Confessions of a Police Constable (13 page)

‘Show TOA Seventy-nine,' I barked into my radio. ‘No trace, no trace. What's the call, please?'

The operator went quiet for a moment.

‘I'll send the CAD to your MDT,' she said.

‘CAD UPDATE RECEIVED,' the morose voice from the in-car computer moaned at me. I scanned the CAD, but there was nothing indicating what might have been going on.

‘We had reports of a woman's six-year-old daughter being lifeless and bleeding profusely. The mother is extremely upset,' the CAD operator said.

‘Are there any skippers on their way?' I asked, but it was a silly question really. A potential sudden death involving a child? Every available sergeant would have run to the nearest Panda.

‘We've just had another phone call from the same location,' said the CAD operator.

‘What?' I mumbled to myself, as I turned around and looked at the phone booth. It was empty. Very, very empty. I stepped out the car and started walking towards the phone booth to make sure, but the absurdity of the situation was daunting; I had a clear view of the thing, and it was definitely, disgustingly and completely empty.

‘Mike Delta receiving five-nine-two'.

‘Five-nine-two, go ahead'.

‘I'm currently looking at the phone box in question; there's nobody there. Nobody in the phone box, nobody near the phone box … Nothing. No trace.'

It appeared the 999 computer system was on the fritz, that British Telecom had changed the numbers to the phone booth, or that something Truly Mysterious was going on.

‘Stand by, five-nine-two,' the operator shut me up. ‘The woman says her daughter is dead.'

A chill ran down my spine.

I can't think of anything worse to hear over the radio.

‘We have a partial address,' the operator added. ‘She says she is on Jameson Street.'

I swore (lightly, and only under my breath, mind. I am a professional, after all) and ran back to my car. Blues on. Pedal down. I headed down the road to Jameson Street.

‘The house number is given as a hundred and fifteen – one-one-five,' the operator clarified.

I looked out of my window, looking for house numbers. 119. 121. 123. 125.

Bollocks.

I hit the brakes, and brought the car to an abrupt stop. Into reverse. 121. 119. 117. 115. There it was.

‘Show TOA Seventy-nine,' I said again, as I leapt out of my car, and propelled myself up the three concrete steps to 115. I knocked on the door.

Nothing.

I knocked harder, and rang all the door bells. There were three of them. Three flats.

‘POLICE, OPEN UP,' I said. I had taken my baton out of its holster, and was using the back of it to bang on the heavy wooden door, simultaneously ringing all the doorbells in turn.

An upstairs window opened.

‘Can I help you?' The man, in his mid-20s, looked as if he had just woken up.

‘Have you heard anything about an acci—' I was cut off by my own radio, clipped to my Metvest and turned to just-a-little-bit-too-loud-for-comfort.

‘Cancel, cancel. The address for Jameson Street is a hundred and fifty – one-five-zero. That is, one-five-zero. Not one-one-five.'

Jesus.

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,' I called up to the man. ‘Wrong address.'

He shook his head in disbelief and closed the window. I imagine he was probably mumbling ‘wanker' at me.

Back to my car.

Car wouldn't start.

Why wasn't it starting?

What the hell?

It finally started. Blues back on. Careening back up the road. I looked to my right. House numbers. House numbers. There. 120. 122. 124. Why was there nobody else here yet? 146. 148. 150. Bingo. I stopped the car in the middle of the road. I left my blues on. Jumped out. Leaned back into the car to press the ‘TOA' button on my MDT. I wondered to myself why I just did that. I could have just radioed in my time of arrival. What was wrong with me? I can hear something. Two different types of wailing. A police siren coming closer. A deeply distressed woman moving away from me. Both wailing. I registered that the sound wasn't coming from downstairs and stumbled onto the steps to the ground-floor flat. There was a doorway. A woman. There she was. She was holding a cordless phone in her hands. There wasn't a phone booth in sight.

Whilst I was swearing at a national telephone company in my head, I finally realised that I was stressed. Very stressed. Something about the way this whole job had gone down had really got to me. It happens very rarely, but when it does I'm gripped with a fear of not being in control of myself, as if someone else is remote-controlling me.

There was nothing I wanted more than to get to the woman, and find out what was happening with her child, but I took the time to take a couple of deep breaths. I felt the pulse subside from my ears. That was better. I took another deep breath.

Sometimes, and often for the least predictable reasons, this job really gets to me. I made a mental note to analyse why I felt so helpless. But later. There was no time to dwell.

The woman became a little quieter, and was looking absentmindedly at the policeman – me – frozen halfway up the concrete steps to her house, who appeared to be doing yoga-style breathing exercises.

‘Jesus,' I thought to myself, ‘could I look like any more of an idiot if I tried?'

I bounded up the last few steps.

‘Miss,' I said.

She turned to me, and I could see her eyes were a mess of tears. Her whole face looked bright red, but despite this, there was something familiar about her.

‘Where is your daughter?' I said.

The woman snapped out of her catatonic state and wailed as she stood in the doorway. I wanted to calm her down, but most of all I wanted to find out where her child was. She made a gesture that I took to be a nod, and I walked past her into the house. The whole place was a rancid mess. It suddenly clicked into place: I had been here before, a few years ago. There had been a sudden death here, a drugs overdose, I remembered thinking. I wasn't involved with the case myself; I just dropped off an ICEFLO
³⁶
at the house – but this was definitely the place.

Breaking out of her previous blissfully quiet state of catatonia, the woman threw herself against a wall, squeaking and squealing. I couldn't leave her behind to start looking for the child: she was clearly at risk of causing herself harm.

The phone in her hand was ringing. She picked up.

‘I HAVE TO KEEP THE LINE FREE; THEY ARE GOING TO CALL ME BACK,' she shouted into the receiver. It was clearly 999 trying to call her back, but she just rang off immediately.

It seemed that she was so panicked that she was failing to realise that the people who were calling her were the very people whose call she was waiting for.

Through the doorway I saw a sergeant pull up behind my car and step out along with another of my colleagues.

‘What's going on?' the skipper called out, whilst my colleague began the task of calming the woman – who was now on the verge of passing out due to the sheer amount of shouting she was doing.

‘I haven't been able to go in yet, skip,' I started. ‘I couldn't leave her like this.'

‘Go!' he said, turning his attention to the woman, presumably in the hopes of getting some information out of her. I delved further into the house and picked up a groaning sound coming from the far end of the hallway.

In two bounds I made it to where the sound was coming from, and found a young woman lying at the foot of a staircase. She was in her late teens, early twenties. Her arm was quite clearly broken, and she had a slow trickle of blood coming out of her nose.

For a moment, I was dumbfounded by the incredible number of clashing noises all around me. There was a shouting match going on at the top of the stairs. Behind me, through a closed door, a stereo was playing ghastly pop music at full blast. There were sirens outside, and the woman at the front door was still wailing with formidable force.

‘And where's this bloody six-year-old?' I muttered to myself.

‘Are you okay, miss?' I shouted to the girl at the bottom of the stairs.

She groaned, but didn't seem to be responding to what I was saying. Another police car arrived, and one of my colleagues joined me.

‘Call this one in,' I said to him. ‘I need to find that kid.'

My colleague was an old sweat
³⁷
. He had been doing this for 20-odd years, and was not one to get flustered about anything except a Liverpool game. He calmly hailed the operator via his PR
³⁸
, and started assessing the situation

‘… I have a female, around twenty years of age, breathing but not responding. It appears she has fallen down a flight of stairs …'

At least the woman at the bottom of the stairs was in good hands.

I continued up the stairs, and found at the top six people arguing loudly. There was another woman collapsed on a beanbag chair in what seemed to be a living room.

‘Everybody please shut the hell up just for a minute,' I shouted. ‘We had a report of an injured child. Where is she?'

I couldn't get through to any of them; in order to make themselves heard over my shouting, they simply increased their own volumes another notch, and the argument continued as before. No one seemed the least bit interested in a uniform showing up, and it struck me that the police might not be an uncommon sight in this house.

I made sure the woman on the beanbag was breathing. There was a small collection of drug-taking paraphernalia on the low table next to the beanbag, and I concluded that she wasn't dead, merely dosed into oblivion. Another colleague joined me upstairs and started calming down the shouting people.

I called in the woman I'd found to Dispatch.

‘… Female. Mid-thirties. Breathing. Not responding. No visible injuries, but evidence of drug taking. Possible drugs overdose …'

I hauled the woman off the beanbag and placed her in the recovery position on the floor.

‘WHERE IS THE GODDAMN CHILD?' I shouted at the arguing group.

The room went quiet, and I realised to my embarrassment that I had let the stress get to me. I hate swearing; there's no excuse for doing so in public, certainly in front of strangers, and especially when I'm in uniform.

‘There's no child yet, you fucking spaz,' a girl said, as she patted her belly.

I looked at her. She was heavily pregnant, but sucking on a cigarette nonetheless. I estimated her age to be 17, at the oldest. She blew smoke in my face and her friends took a break in their raging dispute to laugh at her witty riposte. Calling a police officer a spaz: how
droll
.

By now, one of my colleagues had joined me in the living room. He, a little bit calmer than I, saw his chance and seized it: ‘We had a phone-call from the lady downstairs, saying her child was dead.'

The room went quiet.

‘Yeah, she lost a kid a few years ago,' one of them said. ‘Tragic, really.'

‘I think she got a little messed up when Cindy fell down the stairs.'

Finally, some information I could use: there was no child and the woman at the bottom of the stairway had a name – Cindy.

‘What's Cindy's last name?' I asked.

The mother-to-be (it turned out she had turned 16 not long ago) answered again, and I decided to separate her from the rest of the group to get some more answers.

Who is the woman downstairs?
The pregnant girl's mother.

Who is woman on the beanbag?
Cindy's sister.

What had the argument been about?
Whether or not someone had pushed Cindy down the stairs.

Why hadn't anybody thought to try and help Cindy?

The last question was met with a blank stare, as if she didn't understand it.

The ambulance crews arrived. Cindy was taken to hospital. As was her sister Marsha, the one who was blessed-out on heroin; because we weren't sure whether she had overdosed or not, the paramedics decided to take her into A&E just in case. They asked me to come with them as the continuity officer. I don't think they actually needed me, but I won't pretend I wasn't happy to have an excuse to get out of that house. My adrenaline had been running dangerously high all shift, and a few hours of doing nothing and flirting with nurses at accident and emergency might be just the thing to get my blood pressure back down.

The woman who had made the call about her child was sectioned. It seemed she had been suppressing the death of her daughter for many years. This, combined with sporadic drug misuse, rampant alcoholism, and finding a young, bleeding woman at the bottom of a staircase in the house where her daughter lived, had sent her over the edge.

Cindy escaped with a broken arm, a few fractured ribs and a serious concussion. Her boyfriend was investigated for GBH
³⁹
, but CPS
⁴⁰
resolved that there wasn't enough evidence to charge him with anything. The six different witnesses managed to give eight (!) differing accounts of the events.

Meanwhile, Patricia, the girl I had been searching for at the beginning of my shift, came home of her own accord.

Of course she did. Exactly as she had done the other 20-odd times in the past few months.

It turned out that she had just popped to the shop because she was out of cigarettes. She then refused to return to school ‘because it is boring'. I later tried to explain to her that she still had to attend, and suggested that she should reconsider her nicotine habit as well, but I got such an incredible bucket-load of attitude in return that I didn't hold very high hopes of this not happening again.

At the end of a day like this, I draw myself a bath, pour myself a pint of Ginger Hare, sit back and wonder what I did to deserve a job like this.

And yet, when I wake up the next day, I'm chomping at the bit to do it all over again.

It occurs to me as I'm writing this that maybe I'm the one who ought to be sectioned …