Saturday, January 26, 2008

Out for dinner

We were out for dinner last night, and I heard rather a nice story of policing in the past.
'Twas the night of the Great Train Robbery, and the host at last night's dinner was returning from a week's sailing up the West Coast of Scotland - no papers, no mobiles, no nothing, as it used to be ( I know younger readers won't believe this, but still).
He returned home late at night with three extremely large trunks/boxes , and, it being a horrible rainy night ( It's Glasgow) threw them rapidly into his garage and locked it, leaving the car outside.
Come 9am, there was a knock on the door, and there stood two policemen, who enquired who he was. He told them. They then said they were investigating the Great Train Robbery. At which point he thought it was a wind-up and slammed the door on them ( he was quite tired from his time at sea).
Needless to say, within about a nano second, the door was hammered again. Once opened, my friend was staring down the barrel of a revolver, and realised that, just possibly, this was no joke.
Fortunately, he had a perfect alibi, but the point was the policemen told him they were following up several thousand leads from the public. OK it was a huge event, but even minor crimes in those days were reported and followed up. I question whether the same could be said of virtually any crime apart from murder nowadays.

1 comment:

Whispering Walls said...

Nice neighbours!