The girl at the call pool who registered (and then allocated) Susan Trott’s emergency call (Cindy Withers. Are you familiar with Cindy, Rog? Incorrigible shrew. Terrible chip on her shoulder – probably acquired from lugging that phenomenal pair of Double-D cups around everywhere with her) still stridently maintains, in her own defence, that while she appreciated the fact that the box was on your watch, the caller – Susan Trott – phoned from a land-line inside her home, which is directly adjacent to the box, and therefore on ours.
A bag of evidence being unearthed in the back alleys of Skipton – a mere ten hours thereafter – was also considered pertinent to where the case ultimately ended up.
Of course the people in charge of these life-and-death decisions (hard to believe they actually have a whole department dedicated to this kind of guff, Rog, manned entirely by the idiot sons and daughters of Police Commissioners, I don’t doubt), always reserve the right to change what we laughably call ‘their minds’ (thereby effortlessly generating yet another skip-load of paperwork), and have apparently resolved to do so in this instance (I honestly don’t know why this might be, or what they can possibly hope to gain by it, Rog, I just try my damnedest to keep my head down, and take all their stupid, petty, pointless – not to mention hugely disruptive – subterranean political manoeuvrings with a very, very generous pinch of salt).
Returning, if I may, to the issue of the theft itself; it might interest you to discover (and this is not something PC Hill made an official note of, but he happened to mention it to me, afterwards) that during his cursory, five-minute perusal of the postbox, he was approached and engaged in conversation/ loudly interrogated/helpfully advised/subtly lampooned/openly insulted (take your pick, Rog) by at least twelve different individuals, including the aforementioned Thorndyke (don’t these crackpots have jobs to go to, Rog? Or lives to lead? Or hedges to trim? Or Raku classes to attend?), who was wearing a T-shirt bearing the legend ‘Your Vehicle is a Loaded Weapon!’ on one side and ‘Watch out World – I’m a Highwayman!’ on the other.
PC Hill said Mr Thorndyke became ‘quite hysterical’ during their brief exchange, and at one point virtually screamed, ‘This is exactly what they wanted! Are you blind?! Can’t you see?! This is exactly what they wanted! If you actually have any serious intention of investigating this crime – and catching the cowardly vandal who committed this atrocity – then stop dawdling around here like a wet weekend, stuffing your face with battered cod, and go and speak to the man behind it! Talk to Trevor Woods! Talk to their henchman, if you’ve got the balls! He’s up to his scrawny neck in all of this!’ (I feel I must just briefly note, in passing, that there have been no actual road fatalities in Burley Cross since 1917, when, according to town records, ‘an inebriated flower-seller – of poor repute – slipped on some filthy cobbles, fell under the wheels of a cart and was instantly killed.’
It should also be noted that Cllr Thorndyke was wearing a T-shirt – and only a T-shirt, in temperatures of 20 degrees and under – during his exchange with PC Hill. PC Hill said, ‘His teeth were chattering as he spoke. It was actually quite difficult to decipher what he was saying at some points. I don’t know why he didn’t just go home and put his coat on.’)
A short while later, as he was climbing into his patrol car, PC Hill apprehended the aforementioned Mr Woods (the source of all this unbridled hysteria), driving up to the box in his postal van. PC Hill said he was ‘to all intents and purposes a broken man, skulking around the place like a beaten dog…’
On being questioned about the theft, Woods was quoted as saying, ‘They can’t pay me enough to do the collection here, mate. They’re nutters. They should have me on danger money. They’re all sodding lunatics.’
Suffice to say, following PC Hill’s initial investigation of the crime scene (and following the discovery of the refuse sack of letters found dumped in a back alley in Skipton – a mere two doors down from the bijou residence of notorious local petty criminal, Timmy Dickson), I contacted all those individuals whose letters now form a part of the official evidence, informing them that their post couldn’t be returned – or forwarded on – until it had been formally declassified as such.
Next, I initiated an official mail-out to the entire village (also enclosed, Rog, translated into the obligatory three languages – I chose Portuguese, Mandarin and Xhosa) to try and discover if anyone had posted a letter on the evening of Dec. 21st, which had not – for some reason – been retrieved in the Skipton cache.
Nobody had, although Rita Bramwell couldn’t be entirely certain. She said she thought she might have sent something, but that she wasn’t sure what it was, or to whom it was addressed (she’s several wires short of the full radio, Rog). As it transpired, she had actually sent something (case letter 13).
When I then asked her if she had received my earlier communication (informing her that exactly such a letter was being held by us, as evidence), she hotly denied that I had sent her one – although her husband, Peter Bramwell, later found it stuffed down the back of a chaise longue, and was kind enough to apologize to me for his wife’s behaviour.
I subsequently sent Mrs Bramwell a photocopy of her own letter (in an attempt to dispel her confusion). Her response was not at all as I had expected it to be. She hotly denied having sent it – in a long and erratic email – making a series of wild, unsubstantiated claims and accusations – one of which was that it had been ‘forged’, and that I myself was ‘in the frame’ as one of the suspects for the crime (we all had a good chuckle at that in the staff canteen)!
Several people were, you will be stunned to discover, Rog, a little peeved by the news that their post would not be immediately returned to them (you may have seen the bilious squall of angry letters in the local rag, Rog), but this is Burley Cross, after all: a tiny, ridiculously affluent, ludicrously puffed-up moor-side village, stuffed to capacity with spoilt second-home owners, southerners, the strange, the ‘artistic’, the eccentric and the retired (most of them tick all of the above boxes, Rog, and several more besides – although I’m sure I don’t have the natural intelligence, fine vocabulary or social acuity to do them all justice here… Matt Endive (Sr) – case letter 4 – who perfectly exemplifies those latent, Burley Cross characteristics of tragic retard and unalloyed fat-head combined, called me a ‘bumped-up little northern grammar-school oik’, only yesterday on the phone, and then, when I laughed him off, said I was ‘tragically out of my depth’ and ‘riddled with contumely’. I responded – quick as a flash, Rog. I said, ‘Are you sure you don’t mean “contumacy,” Mr Endive – from the Latin com = intense + tumere = to swell?’
A long silence followed, Rog, and I don’t mind admitting that I enjoyed every damn second of it – although, in retrospect, I think he probably did mean contumely).
Of course you know better than anybody, Rog, what kind of problems we’re up against here: to say Burley Cross is ‘Little England writ large’, would be like saying Stilton is ‘a dairy product with blue bits running through it’ (i.e. an understatement, Rog, and a considerable understatement at that).
This is, after all, the same place where the local council’s decision not to install a speed-bump last year caused a mini-riot on Pancake Day which was later ‘Recorded for Posterity, that Future Generations Might Read and Weep’, in a seven-hundred-line epic poem, (still pinned up on the notice board outside the local shop, with copies available for sale inside):
The butcher got the worst of it, when spade and axe did fall, The baker put up quite a fight, when caught up in the brawl…
(Ironically, there is no baker in Burley Cross, Rog, and never has been, either,