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said, ‘It was a bit chilly, sergeant, a breeze off the sea, you know. It can blow a bit chilly on the harbourside at dawn.’
    ‘Yes, so it can,’ he paused, and at that precise moment the telephone rang. The office constable answered it and said, ‘Sergeant, it’s for you. The Superintendent.’
    As he moved to take the call, Sergeant Blaketon looked at meas if he was going to say something, but already I was moving towards the door. I bolted out of the office and was hurrying towards the exit of the police station as I heard Sergeant Blaketon in an animated conversation with the Superintendent. I’d been saved literally in the nick of time.
    But before I reached the door, a voice halted me. It was Stan, the PC on office duty.
    ‘Outside, quick,’ he said as he bustled me out of the station.
    ‘What’s the matter, Stan?’ I almost shouted.
    ‘Have you got a bloody clog off that boat?’ he asked me, eyeing the bulky shape beneath my cape.
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Why? It was given to me.’
    He laughed. ‘Then get to hell out of here, and quick! He was after it, he wanted it, that bloody sergeant you’ve brought over from Ashfordly. He noticed it there last night but there was no one about to ask, so he was going to have a word with the skipper this morning. It seems his wife has always wanted a genuine Dutch clog to put on her mantelpiece, but I can’t think why … Anyway, it had gone by the time he got down to the harbourside this morning …’
    ‘I’m going!’ I said, and I almost ran to the hotel. Anne was delighted, and I got a double helping of sausages that morning.
     
    The next time I boarded a fishing vessel occurred after a spate of shop-breakings in Strensford. In those days, the crime of breaking into shop premises to steal goods was popularly known as shop-breaking, but since 1968 all such ‘break and entry’ offences have been grouped together under the single heading of burglary .
    Whenever we paraded for a night shift during that short sojourn at the seaside, we were reminded that someone, probably a lone operator, was breaking into shops all over the town. The stolen property was not particularly valuable, like cameras or radio sets, nor was it particularly useful, like food or clothing. Most of the attacked premises were the tourist-souvenir type of shop, selling cheap oddments such as jewellery, watches, ornaments and knick-knacks of the kind no truly discerning visitor would take home. They were allclose to the harbourside too.
    On one occasion, for example, three flying ducks in plaster were taken, and we did wonder if the thief ran a boarding house. Almost all the boarding houses in Strensford at that time had plaster ducks flying up their walls, and some had gnomes in their gardens.
    The CID reckoned the breaker was a youth, perhaps a visitor to one of the holiday camps or caravan sites, but whoever he was, he always escaped. Their reckoning was based partly on the fact that he must be slim and agile to be able to wriggle through some of the skylights which were his chief source of entry, and another part of their logic was that the mediocre stuff he stole would hardly appeal to an adult. It would certainly not appeal to a handler of stolen goods or an antique-dealer.
    Throughout those warm summer nights, therefore, the uniform branch maintained observations upon the streets, but we never caught our man.
    More shops were raided, more junk was stolen and eventually the Chamber of Trade, and the Strensford Times , began to ask what the police were doing about the sudden and unwarranted major crime wave. The local Superintendent had the sense to issue a statement to the paper: ‘We are maintaining observations and are utilizing all available manpower in an attempt to curb this seasonal outbreak of crime. We believe it is the work of visiting criminals.’
    This series of shopbreakings occurred long before the days of collators who assembled and disseminated crime-beating information,