Nicola Barker - Burley Cross Postbox Theft

I must confess that the more I thought about this supposed heritage of Mr Booth’s, the more it began to strike me that this combination of two such prominent English brands was both an extremely clever and an intrinsically seductive one.

Here we have all the decency, staunch faith and charitable inclinations of the Booth side, coupled with the fierce, clean, sweet, traditional mintyness of the Trebor contingent. And the magical adhesive that glues them both together? A slight whiff of the transgressive, an element of the clandestine, something deeply romantic which is kept strictly ‘under wraps’.

Of course the famously lofty, sensitive and spiritually inclined Mr Booth couldn’t possibly stoop to discussing such private/intimate matters with ‘the general public’ himself, could he? (I mean where’s the margin to be gained in doing that?!) He has a grovelling ‘assistant’ to do this for him, an eager skivvy, a loyal run-around, someone highly attuned to his complex array of needs and requirements, his fastidious tastes and his subtle preferences, someone to sort out the wheat from the chaff, in other words (note: ‘Obviously Mr Booth’s needs are very specific, and you will know best what will suit him…’).

Enter our Miss Squire, stage left!

Miss Squire has a functional nomenclature (a squire being a knight’s attendant, his escort, and a landed gentleman in his/her own right), a name that somehow resonates a sense of fairness, a sense of squareness (is effectively — when you actually come to think about it — simply a loose conjunction of these two words combined).

Her role is a simple one: to ring ahead on behalf of Mr Booth and to sort out all his ‘arrangements’ (careful to generate the necessary atmosphere of reverence and awe in the process!).

Her manner is always reassuringly calm and authoritative, with the slightest touch of primness, the gentlest hint of candour (just enough to sweeten and then ‘draw out’ her gullible interlocutor).

A technique , Inspector, a clever technique! One that’s as old as the hills, and used by con-artists of all complexions in all corners of the world!

But let’s not get carried away here — let’s think about this logically: if our Mr Booth is a psychic by profession, a talented clairvoyant (by all accounts), then his meat and his drink must be the insignificant detail of other people’s lives. And on this understanding, the one — almost the only — thing a man of his stamp requires (the delicate axis on which all his mumbo-jumbo hinges)?

Information!

Gullible victims!

Opportunities!

So how does he set about acquiring these three basic necessities? (Better still: how does he quietly build himself up whilst effortlessly ingratiating himself at the same time?) By dint of the young Miss Squire and her genial enquiries in local B&Bs, of course!

A measure of flattery is involved (‘Mr Booth has heard that yours is the best B&B in the area…’), an element of doubt (‘although Mr Booth’s requirements are very specific, I’m afraid…’), a further element of competition (‘… and I’ve heard incredibly positive things about The Old Oak…’), an element of disclosure (‘Mr Booth’s privacy is of the utmost importance — he has a fascinating heritage, but it’s all terribly hush-hush…’) in order to encourage an automatic — even unwitting — desire on the part of the victim to divulge something intimate about themselves!

And our poor Mrs Goff? She falls straight into their trap! Ten pages deep! She gives away ludicrous amounts of personal detail, not only about herself, but about her local competitors, spurred on — in all probability — by wounded pride (didn’t Miss Squire promise to pay her a cordial visit on the 21st, then cruelly stand her up?).

But hang on a minute… The 21st?! Isn’t that the very day the Burley Cross postbox was broken into?!

Stimulated by this outrageous idea (and also because it happens to be located directly adjacent to my favourite bakery), I strolled over to the Middleton Theatre and had a word with the girl at the box office there about Mr Booth’s appearance (Jan. 6th &7th). She said (much as I had suspected) that the show had been cancelled due to ‘unforeseen circumstances’.

Hmmn, interesting, I thought, and toddled back to the station where I promptly instigated an official police search on our Mr Booth, only to be told that you had conducted one yourself — and I was already in receipt of it (it had been caught up in your further correspondence with Rosannah Strum-Tadcastle about what you, quite rightly, perceived as an excessively high translation bill. For the record: I actually showed the translation of his letter to Edouard himself; we bumped into each other at The Old Oak, and I just happened to have it to hand. He professed himself ‘astonished’ by its unerring accuracy, said it was ‘a work of pure genius’, and confided that he felt ‘almost as if Mrs Strum-Tadcastle has forged a magical wormhole into the deepest, darkest recesses of my very soul…’

Can me an old sceptic, Inspector, but on the evidence of that, I’d definitely think twice about paying the London hotel bill).

After quietly perusing the police search on Mr Booth (aka Raymond Whittaker) I could find nothing of any consequence to detain me — aside from an excessive number of unpaid parking tickets — and was just about to abandon my inspection of this (quite frankly) unexceptional document, when I happened to observe (in the footnotes) that his local constabulary had planned to pay his neighbour (a suspected illegal alien) a ‘surprise visit’ on December 22nd 2006, but had inadvertently chanced to launch an assault on Mr Booth’s property instead (kicking the door down and ransacking his flat — something they were highly apologetic about afterwards, and rightly so!).

Mr Booth wasn’t home at the time of the raid, but naturally they promised to reimburse him — during a later visit — for a new door and any damage done.

These incidents took place the day after the BCPB theft (the very day on which the cache was uncovered in that Skipton back alley). Curious coincidence, I thought. My eye then returned to the parking tickets themselves, which hailed from all parts of the country, and had been acquired, I presumed, while Mr Booth was out ‘on tour’.

I took the last three tickets as my guide (Shrewsbury, Mold, Bangor) and began to undertake some very basic enquiries. My aim? To discover whether there might be a measure of synchronicity between Mr Booth’s visit to a town and a marked increase in the amount of postal crime in the area.

It didn’t take much time to find out (so I’ll spare you all the unnecessary build-up): in every instance I came up trumps! No postbox thefts, but in each place a significant theft of post had been reported exactly three weeks prior to Mr Booth’s posited arrival!

In the cases of Bangor and Shrewsbury, postal vans had been broken into (although access had not been forced — in both cases two postal bags had been removed while the postman was busy emptying out a nearby box); in the case of Mold, a postman claimed that his bag was snatched ‘by a large gang of kids’ while he struggled to gain access to a block of flats.

All well and good, I told myself, but if Booth and Squires were involved in the BCPB theft (and countless others, by extension) how then to go about explaining why the Burley Cross cache was found dumped in Skipton — letters still untampered with — on the afternoon of the 22nd?

It didn’t take long to come up with a solution (two crunchy sticks of Twix long, followed by a swift half-Snickers, in celebration!).

Here follows a brief outline of how I envisaged the whole scenario panning out: