So it was Alf and I in our somewhat battered Police minivan who made our way to the Colne that gentle morn. What he didn’t know about the area and its scamps, scoundrels and rotters was really not worth knowing, and his talent for finding a quiet place to hide up while he had a smoke was legendary. He was a font of local knowledge and had been a rural beat copper for close to twenty years. He was not only a man of considerable experience in police procedure, but also a shrewd observer of the human condition. He had a quite wicked sense of humour and was completely unabashed by any authority except that of his wife, Maude, who ruled him and their huge family with a rod of iron.Īlf knew the rule book backwards and sideways and could always find some Queen’s Regulation to hide behind when necessary, and his knowledge of by-laws, statutes and criminal law was unparalleled. His round face was gently lined around the eyes, like a parchment on which rather too much sorrow had been written. He wore the medal ribbons of the Atlantic Star for service in the Second World War (as a naval rating on the Atlantic convoys) along with the nineteen thirty-nine to nineteen forty-five star which told those who knew that he was a man of that generation of steel who had lived in some of the most ‘interesting’ times of this century. Alf stood over six feet tall in his massive, black ammunition boots that could, and sometimes did, break down doors. Sitting by my side as I drove, and in nominal charge, was one Alf Peabody, a senior constable and sometime acting sergeant who, despite his considerable girth, scruffy uniform and foul tobacco pipe, was a damn good copper. A virgin constable with shiny buttons and a soul untarnished by the wicked ways of the world. A lad of some thirty-plus summers, still keen and skittish from my months in the police training Stalag, fit, bearded and ripe for adventure. It was passed by the gods of headquarters to the local police who were on patrol in the area. Now read on.Īt about seven in the morning on a cold Sunday in the early Autumn, a ‘999’ call was made from a phone box on the old A604 road close by the village of Sturmer in Essex. I’m just telling you this so you’ll understand the dynamics of what follows. An attitude of deep suspicion, always on the lookout for underhanded dealings. There has always been a ‘friendly’ rivalry between these two forces, not unlike that which existed between the English and the Welsh during the middle ages. That last bit is significant: On one side of the river, the noble Essex Police on the other, the Suffolk Constabulary. During the course of its journey to the sea this river acts as a boundary between the counties of Essex and Suffolk. The river was the Colne, which meanders from somewhere soggy in Cambridgeshire, carving itself a gentle valley along the way, and eventually ending up as a wide estuary on which lurks the port of Harwich. Some time ago, when the world was young and beer and tobacco cheap, a man was found in a river still holding on to, and a little bit entwined with, his bicycle. The Floating Dutchman was probably one of this last sort. Some people go missing because they want to, others go missing in their own heads, poor sods, and then there are those who go missing simply because they got lost. This is the story of The Floating Dutchman.
A layer of ‘now’ is always imposed onto ‘then,’ and these stories are from so far back in my ‘then’ that all that’s left are the bits that stick up from the rest like an old stump in a bog, or perhaps an old bicycle frame in a river. Memory is edited almost as soon as the moment passes, then filtered through time and self-importance. However if you think that the situations I describe could never happen. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious.
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