CHAPTER 21

Just When You Think You’ve Seen it All!

I’ve said it before and now I’m going to say it again, as any bobby in the land will tell you – always expect the unexpected. ‘It’ could happen anywhere and at anytime and the form that ‘it’ comes in could be absolutely anything: sometimes dangerous, sometimes sad or even sometimes humorous. A bobby working within a heavily populated area, like a city, obviously comes across more incidents than the bobby in a rural area so that the chances of coming across one of these unexpected or unusual incidents must, therefore, be greater.

After many years of police experience in the tough east end of Sheffield, I’d seen quite a lot of weird and odd things and you got to a stage where you assumed that there couldn’t be anything left out there that was going to surprise you. How naïve and wrong I was to think such a stupid thing.

Afters shifts (3pm to 11pm) were always busy during the weekend. Rick had managed to finish on time and had scuttled off home – lucky Rick. Tony Scrooby was the night shift detective and he’d gone out to deal with a couple of house burglaries on the Daffodil Estate at the top side of Wincobank and by 11.30pm John and I were ready for off.

About a week before this a snout (informant) had rung John and we’d met up with him at the ‘Mucky Duck’ in the city to see what he wanted.

In the pub he very discreetly pointed out to us a chap who was wearing a smart suit. The man sported a thin pencil moustache and had slicked back dark hair and what with that, his flashy rings, gold necklace and watch he looked a right flash Harry or spiv.

‘Looks like a jeweller,’ said John.

‘Jeweller my arse,’ said the Snout. ‘It’s all false – he’s a ring switcher and as crafty as a cart load of monkeys.’

‘How do you mean?’ John asked.

‘He buys cheap paste jewellery, mainly rings and then visits markets all over the north of England pretending to be a prospective buyer,’ he chuckled and continued, ‘He has a young woman accomplice with him who flashes her legs and cleavage and she tries on lots of different and expensive rings. This makes the stall holder dizzy. The couple walk away without buying anything and it may be ages afterwards that the stall holder realizes that three or four of his diamond rings have been switched for cheap fakes.’

‘I’ve never seen him before,’ said John, ‘where does he hang out?’

‘He lives in a flashy flat in Ecclesall and guess who one of his neighbours is?’ said the snout.

‘Who’s that then?’ asked John with a bemused look on his face.

‘Someone who I think you lot are interested in. It’s that bloke from that new swap shop down The Cliffe. He buys all his bent gear off him,’ he replied.

‘Why are you grassing him up?’ asked John.

‘Because the fly bastard’s done my sister, but he doesn’t know that I know that yet,’ the snout replied.

‘See if you can find anything else out,’ said John, ‘and we’ll see you at the Cavendish Club on Bank Street this coming Saturday night if we get the chance, OK?’ And off we went.

It was a nice, balmy summer’s night and our upstairs windows at the nick had been left open to let in the gentle breeze. They also let in the noise of rowdy drunks who were arriving at the station having been rounded up by the Black Maria – a typical Saturday night. The people who lived in the terraced houses across the road were, as usual, outside and laughing at the antics of people in various stages of drunkenness. As they were being lead into the police station some were singing and happy whilst others were either shouting, swearing, falling down or all three at once – what a comical sight.

Looking down from the window I could see old Mrs Smith laughing her head off across the road and on seeing me she shouted, ‘Looks like a full house tonight, Martyn. There’ll be no more cells left at this rate.’ I gave her a wave and shut the window. John and I were ready to go and meet the snout.

As we walked down the stairs to the main part of the station it was like bedlam and old Mrs Smith was right, the cells were full.

Just as I opened the large front door of the station on our way out, I was suddenly met face to face with a blonde-haired woman who was falling forward towards me. I instinctively grabbed hold of her to stop her falling further and at the same time said, ‘Sorry love, are you OK?’ but she didn’t answer. Immediately behind her was a policewoman who grabbed her from behind and pulled her back upright. They were followed in by my mate PC Roy Sharman who was struggling with a middle-aged drunken bloke in handcuffs and I realized then that both must be prisoners.

The bloke had a shiner on one eye, probably from Roy I thought and chuckled to myself – when beer’s in wits are out. They were man-handled past me and into the large public waiting room which, because the cells were full, was the only room available. It was like hell let loose in the station and John and I couldn’t get out soon enough.

‘MARTYN!’ It was Jane, the policewoman, shouting from the waiting room.

‘What’s up love?’ I replied.

‘There’s something not right going on here, come and see what you think will you?’ she said. I shook my head and thought here we go again – what now – if only we’d finished work five minutes earlier!

Because we were already late John and I decided that he ought to go and meet Mr Snout and then I’d catch up with him a bit later on at the club and off he went. Little was I to know at that point that I was about to embark on yet another ‘IT’ or unusual incident and one which, I can assure you, is absolutely true.

As I stepped into the waiting room I could see that Mr Handcuff-man was fast asleep on the floor, his shiner had got bigger and I could see bright red lipstick smeared around his mouth. I’d not seen the woman properly, except for a quick glance through the waiting room window when I thought she looked a bit of all right.

I couldn’t reckon up why Jane (the policewoman) would need a detective to be involved but by now I’d walked further into the room. Sitting on a chair and facing me from behind a table and holding a handbag was the woman. She had long blonde hair down to her shoulders, blue eye shadow, black eyeliner and thick black mascara on her long eyelashes. She was holding a small white handkerchief up to her nose which I could see had been bleeding. Although I couldn’t see her lower face clearly, because of her handkerchief, I could make out that her bright red lipstick was also smeared across her mouth. I looked across at Mr Handcuff-man. None of us liked lady hitters and I wondered again if Roy (who had gone to mash a pot of tea) had clipped him.

‘What do you want me here for? It looks like a husband and wife common assault job to me,’ I said to Jane. In answer she went to the woman, who was still sitting behind the table and said in a sharp voice, ‘Stand up, lower your arms and show Mr Johnson your torn blouse.’

The woman stood up and sheepishly lowered her arms to reveal the tattered remains of a pink blouse draped around some of her body. The blouse only covered part of her and I could see half of a black bra covering fair-size boobs.

At this stage Roy brought in three pots of tea and as he sat down Jane spoke again to the woman.

‘Walk round from behind the table and stand in front of us.’

As she got closer to us I realized why Jane wanted a detective with her. She was wearing one black stiletto shoe, nylons, suspender belt and a pair of pink knickers.

They certainly didn’t match her thick calf muscles and Adam’s apple and, as usual, I couldn’t stop inwardly laughing. Roy was the same as me and was shaking so much with trying not to laugh out loud that he knocked his pot of tea off the table and onto the floor where it smashed near to Mr Handcuff-man which woke him up with a jolt.

Roy looked at me and fairly loudly said, ‘I must admit she’s got some balls Martyn.’

At that point Mr Handcuff-man jumped up and shouted, ‘The robbing, dirty bastard hasn’t got any balls,’ and before anyone could stop him he lunged forward pulling down the woman’s knickers to her ankles.

Roy pulled him off and then there was a silence that seemed to last for ever as we all looked at the sight in front of us with our mouths and eyes wide open in disbelief. The woman stood in front of us trying to cover herself up and, as we expected, she wasn’t a she at all, she was a he dressed as a woman. We’d all seen transvestites before but what we were now looking at, with mouths wide open, made this one look very different to the others.

Instead of seeing what we expected to see (his crown jewels) we were looking at hair around what appeared to be the shape of a vagina which threw us altogether. It seemed to be built into a flesh coloured and padded girdle which contained a rubbery sort of tube to hold an incoming – well you know what! It’s not very often that you find one policeman never mind three stuck for words but we just couldn’t believe what we were looking at and at first just stared.

‘Bloody hell fire, you were right lass, there is something going off here – but what? Why were they both arrested in the first place?’ I asked Jane.

‘They were having a right ding dong battle in the street,’ she answered. ‘At first I thought it was an attempted rape because the bloke in ‘cuffs was trying to rip her clothes off. Her skirt was on the floor and is probably still there where I left it.’

‘You and Roy wait here and I’ll interview the chap in the ‘cuffs,’ I replied.

Upstairs in the CID office I sat Mr Handcuff-man down and asked him why he was fighting the ‘woman’.

‘I’ve been to watch Sheffield United this afternoon and had a few beers with the lads. After that I went boozing again and I ended up having a skin full,’ he answered.

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘Even though I was pretty drunk I fancied a ‘jump’ so went to find a prostitute. That’s when I met that bastard downstairs,’ he said.

‘What do you mean by that?’ I asked, intrigued.

‘I know where the girls go touting for business so I went there to find a prostitute. I saw her – her who’s downstairs now – walking up and down the street and I thought she looked a bit of all right, just like Diana Dors in fact, so when she asked if I was looking for business, I said yes – I couldn’t wait.’

As he said that I stood up and looked at him, first of all with my mouth wide open in amazement and then said, ‘You’ve got to be bloody joking – are you telling me that the man downstairs was working the streets as a female prostitute – I don’t believe it.’

‘It’s true all right – we agreed a price and she took me up an alleyway where somebody had dumped an old settee.’

‘Keep going,’ I said. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘What happened then?’

He continued, ‘We were snogging and at the same time she got my dick out, sat on top of me and put it inside her. Even though I was pissed I knew something was wrong and shoved her off me. She ran off into the street with me chasing her and when I caught her I tried to rip her clothes off to see whether it was a woman or a man. She hit me with something hard so I thumped her in the nose and that’s when your lot collared us – dirty bastard!’

I couldn’t believe what he had told me and, by the time I got back downstairs, I had to laugh because Roy had told ‘Diana Dors’ to remove his wig and padded bra. He was standing there with his head bent and very sheepishly looking down at his feet. Roy had found him a pair of old police trousers to wear, held up with a pair of braces, to cover up his crown jewels and in full make up he looked a right sight, more like a circus clown than a lady of the night. I couldn’t stop laughing.

I spoke to the Diana Dors lookalike under caution and he readily admitted to working the streets as a female prostitute. It seemed to me that this admission was made very quickly and only because he knew full well that we could prove it. I was certain that he was trying to hide something from us (other than his knackers that is), something that would get him into more trouble than he was already in.

Jane, meanwhile, had searched his handbag and said, ‘What’s this here then?’ and she held up a tube of, what turned out to be, lubricating cream which Diana Dors admitted that he used to put inside the tube to make it feel more natural for the ‘customer’.

More significantly, Jane also found a small cosh and with that I decided that we ought to search his house to see if we could find anything further – something was wrong somewhere.

He was a single bloke and in the house Roy and I found loads of women’s underwear which he again (too readily I thought) admitted to stealing from washing lines in the locality, which oddly enough when checked out against our records, cleared up a lot of minor crime for us. We’d been looking for a ‘knicker pincher’ for ages and it looked as though we’d found him.

We continued searching but I couldn’t stop thinking about the cosh. Why would he need a cosh – self defence? Or could it be for something more sinister? When I found two drawers full of empty wallets, I was gob smacked.

‘Nah then pillock, where’ve you got these wallets from?’ I asked him.

‘I found them in the streets over a period of years,’ was his reply.

‘You must think I came down on the up train mate, I’m not daft. Where are they from?’ But he just repeated what he had said before. Not one of the wallets contained anything to indicate an owner and no matter how much I questioned him, he wouldn’t admit to anything else. In the absence of any complainants we were stuck.

To this day it is my firm belief that his real game was to attract drunken men into a compromising position and during sex he would hit them over the head with the cosh in order to rob them. He realized that the likelihood of anyone making a complaint in those circumstances, would be pretty remote.

We charged ‘Mr Knicker-Pincher’ with common assault and stealing ladies underwear from washing lines and also with being in possession of an offensive weapon (I mean the cosh, of course). He told us that he carried it in order to protect himself. Having no previous convictions he got away with virtually a slap on the wrist for being a naughty girl (sorry – boy).

It was one of the weirdest and bizarre jobs that I ever dealt with and it just goes to show that none of us are too old to learn. None of us knows what is round the corner.

By the time I’d finished at the station that night the night club would be closed and John would have been in bed long ago and it was to be another six months or so, for various reasons, before we would have the chance to look at Mr Ring-Switcher again.

After working about a year in the Criminal Investigation Department I still wasn’t convinced that it was for me. I didn’t feel as comfortable as I did when working the beat and mixing with an amazing variety of people. The things that I was missing the most were the kids, old people and laughter. In early 1962, when I’d joined the job, all I ever wanted to do was to work with people whilst on the beat. The job, however, was changing and not necessarily for the better. It was becoming apparent to me that the bobby on the beat was being viewed, by some, as unnecessary – what a load of rubbish!

A good beat bobby who mixed and worked together with people could, in my opinion, prevent about a third of the crimes that we were there to detect – that is if we could get out of the office because of the mountain of paperwork created.

I decided to give it another twelve months or so in CID and then reassess the situation.

I hope you have enjoyed these stories and, all being well, I’ll let you know how I get on in the next book. Thank you for reading this one – all the best and all being well we’ll meet again soon. There’s still plenty more unusual and funny stories to follow.