Nicola Barker - Burley Cross Postbox Theft

I honestly think this is going to be our BEST FAMILY CHRISTMAS, EVER!!

Up the Whites!!!!!

Lots and lots and lots of love (and cuddles, and good karma etc.)

XXXXXXXXXX

P

Ilkley,

17/03/07

14.00 hrs

(Via internal mail)

For attn Inspector Laurence Everill, Skipton

CONFIDENTIAL

Dear Laurence,

A most heartfelt congratulations on the Bravery Award (and on the surprise promotion, come to that)! I sent you a fulsome text (two fulsome texts — one on both counts), but I imagine they must’ve got lost in the deluge…

Either way, you really did the boys proud back in December. I watched the Awards broadcast, alone, in my flat, with a nice bottle of cheap merlot and an above-average, ready-made Tesco’s Finest Boeuf Stroganoff. Quite a little celebration it was! ‘That’s Laurence Everill,’ I kept saying to the cat. ‘We went to school together, you know!’

I couldn’t help but notice (during a couple of audience ‘reaction shots’) that Sandy (who was sitting with the chief superintendent and his wife, I believe) had a lovely new hairdo — and a host of pretty blonde highlights in her fringe. Quite a departure! She looked lovely — truly lovely. Dark green is definitely her colour. Do tell her how impressed I was (not that she’ll much care, I’m sure!).

Several people have stopped me in the street (or flagged down the car when I’m out on patrol) to discuss the matter. One old dear (who I generally pop in on during my rounds — just to check she’s all right, and have an amiable chat) said, ‘It honestly helps me to sleep better at night, knowing we have men of Sergeant Everill’s calibre working on the force.’

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Like you, Inspector (quite rolls off the tongue, eh?!), I am somewhat at odds to understand why it was that the BCPBT Case (as I prefer to call it) was transferred from your most capable hands in Skipton to my considerably less competent — if slightly more capacious — ones in Ilkley…

(Although which of us ‘mere mortals’ may hope to grasp the complex array of motivating principles guiding that subterranean army of shadowy forces — that ‘silent, faceless vanguard’ — who seem to inveigle their way into every corner of our working lives, overseeing our every, basic move — our every shallow breath, even — like ominous, lowering, ever-watchful phantasms?)

‘Ours is not to reason why,’ as I said, only this morning, to my part-time factotum-cum-administrative-assistant, Mrs Hope (who also sends you her heartfelt congratulations, by the way), ‘ours is but to complete the paperwork — in duplicate!’

Please accept my deepest gratitude for sending me your additional thoughts on the case. They were immensely useful. It’s an education (of sorts) for a rank-and-file copper like myself (a mere picayune, a booby, a hick, a poor shot, a galoot) to be given ready access to the elevated workings of a renowned (and superior) detective intellect.

I am forced to agree with you that PC — soon-to-be sergeant — Hill’s spelling leaves something to be desired (‘suspisious’ is another one), but I still thought his energy and his commitment were thoroughly commendable — a shining example to all us cynical ‘old stagers’, in other words!

If (when he eventually returns from his extended sick-leave), you’re ever stuck on a boring stake-out together (although I fear you may’ve become far too important for that grubby kind of caper, now!) and have nothing of any remote significance left to talk about, then perhaps you might tell him that I think I may’ve found my (clumsy) way towards solving the BCPBT mystery (audible gasps of astonishment!), and that his early leg-work in December contributed in no small part to this breakthrough.

My approach to the thing has, as always, been characteristically ‘back-to-basics’ (to borrow a much derided phrase from the John Major era); a man of your rank and experience might almost call it ‘entry-level policing’ (although I’m rather fond of ‘bread and butter policing’ myself — for obvious reasons!).

Either way, I slowly worked out (during an especially dull lecture about the benefits of cardio-vascular exercise at WeightWatchers on Tuesday) that there could only ever really be three good reasons for a person to feel inclined to break into a postbox at any given moment in time:

1 The hope of acquiring some kind of financial benefit

2 The desire to accrue private information

3 The desire to stop a letter from being sent (an incriminating one, perhaps, posted on the spur of the moment and now held to be a serious liability by either the letter writer him/herself, or by someone who knows the letter writer — and possibly the contents of the letter — and wishes to protect themselves/the future recipient from the potential fallout from the information enclosed).

It was based on these three, very simple notions that I proceeded with my enquiries.

As to reason (1), it soon became evident that this was not a viable option since the three cheques (sent by Wincey Hawkes) were left behind in the cache. So far as I am aware, nothing else of value was reported missing.

As to reason (2), I was able to discover (on inspecting the seals of the envelopes) that very few of them — if any — had actually been opened by the original thief. The majority had been opened by Mhairi Callaghan (the loquacious proprietress of Feathercuts, Skipton), prior to her ringing the police to notify them of her ‘sudden discovery’ of this mysterious yet tantalizing haul which had been randomly dumped in the back alley of her Skipton salon (I deduced this by dint of the tiny residue of red hair dye — Mhairi specializes in tints, something Sandy herself will attest to — on the top left-hand corner of the vast majority of the torn envelope seals).

I verified this suspicion during a subsequent visit to the salon, by passing Mhairi a letter, marked ‘urgent’, which I said I’d found on the doormat. This envelope was instantly torn open, using exactly the same technique as all the others in our body of evidence (the style of opening is highly idiosyncratic; a ‘signature’, of sorts).

Luckily, Mhairi didn’t see her way to reading all of the letters in the cache (perhaps conscience overwhelmed her at some point). Baxter Thorndyke’s Sex Hex letter remained intact (although it was in a fairly worn and dilapidated state by the time it reached my desk!), as did several of the other more ‘sensitive’ pieces (Tom Augustine’s, which he still insists he didn’t write, Nick Endive’s and Nina Springhill’s, to name but three).

Unfortunately Mhairi did see Rita Bramwell’s poignant letter to her alienated daughter, Nadia, something that I feel may well have been a contributing factor to Rita’s unsuccessful suicide attempt in early February (if only she’d been brave enough to tell Peter herself, what a world of pain and heartache she might have saved them both in the long run!).

Naturally, with the realization that Mhairi had opened several of the letters came the suspicion that she may also have been directly involved in the original crime (although her motivation for such an act would have been difficult to pinpoint). I promptly abandoned this theory, however, on discovering that she had a rock-solid alibi for the evening of the 21st, having spent the entire night with Helen Graves — Skipton Constabulary’s charming WPC — watching you and Sandy (whose hair she’d just tinted to such spectacular effect), during a ‘special showing’ of the Bravery Awards in Skipton’s Royal Arms.

So with Mhairi now out of the picture, and with the thief (or thieves) patently having had no financial incentive for the crime, the only available option still remaining on the table (along with two cans of Red Bull, a large pork pie and a cream eclair — ‘brain food’, I like to call it!) was number (3), i.e. that the postbox had been broken into by a local; someone who’d posted a letter and then had thought better of it, or someone with good reason (in their own mind) to want to stop a letter from being sent.