At ten minutes to nine, I went into my little office which adjoined the police house at Aidensfield and telephoned the police station at Ashfordly. This was a daily ritual to see whether any messages awaited me. I was given a list of stolen vehicles, details of a couple of overnight crimes, and the description of a missing woman. It was a very routine start to my day.
I had to depart from my house at nine o’clock precisely. All my supervisory officers, and Sergeant Blaketon in particular, were keen on precise timing. Nine o’clock meant exactly that, not a minute past nine nor even a minute to nine. And I knew Sergeant Blaketon was on duty this morning; that meant he could be sitting outside my house in his official car, checking on whether or not I had managed to climb out of bed following my 1 a.m. finish this same morning. In his mind, punctuality was of paramount importance, and I do believe we sacrificed many fruitful enquiries and duties in order to be at a specific place at a specific time, just in case Oscar Blaketon was checking.
But on this fine spring morning things were going to plan. I had my cap on, my notebook was up to date and everything was in order by two minutes to nine. I kissed Mary and the children goodbye, still not comprehending the menace of Elizabeth’s knowing grin. I went into the office for my van keys – I kept them on a hook under the counter.
They weren’t there. They were not hanging in their usual place. I was sure I’d put them there last night when coming off duty. It was where I always hung them. I checked my uniform pockets without success, then rushed upstairs to see if they were on the bedside cabinet. They weren’t. I checked my pockets again … then the bedroom floor, the bathroom floor … downstairs into the kitchen, into the downstairs loo, back to the office again …
‘Have you seen the van keys?’ I shouted to Mary as the clock struck nine. She was busy in the kitchen, washing the breakfast pots.
‘You always put them on that hook in your office.’
‘I know, but they’re not there.’
‘They must have fallen off. You’re so careful with your keys, especially official ones,’ came the voice from the kitchen.
‘Then you haven’t seen them?’
‘No, I never do! I have no need to.’
‘I haven’t put them down on the draining-board or the breakfast table, have I?’
‘No, I’ve cleared the table, I’d have seen them.’
I groaned. I decided to peep outside to see if Sergeant Blaketon had arrived. Fortunately, he had not. The coast was clear, which allowed me a few more minutes to continue my frantic search. I retraced my routine procedures, checking all the likely places again and again, and it was then that I realized that Elizabeth was following me around and scrutinizing all my actions – grinning the whole time.
‘Elizabeth,’ I asked, halting a moment in my anguish, ‘have you seen daddy’s keys? The keys for the police van?’
She clenched her lips and smiled in her silence. Mary had come through to my office at this stage and witnessed this behaviour. Elizabeth’s grin was rather like that of the Mona Lisa with teeth.
‘Elizabeth?’ Mary recognized the mischief in that smile. ‘Have you got daddy’s keys?’
The response was a more firmly clenched mouth and fixed smile, with her tiny, round face going red with the effort of containing herself.
‘Look, Elizabeth,’ I said, ‘Daddy’s got to go to work and he must have the van keys. He can’t get into the van without them – he can’t switch the radio on and can’t go to work.’
There was a spare set of keys, but they were kept on a board in the sergeants’ office at Ashfordly police station, and I had no wish to allow Oscar Blaketon to learn of my dilemma by requesting them.
‘Elizabeth,’ Mary now took up the challenge, ‘if you have got daddy’s van keys, you must say so, He has to go to work, and the sergeant will be very cross if he doesn’t go out in the van. Now, where are they?’
‘April Fool, Daddy!’ she grinned, her tight little mouth now opening as she could contain herself no longer. ‘Daddy’s an April Foo-hool!’ she chanted.
I should have realized; I should have connected her wicked grins with the arrival of All Fool’s Day, but I had not. I had to laugh at my own stupidity. I’d been well and truly caught.
‘All right, Elizabeth, you made daddy an April Fool. Now, can I have the keys?’
‘I have to keep them hidden till twelve o’clock,’ she said solemnly. ‘You’re not a real April Fool if you get them back before twelve o’clock, and I know when twelve o’clock is. It’s when both pointers are on twelve.’
‘No, Elizabeth, you mustn’t,’ I tried to reason with her. ‘You have made an April Fool out of daddy because he could not find the keys, so you’ve won. Now, I’d like my keys.’
‘They said at school to wait till twelve o’clock,’ she announced, that resolute line appearing on her face. ‘And I’m not telling you where the keys are. Daddy.’
‘Elizabeth …’
‘You’re an April Fool if you can’t find them!’ she began to chant.
Then the telephone rang.
‘You answer it,’ I entreated Mary. ‘If it’s the office, tell them I’m on patrol. Say I went out at nine.’
Mary did so. I heard her announcing that to whoever was calling, and she came back to say, ‘It was Eltering office. You haven’t booked on the air. They were checking.’
‘They’ve booked me on now, have they?’
‘They said it must be bad reception. Come on, Elizabeth, don’t be silly …’
‘I am not being silly!’ she stamped her feet. ‘April Fooling daddy is not silly. Everybody will be doing it.’
It became very evident that Elizabeth was not going to reveal her hiding-place. It was no good wasting time arguing – time was pressing and I had to do something positive. I did consider making all the clocks and watches show the time as twelve o’clock but I didn’t think that would fool her. My only option was to go on patrol, otherwise I could be in serious trouble from Sergeant Blaketon and, because the van was now out of commission, I needed some alternative transport. I decided to use my own car, hiding it where necessary. I could make those hourly points, and if any senior officer challenged me, I could claim either that the radio reception was poor or that my van would not start. Both were correct! And then, after twelve noon, I could return home when, hopefully, Elizabeth would return my keys.
As Elizabeth stood with a grin of triumph upon her face, I knew I should remonstrate with her, and yet it seemed such a cruel thing to do when she was flushed with triumph. I could not be angry with her, not now. My own frustration had evaporated, and so I decided I would regard her triumph as a genuine victory. I praised her for her cleverness and headed for my car.
Fortunately, she had not hidden its keys, and so I made my way to the first point. I must admit I did so with some trepidation because, if the office had been trying to raise me on the radio, I would be subjected to a form of inquisition. But as I stood beside the telephone box at Elsinby there was no phone call and no visit from the ever-vigilant Sergeant Blaketon. From ten o’clock until eleven, I continued to visit outlying farms in my own car, the change in my transport not causing a flicker of interest in the farmers upon whom I called. At eleven, there was no telephone call at Crampton kiosk and I decided that, immediately after my noon point at Briggsby, I would drive home, hopefully to retrieve the keys from Elizabeth so that I could complete my tour of duty in official transport. Looking back upon the events of that morning, I suppose I had a charmed existence, because there were no official calls at the telephone kiosks, which in turn meant no one had been endeavouring to raise me on the radio.
Having completed my noon point, therefore, again with no calls from the office, I rushed home. Upon my return, Elizabeth was waiting with a triumphant smirk on her little face, and I admitted to her that I was an April Fool of the very best kind. I had not been able to prevent her trick from enduring until noon, and I knew I should be the subject of some discussion
at school on Monday.
‘So, Elizabeth,’ I smiled, ‘where are my van keys, please?’
‘I was a very good hider, wasn’t I?’ she smiled at me.
‘Yes, you were,’ I had to agree. ‘A very good hider indeed. Now, I must finish my tour of duty, Elizabeth, so can you get daddy’s keys, please?’
‘I’ve forgotten where I put them.’ She stuck a finger in her mouth as she stared at me.
‘But you can’t … Mary!’ I shouted. ‘Mary, now she can’t remember where she’s hidden my keys!’
‘Never mind, darling,’ Mary patted me on the shoulder. ‘You go and finish this patrol, and I’m sure Elizabeth and I can find your silly old keys.’
So I completed that patrol in my own car, and it was with some relief that I eased into my drive prompt at one o’clock to book off duty. I went into my office, happy that I’d been able to check a great many outstanding stock registers. Before lunch, I settled down to finalize my notebook with entries of my day’s duties.
As I worked, Mary came in, albeit a little sheepishly.
‘Darling,’ she began, and I knew from the tone of her voice that there was a problem. ‘Darling, I’m afraid Elizabeth genuinely can’t remember where she’s hidden your keys.’
As I groaned, the telephone rang. It was Sergeant Blaketon.
‘Rhea?’ he bellowed into the telephone. ‘Where the devil have you been? We’ve been trying to raise you on the radio for the last twenty minutes. You are the only patrol on duty in the section. I need assistance.’
‘Sorry, Sergeant,’ I said. ‘There was bad atmospherics … reception was poor all morning …’
‘Yes, I guessed that. So get yourself down to Brantsford immediately. I need assistance, urgently.’
‘Right, Sergeant,’ I acknowledged. ‘What is your location in Brantsford?’
‘The police office, Rhea. Rendezvous there.’
I puzzled over his problem and had no alternative but to forgo my lunch and rush off in my own car. This morning’s episode was costing me a fortune in petrol. Fifteen minutes later I parked on the hardstanding outside Brantsford police station and went in to meet the sergeant. He had heard my arrival, but his own problems were such that he apparently did not notice I was not in the official van.
‘Sergeant?’ I rushed into the office where he was waiting for me.
‘Ah Rhea, sorry to drag you from your lunch, but I’m the victim of an April Fool’s joke. Some idiot has let all my tyres down. I need help to change the wheels. The jack won’t go under the car … and I need assistance to get them all blown up.’
Had I been in the mini-van, I knew that its jack would have been useless for this task, but I did have my own hydraulic jack. It was in the boot of my car. It was not issued with the vehicle but was my own property, a most useful present from my father. And so, my using that piece of equipment, I helped him raise the official car off the ground, first removing the two rear wheels, which we had inflated by a local garage, then the front ones and finally the spare, which was softer than it should have been. It was a long job.
‘Thank you, Rhea,’ he said when it was all over. ‘I do hate being the subject of such pranks. Perhaps we can forget this ever happened, eh? As colleagues? As man to man?’
‘I’m sure we can, Sergeant,’ I agreed, wondering how long it would take me to recover my own official keys from Elizabeth’s hiding-place. If that took a long time, I would need his co-operation. One good April Fool’s joke deserved another, I felt.
But I needn’t have worried. Mary found the keys after lunch. Elizabeth had hidden them in the ironing-board. There was a small hole in the cover, just large enough to slide in the keys from a mini van. Elizabeth, having remembered that Mary had once lost a brooch in there, had considered it a perfect hiding-place for the mini-van keys. Mary had found them as she’d lifted the ironing-board from its parking place – the keys had jingled in their secret nest.
I put them in my pocket and made a resolution not to leave them on the hook on All Fool’s Day next year, and to cut myself a spare copy of them, just in case.
My short involvement with Sergeant Blaketon that day did have its merits. That night, he told me to finish an hour earlier than usual on my second tour, a 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift. He would cover the extra hour, he said, so my 1 a.m. finish was a thank-you from him.
It was highly appreciated as I curled up in bed against Mary’s warm body for an extra hour on a cool spring morning. I thought Elizabeth had done me a good turn after all.
Practical jokes, were not, however, restricted to April Fool’s Day. Although some were fun, others could be malicious. In reflecting upon Sergeant Blaketon’s four flat tyres, I did wonder whether they were the result of a real joke or whether they were an act of malice. I had a sneaking suspicion they were the latter.
From time to time, reports of acts of a malicious but supposedly jocular nature were received at our offices. Quite often, they were perpetrated by one neighbour upon another usually from spite or revenge. We dealt with damaged cars, paint sprayed on doors or gates, damaged garden plants or greenhouses, broken windows and a host of petty nuisances. The perpetrators regarded them as jokes, the victims regarded them as menacing, and the police regarded them as a crime of malicious damage. Some perpetrators were never prosecuted because there was insufficient evidence to support a court appearance, even though the villain was known.
One such troublesome series of pranks occurred at Elsinby; it caused me a lot of work before I eventually traced and dealt with the culprit. During my enquiries, I was to learn that a lot of incidents had happened at the Hopbind Inn before I was made aware of them. For example, one trick was to lash the bumpers of parked cars to benches outside the pub. When a driver set off home at closing time, he would find himself towing a bench along the High street – which did not do much good to the bench. Then the pranks grew more serious. One car bumper was lashed to that of a car parked behind it, and so a tug-of-war developed between the two vehicles, sometimes resulting in the separation of the said bumper from the car.
It was at this stage that the landlord, George Ward, told me of these occurrences. He stressed that this was not an official complaint. Indeed, he was not the victim; his customers were the victims. He was merely making me aware of the on-going series of pranks because of their nuisance value.
Strictly speaking, it was no concern of mine unless and until I received a formal complaint from one of the ‘injured persons’, as we termed all victims of crime whether or not they suffered physically. After this unofficial notification, though, whenever I paid a visit to the Hopbind Inn, whether on duty or not, I would discreetly ask whether further pranks had been played. It seemed they came in short bursts and always under cover of darkness. Weeks would pass without anything happening, and then there would be a series of related incidents all within, say, a week. Then there would be another lull until a further outbreak occurred.
It seemed almost as if the joker was producing new ideas which he would use for a few days before turning to something else – when the lashed bumper-bar idea had run its course, he spent a week smearing windscreens with grease. After that, he switched on the cars’ headlights so that the batteries became exhausted. Flat tyres were deployed, as were eggs broken upon roofs, or dustbin lids roped to the rear wheels – the clatter they made as the wheels turned was unbelievable.
From my point of view, there was one interesting feature: none of the pranks was truly malicious. For example, the tyres were not slashed, the cars’ paintwork was not dented or scraped with coins, their petrol tanks were not filled with sugar, and their engines not interfered with. In other words, these were fairly harmless pranks which did not result in permanent damage. They were little more than a nuisance.
I patrolled the area whenever I was on duty, sometimes concealing myself in the churchyard or among shrubs and trees which allowed me to observe the pub and its car-park. Like the villain, I operated under cover of darkness,
but I never saw any of these acts committed. Neither did anyone else – the prankster was never seen. This was odd. He seemed to know when he was able to operate. If only I could catch him in the act, I could threaten him with prosecution, and that would surely halt this silly behaviour.
Over the duration of these pranks, I never received any official complaint from the victims, and I regarded this as an acceptance of their minor nature. But they did become more serious as time went by. On one occasion, the door handle of a small van was lashed to the wooden framework of the porch of the inn – and when the van set off, down came the porch. Another time, one end of a rope was tied around one of the fence posts of the railings outside the inn, the other end being tied to a pick-up truck. And when the pick-up moved off, the railings were demolished. But even so, I never received any formal complaint, even though the regulars were aware of my interest. I did encourage them to make a report, but none did and I began to wonder why there persisted this apparent group reticence.
As the pranks continued, I received details through local gossip, and it was noteworthy that every incident occurred outside the Hopbind Inn. Nothing of this kind happened inside the pub, nor did the pranks extend into other areas of the village. From time to time, I discussed them with George, the landlord, and he accepted they were a nuisance but that no one seemed unduly bothered.
Then there was a fairly serious event. Outside the pub, on its extensive forecourt, were two petrol pumps. In addition to filling his customers with ale, George would also fill their cars with petrol, and the prankster chose to lash a tractor to one of those pumps. He had used a strong rope which he’d found on the tractor, and when the machine set off, it almost dragged the petrol pump to the ground and nearly fractured the pipes inside. This time, George decided to report it to me and to make it official.
Constable among the Heather Page 7