Burley Cross Postbox Theft (42 page)

But hang on a minute… The 21st?! Isn’t that
the very day
the Burley Cross postbox was broken into?!

Stimulated by this outrageous idea (and also because it happens to be located directly adjacent to my favourite bakery), I strolled over to the Middleton Theatre and had a word with the girl at the box office there about Mr Booth’s appearance (Jan. 6th &7th). She said (much as I had suspected) that the show had been cancelled due to ‘unforeseen circumstances’.

Hmmn, interesting, I thought, and toddled back to the station where I promptly instigated an official police search on our Mr Booth, only to be told that you had conducted one yourself – and I was already in receipt of it (it had been caught up in your further correspondence with Rosannah Strum-Tadcastle about what you, quite rightly, perceived as an excessively high translation bill. For the record: I actually showed the translation of his letter to Edouard himself; we bumped into each other at The Old Oak, and I just happened to have it to hand. He professed himself ‘astonished’ by its unerring accuracy, said it was ‘a work of pure genius’, and confided that he felt ‘almost as if Mrs Strum-Tadcastle has forged a magical wormhole into the deepest, darkest recesses of my very soul…’

Can me an old sceptic, Inspector, but on the evidence of that, I’d definitely think twice about paying the London hotel bill).

After quietly perusing the police search on Mr Booth (aka Raymond Whittaker) I could find nothing of any consequence to detain me – aside from an excessive number of unpaid parking tickets – and was just about to abandon my inspection of this (quite frankly) unexceptional document, when I happened to observe (in the footnotes) that his local constabulary had planned to pay his neighbour (a suspected
illegal alien) a ‘surprise visit’ on December 22nd 2006, but had inadvertently chanced to launch an assault on Mr Booth’s property instead (kicking the door down and ransacking his flat – something they were highly apologetic about afterwards, and rightly so!).

Mr Booth wasn’t home at the time of the raid, but naturally they promised to reimburse him – during a later visit – for a new door and any damage done.

These incidents took place the day
after
the BCPB theft (the very day on which the cache was uncovered in that Skipton back alley). Curious coincidence, I thought. My eye then returned to the parking tickets themselves, which hailed from all parts of the country, and had been acquired, I presumed, while Mr Booth was out ‘on tour’.

I took the last three tickets as my guide (Shrewsbury, Mold, Bangor) and began to undertake some very basic enquiries. My aim? To discover whether there might be a measure of synchronicity between Mr Booth’s visit to a town and a marked increase in the amount of postal crime in the area.

It didn’t take much time to find out (so I’ll spare you all the unnecessary build-up): in every instance I came up trumps! No postbox thefts, but in each place a significant theft of post had been reported exactly
three weeks
prior to Mr Booth’s posited arrival!

In the cases of Bangor and Shrewsbury, postal vans had been broken into (although access had not been forced – in both cases two postal bags had been removed while the postman was busy emptying out a nearby box); in the case of Mold, a postman claimed that his bag was snatched ‘by a large gang of kids’ while he struggled to gain access to a block of flats.

All well and good, I told myself, but if Booth and Squires
were
involved in the BCPB theft (and countless others, by extension) how then to go about explaining why the Burley Cross cache was found dumped in Skipton – letters still
untampered with – on the afternoon of the 22nd?

It didn’t take long to come up with a solution (two crunchy sticks of Twix long, followed by a swift half-Snickers, in celebration!).

Here follows a brief outline of how I envisaged the whole scenario panning out:

21/12/2006, approx. 21.00 hrs. Burley Cross High Street. The Postbox. Mr Booth’s assistant, Miss Squire, pulls up in her car. She is late. She had planned to arrive earlier in the day to host an inspection of the local B&Bs (which she has already contacted by phone) in order to drum up interest in Mr Booth’s Ilkley show (also, perhaps, to ‘case’ these properties for any objects of exceptional value while accumulating a useful store of information, which she can then follow up on the internet, through detailed searches of local papers, obituaries, MySpace pages, websites etc.).

Unfortunately, Miss Squire has been delayed because of a problem with her tyre (a blowout on the A65). When she arrives in Burley Cross it is late – too late – but she pulls up in her car (or Ka) next to the postbox to check the collection times (which she suspects – and correctly – may have been temporarily altered in the week leading up to Christmas).

As Miss Squire inspects the postbox, it occurs to her that it is in an extremely poor state of repair. She kicks it, gently, with a peremptory toe. The door groans its protest. She kicks it again, still harder. The door caves in a little. Her face breaks into a broad smile. Incredible! Perhaps her luck is turning at last!

She goes over to her car and grabs the first sharp object she can find – a plastic knife and fork (which she’d earlier used to devour a takeaway M&S red onion and feta salad – this is pure speculation, she may’ve just used a stray screwdriver or a handy Swiss army knife, or the salad may actually have been tuna-based) – then returns to the ailing postbox and vigorously attacks the door again.

With hardly any wrangling, the door falls off its hinges, revealing a healthy bounty of Christmas post inside! She pulls out the contents and bundles them into her capacious handbag, then leaps back into her car and drives off.

Fifteen minutes later (21.22 hrs), Miss Squire arrives in Skipton where she is booked into a local B&B. This B&B is located directly across the road from Mhairi Callaghan’s Feathercuts. Miss Squire informs the proprietress of the B&B (Margaret Bridge) that she is late because of a blow-out on the motorway, then heads straight up to her room to retire for the night.

The following day, at around lunchtime (having occupied her morning I know not how) she walks into Mhairi Callaghan’s Feathercuts for a trim. Here she has a long and fascinating conversation with the proprietress about a broad range of issues – Mr Booth included.

In a subsequent interview (14/03/07) Mhairi describes Miss Squire as ‘an absolute gem. Friendly. Very chatty. Beautiful hair, barely needed touching, really.
Very
loyal to Mr Booth…’ who it turns out is ‘the bastard son of some filthy high-up in the Methodist Church and a famous wine gum heiress – Maynards, was it?’ (Yes. So Mhairi’s memory on this score isn’t quite all it might have been…).

Miss Squire then goes on to tell Mhairi how she and Mr Booth met ‘after he relayed a message to her during a live performance about where her late mother had hidden a valuable diamond ring. It was tucked snugly inside a hollowed-out copy of Frank McCourt’s
Angela’s Ashes
, would you believe!’

Uh, no. I wouldn’t.

‘Which she’d been just on the brink of throwing out! Of course Miss Squire was so impressed by him that she booked a further, private consultation to try and make contact with her late mother again. He sat her down and said, “You’re bored with your job,” (she was an air hostess) “you have a strong
psychic gift, but it needs bringing out. You want to become my personal assistant, but you don’t have the first clue how to go about it.” Incredible! The man’s a genius!’ (And the rest, as they say, is history).

Oh yes… One small detail Mhairi
didn’t
forget: while she was finishing up Miss Squire’s haircut, Miss Squire received a phone call (at 13.15 hrs, approx., from Mr Booth) and apparently became ‘quite agitated’. Mhairi is uncertain as to the finer details of this exchange because she was rushed off her feet at the time, juggling Miss Squire’s cut with a difficult tinting job, but Miss Squires left the salon shortly afterwards (too flustered to remember to leave a tip!).

During a later conversation with Maggie Bridge (14/03/07), I was able to discover that Miss Squire cancelled her booking for the following night and left ‘in quite a hurry’. When I asked her if she could remember anything else remotely unusual about Miss Squire’s visit she said no, but as I was leaving she said, ‘In actual fact, yes. I remember it struck me as being quite strange, when I came to make up her room, that Miss Squire had taken pretty much everything that wasn’t glued down – the toilet roll, tissues, soap, napkins, even the bag from inside the wastepaper basket.’ I asked her what kind of a bag it was. ‘It was a standard black refuse bag,’ she said, ‘because I’d run out of the smaller, white ones that I normally use.’

Well, I don’t suppose it takes much of a genius to put two and two together here, Inspector. I’m guessing that Mr Booth – presumably spooked on coming home and finding that his flat had been ransacked by the police – phoned Miss Squires (at the hairdresser’s, where she was intent on sniffing out local gossip to use in his act) and told her that the police were on to them and that she should bail on her mission (who knows what other kinds of mischief Miss Squire was involved in: at this stage we can but conjecture…).

Miss Squire immediately remembered the incriminating bundle of letters in the boot of her car (where, presumably, she
had stored them), and, in a state of high paranoia, ran back to the B&B, took the bin bag from the wastepaper basket, tipped the letters inside it, and dumped them, unopened, in a nearby back alley.

In her panic, Miss Squire neglected to seal the bag quite as tightly as she should have. There were high winds that day, and by the time Mhairi came outside to dump some rubbish of her own, a selection of letters were flying around in her small concrete yard. The rest of the cache she later discovered in the communal back alley… etc. etc.

So what do you think, Inspector?

Of course at this stage there is little I can do to bring about an official case against Mr Booth and his pretty cohort (my theories are just ‘informed speculation’, after all); certainly nothing that might have any hope of standing up in a court of law.

I find this deeply frustrating, not least because – further to my suspicions – I had a sudden fancy that it might be interesting to conduct a second search on Mr Booth (né Whittaker), but this time instead of Raymond I inserted Robert (Trebor?) into the mix. And you’ll never guess what… Seven counts of theft by deceit, four of minor fraud, nine of theft… a veritable Aladdin’s cave of lawbreaking and intrigue!

I am now hard on Mr Booth’s tail. Through his web-page I have acquired extensive amounts of information about future appearances in the UK, and have contacted all the local forces in the areas involved with the details of this case. His Ilkley performance has been re-booked for late September. I await his return to these parts – and that of Miss Squire – with abiding interest.

Re fishing on Saturday. I’m afraid I’ll have to give it a rain check, since I currently have a prior engagement to drive the Brooks sisters (Tilly and Rhona) to the L.S. Lowry museum in Salford.

I went to the trouble of hiring a Vauxhall Zafira for the occasion, and was persuaded to invite Reverend Paul and Tilly’s friend Edo along as well (further to the hanging of Edo’s crucifix in the church, it seems the reverend and he have forged a great spiritual and intellectual bond. Edo is now acting as temporary church warden – since Steve Briars was taken ill with suspected bird flu).

I have yet another surprise in store for them. Further to my unfortunate meeting by the lake with Mr Eliot Tooth – and an extended correspondence on the matter (during which, I’m afraid, some rather harsh truths were exchanged: there really was no palpable, visual evidence of a large, freshwater leech in the general vicinity), I have taken the liberty of contacting Donovan Lefferts and setting him straight on a couple of issues.

Mr Lefferts has undertaken to drive up to Salford from his home in Buxton and finally ‘make peace’ with the two sisters. I’m hopeful that some kind of permanent accord may soon be reached between them. Tilly’s happiness (and Rhona’s, of course) is an issue of paramount importance to me. I am absolutely determined to do everything within my power to bring it about…

Could we try and reschedule for early May?

That would be lovely.

Yours, whistling at the wheel,
PC Roger Topping

PS I picked up a rare, Staffordshire monkey on the market in Saltaire last Saturday for the princely sum of £4! Victorian. Tiny chip to the tail, but pristine beyond that!

PPS Yes, I know that t’ai chi instructor of PC Hill’s quite well. Odd he should say he was Bulgarian – he’s actually Austrian. And he has a lisp, not a stutter.

Back problems can be very troublesome. I remember suffering from them myself, roundabout the time I first got together with Sandy (you’ll know – only too well – how demanding she can be in the boudoir; her needs bordering on the athletic, even the gymnastic, on occasion!).

Now I come to think about it, weren’t you wearing a corset yourself for a while back there (during the late 1990s – around about the time Sandy and I initially filed for our divorce?). Yes. I’m certain that you were. In fact I remember it troubling you, no end. The chafing was the worst part. Most aggravating for you, as I recollect.

PPPS County Wicklow? Really? Is my memory finally deserting me? I could’ve sworn Sandy’s father was buried in the family grave just outside Bolton.

PPPPS I hear the tear in Janna Lee’s scalp has almost entirely healed up, now – there are even promising signs of new growth!

R

Ilkley,
17/03/07
15.30 hrs

(Via internal mail)

For attn Chief Inspector Iain Richardson

CONFIDENTIAL

Dear Chief Inspector Richardson,

The evidence has now been unofficially ‘buried’ (just as you requested). Further to a short, private conversation with Mr Augustine, I have ensured that all remaining photographic proof of PC Peter Richardson’s ‘moment of madness’ (there were three such ‘moments’, in total) has been destroyed.