Prisoners, Property and Prostitutes (16 page)

A local ‘wealthy’ fell out of favour over a matter involving a new burglar alarm he had had fitted which had a direct link to the Police Station in Newport. The activation of the ‘personal attack’ at his large country house met with an appropriately swift response, but the penalty of being in a remote area meant that it was some while before the first car arrived, headlamps blazing and engine groaning as it stopped in a cloud of gravel
dust outside the house. The officer leapt out expecting to find a fleeing gang of burglars, to be confronted by a red-faced house-owner brandishing a stopwatch, who greeted him with the words, ‘This is appalling – if this was a real emergency I’d expect you to be here in a lot less than ten minutes.’

The buffoon had set his alarm off deliberately just to see how long it took us to get there. He was given a small amount of advice on the correct way to use his alarm, and a little instruction on where he could put the stopwatch. Neither was well received.

In time, Neighbourhood Watch schemes were introduced as people were slowly made aware that there were not enough Police to go round.

These schemes were usually very well supported and made good sense – you look after my house and I’ll look after yours – nothing more than good neighbours should do, but with more transient populations than of old it was a way of making people talk to each other a bit more, and was therefore seen as a Good Thing.

Each scheme covered a certain number of houses, perhaps a street, a stretch of road, or at least some easily defined area where there was some feeling of proximity. One lucky householder would be appointed ‘Co-ordinator’ for the scheme – the job was unpaid and meant quite a bit of liaison with the Police, distributing newsletters, reporting information and so on. Most people didn’t mind who was in charge as long as it wasn’t them, but there was usually one in each area (retired teachers or ex-military types seemed most prevalent) who
would identify themselves as a natural leader, and used their two years of National Service in the Catering Corps to good effect, organising meetings and generally revelling in an authority of which they had previously only dreamed.

The basic idea from our point of view was simple and sensible – make everyone a bit more aware of crime levels and types in their area, and if you saw anything suspicious then ring for the Police. If it wasn’t urgent then tell the local Coordinator and he would assess the information and pass it on at the regular meetings with whichever Bobby was the community officer for that area. The Co-ordinators would be given a bit more instruction in respect of grading non-urgent information and would also give basic instructions to householders on their specific areas. It wasn’t much more than applied common sense, but inevitably some people had to make a meal of it, usually by overestimating their own importance.

One sunny afternoon in the outskirts of the town, a man mowing his lawn saw a small car pull onto his neighbour’s drive. His neighbour was away on holiday. Two youths got out of the car and disappeared round the back of the house.

Concerned by this, and being a dedicated and highly trained Neighbourhood Watch member he went to his opposite neighbour, and between them they decided that they should notify the Co-ordinator, as he had told them this was what to do. On receipt of the phone call, the Co-ordinator walked (albeit briskly) to the informants, arriving in sufficient time for the three men to stand and watch as the two youths emerged through the front door of the unoccupied house, carrying a variety of electrical goods, which they put in the car
before driving off. The three then discussed what they had seen for around 15 minutes (at their own estimation) before the Co-ordinator decided he would walk home and inform the Police.

The local detective went to investigate, and was amazed to find that despite (or perhaps because of) the committee based approach to tackling crime, the three men between them had not only failed to take the registration number of the car, they couldn’t even agree on the make, model or colour.

The exasperated detective asked the man who had first seen the car why he hadn’t rung 999 there and then.

‘Well the Co-ordinator told us we weren’t to ring the Police under any circumstances without consulting him first.’

After he had calmed down, the next port of call was the Co-ordinator, whose instruction must surely have been a little ambiguous to have made such a mockery of the idea of a Neighbourhood Watch scheme.

But the worst was yet to come – ‘What did you tell your members to do if they saw something that could be a burglary in progress?’ asked the detective.

‘I told them to contact me for advice,’ came the reply.

‘Why didn’t you tell them to ring 999? Especially in circumstances like today’s matter – we could have caught them if you hadn’t wasted so much time.’

The Co-ordinator puffed himself out and set the Detective straight:

‘There is a rank structure in the Neighbourhood Watch which must be observed,’ he replied pompously.

The detective’s reply was unprintable and profuse.

The Neighbourhood Watch scheme in that area swiftly collapsed, to the relief of many.

It was to this slightly odd area that I would occasionally be seconded to provide cover. This only tended to arise on night shifts, as Barton had plenty of Community Police who did the day to day non-urgent stuff, but at night there was always a double-manned car to do the more immediate work in what was on reflection a vast area, and as you drove round it you realised that you really were a long way from help.

The benefit was that you were also a long way from your supervision. A Sergeant did his best to keep order during office hours, but apart from that the Police of Barton were left well alone. On one of my early visits to the station I had a look at the Occurrence Book – there was one of these at the desk of every nick in the County – a large heavy blank book about two feet square, in which the officer on the desk would record pretty well anything of note for the rest of the staff to read. From serious crime to minor snippets of information, it all went in the Occurrence Book, a practice probably unchanged in more than a century. The book was signed almost daily by the Sergeant, and to my surprise I found it was signed every Sunday by the Divisional Chief Superintendent.

I queried this with Simon Trent, one of the Barton men on my shift.

‘Didn’t know the Chief Super was so diligent – how come he’s here every Sunday because he’s never at Newport.’

‘That’s because Newport isn’t on the route from his house to his golf club. He plays golf every Sunday, then stops in on his
way home to have a brew, sign the book and then claims back all his mileage by putting it down as ‘touring the Division.’

This was innovative if unprofessional, but perhaps just a symptom of the goings on in this rural backwater.

Another quaint feature was that the Police Station also housed a Magistrates’ Court on the first floor. This provided plenty of scope for activities to pass the time on a quiet night, when many a hapless drunk would find themselves awoken around four in the morning after a couple of hours in their cell, and be very upset to find their trial was not only taking place before they were fully sober, but that it also culminated in a finding of guilt and the imposition of the death penalty or transportation to the Colonies by a stern-faced judge who would tell them there was ‘far too much of this sort of thing, and it is time to set an example.’

At the appointed hour of execution, usually 8am, the now penitent and bewildered man would be relieved to find he was given a cup of tea and sent on his way home by the day shift who, suitably briefed, would explain the nightmare of the trial as just an alcohol-induced hallucination and perhaps a warning from their conscience to drink less in future.

While the Barton area was a backwater during the day, at night it became even more isolated. Apart from a major road running north to south just to the west of the town, the place was really just a maze of unlit lanes joining a number of small villages of which Barton happened to be the biggest. Many were ‘chocolate-box’ pretty, with beautiful cottage gardens, tended by retired gentlefolk who took an intense pride in their
surroundings. There would be village fêtes, Rose Queen festivals, and numerous things that made the area a particularly English corner of the world. Time seemed to run slower here. Less quaint but still desirable were a number of small estates of modern houses inhabited by the families of local businessmen whose children went to private schools in the area, and who were on course to carry on a family tradition of becoming respectable members of society.

As teenagers these children were often trusted to look after the house while parents were out for an evening or even overnight, and of course being teenagers, some would seize such an opportunity to have a few friends round for a party without the actual or perceived intrusion of a parental presence.

It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, to one of these parties that Simon and I had a call. It came over the radio as ‘a disturbance in the street’, but when we arrived at the expensive detached house all was quiet. There was just a group of slightly despondent teenagers standing in a contemplative group on the front lawn.

‘What’s happened here then?’ asked Simon as we got out of the car.

After a brief silence a youth who turned out to be the host of the party, and elder son of the household, spoke.

‘We had a bit of a party, but some lads who we don’t know turned up. They were OK at first so we let them stay, but then they got a bit wild and started damaging stuff so we had to get them out. There was a bit of a fight but they’ve gone now.’

‘Any idea who they are?’ asked Simon.

‘No, I think they were in a car. They weren’t from round
here. I think they’d heard about the party through college and sort of gate crashed.’

The party grapevine had let these kids down badly. Someone must have been rather too keen on advertising the words ‘party’ and ‘parents away’, and word had spread a bit too far.

Simon got ready to go. After all, the party was over from everyone’s point of view.

‘So nobody’s hurt, the gatecrashers have gone and we’ve no way of finding them. Is that right?’

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ said the lad. His friends nodded meekly. Something still didn’t feel right; there was a whiff of unease. As we moved towards the car the lad spoke again.

‘Excuse me, but you don’t know of a cheap plumber do you?’

Good old Police – they can help you and sort things out. But not this time.

‘The words “plumber” and “cheap” don’t come in the same sentence at any time and certainly not at’ – he checked his watch -‘not at one fifteen in the morning,’ said Simon. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Could you just come and look and see if you can help?’ asked the lad.

More out of curiosity than a feeling we could do much, we followed the lad and his small, humble entourage through the house and out into the rear garden. A powerful floodlight illuminated a number of well-kept flower beds, a large level lawn, and at one side a very impressive ornamental pond. Floating in the pond was the source of the lad’s problem. One
of the bathrooms in the house had obviously been expensively fitted out, with bath, washbasin, toilet and bidet – but not now. The whole suite sat majestic and useless in a foot or so of water in the pond.

Simon looked at the group. ‘How did they do this then?’

‘Dunno,’ said the lad. ‘I never heard much as we had the music on loud, and it wasn’t till after they’d gone I went to the loo and found it wasn’t in the house – it’s in that clump of reeds. It can’t have taken them more than fifteen minutes to do this. Do you think it can be sorted before our parents get back?’

‘When’s that?’ asked Simon.

‘Around lunchtime tomorrow. Well lunchtime today I suppose it is. What d’you reckon?’

‘Well today’s Sunday, so I think you’d need a few hundred quid ready for a plumber, if you can find one. Failing that I’d go to church and pray hard if I were you. Do you want me to speak to your parents or do you just want my details in case they want to ring me – I’m on duty again at 10 o’clock tomorrow night.’

To our slight surprise and great relief they just opted for the phone number of the Police Station and Simon’s collar number. I would love to have been a fly on the wall when the parents did come home, but strangely we never heard another thing from any member of the family.

The following night was a quiet one. It was strange, but over the years every Police Officer seems to develop some sort of instinct as to how a night shift will go. Mondays to Thursdays start gently and become progressively busier as the week goes on. Fridays and Saturdays are generally quite active as most of the world has fun in one form or another, usually at the
expense of the rest of the world. Sundays are traditionally quiet, with about every sixth one bucking the trend and going berserk for no readily apparent reason. Whether it was some primeval force, a phase of the moon, the alignment of the planets or some more rational factor I don’t know, but simply driving or walking through a town on one of these ‘Mad Sundays’ you would pick up on an atmosphere of unease and conflict which raised your senses, and you knew that a shift of mayhem lay ahead with chases, domestics, pub fights, burglaries and all manner of disorder to come.

But this particular Sunday was quiet. The whole feeling of Barton and its surroundings was one of an area soundly asleep, and we drove round deserted streets and lanes. We had decided to stop a few cars just to see if we could generate any road traffic related process, but there was absolutely nothing worth looking at.

Towards midnight we drove round the car parks of a few pubs, idly hoping to find a late drink-driver, but again drew a blank. Eventually we pulled up behind the Butcher’s Arms, a large former coaching inn on the main road. The bar was in darkness but a couple of figures could be seen inside.

‘Come on,’ said Simon, ‘let’s go and have a word – the landlord’s a mate of mine.’

The back door was unlocked and without knocking we entered into an atmosphere of stale cigarette smoke and beer fumes, to be greeted by the licensee. From his demeanour he was obviously a keen promoter of his wares, and regularly sampled them, presumably to ensure good quality control. He was plastered.