Helping the police with their inquiries

Dear The Police

Congratulations on being the best criminal-catching organisation in this country! In terms of catching crims, you'll always be number one with me, never mind the few bad apples etc etc etc.

Here's a tip: Give it a rest with the press releases and trumpeting to the media every time you catch "Britain's Worst Paedophile" or "Britain's Worst Mass Murderer".

To be perfectly honest, we're only really interested if you catch the really good ones.

Anyone can catch the country's worst mass murderer: He's the one in the blood-stained T-shirt, handing out leaflets outside Debehams saying "I've got grannies buried in my back garden". It hardly takes Sherlock Holmes to drag him in, pull his bungalow apart and push him down the stairs at the cop shop a few times until he confesses.

What you want to be looking out for are people who DO NOT dress in blood-stained T-shirts, handing out leaflets advertising guided tours of their top ten shallow graves. They're the ones with something to hide, and you want to be keeping an eye on them, possibly through a network of CCTV cameras, relentless internet traffic monitoring, and a red light that blinks in a control room every time somebody buys a shovel and/or a tin bath from B&Q.

Hope this helps.

Be lucky.

Your pal,

Albert O'Balsam