Open Writing

My big brother Fred has all the bottle it needs to be a copper. Nothing scares him. He’s always there for you and he’ll have a go. So crims and bad guys, and other losers, take a tip from me – stay clear of that tough cop with the shaved hair and the Geordie accent. I don’t fancy your chances with him.

When I was a little boy, he always stood up for me. We shared the same bedroom for years and were really close.

We lived in this old inn, once a coaching house on the road to Consett, north west of Durham city. The house was draughty and the bedroom door sometimes would slam with great force, startling all the drinkers in the bar downstairs.

Mother would come rushing up the stairs. My bed was nearest the door. She’d round on me “Will you stop slamming that bloody door.”

“It wasn’t me, Mum,” I’d say.

“You are so naughty,” she’d continue. “You are scaring all the drinkers.”

Fred would speak up. “It wasn’t him, Mum. It was the ghost.”

“The ghost?” Mother thundered. “Nonsense.”

“It wasn’t the young’un, and it wasn’t me. It was the ghost.” Fred stood his ground.

Mother went downstairs back to the bar to serve more drinks. An old farmer, who’d lived in the district for many years, told her that a man with a violent temper had died in the room which was now our bedroom.

“How did he die?” asked Mother.

“Killed himself,” said the old gaffer. “Hanged himself from the ceiling rafter. My Dad said it was good riddance. He was that cantankerous.”

Another old customer chimed in “Didn’t he choke on the goose bone at the Christmas Day lunch.

“Nay, that was another one, a glutton. That wasn’t in the kids’ bedroom; it was in the room next door.”

Next day my Mother arranged for a latch hook to be installed in the wall, holding the door open so it couldn’t slam.

Fred and I felt exonerated.

I remember Fred’s first beat when he began his police career with the county force. He was stationed in a small village outside Hartlepool and issued with a BSA 250cc motor-cycle. He boarded in an old farmhouse. I went to stay there with him one weekend. Just when I was about to fall asleep, there would be a series of loud reverberations from inside the thick fieldstone walls.

“Don’t worry, kiddo,” Fred said. “It’s just rats – they run through the cavities in the walls.”

“They sound like cannonballs,” I said. “That is so scary.”

Fred grinned. “You’re always going to get a few rats round a farm.”

I went on his rounds with him the next night, checking out the local pub scene. We’d walk into a bar and all dirty jokes would cease in mid-sentence, all bad language would stop. Fred has that sort of effect on people.

There was a story later in his career that he had won numerous police medals for acts of courage. Only one was for bravery – the others were for success at golf in the inter-county championships.

Fred was a bit of an athlete. He’d had soccer trials for Gateshead and Newcastle United but never quite got there. The police force was always going to be his thing.

He soon earned his stripes and became a sergeant and was transferred to criminal investigation duties. It was a bit unnerving going round the countryside with him, when he turned that crime-scene detective’s eye on the neighborhood.

We’d be driving near our old home in Lanchester and Fred would stop the car near an old farm house.

“What do you make of that?” he’d say.

“It’s an old farmhouse.”

“Yes, but look at all that dressed stone. They’ve nicked that from the old Roman fort down the road.”

The thieves would have been dead two hundred years.

He’d point out a small ledge near the roof. “What about that?”

“It’s just a decoration, isn’t it?”

“No. It’s a ledge that people used to build in previous centuries as a refuge for witches. There’s just enough room for the witch to park her broomstick while passing over at night. In gratitude for this courtesy, she’d refrain from putting any evil spells on the farm.”

Fred has this method of making every piece of information work. He’s different. One day the chief of police sent him to the home of the local Conservative Member of Parliament. There had been a report of an intruder at the castle, the residence of the Member and his family.

Fred drove his police Ford up the long gravel drive to the castle and rapped on the front door with a large knocker shaped like a lion’s head with the tongue lolling.

It was a cold, spooky sort of place, lifeless, rooted in a past. A still, dim moat lay around it, not a ripple on the surface.

A butler in livery answered.

“I’ve come in answer to the report about an intruder,” Fred said.

“Come in. Her ladyship will see you in the parlor.”

Fred walked through a tiled hall beneath the inspection of haughty portraits of ancestors of the family assembled along the walls like a guard of honor. Fred acknowledged them with a grin.

He entered a side room where a handsome woman in her early forties was seated at a table writing on a small portable typewriter. Beside her was an open textbook, and Fred saw from the title it was about the art of writing orations through the ages.

An ancient clock chimed a trembling three, marking the hour.

“Sergeant, how very good of you to come so quickly,” the lady said.

“We believe in responding promptly to call-outs,” Fred replied. “Please tell me in your own words what happened.”

“There isn’t a lot to tell,” she said. “But I’d like to show you the scene where the intruder was discovered.”

She took Fred into a large kitchen, which though filled with modern equipment, still had its original stone flags underfoot.

It was a cool place and Fred was glad he wore his police overcoat.

“The intruder was seen in here by my daughter, just after midnight.”

“Hmn,” said Fred, stroking his chin, eyes narrowed. “What happened?”

“He called something to her. She panicked, fled to her room and locked the door.”

“What sort of a man was he? We’ll need a description.”

“A young man, poorly dressed in shabby old-fashioned clothes.”

“What did he say?” Fred has his notebook out to record the evidence.

“My daughter said it sounded like ‘I’m so cold.’”

“He said he was cold?” said Fred, incredulous.

“He used the old Geordie word, said he was cad.”

“He didn’t molest your daughter?”

“No.”

“Is anything missing?”

“Nothing we can discern.”

“How did he get in?”

“We don’t know. None of the doors or windows was forced.”

“Is your daughter in now?”

“No, she had to go off to a lecture. She’ll be back at the weekend.”

Fred searched around for signs of a break-in. Clearly nobody had come through the ceiling. On the outside walls, the mullioned windows were high and closed. He looked at the bench beneath them and saw no marks, nothing of import. Then he noticed one of the floor slabs was slightly loose.

“How very interesting,” he said. “Do you have a small crowbar or jimmy I could borrow?”

The butler was sent to find something suitable from the gardener. He returned with a short steel tool, sharpened like a chisel at one end. The other end had a hook.

Fred inserted the tool in the gap at the loose floor slab and levered it up.

The woman gasped in horror. There under her kitchen floor lay the skeleton of a footman who had vanished mysteriously a century ago.

The neck was broken and he had been quickly and indecently buried.

The skeleton was exhumed and buried in hallowed ground with the proper prayers said. There were no more intruders at the castle after that. The footman’s ghost was no longer cold beneath the kitchen slabs.

“Who did it?” I asked Fred.

Quick as a flash, he replied, “The butler did it. Not this current one, his great grandfather, the murderous old sod.”

“Any idea why?”

“Some sort of rivalry over the favors of the kitchen maid,” he added.

There’s never any doubt when Fred’s on the case. He brings in the villains dead or alive. While justice might not quite be done, the problem is always settled. We all have to compromise a little sometimes and apparently the ghost was happy.

My brother said he’d seen the dead man later in a dream. The ghost appeared at his bedside one night when rats were thundering through the farmhouse walls.

“Did it say anything?” I asked.

Fred smiled. “It was pleased with me,” he said. “It told me – ‘I’m not so cold now, bonnie lad.’”

This all happened years ago and Fred is now retired. The last I heard of him, he was walking over the moors in Northumberland, peering at rocks and making notes in a diary.

“What were you looking for?” I asked.

“Clues,” he said.

He had been studying Viking times in that area and was examining the rocks for any runes that had been carved there.

“I’ll have to come back in October-November,” he said. “There’s too much vegetation around now. It might be hiding valuable evidence.”

I probably should go with him. It’s not as if I could get into any trouble. Fred has always been there to stand between me and the shades of homicidal butlers, hanged maniacs, choking gluttons, and bloody-axed Vikings. I find the taxation people in Inland Revenue a lot scarier.

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