Constable by the Sea (4 page)

In the midst of my thoughts, a man emerged from the cabin. He noticed me, and I waved my hands to indicate that I wished to speak with him, but he just waved back and went about his work. I decided I must be bold so I descended the steep stone steps which led down the side of the harbour wall to the level of the boats. I crossed one or two swaying decks before I arrived at the Dutch boat. The man was busy with some fishing nets.

‘Good morning,’ I said, realizing I was speaking loudly as one tends to do when addressing foreigners.

‘Gut mornen,’ I think he replied, but I could see the worried look on his face.

It was then that I realized that in other countries the relationship between the police and the public wasn’t quite the same as that which existed between the British bobby and his public. By arriving on his boat without permission, I had probably put the fear of God into this poor fellow. He probably thought I was going to impound his vessel, arrest his crew or arrange a Customs search.

‘Do you speak English?’ I asked.

He shook his head and continued to wear a very harassed expression. The last thing I wanted was to frighten him, and it did cross my mind that, if I antagonized him too greatly, I might have to swim back to the police station.

‘Does anyone on board speak English?’ I tried.

He raised a finger as if in understanding and disappeared below; I could hear a jabbering of tongues and then five men emerged. My heart sank into my boots. I’d done it now … I
had no chance against five powerful Dutchmen.

‘Good morning.’ I tried the Englishman’s traditional approach, the one which seems to be used in any situation.

It brought no reply. They stood and stared at me in the way that cows stand and stare at those who picnic in their fields.

I was almost surrounded by these burly, tough fishermen. I decided that perhaps Anne did not really need a clog after all.

‘Does anyone speak English?’ I spoke slowly now, if a little too loudly, my voice rising in pitch as if to betray my fears.

‘
Ja
,’ said one of them after a long pause. ‘I spik Inglish.’

‘Ah,’ I breathed a sigh of relief. Now for my strange proposition.

‘My-girl-friend,’ I said slowly, thinking the true relationship would be too difficult to explain. ‘She-wants-a-clog-to-keep-for-good-luck,’ and I pointed to the clog I’d earmarked.

‘Clog?’ asked the English-speaker.

I smiled and nodded furiously, then continued very slowly. ‘Yes, she-believes-that-a-clog-like-that-brings-good-fortune-to-her. She-has-asked-me-to-find-a-clog-for-her. I-saw-that-clog-and-thought-it-might-not-be-wanted …’

‘Ah!’ beamed the English-speaking fellow. ‘I understand. She likes charm, hey? A charm? The clog, it will be a charm for her? For luck? She want this charm?’

‘
Ja
,’ I tried, and once more nodded furiously, hoping the reason for my presence would be fully understood.

Now they were all smiling and laughing, and I sensed a deep feeling of relief among them.

‘Yes,’ said the English-speaker. ‘Yes, she can have the clog.’

He gabbled something at the others in his own tongue, and they all smiled and laughed, and I knew how they felt. Relief swept across them and, I must admit, across me.

‘Come,’ said my new friend. ‘Down below, with us. For breakfast? I will get you the clog now.’

And so I joined them all below deck, where I enjoyed a large mug of coffee in their spotless galley. They presented me with the worn-out clog, and once they discovered I was friendly, I found out they could all speak a smattering of English.

Soon afterwards, I left with the huge clog. It must have been
size 12, and I now had the problem of hiding it for the next couple of hours or so, as I smuggled it back to Anne via the police station. I couldn’t take it directly to her because the hotel was a long way off my present beat, and to be found absent from one’s beat was to risk a disciplinary charge, especially with Sergeant Blaketon on duty.

My cape provided the answer. When on patrol, even on summer days, we carried our voluminous capes by folding them flat into several folds and then slinging them over our shoulders. They were ideal waterproof garments, and when worn about our bodies, they also concealed a great deal. I’ve known policemen do their wives’ shopping at times, and then smuggle it home beneath their flowing capes; they can hide fish-and-chips at supper time, Christmas presents at Christmas time, and I once knew a constable who smuggled a custard pie home beneath his cape. So, by draping my cape around my shoulders, I would be able to conceal the large, wooden clog from prying eyes.

Although it wasn’t raining and although it wasn’t particularly chilly that morning, I completed the remainder of the first half of my patrol with my cape concealing the clog. I carried the clog in one hand, with my thumb tucked beneath the button of my breast pocket for support, and none of the passing citizens seemed to think it odd that I should be dressed for rain.

I entered the police station to book off and decided I would make a quick dash to the counter and poke my head through the enquiry hatch without entering the office. I would call, ‘PC Rhea, booking off, refreshment break,’ and then vanish before anyone could forestall my dash from the building or ask silly questions.

But I hadn’t bargained for Sergeant Blaketon.

He saw me before I saw him, and called out, ‘Rhea, just a minute!’

My heart sank. Now I had to enter the office, and there he was, with his back to the fireplace, beaming almost villainously as I walked in. The office man, a senior constable called Stan who was local to Strensford, was seated on a tall stool at the counter, and he flashed me a brief but sympathetic smile.

‘Ah, Rhea,’ Sergeant Blaketon said. ‘Anything to report from No. 1 Beat this morning?’

‘No, sergeant,’ I smiled. ‘All correct. I’m just heading for breakfast.’

‘No trouble on the Dutch fishing boats then?’

‘Trouble, sergeant?’ I wondered how much he knew, or how much he had seen. I had not noticed him on the quayside.

‘Trouble, Rhea. Bother. Mayhem. That sort of thing, the sort of thing that might require the presence of a constable. Nothing like that, was there? Nothing to report?’

The crafty character must have seen me on the deck of that boat, or else he’d been talking to someone else who had seen me. I thought I’d string him along to see what he was aiming at.

‘No, sergeant,’ I decided that brief answers were the best.

‘Oh, I just wondered, I heard that a young constable had been seen on board a Dutch fishing boat this morning. That’s your beat, so I wondered if it might have been trouble of some kind.’

‘No, sergeant,’ I said, and I knew I was blushing by this time. ‘No trouble.’

‘It was you, though, was it, Rhea?’ he persisted.

‘I did go on board for a chat, sergeant, just a friendly chat. Passing the time of day, you know.’

‘Ah!’ he beamed. ‘So my information was correct. But there was no trouble, no complaints, no problems?’

‘None at all, sergeant.’

‘Hmm. Well, that’s all right then. So long as there is no trouble. So you’ll be off for your breakfast then?’

‘Yes, sergeant, I must be off. The hotel likes us to be on time …’

‘Not raining on your beat, was it? Or cold?’

I thought fast. He was moving to the subject of my cape now, so I smiled and said, ‘It was a bit chilly, sergeant, a breeze off the sea, you know. It can blow a bit chilly on the harbourside at dawn.’

‘Yes, so it can,’ he paused, and at that precise moment the telephone rang. The office constable answered it and said, ‘Sergeant, it’s for you. The Superintendent.’

As he moved to take the call, Sergeant Blaketon looked at me
as if he was going to say something, but already I was moving towards the door. I bolted out of the office and was hurrying towards the exit of the police station as I heard Sergeant Blaketon in an animated conversation with the Superintendent. I’d been saved literally in the nick of time.

But before I reached the door, a voice halted me. It was Stan, the PC on office duty.

‘Outside, quick,’ he said as he bustled me out of the station.

‘What’s the matter, Stan?’ I almost shouted.

‘Have you got a bloody clog off that boat?’ he asked me, eyeing the bulky shape beneath my cape.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Why? It was given to me.’

He laughed. ‘Then get to hell out of here, and quick! He was after it, he wanted it, that bloody sergeant you’ve brought over from Ashfordly. He noticed it there last night but there was no one about to ask, so he was going to have a word with the skipper this morning. It seems his wife has always wanted a genuine Dutch clog to put on her mantelpiece, but I can’t think why … Anyway, it had gone by the time he got down to the harbourside this morning …’

‘I’m going!’ I said, and I almost ran to the hotel. Anne was delighted, and I got a double helping of sausages that morning.

The next time I boarded a fishing vessel occurred after a spate of shop-breakings in Strensford. In those days, the crime of breaking into shop premises to steal goods was popularly known as shop-breaking, but since 1968 all such ‘break and entry’ offences have been grouped together under the single heading of
burglary
.

Whenever we paraded for a night shift during that short sojourn at the seaside, we were reminded that someone, probably a lone operator, was breaking into shops all over the town. The stolen property was not particularly valuable, like cameras or radio sets, nor was it particularly useful, like food or clothing. Most of the attacked premises were the
tourist-souvenir
type of shop, selling cheap oddments such as jewellery, watches, ornaments and knick-knacks of the kind no truly discerning visitor would take home. They were all
close to the harbourside too.

On one occasion, for example, three flying ducks in plaster were taken, and we did wonder if the thief ran a boarding house. Almost all the boarding houses in Strensford at that time had plaster ducks flying up their walls, and some had gnomes in their gardens.

The CID reckoned the breaker was a youth, perhaps a visitor to one of the holiday camps or caravan sites, but whoever he was, he always escaped. Their reckoning was based partly on the fact that he must be slim and agile to be able to wriggle through some of the skylights which were his chief source of entry, and another part of their logic was that the mediocre stuff he stole would hardly appeal to an adult. It would certainly not appeal to a handler of stolen goods or an antique-dealer.

Throughout those warm summer nights, therefore, the uniform branch maintained observations upon the streets, but we never caught our man.

More shops were raided, more junk was stolen and eventually the Chamber of Trade, and the
Strensford
Times
, began to ask what the police were doing about the sudden and unwarranted major crime wave. The local Superintendent had the sense to issue a statement to the paper: ‘We are maintaining
observations
and are utilizing all available manpower in an attempt to curb this seasonal outbreak of crime. We believe it is the work of visiting criminals.’

This series of shopbreakings occurred long before the days of collators who assembled and disseminated crime-beating information, and long before the police had computers, which could assess crime intelligence. As I read the Occurrence Book each day, however, I did become aware that the shops were raided on the same nights that we received calls from some sleepy residents that a horse was loose and roaming the streets. It had been heard several times in the dead of night, but no one had actually seen the horse. There developed a theory that the shop-breaker was a horseman and that he carefully studied the movements of the police before committing his crimes.

In an attempt to gain more information, I took several Occurrence Books, which were logs of all daily events, and
checked them meticulously for (a) calls about horses loose at night in Strensford and (b) shop-breakings which occurred around the same time. And a pattern did emerge. The breaks were occurring around two o’clock in the morning, the very time the policemen went into the station for their mid-shift break – this made it seem they
were
being observed. Furthermore, all the occasions when the horse had been reported were around the same mid-shift time.

Then, by one of those strokes of fortune by which great crimes are solved, I had to compile a list of the times of high tides for the information of Force Headquarters – someone over there was compiling a Spring Tide Early Warning System. As I listed the times known to Strensford, I suddenly wondered whether the raids could be linked with tidal times. I was really thinking of the swing bridge across the harbour which opened at times of high tide; high tides occurred twice a day, with about twelve hours between each high water. I did wonder if our horse-riding villain came across that bridge into town, so I carried out my survey over several months.

To cut a long story short, I did not voice my opinions to anyone else but decided to carry out a spell of observations whenever my night duty coincided with a high tide which occurred around 2 a.m. The tide was almost full for some time both before and after the official high-tide time; this meant there was often full water while the policemen were having their mid-shift meals … and that meant the fishing boats were under preparation for sailing. My mind was working fast.

‘Sergeant,’ I spoke to Sergeant Blaketon at the beginning of one night shift. ‘Can I work a harbourside beat tonight but take my break later than normal, say 3 a.m.?’

‘Why, Rhea? What are you scheming now?’

I was in two minds not to tell him, but I felt he would not grant this odd request without knowing the story, and so, in the peace of the sergeant’s office, I explained. To give him credit, he did listen.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Do it. And I’ll be there too. We’ll see this out together, Rhea. We’ll show these townies that us country coppers can arrest their shop-breakers!’

We arranged to meet at 1.45 a.m., and together we would seek a place of concealment from where we could overlook the swing bridge, the harbourside and quays, the herring boats and the main thoroughfares into town.