Prisoners, Property and Prostitutes

by Tom Ratcliffe

The next day the same driver put it back in reporting the same misfire, and again it was returned with no trace of the misfire located.

  To resolve the matter, the traffic officer went to the garage and located the mechanic who had been allocated on both occasions to work on it.

  In a commendable act of co-operation he took the mechanic out as passenger, and showed him under what circumstances the misfire happened. It usually started at about 5,000 revs in third gear, and continued to cause problems in the higher gears at higher revs, with the car pulling hard under load, either with hard acceleration on level ground, or even more pronounced when travelling up a gradient.

  There is always a worry in these circumstances that the fault will not show up, as was presumed had happened when the mechanic had tried to locate it, but this time there was no such problem. Right on cue, 5,000 revs in third, pushing up around 100 miles an hour, in came the misfire.

  ‘There it is,’ said the driver as the car juddered and spluttered. ‘What d’you reckon? Fuel starvation or electrical?’

  Concentrating on the road ahead he changed up a gear and continued the acceleration, the car misfiring obligingly as its speed rose well into three figures.

  After a few moments he expected the mechanic to have made up his mind as to a possible cause, but no explanation was offered.

  Taking his eyes off the road to look enquiringly across at his passenger, he saw the unfortunate man riveted to the passenger seat, eyes bulging, face pale with fear and hands gripping the side of the seat cushion.

  ‘Please stop,’ was all he could mutter.

  The driver pulled into a lay by a little further up the road.

  ‘What’s up? Are you ill?’ he enquired.

  ‘I’ve never been that fast in my life,’ came the reply. ‘Please don’t do that again. We never go above 40 miles an hour when we test them.’

  Future road tests had a little more involvement from the people who actually drove the cars.

  To be fair, misfires in an engine are among the more difficult problems to trace and resolve – there are so many things that can cause one, and you don’t get points for a good guess. You either sort it or you don’t. From a Police driver’s point of view a misfire is incredibly annoying, especially in a chase. If the car you are after is simply faster or better driven then so be it, but a nagging fault is just pure frustration.

  Misfires also have a habit of being at the upper end of the engine’s performance, but on one occasion a motorcyclist friend of mine found he had a chronic problem at the lower end of the rev range. His BMW bike would tick over perfectly well, and produce plenty of power with the throttle wide open, but in the mid range was completely flat, and gave no response on a part-throttle.

  Obviously this had to go to the garages for repair, so off he set. He was travelling with two colleagues, also on motorcycles, and on a nice sunny day they made their way. Two of the bikes were running like sewing machines, the third behaving like an awkward horse, fluffing and hesitating one moment, flat out the next.

  The problem became more aggravated as the journey progressed, and eventually the engine would only work at full throttle or tick-over, so the bike was ridden as if it had an electric switch with a simple on/off setting and no finesse in between. This meant that on the approach to corners the rider had to lose more speed than he would do normally, then yank the throttle open, wait for the power to kick in, and gain speed through the bend and into the following straight, before repeating the procedure at the next slowing down point.

  To avoid being run into by an out of control bike, and to afford some safety if it broke down completely, the two fully-functioning bikes took up second and third places in this irresponsible convoy.

  They made good (in fact very good) progress across the countryside, and with only a couple of miles to go they slowed down going through a dip in order to set the speed for a slightly uphill left hand bend which lay a short way ahead.

  The rider on the faulty bike closed the throttle, and then at the correct point opened it hard again, and waited for the power to kick in. Over the next few fractions of a second petrol was pumped into the engine, awaiting the arrival of a spark to turn it instantly from vapour to fireball.

  A few yards away, adjacent to the bend, stood a small white cottage. This house was a picture of tranquillity in the English countryside, and the retired elderly couple who owned it were enjoying the fine summer weather by catching up on some garden jobs. The husband had just finished mowing the lawn and was at the bottom of the garden, near to the road. His wife was walking out to him bearing a tray with two cups of coffee on it, each on its own saucer.

  As she reached her husband, the eagerly awaited spark arrived in the combustion chambers of the BMW which by now was exactly level with the garden.

  The spark ignited the petrol, and due to the surplus amount injected into the engine, a jet of flame roared down the exhaust, and a massive backfire erupted, shattering the peace of the surroundings.

  The couple at the cottage were probably used to general traffic noise, but the explosion from the bike caught them totally unawares, and the reflex panic from the woman launched the tray and its contents into the air. This unfolding tragedy was witnessed by the third motorcyclist in the line, who as he went past the scene was afforded the briefest snapshot of the tray, cups, saucers and liquid in mid air, on a trajectory towards the husband. He in turn was scowling at the source of the noise, which was by now disappearing rapidly round the bend, power fully restored. How the scene ended is not difficult to guess, but none of the Police stopped to find out.

  To this day the bend is known as ‘coffee cup corner’ to all who were present at the puerile guffawing which greeted the recounting of this unfortunate incident.

  My own first encounter with the Police garage’s mentality came after checking my humble panda car one morning I found that a fuse had blown so I went to the garages to pick up another one.

  ‘Don’t carry any of them,’ came the response to my request.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘You’re the ones that fix them, you’re meant to stock spares aren’t you? You don’t seriously mean you haven’t got a spare 15 amp fuse, be serious.’

  ‘We don’t have so much as a spare brass washer here – we order everything that isn’t a service part from Headquarters when we need it, and that’s not a service part,’ came the final reply from the head mechanic, before his lumbering figure shuffled back into the depths of the inappropriately named ‘workshop’.

  I could have stopped at a local motor factor and bought a fuse out of my own pocket, but why should I? I bemoaned this state of affairs to one of the motorcyclists back at my station, who appeared about half an hour later with the necessary part.

  ‘How did you get hold of that?’ I asked.

  ‘Waited till the boss’s back was turned,’ he said. ‘The mechanics are OK, but they live in fear of the boss. Everyone hates him and if he’s about don’t bother asking, just wait till he’s on a break. You won’t have to wait long if that’s any consolation!’

  As far as day-to-day running of the cars was concerned, the adopted system of allocating of a car to a specific driver on each shift meant that you had a fair idea who had used it before you, even if the log book was not completed. It also meant you knew who was using it next, and allowed me to put a theory into practice.

  The driving course way of teaching you to look after a car involved some fairly basic procedures, most of which were firmly forgotten or ignored the moment the driver got back on division.

  These included things like casting a general eye over the controls and instruments to make sure that for example, the heated rear window was not left needlessly switched on, or that any warning lights showing were not so important as to prevent you actually driving.

  During the heatwave which marked my first Summer as a driver, working a 6am to 2pm ‘early’ was quite bearable as the first few hours of the shift were sunny and pleasant. By
the time the sun became truly hot you were drawing to the end of the shift and able to finish work and still get to the pub by 2.30 for a cool beer before closing time. With this welcome refreshment to look forward to, at ten to two one afternoon I parked my panda in the yard, switched the engine off and wrote the log book up. I left the windows down so the sun didn’t heat it up before the next driver took over, and then put my plan into action. A cursory glance over the controls saw that the heater settings were on full cold, with air directed to face and feet. All the levers were at an extreme of their movement, so to speak. I knew my successor in the car, Dave Bishop, was a keen driver and had quite recently done the same driving course as I had, so I wondered idly whether he would remember to check his controls as taught. Knowing it was morally indefensible, I slid the heater setting to maximum ‘hot’, switched the booster fan to its lowest position, and set the vents to push heat out entirely at foot level. No need for face or windscreen vents – hot air rises after all.

  Dave and I used the same driving position so he would not need to move the seat.

  So I did it for him.

  Just a notch forward, placing him that bit nearer to the dashboard.

  I gathered my belongings from the car, booked off in the station, and went off duty.

  I gave little thought to Dave as I went home, changed, and sat out in my local’s beer garden in the warm afternoon sunshine with a cold drink.

  Next day I had a similar tour of duty, and parked in the yard much as the previous afternoon. However on going into the building I was confronted by Dave – he was obviously annoyed at the previous afternoon’s events, but beneath it was amused at having fallen for such an uncomfortable practical joke.

  ‘You bastard,’ he said. ‘Why the hell did you set the heater on maximum?’

  ‘I was a bit chilly in the morning,’ I lied abysmally, ‘I must have left everything a bit on the warm side for you’.

  ‘Bollocks. You set me up for that. And you put the seat forward. I don’t normally change the driving position after you and I was driving round with the windows wide open, the sweat was absolutely running off me. I didn’t notice till later how hunched up to the steering wheel I was. Nothing I did made it any cooler, I honestly thought I was dying. It was over an hour before I found you’d turned the bloody heater right up. Do anything like that again and I’ll kill you,’ he quipped.

  I think.

  I have to say I didn’t go for practical jokes very often, but sometimes there was an irresistible temptation to try one. The only problem would be if it went out of control, such as the celebrated one where a probationer was out with his tutor when a man came up to them and shot the tutor before running away. The terrified rookie radioed frantically for help, but found that there was no reply on his radio. Up to this point the rest of his shift had been enjoying the joke in a slightly sadistic way.The joke fell apart when, using his initiative, he ran to a nearby public phone box and dialled 999, reporting the incident directly to the main Control Room for the County. This in turn caused mass panic, and a few minutes later the Chief Constable got the phone call that everyone must dread, giving him the grave news about one of his officers.

  Shortly afterwards came the news that the whole thing was a wind-up, and wasn’t meant to go outside the town. Unsurprisingly, the mirth value of the prank was utterly lost on the Chief.

  Hence the need for a reasonable ‘risk assessment’ if any such matter were planned.

  Twelve

  Life as a Constable in Newport suited me very well. After starting at the very bottom in one town, it was good to ‘hit the ground running’ as they say, to have a new start on a new block, but ready armed with skills and experience with which to do the job. I also found a far better spirit of teamwork running through the ranks, no better example of which came when I handed my overtime form to Sergeant Albert Jeffries, a true gentleman of a supervisor, as traditional and as steady as his name suggested. He was nearing the end of his service and had a reputation as an all round ‘good bloke’.

  The normal practice that I had been used to at my first posting was that you handed the form to your Sergeant to be signed, and it then had to be checked against your pocket notebook to make sure that the amount claimed on the form for payment matched exactly the amount of time worked and duly recorded in the notebook.

  I gave him the form and as he started to put pen to paper I handed him my notebook.

  ‘You’ll want to check it against this,’ I said.

  He paused and lifted his pen from the paper.

  ‘Why would I want to see your book?’ he asked.

  ‘ To see that it tallies,’ I replied innocently.

  ‘Goodness me,’ he said. ‘ To work as a Police Officer means the public and the Force put trust in you. If you’ve signed a form to say you worked those hours, then I believe you. I wouldn’t expect you to try to trick me, if we can’t trust each other then who can we trust? That’s how things should work – less of this doubting everyone at every turn.’

  I was so pleased to hear his words – this simple exchange restored my faith in the system – I joined thinking that everyone was on the same side within the Force, a belief that had been badly knocked in the first 18 months. Sad in many ways that it needed to be reaffirmed, but it was only at my first posting that I had to endure the humiliation of being routinely distrusted.

  For the few months I worked under Sergeant Jeffries until he retired he was always the same. His simple philosophy of trust and honesty was so refreshing, and not restricted to those of us ‘inside’ the Police. Members of the public who came to the station for advice were never promised anything that couldn’t be delivered, and were all treated and respected as individuals. His many years’ service had all been uniform front-line duty, and as such he was a mine of information, and was more than willing to use it to help anyone in need. To be on his block was a definite advantage as it provided stability with pretty much everything, not least of which was how to put a file together. There were only so many forms in an average file, but every time a new Sergeant arrived on the block the ‘correct’ order in which the paperwork had to go seemed to change. I lost count of the number of times I was told ‘there is only one way to put a file together’ or ‘Prosecutions won’t accept them unless they are like this’. I don’t think the prosecutions department really cared, in fact they probably derived amusement from the minor but pedantic variety provided by each self-righteous supervisor from his own little empire.

  Albert Jeffries’ view was refreshingly different – he took a common sense approach. Perhaps the forms weren’t in quite the right order, perhaps a little detail was missing but if as an overall package the evidence was there and the result looked tidy, then it was fine and would be sent on quite happily into the criminal justice system, never to return.

  One Sunday evening I was in a small report writing room within earshot of the front desk when I heard him speaking with a man who had come in to produce his driving licence and other documents as a result of falling foul of the law. The man started to ask some legal questions and straight away Sergeant Jeffries interrupted him.

  ‘Let me stop you there,’ I heard him say. ‘If you need legal advice I think you ought to see a solicitor, they’re the experts if you go to Court you know.’

  ‘Yeah but solicitors cost money and I don’t want to look stupid by going to one if there’s nothing they can do, so I thought I ’d check with you lot first, see if you reckon I’ve got a chance of getting off’ said the man.

  ‘By all means,’ said Sergeant Jeffries expansively. ‘Ask away, but it will only be my opinion.’ This was a typical reply from him – willing to help as much as possible, but leaving his listener in no doubt as to the extent and validity of his knowledge.

  The man gave an account of how he had been breathalysed and arrested after a road accident in the town centre late the previous Saturday night, and had been taken to Newport Police Station for a breath test. The af
fair was a very simple drink-drive matter and the man readily admitted to having had far too much to drink, but during the breath test procedure at the station he had got the impression that the Sergeant operating the machine really didn’t seem to know what he was doing. The nub of the enquiry was this – did Sergeant Jeffries think it was worth his while to put in a ‘not guilty’ plea and try to get off on a procedural technicality, even though he was not disputing the fact he was well over the drink-drive limit?

  Sergeant Jeffries was quiet for some moments as he digested the information, then gave his usual measured reply.

  ‘You have to consider this carefully,’ he said. ‘If you are right, and the correct procedure for the machine was not followed, then you could easily get off. But if you are wrong, and the machine was operated correctly, then you would undoubtedly be convicted and what’s more you might risk a much harsher penalty for trying to be clever and failing. And don’t forget what condition you say you were in when the test was done, so how good a witness does that make you? Additionally, you haven’t had any of the training that the Sergeant dealing with you will have had. But if you have any doubt at all then you see a solicitor, and ultimately it is your decision how you plead.’

  This was Sergeant Jeffries at his best. Honest, comprehensive and fair. I admired him.

  The man thought for a few moments, then said,‘I see what you mean – It’d be a bit of a gamble and I could get hammered by the Magistrates if it went wrong. It’s probably better if I throw my hand in. Cheers anyway mate, you’ve been really helpful.’

  The man left the foyer and walked down the road as I came out of the room where I had by now finished my paperwork. Had the man looked back he would have seen a wry grin spread across the helpful Sergeant’s face.

  ‘Why the devious look Sarge?’ I asked. ‘That seemed very fair advice. What’s so amusing?’

  ‘I think I answered him honestly, don’t you?’ he asked in a detached sort of way, but still smiling.