“I’m not on duty,” I retorted. “You are. So if it’s a job, it’s yours, mate! Besides, we can’t ignore it, your police car’s outside and there’s a patrol car beside it. It’s like a police road traffic department out there . . .”
He groaned as he anticipated an urgent request for his attention, but when I opened the door, Sergeant Blaketon was standing there in full uniform. And he was smiling broadly.
“Good heavens, Sergeant,” I said, in what I hoped was a voice loud enough for Phil and the others to hear, “Whatever brings you out to Aidensfield when I’m off duty?”
“I just happened to be passing,” he said and I could see the glint of success in his eye.
“Really?” I detected facetiousness in his voice.
“Yes. And I saw Bellamy’s car. And that patrol car, both parked outside. I wondered if they’d had any success tracing that escaped prisoner?”
“What escaped prisoner?” I asked. Had there really been an escapee in Aidensfield? I hadn’t heard anything about it.
“You won’t have heard, you’re off duty but, well, I knew you wouldn’t mind if I called in, seeing we’re all in this together, this search; I know you’re not on duty . . .”
The crafty old schemer had come out deliberately, I knew; he’d known I’d be at home, he’d known Mary would be out and I bet he knew Bellamy would be here too, sneaking time off to watch the final . . .”
“Fancy a coffee, Sergeant?” I asked.
“Not interrupting anything, am I?” he grinned.
“I’ve just made one for Phil and the others,” I said. “They all had a job on my patch, they were all looking for that prisoner . . .”
“Were they now? And have they obtained any sightings?” asked Sergeant Blaketon.
“I’ve no idea, Sergeant, they haven’t said.”
Then, from the living-room, I heard the roar of the crowd as the teams ran on to the pitch. Blaketon heard it and I saw the reaction. He was itching to get in there and watch.
“Watching telly, are we, Rhea?”
“My wife’s gone out, the children are being looked after, so I thought I’d watch the telly. It’s Cup Final day, Sergeant,” I said as if I wasn’t really interested. “Leeds versus Liverpool.”
“Is it really?”
“Would you like to join us? The kettle’s boiled . . .”
But before I could say anything else, Oscar Blaketon was rushing through to my lounge, removing his cap in the process, and he was just in time to flop into a chair as the whistle blew for kick-off. I heard him say, “Not a word, Bellamy, not one word,” as he fixed his gaze on the screen.
I took in a coffee for him, with one for myself and a second one for Phil and the others who sat just as transfixed as Sergeant Blaketon as they barely acknowledged my presence. Their addiction was complete. And so Phil and the patrol officers remained to watch the game; no other constables called to watch the game — Blaketon’s car, parked outside, would have warned them off if they had made an approach — but had they known, they could have come in. Oscar was in his seventh heaven as he savoured every kick on Wembley’s turf, but when Liverpool won by two goals to one, he left quietly, if a little sad. It hadn’t been the dream result he’d desired.
“Thank you, Rhea,” he said as he left. “Anything to report, Bellamy?” He turned to Phil with a look of dejection on his face.
“I think that report about an escaped prisoner must have been a false alarm, Sergeant,” Phil said. “I can’t find anyone resembling an escapee, nor anyone who made the report. You said a lady had called you from Aidensfield?”
“We heard your call to PC Bellamy on the air, Sergeant,” said one of the patrol officers. “We were nearby, so we decided to patrol the village, just in case.”
“I thought there might just be time to make a search before kick-off,” grinned Blaketon.
“Yes, there was,” said Bellamy.
“And, as I’m on cover duty, I thought I’d better attend myself just in case it was a genuine call. You never can tell with calls like that,” he said with a strange smile on his face.
But when I checked the Occurrence Book later, there was no entry about the reported sighting of an escaped prisoner. No one had rung in to report one. I decided that Sergeant Blaketon had been very cunning on that occasion. He had scored points over his wife too, for she never knew he had seen the match and neither Phil nor I would tell her.
5. Taking Care of the Pennies
The unsunned heaps of miser’s treasures.
JOHN MILTON, 1608–74
Most of us associate the word ‘miser’ with a man who greedily hoards his money but I cannot find a feminine equivalent of that word. One of my dictionaries fails to provide any hint as to the sex of a miser, but says that it means one who hoards wealth and lives miserably; an avaricious person. Another says the word means one who deprives himself of all but the barest essentials in order to hoard money. From this latter definition, one might be tempted to believe there are no female misers but in the course of my duties at Aidensfield, I did come across certain women whose behaviour might well have qualified them as miserly.
One such lady suffered a sudden and mysterious death. Her name was Adelaide Bowes, she was unmarried and she lived alone in a ramshackle cottage in Undercliffe Road. She presented a strange sight as she trudged around Aidensfield in an old brown longcoat dating to World War I, a dark headscarf which almost concealed her face and ancient Wellington boots turned down at the top. Stooped and grey-haired, her age was indeterminate and the villagers said she had always looked like that; no living person could recall her appearance being any different.
Everyone considered her to be very, very poor. She bought only the most meagre of supplies from the shop, barely enough to maintain a baby let alone a full-grown woman, and she never spent money on clothes or household effects. Her furniture was scrap recovered from the village tip, her house had no electricity and no running water; she relied on an open fire for heat, light and cooking upon, and she obtained water from a stream which flowed past her house to join Aidensfield Beck. Most of her time was spent wandering around the village collecting wood for her fire and even inspecting dustbins for the cast-offs discarded by those supposedly more wealthy. Those cast-offs could be clothes, shoes or even food. Miss Bowes was a recluse who shunned the friendship of everyone; no one ever went into her house and she never visited anyone in Aidensfield. She rarely washed, if the blackness of her hands was any guide to the rest of her, nor did she launder her clothes or clean the house.
As the local constable, I became aware of her shortly after my arrival, but enquiries from several villagers assured me that she was not in need of professional help or advice, and that she had lived in that manner for as long as anyone knew. Sometimes, if I bade “Good morning” to Adelaide, she would respond with a nod of her head or even a toothless smile, but she would never allow me to get into conversation with her.
As one of the village eccentrics, she was accepted by all and no one tried to interfere with her life style.
Then she was missed.
It was Joe Steel who first mentioned it to me.
“Adelaide didn’t come into the shop this morning,” he said to me. “I save old newspapers for her, she uses them to light the fire, I think,” he added.
“Is it unusual for her not to call?” I asked.
“Fairly,” he nodded. “She’s usually pretty consistent in her movements; it’s coolish weather and she likes her papers.”
“I’ll have a look at the house,” I assured him.
It was really a hovel. She owned the cottage, having inherited it from her family, and it stood alone in a patch of overgrown garden. There was a garden shed made of creosoted timber but it was falling down, and the path to her front door was overgrown with nettles and briars. The windows hadn’t been cleaned for years, the paintwork of the house was peeling off and the woodwork was rotten. It did not look like a house which had an occupant. When I reached the fr
ont door, I knocked loudly and shouted, “Adelaide? It’s PC Rhea. Are you there?”
There was no reply. Not a sound came from within. “Adelaide?” I tried the door handle; the door opened, scraping across the stone-flagged floor as I pushed it wide enough to enter. “Adelaide? Anyone there?”
Calling my name, I climbed over the sacks of rubbish in the entrance hall, moved an old dining-chair and managed to get into the living-room.
It was full of books; they were stacked on the floor, the table, the window-ledges, the tops of cupboards — in fact, every flat surface contained several piles of books. And there were more books piled upon the piles, some neatly, others in a muddle and many in irregular heaps. I scrambled across them, climbing over lofty piles as I called her name. Some spun away beneath my feet but did not go far, as there was nowhere for them to go.
It was like clambering through a heap of waste comprised entirely of old books — I bet some of them were rare editions and probably worth a fortune.
I reached the kitchen, or scullery as it is known hereabouts, but there was no sign of Adelaide. The kitchen was similarly awful, a depository for dirty crockery and pans which had never been cleaned. There were scraps of waste food, half-eaten tins of beans, half loaves of bread going mouldy . . . it was almost impossible to believe that anyone actually lived here.
Shouting the whole time, I made my way up the bare wooden staircase; it was so narrow that I walked sideways and the stench was awful. But I found Adelaide. She was lying on the bedroom floor, fully clothed in her old brown longcoat, headscarf and wellingtons, and she was clutching a tin of weedkiller. I crouched at her side, doing by best to ignore the appalling stench and touched her head. She was dead; of that there was no doubt. I guessed she had died from natural causes, but that tin of weedkiller did make me just a little concerned — had she consumed any of it? Was this a suicide?
I made a brief examination to satisfy myself that there were no signs of attack upon her and then left the house, knowing better than to touch or move anything. My first job was to call Dr Ferrenby to certify the death but if he could not ascertain the cause of death, then there would have to be a post-mortem examination. In particular, we had to satisfy ourselves whether her death was from natural causes, or whether it had happened by her own hand or by some other means.
Dr Ferrenby came directly from his surgery.
“Poor old Adelaide,” he said as he gazed upon her lifeless remains. “What a miserable life she had. Yes, Nick, she’s dead. I’ll certify that. But I can’t certify the cause of death, you’ll need a PM. I don’t like the look of that weedkiller. It’s not a murder though. Felo de se, you think?”
He used an old term for a suicide, a legal term meaning felon of one’s self, or unlawful death by one’s own hand. In the old days, a felo de se forfeited all his or her property and was given an ignominious burial in unconsecrated ground.
“Would it kill her?” I asked.
“Depends what’s in it, you’ll have to get the contents of the tin analysed. So there you are, Nick, old son; a sudden death for you to deal with.”
I radioed Sergeant Blaketon to inform him of the sudden death and to express an opinion, backed by the doctor, that there were no suspicious circumstances. I said it looked like natural causes, although suicide was just a possibility.
I then asked Sergeant Blaketon if he would arrange the despatch of the shell in a van from Eltering police station. The shell is really a makeshift coffin, which is used to carry away bodies in such cases, for the corpse needed to be removed to a mortuary as soon as possible.
He said he would arrange that and added, “If it’s suicide, Rhea, she might have left a note. Lots of ’em do, you know. You’d better search the house to see if you can find one.”
I did not relish that task. To search for a suicide note among such a mass of accumulated filth threatened to be a most awesome and horrible task, but it had to be done. I returned to the house, with the body still upstairs, as I began my hunt.
I found a writing bureau in a back bedroom. It contained a writing pad and envelopes and so I started there. I found no suicide note, but I did find a handwritten will, signed by Adelaide and correctly witnessed by two people, one of whom was a solicitor. The will was simply phrased and as I read it, I saw that she had no family or relations and had left all her wealth and possessions to the Salvation Army “In appreciation of the time you cared for me in London in 1949.” A Salvation Army captain at Eltering had been nominated as executor of her will. I wondered what they would do with all this rubbish, although the old cottage might have some value.
Then on a shelf above there was a Bible and so I decided to see if she’d placed a note within its pages -I had known that sort of thing to happen in some suicide cases.
But I was astonished at what I found. Between almost every page there was either a £1 note or a ten-shilling note; as I turned the pages, the Bible revealed a fortune. I looked in some other books — and there was more accumulated wealth, hundreds and thousands of pounds. I stopped and radioed for Sergeant Blaketon to visit me urgently at the cottage. I must have a witness for this; I had no wish to be accused of helping myself to any of this hoard and so I locked the doors and waited outside. In the police service, one is always open to accusations of taking property from houses in such circumstances. It is an accusation easy to make and difficult to refute.
“What’s going on, Rhea?” Sergeant Blaketon demanded as he climbed from his car half an hour later. “Why are you standing outside the house?”
I told him, and as I was explaining, the van with the shell arrived. Before dealing with the money, we removed the body and then Blaketon and I went back inside, with me showing him the hoard of cash.
“How much more is there?” he asked, looking around the rooms and wilting at the sight of the pile of books in the living-room. I went to one of them and opened it — its pages were lined with £1 notes. I opened another — it was the same, sometimes with £1 notes and sometimes containing ten-shilling notes and even fivers in some cases.
“There’s thousands, Sergeant,” I said. “Thousands.”
“We can’t leave this lot unguarded, Rhea,” he said. “What the hell can we do with it? It’ll need a furniture van to shift it and besides, it’s not really our problem, is it? Hasn’t she any relations who’ll see to it?”
I told him about the lack of relatives and of the will I’d discovered and he smiled. “Then let’s ring the Sally Army, shall we? This must all belong to them now, the house and its contents, and that executor she’s named can take charge. They can do the search, Rhea; they’ll be looking for money, not a suicide note. If they find one, ask them to hand it to you, although I reckon she died naturally. She looked natural, if you know what I mean. Anyway, you’d better remain on guard. I’ll get PC Rogers at Eltering to contact that Salvation Army officer named in the will, and ask him and his team to come here immediately. But you’ll have to stay on guard until they are in possession of their inheritance and I think I’ll get the duty solicitor to come along as well, just to make sure we’ve done the right thing.”
The alternative was for us to empty the house and place the entire contents in police premises for safe-keeping, but that demanded manpower and time, two things in very short supply. I thought Blaketon’s solution was a good one. He had enough trust in me to leave me alone with all that cash and while I was waiting for the Salvation Army to arrive I radioed Ashfordly police station to ask Phil Bellamy to arrange for the body to be taken to the pathology lab at Scarborough Hospital.
When Captain Rodney Blair arrived in his Salvation Army uniform, I explained what lay inside the premises and he said he knew Adelaide fairly well; she had often written to him and had great respect for the Army and its work following some unspecified assistance in London years ago. I formally handed over the house and contents to him and his fellow officers, then left the premises.
My next task would be to attend the post-mor
tem, probably sometime tomorrow, and one of the worst jobs was to prepare the body for the pathologist’s examination. But it all went well — Adelaide had died from natural causes. She had not consumed any weedkiller and we had no idea why the tin was in her hand as she had died. That was another mystery.
The big mystery, of course, was why she had lived in such poverty while hoarding so much money in her house. There was more than £100,000 and it all went to Salvation Army funds — although they did give £5,000 to our own police widows’ pension fund.
I have often pondered Adelaide’s fate, wondering why people deny themselves the necessities of life in order to leave enormous wealth, which they can never enjoy.
* * *
Another common form of miserliness is found in those with money who will spend it on large, expensive items but who will be mean to the extreme when it comes to the smaller essentials.
For example, I knew a man who would willingly spend up to £100 on a pair of shoes, but when the laces broke, he would not buy a new pair. He would tie knots in the broken laces or even made do with old laces from discarded shoes. Thus he walked around in beautiful shoes with tatty, odd-coloured laces.
In one of the moorland farms above Aidensfield was a lady whose actions puzzled me. She was called Betty Barton and I could never make up my mind whether she was mean or just lazy because she rarely emptied the teapot. She employed a massive metal pot, the kind one used to see on railway stations, in transport cafes and during events where lots of people gathered for tea, like agricultural shows or garden parties. It was one of those pots that could fill dozens of cups without being replenished and that’s how Betty operated.
Her massive teapot would permanently sit on the hearth, very close to the warmth of the blazing fire even in the height of summer, and whenever she wanted a cup of tea, she simply poured in hot water from the kettle that was always on the hob. The bottom half of the teapot was always full of old tea-leaves and, if the resultant brew was rather weak, she would simply add a spoonful or two of fresh leaves — without emptying the old ones. The thick mass of brown sludge at the bottom simply grew deeper and deeper, but Betty seemed to enjoy the drink that it produced. On one occasion, I was handed a mug of such tea and it was terrible, something akin to that which might have emerged from a witch’s cauldron.
CONSTABLE AROUND THE GREEN a perfect feel-good read from one of Britain's best-loved authors (Constable Nick Mystery Book 12) Page 10
