Bobby on the Beat

by Pamela Rhodes

  Doris was quite glamorous-looking outside work, and always seemed well turned out in gloves and a hat, with curled dark hair, which she normally tied back at work. She spent a lot of time talking about her boyfriends. She had a succession of them but they all seemed to be called Henry.

  ‘Henry’s got a car!’ she said excitedly one Saturday, as we tucked into a large piece of Mrs Philpot’s finest carrot cake between us. ‘You can take the roof off and everything. Oh, it’s beautiful, Pam, you should see it. I think it’s really essential a man drives these days. Don’t you?’

  ‘I hadn’t given it much thought. I suppose it’s quite useful. But expensive. And a bit scary, don’t you think? They go so fast.’

  ‘My last Henry, with the limp – not dark-haired Henry, the other one – he didn’t drive. After a while I got so bored with walking everywhere, and buses. Waiting around for hours. Now we can just hop in and go where we like. It’s freedom, that’s what it is.’

  She sat back and closed her eyes, smiling, as if deep in the memory of a particularly unforgettable country drive, then she sat back up suddenly.

  ‘Ooh, by the way, have you heard?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, I could be wrong, but I heard the Spec on the phone to HQ about it the other day. I could be wrong, but I think we’re to be joined by another woman.’

  ‘Really? Gosh. I wonder what she’ll be like.’

  ‘Well. I don’t like to pry, you know me. But I did happen to catch sight, quite by accident, of a document on the Super’s desk. I was just dusting. Anyway, it said she’d be arriving in the next week or two.’

  ‘So soon!’

  ‘I’m surprised they haven’t mentioned it to you.’

  ‘So am I.’

  When the Inspector called me into his office the following Monday, I had to feign surprise at the news of a new female PC.

  ‘You know how much we value you, and your contribution at Richmond,’ he said, putting his hat on the desk beside him and settling into his chair. ‘But I’m aware it’s a lot for one person. There may also be another opportunity for you coming up.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘But we’ll discuss that later.’

  ‘Right. I suppose it will be good to have someone to cover the other shifts. What with things getting so busy.’

  ‘Exactly what I said. Now that we’re used to having a woman around, we might as well make the most of them. She starts on Monday. I trust you’ll make her welcome. Jeanette Farthing. That’s her name. Like the coin.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  All week, I wondered what Jeanette would be like. Although we had Doris, I had got used to being the only WPC at the station. It wasn’t so much that I would resent another woman, more that it would take a slight shift of identity. I wouldn’t be unique any more.

  Jeanette arrived at the station the following Monday. She was quite a bit taller than me, a couple of inches at least, with dark glossy hair which looked long, somehow, despite being well above shoulder length. Her uniform was immaculate, and everything about her seemed to ooze confidence.

  ‘Morning. You must be Pam. I’ve heard so much about you from Dorry,’ she held out her hand. Doris was leaning over the desk, facing her and smiling.

  ‘Welcome to Richmond,’ I said. ‘You seem to have settled in already.’

  ‘Yes. I’m like that. I always just fit in, wherever I am. I don’t know how.’

  ‘Jeanette was telling me about her last job,’ Doris said. ‘She worked in a slaughterhouse for a whole year! Can you imagine? Such guts.’

  They both laughed uproariously.

  ‘No, actually I worked in an office,’ Jeanette said after they’d stopped laughing. ‘Nowhere near as interesting – but a lot less blood. Most of the time.’

  More laughter.

  As it turned out, I hardly ever saw Jeanette. Whenever I did cross shifts with her she seemed to spend a lot of time talking to Doris. And it wasn’t long before I was sent on my own little journey. I would soon put Richmond, and everyone in it, behind me altogether, for a while at least.

  ‘There’s someone in reception. Says she’ll only talk to you,’ said Sergeant Shaw as I put down my handbag on the desk. I was on the afternoon shift, and had just said hello to Doris, who was in the corner, typing.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘An elderly lady. Something about marmalade. She said she wants the police lady.’

  I walked out to the front and there was Mrs Colbert, sitting on the bench, hunched over her walking stick. She looked as though she had been crying; her nose was all red and her cheeks were flushed.

  ‘Look, Gladys, here’s the lady police officer. She’ll take you home and we can sort this out.’

  Sergeant Shaw took me aside. ‘Swears blind she had some marmalade or something, and now she can’t find it. Says she’s looked everywhere. Thinks they might have had an intruder. In the night. You better go with her and check.’

  ‘Come along, Mrs Colbert,’ I said, helping her up.

  ‘Will you catch them?’ she said and wiped her nose.

  ‘I hope so. Let’s go and see anyway. I’m sure it’s probably nothing.’

  We walked past the workhouse, where people with no homes or jobs were taken. I wondered who was in there now and how you’d end up in a place like that. As we shuffled up the street, I looked down and noticed that Mrs Colbert was wearing her slippers again. They used to be pink, but now they were all blackened at the edges, from walking about outside, no doubt. The last time I had seen her she had been in the cemetery on Christmas Day, looking for her dead husband. Before that, she was wandering up the street and her daughter had been out of her mind with worry. Perhaps they can’t cope, I thought. The daughter worked full-time as a nurse and couldn’t keep an eye on her mother through the day.

  ‘So tell me what happened, exactly? With the marmalade or the noise or whatever?’

  ‘Well. I woke up in the morning, as usual, and went downstairs. I fed Billy, but I had thought to myself that I’d heard a noise. Scraping. I was making my breakfast. Searched everywhere for the marmalade. Everywhere.’

  Her voice rose and was getting quicker as she spoke. She had on a lot of powder puff and blue eye shadow, and spoke through nervously pinched lips.

  ‘Cupboards, drawers, even in the cellar. Salt, pepper, butter, Spam, all there. But no marmalade. I seem to forget everything these days so I even looked in the garden. Just in case. Since my husband went, things just don’t seem to be as they were. Things … move, of their own accord.’

  She looked warily into the middle distance as though she had got quite used to being haunted by one thing or another.

  When we got to her daughter’s house, we both began looking through the cupboards again. The kitchen was filled with washing up – her daughter had obviously been too busy to tidy up before she had to be at work again.

  ‘Did you have it at breakfast yesterday?’ I asked as I rooted through the sink and then tried to remove a sticky substance which had made its way into my sleeve.

  ‘No, I don’t think so. No. I had porridge yesterday. I think. Or was that the day before? Oh, I don’t know any more.’

  After a while she began to look sheepish and looked away, then up at me with small eyes.

  ‘Well, I may have had it yesterday. Perhaps I finished it. I don’t know. Oh, Lord.’

  She sat down on a rickety chair at the kitchen table and started to cry again, her head in her hands.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘We all make mistakes. Did you eat it then?’

  ‘I think so.’ She looked over at the sink.

  I rummaged around in the pile of washing up and there it was, the empty marmalade jar.

  ‘Is this it?’

  ‘Yes. But I thought I … I don’t know what I thought any more.’

  ‘Well, that’s a relief to find it anyway, isn’t it?’ I tried to sound chirpy.

  ‘Oh, please, don’t be cross. I’m so stupid
. To have brought you all the way down here.’

  ‘I’m not cross. Don’t be silly.’

  I was doing my best to comfort the woman, but feared that her state of confusion had gone beyond anything I could help with.

  ‘Well, at least you know you haven’t had any intruders anyway, don’t you?’

  For one brief moment of clarity she seemed to agree, but it was all too short-lived.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I do. I know that much. Don’t I?’

  When I got back to the station, the Inspector wanted to see me in his office. I racked my brains as to whether I had done anything wrong. There was that little boy who had fallen over on the road when I was on the school crossing patrol. But nothing seemed to have come of that. Or might I have filed something in the wrong place, or made a mistake with my typing?

  ‘Sit down,’ said the Inspector. I couldn’t read his expression.

  The walls of his office were lined with legal books, and on the desk was a photo of his wife and their two daughters, twins in matching dresses and hair ties.

  ‘I’ve got some exciting news for you,’ he said, leaning back and fiddling with his pen. I relaxed; at least it wasn’t a telling off, then.

  ‘Have you ever been to Redcar? On the coast up north.’

  ‘No, I haven’t, sir.’

  ‘Well, they’re looking for a WPC during the coming busy period, and now that we’ve got Jeanette, we can spare you. So HQ has asked for you to be transferred for the summer, to help with the tourist season.’

  ‘Oh, right. Well. That should be different.’

  ‘It should be a change. Anyway, you’ll be leaving next week. That gives you the rest of the week to find some digs. Shouldn’t be too hard, but ask if you need any help. Be pleasant to take in the sea air at any rate, I’m sure. Wish I was going too, to be honest with you.’

  I had just less than a week to sort out some new digs; and I had to let my landlady, Janet, know I’d be leaving. She was quietly relieved, I think, if truth be told. Her children were getting older now, and the house seemed to be getting smaller and messier by the day.

  I telephoned Mam from a pay phone and told her my news.

  ‘She’s moving to Redcar,’ she called out to my dad, who was listening to a new comedy on the radio. ‘The Goon Show. I can’t get him off of it,’ she said to me. ‘He laughs for hours.’

  ‘Isn’t that where Annie and Colin moved to?’ he called back, and then I heard him laugh loudly at a man with a funny voice.

  ‘Ooh, yes, you must get in touch with them. They’re bound to know somewhere you can stay.’

  So she gave me the details of their friends, and Annie immediately offered to put me up for the summer. They had no children, so plenty of room, she said. Well, I thought, at least that’s sorted.

  On my last day at Richmond, I sat in the station office and finished off my final report. I was about leave when Sergeant Shaw came over and produced a small brown package tied up with string.

  ‘For the journey. We thought you could use it.’

  I opened it up and it was a large bar of chocolate.

  ‘We all chipped in,’ said Peter.

  ‘That’s kind!’ I said. ‘Delicious. Thank you.’

  ‘You might even meet a nice man out there,’ said Doris. ‘You never know, all that sea air and those sunsets. Bit of romance.’

  ‘More to the point, look out for those donkeys,’ Ben warned. ‘They can give you a right good kick in the shins if you stand behind them.’

  ‘Thanks for that. Thank you all. I’ll see you in a few months then.’

  8

  As I stepped off the bus, the air in Redcar smelled different from Richmond; it reminded me of home. There was that familiar sound of gulls squawking overhead, and the open, fresh feel of a salty sea breeze that had accompanied so much of my teenage life. The roads were already filling up with holidaymakers in their cars, and several families trooped off the bus with me, carrying bags and big sun hats.

  It wasn’t actually sunny, and in fact there was a sharp easterly breeze. But it didn’t stop people leaping about in the sea, building sandcastles and playing cricket on the beach. Dads sat reading the newspaper with handkerchiefs on their heads, while their children dug huge holes and buried each other in the sand. Girls showed off the latest in swimwear, splashing about in the sea laughing, climbing on each other’s shoulders or dunking each other under the water.

  I tried to find the police station from the instructions I had written down myself on a piece of paper, but I struggled to read them. In the end, I had to ask someone, and by the time I found it I was exhausted from my travels.

  Redcar was a much bigger station than Richmond; it was a rather imposing and grand red-brick building which went back for quite a long way. I waited around in the main entrance until a sergeant came over and called me in.

  ‘Rhodes?’ he asked, without smiling. ‘You’re later than I was expecting.’

  ‘Yes, sorry, I got a bit lost.’

  ‘Well. You need to be punctual here. Sit down. I’m Sergeant Ditchburn. The duty sergeant. We’ve got seven other PCs, and now two WPCs. And Inspector Sharpe – you won’t see much of him, but he’s in charge from on high, as it were.’

  As we sat down, Sergeant Ditchburn began picking his nails. He had a sharp pointy nose, and had scraped his remaining hair across his bald patch. He had the air of someone who is always just a little bit put out by life. Behind him, in the office, there were two female clerks noisily typing, but neither of them said hello or even looked up.

  ‘You won’t need to do any office duties here. That’s all taken care of. Everything here has its place, though heaven knows it’s a struggle to keep them all in check sometimes. I suppose you want to know what you’ll be doing then? Why we’ve brought you here?’

  ‘That would be nice. Yes.’

  ‘Patrolling the seafront mainly. Moving on cars, giving directions, that kind of thing. We don’t have any females stationed here usually. But they’re bringing in two this summer. So we’ll be positively overrun.’

  As he didn’t smile, I wasn’t sure whether it was a very dry joke or a serious comment, so I kept quiet and sat with my hands in my lap waiting for his next move.

  ‘You and another girl. A Miss Treadwell. Maureen Treadwell.’

  I sat up. The name sounded familiar. Where had I heard it before? Then I remembered: it must be Maureen from Scarborough! Jane had introduced us and I’d given her some advice about the questions which came up in the exam and that kind of thing. But I hadn’t heard from her since. Well I never! Maureen Treadwell had got into the police too, then.

  ‘What’s wrong with you, girl? You look like you’ve had a horrible vision.’

  ‘Sorry. No. I was just thinking. I know Maureen. Miss Treadwell. From home.’

  ‘Hmm. Anyway. Report for duty tomorrow and I’ll get PC Featherstone to show you your beats. Any questions?’

  My head was full to the brim with questions, but I didn’t dare ask Sergeant Ditchburn any of them.

  When I arrived at my new digs, I was nearly in tears. I was so tired and Sergeant Ditchburn hadn’t seemed at all friendly. I was relieved when Annie answered the door with a beaming smile.

  ‘Come in, come in. You look shattered.’

  She was plump, not very tall and always seemed to be wearing her apron. Her short grey hair was covered with a scarf, and she had permanently rosy cheeks as though she had just emerged from a boiler room.

  ‘You’re just in time for tea. Come and sit down.’

  I was so exhausted I could have fallen down and slept right there and then. But my hunger got the better of me. As we sat down at the table, to my relief there was none of the fuss over cutlery I’d had with Sergeant Freeman, just a single knife and fork and a nice chicken pie.

  Colin was at the table already, with a napkin tucked into his shirt, drinking a bottle of stout.

  He had on an oversized green cardigan and sli
ppers, and was small and skinny compared to his wife. Despite their size difference, they had the look of a couple who have been together for so long that they’ve started to resemble one another in mannerisms and facial expressions.

  ‘I’d better watch what I say with the law in the house. Have you arrested anyone then?’ asked Colin, gulping down his pie.

  ‘Not really, no,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, leave the poor girl alone,’ said Annie. ‘He’s always winding people up. Ignore him.’

  ‘How do you know my mam and dad?’ I asked.

  ‘Your father and I worked for Mr Saville, this millionaire in Bradford. Made his money in textiles. I was his driver for ten years. Your father was his PA. He lost the lot, though, the millionaire, in the depression.’

  ‘The whole fortune,’ said Annie. ‘Can you believe? He just wouldn’t lay people off. Nice, I suppose, but in the end everyone lost their jobs so …’

  ‘Anyway, yes, so he had to lay a lot of us workers off. Your father, being the kind of bloke he is, he set up his own business, as you know.’

  ‘I understand he’s quite successful now, isn’t he? Your father?’ asked Annie.

  ‘Yes. I think so. Well, we’ve got a telephone anyway!’

  They laughed when I said this, but I wasn’t sure why.

  ‘Good man. So, anyway, we decided to move out of town. I found a job at the steel works. Made foreman eventually. And here we are.’

  ‘Wouldn’t live anywhere else now. I need to be by the sea,’ Annie said. ‘How’s your mother, by the way? I’ve been meaning to write to her.’

  ‘Good, I think. The tourist business is doing really well in Scarborough and she takes care of a lot of the financial side and everything now.’

  After the pie, Annie brought out a large bowl of rhubarb and custard and we all tucked in.

  ‘Redcar was a Victorian seaside resort, you know. Queen Victoria came here and everything, probably,’ said Colin, after we had finished eating.

  ‘No, she didn’t. You’re thinking of Hull,’ Annie told him.

  ‘Why’s there a street named after her, then?’

  ‘I don’t know. Probably the Jubilee, or something. Anyway, love, I have to ask: what’s it like being a policewoman? Do you get much … trouble or anything, from the lads, ever? Or tricky criminals to deal with and things like that?’