The Norfolk Probationer



  THE NORFOLK PROBATIONER

  A Catrin Sayer short story

  Allan Jones

  Published by Allan Jones

  Copyright 2014 Allan Jones

  ISBN: 978-0-9919072-2-9

  License Notes

  Thank you for downloading this free ebook. All Rights Reserved. This is a work of fiction. Some of the places in this story are real, others are entirely fictitious. Any portrayal of a particular place or organisation as part of this work is fictional. All persons and events are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Cover

  Norwich Cathedral, early 1970s (author photograph).

  About the author

  Allan Jones lives in Ontario, Canada. He was born and grew up in Merseyside, England. He studied in North Wales (B.Sc.) and East Anglia (Ph.D.). By profession a chemist, he has worked for many years as a consultant on international chemical regulation and has lived in or travelled to most of the regions featured in the Catrin Sayer novels.

  Other ebooks by Allan Jones

  The Catrin Sayer Mysteries

  The Chinese Sailor. Set in North Wales, Sayer’s first case involves a missing seaman and the smuggling of stolen art.

  The Scottish Colourist. The second book in the series is set in Glasgow and West Scotland and involves art fraud and the drug trade.

  The Falmouth Model. The third book is set in Cornwall and begins immediately after this short story. Sayer is drawn into an investigation into a bizarre Facebook attack on a university student who also models for a life drawing class.

  In a Moon’s Course. A book of flight simulation stories and route plans based on the stories of the Air Transport Auxiliary in World War II.

  Table of Contents

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  Notes

  I

  Constable Melissa Nunn drove her panda car with its distinctive blue and yellow Norfolk Constabulary flashes into the entrance of Norwich Station. She had about two minutes, she thought, before the London train pulls in. The last thing she wanted was to keep this police officer waiting; it would be a bad start. It wasn’t that the visitor was particularly high-ranking; she was a detective sergeant with the Metropolitan Police Service. DS Catrin Sayer already had a reputation that went ahead of her and she wasn’t thirty yet, DS Selman had told her.

  Melissa was six months out of training college and a probationer at the Norfolk Constabulary Headquarters. She felt like a spare part at times, assigned to anything and everything no-one else wanted to do, it seemed to her. She wondered how the woman she was collecting had done it; to get a plain-clothes job in a specialist art unit in Scotland Yard. And become a sergeant before thirty. It seemed a world away.

  As the arriving passengers came out she looked for an unaccompanied woman with blond, collar length hair and a scar on her face. That was all that she had been told.

  Catrin walked through the impressive entrance archway of Norwich Station and saw the police car waiting. She pulled her somewhat battered overnight case behind her and headed over as the uniformed constable got out of the vehicle, standing to meet her. The suitcase had done a lot of travelling in the last three years.

  “Sergeant Sayer, welcome, I am Melissa Nunn. I am to take you directly to the hospital to meet up with DS Selman.”

  “Good evening, Nunn, thank you for collecting me.”

  As they set off Catrin asked, “Any update on Mr. and Mrs. Pickersgill, do you know?”

  “I heard, Sergeant, that he is doing much better, he seems to have an iron constitution for an older man. The wife, it is more the shock from it all. As I think you know already, she is weakened anyway; she has late-stage cancer. A violent attack like that, well, it takes it out of you.”

  Catrin saw the WPC blush as she spoke and glance at the scar on her face, a two-inch pale pink line. So Neil Selman had told this probationer about that too.

  “It’s Catrin, while it’s just us in the car, Melissa, and yes, I am well aware that it takes it out of you.”

  The young WPC nodded and said nothing. Catrin remembered it was about six years since she was a probationer, also assigned at times to ferrying visitors around, worried about what to say next or whether to say anything at all. Her beat had then been Lambeth and like all probationers in their first two years of service, she had a mix of duties, additional training and pairing with more experienced officers, all to ‘learn the ropes’.

  Melissa started again. “So the Art Crime Unit investigates cases like this all the time. You must be all over the place.”

  “Sometimes, Melissa, but the travel is in fits and starts, not regular; a lot of the time the work is office-based. The Tube ride from home to New Scotland Yard and back is about all I do then. But I have seen a lot of the UK in the last while, it’s true.”

  “Are you are an art expert, Catrin?”

  “I have a degree in Fine Arts and Art History and I paint, but I am not an expert in the sense you mean, not like some of the officers in A&A, I mean, the Art & Antiques Unit at the Met. They are very experienced and qualified to chase up stolen art and forgeries.

  “My job, the ACU’s job I should say, is to work with regional police services to catch villains of the sort that attacked Mr. and Mrs. Pickersgill; in fact, to work on any serious art-related crime. If A&A turn left to follow the trail of the stolen art, we normally end up turning right to help track down whoever beat up the security guard or owner. If we trip over the paintings and don’t put our foot through them it’s a bonus.”

  “Oh my God, don’t put your foot through the Canaletto, if you find it,” Melissa laughed, “I am told it is worth a fortune.”

  Catrin grinned, “Oh yes, it is worth quite a lot of money. Not in the ten or twenty million pound range that the top-end Canaletto paintings bring in these days, but more than you and I together will earn in a lifetime, I suspect.”