Burley Cross Postbox Theft (41 page)

As to reason (2), I was able to discover (on inspecting the seals of the envelopes) that very few of them – if any – had actually been opened by the original thief. The majority had been opened by Mhairi Callaghan (the loquacious proprietress of Feathercuts, Skipton), prior to her ringing the police to notify them of her ‘sudden discovery’ of this mysterious yet
tantalizing haul which had been randomly dumped in the back alley of her Skipton salon (I deduced this by dint of the tiny residue of red hair dye – Mhairi specializes in tints, something Sandy herself will attest to – on the top left-hand corner of the vast majority of the torn envelope seals).

I verified this suspicion during a subsequent visit to the salon, by passing Mhairi a letter, marked ‘urgent’, which I said I’d found on the doormat. This envelope was instantly torn open, using exactly the same technique as all the others in our body of evidence (the style of opening is highly idiosyncratic; a ‘signature’, of sorts).

Luckily, Mhairi didn’t see her way to reading all of the letters in the cache (perhaps conscience overwhelmed her at some point). Baxter Thorndyke’s Sex Hex letter remained intact (although it was in a fairly worn and dilapidated state by the time it reached my desk!), as did several of the other more ‘sensitive’ pieces (Tom Augustine’s, which he still insists he didn’t write, Nick Endive’s and Nina Springhill’s, to name but three).

Unfortunately Mhairi
did
see Rita Bramwell’s poignant letter to her alienated daughter, Nadia, something that I feel may well have been a contributing factor to Rita’s unsuccessful suicide attempt in early February (if only she’d been brave enough to tell Peter herself, what a world of pain and heartache she might have saved them both in the long run!).

Naturally, with the realization that Mhairi had opened several of the letters came the suspicion that she may also have been directly involved in the original crime (although her motivation for such an act would have been difficult to pinpoint). I promptly abandoned this theory, however, on discovering that she had a rock-solid alibi for the evening of the 21st, having spent the entire night with Helen Graves – Skipton Constabulary’s charming WPC – watching you and Sandy (whose hair she’d just tinted to such spectacular effect), during a ‘special showing’ of the Bravery Awards in Skipton’s Royal Arms.

So with Mhairi now out of the picture, and with the thief (or thieves) patently having had no financial incentive for the crime, the only available option still remaining on the table (along with two cans of Red Bull, a large pork pie and a cream eclair – ‘brain food’, I like to call it!) was number (3), i.e. that the postbox had been broken into by a local; someone who’d posted a letter and then had thought better of it, or someone with good reason (in their own mind) to want to stop a letter from being sent.

Nick Endive now shot straight to the top of my list of suspects; his passionate but illicit declaration of love to Nina Springhill was, I reasoned, exactly the kind of confession a man might seriously live to regret…

Let me also just say, at this pertinent juncture, that I am not now (and never was) willing to follow the Thorndyke route and blame either Trevor Woods – BC’s long-suffering postman – or his employers at the Royal Mail for this illegal act (had they been truly determined to replace the postbox with a more modern version, I’m certain there would have been countless far less complicated ways for them to have facilitated this process). In fact, so far as I can tell, the only illegal act the directors of
that
particular organization can fairly be accused of is asset-stripping a perfectly good, ancient and honourable British institution, then blithely running it – with due government approval, nay, assistance, even – into the ground! (As you already know, Inspector, this is something of a pet subject of mine – and one that I’m always only too happy to get exercised about…)

Re option (3): if the thief/thieves hadn’t actually opened any of the remaining letters in the cache, I think we must, by necessity, deduce that the letter they wanted to get their greedy mitts on was – more than likely – subsequently identified, separated from the rest and rapidly disposed of (to behave otherwise would be illogical: why commit a crime and then cheerfully leave the reason for it behind you in the guise of a glaring piece of evidence?!

Love-lorn as Nick Endive obviously was, surely even he wouldn’t have been silly enough to dump a letter containing his innermost feelings in a bin bag behind the salon of one of Skipton’s most famous blabbermouths!).

Bearing all of the above in mind, the BCPBT investigation was now effectively stuck in neutral – facing a metaphorical ‘brick wall’ – because without fingerprints (which PC Hill was unable to acquire, due to the rain, and the necessary distraction of his delicious-sounding fish dinner) or a witness (of which there were none), we were left without any palpable clue as to the thief’s identity (and scant hope of acquiring any, either).

On this basis I decided (as you yourself had done before me) to make a study of the remaining letters in the cache to try and build up a picture of Burley Cross (as a crime scene/ community, on the week/night of the robbery), in the pathetic hope that there might be some subtle clues to this mystery inadvertently sewn into the everyday fabric – the insignificant weft and weave, so to speak – of other people’s lives.

I don’t doubt that we all found out rather more about this small, attractive, relatively well-to-do moor-side village than we had hoped (or, indeed, expected) by this subsequent course of action, Inspector, not least that Astrid Logan was planning to instigate yet another of her surreptitious ‘moonlight flits’ with that troublesome, and evasive, internet pal of hers.

Part of me regrets the fact that the force was unable to take any kind of decisive action in this regard (perhaps we might have posted the letter on, in the hope of setting up a trap and catching the filthy bugger, red-handed… But the timing – as you comment in your ‘further notes’ – was, of course, way too tight).

It later transpired that the contact address, alone, proved very useful. I’ve since been told (in subsequent conversations with the Portsmouth Constabulary) that Marc Pym’s home was raided (for a third time) in January and his computer confiscated, although little incriminating evidence was found
on it (aside from a lengthy correspondence – mainly focusing on the subject of diet – and the contact addresses of forty-three underage girls, all of whom he had met on eating disorder websites as ‘Gabriel’, or in the form of his avatar, ‘Skinny Lad’, a nineteen-year-old boy suffering from chronic bulimia).

As we currently stand, the gentleman in question still remains ‘at large’.

A further codicil to this story: after you contacted Penelope and Angus McNeilly with the news about Astrid (and told them that they were at liberty to do with it what they would), I have been reliably informed that they immediately made contact with Mr Wolf (he being the one person whose reputation might, quite reasonably, have been perceived as being the most damaged by Astrid’s deception) and duly apologized to him on Astrid’s behalf. He subsequently insisted – being ever the gentleman – that the matter should remain strictly under wraps. He was much less concerned about his own social standing, it seems, than for Astrid’s long-term mental and physical well-being, especially in the light of her mother’s tragic death from cervical cancer at the start of the New Year.

(I don’t know why, but I have a nagging feeling that this won’t – by any stretch of the imagination – be the last we hear of this particular story, more’s the pity…)

But let’s get back to the real gist of the matter, now, shall we? Like I said before, there were many things I learned from my perusal of those twenty-six letters, Inspector (many things – enough to fill several notebooks, in fact), yet the piece of correspondence that drew me the most (the one that my eye kept on returning to, come what may), was the letter to Miss Squire (Miss Courtney Squire, ‘personal assistant’ to Mr Gerald Booth), from Mrs Brenda Goff (of Buckden House).

I have known Mrs Goff for many years, and she has never particularly struck me as the most forthcoming of women (it’s sometimes as much as I can do to elicit a grudging ‘Good
morning’ out of her!), and yet here she was, the busy proprietress of an extremely successful bed and breakfast, committing the time and the effort to writing a letter (ten pages in length!) to someone she’d actually never met – someone with whom she’d previously enjoyed only the most rudimentary of telephone conversations.

This Miss Squire certainly must have a very successful and dynamic cold-calling technique, I mused, since not only had she clearly impressed Mrs Goff during this short, introductory chat of hers (to the extent that Mrs Goff was willing to offer her reduced rates on two rooms at hardly any notice), but she’d had what sounded like a similar kind of impact on Wincey at The Old Oak – and who can guess how many others in the local vicinity?

During her letter, Mrs Goff mentions, in passing, that Wincey had been told that Mr Booth (‘a practitioner of the Esoteric Sciences’) was ’the by-product of a secret tryst between a prominent individual from the Salvation Army dynasty and one of the legendary Trebors…’

Well, I don’t think it takes too much of a stretch of the imagination to work out
which
prominent individual from the Sally Army we are automatically meant to think of here: there surely can’t be many individuals more prominent than the Salvation Army’s founder: Sir William Booth, himself (the clue is in the name, I suppose). Although the connection’s never made completely explicit (how could it have been? As an illegitimate son, Mr Booth’s theoretical ancestor would have had no right to claim membership of the family).

But how about the Trebors? A little harder to pin down. I did some research on the internet and found myself unable to find out anything about this ‘legendary’ clan – to the extent that I have now begun to have serious doubts as to whether they even really exist (might Trebor not just be the name of the sweet company itself? Also, quite coincidentally, the name Robert, back to front?).

What I do know is that the company was formed in 1907, that the famous Trebor Extra Strong Mint was launched in 1935, that shortly afterwards they merged with Bassett’s (the Liquorice Allsorts people, formed by George Bassett in 1842) and then still later on with Cadbury’s Schweppes.

I must confess that the more I thought about this supposed heritage of Mr Booth’s, the more it began to strike me that this combination of two such prominent English brands was both an extremely clever and an intrinsically seductive one.

Here we have all the decency, staunch faith and charitable inclinations of the Booth side, coupled with the fierce, clean, sweet, traditional mintyness of the Trebor contingent. And the magical adhesive that glues them both together? A slight whiff of the transgressive, an element of the clandestine, something deeply romantic which is kept strictly ‘under wraps’.

Of course the famously lofty, sensitive and spiritually inclined Mr Booth couldn’t possibly stoop to discussing such private/intimate matters with ‘the general public’ himself, could he? (I mean where’s the margin to be gained in doing that?!) He has a grovelling ‘assistant’ to do this for him, an eager skivvy, a loyal run-around, someone highly attuned to his complex array of needs and requirements, his fastidious tastes and his subtle preferences, someone to sort out the wheat from the chaff, in other words (note: ‘Obviously Mr Booth’s needs are very specific, and you will know best what will suit him…’).

Enter our Miss Squire, stage left!

Miss Squire has a functional nomenclature (a squire being a knight’s attendant, his escort, and a landed gentleman in his/her own right), a name that somehow resonates a sense of fairness, a sense of squareness (is effectively – when you actually come to think about it – simply a loose conjunction of these two words combined).

Her role is a simple one: to ring ahead on behalf of Mr Booth and to sort out all his ‘arrangements’ (careful to generate the necessary atmosphere of reverence and awe in the process!).

Her manner is always reassuringly calm and authoritative, with the slightest touch of primness, the gentlest hint of candour (just enough to sweeten and then ‘draw out’ her gullible interlocutor).

A
technique
, Inspector, a clever technique! One that’s as old as the hills, and used by con-artists of all complexions in all corners of the world!

But let’s not get carried away here – let’s think about this logically: if our Mr Booth is a psychic by profession, a talented clairvoyant (by all accounts), then his meat and his drink must be the insignificant detail of other people’s lives. And on this understanding, the one – almost the only – thing a man of his stamp requires (the delicate axis on which all his mumbo-jumbo hinges)?

Information!

Gullible victims!

Opportunities!

So how does he set about acquiring these three basic necessities? (Better still: how does he quietly build himself up whilst effortlessly ingratiating himself at the same time?) By dint of the young Miss Squire and her genial enquiries in local B&Bs, of course!

A measure of flattery is involved (‘Mr Booth has heard that yours is the best B&B in the area…’), an element of doubt (‘although Mr Booth’s requirements are
very
specific, I’m afraid…’), a further element of competition (‘… and I’ve heard
incredibly
positive things about The Old Oak…’), an element of disclosure (‘Mr Booth’s privacy is of the utmost importance – he has a fascinating heritage, but it’s all terribly hush-hush…’) in order to encourage an automatic – even unwitting – desire on the part of the victim to
divulge something intimate about themselves!

And our poor Mrs Goff? She falls straight into their trap! Ten pages deep! She gives away ludicrous amounts of personal detail, not only about herself, but about her local competitors,
spurred on – in all probability – by wounded pride (didn’t Miss Squire promise to pay her a cordial visit on the 21st, then cruelly stand her up?).