CONSTABLE AROUND THE HOUSES a perfect feel-good read from one of Britain’s best-loved authors (Constable Nick Mystery Book 23) by NICHOLAS RHEA

Author:NICHOLAS RHEA [RHEA, NICHOLAS]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Joffe Books crime thriller and cozy mystery suspense
Published: 2021-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

It is often claimed that one of the roles of the police is to rescue members of the great British public from the results of their own stupidity. Certainly, some people — supposedly adults — do behave in a rather childish fashion, particularly when they are on holiday, and this often results in them requiring the aid of the emergency services. They do things like getting swept out to sea on rubber dinghies, lost in fog or snow in the mountains, trapped by the tide on beaches and setting fire to forests and moors; such dilemmas often occur through sheer carelessness, base stupidity or ill-preparation but it is the public who usually fund their rescue. It has often been suggested that fools should be made to pay for their own mistakes, but how can a daft working man afford to pay thousands of pounds for a combined air-sea rescue when his inflatable has been washed out to sea because he fell asleep in it, or his actions in lighting a campfire to cook his sausages and baked beans resulted in the loss by burning of thousands of acres of heather and peat moorland?

In similar vein, the fire brigade would say that a high proportion of chip-pan fires occur at tea-time when women leave them on full heat while gossiping, cars fall on to men working beneath them because they are not properly jacked up and do-it-yourself merchants sometimes find their houses collapsing around their ears because they haven’t been sufficiently careful in their ‘improvement’ work. It is beyond doubt that the police, fire brigade and ambulance service spend a lot of their time — and a lot of public money — going to the assistance of total clowns and coping with the lamentable behaviour of idiots.

Having said all that it is also a fact of police life that some silly incidents occur, not through carelessness or stupidity, but through an unfortunate and unpredictable combination of circumstances. And, like those who are fools, it is often the police or some other emergency service who have to remedy the matter.

For example, consider the case of Cuthbert Crombie who became known in Aidensfield as Crombie the Zombie. Cuthbert was what might be described an idealist; he was very left-wing and voted Labour; he wanted to ban the bomb, nationalize all systems of production, have no private ownership of property and live in a happy clappy world where everyone was equal, except those who were more equal than the others because they had more brains. They would be the leaders of his new world, and he would be among them showing others how to lead the ideal life. Full of socialist zeal of the loonier kind, he left the urban haze of industrial Rotherham to live in the fresh moorland air of rural Aidensfield where he could convert the unbelievers, or just sit and think, or perhaps just sit.

In his late twenties, bearded, long-haired, be-sandaled and fond of wearing jeans, Cuthbert was married

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