to locate that place. It sounded easy, but I knew it wasn’t going to be. I suggested that we select a weekend which corresponded to their first visit, i.e. during early October, because the colours, the contours and even the sunlight would make conditions almost identical to that first visit. This was agreed.
At dawn one Sunday morning in October, therefore, Durham CID ferried the Copelands to Guisborough, a market town on the northern tip of the moors. I drove there to meet them.
I had been allowed to use Sergeant Blaketon’s official car, immaculate in its black livery. He had checked the milometer, the tyres, the water and oil, and he had also noted there was not a scratch or patch of dirt on his vehicle.
‘I want my car back in this condition, Rhea,’ he reminded me as I drove off.
Armed with maps, books and photographs of the moors, I met my companions for the day and, over a coffee in a small café, we tried to identify their route. They had enjoyed a coffee in this very café on that other visit, which made it a perfect starting-point. As a rare treat, I could pay for their coffee from official funds, because I had been issued with a small sum of money towards our subsistence for the day.
Having met this sincere couple, I was looking forward to the task. The Copelands were in their late thirties or early forties and were a genuine, down-to-earth man and woman who had found themselves in a curious situation. I did my best to assure them that they were not wasting their time or mine, for that worry seemed uppermost in their minds. I’m sure I convinced them that we considered a reconstruction of their experience meritworthy, otherwise we should not have agreed to undertake this journey.
CONSTABLE NICK BOX SET 6-10 five feel-good village cozy mysteries Page 87