CONSTABLE NICK BOX SET 1–5 five feel-good village cozy mysteries

by Nicholas Rhea

  For example, “night” for the purpose of the convention concerning the night work of women employed in industry, meant a period of at least eleven consecutive hours, including the interval between ten o’clock in the evening and five o’clock in the morning. Under the Larceny Act of 1916 then in force, but now superseded by the Theft Act of 1968, the term “night” meant the interval between 9 pm in the evening and 6 am the following day. In those days, an offence committed during the night-hours was considered infinitely more serious than a similar one committed during the daytime, consequently lots of officers patrolled the streets in case something fearsome occurred and lots of emphasis was placed upon things which might go wrong in the night. The officers had to know how to cope with anything that might arise, be it a domestic disturbance between man and wife or an aircraft crash upon the town.

  Typical of the things learned was that a licensee with a billiards table must not allow anyone to use a table or instrument between 1 am and 8 am, a provision made under the Gaming Act of 1845. Another learned gem was that burglary was a crime which could be committed only between 9 pm and 6 am; if it occurred at any other time it was known as housebreaking, shop-breaking or by some other suitably descriptive name. The same period of night, 9 pm until 6 am, was also featured in the Larceny Act for many offences, including the famous Four Night Misdemeanours. These were:

  Being found by night in any building with intent to commit felony therein;

  Being found by night and having in his possession without lawful excuse any key, picklock, crow, jack, bit or other implement of housebreaking;

  Being found by night armed with any dangerous weapon or instrument with intent to break into a building and commit felony therein;

  Being found by night having his face blackened or disguised with intent to commit a felony.

  For the purpose of keeping dogs under control, the period “night” meant the period between sunset and sunrise, while the laws governing lights on vehicles determined that “night” comprised the hours of darkness which were specified as the time between half-an-hour after sunset until half-an-hour before sunrise, although under a 1927 Act, it meant, during summertime, the period between one hour after sunset and one hour before sunrise in any locality. The reporting of offenders under such a multiplicity of rules could be hazardous although we were helped by a High Court case in 1899 (Gordon v Caun) which determined that sunset meant sunset according to local, not Greenwich, time.

  So many references to “night” meant that all manner of juicy crimes could be committed, many of which gloried in the realm of felony. A felony was A Most Serious Matter, like entering a dwelling-house in the night or breaking into homes which was called burglary. It was felonious to lie or loiter in any highway, yard or other place during the night. Other Less Serious Matters, known as Misdemeanours, included Old Metal Dealers who were convicted of receiving stolen goods, making purchases between 6 pm and 9 am, and prostitutes or night-walkers loitering or importuning in any street.

  In addition, there were those villains who set spring-traps to catch humans, although at that time, the 1950s, it was not illegal to set them between sunset and sunrise if it was done to protect one’s dwelling-house. Non-licensed refreshment houses must not be kept open between 10 pm and 5 am, while pubs were subjected to a whole host of rules which we had to memorise.

  With all this potential illegal activity, it follows that night-time patrols were full of interest, although it ought to be said that the interesting things were rarely related to any of these statutes. Most of them had grown seriously out of date during the first half of the 20th century and were ignored to a large degree. None the less, they did exist, and they were the law.

  Having studiously learned all the necessary definitions of “night” and having calculated when one was supposed to be on duty, we were exhorted to go out and fight crime. A suitable town was selected by Headquarters, one which was deemed ideal for the operational birth of a budding bobby and it was to such places that we were dispatched. There were several suitable towns in the North Riding of Yorkshire and the one selected as my tutorial community was Strensford. To this peaceful place I was dispatched to quell riots, solve crimes, arrest burglars, catch rapists and report cyclists without lights. It was my time of learning, my period of studying police procedures and of learning the craft of bobbying from seasoned men. It was also a time to appreciate some of the dilemmas into which members of the public managed to get themselves.

  No policeman ever forgets those first faltering steps of nights. If there is a time when the public is at its most vulnerable, it is during the hours of darkness, or between sunset and sunrise, or between the period half-an-hour before sunset until half-an-hour after sunrise . . .

  Having been posted to Strensford, I began to learn the craft of being cunning. I began to fearlessly shake hands with doorknobs and learned how to make use of the shadows to conceal myself from everyone, including the sergeant. Hiding from the sergeant was considered good sport, particularly when it was possible to observe him seeking ourselves. Strensford taught me a lot.

  I learned never to put my weight upon a doorknob when trying it for security. It could be guaranteed that that particular door was insecure and that it would pitch me headlong into the shop, to land in a tub of rotting tomatoes or a pile of ovenware or other noisome paraphernalia. The alarm created in the bedrooms of nearby slumbering members of the public can easily be imagined, so doorknobs were treated with great respect. Back doors were treated with even greater respect because they were frequently left open by shopkeepers or their staff as they rushed home at 5 pm, trusting to God and the patrolling policeman to save a lifetime’s work from opportunist villains. Some doorknobs abutted the street and they were simple to cope with; others were in deep recesses where many a courting couple has disturbed a policeman going about his legitimate business. Some were along paths or alleys and others up rickety steep stairs. One could almost write a “Constable’s Guide to Door Knobs” after contending with such a range.

  The idea of this twice-nightly friendship ritual with doorknobs (once before the meal break and once afterwards) coupled with an examination of windows was to make sure no one had been burgled. All “property” as we termed it, must be “tried”. That was our main role during the night, while the supervisory sergeant surreptitiously prowled in our wake to check that none of us omitted to discover unlocked shops or attacked premises. If we did miss a knob, we were in trouble, although it did occur to me that if the sergeant tried all the knobs in the town, why did we bother? It seemed such an elementary question that I was terrified to ask it in case the answer made me appear a naïve fool.

  If we found an insecure place, we had to enter it and face the unknown foe inside. Biting our chin-straps to silence rattling teeth and in pitch darkness, we must search the place for villainous felons, or people with faces blackened by night and other evil creatures. God knows what we would have done if we’d found anyone!

  Having found no one, and having noted that the exposed stock appeared untouched, we had then to make our way on foot to the office to discover the name of the key-holder. The next stage was to drag him from his bed with the news that he’d almost lost everything that was dear to him.

  Some key-holders appeared to relish being knocked up at all hours because they regularly left open their shops, pubs, banks, offices or clubs. For others, however, the appearance of a cold, grim-faced constable at their door at three in the morning was enough to ensure they locked up in future. Others couldn’t understand why we didn’t simply drop the latch ourselves instead of making such a fuss. Such an action could be fraught with danger. If something had been stolen and its absence discovered after the policeman’s visit, all sorts of accusations would be levelled at the patrolling bobby. There are plenty of unsavoury types all too eager to concoct stories too; so we checked insecure premises very thoroughly in the presence of some responsible person.

  The simplest way to complete
one’s allocation of property each night was to ignore it entirely and curl up for a sleep in a telephone kiosk. There were officers who were very able at this; many equipped themselves with portable alarm-clocks to rouse them from their cramped slumbers, happy in the knowledge that the sergeant would make the tour and find all the insecure properties. It meant a telling off, but it saved a lot of boot leather, torch batteries and leg ache. Some dedicated constables went on night-duty armed with reels of black cotton. Having checked a property for secure doors and windows, these cotton-toting constables would fasten a length of cotton about chest or knee height across the path or doorway. Any intruder would break the strand, the logic being that the second tour of one’s property would not involve extensive walking along paths and through gardens. It would comprise nothing more than shining a torch upon selected pieces of black cotton. If the cotton was broken, someone had been. The trouble was that it might have been the sergeant, it might have been legitimate visitors, or it might have been a villain. There was no way of telling, so I did not rely upon the black cotton syndrome. Besides, it was not the easiest of tasks, finding black cotton at night.

  One of my tutorial sergeants at Strensford had a nasty habit of finding properties open in advance of the patrolling constable. He would then sit in them, secretly, until the arrival of the policeman. If the policeman diligently found the insecurity, praise was heaped upon his shining cap, but if he did not find it, he was in dire trouble for neglect of duty. It rapidly became obvious when Sarge was playing his game because no one saw him around the town. Sometimes, he did not turn up at the station for his mid-shift meal break, so we knew he was sitting in a shop, waiting to pounce.

  If that was his contribution to crime prevention, ours was equally good. When he was in charge, we would hurry around our beats to check those properties we knew were most vulnerable or in the hands of careless owners. If we found an insecure or open door which had not been burgled or forced, we did not action it immediately. We left it alone.

  Sarge would potter along to find the self-same door some time later and would disappear inside to begin his constable-catching vigil. He failed to realise that we knew he was there. We would leave him there until shortly before six o’clock in the morning when one of us would return to the premises and “find” the insecurity. Did he praise us? Not on your life; we got a bulling for being late in making the find, but he gradually got the message. After sitting alone all night among objects like sausages, ladies’ knickers, fruit, pans and antiques, he decided there were better ways of passing the time.

  Another valuable lesson during those early weeks in the Force was the art of concealment at night. The dark uniform lent itself to invisibility and it was easy to stand in the shadows to watch the world pass by. At night, policemen walk along the inner edges of footpaths, close to the walls in order to be unseen, while shop doorways possess excellent concealment properties, as do areas beneath trees and shrubs.

  When concealed, it is necessary to pass messages to one another and in those days before we had personal radio sets, lots of unofficial messages were passed with the aid of our torches. One’s colleagues would stand in the shadows and announce the pending arrival of the sergeant, inspector or superintendent, or the movements of a suspected person or indeed anything else, merely by flashing a torch. We had a code of flashes for supervisory officers — one for a superintendent which represented the solitary crown of rank upon his shoulder, two for an inspector and his pips, and three for a sergeant with his stripes. Coded messages of this kind could be passed silently over very great distances and we would sometimes take advantage of the reflections in shop windows. This allowed us to pass messages around corners.

  All this could be achieved while remaining invisible. In fact, the simple act of standing still often renders a policeman invisible and I’ve known persons stand and talk to one another literally a couple of feet from me, totally unaware of my eavesdropping presence. That’s not possible in a panda car.

  It was considered great sport to conceal oneself in a darkened doorway along the known routes of gentlemen who walked home late at night, having been on the razzle or having supped late in a friendly pub. As the pensive gent wandered slowly along his way, the amiable neighbourhood constable would step silently from the shadows immediately behind him and in a loud voice bid him ‘GOODNIGHT’. This had the remarkable effect of speeding him along his journey with hairs standing erect and icicles jangling down his spine. The long-term effect was to make him change his route or abandon his lonesome trails.

  Once I unwittingly scared the pants off a late reveller. It was a cold, freezing night and my feet were like blocks of ice. About two in the morning I decided to get a little relief by sitting on one of those large metal containers which house the mechanical gadgetry of traffic lights and which are invariably painted green. The containers are about four feet high and rather slender, so I hoisted myself on to the box and sat there, my large cape spreading from my shoulders and concealing the top of this convenient seat. As I perched there, hugging myself for warmth, along came a late-night reveller, singing gently to himself as he came towards me. It was clear he did not know I was there, and he almost ran into me. I said from a great height, “Goodnight.”

  His glazed eyes raised themselves suddenly to heaven and in a beery breath, he cried, “God Almighty, a bloody bat!” and burst into a staggering gallop. I felt sure he would be sober when he arrived home.

  One indispensable accessory to the art of performing night-duty in those stirring times at Strensford was the Clock. Whether or not the system applied to every police station or whether it was unique to my first nick, I do not know. It was undoubtedly a very cunning and complicated fabrication where time was altered with the twofold intention of baffling the bobby and thwarting the thief.

  The clock operated as follows. As I have already mentioned, policemen did not possess personal radio sets at that time. Having left the cosy warmth of the police office, they were effectively out of range of patrolling supervisory officers. Furthermore, if anything happened, the constable could not be contacted and dispatched to the scene of any incident. As we had no luxurious methods of communication like police boxes with direct lines to the station, we made use of public telephone kiosks.

  We would stand outside selected kiosks at given times, there to await the arrival of a sergeant or a telephone call announcing that horrific things had happened and that our presence was immediately required. We had to stand outside those red-painted boxes for five minutes every half-hour of an eight-hour shift, moving from one to another in a monotonous, regulated sequence — GPO Kiosk, Fishmarket Kiosk,

  New Quay Kiosk, Golden Lion Kiosk, Laundry Kiosk, GPO Kiosk again . . . and so on. These five-minute waiting periods were known as “points”.

  The situation was that no one dare miss a point. Even if something catastrophic occurred, one must never miss a point — exciting crime inquiries were abandoned for the sake of making points, gorgeous blondes were not chatted up due to the fear of missing points, valuable clues were not examined in case we missed our points. The making of points dominated our lives.

  The method of patrolling a beat was therefore along well-trodden paths between points. The town was divided into several beats, each of which had a different combination of available kiosks with points at differing times. When lots of bobbies were on duty with their points staggered around the Greenwich clock, a policeman could be contacted fairly quickly. A plethora of bobbies might, in a speeded-up film sequence, be seen to be whizzing across one another’s paths but never quite making contact. It wasn’t a bad system really, but it had one shocking weakness.

  If a policeman was at any kiosk at exactly the same time every day then the burglars, housebreakers, robbers, rapists and other sundry rogues would get to know this. They would know the movements of the local constabulary and, having worked out their timing and movements, would perpetrate their foulest deeds while we were busy making points. That
was the flaw.

  The Clock was therefore designed to beat the villains — it would baffle the burglar, harry the housebreaker and rattle robbers and rapists.

  The Clock itself was a circular wooden board attached to the wall of the Charge Office. It was marked with numerals taken from a police uniform and they were spaced around its outer circumference in exactly the same way as the face of a genuine clock, reading from 1 to 11, and with zero where 12 would normally be. The Clock had a solitary pointer which could be moved around the face to indicate one of the aforementioned numbers.

  Thus the pointer might indicate five, ten, fifteen, twenty and so forth up to fifty-five minutes. In addition, all officers were supplied with a little book containing the dates of every month. Beside each date was a figure from the face of the Clock. Thus on 10 January the Clock might show twenty. On 26 February it might show five, and so on, for every day of the year, including leap years. It didn’t really matter what it showed, so long as everyone knew and worked on the same basis, hence the explanatory book.

  If the Clock showed five on a particular day it meant that all points were five minutes later than scheduled. Thus a 12 noon point shown at the GPO Kiosk would be made at 12.05 pm. If the Clock showed fifty-five, the point would be made at 12.55 pm, fifty-five minutes late.

  When beginning a tour of duty, therefore, it was vital to check the Clock and to make a note of its reading in one’s notebook. The sergeant would then allocate us to our beats and off we’d go. This meant an entry in one’s notebook and in one’s memory bank that one was working No 6 Beat with points normally at quarter to and quarter past the hour, but with today’s Clock at fifty-five.

  Sometimes beats were worked in reverse. The Clock could also be given a minus quality. Working a beat backwards with the Clock on minus ten was a hilarious affair especially when everyone else was working his beat in the normal sequence with the Clock on plus five.