‘Dunno,’ said young Thomas, combing his beard with his fingers. ‘I’ve only been here five years. You get so used to seeing things like that, you don’t notice.’
Then two worried strangers came hurrying across dragging a screaming lost child.
The next thing to be pinched was an expensive Japanese camera. The victim, a college lecturer, had only put it down in the horse trough for a second, while he got out his telephoto lens. Then a fat lady had collapsed against him, come over all faint in the heat. By the time he’d got her to a bench, the camera was gone.
‘Where’s this fat lady now?’ asked Sergeant Nice. ‘Bet we won’t see hide nor hair of her again.’ The thief could not have picked a better accomplice to act as decoy.
But when they reached the scene of crime, the fat lady was still there, only partially recovered and surrounded by husband, five children, an aged aunt and the family from next door. No sneak-thief could afford to pay eleven decoys; especially as they gave local addresses which they were quite eager to have checked.
The third victim of theft, the same evening, was a young girl who had lost a wet bathing-costume wrapped in a sandy towel. Just put it down in the horse trough while she ran a comb through her long wet blonde hair. Her attention had been distracted when two cars collided at low speed, strewing the road with headlamp-glass.
Sergeant Nice’s head began to whirl. What kind of nut steals a camera one hour and a wet bathing-costume the next? What kind of nut uses the same modus operandi, in the same spot, three times running on the same day? Come to that, what kind of nut can make fat ladies faint, cars crash and street lamps short-circuit? I’m getting a touch of the sun myself, he thought, setting his white-topped cap more firmly on his head. He wouldn’t dare breathe a word of this, or he would get mentioned at the next Police Social. Then he sighed with relief. It’s all coincidence. People faint every day, cars crash, street lamps short-circuit. What’s new about this joker is that he waits for these things to happen, then takes advantage. Simple, really. Quite clever.
So when the constables reported in at the end of the day, he questioned them closely about funny, non-criminal incidents that had made people stare. The constables screwed up their faces. Like what, Sarge? He tried to explain, then had to turn away for a moment, to answer the phone. When he turned back, the constables were nudging each other, and they had a lot of trouble getting their faces straight again. Sergeant Nice had to be downright nasty in the end, to preserve discipline. Their gossip would be all over Oldcastle police canteen by tomorrow.
Still, they were able to report no unusual incidents that day, anywhere else but the clocktower. Nothing more unusual than women belting screaming kids, or young men sliding their hands down the backs of their girlfriends’ bathing-costumes. And those things happened every day in Graymouth in the season.
I must be getting paranoid in my old age, thought Sergeant Nice as he got into his striped pyjamas ready for bed. He was proud of knowing what ‘paranoid’ meant. Few of his colleagues did.
The following morning, council electricians came to repair the street light. Came grumbling. Why couldn’t Graymouth wait its turn in the queue? There were broken street lights all over the Oldcastle district. But this bugger in his white-topped cap, who thought he was God Almighty, had rung up their boss and disrupted their comfy work-schedule, demanding that they see to it immediately, because it might be a danger to the public.
Sergeant Nice slipped them a quid, in return for a detailed report on what had gone wrong with the lamp. This softened them; but they started giving him funny looks. OK, they giggled, as they were borne aloft on their yellow telescopic working-platform. Why mock the afflicted? A quid was a quid; a drink was a drink. Sergeant Nice knew what they were saying, but his back was broad.
They came across to the police station two hours later, sweating with effort and with a different look on their faces. They had never seen anything like it. Wire and junction-box were burnt right out – like arc-welding. Newly installed wire it had been, too, not a year old. And a brand new junction-box. Should have had a five-year life at least. Perhaps the moisture in the sea air?
‘It was early afternoon,’ said Sergeant Nice. ‘Boiling hot sunshine all day. And we haven’t had rain for a week. So where’s the moisture coming from?’
They shrugged. They had never seen anything like it, they repeated; but those lamps were old. They’d have been scrapped years ago, anywhere else but Graymouth.
‘It hadn’t been nobbled?’ asked Sergeant Nice.
‘Nobbled?’
‘Got at?’ He didn’t want to say the word, but in the end he had to. ‘Sabotaged?’
No chance of sabotage, they said. Why, they’d been an hour unscrewing things to get at the fault. The only other way – the power supply – would have blown every lamp in the street. Anyway, who’d want to sabotage a street lamp? Funny looks and nudges again. Now his name would be all over the council workmen’s canteen too.
He brooded so much over his lunch that his wife came to the conclusion that she needn’t have bothered cooking. Nothing ever actually stopped him eating; he liked his grub too much for that. But in this mood he’d eat baked beans on toast and never notice.
He brooded about gossip. Not gossip about himself, but gossip that would harm the good name of the town. God knew, times were hard enough for the shopkeepers without this. One day-tripper with a grievance could put off ten more from coming. Graymouth was becoming the place where you got your handbag pinched. People needed to be carefree on holiday; towels, trannies, picnic baskets left unattended all over the beach. If you couldn’t be a bit careless on holiday, when could you be? This johnny would have to be dealt with, quick.
Simple enough. Watch the clocktower like a hawk from young Thomas’s shop. The moment something funny began happening, head for the horse trough.
But it wasn’t quite that simple. Young Thomas didn’t mind him settling behind the fridge, staring out at the clocktower between two rows of nuddy-magazines hanging up outside the window. But the public minded. Even though he didn’t look round when they came in, he could feel their glances on the back of his neck, the sudden cautious muting of their voices. They hurried through their purchases; couldn’t wait to get out of the shop. Bought less than they would have done. Nobody loves a copper. He was ruining young Thomas’s trade. Worse, people would be talking about him, speculating about what he was up to. Sooner or later, the sneak-thief would overhear.
He went home and changed into khaki slacks and a beach shirt. He even opened the fridge for Thomas and handed out the correct number of raspberry lollies. Pretended to read a nuddy-magazine, full of girls who looked like pink plastic dolls, untouched by human hand. For the holiday-makers, he faded into the background. But the locals began to notice and make snide remarks about moonlighting and the police being poorly paid. And his own constables kept bringing him trivial matters, with stupid smirks on their faces. Still, he was a patient man.
At twenty past four, his patience paid off. Two dogs started a fight. Quite small dogs, but the howling and snarling sounded like murder at the zoo. In a second, Sergeant Nice had vaulted the fridge, knocked down a revolving rack of picture-postcards, caught it on the wing, handed it to an amazed woman customer and was running into the street, straight for the horse trough. This time . . .
There was a continuous desperate tooting from his right. It was as well he looked. An old Morris Minor, headlights blazing in the afternoon sunlight, was swerving wildly through scattering holiday-makers at a terrifying speed. Sergeant Nice leapt for his life, ending up with his face and palms embedded with the gravel of the road. He had just time to notice he’d torn the knee out of his slacks when there was a shrill screaming of brakes and a tremendous crash of glass from the sea end of Front Street. He turned to see the Morris Minor with its nose wedged in the glass skylights over the underground public lavatory, and a stream of men, like provoked soldier ants, issuing from the lavatory stairs,
alternately trying to comb glass out of their hair and do up the flies of their trousers. One, hopping like a kangaroo with his trousers round his ankles, obviously had more serious problems.
But first things first. Sergeant Nice ran on for the horse trough, leaving the flying uniformed figure of Constable Hughes to take charge of things at the sanitation end.
When he reached the clocktower, everyone was still watching the scene round the Morris Minor.
‘Anyone lost anything?’ he shouted. ‘Anybody had anything stolen?’
The holiday-makers didn’t understand at first; stared at him as if he was mad. Then a woman began that desperate looking round, that one pace forward and another back, that agitated moving of the hands and searching the already-searched that could only mean one thing.
‘Me handbag,’ she said, hand going to her plump throat. ‘I just put it down there for a moment . . .’
The dry, empty bottom of the horse trough leered up at Sergeant Nice.
‘Tell us again how it happened,’ said Sergeant Nice.
The driver of the Morris Minor could not have looked less criminal. He was only five foot three, with a Beatle haircut, large, sad, brown eyes and the wizened air of a retired jockey. He was accompanied by a wife and five kids, who testified steadily and vociferously to the truth of everything she said.
‘Oi’ve never done more than fifty in me loif.’ Shock had made the Brummy accent very strong. ‘The owld car won’t do more than fifty; she’s a toired old girl. Oi was looking for a place to park when it ’appened. She suddenly went mad.’
‘I’m glad you had the presence of mind to put on your headlights and sound your horn.’ Sergeant Nice felt entitled to a tiny sarcasm.
‘Oi didn’t switch the loits on. Moi ’and was nowhere near the ’orn.’
‘It wasn’t neither,’ said his wife. ‘’E just sat there, scared paraloised.’
‘Moi foot was nowhere near the accelerator neither. Oi had it on the broik, but it weren’t working. The car just seemed to go mad!’
‘The brakes worked in the end. Just before you hit the public lavatory.’
‘Oi know – that’s the funny thing. That’s just what Oi said to Ingrid ‘ere. Oi’m not driving that thing again – it can go to the scrapheap. And it only passed its MOT last week . . .’
In the end, they were very hard to get rid of. They sat around staring at Sergeant Nice as if he owed them some explanation. As they finally left the station, he could still hear the little Brummy’s voice raised in querulous indignation. ‘It just seemed to go mad . . .’
Sergeant Nice drew out a spotless white hanky and wiped his brow. He had done all he could. The man had been breathalysed; stone cold sober, his breath reeking of chips with vinegar bought further up the coast. The car had been sent to a garage to await the vehicle examiner, but the sergeant had a nasty feeling that it would be found fault-free, except for half a public lavatory skylight in the treads of its front tyres.
The dogs, it seemed, had finished their quarrel and vanished, in the very moment the car crash started. Nobody had noticed them again. The woman’s handbag had contained seventy-seven pounds in cash, a chequebook and cheque card.
Sergeant Nice decided to interview the two drivers involved in yesterday’s collision.
‘Well, all I can say is that the manhole cover should be there,’ said the man from the council, crossly. ‘It’s marked quite clearly on the plan. I mean, if this stretch of sewer got blocked, or fell in, things could get really nasty. We’d have to get down into it from the next manhole cover in St George’s Road, and that’s two hundred yards – and that’s a hell of a walk underground. I mean, this is a main sewer. Mind you, we do have trouble with manholes getting covered up – mainly by the country road maintenance lot. They’ll tarmac over a manhole cover as soon as look at you. Then the water board find out, and we cop it in the neck.’
‘There used to be a manhole cover here,’ said Sergeant Nice. ‘I remember it as a little lad. Made by J. Holcraft and Co., Sheffield. And look, you can still see the ornamental cobbles that surrounded it.’
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ said the man from the council. ‘I’ve got eyes.’
‘When would it last have been inspected?’
The man from the council gave him a curious look. ‘We don’t inspect them. We haven’t got the manpower to go round inspecting covers like that. We never know till the water board needs them, and then they complain and we get it in the neck.’
‘It would have been . . . noticed since 1902?’
‘What’s 1902 got to do with it?’ said the man from the council, suspiciously.
Sergeant Nice tapped the bronze date on the horse trough. This seemed to incense the man from the council.
‘’Course it will have been noticed. This sewer was totally refurbished in 1936 – it would have got new manhole covers then. There’ll have been men down this manhole a dozen times since then . . . we’re not idle, you know.’ He glared at Sergeant Nice. ‘Though what interest it is to you . . .’
He drove away finally in his new Ford Fiesta, vowing there would be trouble soon and implying it was all Sergeant Nice’s fault.
‘There were two phone calls while you were out,’ said Sergeant Nice’s wife. ‘One from the Chief Environment Health Officer and one from the Head of Traffic Police. They were both sorry you were out. Seemed to want to tell you to mind your own business and stop interfering with their departments. They’re both going to ring back. What bee have you got in your bonnet now?’ Sergeant Nice grunted, but didn’t bother to reply. Deep in thought, he was forking a lunch of baked beans on toast into his mouth. Three incidents in one minute were too much to stomach. Two dogs fighting (though the Oldcastle police would not strictly regard that as an incident), a highly dangerous car crash and the theft of a handbag. All occurring within fifty yards of the clocktower. And no other incidents reported that day in Graymouth at all, except a late-night fight behind the Priory Arms, two domestics and a slot machine broken into. And they were all routine.
What the hell was going on round the clocktower? What kind of criminal could set two dogs fighting, make a perfectly sound (and still perfectly sound) car go berserk in the hands of a timid, sober driver with a car load of little kids? Sergeant Nice delved into the depths of his knowledge. A conjurer – the quickness of the hand deceives the eye? Mass-hypnosis, which was supposed to lie at the bottom of the Indian Rope Trick? Sergeant Nice pulled himself back to reality sharply.
But two things were clear. Somebody (call him X) was stealing a wildly differing series of things from that horse trough. And X would go to the lengths of endangering life to make sure he was not observed. If two dogs fighting was not enough to bamboozle the police, then a crashing car was added. A pretty ruthless villain . . . Or was he? No lives had been lost. No serious injury. But there might have been.
Somehow, Sergeant Nice just knew that any attempt by a living copper to catch the thief red-handed would be met with yet another bizarre distraction. Which would succeed. There had to be another way . . . Suddenly, Sergeant Nice knew the answer. He began to chuckle to himself, then came right out of his dark mood. He pushed the rest of his lunch aside.
‘You know I can’t stand baked beans.’
‘Welcome home,’ said his wife, sarcastically.
Young Thomas didn’t mind having a cine-camera in his upstairs front bedroom. He didn’t even mind having a control-wire running down his stairs, to a control-box beside his till.
‘If anything starts in the street outside,’ said Sergeant Nice, ‘just press that button and it’ll start the camera.’
‘What do you mean, anything?’ asked Thomas.
‘Anything that would make you run to your shop door to watch. Like that street lamp blowing up, or two dogs fighting . . .’
‘Whatever turns you on,’ said Thomas. ‘But I wish you’d tell me what it’s all about. The wife’s being difficult, she says she always cleans the bedroom
on Wednesdays; and we can’t draw the bedroom curtains properly.’
‘I want to get film of that guy who’s lifting handbags.’
‘Keen,’ said Thomas. ‘Good as Kojak. Better than Kojak. Don’t use real policemen, use a newsagent – save the government money. The Chancellor’d love you.’
‘Be a good lad,’ said Sergeant Nice, coaxingly.
‘Does the Super know about this?’ Then Thomas looked sympathetic and said, ‘OK. I won’t split on you. I’ll leave that to the wife. I reckon she’ll take three days of it before she rings the Super.’
It took two days to work. Two whole, sunny days of total peace and quiet which drove Sergeant Nice to despair. Then, on the third morning, it happened. Another street light blew, even more spectacularly. There was a fair crowd round the clocktower at the time: motorbikers. They liked the firework display a lot. Danced wildly up and down trying to catch the glinting sparks as they showered down. When the party was over, they discovered they had lost six crash helmets and four pairs of real leather gauntlets. All of which had been piled, for safety, inside the horse trough. Sergeant Nice was a quarter of a mile away at the time. He had been forcing himself to move further and further away from the clocktower for two whole days; it had required great moral courage.
But Thomas was jubilant. ‘I pressed your button. We’ve got it – him, I mean.’
Sergeant Nice walked upstairs prudently, taking care not to hope for too much. Yes, the cine-camera on its tripod was still pointing in the right direction. Young Thomas’s wife hadn’t disturbed it in her cleaning or curtain-pulling. The 500 mm telephoto lens still enclosed a generous view of the clocktower. The electronic exposure meter was working, focus was perfect. The whole four minutes of film was used up, run through. Allowing himself moderate hope, Sergeant Nice removed the film from the camera.
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