Judgement Call

by Nick Oldham

  The sergeant was correct. It had been a long chase on foot and at one point a nasty little very determined Jack Russell terrier had appeared from nowhere, snapping ferociously at Henry’s heels, complicating matters even further when it sank its fangs into Henry’s trouser bottom and hung on for dear life. It had taken a well-aimed, brutal kick to send the little beast squealing and cartwheeling over a low wall.

  ‘Rape,’ the sergeant said, drawing out the word and lowering his jaw so his triple chins expanded like a toad.

  ‘Yes, sarge,’ Henry said respectfully.

  ‘Mm.’ The sergeant’s lips rubbed together, but in opposite directions, like a loom. ‘OK,’ he said at length, and turned to the prisoner. ‘Anything to say about that?’

  ‘Not guilty.’ Kaminski shook himself free from Henry’s grip and sneered contemptuously at him. He had stony eyes and a pinched, rodent-like face, his cheeks pock-marked and pitted. Henry glared back with equal contempt, not fazed by the hard man, but aware it had been an uphill battle to subdue him and if the double-crewed section van hadn’t turned up when it did, he might have had to admit defeat and let the bastard go.

  ‘Circumstances?’ The sergeant directed the word at Henry.

  ‘Attended the report of a sexual assault, took the report – and this man is the alleged offender. Ran off when I told him he was under arrest.’

  The sergeant pushed his half-glasses back up his bulbous, booze-reddened nose. ‘You’re sure about this?’

  ‘Yes, sarge,’ Henry answered, puzzled, wondering why he wouldn’t be.

  The sergeant’s lips now tightened into a disapproving knot, but he reached under the desk and came out with a blank charge sheet which he placed with a flourish on the desktop. He extracted a torpedo-shaped fountain pen from his shirt pocket, unscrewed the lid and dipped the nib into the already open bottle of Quink and refilled the pen using the lever on its side. All the while he kept a beady eye on the two people in front of him. He tapped the tip of the nib on the rim of the ink bottle and was now ready to write and record details.

  ‘Name,’ he said to the prisoner, even though he already knew it.

  ‘Vladimir Kaminski.’

  Once the name, address and date of birth were recorded, then the prisoner’s property, the sergeant instructed Henry to take him down to the cells and put him in number one. He could have used any of the cells that morning because they were all empty. It was a quiet morning at this end of the valley.

  ‘This way,’ Henry said. He placed a hand on Kaminski’s huge right forearm to direct him to the cell corridor.

  Kaminski spun fiercely. Henry reared back, expecting to be attacked as the prisoner bunched his immense fists. ‘Don’ you fuckin’ touch me again,’ he growled.

  Suddenly, behind Kaminski there was a blur of speed and power as the sergeant leaned over and smacked the prisoner across the ear with a grizzly bear-like, open-handed blow that sent him spinning across the tiled floor, up against the wall.

  Henry knew what he had witnessed, knew he’d seen it, something he’d only ever heard whispered about before – but the stunning blow had been delivered so quickly and accurately and apparently effortlessly that it was almost impossible to actually say it had really happened, other than for the sound of the smack and the prisoner hitting the wall a moment later.

  Sergeant Bill Ridgeson’s legendary forehand smash.

  Kaminski was bent over double, his hands clamped over his head like a protective helmet, glaring at the officers.

  The sergeant hadn’t moved from his position. Calmly he repositioned his glasses on the bridge of his nose, picked up his mug of tea and said, ‘I do not allow any form of aggression in my police station … except from me.’ He took a slurp of tea, nodded at Henry. ‘Cell one, please.’

  ‘Yes, sarge.’ He walked over to Kaminski. ‘Up,’ he said, jerking his thumb.

  Scowling through a pain-ravaged face, hand cupping a throbbing ear, his head ringing like a church bell in a vestry, he rose and this time allowed Henry to steer him down to the cells and into number one, which was clean and ready for its first occupant of the day. Henry told him to remove his trainers and leave them in the corridor before entering the cell.

  Henry slammed shut the self-locking steel door. Kaminski shoved his head at right angles into the inspection hatch.

  ‘You make big mistake, cop,’ he said, exaggerating his Eastern European accent for best effect.

  ‘Vot you mean,’ Henry mimicked him, ‘Igor?’

  ‘She vill not make a statement. She vill not take me to court. She knows she vill be dead if she does.’

  ‘Now you shouldn’t have said that. Threats to kill can put you away for ten years.’ Henry crashed the up-sliding hatch into place and locked it.

  ‘Ve’ll see,’ Kaminski’s muted voice cried.

  Henry jerked a middle digit up at the peephole in the cell door behind which he could see Kaminski’s eye and returned to the charge office where Sergeant Ridgeson was inserting the forms into the binder. He glanced at Henry, shook his head sadly and said, ‘Why have you arrested him?’

  ‘Rape. He raped his girlfriend. Beat her up, too.’

  ‘Sally Lee, you mean? Sally “Jugs” Lee?’ Ridgeson scoffed.

  ‘Yes, that’s her …’ A sudden lurch of dread gripped Henry’s guts in a clawed hand.

  The sergeant’s head continued to shake pityingly. He blew out. ‘You’ll learn … I took the liberty of calling the DI, just to let him know.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘His patch, laddie. He likes to keep abreast of all serious arrests. What are you going to do now?’

  ‘Get a statement from Miss Lee … police surgeon and all that, Scenes of Crime … Hopefully she should have landed at the front desk by now.’

  ‘You’ll be lucky if she has,’ the sergeant muttered. ‘Just don’t let her jerk you around.’

  At that moment a policewoman appeared at the charge office door. She looked at Henry. ‘A Miss Lee at the desk for you,’ she announced. She kept her eyes on him.

  ‘Thanks … be there in a moment, Jo.’

  The policewoman gave him a slightly quirky half-smile, lowered her eyes coyly and returned to the front office with just another almost imperceptible second glance at Henry, who didn’t notice a thing. The sergeant did. He was one of this police station’s fixtures and fittings, a font of all knowledge, professional and tittle-tattle, and he rarely missed a trick.

  ‘What do you mean, sarge?’ Henry asked, referring to Ridgeson’s last remark.

  ‘You’ll come to realize,’ he said patiently, leaning forwards, ‘that there’s two sides to every coin and everything is not as it seems. I suspect that Miss Lee simply wants Vlad the Impaler out of her hair for a while. Probably wants some other bugger to shag her without poor Vlad finding out, then when the deed is done, she’ll drop the charges, or you won’t be able to find her to get her to court and next thing you know, it’ll be all lovey-dovey … until next time. You’ll look like an unwiped arse and the prosecutions department will not be happy with you.’

  ‘So you’re saying we don’t protect her?’

  ‘Don’t waste your time on her … she howls wolf.’

  ‘But he’s beaten her up as well as raped her.’

  Ridgeson shrugged. ‘You’d be better off chasing the tail of that bonny police lass … you’d get a result there.’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘Didn’t you see the lustful, come-hither look she just gave you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Having said that, I hear you’re courting.’

  Henry grinned and reddened up. ‘Wouldn’t say courting.’

  ‘Anyway …’ The sergeant waved him away. ‘Get your statement if you must, but I’m telling you from experience …’

  ‘Waste of time?’

  ‘And money and resources … and by the way, before you appear in public again, get yourself sorted out. You look like you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards.
’

  After a hasty swill, brush up and tie replacement, Henry walked to the front office of the police station. It was a fairly small room, consisting of a radio console, a telephone switchboard, a teleprinter machine tucked away behind a clear Perspex screen, a narrow public enquiry desk with the foyer beyond, and little else. Not much room to manoeuvre for such an important location – the communications hub for the whole of the Rossendale Valley. It was staffed by a civilian phone/radio operator and a station duty constable who was presently having his refreshment break – refs – in the first-floor dining room. His job was being covered by Jo, the policewoman, whose eyes widened, then narrowed momentarily, as Henry entered.

  ‘I’ve sat her down in the waiting room,’ she told him.

  Henry eyed her discreetly, a once-over. ‘How did she seem?’

  ‘The usual.’

  ‘She’s a regular?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, seen her a few times … Is it true you flattened Vladimir?’ Her gaze played rather obviously over Henry.

  ‘Uh, sort of.’

  ‘He’s the cock of the town, you know?’

  ‘Doesn’t mean he doesn’t get arrested,’ Henry said brazenly. ‘Maybe he needs locking up more often.’ He grinned at her, sidled past, catching a faint aroma of pleasant perfume on her. At the front desk Henry stood aside to allow the station duty PC to enter the room. He was returning from his refs having visited the staff toilet accessed through the secure doors on the other side of the public foyer. He winked conspiratorially at Henry, folding a Daily Express under his arm and refitting his clip-on tie. Henry knew this PC was a bit of a legend and it was one of his horrible habits to leave what he called a ‘baby’s arm’ in the toilet bowl for the benefit – and horror – of the next user who, invariably (as this loo was a shared sex one), would be one of the young ladies from the admin office. Screams of disgust were regularly heard throughout the station in the mornings and had generated frequent memos from the superintendent, most of which ended up defaced and stuck on the toilet wall.

  Henry ducked through the hatch and turned right into the waiting room. Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of a ferocious red-faced man entering the front door of the station, carrying a dog in his arms. A Jack Russell terrier. Henry recognized the nasty little canine as the one he’d brutally kicked out of the way after it had attacked him whilst chasing Kaminski. The dog saw him, made eye contact, must have recognized him, as it bristled, snarled, baring its teeth, then started yapping. Henry quickly went into the waiting room before the owner jumped to any conclusions.

  Miss Lee had taken a seat on which she perched with her hands clasped between her knees, her head drooping, tears streaming down her battered face. She glanced up as Henry came in, and gently wiped her swollen cheek dry with her fingertips. Henry noted that her nails were long, sharp and painted bright red.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ He lowered himself onto the chair on the opposite side of the screwed-down table.

  She looked broken-heartedly at him. ‘Is he locked up?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The news had an instant effect on her. ‘Brilliant.’ She sat upright. She was still wearing the low-cut T-shirt exposing the upper half, or more, of her breasts. They wobbled whitely in a bra that was clearly a tight size too small for the job. Henry saw a tattoo on the right one: ‘VLAD’. It looked home-inflicted. There was also an evil-looking discoloured love bite on the right side of her neck.

  ‘Will he go on remand?’ she asked hopefully.

  Henry pouted. ‘That won’t be my decision. I need to gather evidence first, then interview him. Then see.’

  ‘What do you mean, gather evidence?’

  ‘A statement from you … photos of your injuries … you’ll have to be examined by a police doctor … that sort of thing.’

  ‘Oooh – I don’t know about that.’ Her face scrunched up sourly at the thought.

  The detective inspector pushed away the prosecution file he’d been checking. He stood up and walked over to the full-length mirror hung discreetly on the back of his office door and gave himself a once-over.

  As befitting the man who exercised the most influence in the station – regardless of what the uniformed superintendent and chief inspector might think – he, the highest ranking detective in the valley, was, as always, dressed immaculately. The suit he wore, from Slater’s menswear in Manchester, where good deals could be had by savvy detectives, was of a light-grey Italian cut, with wide lapels. His slightly ostentatious tie was fastened with a massive Windsor knot against a dark-blue shirt, his highly polished black winkle-picker shoes had Cuban heels.

  He looked the part.

  His nostrils flared as he angled his face so that he looked down his nose at his reflection, a haughty smirk of superiority on his face. This was the look he gave most people, the ones he considered underlings: the look of contempt. Of course it would have been better had he been taller. Five-eight was only just high enough for him to join the cops, but the heels on his winkle-pickers did notch him up an extra inch and a half. It would also have been more effective if he wasn’t so chubby, weight being a constant battle for him. CID boozing and bad food didn’t help matters: the detective’s lifestyle. A significant double jowl was also forming but he found that if he jutted his jawline out far enough, he could disguise it … to an extent.

  He smiled at himself because he knew that although appearance did matter, what was more important was attitude. You could look good but you needed that something more to carry it off – and this detective inspector had it bursting out all over, all the way up from his heel protectors hammered carefully into his Cuban heels (that clicked arrogantly as he strutted along the tiled corridors of the cop shop), right up to his meticulously trimmed moustache and nasal hairs, and the thick head of hair and long Dickensian sideboards curving down in front of his ears.

  He looked the part, acted the part, but above all, and as far as he was concerned, was the real deal.

  He shrugged himself into his jacket, pulled down his shirt cuffs to display the platinum cufflinks and stepped out of his office into the corridor.

  It was time for DI Robert Fanshaw-Bayley to implement some clout and see what that jumped-up PC was up to. He tried to recall the lad’s name but for the moment, couldn’t.

  ‘If you’d be more comfortable speaking to a WPC, I can arrange that,’ Henry suggested again.

  ‘No … like I said, I like you. I don’t mind talking to you,’ Sally Lee said. ‘You take me seriously … I don’t mind you knowing intimate things about me.’

  ‘OK,’ Henry said.

  Her bottom lip quivered.

  ‘No need to cry, Miss Lee. We’ll get this sorted.’

  ‘Thanks. I’m really grateful,’ she gulped. She had changed her mood again and now her handkerchief was damp with tear stains. Her mascara had run around her uninjured eye, adding to the mess her face had become, with the swollen, ugly-looking left eye and puffed-out lips that looked like fat earthworms.

  ‘Could you manage a cup of tea?’

  ‘That’d be good. Four sugars and milk, please, full fat if you’ve got it.’

  Henry rose and Miss Lee gave him a contorted smile. ‘Look … Sally … don’t take this the wrong way, but I need to ask you something straight. Did Vladimir really rape you?’

  ‘Yeah, course he did, the bastard,’ she said, insulted. ‘Last night.’

  ‘He’s done it before, I believe? And assaulted you before?’

  Suddenly she wilted visibly, realizing where this might be leading. Henry squinted at her and lowered himself back into the chair.

  ‘Don’t you believe me?’

  ‘Yes, I do, and I’ll do everything I can to help you. That’s a promise, but you have to know this is a two-way street.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  Henry chewed his bottom lip, wondering how to phrase the words, but before he could speak she said, ‘I live in fear of him, OK? Y’know? He beats me up, regular like �
�� and rapes me … one day I reckon he’ll bloody well kill me.’

  ‘Oh, boo-hoo-hoo!’

  Henry and Sally jerked their faces around to the door which had opened so silently neither had noticed, and where DI Fanshaw-Bayley now stood, pretending to rub away tears from his eyes with his knuckles. He had obviously heard and disbelieved every single word of her story. He dropped his hands to his sides and said callously, ‘Boo-bloody-hoo!’

  He jabbed a thick finger at Henry. ‘My office.’ Then he jerked his thumb over his shoulder to underline the instruction. He looked at Sally Lee. ‘You stay here. I’ll be back soon to talk to you, Miss Jugs.’

  ‘Sit down,’ the DI said whilst easing his bulk into his office chair behind his impeccably neat desk. Henry sat on the indicated chair which, he could have sworn, had an inch shaved off each leg.

  Fanshaw-Bayley shuffled his backside comfortable, like he was settling into a nest, leaned forwards and interlocked his fingers and gave Henry a tight, unpleasant smile.

  ‘What’s your name again?’

  Slightly taken back – nay, offended – Henry said, ‘PC Christie, Henry Christie.’ His shock was because not very long before he had assisted the DI with a murder case and the two of them had had a lot of interaction – up to the point at which Henry had been cut adrift.

  ‘Ahh, that’s right. You gave me a chuck-up with that young lass who’d been murdered, didn’t you?’ the DI confirmed.

  ‘Yeah, boss.’

  The DI’s eyes narrowed. ‘Aren’t you the one who’s just come back from a CID aide secondment in Blackburn … under a cloud?’ Henry swallowed drily, said nothing. ‘Something about locking people up you were told not to? Had a big fallout with one of the DIs?’

  ‘Uh – sort of,’ Henry acknowledged, but thought, ‘There’s two sides to every story,’ only problem being that with the CID being the most powerful, most ‘other sides’ were squashed like bugs.

  Fanshaw-Bayley nodded knowledgeably. ‘You raised your fist at him, didn’t you?’ Henry stayed dumb. ‘Bit of a loose cannon, a hot-head by all accounts. Lucky you’re still in a job.’

  ‘Not really,’ Henry said.