Confessions of a Police Constable (19 page)

‘To facilitate a prompt and effective investigation into these allegations,' Syd said without a pause.

‘Very well. You look familiar,' the sarge said to the prisoner. ‘What is your name?'

The prisoner remained silent.

‘What's his name, officer?' he asked.

‘Well …' Syd said, and fell quiet. I could see he was blushing.

‘He claims to be called Leonardo DiCaprio,' Syd finally responded. The other officers in the room replied with laughter. ‘But I have my doubts, sarge.'

‘Did he have any ID on him?'

‘No, sir.'

‘Well, we'll get to the bottom of this. Mr DiCaprio, I am authorising your detention so you can be interviewed on tape about this matter. You will also have one more chance to tell me your real name.'

Again, not-DiCaprio remained silent, merely shrugging and fidgeting.

‘DiCaprio,' the skipper said, ‘have you taken anything? Drugs?'

More fidgeting.

The custody sergeant turned to me.

‘I think Mr DiCaprio here might be under the influence of some type of substance, and to ensure we haven't missed any drugs on his person, I authorise a strip-search of the prisoner at this time.' He took a quick glance at the whiteboard behind him. ‘Please use cell M-five to do the search'.

As I led DiCaprio towards the cell, the rest of the team came over and started patting Syd on the back; a few clapped their hands quietly, and he got more than one more thumbs up. The sarge had authorised the detention of Syd's first prisoner, meaning he had passed his test. There was still a lot of work to do, though …

Starting with the strip-search.

If you're taken into custody, you're going to be subjected to a thorough search to make sure you don't have anything on you that could be used to hurt yourself or others, or any items that could be evidence in a crime you've committed. There are three different levels of search: a regular search involves a more thorough search than we can do on the street; the next level up is a strip-search, which means that we remove one or more items of clothing from the prisoner; and the top level is an ‘intimate search', which is every bit as unpleasant as it sounds for everybody concerned. Luckily, you have to do a special course in order to be authorised to do intimate searches, and I've been able to avoid doing that course so far.

‘Right, let's get this search out of the way,' I said to Syd.

Syd had assisted on strip-searches before, so I let him take the lead. First he asked our prisoner to take his sweatshirt off; DiCaprio passed the item to me and I went through all the pockets and the lining. We repeated the procedure for the T-shirt. Next, his shoes and socks. Then his jeans; I checked the linings, pockets and stitching in detail. I found a crumpled-up £5 note that Syd had missed in the first search, but other than that we didn't find anything.

DiCaprio was now standing there just in his boxers; Syd asked him to put his T-shirt back on before taking his boxers off. There's no reason to make someone be completely naked for a strip-search: it's not necessary in order to complete the search, and there's no point in demeaning people. Once DiCaprio had taken his boxers off, Syd handed them to me for a closer inspection. It pains me to report that they should probably have been washed a few weeks earlier. I didn't try, but I'm relatively sure that if I'd placed the boxers on the floor they would have kept their shape and stood up by themselves. Most unglamorous.

Once de-boxered, Syd asked DiCaprio to squat down, turn 180 degrees and squat down again. He then asked DiCaprio to hold his testicles out of the way, and do the same again. We took a good look, and concluded that whilst DiCaprio could most definitely do with learning a few lessons about personal hygiene, he certainly wasn't keeping any drugs clenched between his butt-cheeks.

‘Here you go,' Syd said, and gave him his clothes back, minus his sweatshirt and shoelaces. ‘I'll be keeping these,' he said, ‘or I can cut the cord out of your sweatshirt and take it out, if you like, but it's unlikely you'll be able to get the cord back in there if I do.'

DiCaprio muttered something that sounded like an invite for Syd to do something anatomically unlikely, so we figured he didn't want his sweatshirt cord cut into slices. We placed his £5 note and the items we had taken off him into evidence bags.

‘He's clean,' Syd said, as we returned to the custody sergeant.

‘Well …' I said with a smirk. ‘I'm not sure about that. But at least we're pretty confident he doesn't have any drugs on him.'

‘Right-oh,' said the sergeant. ‘Go play with DNA and Livescan, and go get me some beauty shots of him,' he added, before returning to his telephone call. I overheard him saying something about a detective into the receiver.

Syd and I took DiCaprio through to the room that keeps the Livescan machine. It sounds posh, but really it's just a digital fingerprint scanner hooked up to a central database. It's not very hard to use (unless the prisoner doesn't want to be fingerprinted. It's just about possible to fingerprint somebody against their will, but to do so requires half a dozen officers and generally results in a lot of bruises all round). It's one of the better pieces of kit we have available to us. It took the machine all of 20 seconds to spit out our prisoner's real name and some details; it appears he had, in fact, been arrested before. Jackpot.

I did my best not to react when I saw the result, and we continued taking not-DiCaprio's DNA (a quick cheek swab) and mug shots for the police database and arrest records.

Once we had returned to the custody desk, I signalled for the skipper to look at his screen. The results of the Livescan check would be showing up in front of him. He nodded as if he already knew what the result was going to be, and pressed a few buttons on his computer, before taking Syd aside briefly. The custody skipper was careful about not being overheard. I could not tell for certain what they were talking about, but from the look on Syd's face, I could see it was something rather serious. Once they'd finished their discussion, Syd turned and spoke into his radio.

The custody skipper began to make idle conversation with DiCaprio for a few minutes, about toothache-inducing inane things; I had a feeling he was doing that mostly to stop the prisoner from listening in on Syd's conversation.

A few seconds later, three officers from my team casually strolled into the custody suite, taking up positions all around the custody desk.

‘Thank you, Syd,' the skipper said, before turning to DiCaprio.

‘The machine you just used, Mr Everett, was a fingerprinting machine. We have positively identified you, so I know who you are. I know that your name is Lee Everett, and this officer here,' he said, pointing to Syd with his hand shaped like a gun, ‘has something to tell you. Listen to him carefully.'

Sid took a step forward, and all the other officers surrounding the-man-formerly-known-as-Leonardo-DiCaprio-now-known-to-be-Lee-Everett seemed to tense up and lean forward as well.

‘Mr Everett,' Syd began, ‘I have heard evidence of an incident that happened on Thursday, where your brother was seriously injured during a vicious assault by an unknown assailant. He has not regained consciousness yet, but witnesses state that you and your brother had had a loud argument only hours before the assault. In light of this, I am further arresting you for the attempted murder of Daniel Everett. You do not have to say anything, but …'

As Syd completed the caution, I contemplated what had just happened.

I have to say, I was a little bit envious of Syd. I've been a police officer for quite a few years now, but I've never actually done an arrest for anything quite as serious as attempted murder.

I was keeping a close eye on Lee, who was standing in the middle of the custody suite floor. Five police officers, along with the usual collection of Designated Detention Officers and custody sergeants that mill around in custody, were surrounding him. On hearing the word ‘murder' the FME
⁴⁴
popped out of his office as well, to take a look at our suspect.

When Syd completed his caution, the custody area fell into complete silence. Only the hum of the ventilation system and a distant howl from one of the other prisoners (who, come to think of it, had been screaming the whole time we had been there) was audible.

Finally, the custody skipper broke the silence.

‘Right. You should know that every inch of the custody suites are covered in CCTV and audio recording. As this officer just reminded you, everything you say may be given in evidence; that includes the CCTV tapes. I have to ask you a few questions before we move you to your cell, so please approach the desk.'

The skipper nodded at the surplus officers and they left.

Lee meanwhile stood limply, like a hot air balloon that was being slowly deflated. He became a lot more cooperative, answering all the standard questions asked by the custody sergeants. Questions about his welfare (whether he had ever tried to self-harm; whether he had suicidal thoughts; whether he used any medication; whether he wanted to talk to a drugs worker) and that of others (whether he had any dependents, such as kids, or whether anybody might suffer from his being detained), and a whole series of other questions as well. Lee answered each of them with a ‘yes' or ‘no', signed all the things he needed to sign, and eventually allowed us to move him to cell M5 – the same one where we had strip-searched him about 45 minutes earlier.

‘So, how are you feeling?' I asked Syd, once we were sitting in the writing room doing the reams and reams of paperwork involved with preparing the information for the case progression unit.

‘Pretty good. How did I do?' he asked

‘How do you think you did?'

‘I'm not sure. I was piss nervous. I barely remember any of it all, to be honest.'

I laughed.

‘Don't worry, you did really well. A couple of little glitches here and there, but bugger me if it didn't turn out that your very first arrest was one for attempted murder! I've never done a murder arrest before in my life!'

‘Seriously?!' Syd asked.

‘No! Unless you find someone at the scene, it's usually the BSU
⁴⁵
that gets used for those arrests,' I said. ‘Makes sense, I suppose; when someone knows they may go down for murder, they might feel as if they have nothing to lose, which could make them violent.'

‘Ha,' Syd said, and suddenly remembered the sharpened screwdriver. ‘Holy shit, do you think that screwdriver might have been the murder weapon?'

‘Well, I can tell you for sure that it
isn't
a murder weapon, since his brother isn't
dead
. But either way, you know more than me, mate. I only found out he might be an attempted murder suspect when you arrested him for it!'

‘The skipper didn't say anything about the specifics of his injuries, so I don't really know,' Syd said. ‘Can we look it up on CRIS
⁴⁶
?'

He was asking whether we could look at the case notes for investigation of the assault.

‘Answer your own question, my friend,' I said. ‘Is the CRIS report relevant to the notes we're writing up?'

‘Yeah, of course, I arrested the guy for it!'

‘Hmm. Not quite. You arrested him based on information given to you by the custody skipper, and that is what needs to go into your notes.'

‘And after I've written my notes?'

‘Are you involved in the investigation of the assault?'

‘No …'

‘Well, then, no. I don't want to be an arse, but the computer guys are really strict about stuff like this. If you start poking about in databases around cases you aren't actively working on, you could get in trouble. Everything is logged, and you had best have a really good explanation for why you're looking at a particular case.'

‘But … I'm really curious now!'

I grinned.

‘Me too! Tell you what, write down the CRIS reference number from the custody cover sheet, and then, once we've written up our notes, you can ask the team skipper; tell him you want to learn more, and that you've just made an arrest for attempted murder. He'll tell you whether you can take a peek, or perhaps explain to you how you can find out more. Call me paranoid, but I never go deeper than I absolutely have to for investigations I'm working on.'

I helped Syd write up his reports statements. We also had to go back to the supermarket to get a statement from Nick the shop security guy; to my delight, he had one ready filled in when we got there.

‘Wow, I guess you get a lot of shoplifters, eh?' Syd said.

‘Yeah, a few. One of the Safer Neighbourhood guys came in here one day and gave me a template we could use, to save us some time and to make their life easier, so we always include the right bits and pieces.'

Syd looked at the A4 sheet in his hand, mumbling as he read: ‘Observed a male aged approximately … Attempted to pay … Card declined … Placed goods in pockets … Attempted to leave …'

Syd looked up at Nick. ‘This is fab, thank you! If you wouldn't mind just signing it as well, we'll be on our way!'

After that we had to fill out a simple MG11 witness statement explaining the circumstances and events of the attempted murder arrest.

When the printer next to us woke from its slumber to print out the final versions of our statements, Syd sat back and looked at his iPhone. ‘Crap, this arrest took nearly five hours! Is that normal?'

‘Some things go a little bit faster once you get used to it. If there's no queue at custody, I can do a shoplifting arrest in a couple of hours or so. Yours took longer because you're not used to the forms, and because you still have to think about how to put together your statements. Don't worry – it'll become second nature, and you'll soon be able to do your witness statements as fast as you can type 'em up. Like anything else, it comes with practice,' I concluded.