Confessions of a Police Constable (24 page)

Fridays are notorious for all sorts of reasons. Statistically, traffic accidents are more likely to happen on Friday afternoons. Friday evenings following a hot summer day are silly season. People drink way too much, they are dehydrated after a long warm day, and I swear the summer heat brings out the hormones in full force. In my line of work, there's no such thing as a ‘slow' Friday, but tonight, all the planets would be in alignment for a perfect storm.

I mention all of this only because it made me happy I was on the early turn, working from 6 a.m. until about 2 p.m. In other words, there was a sliver of a silver lining to sweating like a spoiled kid in a toy store: at least we'd be off duty before it all kicked off later in the evening.

This particular Friday, I was posted with Kim. I've mentioned Kim before, but not stressed yet what a truly formidable woman she is; Kim is my age, but before I'd even finished university she had had two children. There's something profoundly disarming about a 30-odd-year-old rather attractive woman who has perfected the universal ‘mum stare'. I saw her use it on a young armed suspect once. The suspect in question was roughly 14 and armed with a knife, but one look from Kim and she put her kitchen knife down, hung her head and apologised, before offering up her arms to be handcuffed – and all of that without saying a single word! She's one of the best police officers I know.

Kim has been married to one of the custody sergeants at our nick for many years. A rocky relationship, I have no doubt, but at the end of the day, there's something deep and genuine between Kim and her husband, Jacob; they seem to have reached a perfect balance of laughing and shouting at each other.

After a particularly spirited fight, Jacob once drunkenly confided to me, ‘Kim has this thing she does. She sleeps naked, and when she gets up, she drowsily shakes her hair out of her face, before she grabs her underwear and a pair of jeans. She then forces that amazing arse of hers into a pair of trousers that only just fit. In the process, she jumps up and down and wiggles back and forth. I have to tell you, Matt, the way her breasts move when she does that … I could never leave her for that sight alone.'

I've never brought up Jacob's story since, of course, but – curse him – I've never been able to see Kim in quite the same way again. If she were single …

Kim and I were doing our usual thing: manning the area car, a lovely BMW 5-Series that is used for general support and fast-response duties. Our end of the borough is a crinkly mess of back roads and one-way systems, so in reality, the Beamer rarely arrives faster than the Astras, but the additional comfort and the feel-good factor of being on the area car makes it a good posting. So far today, we had helped out with a resented stop-and-search that ended up in a couple of arrests for assault on a police officer. We also attended as a second pair of hands on a domestic dispute where two brothers had decided to settle a disagreement with their fists (another pair of assault arrests). Last but not least, we ended up standing around, directing traffic around the site of a particularly nasty traffic accident involving a cyclist and a black cab.

‘Two-zero receiving Mike Delta,' my radio murmured.

‘Twenty receiving, go ahead,' I replied.

‘You're showing green, are you tied up at the moment?' the CAD operator enquired, referring to the fact that our status was set as ‘on patrol', which causes our call sign to show up green or ‘not deployed' on the CAD software.

‘We're just directing traffic around the incident in Chute Street,' I said, as a set of flashing blue lights approached. Reinforcements, in the shape of a traffic patrol car, had just rocked up. I pressed my PTT
⁶¹
button again to resume my transmission. ‘Looks like traffic just arrived, so I think we can be stood down from this in a couple of minutes. What have you got?'

After we made sure that the traffic guys didn't need us we took off to the next job.

‘I'm not really sure what the deal is here,' I said to Kim. ‘The operator was saying something about a school, but it's not completely clear what's happening. Can you check the CAD and fill me in?'

Kim looked through the pages that had been sent to our in-car computer and chose bits to read out loud to me.

‘I'm not really sure what this is about either, it looks like the 999 operator has been smoking crack rock,' Kim said. ‘But I'm pretty sure you were right about the school, although there are three other addresses on this bloody CAD as well. Let's go take a look at the school first.'

When we arrived we were met by one of the teachers who led us to a nurse's office. Inside, a paramedic was finishing up his assessment of a girl from the school.

‘You're going to be all right,' the paramedic said to the girl, as we came in, ‘but since you've had a knock on the head, we're going to take you to the hospital to make sure. I've got to fill in some paperwork, though, so perhaps you can talk to the officers here first.'

The paramedic looked at me, winked at Kim and went back to his paperwork.

Kim took out her notepad and started questioning the student. It turned out she was 14 years old, her name was Sandra (‘my friends call me San. Like Sam, but with an N. There's another Sandra, you see, so people call me San') and she had been in a fight.

‘So what happened was that, like, Lateesha was calling me names and I said to stop and then Tiff told her to shut up but Lateesha had already texted Winnie and Sam on her Blackberry, but then Ms King saw her and stopped them from shouting at me but then they sent me a message on Facebook but I didn't get it because I've blocked her and she doesn't know that, but I didn't respond and then she just sent a message to Jim instead and Lateesha really likes Jim but nobody is supposed to know about that and then I said that she really liked Jim and she told me to shut up but then Ms King came back and told me to go to the other end of the schoolyard but she has no right to do that 'cause it's a free country and I refused to go, but then Lateesha went to the loos but I didn't know that was where she was so when I went to the loo they jumped me and I ran out where I bumped into Jim, and Lateesha followed me but Sandra was talking to Jim so—'

It was as if someone had turned on a tap that was spewing an uninterruptable stream of seemingly unconnected words and phrases.

I glanced over at Kim's notebook. She had written ‘Sandra McOwen – DOB/06011998', and nothing else. Kim looked up at me, and tried really hard to suppress a smile. She nearly succeeded.

‘Hey San, you're going to have to stop there for a moment,' she said. ‘You've got to remember that I don't know any of these people; let's start at the beginning, what happened?'

We spent a very long time teasing the full story out of San, and ended up taking a ‘good cop, tangent-referee' approach: Kim was the understanding listener, and I had to step in every 24 seconds or so to get San back on topic. We still learnt a lot of ‘off-topic' information, such as San's taste in music (she doesn't like dubstep), to her school politics (she was baffled that wearing her necklace wasn't a human right – how dare they take it away from her?), to recent developments in reality TV shows (I would recap, but I fear I'd be showing my age; I had absolutely no idea which shows she was referring to).

The facts, it turned out, could be succinctly summarised as follows: Lateesha is the 18-year-old sister of one of San's classmates. San and Lateesha have an ongoing tiff that flares up at irregular intervals. Today's episode started two days ago, when Lateesha said something about San. San retaliated by
fraping
⁶²
Lateesha. Lateesha retaliated by gathering her friends in the schoolyard and then beating up San, using her keys and key-rings as a weapon. In the altercation, San was slashed with the keys across her arm and on the face. She then fell to the ground, hitting her head against a bench.

We had finished taking our statement and were ready to let the paramedic take San to hospital for a more thorough check-up, when San let another morsel of information slip: ‘I guess you'll be able to see all about it on YouTube tomorrow anyway.'

‘Wait a minute – how would this end up on YouTube?' Kim asked. ‘Has that happened before?'

‘Yeah, all the time, but then YouTube takes it down again,' San said, her voice betraying more than just a trace of bitterness. ‘Not until the whole school has seen it, though.'

‘So … Someone was filming this?' Kim asked.

San nodded: ‘Yeah. Sandra. The other Sandra. She's got a Blackberry and she's always filming shit. She thinks she's Spielberg or summat.'

‘Do you know what Sandra's last name is?' Kim asked.

San told her.

‘What about her address? Do you know where she lives?'

San did not.

I left the nurse's office and went to find a teacher.

‘Hey, we need the address for one of your students,' I said. ‘Can you help?'

She referred me to the school office.

‘Hey, I'm Matt Delito,' I introduced myself. ‘I'm investigating an assault on one of your students, and we urgently need to speak to Sandra Hollywell; could you give me her address?'

‘Sorry, we can't give out information about our students,' the lady behind the counter informed me, and nodded firmly. ‘Data protection and all that.'

‘But …' I began to protest, but the lady leant forward, as if anticipating my argument.

‘We. Can't. Give. Out. Information. About. Our. Students,' she said, with the tone usually reserved for only the slowest of children.

I went back to the nurse's office where Kim was showing San something on her mobile phone.

‘I think we have her address,' Kim said. It turned out the two Sandras were friends on Facebook, and that Sandra Two, the bully, had just checked in at ‘home'. Her address had popped up on the map application; that's all we needed.

We left San in the care of the paramedic.

‘You know what we're going to have to do, don't you?' Kim said to me, as she shoved her notebook back into her stab vest.

I nodded, curtly. We were going to have to find Sandra and confiscate her mobile phone as evidence; assault is serious business, and the video might be crucial in securing a charge against Lateesha. However, if Sandra somehow realised the importance or severity of the film she had on her phone, she might delete it, which would leave us with nothing.

‘Right, you've got the address?' I asked.

Kim nodded.

‘Right-oh. Let's go deal with this bully, then,' I said.

As we were leaving the room, I turned quickly to San. ‘Please, don't tell any of your classmates that you've spoken to the police yet. We need to find Sandra, and it's best if she doesn't know she's about to get a visit from us.'

San was bouncing up and down in excitement.

‘It's just like
CSI
!' she said, with a huge smile on her face.

‘Er,' Kim said, looking over at me briefly. ‘Yes.
Exactly
like that.'

We climbed back into the BMW, and Kim started typing the address into the car's Mobile Data Terminal.

When we arrived at the estate at which she'd ‘checked' herself into, we saw a girl who fit Sandra's description outside.

‘Hi there,' Kim said to the girl, who was typing away on a mobile phone.

‘Hey,' she said, without even looking up.

Kim stopped right in front of her. When the girl finally registered Kim, and her uniform, she nearly dropped her phone.

‘Uh, is anything wrong?' she asked.

‘Nothing to worry about,' said Kim. ‘I just want to ask you a few questions, is all. Are you Sandra?'

As soon as the name was mentioned, the girl's eyes darted back and forth between me and Kim. She remained silent.

‘Are you Sandra?' Kim asked again, positioning herself off to one side. I stood on the other side, just in case she decided to make a run for it.

‘Maaaaaaybe,' she said smartly.

In the process, she made our job a lot harder – given that she hadn't committed a crime per se, there wasn't much we could do to make her to talk to us. We wouldn't be able to arrest her, given that we didn't have any grounds or reason for arrest.

‘Am I under arrest?' the girl asked.

‘No! Not at all!' Kim smiled. ‘You have nothing to worry about, but something happened at Sandra's school today, so we need to talk to her.'

‘I don't know anything,' the girl said, and started walking towards the gate leaving the estate. I looked over at Kim and she looked back, shrugging.

Another girl came out of a building, and she shouted out to the girl who was about to leave.

‘Hey! Where are you going?'

‘These cops are here for you,' she shouted back, and kept walking.

Ah, so we did have the wrong girl – but at least we now knew who the right one was. Kim walked over to her. I called a quick ‘Thank you' after the other girl and joined Kim.

‘Hey,' Kim said.

‘Hi,' Sandra replied. ‘Is something wrong?'

‘Not at all,' Kim said, glancing down at the mobile in Sandra's hands. She was in the process of writing a message to somebody. The mobile was a Blackberry.

‘Can I borrow your phone for a moment?' Kim said.

‘What? No you can't – you've got your own!' Sandra said, and pointed towards the personal radio clipped onto Kim's stab vest.

‘Right, well, can you put it away in your pocket for a moment, then? There's something I need to talk to you about.'

I took a couple of strides away, and sat down on the steps. Kim was using her girl-talk voice and there wasn't much I could do by hovering but risk intimidating Sandra. I pretended to be incredibly bored and played with my iPhone, all the while keeping a close eye on both of them.