No Further Action

by TL Dyer

  Smithy glances at the clock on the dash. ‘Well, listen, you hot foot it over to the NCP. Grab yourself a bacon butty and a hot drink before they’re all gone.’

  Right Guard flips a salute. ‘Yes sir, Officer. If you say so, sir.’

  ‘Cheeky bastard. Go on, get out of here. And you’ve got our number, use it if you need to.’ Smithy checks the mirrors and hits the indicator. ‘Laters.’

  ‘See you, Right Guard.’ I flip him a thumbs up, which he returns, hitching the kit bag a little higher on his shoulder and starting down the length of the pedestrianised High Street to get to the multi-storey car park and breakfast.

  I watch him go before we turn up the hill out of sight.

  ‘He doesn’t look right without Piper,’ my partner mutters.

  Smithy’s concentrated glare is focused on the road and the houses on either side of us, but his mind’s still back there with the old fella. I know for a fact that he’s sometimes brought his own dog round this way on a day off. A play date for Millie maybe. Or to check on Right Guard. My guess is he still will. Perhaps more so now the old guy’s alone. Right Guard hid it well, but he’s got to be feeling it. Fifteen years with the only friend you’ve got in the world? Of all the ways his life is shit, this might just be the thing that tips him over the edge.

  We patrol for another three quarters of an hour before a call comes in for assistance at Tredegar Park. We’re at the other end of the town, so blue light it and still get there in under five minutes. Smithy’s a mean driver when he needs to be.

  ‘You can let go now,’ he says, as we reach the car park and he pulls up besides two other marked units. I drop my hand from the door frame and I’m out the second he stops.

  We hear the shouts even without the pram brigade pointing out which direction to go. And as we hoof it through the tree line into the wide open space of the playing field, I clock one black uniform kneeling to the ground, suspect face down and pinned beneath him. I can’t see who it is from here, but he points to where another uniform is having less success with his suspect. We both run for him, but Smithy’s got a few years on me and gets there first. The suspect’s rolling around on the grass, trying everything to resist being trapped like his friend. Meanwhile the copper, whose ginger bonce I recognise as Jaffa’s, is doing everything he can to not let go of the slippery so and so.

  Smithy grabs a fistful of red t-shirt and hauls the wiry culprit an inch into the air before landing him on the grass. Jaffa wastes no time in putting his knee to his back and releasing his cuffs from his belt while Smithy locks his hands around the boys’ wrists. Because that’s all he is. A boy. All fury and thunder, panting his rage and saliva into the dirt.

  ‘You’re hurting my back, you fuckers.’

  ‘Keep still then,’ Jaffa replies, getting one cuff on, but the kid twists his right hand free of Smithy’s pincer grip. This time it’s Jaffa who grabs hold, and with great satisfaction gets him in the other cuff, snapping it shut.

  ‘Fucking serious. Get off me. Get your fucking hands off me.’ Spit flies from his mouth, runs down his chin. ‘Bastards. You can’t do this. I’ll fucking sue you. Get your. Fucking hands. Off me.’

  ‘Sorry, no can do,’ Smithy says, his palm on the back of the boy’s shoulder blades, waiting out his rage. ‘And you need to calm down, mate. Make this easier for all of us.’

  ‘My father’s a lawyer. He’ll fucking sue your arses. All your arses.’

  ‘I don’t think so, mate.’

  ‘I’m not your fucking mate. And I’m telling you, you’ll never work for the pigs again, you tossers. I know my rights.’

  ‘Excellent. So my colleague doesn’t have to read them, then.’

  ‘Fuck off. You’re in so much shit right now, you’ve no idea. My father’s the best lawyer in South Wales.’

  Smithy laughs. ‘Farmer, your dad’s still doing a stretch for armed robbery, last time I looked.’

  The boy stills. Smithy lets go of his shoulders and Farmer raises his head an inch, peering up and squinting against the sun, only to be met by Smithy’s welcoming grin.

  ‘Bollocks.’ He drops his head back to the grass.

  ‘Yeah, sorry, son, we meet again. What is it this time?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he mutters to the dirt, all piss and fire well and truly extinguished. ‘I wasn’t doing nothing.’

  Now that Jaffa can get a word in, he tells the kid on the ground, ‘You are under arrest for suspicion of indecent exposure. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand?’

  I look over to where a PC I recognise, but whose name I don’t recall, is helping his cuffed suspect to his feet. I pick up his lid, which he must have lost in the scuffle, and brush it down.

  ‘Cheers, mate,’ he says, taking it from me. Cartwright, his name tag reads, and I remember him now, from the Tredegar Park ward, only recently transferred from Monmouthshire. A big lad, he has at least five inches in height on Jaffa and a lot more than that in girth. But for all that, his suspect, a dark-haired, dark-eyed, sullen-looking teen, doesn’t seem to be going anywhere in a hurry.

  ‘Seems you got the better end of the deal,’ I say, and with the sparky Farmer now on his feet but with a face like a slapped arse, we walk back across the field.

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ Cartwright says. ‘Put up a good chase.’ Then to the kid, ‘You should be killing it on the sports athletics team, pal, not out here acting the idiot – there are no medals for that.’

  Farmer would have had a comeback to that, but not this one. He just turns his face to his shoulder and rubs his nose over his Lyle and Scott t-shirt. My guess is, a run-in with the cops isn’t something he does every day. I want to ask him what he’s wasting his time with this Farmer prick for, but who am I to cast aspersions. I don’t know the kid. I don’t know Farmer. I only know their types. I wish they didn’t have types, but they do.

  Once both Jaffa and Cartwright have their suspects in the back of their respective cars, and we’re waiting on a meat wagon to pick up the more hot-headed of the two, I ask what it was all about.

  ‘This one,’ Jaffa says, nodding towards his detainee, ‘has been exposing himself to the young mothers in the park.’

  ‘Well that’s new for him,’ Smithy says. ‘His usual MO is shooting his mouth off and being an antagonising little prick.’

  ‘What about yours?’ I say to Cartwright, because the lad on the back seat of Cartwright’s car, who’s close to welling up, does not look like your average willy wagger.

  ‘Along for the ride, I guess. Peer pressure, maybe.’

  ‘You think it’s necessary to take him in?’

  ‘Fuller,’ Smithy says behind me. ‘Have you had a lobotomy?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of.’

  ‘Then you know he should be booked in and questioned. Plus he tried to evade our good colleagues here; what does that say about him?’

  I snort a soft laugh. ‘Well I’d run too, if I saw you loping my way at full pelt. But forget it. Just a suggested judgement call, that’s all. Kid looks like a warning might be enough. Save on paperwork, custody space, and parental strife.’

  Jaffa shrugs, uninterested in the debate or whatever Cartwright might decide to do. He’s more concerned with the police van pulling in to the car park to taxi his man to the booking-in suite at the hotel Newport Central.

  ‘I’ll take him in and see what the skipper says,’ Cartwright confirms, as if there was never any doubt. ‘He might give us something that’ll drop his friend here in it, and either way maybe the experience will be a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing.’

  ‘Good man.’ Smithy rounds our squad car to the driver’s side. ‘Fuller, shift your arse. I need some calories to replace the ones I just lost.’

  I get in and click the seatbelt in place.

  ‘Cheers for all your hard work there,
by the way,’ my partner says, manoeuvring around Farmer’s transportation. I peer at him sideways and register the smirk peeling back his lips.

  ‘You need the experience more than me,’ I say, as we roll to the exit and I watch a woman take a young child from her 4x4 and point to us. I wave. The toddler gawks wide-eyed and open-mouthed, only breaking out into a grin after a few whispered words in his ear from his mother. He wobbles his hand back and forth in a wave. I smile and wave again, wondering who we are this time – PC Plum? Officer Dibble? A little young yet for Officer Barbrady.

  ‘Besides,’ I add, as we pull up at the park’s exit, ‘doesn’t hurt for you to earn your wage now and then.’

  We slot into the traffic and head back to the town. ‘For that, Alice, the Milky Bars are on you. I’ll have a large, please, not one of those pathetic ones you got me the last time.’

  Smithy’s mood must be on the up-swing if he’s using my old nickname – Alice, as in Wonderland, owing to the fact I’m a quiet observer more than I am a talker. When I first joined up, this made them think I was living in my imagination half the time, or in some kind of internal utopia. But once they knew me better, it was too late. Once a nickname sticks, it sticks.

  There’s a queue inside the newsagents and, despite the offer from an old gentleman to go in front of him, which I politely decline, I stand in line and wait. But I’ve only been there less than a minute when Smithy’s tooting on the horn. He’s put the blues on and is waving to get my attention. I brush past the others in the queue.

  ‘Excuse me, excuse me. Sorry.’ I drop the chocolate bars and Smithy’s bottle of Coke on the counter. ‘So sorry. Got to go.’

  I run from the shop while adjusting the volume dial on my radio; I didn’t hear anything come through. Jumping in the car, I’m pulling the belt over me, bracing for Smithy to floor it, adrenaline flooding my body, so that when we don’t seem to be going anywhere, I snap at my colleague. ‘What you waiting for?’

  ‘Changed my mind,’ he says with a soft sigh, elbow resting on the door and brown eyes calm. ‘Think I’ll have a Mars bar instead, mate.’

  *

  By lunchtime I feel like I’ve done a full shift, though compared to some days, this one’s been tame so far. Apart from providing assistance to detain the willy wagger in the park, we cautioned a first-time shoplifter in Tesco Extra – a thirty-three-year-old mum who attempted to leave the store with four large tins of baby formula in her shoulder bag; stopped a construction worker for driving with an unsecured load on his open flat bed truck, and waited while he re-secured the two dozen or so pieces of plastic guttering which he claimed must have worked loose during the journey; and also attended a one-person RTC in the multi-storey car park where an elderly woman driver had misjudged the size of her Picasso and the proximity of the stone barrier preventing cars from plummeting to the storey below. No harm done, but a lot of posturing needed to calm the woman’s nerves. Something that, it turns out, Smithy is particularly good at. His way with the ladies knows no age limit. By the time we were waving her off, the pensioner had all but given him her number.

  Once we stop to eat, I’m glad of the break and the silence in the car. As my partner chews on his Mexican chicken baguette while scrolling through something on his phone, I stare down the busy lunchtime street in the direction of John Frost Square, or what’s left of it since they remodelled the shopping centre. What used to be a square is now more of a rectangular plaza linking two of the indoor precincts together. The whole area is pedestrianised and we’re parked way up on Charles Street outside an empty hairdresser’s, its glass-fronted window pasted with red and yellow posters of some circus long been and gone.

  I glance to Smithy, but he’s lost to his phone and his food. I finish my sandwich and wipe my mouth with the napkin.

  ‘Hey, mate. You ever heard of a dealer named Stokes?’ I ask, peeling the lid off my latte and blowing on it.

  ‘Stokes... Go by any other name?’

  I press the lid back on. ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘What’s he look like?’

  Smithy’s not curious why I’m asking, but he is looking at me for an answer. He can see I don’t have one. ‘Not giving me much to go on here, mate.’

  ‘Local. Deals out of John Frost Square sometimes. Pot for the kids, that kind of thing.’

  Smithy stares down the street as if that might jog his memory. I’m thinking this is going nowhere but it was worth a shot, when he says, ‘Could be Cranky.’

  ‘Cranky?’

  ‘He might be a Stokes. Don’t quote me on that, but he’s the only local dealer whose full name I don’t know.’

  I nod and we say nothing more. Smithy goes back to his phone, hooking up with the girl from last night maybe, or setting up a new date for tonight; either way, he’s not interested in why I’m poking around. But several hours later when we’re halfway through the afternoon shift and taking a slow drive down through Upper Dock Street near the bus station, Smithy points out a lanky lad with pipe cleaner legs in skin-tight denim and a black and white wool jacket zipped up to his throat. A patchy attempt at a beard coats the pale face beneath the hood, and where his head is dipped, small eyes dart left and right while he takes broad quick strides across the road. He glances towards our car, then away again, thick-soled ankle boots slapping over the damp pavement where a light rain has fallen. His back’s to us now and I watch him go, not altering his pace or his loping gait.

  ‘That’s your man,’ Smithy says, though I’d already guessed. ‘That’s Cranky.’

  Chapter 16

  ‘Do the loop again. I want another look at him.’

  My partner sighs. ‘If you insist.’

  We round the block and get back on to High Street. I point to the Loading Only bay and Smithy brings the car to a stop at the rear of a Transit making a delivery. Its driver glances at us sideways, but I’m more interested in the side road behind him that joins up with this one. The speed Cranky’s walking, I don’t have to wait long for him to emerge. He crosses the road and then my view is blocked by the van, but my partner picks up the commentary.

  ‘Passing the entrance to the arcade, heading to town.’ Smithy flicks the indicator and gets us a little closer, pulling into the bay in front of the indoor market. From there, I watch the lean figure swagger past Subways and the amusement arcade, before pausing outside the boarded-up newsagents. He takes something from his jacket pocket and ducks his head. A plume of smoke rises a second later. Leaning against the closed shop, his back and one boot propped up against the shutters, he looks up and down the street as he smokes. His gaze doesn’t linger in our direction, so I don’t think he’s clocked us. Or clocked that we’ve clocked him, at least.

  ‘You’re sure that’s Cranky? A dealer?’

  Smithy narrows his eyes at me, which I take as a yes. I unclip the seatbelt.

  ‘I might just have a word with him.’

  ‘Whoa, mate.’ His hand’s on my arm, my other arm’s reaching for the door handle.

  ‘I want to feel him out, that’s all.’

  My partner shifts in his seat to look at me. It’s a look that says I must need a lie down.

  ‘Fuller, what is it with you today? The fella’s only having a smoke. If you’ve got a wasp up your arse about him, you’re not doing yourself any favours approaching him without good reason.’

  I let go of the door handle and drop back into the seat. He’s right. Of course he’s right. I’d do well not to show my hand yet.

  Smithy doesn’t push further, but he shifts in his seat like a drug stakeout wasn’t on our agenda today and he’s not skipping through hoops about it. He’ll get over it. I’m more concerned about how well Anna knew this Stokes, whoever the hell he really is, and where she knew him from. How had she come across a dealer? Did he go to her college once? Her school? Did they date?

  My hand drops to my thigh with a slap, for all the ones like Cranky, pathetic little nothings with their blinkered vision and their selfis
h needs, and all they do is take. Money. Drugs. Whatever they can from whoever they can. Never thinking about the trail of disaster they’re leaving behind. Not caring even if they do think about it. Why should they care? This life is all about them, isn’t it? Never mind that Anna came from a good family. Never mind that she was a decent person with an important career ahead of her. Worth a hundred times what this waster will ever be.

  Cranky grounds the cigarette with his boot and walks the few yards to McDonald’s where he disappears inside. The taste of stale coffee from earlier lingers on my tongue and I tell Smithy I need to stop to pick up some water.

  ‘Sure,’ my partner says. ‘But not there you don’t.’

  Tired maybe of this waiting game that he perceives as a waste of time, Smithy drives us down the High Street and passes McDonald’s without slowing.

  *

  It’s mid afternoon, only a few more hours to go, and we’re back where we started this morning, parked beside the Indian. No Right Guard this time, but a group of men hang around outside a bar further up and they’re spiking my radar. They stumbled out onto the pavement ten minutes ago and still haven’t spotted us yet, busy as they are with whatever it is that preoccupies them. Heads together, it’s hard to see what they’re doing, but my guess is it isn’t good. Two of the group retreat inside, leaving two behind, neither of which appear too sturdy on their feet. Another reason perhaps why we haven’t been spotted.

  ‘WOFT, mate,’ Smithy says beside me. I stare at him, drawing a blank. He tuts. ‘Waste of fucking time, Alice. Just a bunch of pissheads in the middle of the afternoon.’

  ‘Right. DHTC, Smithy, lad. Doesn’t hurt to check.’

  Ignoring his huff and muttered protests, I get out of the car, press on my lid as I walk the pavement, and tuck my fingers inside my vest. I’m about ten metres away before I’m spotted. ‘Alright, lads?’

  The one closest to me drops his hands into his black bomber jacket and looks to the floor to steady himself, but it only has the opposite effect. The other, older but perhaps none the wiser, pulls out a packet of cigarettes and promptly lights up.