‘Is this your car?’ I asked, pointing at the vehicle.
‘Yes … but I’m a nurse. State registered.’ She continued to fumble in her bag. ‘I’ve been visiting Mr Farthing there. Can’t leave the house, you see.’
‘Sorry, but I have to take your details. Leaving a car unattended with the engine running is an offence.’
Her face dropped. ‘Is there nothing you can … ?’
‘You will be reported.’
I took her name, address, occupation and age, and looked at her documents, entering the details into my notebook. The poor woman looked quite devastated by the whole thing, since she was only doing her job and would be late for her next appointment, she said.
The rain continued to pour down. As I walked home, the shoes the Inspector had given me filled up with water too. Perhaps, I thought, it was some kind of divine retribution for stopping nurses who leave their engines running while on the job.
It was three days before Christmas and the whole town was in a festive mood. I was passing through the town centre on my beat and soaking it all up. A small girl in a little red coat pointed at a shop window where a lifesize talking doll was being demonstrated. When you pulled a cord at its back it appeared to have a spectacular variety of words and phrases, although its mouth never moved, which was quite unnerving.
Outside the Town Hall, a Salvation Army brass band played Christmas carols, while a crowd stood humming along to the music, smiling, wrapped up in their winter coats, hats and gloves. I walked through and hugged my own coat round myself more tightly to keep out the sharp nip in the air.
My first ‘point’ was at the phone box on Market Place. After thirty minutes on the beat I stood there and waited, in case the station rang through. No one called, so I continued on down Station Road. Towards the end of my shift, one of my jobs was to check the church offertory box, so I walked into the Catholic church opposite the station and stood there for a while, out of the cold, in front of the huge stained-glass window.
The church was perfectly silent, the low winter sun shining through the glass, lighting up a group of angels hovering in the air around Jesus Christ, who pointed disconsolately up in the air. As I was leaving, Father Reilly came shuffling out from the back room.
‘Oh, you startled me! But I’m glad I’ve caught you. I’ve been meaning to pop by the station. I’ve something for you and the lads.’
‘Hello, Father. Merry Christmas,’ I said. ‘I just came in to check you hadn’t had any trouble with those thieves again.’
‘No, thank the Lord. I had a better lock fitted on the thing. Hopefully that’ll keep the dogs at bay, as it were. God knows, we could use all the money we can get these days, what with the vaults leaking.’
He disappeared for a moment and I noticed a small nativity scene, in which there appeared to be only two wise men. I supposed one must have got lost.
‘Here you go, my girl,’ said Father Reilly, handing me a small red package, ‘and give these to the boys with my blessings.’ He passed me another few parcels.
‘Thank you. What a treat.’
‘Well, nice to have something to open on Christmas Day. It can’t all be Jesus this and Jesus that.’
‘Quite,’ I said, unsure whether he was joking or not.
‘And will we be seeing you here for Mass?’
‘I have to work, I’m afraid. But Merry Christmas. And thank you.’
As I left the church with the bundle of packages I had just one more point to make before returning to the office. In the distance, on my way back down towards the railway station, I could see two shapes capering about in the road outside the phone box. Two ladies were standing next to them, waving their arms about in a panic.
I couldn’t make out what they were looking at, at first. It looked like two giant rabbits hopping up and down, but, as I got nearer, I realized it was a pair of goats, with small shaggy beards, floppy brown ears and wild orange eyes, standing in the road. They might cause an accident, I thought, and ran over as fast as I could.
‘Hoy, what’s happening? Are you OK?’
‘Oh, thank goodness you’re here! We weren’t sure what to do. They looked so wild,’ said one of the women, who was struggling with her shopping bag, trying to stop one of the goats pecking at it.
‘Do they bite, do you know?’ asked the other woman, who had backed away so far up the grass verge she was almost on the railway line.
Together we started trying to herd the goats off the road, but our shouts of ‘shoo’ and ‘hey you’ failed miserably. They just wouldn’t budge. Then they started wheeling around us, thinking we were playing a game, and then around each other.
And there was the rumble of the mid-afternoon bus. It came hurtling down the hill, blasting its horn.
‘That’s our bus!’ shouted the other lady, who had gradually crept down off the verge. ‘Will you be all right?’ she asked. ‘Only we’re late as it is.’
‘Yes, of course. You go.’
I was just wondering how to get the goats tied up when Francesco, one of the mechanics from the garage by the railway station, saw me struggling. He dropped his cigarette and grabbed a long piece of rope from the workshop.
‘You go that side. I’ll run them this way,’ he shouted over to me. ‘We’ll meet in the middle and get the rope round them both.’
I ran round the side of one goat and Francesco ran the other way, but no matter how hard we tried, they kept managing to slip through the middle of us. One of the goats got past us and ran into the garage shop, round and round the aisles, knocking things off the shelves, before running back through the door past a customer, who let out a terrified squeal.
‘I’ve got one!’ yelled Francesco finally, tying the rope round it and tethering it to the railings in front of the garage. ‘You run the other one this way and I’ll catch the little blighter.’
I ran up behind the remaining animal with my arms out, and it plunged straight for Francesco, who managed to catch it and hold it steady by the torso. He tethered it with the other goat.
‘Team work, eh? What’s this anyway? You’re taking the goats for a walk, or what?’
‘I found them up the road there. They must have escaped from old McGregor’s farm. Thank goodness you were here!’
‘Hey. Call me Doctor Doolittle. That was a lot of goat for one young lady to handle alone.’
One of the animals started nibbling his shoe.
‘Maybe they’re hungry?’ I suggested. ‘Shall we take them up there by the grass and they can eat while I get the farmer?’
As Francesco tied them up on the grass verge they started bleating at the tops of their lungs again, but soon began chomping away. Francesco came with me up the lane to fetch Farmer Joe. The last time I’d seen Francesco I was checking on the aliens in the town, and he’d been just a person on my list. I really knew nothing about why he was living here in England or where he came from. We chatted as we walked.
‘My father, he was a doctor. No fascista. He was against Mussolini. He lived in Bardi, north Italy. Came to England, found good job here. But when Italy joined the war – I was sixteen – many were taken. It was the middle of the night and they took him. My father was taken, put on a boat, like so many cattles.’
‘Where did they take him?’
‘The boat was heading for Canada. He met an officer from the British army on the boat. Well, he was lucky. My father had been this officer’s doctor in London before the war. So he asked my father to join them at the top table, with all the silver knives and forks and wine flowing. But my father, he said no, I will stay with my brothers. And he stayed in the lower decks with the others. Class, jobs, all that meant nothing. Just all Italians together.’
‘So then what happened? Did he end up in Canada?’
‘So many bodies.’ Francesco looked down sadly. ‘Isn’t that your Farmer Joe up there? Maybe I finish the story another day?’
Joe, with his wispy grey hair and baggy trousers, was standi
ng in a field, drinking from a flask of tea. Bertie the bullock, who was, by now, more of a fully grown bull, nudged the gate with his nose as we approached and I backed away.
‘Afternoon, Joe.’
‘Ah, thee again, eh? Come for some more tea? The wife’s not here. She’s at her sister’s.’
‘Not this time. I think we’ve found something that belongs to you. You’re not missing two little kid goats, by any chance?’
‘I was wondering where they’d got to. Beautiful. Not even a year old yet. Such lovely ears.’
‘They’re certainly characters. But they could have caused an accident. We’ve had to tie them up down the lane, I’m afraid. And I’ll have to take down your details, report you for allowing stock to stray onto the highway. Again.’
‘Will you, indeed?’ he said, apparently unmoved, and continued to drink his tea. ‘Well, I think you know most of my details already, don’t you?’
He did have a point, but I wrote them down in my notebook in any case, along with the time and date.
‘If you could make sure you lock them up securely in future, hopefully this will be the last time we meet like this, over escaped livestock …’ I thought about his wife, remembering all her ailments and the squalid conditions up at the farm. ‘How is Mrs McGregor, by the way?’
‘She’s alive. Which is something, I suppose. We’ve sold over a hundred turkeys this year already. Nice and fat too. So Christmas is good for something at least. All the lads want is time off and holidays, though, and then there’s the wife’s sister and her three children to come and we have to feed them and they make such a noise my head hurts.’
‘Well. I am sorry to have to report you for this. But you know the law.’
‘Aye, lass. I know the law.’
When I got back to the station, there was a hubbub in the parade room. Two of the lads from the station, Ben Carter and Bill Bryant, were in various states of undress, or with their shirts hanging out, at any rate.
‘Ooh. Excuse me!’ I said as I walked in, and was about to turn and leave.
‘You’ll be next,’ said Ben. ‘We’re all being measured for our new best uniforms.’
A man with a neatly trimmed beard, small spectacles and an impeccable pinstriped suit came in, holding a large leather tape measure. He bent down and held it against Bill’s legs, then measured his chest size and arm length.
‘Afternoon. Perhaps you’d prefer to be measured … elsewhere? So the gentlemen won’t know your … ahem … measurements?’ he whispered to me.
‘Right, yes. Of course. I’ll go and wait in the corridor.’
I looked at the peeling paint on the ceiling until the tailor came back.
‘All done with the lads. I’ve done a few women, but we don’t see many in the force and few of the fairer sex buy my kind of suit,’ said the tailor as he walked down the corridor towards me.
‘Yes, there aren’t many of us. Only nine in North Riding in total.’ I brushed myself down. ‘So where do you want me?’
‘If you could just take your jacket off that will be fine.’
He ran the tape measure along the length of my arms, and made a note in a small book.
‘So … what makes a young lass like you want to get mixed up with all this criminal element? Just hold your arms out, stretched like this. All those murderers and thieves! Can’t be much fun. With things the way they are these days. All those stories in the papers.’
‘I suppose I wanted to get out of Scarborough. Try something different. An adventure, maybe. And it’s really not that bad here. Most people are all right.’
‘If you say so. Well, good luck, that’s what I say. There should be more like you. Women who have a go.’
Once I was all measured up, I went back into the office, and Sergeant Cleese called me over to the desk.
‘We’re serving a distress warrant this afternoon,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘Not a pretty job before Christmas, I grant you. But the law’s the law, whatever the time of year.’
I knew what a distress warrant was from training. If someone hadn’t paid a debt, or had taxes owing, then property could be seized and sold to pay it off. We had to go and make it official, identify any goods of value that could be sold and put a notice on them.
As we drove out of the town, I began to recognize the road. It wasn’t on my beat in Richmond, but I had been there before, with Sergeant Hardcastle. It was one of the villages to the north of town, where the cottages all had neat little front gardens. We knocked on the door; there was a familiar stone gnome on the garden lawn, holding a wheelbarrow.
Sergeant Cleese knocked loudly and we waited for a while, but no one came. I thought I saw a shape move past the window, but there was no answer. He knocked again and called through the letterbox.
‘She’s in there all right,’ he said to me. ‘Mrs Taylor? We know you’re at home. Please answer the door. You don’t want to make things any worse for you and the girls, do you?’
Still no answer. Then light footsteps on the stairs and the door slowly opened. A small girl with bright blonde hair stood on the threshold, clutching a formerly white teddy bear with only one eye. I remembered her as one of the two young daughters from the incest/bigamy case. The woman, Mrs Taylor, had turned out to have two husbands at the same time, and a daughter from each. We had suspected her husband of indecency with his own daughter, but it had turned out that the second husband had been abusing the older girl, his stepdaughter. They had tracked him down somewhere in Lancashire eventually, but that was the last I had heard.
‘Hello,’ said Sergeant Cleese, bending down. ‘Is your mother at home?’
‘She said to tell you she’s not in,’ said the little girl, glancing briefly over towards the living room door. ‘And that she’ll be out all day. It’s Christmas soon. Do you know what St Nicholas is bringing me?’
‘What’s that?’
‘A bicycle. I saw it!’ she grinned. ‘He’s already brought it. Early. And hid it in Mam’s bedroom. But I found it. It’s red and has a bell and a basket, and everything. But don’t tell I told you!’ She looked away, suddenly nervous.
Perhaps realizing that her daughter had engaged us in too much conversation, and that we were not likely to be leaving in a hurry, Mrs Taylor emerged from the living room and walked over, flattening down her apron.
‘Oh, officers. I didn’t realize you were here. I was quite occupied with … some things. What are you doing, Jessica? What silly things you say sometimes. Don’t mind the child, she has the wildest thoughts. Don’t know where they come from sometimes. What can I help you with? Is it about my husband, because I thought that was all …’
‘Not this time. I’m sorry, but we’re here to serve a distress warrant. Do you know what that is?’
‘I do, officer, but … if it’s about the rent, I told Mr Shuttleworth I’d pay all of it after Christmas. With Clive in prison and the girls … I’m getting another job, nights, at the hospital. And Saturdays at the shop. I barely see them as it is.’
‘Can we come in, Mrs Taylor? I’m afraid it’s not that simple. The money has to come from somewhere.’
As we walked around her house, I noticed there was a strong smell of damp and mould. There wasn’t much of any value that I could see either. A lot of thing things that had been in there before, the Indian sculptures and silks, had gone. A small wireless sat on the side in the kitchen, along with a few plates and a hand whisk. In the living room there was a shabby-looking brown sofa and an elephant’s foot, which had been turned into a stool.
‘From India,’ Mrs Taylor said sadly, then quickly added, ‘but it’s not worth much.’
Upstairs, there were two bedrooms. In the girls’ room was a row of ragged teddy bears and, in Mrs Taylor’s bedroom, a dressing table with a hairbrush, some make-up and a wooden box.
‘What’s this?’ asked Cleese, looking up at a large grandfather clock with pictures of moons and stars across the face.
‘That’s my m
other’s. It’s all I have left of her. We sold the mirror and this is all there is.’
Without saying a word, Cleese took out a notice and stuck it on there.
‘What’s … what are you doing?’ asked Mrs Taylor, rubbing her hands together in distress.
‘What’s that?’ asked Cleese, indicating a necklace on the sideboard.
‘It’s fake. Costume jewellery …’
‘Hmm.’ He moved on, looking for any other items of value. ‘Rhodes.’
‘Yes, Sergeant,’ I answered, unsure what was going to happen next.
‘Put a notice on that, would you?’
‘On what?’ I said, looking around, for there was really very little in the room at all. Then I saw what he was pointing at. In the corner, behind the bedstead, complete with bell and basket, was a shiny red child’s bicycle.
Christmas was a day like any other at the station, although it was quieter. I was on lates, so I saw my landlady’s children open up their presents in the morning, ate Christmas lunch and then worked in the afternoon. Michael got a bright green railway engine to add to his collection, which occupied him for the rest of the day. Fiona was delighted to receive one of those talking dolls, which, after some demonstration, I discovered was also capable of crying real tears like a baby if you filled its head with water.
‘Shame you’ll miss this afternoon. We were going to play a game,’ Janet said as she cleared the plates away.
I had put on my new uniform from the tailor’s, crisp and smelling of fresh wool. It was a relief, as my previous kit had been secondhand and never quite fitted properly.
‘Well, Christmas is just another day really, isn’t it?’ I said, trying not to mind. ‘But I’m sure you’ll all have fun.’
In reality, I missed my family and wondered what they were all doing. I had received a small package from Mam containing some satsumas and nuts, and a lovely green brooch. ‘For your next dance’ she had written in the card in her tiny handwriting. I had told her in my letters about going up to Catterick and seeing all the handsome officers, though for some reason I had decided not to mention Jim.
Bobby on the Beat Page 15
