Confessions of a Police Constable (20 page)

We walked through to the custody suite to use the ATR
⁴⁷
to stamp our statements and other paperwork. Once stamped, we took the paperwork to the stuffy office occupied by the Case Progression Unit, where we handed over the cases. And that was that.

‘So, what's going to happen next?' Syd asked.

‘Well, I don't know about you, but my shift finished about an hour ago, so I think I'm going to the pub, and I'm bringing you with me. We've got to celebrate your first arrest!'

Syd laughed. ‘Well, I can't say no to that, but I meant with the guy.'

‘Oh. Well, the CPU
⁴⁸
will be taking over from here. They'll interview Lee on tape and prepare a case. They then hand it over to the CPS
⁴⁹
to see if they want to prosecute the case. I have a funny feeling that Detective Carson is going to get on him first, though; he's the guy investigating the assault of Lee's brother. Lee will be up in magistrate's court soon, and they'll probably bounce him straight on to Crown court, because I imagine he's going to be charged with at least grievous bodily harm, if not attempted murder or – if his brother dies –
actual
murder. Either way, the punishment for any of those crimes is longer than six months' imprisonment, which is the maximum sentence a magistrate can impose, so it'll be a one-way ticket to Crown court for Mr Everett.'

‘That makes sense,' Syd said.

We walked out of the changing rooms into the yard behind the police station, and straight into the arms of ten guys from our response team who burst into applause and cheers.

‘Welcome to the team,' said the team skipper. ‘Obviously, it's your round. Mine's a lager top.'

Pete and I were standing outside a block of flats towards the north end of the borough. Our destination was on the eleventh floor, but sod's law had struck, and of course the lifts were out of order. Of
course
. Why wouldn't they be? With a sigh, we began the long climb.

I started whistling a song, but noticed that Pete didn't join in. He's usually one of the merry ones.

‘What's wrong, mate? You're awfully quiet today,' I said to him.

‘I had a dog of a shift yesterday,' Pete responded.

‘That bad, huh?'

‘Yeah, I couldn't sleep last night, to be honest. I'm knackered.'

‘Bloody hell. That doesn't sound like you, buddy. What happened?'

‘Mate, it was grim.'

‘Go on …'

‘Got sent to a call, right, from a nineteen-year-old chick who was worried about her neighbour.'

‘Sudden death?'

‘Ha,' Pete said, shaking his head slowly. ‘Well, yes, it was, but it was the worst one I've ever been to.'

‘Seriously? Worse than the one at the tail-end of last year, where you had to shove your face down a toilet every six minutes?' I laughed.

Pete's face broke, slowly, almost into a smile. He didn't offer a reply to my question.

‘I'll just take that as a “Yes, it was worse”, then.'

‘So, the neighbour was a thirty-odd-year-old lady. When we got there, I could smell death right away, but
she
was fine,' Pete said.

Ah, the smell of death. There's something so primally disgusting and piercing about that smell – I could feel it burrowing its way into my nostrils when Pete mentioned it. I'd happily place my hand on a Bible and swear that I could smell it right there on the stairwell.

‘She seemed completely lucid, like there was no problem at all,' Pete said.

‘But the smell?'

‘She was carrying a baby.'

‘Ah noooo …' I said, sensing where his story was going.

‘Yeah, mate. It was grim.'

‘Shit. How long?'

‘The baby had maggots crawling all over it. It was horrible. The mother seemed completely oblivious to the fact that her kid must have been dead for at least the best part of a week. Coroner wasn't sure how long.'

I stopped on the landing, leaning a shoulder against a wall. We deal with a lot of deaths in this job, and I've lost my lunch more than a few times as a result. This was the first time I'd felt as if I should play a violin solo just from hearing a story.

‘What happened?'

‘I called for backup. I'm glad I did, mate – as soon as we said we needed to take the kid off her, she went fucking bananas. She refused to let us take the sprog. She ran inside her flat and tried to fight us off. She ended up cleaving Jake in the arm with a knife.'

‘What? Jake? Seriously? How is he?' I asked.

Jake is one of the toughest officers we have – he normally works on the robbery squad, and he's usually the first person to dive head-first into a fight. He's good at it and he likes it, which is lucky because on the robbery squad he gets plenty of opportunities for three-dimensional, technicolor adventures in fisticuffs.

‘Eh, you know Jake. He's crazy. Proud of every scar. I'm sure he's chatting up some cute nurse right now, the bastard,' Pete said, smiling sadly.

‘Jesus,' I said, not knowing what else to add.

‘Anyway, so we had to section her, and ship her baby off to the morgue. Turns out it was probably a cot death or something, but she just continued changing the little boy's clothes and diapers and trying to feed him as if nothing had happened. She was just in complete denial about it all.'

‘Dude, that's fucking horrible.'

‘Yeah, tell me about it. I'm pretty shook up. It just makes you think about stuff, you know. The woman seemed completely fine when I met her, but it turns out she was probably the craziest person I've ever met.'

‘I'm so sorry, mate. Have you spoken to anybody?'

‘Just you.'

‘I'd give the helpline a bell, buddy. The number's on the wall next to the lockers up on the third floor. Blue poster. Sounds like it may be worth getting it all off your chest to someone who knows what to say.'

Pete shrugged non-committally.

‘Seriously, mate,' I said. ‘Nobody's going to think less of you for talking to someone. I'm feeling sick just hearing about it, and I wasn't even there. I can't imagine how you feel.'

Pete started walking the last few flights of stairs going up to our next call, but turned before he reached the top.

‘You know what was really fucked up?' Pete said.

‘Go on?'

‘She called NHS Direct, apparently.'

‘What?'

‘Yeah. She told us, once she calmed down a little, finally. She called NHS Direct and said that her baby wasn't eating properly.'

‘Jesus.'

‘They told her to go to a doctor, but she decided to wait for a few days. I think, deep down, she knew that the little boy was no more, but she just wanted to put off being told.'

Hearing that completely broke my heart. For a moment, I thought I might cry.

‘That is the single saddest thing I've ever heard in my life,' I said.

‘Yeah, I know, right? I mean … How do you deal with something like that?'

‘Well, she's been sectioned, so she's being looked after. Your turn,' I said, and looked up the steps at Pete. ‘Seriously, promise me you'll talk to the people? I'll come with you if you like?'

‘I really appreciate it, mate,' Pete said.

Climbing up to Pete's level, I hugged him. It seemed like the only useful thing I could do.

‘Shall we?' he said, after a short pause.

‘Let's do this,' I said, and we finished making our way up the last flight of stairs.

When we arrived at the right apartment, we found ourselves about an inch of cheap wood away from a cacophony of noise and chaos.

‘Here goes nothing,' Pete sighed, and knocked on the door …

To say that there was no response when we knocked would suggest we could hear anything over the racket from inside.

Pete took his handcuffs out of the carrying pouch, and used them to bang again on the door. This, it appeared, was more effective. The shouting and squealing stopped. (Though the barking continued.)

‘Who is it?' said a none-too-friendly voice from inside.

‘Police, open up,' Pete shouted back, and then awkwardly bolted on a ‘please' at the end.

I had to smile – Pete had recently been accused of being too gruff. However, nobody had told him that we'd all been taken aside – as part of the SMT
⁵⁰
plan to make the police force more approachable – and told individually that we're too gruff and grouchy. It might be true for some of us, but Pete's one of the good guys; I felt a little bit bad that he'd taken the management-induced criticism to heart.

A man – aged around 30 or so – opened the door, but only a tiny bit. He took a quick look at us before worming his way through the gap to join us outside.

‘I'm surprised you came,' he started.

‘You are? What's the problem?' Pete replied.

‘It's a complicated story.'

‘Not to worry … What's your name again?'

‘Oh, sorry. I'm Roger Samson. Call me Rodge,' the man replied, and held his hand out for us to shake. We did. As Pete shook the man's hand, I saw a look of recognition – maybe warmth, even – on his face.

‘Well, Rod—' Pete started, but then halfway through decided that he was not, under any circumstances, going to call this man ‘Rodge'.

‘Well, Roger …' Pete finished. ‘Start at the beginning, and I'm sure we'll get there.'

‘Oh. Sure. Well, the problem is that this is my mother's. The woman you can hear shouting inside is my sister. Our mum recently had a stroke and can't really communicate. I don't know how much she understands of what's going on. My sister decided to move into my mother's flat, and she has turned it into a place completely unbecoming of an old lady.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘She brings men home all the time,' he hesitated. ‘I guess I may as well tell you the whole story. My sister has a long history of drug abuse, and she's a working girl.'

He looked from me to Pete and back.

‘A prostitute,' he clarified, as if the term ‘working girl' was alien to us.

‘Okay, well, that's not good,' Pete said. ‘How long has your sister been living here?'

‘About a year, I think,' Roger replied. ‘But I couldn't say for sure.'

‘A year, huh? And how long has this been going on?'

‘I'm … not sure. I just came out of prison, to be honest. Few weeks ago. It's a long story, but I ended up doing some things I regret, and that's over with now. I want to turn over a new leaf; I have a job and everything these days.'

‘I'm glad to hear that, Roger,' I said. ‘What are you doing?'

‘I work at the DIY store down the road. Give people advice about paints and emulsions, all that. It's not very exciting, but it pays the bills. It feels good to finally be doing the right thing, you know?'

‘Good on ya,' Pete said genuinely.

Despite the fact that we deal with shady characters every day of every week, it is relatively rare for us to run into people who seem to have genuinely pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and followed the poorly-signposted path down the straight and narrow. I realised then that Pete must have dealt with the ‘old' Roger before. In these instances, my reaction is always the same as Pete's – whenever I come across ‘regular customers' who I haven't seen in a while, I'll have a quick chat with them to find out how they are getting on. There's one guy in particular, who managed to tear himself loose from a gang following a long stint in prison for an armed robbery that went all shades of wrong. You get to know the regulars quite well after a while. I wouldn't consider them friends by a long stretch, but you do eventually develop a sort of rapport with some of them – almost a fraternal thing, I think. It's sad when we have to arrest them, and it's great when they are doing well.

‘Well, when I got out, I went to visit my mum; my sister had been there for a while already. My sister hadn't even realised our mother had had a stroke. I took her to the hospital right away, but the staff said the stroke had happened some time ago.' He shook his head slowly. ‘It really hurts me, my mother's face looks as if it's made out of heavy jelly, and the hospital says that most of the effects would have been avoidable if she'd been taken to see a doctor sooner.'

‘I'm really sorry to hear that, Roger,' Pete said. ‘How did she not know your mum had had a stroke? Isn't that usually pretty obvious?'

‘Drugs,' Roger shrugged. ‘A lot of drugs. She just doesn't care about much else. It's a shame, she used to be great, but now she's just a wreck. I barely recognise her these days. Haven't seen her smile since I came out of prison.'

‘So, what is all the shouting about now?' I asked.

‘Well, I … I guess, I flushed her stash of heroin down the toilet.'

‘Ah. And she was angry about that?' I asked, feeling a little silly about asking such a blatantly obvious question.

‘Yes, of course. More importantly, my mother wants my sister out of the house, but she refuses to leave.'

‘And you say this is your mother's flat?'

‘That's right.'

‘Does she own it?'

‘No, she rents.'

‘But it is her name on the lease?'

‘Yeah.'

‘And you're completely sure about that?'

‘Yeah, I moved her in myself, when my dad died seven years ago.'

‘Right. And your mother told your sister that she wants her to leave?'

‘Not as such. She can't really speak anymore, so I asked her if she wanted my sister to leave and she nodded,' he said. ‘I think she's tried to tell my sister before, as well, but I'm not sure.'

‘Right,' I said. ‘I'm going to have to talk to your mother, I think.'