CONSTABLE IN DISGUISE a perfect feel-good read from one of Britain's best-loved authors (Constable Nick Mystery Book 9)

by NICHOLAS RHEA

  ‘Ah, Mr Rhea. Such a nice surprise. We seldom get a visit by the police.’

  The Reverend Jason Chandler was a curious man, in my view. He had done several jobs before entering the ministry of the Church of England, including being a coastguard and a salesman of women’s lingerie, and he lived a life remote from the parishioners. He seldom entered the social life of the area and, as a bachelor, found it difficult to mix with the families whom his church served. In his late forties, he was always pleasant when I met him.

  ‘Mr Chandler,’ I began, ‘I’ve an odd event to enquire about,’ and I related the story of Mr Bradley’s remains being found by the hiker.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said without hesitation. ‘He was in my congregation this morning, Mr Rhea. A congregation of one, I might add. And then he collapsed and died. He was sitting in the first pew, so I laid him out and put a sign up asking for prayers. I do hope he goes to Heaven, Mr Rhea. He was a truly generous man, a keen supporter of our little church at Briggsby.’

  ‘Did you call the doctor?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, no. I, well, had reached the most solemn part of the service, preparing for communion, you know, when it happened, I had reached the consecration of bread and wine and could not interrupt that . . . so when I got to him, it was clear he was dead. I was a coastguard, you know, very highly trained in first aid, and, well, there was no doubt about it. He was too late to receive communion, you know. He passed away just a few minutes too soon, and I know that would not have pleased him. He did like to receive communion, Mr Rhea. Anyway, calling a doctor would have been a total waste of time, far too late to revive him. Far too late. God works in mysterious ways, Mr Rhea.’

  ‘You can say that again!’ I could not help myself uttering that remark. ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘After I’d laid him out, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, nothing. I felt I ought to put the sign on him to tell visitors he was dead, rather than asleep. People do fall asleep in church, as I’m sure you know, but I felt I ought to make it quite clear that this was a dead man.’

  ‘Which you did. Then what?’

  ‘Well, I had another service immediately afterwards, at Crampton, and had to leave straight away, otherwise I would have kept that congregation waiting — Lord and Lady Crampton always attend on Thursdays, you see.’

  ‘It’s a few minutes’ drive to Crampton, eh?’

  ‘Yes,’ he oozed. ‘There is not a moment to spare on that trip, and I had to be on time . . . I knew Mrs Dodson would see to Mr Bradley. She does his cottage, you know. She’s the church cleaner, as well, so I knew he was in good hands. It’s her day in, you see, and I knew she would find him. She was due to do the brasses today and, well, I felt she could not help noticing him.’

  ‘She didn’t go in this morning.’ I sighed, wondering how on earth people could behave like this, and added for good measure, ‘The head fell off her brush.’

  ‘Oh, dear, I do hope she gets it fixed. That church floor does get very dusty, from the road, you know, passing traffic . . .’

  I had found the last person to see poor old Mr Bradley when he was alive, and I had an account of his final moments, such as they were. After taking a formal statement from the Reverend Mr Chandler, I left him to his gardening and wondered how he would have coped as a coastguard if a ship was about to be grounded. Maybe he would have left it for a fisherman to sort out — which might explain why he was no longer a coastguard.

  The post-mortem examination showed that Mr Bradley had died from natural causes, from a heart attack, in fact. There would be no inquest.

  We did find his relatives, and they took the body home for burial. I did not tell them of the odd circumstances of the discovery of his body, merely saying he had died in church while attending a service.

  That knowledge seemed to offer them some consolation, so I did not say that he had missed Holy Communion.

  Sad though sudden death is, there are times when coping with corpses is akin to a black comedy.

  Three large policemen, one of whom was myself, once had the tricky job of manoeuvring the corpse of an eighteen-stone man down a narrow, winding staircase while the grieving family sat in a room at the foot of the stairs. The problem was that the corpse had only one leg, so there was precious little to grip as we took it away for a post-mortem. The truth was the fellow got away from us on those stairs and bumped his way down the flight until he ended in a heap on the front door mat. Fortunately the door into the room was closed, and so the relatives never saw what happened; it was also fortunate that the front door was closed, otherwise the one-legged body would have rolled into the street and directly into a bus queue standing outside. The result might have been something like a game of giant skittles.

  We had a similar task when a huge woman collapsed on the top of a lighthouse; we had to slide her down the winding staircase because it was impossible to lift her and impossible to manoeuvre the coffin-sized shell around the tight corners. We made use of a card table top and sat her upright on that, then used it as a kind of sledge with her on board. I’m sure the trip gave her a posthumous thrill — it frightened the life out of us, for we felt sure the contraption would escape from our hands on the descent. But it didn’t.

  I had to admire the improvisation skills of a colleague at Strensford, when he came across a dead man at the back of a pub one Saturday lunchtime. A regular at the pub had found the corpse and thought it was merely a drunk sleeping off his over-indulgence. Because this route led in from the car park, however, and because it was also a busy alley leading to several shops, my colleague had to think fast. He was alone, the local police van was in use at Thirsk Races, and the shell was being utilised at another sudden death. He did not like to leave his body lying on a busy thoroughfare with women and children passing by every few seconds, so he borrowed a wheelbarrow from the landlord, sat the still-warm corpse in it and placed one or two beer bottles around it. Thus the corpse had all the appearance of a drunk, and my colleague wheeled it through the town to the mortuary. He was cheered on his way by some other cheerful drinkers, but no one knew he was carting away a corpse. They thought it was a drunk being arrested in a highly unusual but very practical manner.

  Perhaps the funniest that I was involved in, from a slapstick point of view, involved a body in the upper harbour at Strensford.

  The call came at seven o’clock one morning, when I was patrolling in uniform, and I was despatched to the power station whose night-duty man had noticed the body with the arrival of dawn. It lay in the mud, apparently having been left high and dry when the tide had receded, and it was that of an elderly man. I went into the control room to ask where precisely this body lay and was shown from an upper window.

  ‘You’ll need wellies,’ I was told. ‘It’s thick mud out there.’

  I borrowed a pair from the power station’s staff room, went down a gangway normally used by boats and started to walk across the expanse of thick black mud. I sank almost to Wellington boot tops in the slime, but beneath the layer of greasy mud there was a firm surface, so I decided to continue. The body lay at least fifty yards away, and beyond it the river flowed towards the sea in a channel it had created over the years. When the tide was in, this area of mud flats would be covered with several feet of sea water, but there were some hours before this would happen.

  Then, as I lifted my foot to make the next step, the Wellington remained in the mud. The depth and the suction held it down, and so I had to walk across to the corpse by literally lifting each Wellington up by hand as I walked. Step by step, already filthy around the legs and hands, I made my way to that body. It seemed to take an age, but I arrived to find an old man lying face down in the mud.

  The clothes on his back were dry, an indication that he had fallen face down into the waters of the upper harbour. As the tide had flowed out, he had been left marooned on this mud bank. He was dead; of that, I was never in doubt, but I tried to lift the body to examine hi
s face and to make a cursory check for any signs of life.

  As I took the weight with my hands, my feet slithered backwards in that slime, and I fell flat on my own face beside the body, sending a shower of black, oily mud towards the skies. I was spread-eagled there and could feel myself sinking, but I managed to draw my legs beneath me to stand upright. I emerged like a black and greasy excrescence and wondered if the power station staff were observing this performance. Once on my feet, now oozing all over with stinking mud, I tried again. But the body would not shift; the suction of the ghastly brew held it firmly down. I splodged around in that smelly scum, trying and trying to slide or lift the body, but in that thick, oily mess it would not move. I stank like a drain now and was smothered because of frequent slips and falls.

  I decided I needed help and that bare feet might be one solution, so I trudged back to the power station, leaving my wellies standing on the corpse’s rump. They would act as markers for my next sortie. From an outbuilding at the power station, where my condition could not do a lot of harm, I rang for assistance.

  The power-station staff, now increasing in numbers as the day’s work began, laughed themselves sick when they saw me, but I did manage to persuade the sergeant that I needed help. He said he would send someone to help me, and this would be a constable who lived nearby. He was summoned to my aid. When Alan arrived, he fell about laughing at me, and then we set off together across the mud, heading for the pair of wellies which were our guides. The stench from the path I had created by disturbing the mud was appalling. It was like splodging through a huge open-air sewer.

  Alan had taken off his shoes and had rolled his trousers up to his knees before accompanying me, but even the act of walking made us slither and catch one another; by the time Alan arrived with me, we were both smothered in stinking black slime. We decided that the only way to turn the body over was for me to stand at one side, grip his clothing and roll him towards me, while Alan stood at the other to lift and push simultaneously. We tried. The body refused to move. Then, as we heaved and pulled, there was, without any warning, a loud sucking sound as the body suddenly moved — I fell backwards into the knee-deep mud, the body came halfway out and Alan fell flat on his face as his feet slithered away. When I stood up, the corpse was on its side with one hand sticking into the air like a mast, and Alan was crawling out of the mire with his entire face and upper body dripping with ooze. But we had dislodged the body from its anchorage.

  We managed to get the unfortunate chap out of the sludge and onto his feet and, satisfied that he was really very dead, began to carry him back to the shore. I put one of the dead arms about my shoulders, and Alan did likewise; thus the three of us slithered, fell and stank our way back to the slipway, by which time a cheering crowd had assembled at the power-station railings.

  Once ashore, we could cope. There had to be a post-mortem on this body, and the odd thing was that he had not died from drowning — there was no water in his lungs. He had died from natural causes. How he came to be in the water was never discovered.

  Afterwards I submitted a request for my uniform to be cleaned at the expense of the police, and I was told that no funds were available for that kind of thing. Keeping my uniform pressed and clean for duty was my responsibility, I was told.

  But from that day forward, there was always a welcome for me at the power station, with a cup of coffee and the offer of a pair of clean wellies any time I need them to go paddling.

  Chapter 7

  I hope I shall never be deterred from detecting

  what I think is a cheat.

  SAMUEL JOHNSON, 1709—84

  ONE OF THE CRIMES which puzzled, and probably still puzzles, the general public was that of taking and driving away a motor vehicle without having either the consent of the owner or other lawful authority. This bafflement has arisen because this is not the same crime as stealing a motor vehicle. The two are quite distinct, and the essential difference is that stealing entails the intention of permanently depriving the owner of his property, while the unauthorised borrower has no such intention. He takes a vehicle for a joy-ride, and youths would take cars simply to get them home after a night out, after which they would abandon them with little thought of the owners’ anguish or little anxiety about the damage and expense they had caused the unfortunate owner. Almost without exception, the cars were found by the police and restored to their owners.

  For some years, this unlawful taking of motor vehicles was not a crime, simply because it had not been considered when the early definitions of larceny were compiled. To prosecute the ‘takers’ for something, they were occasionally charged with stealing the petrol they had consumed. This smacked of desperation, but what else could be done by the police?

  Later, because an increasing number of cars were being ‘borrowed’ illicitly, the offence was written into the law, albeit not as part of the law on stealing but as part of the 1930’s road traffic law. It was another thirty years or so before the law realised that other forms of conveyance were also borrowed without lawful authority and that no statute catered for them. They included bikes, hang-gliders, aircraft, boats, trains and roller-skates — in fact, it now includes anything constructed or adapted for the carriage of persons by land, water or air, whether or not such a thing has an engine fitted. However, it does not include things which are pedestrian-controlled, such as prams and lawnmowers. This long-overdue 1968 law did, of course, continue to include cars, lorries, buses and other such means of transport.

  The unlawful borrowing of that mass of other conveyances was not written into the Theft Act until 1968, and so, when I was a young constable and an Aide to CID, I was not concerned with the unauthorised taking of all conveyances but merely with those which fell into the definition of motor vehicles. But we were heavily into the popular crime of Taking Without Consent, as we called it in long-hand, or TWOC as we abbreviated it. We pronounced it TWOCK.

  There was no crime of TWOCing a pedal cycle, however (there is now), and so lots of illicit bike-borrowers were never prosecuted simply because they had committed no criminal offence. Now, a bike is within the meaning of a conveyance, and so illegal borrowers can be prosecuted.

  One of the more popular crimes when I was an Aide to CID was the relay TWOC. A man would take a car from, say, London and drive it as far as the tank full of petrol permitted — say, Luton. At Luton he would abandon the first car and take another one, driving that until its tank was almost empty. That might have carried him to, say, Newark, where he would seek another one with the keys in the ignition. The Newark car would perhaps be driven to York and left in a side street as he took yet another to convey him to Middlesbrough or further north. And so the journey continued. In this way, a TWOC merchant could travel the length or breadth of Britain without cost to himself but leaving in his wake a trail of abandoned motor vehicles.

  The sufferers were the owners of the cars. Sometimes the cars were damaged; sometimes they were abandoned in awkward places as their tanks ran dry, and sometimes they were never found at all. If they were found abandoned, it rested upon the unfortunate owner to recover them, and so their owners had to travel long distances at their own expense to fetch home their straying vehicles. Sometimes, as a matter of courtesy and as a means of further protecting these abandoned cars, we would take them to the police station for security.

  One such case of relay TWOC occurred while I was doing my stint as an Aide at Eltering.

  The message originated from the Metropolitan Police in London and it said that a car taken from Putney had been found abandoned at St Albans; one taken at St Albans had been found abandoned at Peterborough; one taken at Peterborough had been found abandoned at Doncaster, and one had been stolen at Doncaster only that afternoon. That had not yet been found, and so all police forces within reach of the A1 (the Great North Road) were being alerted. It seemed that a relay TWOC merchant was driving north via the A1, venturing off only to abandon one car and take another.

  The car
stolen from Doncaster was a black Humber Snipe, and its registration number was HMH 200. We were requested to seek this car in our area, where it might have been abandoned. We are also advised to alert our officers to the likelihood of a theft or TWOC in our part of the country.

  At half past seven that same evening, one of the uniformed constables of Eltering rang in from a telephone kiosk to say he had found the abandoned Humber Snipe. There was no one with the car, the keys were still in the ignition, and it was presently on a piece of waste ground in the town. He was told not to touch it until the CID arrived. Detective Sergeant Connolly was told of the car and said to me, ‘Go and have a look at it, Nick. There’s not a lot we can do with a job of this kind but see if there’s any stolen property stashed away in it, fingerprints on the fascia, that sort of thing.’

  I joined PC Steve Forman at the car. He had found it during a routine foot patrol and watched as I opened the boot, lifted the seats and did a thorough search without finding anything of interest. With a light fingerprint brush laced with grey powder, I dusted the steering-wheel, internal mirror, ashtray and other points likely to have been handled by the driver, but none was worth preserving. They were all smudged.

  I made an external examination of the car. I noted that it bore the number plates MHH 200, which had not been altered or replaced by false ones, and saw that it was in a filthy condition. Its general appearance was one of neglect but it did bear a current Road Fund Licence, as the excise licence was then known. This was before the days of MOT tests, and the tyres were bald, the interior was full of dust and com husks, old sacks and rusting tools, and there were holes under the mudguards and in the doors.

  ‘Is there any petrol in it?’ I asked Steve.

  He switched on the ignition, and the gauge showed empty, although by shaking the car with the filler cap off, we could hear a faint sloshing in the tank.