‘We are not concerned with the moral aspects of your relationship, Mrs Pendlebury, just the facts. Now, can we get this statement written down officially?’
‘Yes, of course,’ and I thought I detected a note of relief in her voice.
But there were no tears, no signs of sorrow and no hint of any regret. She was an amazing woman and I did wonder whether the hinted aristocratic breeding in her bearing was genuine. Whether she would cry when we left, I could not say, but she did not mention her appointment any more. Instead, she allowed Gerry to write down her statement, and it catered for those final minutes of George Frederick Halliwell. As he had rolled off her, dead but happy, she had tried to re-establish his clothing for decency’s sake, but the weight of his body had defeated her.
She bade us farewell, still addressing Gerry as ‘Inspector’, and we were all relieved.
‘I wonder why she left the sweet peas behind,’ said Gerry as we drove away.
‘They were probably her wreath,’ I said. ‘She won’t attend the funeral, will she?’
‘She will,’ he said firmly, ‘but as a county councillor and a colleague, not as his mistress. She will regard that as her duty,’ he smiled.
‘You know, Sarge, I think you are right,’ I added.
And he was. She turned up at the funeral looking splendid and self-assured, but sorrowful. And she donated another wreath, this time without any sweet peas.
Chapter 3
The law’s made to take care o’ raskills.
GEORGE ELIOT, 1819—80
DURING ONE OF THOSE quiet moments in the CID office, it dawned on me why I might have been selected as an Aide to the constabulary’s detectives. It was surely the outcome of two cases in which I had been involved during my very youthful days. At the time I was patrolling a town beat as a raw and unconfident constable at Strensford, but my actions had been recorded in my personal file and, indeed, I received a chief constable’s commendation following one of the investigations. I guessed that, on the strength of these, I was thought to possess Sherlockian qualities, and so these cases are worthy of record here, even though they did not occur during my attachment to Eltering CID.
The first story began one New Year’s Eve. In the North Riding of Yorkshire, this is a time of celebration. There are lots of parties, dancing, feasting, drinking and general bonhomie. As the desire to have a good time manifests itself in constables as well as ordinary mortals, most of us tried to avoid working night shift as the old year became the new one. Often lots were drawn to avoid argument and hints of favouritism but even then there were grumbles. To be off duty on New Year’s Eve was indeed a bonus; to be on duty was a real chore.
On this particular New Year’s Eve, a colleague of mine, who was doing his best to woo the lady of his dreams, had an invitation to a dinner dance with her family. He desperately wanted to go. The sergeant said he could have the night off provided someone worked his night shift for him. He asked me. At first I was horrified at the thought but, with an understanding wife who was a close friend of his lady-love and who wished to see a successful conclusion to this ardent wooing, I capitulated. We swapped shifts and I found myself patrolling the deserted streets to the sound of happy people making merry behind closed doors. There is something akin to real distress within one’s soul while patrolling a town alone, listening to the sounds of happy voices in warm interiors along every street. It produces a massive feeling of being unwanted, and it echoes the loneliness of the diligently patrolling police officer.
In spite of being on duty as the old year became the new, we did have a good time. In the chill of that happy night, girls kissed us to wish us a Happy New Year, we honoured the time-old tradition of First Footing and we joined in many parties, albeit with the decorum of the constabulary uppermost in our minds. We regarded it as a good public relations exercise, a social mingling of the police and the people whom they serve and for whom they care.
By two o’clock that morning, with the first hours of the new year now history, it was snowing. The fall was gentle but it was dry, and it rapidly covered the ground with a blanket of beautiful white. Soon the entire landscape was glistening in the flickering lights of partying households and traffic-free streets, but we knew that on the lofty moorland roads there would be drifting in the bitter north-east wind.
My refreshment break that cold morning was timed to begin at 2.15 a.m. and to finish at 3 a.m. I welcomed the warmth of the police station with its blazing coal fire, a blaze that was never allowed to go out between 1 October and 31 May. It burned for twenty-four hours a day, and it was a wonderful tonic during a chill night duty. I settled down with my bait-bag, which contained my snack of sandwiches and an apple, plus a flask of coffee. My only companion was the office duty constable, Joe Westonby. We chatted about the cheerful events of the night; even Joe had had visitors from the nearby houses, people who came in to wish him a Happy New Year in his lonely job.
And then, at 2.30 a.m., the telephone rang. It was the ambulance station, who announced they had received a telephone call from a moorland farmer to say that a car had overturned in his gateway and two people had been injured. They were now in the farmhouse but not too seriously hurt. He added that the moorland roads were treacherous and filling in rapidly with heavy drifting and a steady fall of snow, but the ambulance had to make an attempt to cover those five hilly moorland miles and bring the casualties to hospital.
‘Take one of our lads with you,’ Joe suggested to the ambulance station’s duty officer. ‘If it’s not urgent, he can be with you in five minutes.’
This step agreed, partly to assist us in our duty of dealing with the accident and partly because in those days we did not have the regular use of official cars, Joe rang PC Timms at a kiosk in town and told him to accompany the ambulance. He suggested he take a shovel too, and some wellies, as it could develop into a hazardous trip.
With that drama now being dealt with, I resumed my town patrol and returned to the office at 4.30 a.m. for a warm-up before the lovely fire. The sergeant said we could all come in for a break as we were covered in snow and our extremities were freezing. The steady pace of patrolling a beat does not warm the circulation, and it is not dignified to break into a trot, even on the coldest of Yorkshire nights. My toes and fingers were frozen, and I was ready for bed, but there was another hour and a half before I could book off duty at 6 a.m.
As I entered the station, I saw the ambulance struggling up the slippery slope to the hospital; it had to pass the police station to get there, so I grabbed a shovel and scattered gravel along its path. But it halted outside. ‘There’s snow up yonder that’ll block us in before sun-up,’ said the driver. ‘We nearly got snowed up in t’farmhouse. Anyroad, we made it; one of ’em’ll need hospital treatment, t’other’s in t’back with your mate. T’car’s a write-off.’
I opened the rear doors of the ambulance and out climbed PC Graham Timms and another man. In the darkness, the ambulance struggled to finish its journey to the hospital with spinning wheels and a few sideways slithers as I accompanied Timms and his companion into the station. He had brought the man in so that he could obtain the details for his accident report.
Even in the gloom, I recognised the motorist and he recognised me; we had been brought up in neighbouring moorland villages, and in those small communities we all knew each other.
‘Now then, Ben,’ I said. ‘You’re not hurt then?’
‘Hello, Nick. No, I was lucky. Harry’s got a broken arm, I think. It could have been worse.’
‘Who was driving?’ I asked, merely out of interest.
‘Me,’ said Ben Baldwin as I followed him down the dark passage into the enquiry office.
As he walked into the light of the office, I saw that he was wearing a smart pale blue raincoat that was a shade too long for his short figure and more than a shade too wide at the shoulders. As he and PC Timms settled into the office, with Timms arranging a cup of tea for Baldwin, I was sure I recognised that coat
. It was exactly like one that had been stolen from a village dance hall about two years earlier. Baldwin took it off and hung it on a hook on the office wall, so I poured myself a cup of tea and studied it carefully. Baldwin was taken into another office by Timms, and I was alone with PC Westonby.
‘Joe,’ I said, ‘that coat hanging there, I’m sure it’s one that was stolen two years ago from a dance hall at Fieldholme.’
‘Don’t be daft, Nick,’ he grinned. ‘A coat’s a coat. You can’t tell one from another, especially not after two years!’
‘I can,’ I confirmed. ‘Because it’s mine.’
‘Yours?’ he puzzled. ‘You mean somebody nicked your coat and this is it?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
He stared at me, unbelieving, then said, ‘Try it on while Baldwin’s out.’
I did, and it fitted perfectly; I knew it was mine. I returned it to the coat hook.
‘Tell me more,’ invited Joe.
I explained that, before I joined the police service, I did my two years National Service with the RAF and upon leaving bought myself a smart new raincoat. It was expensive, and it was RAF blue in colour. With my new coat on, I took my fiancée to a dance at Fieldholme Village Hall one Saturday night. It was during the three weeks holiday I had allowed myself between leaving the RAF and joining the police force. When the dance was over, I went to the cloakroom for my coat. It had gone. In its place there was a filthy brown raincoat that was covered in grease and oil stains and which was far too small for me. I reported the theft to the village constable.
‘And you maintain this is yours?’
‘Yes,’ I said, without a shadow of doubt in my mind.
‘But how can you tell?’ he asked me.
‘I dunno,’ I had to admit. ‘I just know it’s mine — the colour’s unusual for one thing, and it’s too big for Baldwin anyway. That is my coat, Joe, and he’s pinched it.’
‘That’s no good for our purposes, Nick,’ he said. ‘You know very well that we need to prove it’s yours. Believing is no good; if we try to prosecute him on your say-so, no court will convict him.’
‘So he gets away with theft of my coat?’
‘Look, Nick, you know the ropes as well as I do. I know this seems different because you claim it’s yours, but look at it on a broader plane — after all, anyone could claim property in this way, by merely saying it’s theirs. People do make mistakes, you know. They think they recognise something they’ve lost . . .’
I was aware of the problems and the need for positive identification, and in this case it highlighted the value of having some means of personalizing one’s goods, especially when there are hundreds or thousands of identical copies.
‘I’ve still got the brown one at home,’ I said. ‘I’ve been keeping it in case this sort of thing happened — I guessed the thief was local.’
‘I’ll have a go at Baldwin when Graham’s finished with him,’ promised Joe. ‘You’d better not be the one to interview him — you’re biased! In the meantime, I’ll dig out your crime complaint — when was it, exactly?’
I told him the date of the dance two years earlier. When Baldwin had given his account of the accident, Timms brought him back into the enquiry office to collect his raincoat. I stood to one side as Joe said, ‘Put that coat on, Mr Baldwin.’
He did; it looked huge.
‘Nice coat,’ said Joe. ‘Where did you get it?’
‘Middlesbrough,’ said Baldwin.
‘New, was it?’
‘Yes, brand new, but I can’t remember the shop.’
‘What did it cost?’
‘Twenty-five quid,’ he said; it had cost me £30, in fact.
Joe looked at me. How could we disprove this story? It lacked any detail that could be challenged — like the familiar thief’s tale that ‘I got it off a chap in a pub’ or ‘It fell off the back of a lorry.’ I said nothing, knowing that I could jeopardise the enquiry if I wasn’t careful.
Joe must have believed my claims because he tried shock tactics. ‘Well, Mr Baldwin, I don’t believe you. And I’ll tell you what, you’ve just dropped the biggest bollock of your life. That coat isn’t yours; it’s this lad’s. It belongs to PC Nicholas Rhea, and you nicked it from a dance hall at Fieldholme two years ago.’
Baldwin’s eyes showed his guilt and his horror, but he recovered quickly and said, ‘Bollocks! It’s mine and I bought it new.’
Then I remembered a detail which no one else knew. It came to me as Baldwin was affirming his ownership, and I said, ‘Joe, there is a way of proving it’s mine.’
‘You need something good, Nick,’ was all he said.
‘It is.’ I was confident now. ‘When I was in the RAF, we had tags bearing our service numbers; we sewed them into our clothes. My number was 2736883, and it was on a white tag; I had some of those tags spare when I left the RAF, and I sewed one under the flap on the wrist of the right sleeve of that coat.’
I saw by the expression in Baldwin’s eyes that he knew I was the true owner of that coat, but I also reckoned he would never admit stealing it. I had known him long enough to know his character, but had he found that tag?
Joe beamed. ‘Come here, Mr Baldwin,’ he said, and as Baldwin stood before him, Joe loosened the button on the flap on the cuff of the right sleeve and turned it back. But there was no service number tag inside — although there were some tiny remnants of white cotton where it had been removed.
‘Evidence of guilt, Nick,’ said Joe, pointing to the shreds of cotton. ‘He’s removed the number — that’s good enough for a court.’
We looked at Ben Baldwin, guilt all over his face as he said, ‘Sorry, Nick, I had no idea it was yours . . .’
And he confessed to the theft two years earlier.
Due to my personal interest in the case, it was unwise for me to undertake the formalities that ensued. I was merely a witness, a victim of that crime, so Joe arrested Ben and he was formally charged. But it did not end there.
The first problem was that there was no record of my original report of the theft. The crime records did not show that I had reported it, and this threatened to cause administrative problems until the CID realised the entry might be in the lost-property book! And so it was. My coat was recorded as ‘lost’, not stolen, but at least there was a note of it in official records. But how on earth anyone could assume it was ‘lost’, when another of completely different size, colour, appearance and quality had replaced it, was baffling.
I reckoned it was one way of keeping down the crime figures!
But there were more developments. When the local crime records were searched, it was learned that several other coats had been stolen from dance halls in the locality. They had disappeared over four or five years, and with the arrest of Ben Baldwin, we now had a prime suspect. He was a part-time barman and general dealer, who lived alone in a small cottage at a village called Kindledale. As common law permitted, the CID decided that his home should be searched for material evidence of those other crimes. Ben was told of these plans and did not object, so the search went ahead while he was in custody at Strensford.
If he had objected, a search warrant would have been obtained, although it was not necessary in these circumstances. The Royal Commission on Police Powers and Procedures expressed an opinion that the authority for such searches of the premises occupied by arrested persons was now enshrined in common law.
And in this case no further coats were found. But Ben’s home did reveal a huge cache of other stolen goods. It was filled to overflowing with tins of food, bottles of whisky, brandy and gin, bottles of beer and stout, packets of sugar, flour and cereals and a host of other odds and ends. When confronted with this, Ben admitted stealing the lot from the various inns and hotels where he had worked.
In many instances, the owners had not missed the goods, although, with the volume involved, it was felt that any stocktaking would reveal these deficiencies. And so Ben was charged with several more thefts; as we sa
y, these were ‘TIC’d’ when he appeared in the magistrates’ court to answer the charge of stealing my coat. A hefty fine was imposed upon him.
The newspapers were full of the story due to the odd circumstances which had led to his arrest, and I had my coat returned to me, a little more battered and worn than it had been when I ‘lost’ it but still wearable after a thorough cleansing. And for my powers of observation in recognising the stolen coat, I received a commendation from the chief constable.
But the story continues. A week after the court case, my wife’s cousin rang me from Fieldholme. A large cardboard box had mysteriously appeared in his garden overnight, and when he opened it, it contained several overcoats. One belonged to him but he had no idea to whom the others belonged. Our records showed they had all been stolen in that vicinity.
And we never did find out who had stolen those other coats, nor who had dumped the box in that garden.
Some twenty years later, there was a further sequel to this yarn. I appeared before a Promotion Board at Police Headquarters where my career was discussed; that commendation was mentioned and I had to give an account of it. It was only as I discussed it with the chief constable and his senior officers that it dawned on me that nowhere in the Headquarters files was it mentioned that it was my own coat.
Maybe, if that early report had included that point, I would never have been commended?
However, it is clear that, if I had not swapped shifts that New Year’s Eve, a lot of crimes would have remained unsolved.
The second investigation which came my way as a youthful constable at Strensford was one which involved ‘discreet enquiries’. In this case, our neighbouring police force at Middlesbrough had received an application from a gentleman who wished to be granted a liquor licence. His request was for the grant of a restaurant licence which was issued by the justices.
He had bought some small parts of an old factory premises and wanted to turn them into a licensed restaurant. At that time, restaurant licences were a new idea, having recently been given statutory approval, for it meant that intoxicants could be sold with table meals away from the established hotels and inns, provided the premises were suitable and, of course, that the applicant was also suitable.
CONSTABLE IN DISGUISE a perfect feel-good read from one of Britain's best-loved authors (Constable Nick Mystery Book 9) Page 4