A novel problem in Crookes

The first time a highly unusual man walked through the door of Novel, an independent bookshop in Crookes, was in September last year — the very first weekend it opened. That man, who told the 31-year-old owner Kate that he was Donald Trump’s son, part of Liverpool FC and a superhero, is now one of three men she’s had to ban from the shop. 

As of this week, strolling into Novel isn’t as easy as it was back then. When I visit to speak to Kate about “man number three”, I have to wait while a member of staff unlocks the front door for me. She locks it behind me immediately when I leave. 

“It’s upsetting that I now have to be hyper-vigilant with people that walk through my door,” Kate says. “You’re in your brain micro-analysing everything they’re doing.” As a result, she sometimes has her back up with men who are a little eccentric but “turn out to be lovely and harmless”. But after her experiences this year — the stress of which she suspects exacerbated her Crohn’s Disease to the point she had to be hospitalised in August — she doesn’t feel she can afford to let her guard down. 

“Man number three” is the reason Kate has decided to scale back Novel’s opening hours and look for a part-time job. He first visited the shop on a Saturday morning in July, Kate tells me. “I was on my own and he stank of booze and I could tell the moment he walked in that he was not in his right mind.” His hands were bloody, like he’d been in a fight. “He immediately told me ‘you don’t need to fear me’ and asked why I was scared but the look on his face was completely manic,” she says.

The man shouted that he wanted a coffee, before repeatedly prodding her to ask about his injuries. “I just ignored it. And then he said ‘come on, we’re friends aren’t we? Let me tell you what I have been up to.’” Kate topped up his coffee with cold water before handing it over, fearing he might throw it at her. He left without paying and stole a book as he went, although he stopped a member of the public 20 metres away and asked them to return it for him. 

Kate hoped this incident was just a one-off but, a few days later, the man was back again. “He seems to have gone on a rampage around Crookes for about five days,” she says, despite him giving a Firth Park address when he appeared at Sheffield Crown Court in October. Though Kate wasn’t working when he next showed up, the visit was very similar — he ordered a coffee and left without paying, even stealing the exact same book and posting it back through the letterbox later that day.

During the man’s third visit, Kate’s employee told him she would only make him a coffee if he paid first. He did not take this news well. “He said ‘I’ve already messed my hands up doing this once, do I need to make this worse for you?’” He would, he told Kate, “make her regret ever having opened a shop”. Kate asked her employee to go in the back and call the police but the man ended up leaving on his own, stealing the same book as he had done before. “We were so shaken up that we shut for the afternoon,” Kate says, adding that they stayed closed until the man’s arrest a few days later. “It pissed me off that the police wouldn’t come because this man had very clearly done something violent before, we didn’t feel safe.”

Since then, Kate has heard that the man in question also smashed six windows at the Springvale Tavern and behaved badly at a number of other local businesses. The employee behind the bar at the pub tells me he can’t comment, although a regular laughs knowingly from the corner. What he is willing to confirm is what the man allegedly told one of his bouncers, which is that he was deliberately “targeting women”. 

This was no great surprise to Kate. “I think men come into certain businesses because they know it’ll be quiet and there will be a nice lady behind the counter,” she says. “Cloud Coffee is a stone’s throw away from us but it’s run by two massive guys so they’ve never had any issues with anyone like this coming through the door.” When Kate posted on Novel’s Instagram account about her experience with “man number three,” in order to explain why the shop would not be open as usual on Monday, she was inundated with messages from other female business-owners about men they’d had to ban for concerning behaviour. “One told me she’d had a guy hand her a full ring binder full of love letters.”

In fact, “man number three” is probably more like man number 33, if you take Crookes as a whole. There is now such a long list of local characters that it takes more than five minutes’ of back and forth with the staff behind the counter at Porky’s sandwich shop before we’re confident we’re talking about the same person. Do I mean the one with the bald head? No, not him. The one with the Youtube channel? Not him either. The one with only one eye? It goes on. 

In Kate’s view, there has been a marked increase in the number of vulnerable people hanging out in Crookes over the last year or so, which she believes is a direct consequence of the city-centre crackdown on antisocial behaviour pushing them out to the suburbs. “People know they will get arrested in town for anything at the moment,” she says. “And Crookes is great because there’s lot of students, who tend to be more generous.” 

When the staff at Porky’s are finally clear on who “man number three” is, the owner tells me she’s had to ban him too. She tried to befriend him at first, she says, because she felt a bit sorry for him and she reckons the fact that his English isn’t very good may make him seem rude even when he isn’t trying to be. However, the way he could suddenly switch and become very angry mid-conversation was eventually too much to put up with. He does seem to have a problem with women, she admits, although there’s also clearly something more serious going on. 

On 10 July, “man number three” was arrested outside St Thomas’ Church — no one I chat to locally is aware what happened there, and the church declines to comment. Kate was told there were 20 charges to his name, including theft and intimidation. However, by the time the man appeared at Sheffield Crown Court in October, he was answering for only one of the allegations leveled against him, which was also the most serious. 

On 8 July, the court heard, he attacked a cleaner who disturbed him by hoovering — punching him, hitting him with the hoover and putting him in a chokehold — before assaulting a second man who tried to intervene. He pled guilty and was sentenced to a year in jail, although the judge noted he had been “persuaded” to suspend this sentence, meaning the man would not have to go to jail if he managed to stay out of trouble for the next year. 

The reason for this clemency is where an already complicated situation only becomes more fraught. The man’s defence lawyer referred the judge to reports prepared on behalf of his client, who is an asylum seeker, which showed that he was suffering from a number of psychological issues, including PTSD. The judge was convinced that he sincerely regretted his behaviour. 

Emma Rattenbury, a local activist who works with “people seeking sanctuary,” says there is shockingly little mental health support available for people who apply for asylum. “Many people seeking sanctuary are very traumatised — they may have experienced torture or imprisonment — and that’s not an excuse for them behaving really, really inappropriately, but it is an explanation.” While local charities supporting refugees and asylum seekers can invite them to weekly drop-ins or refer them to NHS mental health services, it’s very unlikely that an adult man would be seen. “Priority tends to be given to children,” she explains. “Mental health services in the NHS are so thinly stretched that even as a British citizen it’s difficult to get access to anything quickly.”

“I have no doubt he has had a really traumatic life, because you’d have to be pretty traumatised to act this way,” Kate says. However, she was very concerned that the sentence was suspended, especially when he started popping up in Crookes again. Kate made the decision to close on Monday after learning the man had visited her shop while she wasn’t there last week. Since then, she adds, he’s walked past her shop a few times and smiled at her, which she thinks is designed to intimidate her. “I just don’t feel safe, I don’t trust him and I'm at a bit of a loss for what to do,” she said in her video on Instagram. 

Emma explains that the man likely will be — or perhaps has already been — refused asylum after his conviction. He is probably “on the list to be shipped off somewhere,” she says, but people in his position are “often left in limbo” for a surprisingly long amount of time. “His file will be somewhere on some shelf and they don’t know what they’re doing with him yet,” she says. “It’s an appalling situation all round — it’s appalling for him, it’s appalling for these women and it’s appalling for anyone he comes into contact with when he is in a bad way.” 

“I’d never cheer about someone getting deported,” Kate tells me. “But, if you’re going to menace people, there need to be consequences.” It’s a lesson she learned the hard way, she says, through her experience with “man number one”. 

When man number one first visited the shop on opening weekend, Kate initially tried to be polite. However, during a later visit, she became uncomfortable when she realised he “was staring very intently” at her chest. When he noticed her unease, he insisted “there’s no problem if older men want to have sex with younger women”. Her husband encouraged her to go upstairs and then asked the man to leave. “He started chucking stuff at him, throwing books around the shop and asking people to fight him,” she says. Since then, she’s heard myriad tales of “the insanity he has unleashed on Crookes”. 

At the time, Kate took the advice she was given by local police not to press charges. “They told me they’d go round and have a conversation with him and he’d leave me alone,” she says. “I just agreed with whatever they thought was the best course of action.” She tells me the man never entered her shop again but would occasionally walk past and mime shooting her with an imaginary gun. “I was always like ‘fuck, it’s him’.”

However, eventually Kate regretted not pressing charges, after she learned the full extent of his concerning behaviour, particularly towards students. She discovered public social media posts — written entirely in capital letters — in which the man wrote that his “blood boils” when he sees a beautiful woman and that the pain of never having had a girlfriend “makes [him] seek revenge”. 

Kate understands why her shop would seem like an inviting place to hang out — after all, she’s worked hard to make it that way. “These are men who slip through the cracks and feel like the world is against them,” she says. “Shops like mine are open, friendly, warm.” But that inviting atmosphere has been “so badly compromised” by people who need help she can’t offer. “These men are just allowed free roam, with seemingly no tabs kept on them,” she says. “The actual infrastructure of social work and probation that should be helping and supporting them is very poor.”

She also feels let down by the police, despite really appreciating the support of her local neighbourhood officers, because she knows from past experience that a 999 call during a concerning incident is unlikely to do much good. “The police have said that, if a man comes in with a weapon, that’s when I should call them. But it’s not like they magically appear once I call, what do I do in the meantime?”

When contacted for comment by The Tribune, Inspector Nik Dodsworth said the Neighbourhood Policing Team for Sheffield North West have been working closely with affected businesses in Crookes “offering advice and support including around enhanced security measures and crime prevention tactics”. He added: “We are also enhancing patrols in the local area to provide reassurance and make people feel safer, and exploring the possibility of civil orders against prolific individuals. We will do all we can, alongside our partners, to ensure our vibrant local communities including Crookes remain safe and enjoyable places to live, work and visit.”