11 Earlier that morning, 9.30am.
There tended to be a bit of a pattern to these calls. There was an unbelievably high number of domestic disputes — either someone calling the police because his neighbour had parked across his drive or trimmed his hedge without permission, or a wife calling the police on her husband because he’d hidden the remote control and wouldn’t tell her where it was.
Before Stuart Houghton joined the police, he’d read these stories in newspapers and assumed they must be fairly rare occurrences — something that happened in one police force once every few months. He was wrong. Most days, he’d spend his time wondering why the hell half the people he went out to see had even called the police.
His favourite had to be the guy who flagged them down on the high street bec
