Confessions of a Police Constable

by Matt Delito

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Bernard said, completely straight-faced. I stifled a chuckle.

  ‘Hey, guys …’ Pete said, as he walked back into the living room. To my embarrassment, that was the first time I had noticed he had left it in the first place.

  There was a small, neatly stacked pile of mail in his hands. I looked at the top envelope in the stack. It was addressed to S. Nguimgo.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked Team Charles.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Pete’s Charles lied.

  Pete looked through the stack.

  ‘They are bills and letters …’ he said, as he was going through the stack. ‘All addressed to S or Stéphane … The newest one was post-marked two days ago, the oldest one about four weeks ago.’

  I took a quick look at my wristwatch to confirm the date. Four weeks ago would have been around the beginning of February.

  ‘So here’s what I think, guys,’ I said. ‘There is a third person living here, but it’s not Stéphane.’

  I looked from Charles to Charles. ‘Instead, Stéphane is your landlord, and he comes here at the beginning of every month to pick up his rent and his mail. Is that right?’

  Both men remained silent.

  I sighed, tearing off a piece of paper from my notebook.

  ‘If you don’t want police showing up here every few days, I strongly suggest that you “remember” where Stéphane lives. He’s not necessarily in that much trouble, but we do need to talk to him urgently. If you know anything, or if you run into him, please call us on this number,’ I said, and wrote down ‘101’ in comically large numbers on the pad. ‘Or ask him to come talk to us at any police station.’

  ‘And now,’ Pete says. ‘I’m just going to have a quick look in that room where nobody lives, to make sure that nobody is living there at this very moment. Would that be okay?’ He looked from Charles to Charles, daring each of them to protest. They didn’t.

  As we waited, I found myself wondering if Pete really had valid grounds for search. Obviously, we have the right to search for people when we’re executing an arrest enquiry, but searching a room where there obviously is nobody home? I figured I’d keep my mouth shut. Still, if Pete felt he could write up an explanation for the search, then it was on him. In his defence, we did have to confirm whether or not our missing person actually lived in this flat, and it would be good for the report to be able to add that extra scrap of information.

  Pete returned only a few minutes later and handed me a piece of paper; it was a letter from a mobile phone company.

  ‘Who is Boubacar?’ I asked.

  One of the Charleses mumbled something.

  ‘Excuse me?’ I snapped. I’d lost my patience with these two by now.

  We were two hours into a negative arrest enquiry, a process that normally only takes five minutes: you check the house – if the person you’re looking for is there, you arrest them and take them to the station; if not, you leave. This was getting a little bit ridiculous.

  ‘It’s my brother,’ said the Charles who hadn’t spoken any English at first.

  ‘Do you know his date of birth?’ I asked.

  He gave it to me, and I ran Boubacar’s details through the computer as well. He came back as wanted in suspicion of several counts of fraud, all committed in Birmingham.

  ‘What does your brother do for a living, Charles?’ I asked.

  He shrugged, and I tried to encourage him to tell me where his brother might be, but Charles claimed to know absolutely nothing. Eventually, I gave up.

  I looked up at Pete, then across to Bernard.

  ‘Are we done here?’ I asked. The uniform-clad pair turned away, in perfect synchrony. I knew they felt the same as me: we had wasted a monumental amount of time and effort on a completely fruitless arrest enquiry, on a day when the borough was seriously short on staff.

  Ridiculous.

  As I started to leave, Pete’s Charles piped up.

  ‘Hey, who is going to pay for the door?’ he said.

  ‘You have home insurance, don’t you?’ I answered, and started digging around in my Metvest. Pete tapped me on the shoulder and shoved the flyer I was looking for into my hand with a grin. I was not particularly surprised to discover that Pete, who had a passion for kicking doors open, carried on him the information leaflet we hand out in these situations.

  ‘Next time,’ I said to the Charleses, handing over the flyer, ‘when the police knock on your door, try opening. It’s cheaper.’

  Feeling despondent, we started walking down the four flights. That was a total of three officers times three hours – so, 12 hours of police constable time – wasted, for nothing.

  However, before we fully made it to the bottom of the stairs, our bad moods were lifted: a group of youths had been seen ‘fighting with sticks’ (that means baseball or cricket bats, usually) in a nearby park. There was no way we weren’t going to be the first officers on scene.

  ‘Show six-eight,’ Bernard shouted into his radio as he ran towards the Panda.

  ‘Show eight-seven,’ I echoed, not a second later, as we leapt into the caged van, before flicking the lights and sirens on, following the Astra to the location at high speed.

  A shot to the heart

  I had reached the halfway point in my shift, and it had been completely and utterly dead all morning. I’m sure quite a few of my colleagues would disagree with me when I say this, but I much prefer busy.

  Officially, our shifts are about nine hours long, with a one-hour overlap with the next shift. This means, sometimes you might be dismissed earlier, because the next shift has managed to get their act together quickly; other times, you’re working for ten hours straight – or much worse, because you end up with an arrest minutes before the shift is meant to end.

  Don’t get me wrong; the overtime is a delicious sprinkling of cold, hard, additional queenheads sitting in my bank account, but it is also properly knackering.

  However, the reason I love busy shifts, is that one finds oneself looking at one’s watch, only to realise that the shift ends in 20 minutes. When a whole day flies by as if it’s nothing, it’s hard not to enjoy work. Naturally, ’tis not always so …

  Monday mornings can be pretty bleak during the cold snaps that come in the midst of winter. This is typically when the office-bound social services folk realise that the people they are looking after haven’t been in touch for a while. Instead of checking up on their wards themselves, they’ll call the police. Then, one of us will be despatched to a house or flat somewhere. Frequently, there’s absolutely nothing wrong other than someone has forgotten to pay their phone bill. At less fortunate times, we might find an elderly, infirm or mentally unstable resident a bit worse for wear, possibly in the progress of conducting a mutually beneficial business merger (or a fluid-fibre exchange, if you will) with the carpet on the living-room floor or the mattress in their bedroom.

  What made this Monday particularly unpleasant was that I was feeling a little bit hung over. My quiet Sunday-night trip to the pub had turned into a tequila-slamming headache-fest of gorilla-sized proportions. I would have felt this to be irresponsible on a school night, if it hadn’t been for the fact that Sunday’s early shift had been so awful that tequilas were completely necessary and strictly medicinal.

  As soon as I rolled out of the gate to the police station on the Sunday morning, I was despatched at great haste to the scene of a freshly expired 18-year-old student, who had been found by his now-in-need-of-some-serious-therapy university housemates. Apparently (and I’m not a coroner, so the ‘apparently’ means that I can’t really say for sure, but my untrained eyes made the following conclusions) he’d decided to put a full stop to his not-even-really-started life in a particularly gruesome way that left his student halls room covered in claret. My shift was punctuated (I like to think of my lunch-breaks as a semi-colon: longer than a comma, but with a light dusting of suspense at what might be coming next) with a sizeable kebab that smelled worse than the
aforementioned 18-year-old. As disgusting as my mid-shift refuelling choice might have been, I was still dismayed that the eating of it was rudely interrupted by my radio despatching me to yet another sudden death: another absolute tragedy where it appears that a woman around my age died of drowning following a freak falling-over-in-the-bathtub incident. Somehow she had not been found until ten days later.

  Anyway, today was another day. I had spent the morning on a marked motorbike. It’s unusual for us to do response duties on a motorbike – mostly response duties are carried out in a car. Patrol taskings, on the other hand, can be fulfilled by pedal bike or car. Motorbikes tend to be reserved for traffic and robbery duties. However, a significant number of the response cars were out of action (otherwise known as 54’d66). The shift skipper figured they might as well try to put as many uniforms on the streets as they could, so, since Robbery were using their Q-car instead of the bikes, he sent me out with the keys to a shiny new BMW motorbike.

  I really like being on a police bike (or a ‘Solo’, as we call them). If you think a police car on lights-and-sirens is a quick way to get around in London, you’ve never tried riding a 1200cc touring bike with blue-and-yellow battenburg markings, a frankly unnecessarily loud siren, and lots of flashing blue lights through rush-hour traffic. I won’t lie: it’s good fun.

  I’d been assigned to a part of the borough where there had been a spate of thefts from vehicles – sat-nav units, for the most part – so I was casually cruising along the edge of the tasking area. However, a light drizzle earlier in the day, along with a distinct nip in the air, meant that the roads were empty: nobody in their right mind wanted to leave their nice cosy house.

  ‘Mike Delta three-seven,’ my radio broadcast. At first, I didn’t respond: three-seven is not an oft-used call sign, and I didn’t think I’d ever been issued that designation before (nor do I think I’ve been issued it since).

  ‘Go ahead,’ I replied eventually, when I realised they were talking to me.

  ‘The next borough over has had a serious incident; an IC3 male, aged around fifteen, has been stabbed in the chest, apparently. They’re stretched for staff, and need someone to help land the HEMS67 helicopter. Are you free to head over?’

  ‘Sure thing,’ I replied, flicking my blues on. ‘Give me five minutes and the exact location, please?’

  ‘I’ll send it to your MDT,’ the operator said.

  ‘Er, I haven’t got one,’ I said. ‘I’m on a bike.’

  ‘Of course you are. My apologies,’ the operator transmitted, before instructing me to switch to the spare channel in order to fill me in on the incident over the radio instead.

  As the operator gave me the details, I clocked that the incident had happened in the opposite end of the borough. In effect, that meant a blue-light run from my location, all the way across town. Once I’d been briefed, and had my marching orders, I switched the bike radio to the despatch channel of the borough I was going to. As soon as I switched, I realised they were dealing with pandemonium over there. There were dozens of incidents in progress and the radio channel was absolute chaos.

  ‘Foxtrot Bravo receiving Mike Delta three-seven?’ I transmitted as soon as there was a tiny gap in radio traffic

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Just to confirm I’m running from Mike Delta to the location to assist HEMS landing.’

  ‘Received, thanks. Let us know when you get there.’

  Travelling along the dual carriageway connecting the two boroughs at speeds of anything between zero and 90 miles per hour – whatever the fastest safe speed was given the circumstances, bearing in mind that the whole stretch of road has 40 or 50 limits – I wondered whether I’d be able to even beat HEMS to the location. It sounded pretty unlikely.

  Sure, on a high-powered motorcycle it sort of feels like you’re flying through traffic, but HEMS is actually flying, and usually at about 150mph. I’m pretty sure the BMW K1200 could reach 150mph if I really pushed it, but my route had pesky obstacles like cars, roundabouts, buildings and pedestrians, whereas the ghetto-bird simply skips over everything. It was going to be an interesting little race, for sure.

  ‘Foxtrot Bravo, Foxtrot Bravo, Helimed two-seven Alpha requesting talk-through with Mike Delta three-seven,’ my radio sung with the HEMS co-pilot’s almost satirically polite voice.

  The police helicopter is known as India 99 (if there is more than one helicopter in the air at a given time, their call signs are India 98, India 97, etc). This wasn’t the first time I’d noticed that a heli-pilot has an outrageously posh accent. Perhaps it’s a prerequisite to be allowed to fly rotary-winged aircraft above the fair city of London? The other thing the heli-pilots do rather splendidly is absolutely immaculate radio protocol. I quite like it when they butt into our radio channels; in their extreme clarity, they put the rest of us to shame. On the flipside, if any of our police officers followed perfect protocol when on response duties, they’d be the butt of every joke.

  The heli-pilot’s timing for talk-through was perfect: I had just pulled the bike onto the centre stand having arrived at the location where the helicopter was going to land. All in all, the blue-light run had taken just over seven minutes – not bad for covering around six and a half miles. If my maths skills don’t elude me, that meant I had an average speed of just over 50mph – not too shabby at all, I thought, as I mentally patted myself on the back. It’s hard not to feel a little bit like a superhero when you manage to beat a helicopter through rush-hour traffic.

  Across from the park was a large, low-slung warehouse. Parked up outside were three cars: one was a paramedic’s, the other two were police cars. I could hear sounds coming from the warehouse, so presumed that that was where the victim was.

  ‘Go ahead, Helimed two-seven Alpha. Talk-through authorised, the channel is yours,’ the operator said, giving the helicopter permission to talk to me directly over the Foxtrot Delta despatch channel.

  ‘Thank you, Foxtrot Bravo. Mike Delta three-seven, our ETA is four minutes, we are running from a training mission outside the M25. Is the landing location ready?’ the HEMS helicopter asked.

  ‘Negative, Helimed two-seven,’ I transmitted, a little bit disappointed. I thought I had somehow beaten the helicopter flying in from the Royal London – in reality they had been much further away. ‘You are landing in a small park next to the incident; I am at location now, but there are some people on location. I’ll clear them and confirm.’

  ‘Thank you, Mike Delta three-seven,’ the chopper crew said. ‘Foxtrot Bravo, thanks for the talk-through. Helimed two-seven Alpha out.’

  I unplugged myself from the bike radio (something you remember to do automatically after nearly ripping your ear off a few times), left my helmet on the bike’s rear-view mirror, and moved my personal radio from my jacket pocket to the clip on the front of my Metvest. I hadn’t yet changed the channel on my personal radio to the official channel, so I fiddled with it as I approached the two people in the park.

  ‘Hi there,’ I said to two men who were seated on a bench at the edge of the small green. One of them shuffled away immediately, grunting something as he left. He glanced back at me defiantly, as if daring me to challenge him. Normally, that’s a good indication that they’re carrying something they shouldn’t be, but I wasn’t on a drugs mission: I was there to clear the park, and he was doing my job for me. Thank you, sir!

  ‘Hello,’ the other man said. He had an open can by his feet – cider, I think – and was trying to hide it with his leg.

  ‘We have had a bit of an incident,’ I started, realising that I didn’t really know exactly what had happened, beyond the fact that someone had been stabbed. All I knew was that if he was in need of the air ambulance, it must be pretty serious.

  ‘So?’ the man said.

  ‘We’re going to be landing a helicopter in this space, and it’ll be too dangerous for you to be here,’ I said. ‘I’m going to have to ask you to leave the area.’

  ‘Aha?’ he
said.

  ‘Please move, sir,’ I said, pointing towards the gate of the low fence surrounding the park.

  ‘No,’ he said, simply.

  I blinked.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘No. I have a right to be here. Not moving,’ he said, and wrapped his threadbare coat tighter around him.

  ‘Uhm … Yes. You’re going to have to move,’ I replied. ‘I’m going to need this space. A helicopter is going to land here,’ I repeated, in an exercise of mind-numbing futility.

  The man looked back at me, cocking his head slightly. I stole a furtive glance at my watch.

  ‘I’m really sorry, but I don’t have time for this. You’re really going to have to go now,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said, glancing over my shoulder. I looked behind me. The man who had left us was standing near my motorcycle, looking at it closely.

  I sighed.

  ‘You have ten seconds to get out of this park,’ I said. ‘Someone is seriously hurt, and we are going to need an ambulance helicopter to land here so they can save his life.’

  ‘I pay my taxes,’ the man said. ‘What right do you have to force me to move?’

  ‘I’m not forcing you,’ I said, doing my best to avoid a confrontation. ‘I’m asking you very, very nicely if you could pretty please move somewhere else. I don’t even care if you take your drink with you – I won’t take it off you. I really need this space and it’s going to be dangerous to be here very soon.’

  ‘I’m not moving,’ the man said. ‘I fought for my country, you know. You can’t tell me to do anything. I know my rights.’

  There are times when I rather enjoy discussions about the law with people who don’t believe they have to do what I say. This was not one of those times. I glanced nervously at my watch for a second time and realised that if their estimation was any good (and it usually is), the helicopter was going to arrive any second.