Burley Cross Postbox Theft

by Nicola Barker

  Mr Thorndyke won’t be a problem. I believe Inspector Everill and Sergeant Hill have already seen to that – at a price, naturally (although I’m sure the force will be all the better for it).

  How right you were to deduce that my desk in Ilkley was the perfect place to direct a ‘tricky, little problem’ so that it might (I quote), ‘quietly breathe its last – in an atmosphere of shuddering obscurity – and then die’.

  You were also correct to realize that I was one of the few people left on the force ‘stupid enough to care about the difference between right and wrong, but still sufficiently respectful to take direction from above – without even the remotest expectation of personal gain…’.

  I am, of course, thoroughly overwhelmed at receiving such a huge accolade from a police officer of your great stature.

  Please extend my very best wishes to your son. (Still no word on that blasted dog, I’m afraid…)

  Happy Easter.

  Yours, as ever,

  PC Roger Topping

  PS Am thinking of giving up all remaining shreds of my professional credibility for Lent. How about you, Chief Inspector? Just chocolate again, this year?

  Ilkley,

  17/03/07

  16.00 hrs

  Dear Mrs Hawkes,

  Back on the old fags again, eh? And after you swore blind that you’d given the damn things up! Of course it’s really none of my business (I’m perfectly aware of that), but I won’t pretend I’m not a little disappointed, Wincey. It’s a filthy habit.

  I quit because of Duke – we both did: you, me, five or six others (Meredith Coles, Duncan Tanner, Mhairi Callaghan, Joan Dunkley) on New Year’s Day 2004 – ten months before Duke finally passed.

  I remember how pleased he was – how proud he was (of you, me, all of us). He was a shadow of his former self by then. So thin, pale, reduced… That terrible, hacking cough.

  Quitting wasn’t easy, but whenever I’ve felt the urge to chuck in the towel and start up again, I’ve thought of Duke. I’ve called to mind that autumn evening (that damp, early autumn evening in 2003) when he clambered on to the saloon bar with his trusty harmonium, sat down, cleared his throat, began pumping away at it with his feet (and banging away on it with his hands – doubtless intent on performing some wonderfully libellous composition about certain, stand-out members of the local community), opened his mouth to sing, and then… then nothing. Nothing came out! Not a single note! That awful look of confusion on his face – quickly surpassed by one of haunting fear…

  I’ll never forget it.

  I’ll never forget Duke. He was an extraordinary man; the spirit of Burley Cross (the old spirit, the true spirit), and greatly missed by all of us.

  Perhaps we don’t get around to telling you that quite as often as we should…

  So how did I find out, you’re wondering? About the smoking? Well, I’ve been suspicious for a while. The clues have been there: a slight whiff of smoke on your clothing, your eagerness to dash ‘out back’ every twenty minutes or so in order to ‘check on the barrel’, followed by a swift re-application of lipstick on your return. On one occasion – quite recently – I could’ve sworn I saw a trace of ash on the toe of your court shoe.

  Oh, and then there’s Mhairi, of course. She’s back on the snout herself. Don’t worry, she didn’t tell me (didn’t break the faith between you), this was just a little theory I came up with, all by myself. I was actually in Feathercuts on Tuesday, following up on a case I’ve just recently inherited from the Skipton Constabulary (the Burley Cross Postbox Theft Case – as one of the official victims of the crime, you’ll probably have received formal notification to this effect from Skipton by now).

  You’re probably also aware of the fact that it was Mhairi who discovered the stolen cache (out in the back alley, behind her salon), and that – contrary to popular belief – the letters weren’t found pilfered – violated, even – by the thief. They were pristine. Untouched. It was Mhairi herself who tore some of them open (and perused the contents), before finally doing what she should have done in the first place: ringing the police.

  Did she tell you about Rita Bramwell’s secret daughter? (You’d been pretty worried about Rita for a while, hadn’t you? Hadn’t everyone? I mean it wasn’t just idle gossip on Mhairi’s part so much as an act of charity – a gesture of honest concern.)

  But when Mhairi told you how she’d acquired the information? From a letter in the stolen cache? Weren’t you horrified? Truly horrified? And then, when Rita got wind of it and attempted suicide? How did you feel then? Eh? Bad? Conflicted? Culpable? As if you’d pushed that cruel, sharp blade on to her delicate wrists with your own hand?

  Mhairi told you – she insisted, she promised – that the letter she had found was already torn open, but you knew that it wasn’t, didn’t you? Because when you stole those letters you didn’t think of opening them. Not even for a second (you’re far too scrupulous, too honourable for that!).

  Although you were angry, weren’t you? Underneath your studied veneer of cheery professionalism? Angry about a lot of things (not that anybody would have guessed it – with your open smile, your easy hospitality, your ready line in casual chitchat…).

  You were angry that Duke was gone, that he’d been taken from you, so cruelly. You were angry that he’d left you in a state of such crippling debt (from all those expensive renovations, instigated, in the main, because of that ridiculous feud of his – that pointless rivalry – with Baxter Thorndyke). You were angry after the burglary (and with good reason, too. The mess those vandals made of the newly refurbished bar! So cruel! So pointless! So unnecessary!). You were angry when your insurance premiums sky-rocketed. Angry that Timmy Dickson pretty much got away with it (after turning in crucial evidence on another, unrelated – but apparently more ‘serious’ case – and plea-bargaining with the judge).

  You were angry about how long it took you to get back on to any kind of an even financial keel after the police confiscated a series of cheques and other critical pieces of documentation as ‘evidence’ (because Sergeant Everill had developed a – completely stupid and erroneous – theory that the whole thing might actually be ‘an inside job’).

  And then, when it felt like you might finally be getting back on track again, that stupid riot after the darts tournament! The ruinous headlines in the papers! Your insurance premiums virtually doubling overnight! Harsh words from the brewery! All those bills! All that stress! Baxter Thorndyke sticking his boot in at every available opportunity…

  It wasn’t just important, now, but imperative that trade should improve in the run-up to Christmas. You were already living hand to mouth – so desperate, indeed, to make ends meet that you had actively started encouraging coach parties (even though a large proportion of the village was dead set against it). That huge stink over the damage to grass verges! Ridiculous! Exhausting!

  And then last, but by no means least (the icing on the cake): that hyperactive Coombes kid tampering with the mechanism of Duke’s prized grandfather clock! (Duke’s beloved clock! Its steady, regular tick, representing for you – for all of us – the life and breath of The Old Oak.)

  You wanted to throw in the towel that night, didn’t you? That night of the Coombes family Auction of Promises dinner? Standing there, all alone, in the snug, tears running down your cheeks, the carpet around you scattered with a terrifying array of nuts and bolts and springs and gears and wheels…

  But you couldn’t throw it in, no matter how much you wanted to. You couldn’t give up on Duke’s dream. You couldn’t let Thorndyke get the better of you both. You simply couldn’t let that bastard win!

  But cash was so short, wasn’t it? So short, in fact, that you found yourself doing something you thought you could never, ever stoop to. You found yourself borrowing from the charity box (just briefly, just temporarily, just a harmless, spur-of-the-moment thing). You’d been placed in charge of the Auction of Promises budget after Prue dashed off on her mercy mission to Fran
ce. And then there was the bridge night – the money raised for that donkey sanctuary in Cairo…

  Good old Wincey, trusty old Wincey, so ashamed of having temporarily pocketed the charity cash that she ducks behind a car on seeing Sebastian St John and Unity Gray idly chatting outside the post office together. Not because you’re angry with Unity (for the darts comp. catastrophe). No! Not at all! But because you’re crippled with embarrassment. You can’t bear the thought that they’re going to ask (for the third time, the fourth time) if you’ve managed to bank that infernal charity money, yet.

  You can’t bank it – it’s impossible – because there’s not a penny of it left (and not so much as a bean remaining in your account to cover the debt!). But then that awful look of humiliation on Unity’s old face! You hadn’t managed to duck quite soon enough (she saw! She’d noticed!). So you quickly pretend you’ve dropped something (what? A coin? A bangle? A stamp?), that it’s rolled down into the road and you’re simply trying to retrieve it. You scrabble around in the gutter for a while, then you turn and you make a rapid bee-line for… Where? Anywhere! The church!

  You dash inside, mortified. You lean against a back wall, peering around you in the half-gloom, catching your breath. Your eyes alight on a bank of candles, flickering, comfortingly, in a far corner. You smell the scent of flowers. It feels different in the church. Warmer. You’ve not been inside the place since Duke’s funeral – which Reverend Horwood hijacked with some horribly inappropriate hell and damnation diatribe (about the social ills caused by alcohol). You swore you’d never enter its dark portals again after that.

  But here you are, just the same. You’re staring at the bank of candles and feeling strangely – unwittingly – drawn towards them, so you go and sit down on a pew. You’re desperately sad – desperately alone. You inspect the exquisitely embroidered knee-rest for a while. You close your eyes. You rest your forehead, lightly, on the back of the pew in front. You find yourself whispering a little prayer. Your tensed muscles gradually begin to relax. You feel a sense of lightness, of peace, a brief moment of comfort, even…

  But then your reverie – your brief, blissful idyll – is cruelly destroyed as a loud commotion breaks out directly behind you. Suddenly the church is full of people – full of argument and rancour. Reverend Paul is there, and Reverend Horwood, and several of Reverend Horwood’s ‘ladies’, and Reverend Paul (usually so quiet and unassuming) is shouting at Reverend Horwood for displaying a crucifix in the church foyer without first seeking his prior permission.

  You’re appalled by this scene – jolted by it – disorientated – and you quickly rise to your feet and flee the building. You’re in such a hurry to get out of there that you leave your gloves and your scarf behind you. Yet the gloves and the scarf aren’t the only things you miss in your rush. You miss something else – something you couldn’t really be expected to notice, but something significant, even momentous…

  Rhona Brooks (one of Reverend Horwood’s ‘ladies’, his most loyal acolyte) is also in attendance. You and Rhona have never been close. Rhona doesn’t drink. She’s very morose, very dowdy, very devout. She doesn’t socialize much. You have nothing in common with her. But when that argument takes place between the new reverend and the old, and she sees you suddenly quit the church, Rhona notices your distress (your gloves and your scarf left behind on the pew), and something gives way inside her. A tiny shift takes place. A little knot of doubt enters her staunch, puritanical heart. She starts to question herself. She starts to wonder…

  She plays the scene over – again and again – in her mind: the sight of you, Wincey Hawkes, the old publican’s wife, cowering in the corner, hoping to find comfort in front of that flickering bank of candles (that frivolous bank of candles which Reverend Horwood disapproves of so much). She sees (not just sees, but feels, each time she replays the scene in her head), that palpable sense of hurt felt by the new reverend (the sense of betrayal), the atmosphere of contempt – of rage, even – emanating from the old (but… but it was only a little joke, wasn’t it, after all? The carving? Edo’s carving? Nothing more than that? Nothing serious? Nothing critical? Just a quick, mischievous yank on the tiger’s tail?).

  Let’s push Rhona to the back of our minds for a moment, though, shall we? (But don’t forget her – heaven forbid! – because she still has a small yet critical role to play in this story.) Let’s think about Wincey again. Let’s think about you, eh?

  What happens next? You go home to the pub. You do several hours’ work behind the bar. You’re re-stocking the crisps in the snug – polishing the optics, perhaps – when you chance to overhear a conversation between Kenneth Cranshaw (Sr) and Walter Francis…

  Seems that Mr Cranshaw (Sr) has just returned from a council meeting where the old prefab on Sharp Crag Farm has been designated ‘unfit for human habitation’ (at Baxter Thorndyke’s instigation!). Poor Donal Flint is furious about it – it doesn’t rain, it pours, they’re saying; didn’t he just lose three sheep to the fly strike this week?

  Your mind turns to the bill for the repair of Duke’s grandfather clock – how you pretended it was just a hundred when it was actually over four… And poor Paula Coombes’s face when you told her – £100! An unimaginably huge amount to her (an unimaginably huge amount to you, right now).

  So the next day, when she pops in (still plainly ignorant of the developments on council), you tell her to forget about the repair bill. ‘I’m sure the insurance will cough up, eventually,’ you say. But Paula already has a bee in her bonnet about taking her late husband’s mother’s favourite vase – or decanter – to a local antique shop to see what she can raise on it. And though your every good instinct rails against this scheme (she’s a widow without so much as a change of clothes to her name, the older boy’s a reprobate, all the kids currently have measles), you find yourself giving in to her. You’re so broke! She’s so eager to make it up to you! And the actual bill is four hundred – you kept that fact back from her, didn’t you? To try and spare her feelings?

  Poor Paula! So keen to make amends, so full of sincerity and optimism, that you don’t have the heart… you don’t have the luxury… Which is it, exactly? Does it really even matter?

  The next afternoon, at lunchtime, you receive a piece of most unwelcome news. Paula’s been in a car crash – on her way to Ilkley, or to Bradley, or to Kildwick – with the blue glass decanter. The van is a write-off. The decanter is smashed. And she doesn’t even know yet that she’s to be made homeless, at Christmas! Five kiddies in tow! You sit in the empty dining rooms, your head in your hands.

  It’s then that you receive a visit from Rhona Brooks. She has your scarf and your gloves with her (which you’d left at the church). And she looks so out of place in here, so ill at ease, with her stooping gait, her long, grey, almost nunnish dress, the prominent cross at her neck, those huge, calloused hands. But even so. ‘You seem upset,’ she murmurs, and she pulls out a chair.

  So you tell her about Paula Coombes. You tell her about the clock. You tell her about the vase, the bill, the crash. And then, before you know quite what you’re doing, everything else just starts tumbling out. About the insurance, and the numbers, and the articles in the paper, and how broke you are, and last – but no means least – about the charity cash.

  ‘It’s all such a mess,’ you say, ‘such a terrible mess!’

  And you think Rhona will hate you, that she’ll judge you (the way Reverend Horwood judged Duke); a part of you actually wants her to, a part of you actually needs her to. But she doesn’t. She just sits there, quietly, and she listens, her giant hands knitted together, gently, upon her lap. And when she’s done listening, she stands up, and she leans forward, and she squeezes your shoulder, and she nods, then she leaves, muttering something about needing to ‘finish off a hedge, over at the Manor’.

  When she’s gone, you wonder if you only dreamed it. And the day draws, inexorably, onwards. Deliveries. A broken oven in the kitchens. The chef threatening to
hand in his notice if he doesn’t get a kitchen assistant to help with the chores. Then the cleaner’s a no-show. And the phone keeps on ringing: salesmen, creditors. A coach party arrives, but nobody requires hot meals. One of the toilets gets blocked…

  You begin to rail against the world again. How could you not? And it’s the evening already and the barman’s cut his finger on a broken bottle – they’re bandaging it up in the kitchen, so you’re back behind the bar. And Sebastian (just on his way over to post a letter to Prue), pops in for a quick chat about the Auction of Promises. Mrs Goff is there, too, propping up the bar, her face full of sympathy. ‘Numbers not up yet, Wincey?’ she asks, scanning the half-empty saloon.

  You’re finding it difficult to talk. Your throat keeps contracting. Your eyes keep filling with tears. You’re so tired – so exhausted. Then Sebastian mentions the money again. The fifth time, is this? The sixth time? And you don’t know what to say, what to do… So you go and grab your cheque book and you write out three cheques – one, two, three of them, signing with a flourish (entirely for Brenda Goff’s benefit): one for the Auction of Promises, a second for the clock repairs, a third for the donkey sanctuary. You address the three envelopes, leaning on the bar. You apply three stamps.

  ‘Pop these in the post for me, Seb,’ you say, ‘there’s a good lad.’

  An hour later, though, and your stomach is in knots. You know there’s no cash to cover the cheques in your account – you’ve already fallen behind on the mortgage. What to do? What to do?

  So you throw on your coat and head out. It’s almost nine. You have a small can of lighter fluid in your hand – or a bottle of red wine vinegar. You must destroy those cheques – at any cost – or everything will be lost.

  But when you reach the postbox you can’t bring yourself to do it, can you? You just stand there, staring at the damn thing, grinding your teeth with frustration, with rage, with grief, with disappointment. And in a moment of pure, unadulterated pique, you kick out your foot. You land a blow on the box. One, small blow. Then the door pops off.