Constable Through the Meadow (9 page)

‘Nothing to do with it?’

When I heard this, I wondered about Paul’s assessment – Paul would never have allowed Ada to go all the way to London with a dud. I was sure Paul knew his antiques …

‘Nay, nowt. Summat to do with insurance, he said. He wouldn’t take it off me, so I had to fetch it back.’

And she dug into the paper carrier bag and lifted it out.

‘Is that all?’

‘Well, he said he’d be having words with you about it, I told him your telephone number. Tomorrow, he said, all being well. He’ll ring.’

There was clear disappointment on Simon’s face and I knew mine also showed similar feelings. It seemed that the so-called experts in London had merely fobbed off poor old Ada. The vicar should have gone, he should have taken it and presented it in a more sophisticated manner.

‘Leave it with me, Ada,’ said Simon. ‘We’ll see what they say tomorrow, eh?’

‘Aye, and it’s my bedtime now. See you tomorrow,’ and off she went.

I remained with Simon for a while, each of us expressing our sorrow at her apparently callous treatment in London, and then I went home. Then at lunch-time the following day, I got a call from Simon Hamilton.

‘Can you spare ten minutes, Nicholas?’ he asked.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I’ll come now.’

When I arrived at the vicarage, he showed me into his kitchen where Ada was seated at the table. Mrs Hamilton was also present and I noticed a glass of wine at each place setting. And in the centre was the dirty old chalice.

When we were all gathered together, Simon said, ‘Ada, PC Rhea, I’d like to thank you both for your work in rescuing this chalice. I’ve had a call from Sotheby’s this morning, Ada, and they thank you for taking it to them.’

‘The cheek of ’em!’ she pouted. ‘Nearly threw me out they did … didn’t want to know about me …’

‘I think you have misunderstood them, Ada.’ He spoke
softly. ‘They did a proper and expert examination; it’s a Henry IV pewter chalice, a very rare object and more so because of the arms which it bears. It seems pewter chalices were used in medieval times, but most of them were buried with the priests when they died. Very few from this period have survived, especially of this quality. Now, did he say what it was worth?’

‘Well, he muttered on about it being worth summat in the region of half a million pounds. Now I ask you, Mr Hamilton! Half a million pounds for that bit of awd tin?’

‘And you didn’t believe him?’

‘I did not! I reckoned he was having me on ’cos I’m a country woman who doesn’t know about such things.’

‘Ada, he does genuinely believe it would bring that amount in a sale at his auction rooms. It is unique, Ada, a real treasure.’

‘You’re all having me on!’ She flushed deeply now and looked very embarrassed. ‘That’s why I said nowt to you about what they’d said it was worth. A bit of awd tin can’t be worth that much, it just can’t.’

‘No, we’re not teasing you, Ada, none of us. His problem was that he could not keep it overnight because he was not insured for that particular cup. So you took it sight-seeing …’

‘Aye, and I nearly lost it over London Bridge, an’ all,’ she said grimly. ‘Can’t say I’d have missed it.’

‘So you’ve a problem now.’ I put to him. ‘Your church will never afford the premiums to insure this!’

‘I must speak to the Archbishop,’ he said. ‘This is a real shock, Ada, a massive shock. I’m reeling from the thought that this has been standing in my vestry for years and, but for you, would have been thrown out …’

‘Half a million pounds!’ she said. ‘For that bit of awd tin? I’d not give it house-room!’

She was steadfastly refusing to accept the truth of that
statement
, and left the vicarage shaking her head. After being assured Simon would place it in a bank vault for safe keeping, I followed her out, stunned that I’d carried it around in my car and had left it unattended in a York car-park!

It would be about a month later when Rev. Simon Hamilton called me again. ‘I thought you’d like to know the outcome of the chalice saga,’ he said.

‘Love to,’ I said, and drove to his vicarage for a coffee with him.

When I was settled, he said, ‘As you’ve been involved with this from the start,’ he strode up and down his spacious kitchen, ‘I thought you’d like to hear the Archbishop’s decision about the chalice.’

‘Yes, thanks, Simon. I appreciate that.’

‘It is a problem, Nicholas,’ he said. ‘We cannot keep it because of the risks and the necessarily high insurance
premiums
. We could not afford them. And, as you know, we do need a regular supply of money for upkeep of our church.’

I let him take his time on this explanation.

‘If we allowed Sotheby’s to auction it on our behalf, it might raise that huge sum; half a million pounds does seem excessive, but I am assured it could bring as much as that on the open market, maybe from international buyers.’

‘So you’re selling it?’ I asked.

‘Not by public auction. As the Archbishop says, if we did sell it through Sotheby’s, it might go out of the country. There is no telling where it might get to. We don’t want that – we want such a unique chalice, our chalice, kept in England, Nicholas. It must never leave these shores.’

‘But you’re in a cleft stick, Simon,’ I said. ‘You can’t afford to keep it, and you can’t dictate where it goes if it is sold. You cannot issue conditions for sales of that kind.’

‘A solution has been reached, Nicholas,’ he said. ‘A museum has offered us £45,000 for it; it will be put on display and kept in this country for all time.’

‘But that’s a fraction of its true value,’ I protested.

‘Perhaps, but it’s all that museum can afford. If we invest that cash, it will give the church a very nice income for years ahead and that will safeguard it and permit us to maintain it in the manner it deserves. After all, we want nothing more than that. You see, this method pleases everyone because the chalice can be viewed by the public, we get some income from it and it will never again be lost or taken out of England. It’s an admirable solution.’

‘But you’re throwing money away!’ I said.

‘Not really, because we’re getting more than we’ve had
before, and we don’t really need half a million, Nicholas.’

‘It’s a real Christian decision,’ I heard myself say.

‘It was made by the Archbishop, I might add,’ said Simon as if that explained everything.

Today, Ada’s name is upon the notice which provides a history of the chalice as it stands in a famous museum, and soon after the sale, Ada got a new apron, some new brushes and dusters. So the chalice was of benefit to her as well.

And she still refuses to believe that such a ‘piece of awd tin’ was worth so much money.

The crime of theft, known legally in England as larceny until 1968, is among the earliest of criminal offences; not only is it a crime, however, it is also a sin, and as such features in the Ten Commandments. ‘Thou shalt not steal’ could hardly be a more direct prohibition.

A universal loathing of theft has, over the centuries, provided it with many penalties, some of them dreadfully severe. Some five hundred years before Christ, for example, the Romans hanged those who stole crops at night. They were executed at the scene of their crime as a sacrifice to Ceres, goddess of the harvest. Here in England during Danish times, a thief could be killed without fear of having to pay compensation to his family because his act of stealing had rendered him valueless. During medieval times, theft continued to be a capital offence along with others such as murder, treason, arson, burglary and robbery; Henry II, however, said that crimes which involved the theft of five shillings (25p) or less could be punished by amputation of a foot instead of death.

By the middle ages, reforms were gradually reducing the barbarity of our penal system, although as late as the
seventeenth
century a woman was drowned in Loch Spynie in
Scotland
for committing theft, and across the Channel in France the infamous guillotine was utilised against thieves.

After many tests, France’s wonderful new death-dealing
machine was perfected by Tobias Schmidt and fitted with a slanting blade on the advice of Louis XVI. In fact, he was later to die by that very blade. However, after being installed on 15th April 1792 as the official method of execution, the guillotine’s very first victim was a thief. He was Nicholas-Jacques Pelletier who was guillotined at 3.30pm on 25th April 1792 by the Executioner of Criminal Sentences, Charles-Henri Sanson. The machine was thoughtfully painted red and white, and Pelletier’s execution had been delayed so that he could have the honour of being the first to be executed by the guillotine.

Even by the early years of last century, some forms of theft in this country carried the death penalty. In 1810, the reformer Samuel Romilly was horrified by the number of offences which did carry the death penalty, and he tried to introduce bills in Parliament to change these laws. At first, he failed; he tried, for example to remove the death penalty which had been reinstated for stealing objects up to the value of five shillings (25p), and also for stealing objects to the value of £2 from houses and for stealing from ships in navigable waters.

He achieved partial success when Parliament abolished the death penalty for stealing from bleaching-grounds. In spite of his efforts, in 1819 there were still over two hundred capital offences on the statute book, one of which was impersonation of a Chelsea Pensioner!

Examples of the contempt in which theft was held occurred in 1827, when a man called Moses Snook was awarded ten years transportation for stealing a plank of wood, and another man was sentenced to death for stealing 2s 6d (12½p). But the spirit of change was moving, and Robert Peel, founder of the modern police service, made a tremendous impact upon legal reform. His influence reduced three hundred Acts of Parliament to only four, and drastically reduced the number of capital offences. The death penalty continued to exist however, even for some crimes of theft such as stealing goods to the value of £2 or more from a dwelling-house.

But the juries hated the death penalty for such crimes and they would deliberately undervalue the stolen goods to save a criminal from death. One jury valued a £10 note at £1 19s 0d (£1.95) to save a criminal from death; other examples involved
sheep-stealing and horse-stealing, both of which carried the death penalty. A jury found a thief guilty of stealing only the fleece of a sheep instead of the whole beast, and guilty of stealing only the hair of a horse instead of the entire animal.

By 1956, when I joined the Force, theft, in its many and varied forms, carried penalties which ranged from a maximum of five years’ imprisonment up to and including life
imprisonment
, although fines were often imposed in the less serious cases. It was then called larceny, a term which still creeps into some publications.

Stealing from one’s employer, for example, carried a maximum penalty of fourteen years’ imprisonment; an officer of the Bank of England who stole securities or money from the bank could get life imprisonment. The stealing of horses, cattle or sheep carried up to fourteen years, while stealing postal packets carried life imprisonment. In 1957, a murder
committed
during the course of or in the furtherance of theft carried the death penalty, and on 13th August 1964, Gwynne Owen Evans and Peter Anthony Allen, two Lancastrians in their early twenties, were hanged for murdering a van-driver during the course of theft. These were England’s last judicial hangings.

In 1968, the law of theft was completely overhauled. The definition of the crime was both altered and simplified, and from that time it has carried a maximum penalty of ten years’ imprisonment, with associated offences such as burglary and robbery carrying a maximum of life imprisonment in some cases. Those penalties still apply, for theft is still regarded by some as a sin, by others as a major crime and by yet more as a normal part of life.

People help themselves to ‘souvenirs’ from hotels,
restaurants
and cafes; they take stuff home from work and fiddle expense accounts. They ‘borrow’ with no intention of
returning
, lift plants from garden centres, purloin precious objects from stately homes and have expeditions to our cities for
shop-lifting
. And it is all theft with a ten-year maximum jail sentence.

In our modern society, the scope for theft is infinite; hundreds of thousands of such crimes are committed daily but massive numbers go unreported because they are accepted as ‘normal’, and so the true incidence of theft in this country can
never be known nor even estimated. But taken as a whole, and supported by most police officers, this will suggest that we live in a very dishonest society.

A statement of this kind, taken from knowledge but
unsupported
by statistics, will anger politicians who are to the left of centre, but such a claim will be agreed by most business and professional people. They know that thefts occur from their premises and many are dealt with internally, so why report those for which there is no chance of detection? A cafe-owning friend of mine cheerfully told me that he had about a hundred and twenty teaspoons and thirty-six ashtrays stolen
every
week,
but he never reported any of these crimes to the police. The incidence of unreported theft would make a marvellous study for a university student …

But while the Church continues to denounce theft as a sin, and socialists continue to regard it as a symptom of a society deprived of its basic needs, police officers continue to regard it as a crime committed not by those in need, but by those who like to get their hands on something for nothing and don’t mind who suffers in the process. I must confess that I know few, if any, thieves who genuinely had to steal in order to survive; they stole out of pure greed. And that is why thieves are so despicable.

Although so many thefts are not notified to the police,
considerable
numbers
are
formally reported and investigated before being fed into the nation’s crime statistics. For the operational police officer, however, such academic matters are of little importance; his work involves knowing what
constitutes
a theft, and how to catch the villain responsible. Statistics are of little interest to him.

The 1916 definition of larceny was as follows, and this was the wording which we had to learn parrot-fashion. It was the
equivalent
of learning the Lord’s Prayer or the alphabet, and although I learned this more than thirty years ago I still remember it. Since then, of course, I had to learn the new definition of theft which is contained in the Theft Act 1968, but the old words stick in the memory. The 1916 wording may seem ponderous, but it does have a certain rhythm and indeed one poet wrote it down in verse form.

The definition is as follows, according to section 1 of the
Larceny Act 1916, now repealed. ‘A person steals who, without the consent of the owner, fraudulently and without a claim of right made in good faith, takes and carries away anything capable of being stolen, with intent at the time of such taking permanently to deprive the owner thereof.

‘Provided that a person may be guilty of stealing any such thing notwithstanding that he has lawful possession thereof, if, being a bailee or part-owner thereof, he fraudulently converts the same to his own use or to the use of any person other than the owner.’

I frequently imagine a Shakespearian actor quoting this
definition
, with due pauses at all the commas and full-stops, but our task was to learn it and understand it, along with all the other variations of larceny such as stealing by finding or by intimidation, stealing by mistake or by trick, larceny from the person, larceny of trees and shrubs, and a whole range of other associated crimes like embezzlement, burglary, housebreaking, robbery, false pretences, frauds by agents and trustees,
blackmail
, receiving stolen property, taking of motor vehicles, etc.

It was fascinating stuff and the precise interpretation of that definition has kept lawyers occupied and earning fat fees for years. We had to know it in our heads so that we could instantly implement its provisions in the street, even if our actions did result in appeals to the High Court or House of Lords in the months to come. But in a volume of this nature, there is no space to enlarge upon the wonderful range of legal fiction which resulted from this and similar statutes. But imagine a thief maliciously cutting someone’s grass and leaving the clippings behind on the lawn … would it be larceny? Were the
clippings
‘taken and carried away’ or indeed, is grass capable of being stolen? And, how many crimes would be committed? One only? Or one for each blade of grass? Was there intention permanently to deprive the owner of his grass? Or was the whole affair a crime of malicious damage? Such points could keep a class of students occupied for hours and reap rich fees for lawyers.

But police officers tend to deal more with the ordinary crime than the exotic, and few interesting cases of larceny came my way at Aidensfield. Most of them were very routine, often
committed at night by pilferers who sneaked around the village picking up things left lying around. For example, one farmer had a brand-new wire rat-trap stolen from his barn, a
householder
had a selection of pot plants stolen from his greenhouse, a child’s tricycle was stolen having been left outside all night, and someone managed to steal a full-size horse trough. Coal was occasionally nicked from the coal yard, wood was taken from the timber yard and, as happens in most villages, there was a phantom knicker-pincher who stole ladies’ underwear from clothes-lines. It seems that almost every village, and in towns every housing estate, has a resident phantom knicker-pincher, most of whom are peculiar men who operate under cover of darkness, many of whom are usually caught in the act of
satisfying
their weird addiction. When their houses are searched, a hoard of illicitly obtained exotic and colourful underwear is usually found. Publicity rarely brings forth claimants because many ladies are too shy to report the initial theft or to admit ownership of some of the magnificent and strikingly sensual underwear thus recovered. The courts are then left with the task of ordering suitable disposal.

Apart from the mundane thefts, several interesting cases did cross my path and one of them involved a picture hanging in a village pub.

It was one of those background pictures, some of which are delightful, which adorn the walls of village inns but which are seldom appreciated until someone steals them or mutilates them in some way during a fit of pique or drunkenness. In this instance, however, the picture remained safely in its position above the black cast-iron Yorkist range, enhanced in the colder seasons by the flickering flames of the log fire below and in the warmer seasons by a vase of flowers positioned on the
mantelpiece
.

The picture was an oil painting of Winston Churchill as the British Prime Minister and it depicted him with his famous cigar between his lips. It showed him at the height of his powers, a confident and forceful personality who had guided our nation to victory during World War II. In the picture, he was contemplating something across to his left (maybe the Labour party!) and was shown seated in his study with books
around him and papers scattered across his desk. It was a fine picture of a widely respected statesman and it had been in the Moon and Compass Inn for several years.

It was one of those pictures which brighten the bars of our village inns, and many a glass had been raised to Winston, later Sir Winston, in his silent pose above the cosy, welcoming fire of the Moon and Compass. During my official visits to the inn, Sir Winston was still alive and I had admired the picture and complimented David Grayson, the landlord, upon its merits. This pleased him, although he had acquired the painting with the fittings of the pub.

The possibility that there could be a problem associated with that picture never entered my head until I received a visit from a tourist. He arrived on the stroke of two o’clock one Wednesday afternoon just as I was about to embark upon a tour of duty in the mini-van. I noticed the sleek grey Jaguar 340 glide to a halt outside my house and a smart man in his sixties emerged. He was dressed in light summer clothes of the casual kind, and his wife remained in the car. I met him in the drive to the police house.

‘Good afternoon,’ I greeted him.