An Alligator in the Bathroom...And Other Stories Page 8

  8

  THE SECRET LIFE OF SERGEANT WAINWRIGHT

  We could always expect maximum cooperation from the police, whenever and wherever, but standing out as a six-foot-two, seventeen-stone first among equals was Doug Wainwright. He was almost as animal mad as me, and that surely is saying something. Here’s an example.

  I had a call from Carol on Radio Langdale that sent me on a scorching August day to a popular beauty spot, a clearing at the edge of some woods near one of our more picturesque villages. There was a river with a small waterfall, a car park and picnic tables. A woman from the village, who had been out walking her dog, had rung in to say that some thoughtless halfwit had left three miniature poodles in a car with no windows open. The windows were steamed up and the dogs seemed in a bad way, and she was specific about the car, a Jaguar saloon in British racing green.

  Dogs being left in unventilated cars was a regular occurrence, despite my putting posters up at every tourist car park in the area. Usually, the call from the member of the public was timely enough to save the dog’s life, although not to save it from a long period of distress.

  It was one of the hottest days of the year. In such weather, inside a car with the windows shut, the temperature rises quickly to an unbearable level. Everybody knows this. Everybody has left a car in sunlight and found it like an oven when they next opened the doors, so why do they leave dogs inside?

  When I got there, from what I could see through the condensation on the inside of the windows, one little dog had already collapsed and the other two were nearly gone after their frantic efforts to scratch their way out. No sooner had I taken stock than I was surrounded by picnickers, all seeing what I could see and all telling me I had to do something. I knew Carol had phoned the police but this was an urgent situation, life or death by the look of it, and I didn’t think I could afford the time to wait for the law to arrive.

  I had no powers to break into a car but I was working out how I might do it when good old Sergeant Wainwright turned up, only minutes after me, siren going and blue light flashing.

  ‘Can you get to the door handle through the quarter-light?’ I suggested.

  ‘Bollocks to that,’ said Doug. ‘Let the ignorant ****house pay for a back window.’

  So he took out his truncheon and with one blow smashed the back window into tiny pieces – no alarms on cars in those days. One dog was laid out on the shelf above the back seat, and it was dead, well beyond help. Another was collapsed on the seat, and the third was half sitting, supported by the car door. We grabbed the two living dogs and ran to the waterfall with them.

  We gave them a good ducking in the cold water, which might have been too much of a shock but that was a risk we had to take. One came round in a minute or two as if from a trance, with its eyes glazed over as it staggered around in the shallow pool. The other took a bit longer to come back from the dead; neither of them could walk properly. I opened up my van and laid them in the back under a wet blanket.

  Quite soon after, the owners arrived. We knew it was them because the man, seeing the state of his car from fifty yards away, started shouting abuse. He was a coarse, very fat, red-faced oaf from – well, let’s just say the West Riding conurbation, accompanied by a peroxide-blonde lady, his wife going by the size and number of rings on her left hand, well bejewelled elsewhere, tight-sweatered, leopard-skin trousered and stiletto-heeled, something like Marina off Last of the Summer Wine only nowhere near as charming. Goodness knows where they’d been. They didn’t look like birdwatchers.

  The man seemed used to everyone jumping when he spoke, but he hadn’t met Sergeant Wainwright before, who got his retaliation in first. Anyone stopped by the police in the olden days will know that the first thing they said was ‘Is this your car, sir?’; now of course they say, ‘Is this your car, mate?’ Doug Wainwright said, ‘Is this your car, you fat bastard?’

  The oaf began blustering about how he couldn’t be talked to like that, and Sergeant Wainwright let him run on for a bit, then told him he was under arrest for animal cruelty and got the handcuffs out and pushed his arm up his back. I tried to calm things down but Doug told me to belt up, cautioned the man and offered several charges including killing one of his dogs.

  The woman burst into tears and was still sobbing, in between calling her husband various names, as Doug put them in the police car and drove off. I did the same, heading for the vet’s, where one dog was dehydrated enough to be put on a saline drip. Once I knew that the two animals were in a stable condition, I set off for the cop shop where I found Doug having a cup of tea. He was in no rush to interview the errant couple but eventually we did that together, when it turned out that madam was a real poodle enthusiast, used to be a breeder, now just went around the shows including Cruft’s. She was distraught, while he was still in a fury about his car, wrecked by this monster who called himself a policeman.

  At that remark, if Doug had socked him one I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I think he was now feeling sorry for the woman, clearly desolated by what had happened and, for her sins, married to this crass cretin.

  They pleaded guilty at the magistrates’ court to three charges of animal cruelty under the 1911 Act and were fined £200 on each count, which was a considerable sum then, maybe equivalent to a total of £3,000 today.

  Doug Wainwright was a legend, a fearless copper of the old school whose breed has disappeared from British policing under the weight of modernisation. I’d heard a couple of stories about him from way back, when he was a PC in a certain Yorkshire seaside town.

  One day, he bid good morning to a man who was well known to the police but who wasn’t engaged in criminal activity at that moment and so, in Doug’s view, was entitled to civility. As Doug walked on, he heard the man say something extremely derogatory to his girlfriend, about the local constabulary as currently represented, so he strolled back to the man, who was sitting on the harbour wall. Checking that the tide was out, Doug gave the man a mighty push that sent him backwards into the mud below.

  Complaints from a known villain would never get anywhere with the station inspector then, and the same applied in the tale of the electric colander. Another well-known felon, a burglar by trade, had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly. There were several burglaries on the books that the police knew this man had done but they couldn’t prove it, so Doug said he would get a confession.

  This burglar was a little ferret of a chap, thoroughly disreputable, and still fairly drunk, so he didn’t question anything when Doug and a colleague took him to the interview room, put a colander from the station kitchen on his head, and connected it to a radiator with a set of jump leads. Doug took out a walkie-talkie radio and told the deeply confused suspect that here they had the very latest in lie detectors. He would turn the device on with his radio, and ask some specific questions about a recent series of burglaries. If the man told a lie, the detector would give him a painful electric shock.

  All the cases were cleared up without recourse to electricity.

  In one way, Doug Wainwright was an orthodox animal nut, very knowledgeable, interested in everything, but in another he was somewhat eccentric. His speciality was reptiles, but he would have mini-crazes on particular species and he would have to have the experience of keeping them. Here was a man who could name every kind of snake in the Latin, but who also got excited about trying to tame a weasel. There was even a story from his earlier times by the seaside that he’d tried to tame a seal into going swimming with him.

  Over the years, he actually became something of a national expert on reptiles although he had no academic background. Just his enthusiasm that took him into every corner and every source of information.

  He rang me one day with that familiar tone in his voice that always made me think, Now what’s he done? He had acquired a boa constrictor, about ten feet long, as thick as your leg, and I had to go round to see it. I could tell it was too late for a lecture on the dangers of keeping large constrictors
and, anyway, I thought, Doug knew what he was doing.

  He had it in a massive vivarium and, I have to say, it was a most impressive creature, but over the next few weeks Doug became increasingly concerned. I didn’t know where he’d got the snake from and I didn’t ask, and he didn’t seem to know when it had last fed, and it was not at all interested in the dead rats Doug was offering. Constrictors don’t need to eat very often, but after three months Doug decided he had to do more to tempt it. He took it out of the vivarium, thinking perhaps that if he could get a rat in its mouth it would swallow it.

  We think of these giants being able to dislocate their jaws so they can swallow prey animals bigger than themselves that they’ve just crushed to death. We’ve seen pictures of a snake with a large bulge where the last meal is being digested. All true, but what perhaps we don’t realise is that a big constrictor has a big mouth anyway, maybe fifteen inches across and, although it doesn’t live by striking with a venomous bite, it can do that without the venom.

  This constrictor clearly didn’t like being handled by Doug, and it struck at him. It bit him on the face, and he had tooth marks in a circle, across his forehead, down his cheeks, and under his nose. How it missed his eyes we shall never know. Face covered in blood, he pushed his pet snake back into its vivarium and went to A & E at the nearest hospital.

  He was well known in there. He often ended up bringing drunks in who had glassed each other or some such, but he was not in uniform this time and he looked like he’d been glassed himself. The nurses didn’t recognise him.

  They listened to his story, but didn’t entirely believe it. I got a rather weird call from the hospital, saying that there was a very dodgy character who had been mistreating snakes and could I call by. Which I did, and the staff nurse repeated her suspicions, that this man might be a snake dealer, perhaps selling them for meat, or importing them illegally, and he’d obviously been doing something bad for the snake to bite him like that.

  I said I’d stroll by the cubicle and see what I could see, and I had some difficulty not bursting out laughing when I saw a disconsolate Doug sitting there, looking like an extra from The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, blood seeping through the bandages that swathed his head.

  I told the nurse that she had been quite right to call me, and I needed to interview this suspect snake-charmer at the police station to get to the bottom of it. I then popped in to see Doug, almost choked trying not to laugh, while he asked me for a lift home as he’d walked there. I escorted him from the premises, tipping a wink to the staff nurse, and that was that, except it wasn’t.

  A few weeks later, Doug happened to mention going into Casualty with his injured drunks to be stitched up, and how friendly the nurses had always been, cracking jokes and generally trying to make the night shift go with a swing. ‘That was until recently,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what I’ve done but they won’t talk to me now.’

  9

  THE WAR NOBODY WINS

  When an inspector took over a new territory, the first thing to do was study a very variable document called Branch Hints. If the previous incumbent had been diligent and efficient, the Hints could be comprehensive with loads of helpful stuff – maps, lists of contacts in the police and fire brigade, recommended vets, not so recommended vets, RSPCA supporters, committee members, market days, good pubs, everything that might be useful – plus the baddies. These were known offenders and reoffenders, who you would find yourself going back to again and again, to check on their animals.

  Contained in my Branch Hints, when I first moved to Scorswick, were a couple of paragraphs about a gypsy family. These were not the type of traveller you see nowadays at Appleby New Fair, with their massive, flash, chromium-plated caravans complete with family silver and satellite dish, pulled by the biggest, ugliest four-wheel drives. No, these were the traditional sort, living in horse-drawn, bowtop wagons and not, seemingly, having any particular occupation nor ready source of income.

  My father would have called them didicois, the rough-and-ready gypsy lower classes (Romany word dikakai – ‘look here, man’, what you see is what you get), who followed the travelling ways. Such a lifestyle was feasible in the latter half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Families could follow a circuit, stopping here and there, same places at the same time every year, to do occasional farm work, buy, sell and train horses, do whatever odd jobs there were, mend things, tell fortunes, sell cheap herbal remedies to people who couldn’t afford a doctor, pick up scrap metal, and move on.

  There was trouble sometimes, but generally it was live and let live. Country folk in those days would not dial 999 to complain about a gypsy woman drying her washing on the hedge.

  Now there is no market for the travellers’ crafts and services. There is no potato picking, we don’t mend pans any more, we don’t believe in the powers of lucky white heather, and the few people who keep horses prefer the vet’s antibiotics to the gypsies’ magic medicine. A lot of the old gypsy families have moved on to new trades – loft insulation, driveway asphalting, landscape gardening, second-hand cars – but these gypsies of mine had not done that. They had kept to the old ways, without the old ways of making it work.

  They never went anywhere. They might move to the other end of the lane where there was some grass for their horses, and back again later, but that was it. They were non-travelling travellers, and the reason for it I guessed was the old man, the patriarch, Tom he was called, who seemed to spend his entire existence sitting outside on a log, beside the fire that was always burning, looking into the embers.

  Reading what was in the Hints, and noting the number of complaints my predecessor had taken, accusing them of poor treatment of horses and dogs, I decided to take the friendly approach and get to know these people. There were eight of them. The seniors were Old Tom – although how old I could never tell, maybe sixty, maybe ninety – and a very jolly, well-rounded lady called Meg who might have been his wife but could have been his daughter or younger sister. In any case, she was always telling him to do something or other, which he never did.

  There were three more women, one about seventeen, one about thirty, and one in between who had the looks to be a film star: underneath the grime, the tangled hair, the dirty rags of clothes, there was a dark-eyed Hollywood beauty.

  There were two men, who would have been the bread-winners had any bread been won, and little Joe, seven years old. Joe was the pride and joy of the family. Every week day in term time, somebody from social services picked him up, took him somewhere, stripped him, showered him, put him in primary school uniform, and dropped him off at school. At the end of the day, the procedure was reversed, without the shower.

  Little Joe was the first member of the clan to receive a normal education and so would be the first to be able to write. Gypsies often claim to be unable to read, although I’ve never seen one having any difficulty with the racing pages, and their mental arithmetic when working out a deal would leave me standing, but little Joe would still be unique in that he would be a master of all three of the Rs.

  Because their camp was only a short detour from my usual route into the office, I became a regular visitor. I can’t say I was ever totally accepted, but certainly the family, and patriarch Tom especially, went from fairly sullen mistrust to friendly tolerance, apart maybe from one of the men, and when I gave Tom my old uniform tunic he was genuinely delighted and never took it off. I kept a close eye on their horses and their lurcher dogs, and all was well.

  I used my veterinary contacts to get a free supply of medicines so I could inject any new dogs against distemper, and got treatments for the horses too. And, because our own son Carter junior was just a bit older than little Joe, there were clothes cast-offs. If my small rescue shelter in the potting shed was low on canine customers, there would be excess dog food I could pass on, and so we went over two years and more.

  My visits gradually became less frequent as I believed the need grew less, and I had plen
ty of other business to attend to. One very cold winter’s day, I decided to look in. I pulled up to have a chat with the van window down, when I saw something that immediately overcame my reluctance to get out in the freezing air. It looked like a dead dog, attached by baler twine to a wooden peg but hidden under one of the wagons. I could only just see it and, clearly, I was not supposed to. The gypsies saw that I’d seen and went into a guilty panic.

  ‘Don’t you look at that, sir, it’s nothing. Nothing at all to worry about. Don’t you go troubling about that, boss,’ and so on. Of course I did have to go troubling, and what I found shocked me greatly. I had believed these people were doing right by their animals, and that our friendship and mutual trust had put another layer of good will on top of that.

  I pulled on the string and looked down on a scene of horror. It had been a lurcher, and it was the most emaciated creature I had ever come across. There was no flesh on its bones at all. It had been suffering horribly from demodectic mange, it was covered in sores, and I couldn’t tell how long it had been dead.

  I blew my top at them. How could they do this? What could possess them to be so cruel to a dog that had been bred to serve them? Maybe it was one I’d injected, I didn’t know. Well, there wouldn’t be any more injections because there wouldn’t be any more dogs. I’d get them into court and they’d be banned from keeping dogs.

  They just stood there, not saying anything, not offering any kind of explanation. I looked hard at the one family member who had never lost his mistrust of me, a man of about forty known as Young Tom, presumably son of, and he wouldn’t meet my eye.

  ‘It’s yours, isn’t it, Tom?’ I said. I could see the women were furious with him and, under such pressure, he nodded, and then they turned on me, pleading with me to let it go. They would bury the dog and nobody need know any more about it.