Just the Job, Lad

by Mike Pannett

  There wasn’t anything much else to say, really. I thanked Birdie, left his office and got ready to leave.

  Ann was in when I got home, thank goodness. As soon as I was in the back door – before I’d even got my shoes off – I was telling her what had happened. ‘You couldn’t make it up,’ I said. I was seething by now. ‘A bloke like that, built like a brick outhouse, picks on a ten-stone weakling, no real provocation, and sends him to hospital. Lucky he didn’t crack his skull. We make a swift clean arrest, get him off the streets before he does any more damage, and now I’m the one in trouble. How does that work, eh?’ I kicked my shoes into the corner and went into the sitting room.

  ‘What exactly is he saying you called him?’ Ann asked.

  ‘I said he was “scum”. No, I correct myself, I said he was “a piece of scum”. Which he is. God, if I’d said what I was really thinking I’d be in real trouble, I can tell you.’

  I sat down in my recliner. ‘So,’ I said, ‘it looks as though I’ve got myself well and truly in the mire. Me and my big mouth, eh?’

  ‘Mike, stop being so dramatic. You’re not well and truly in the mire. It’s hardly the crime of the century, certainly not in the Gene Hunt school of policing. But’– Ann sighed and came to sit on the arm of the chair – ‘you could really do without it now, couldn’t you?’

  ‘You mean there’s a good time to be accused of abusing a prisoner?’

  ‘No, I mean you could find yourself on a promotion interview board before very much longer.’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose I could. So now what do I do? ’

  ‘Hmm.’ Ann got up and went to stand by the hearth. She didn’t say anything for a few moments, just plucked a few dead flowers off a bunch I’d bought her at the weekend. That’s one of the things I really like about her. Where I’ve always got something to say for myself, and occasionally speak before I’ve thought my answer through, she will chew a thing over for some time before she comes up with a response.

  As I waited, Henry came and put his head on my knee. It’s funny how a dog sometimes knows you’re unhappy. ‘All right for you,’ I said. ‘Eat, sleep, walk, eat. You don’t know how lucky you are.’

  ‘Where’s that dictionary?’ Ann was looking behind the TV. ‘You moved it?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s over there with my books,’ I said. ‘On the sideboard. I was using it for my exam preparation – till the bloody builders moved in.’

  ‘Another week or two and they’ll be done,’ she said. ‘If you believe Soapy.’ She went and picked up the dictionary. It wasn’t a massive one, not like the one my dad had when we were growing up. It was more the sort you could get in your pocket if you had to. ‘Right.’ Ann had done her thinking and was now into action mode. She started flipping through the pages. ‘Scum,’ she said, ‘scum scum scum – where are you? We’ve got script reader, scuffle, sculpture – ah, here we go: scum.’ She furrowed her brow, walked over to the window where the light was better, and read aloud. “A film or layer of foul or extraneous matter” . . . ye-es. “Refuse” . . . ye-es. Ah, this is what we want.’ She turned to face me, holding the book in her two hands. ‘Are you ready for this? Are you sitting comfortably?’

  ‘Go on, let’s have it.’

  ‘Right then. “A low, worthless or evil person; a person of little or no consequence; riffraff or rabble”.’

  ‘Hey, I like it,’ I said. ‘Low, worthless and . . . say that last bit again, will you?’

  ‘A person of little or no consequence—’

  ‘That’s him! Yeah, that’s John Simmonds to a T. But how does that help me?’

  Ann put the dictionary down on the coffee table and went to the sideboard drawer to get a notepad. ‘It’s the main prop of your defence,’ she said. ‘We’ll copy this down, verbatim. In fact, I know what we’ll do: we’ll type it up and print it out. And while we’re at it let’s make a note of the actual dictionary we’re quoting from. What edition it is and everything. Let’s show them you know what you’re talking about. Not a man to bandy words about without knowing what they mean, eh?’ She grinned and tapped me on the knee. She was loving this. ‘They’ll be impressed by that, you see if they aren’t.’

  ‘You don’t think I didn’t know what it meant when I said it, do you? ’Cos I did.’

  Ann raised an eyebrow. ‘Of course you did, but now you know for sure.’ She tapped her pen against the notepad. ‘Documentary evidence. Now listen, you know how they work. What about your tray, your paperwork, your locker? What sort of state are they in? They’ll see this as an opportunity to give you a full MOT. If they can’t get you on one thing, they’ll be looking for another. You know how they are.’

  ‘Well, the only thing they’ll find is a few wildlife magazines and a pair of dirty wellies,’ I said. ‘Y’know, I always remember what I was told as a young copper. That honesty is the main thing. If you’ve made a mistake, you own up to it. If you try and hide something and act dishonestly, then you’re going to find yourself out of a job.’

  ‘Yep, you’re right there. That’s what I was always told too. You know, if I hadn’t transferred back up here from London I was going to go into the complaints department. I was seriously thinking about it, at any rate.’

  ‘Me too. I was looking to join their surveillance wing. Quite a few of my old team have joined them since I came up north.’

  ‘For me it was the next step towards promotion. A few of my old inspectors were on it. They actually invited me to join.’

  ‘Strange the way things turn out, eh? Anyway, let’s just hope they don’t take too long. I’ve had these things drag on for weeks – months. Gets you down.’

  As it happened it was only a day or two later when Birdie called me into his office again. This time he had me sat down straight away. And he called me Mike.

  ‘The formal complaint has been lodged,’ he said, ‘and I have to serve this Regulation Nine notice on you.’ He read the details of the complaint to me from the standard Reg 9 form. ‘Would you like to say anything in response?’

  I gave him the standard answer. ‘Nothing to say at this stage, sir.’

  Birdie copied down what I’d said verbatim on the duplicated forms, before asking me to read and sign it, confirming my response and receipt of the notification. He then handed me a copy and said, ‘Sorry about that Mike. It’s not a part of the job I like, but it’s out of my hands now. From this point on, Complaints will be dealing with it.’

  I wondered how Birdie expected me to react to this formal notification. I remember how unhappy I was the first time I had a complaint lodged against me – in fact, I was well and truly rattled – but that was many years ago now. I was particularly upset about it, because I felt it was unjustified. But I remember my sergeant at the time saying to me, ‘Listen, it’s normal. You’ve got to learn to expect them. It’s part of the job. If you go through a full year without getting one it’ll be assumed – I’ll assume – that you aren’t doing your job properly.’ The thing was, people were a lot more confrontational down in the Smoke. They never actually said ‘It’s a fair cop’ and came quietly. That’s strictly for black-and-white films. It was always ‘Get your f***ing hands off me; I know my rights’, followed by ‘I want to speak to a solicitor’. And fair enough. You could understand it, even if it was a pain in the backside. It became the norm. There were times when I had two or three complaints outstanding against me, and after a while they stopped bothering me – except when they were claiming I’d assaulted or physically abused them, that is, because I never did. Ever. Apart from the fact that it wasn’t in my nature, I was only too well aware that you could lose your job and end up in prison if one of the more serious allegations against you was upheld. But since I’d moved back up north it had been a different story. I simply hardly ever got one. This was my first in three, maybe four years. I don’t think young Fordy or Jayne had ever had one. Among thirty-eight Ryedale officers there might be one or two with complaints ongoing at any one time, sometimes non
e. North Yorkshire criminals tend not to bleat when they get caught, and they tend to mistrust solicitors.

  I had a good idea what to expect as the procedure ran its course. I knew that I could expect a call to a formal interview with the C & D – that is, Complaints and Discipline, variously known to us humble coppers as the Leather Heel squad or simply the SS. At the time I left London it was the Met’s fastest-growing department. How things change. When I first started the majority of everyday complaints would have been dealt with in-house, by your local inspector. More serious matters were passed to the small complaints team based at Tintagel House. There was clearly a need for a degree of impartiality, so they started bringing in small dedicated teams, and they just mushroomed. There’s no point denying that a small minority of cops have stepped over the line, and perhaps the fact that every such case is very well publicised in the media reflects their comparative rarity. But of course, it only takes a couple of high-profile cases and suddenly every cop is tarred with the same brush, giving the public the impression that there are in fact far greater problems than there really are. Nobody likes a bent cop, least of all me, but in my opinion the police response has been over the top. Suddenly we had hundreds and hundreds of officers working on this kind of thing full-time. Integrity officers, they called them, plain-clothes outfits with undercover and surveillance officers actually policing the police. It’s a bit like the Americans and their Internal Affairs, I suppose. We were all, every one of us, wary of them. And we felt we were right to be wary, that they were out to get you. Word would soon get round when they were conducting integrity tests. An undercover complaints officer might, for example, hand in a wallet at a station front desk, pretending to be a member of the public who’d had just found it in the back of a taxi. A short time later the station officer would have a visit from a member of the complaints department, who would want to see the wallet to ensure that the contents were still intact and properly recorded. We soon figured out what was going on and of course the practical jokers latched onto it. You would find a pound coin left on a canteen table in the refreshments room. Nearby would be a handwritten note saying ‘integrity test’, and the pound coin would be left to gather dust for months. Every time a contractor was working in the station, repairing ceiling tiles or fitting new lights and so on, we would talk noisily about covert cameras and sound systems to see whether we could embarrass them. I actually remember seeing an overalled workman up a ladder in among the suspended ceiling tiles in the canteen at a central London police station one day. It was only when I recognised him as a police officer from a another station, a guy I’d worked with previously, that I realised he was probably now in Complaints and was rigging up some sort of covert equipment. I was, to put it mildly, taken aback, but I didn’t say anything. The unwritten rule is, if you see a cop under cover you don’t let on, just let them carry on as if you’d seen nothing. I tended to laugh about it – we all did – but in truth it made me feel sad that we needed to go to these lengths. It did seem to me that around that time morale amongst us beat bobbies dropped. We couldn’t even have the usual team banter, the sort of jokes that kept everyone bonded together. We were worried that some of our comments might be considered politically incorrect and would be taken out of context and held against us. We always felt ‘they’ were plotting to get ‘us’ to incriminate ourselves, and we ended up asking ourselves, whose side are they on anyway? In theory, of course, they were neutral. And we soon came to the conclusion that they were: they treated everyone with the same degree of suspicion and condescension, regardless of rank. Amongst the humble beat coppers, the policy was to say as little as possible to them. Even here in North Yorkshire they’d just introduced a hotline to complaints for staff to use if they wanted to pass on any information without anyone else knowing.

  Despite all of that, however, I was confident that I could handle what was coming. I really did feel that I’d done nothing worse than express an honest opinion to a man who deserved to be told that his behaviour was unacceptable. And the worst-case scenario? Well, it wasn’t as if I’d physically assaulted someone. That would have cost me my job. No, the most I had to fear was a reprimand or a fine. But I’d already made up my mind about that: I would contest the validity of the complaint every inch of the way.

  The hard part of this sort of thing is the waiting, but mercifully it wasn’t too long before things started to move. Perhaps two weeks had passed when news came that Simmonds had been to the magistrates’ court. The outcome, as far as I was concerned, was satisfactory. He’d received a six-month prison sentence, suspended for two years. If that didn’t steady him down, nothing would, short of his being locked up. It was a sword of Damocles hanging over his head for the next two years, and if he ignored it, well, he knew what to expect. As far as I was concerned it should have been case closed, were it not for the complaint.

  They came for me a few days after Simmonds’ court appearance, two officers in plain clothes. One was an older, grizzled-looking guy, overweight in a rumpled suit, the other much younger and smarter, in a blazer and grey trousers. I wondered whether they were going to pull the old ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine. We went into the interview room, sat down, and the younger guy set up the tape recorder. That’s never a nice feeling, watching someone press record. You know that from that moment on you have to think about every word you utter. No throwaway lines, no flippant remarks, nothing that could ever be held against you at a later date. And no unnecessary detail. Just straight factual answers, and keep them as short as possible. I tried hard to keep in my mind how Ann would handle it. Think, think some more, then deliver your answer, nice and slow. I could have had a ‘friend’ present – which basically meant a member of our union, the Police Federation, or a colleague – but I didn’t see the necessity. No, I felt well prepared. Ann and I had gone through what the best course of action was and I was ready.

  From the off, the atmosphere was very formal. The two officers who’d come to interview me sat forward in their seats staring me straight in the face while they formally cautioned me. They know it rattles you, and that’s their intention. There’s no denying that it’s not a nice feeling. You dish out cautions in the line of duty on a regular basis, but to be on the receiving end – no, I didn’t like it one little bit. It felt bloody awful.

  From the word go I felt I was being treated as if I was a criminal. An officer with less experience than I had could have found it really intimidating and could easily have slipped up.

  ‘PC Pannett, were you on duty on . . .?’ They gave the date, the time and the place of the incident.

  ‘Yes I was, sir.’

  ‘Did you arrest John Simmonds?’

  ‘Yes sir, I did.’

  Then I suddenly thought, hang about, what am I doing here? I am guilty of nothing. I had arrested a violent man, and told him the truth about himself. Why was I being put under the spotlight? I decided I could save everybody a lot of time if I took the initiative.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘can I just stop you for a moment? There’s something I want to say.’

  ‘Go on,’ said the senior man. He was an inspector, his mate a sergeant.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘from the tone of your questions I get the impression you’re expecting me to deny the allegation.’

  They looked at each other. ‘Carry on,’ the inspector said. He wasn’t giving anything away.

  ‘I have got this right, haven’t I? That he’s taken exception to me calling him a piece of scum?’

  ‘That’s the sum and substance of the complaint, yes.’

  ‘Well, I’m not denying it.’ I looked at them, wondering whether they would respond. But they said nothing, so I carried on. ‘The point is, I did call him a piece of scum. I admit it, and I’m standing by what I said. I mean, let’s be clear about this: I chose my words very carefully.’ They looked at me and still didn’t respond. ‘And when I got home, just to be on the safe side, I checked in here.’

  I paused, and
produced the dictionary from my jacket pocket. Ann had put one of those fluorescent sticky tags at the relevant place so that I didn’t have to fanny about looking for the right page.

  ‘Here we are,’ I said, opening it up. ‘“Scum.”’ I couldn’t resist stealing a glance at my inquisitors. I don’t think they’d ever come across anything quite like this before and were, I suspect, bemused. ‘“Scum,”’ I repeated, and ran through the definitions Ann had found, laying particular emphasis on ‘a person of little or no consequence’ before closing the book and replacing it in my pocket. ‘This man,’ I said, ‘this Simmonds character – he fitted that description perfectly. All I was doing was reminding him of the fact.’

  To tell the truth, I was surprised how quickly they wrapped things up after that. I could only assume that they’d come to Malton expecting me to deny everything. That that was what they’d prepared for. And I’d taken the wind right out of their sails.

  I couldn’t wait to get out of the room now. I didn’t like being on the wrong side of the table. I’d interviewed enough villains, sat them in this exact chair. I felt tainted.

  But my inquisitors hadn’t finished yet.

  ‘So,’ the older guy said, ‘one more question to deal with. Are you prepared – or are you willing – to apologise to the man for what you called him? Even though you claim it was appropriate.’

  ‘Apologise?’ I replied. ‘Absolutely not. No, not in a million years. I stand by it, one hundred per cent.’

  ‘How about agreeing to a meeting with him?’ the sergeant asked.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘A meeting. To come to an informal resolution. A sort of olive branch.’

  I could see where he was going with this, but I wasn’t having it. ‘If I have a choice,’ I said, ‘my answer is no.’ I was on a kind of high after the way they’d folded. Why yield ground now? Apart from which, I found the very idea of meeting up with Simmonds – what shall I say – distasteful.