Confessions of a Police Constable (6 page)

The situation the operator was asking me to attend was a Code Zulu – a Sudden Death.

Sudden Deaths are the bread-and-butter of policing; whenever a ‘sudden death' happens, police are called as a matter of course. I'm actually a little bit fuzzy on what defines a ‘sudden death', but I believe it is any death that doesn't happen as the cause of an obvious accident, and to someone who has not seen a doctor in a couple of weeks.

‘A few weeks? Oh my, I haven't been to my GP in over a year,' you might say. That was certainly my reaction when I first found out what a sudden death was. However, the two-week rule means that anybody who has had recent medical issues – heart attacks, late-stage cancer and so on – isn't automatically classed as ‘sudden', because, well, they're not technically sudden.

As a police officer, I sometimes fear I have become a little bit blasé about death. I see dead bodies relatively routinely as part of my job. Whether a person expires through a traffic accident, work accident, suicide or violence, they will end up across our desks sooner or later, and as a response copper, I'm sent to deal with all of it first-hand.

Sudden deaths are always eerie, though, because they are unexpected. I suppose being side-swiped by a lorry is also unexpected, but at least there's something oddly honest about a traffic death. One particularly memorable sudden death I attended was at a cinema. We had received a call from a very distressed cinema manager. Apparently, a 25-year-old girl had bought a ticket to a matinee showing and quietly sat down in one of the back rows of the cinema, where she remained seated until the credits had finished. The cleaners poked her to wake her up, and she flopped over, dead as last week's kebab dinner. At first, we thought she was a suicide case (either that, or she simply lost her will to live halfway through M. Night Shyamalan's
The Happening
, which, to be fair, is a conclusion any coroner worth their salt would accept). However, it turned out that she had had an obscure type of heart failure.

Today's case was at a residential property a short distance from me.

‘Yeah, I'm free. I'm on foot, but I'll stroll over. I'll be about ten minutes,' I responded (much sooner than the length of the digressing monologue above would indicate).

‘Great. Please liaise with thirty-four and seventy-one, they are en route,' the CAD operator concluded. I slowed my pace a little. No point in getting to the party early.

Just as I walked through the front doorway of the property, Jeff, one of the newer members on our team, burst out of the living room and launched himself full-speed into the toilet. I suppressed a giggle. I could hear him throwing up his lunch as I walked towards the living room. I noticed immediately that the house was in absolutely meticulous condition. Every photograph was so perfectly straight that I suspected the owner had used a spirit level. The carpets looked crisply shampooed, the windows were spotless; apart from an incredible swarm of flies, the house was practically a model home. It was a far cry from some of the crack dens we have to wade around, some of which are so bad you feel obliged to wipe your boots on the doormat on the way
out
of the flat, so that you don't make the street dirty when you leave.

I turned the corner into the living room, and the sight that met me was, put simply, grim. A man, who must have been quite obese, had died sitting on a chair in his living room. As he'd drawn his last breath, he'd fallen from his seat, and his ample body had come to rest against the radiator. Of course, seeing as it was January – and a pretty nippy January at that – the radiator had been at full blast.

The combination of the radiator heat and the dead body was not a good thing: the man had probably only been dead for about a week, but the warmth meant that the flies had bred much faster.

I am not sure what in particular had made Jeff bolt from the room to the bathroom. It could have been the sight of the maggots boring their way through the skin on the man's face and neck. It could have been the large stains where his gas-bloated skin had burst, spilling flies, maggots and bodily fluids on the carpet. My money would have been on the smell, though. The aroma of somebody who has been dead for a couple of weeks is something that stays with you for days. It is such a distinctive, persistent and piercing stench that I swear I can smell it now as I type this – even though I haven't had the misfortune of attending a sudden death in weeks.

‘You all right, Matt?' I heard a weak voice behind me. It was Jeff.

‘Yeah, bud. You feeling better?' I asked

‘Man … I can just never get used to seeing people like that.'

‘You will, eventually. Trust me. Who called it in?' I asked.

‘A neighbour smelled him this morning, and called the landlord to complain, of all people.'

‘Hah, the landlord, eh? You'd have thought people would have the sense to call
us
.'

‘I spoke to the neighbour. He was in a state of complete shock,' Jeff said. ‘He apologised so many times I thought for a moment he might have killed the guy himself. Turns out he's never seen a dead body before; he thought it was the smell of cat litter. The complaint to the landlord was about his neighbour having pets!'

I shuddered at the mention of furry little felines. The funny, cute videos on YouTube are only half the story: sure, cats are cute enough, but they're also vicious little carnivores. I've attended a sudden death where a pair of cats were in the house when their owner died. Suffice to say, the cats did not go hungry despite not being fed.

‘Who would have known, eh?' I said.

‘Yeah,' Jeff said, still standing at the door, looking at the bloated body slumped against the radiator. ‘So … er … what do you reckon?'

‘No idea, mate. He doesn't look that old,' I said. ‘How did you get into the flat?'

‘We had to kick the door in,' Jeff replied. ‘Landlord couldn't get in; the latch was on.'

‘Clearly, nobody killed the poor sod, so whatever he died of, it's probably nothing criminal. Best get him ready for the coroner, though, eh?'

Jeff excused himself and ran off to throw up some more. By now, I wasn't feeling too hot either.

Preparing someone for the coroner includes checking all the property of the deceased – including their pockets. I could tell that this particular pockets-check was going to be unpleasant.

When Jeff returned, one of the sergeants was with him.

‘What have we got, Delito?' the sergeant barked.

It was Mike Delta 71 – only ever known as 71. I'm sure he must
have
a name, and I'm sure his name is printed directly underneath ‘Police Sergeant' on the Velcro nametag on his Metvest, but nobody ever uses it. I had made a dreadful mistake in the station café a few months before by doing my impersonation of 71's wife, as she, in the throes of carnal enlightenment, screams out ‘Oh! Ooh! My god! Yes! seventy-one! I'm coming! Coming so hard! Your truncheon is making me come! Sevent—' and that, ladies and gentlemen, is of course the precise moment when 71 walked into the café.

We haven't really been on speaking terms since.

I explained the goings-on so far, and 71 nodded in response. Meanwhile, Jeff had ducked away from the door again, except this time it was to laugh, not to throw up. He was one of the people who had cheered on my impersonation of Mrs 71.

‘Jeff,' 71 barked. ‘Come help Delito with this body.'

We had to place Mr Bloggs on his back in order to search him properly. Once we'd both put on gloves, Jeff moved the chair out of the way and took the body under one arm, whilst I picked up his other arm.

‘Onto his back,' I said. ‘Slowly. One … Two …'

We moved him on three, but the side of his head seemed to stick to the radiator. I watched the skin of his face stretch, ever so slowly, until finally it gave way. The dead man's head flopped back with a crunch. My eyes were glued to the radiator, where a disturbingly large amount of cheek skin was still sticking to the metal. Jeff let go of his side and leapt from the room. I dropped my side of the body as well, and the man hit the carpet with a thud.

The combination of the cheek stuck on the radiator and the sound of Jeff retching pushed me over the edge. I moved towards the doorway, but found my way blocked by Jeff, who had thrown up on 71's leg. I decided to take my hat off, and leave my lunch in it instead. I should have known Burger King would be a bad idea.

Usually, we find out about traffic incidents over the radio. Either someone dials 999, or CCTV cameras pick up weird traffic movements and discover that two finely engineered boxes of iron and plastic have reduced each other to a set of insurance claims, and their drivers and passengers to ‘casualties'.

However, I once drove by the scene of one accident just as it happened. My friend Kim, who also happened to be my operator that day, and I had just finished with an incredibly grievous case of a sudden death caused by a drugs overdose. As I pulled out of a junction, a motorcyclist who had been thrown from his bike came skidding past us.

We immediately stopped our car – blue lights blazing – using it to block the road, and got out to see what had happened.

‘He's not breathing,' Kim said, once she had run over to him and flipped his visor open. ‘I don't think he's breathing!'

I checked the road quickly; our vehicle was holding back any traffic from coming our way, which would have to do in terms of protecting us.

To be able to do fully effective CPR
²¹
, you usually also need to be able to give rescue breaths. To do that, you need access to the patient's mouth, and you'll be unsurprised to hear that a full-face motorcycle helmet doesn't really help in that respect.

It is commonly believed that you should never remove a motorcyclist's helmet if he's been in an accident. As a general rule, that is true; motorcycle accidents have a high rate of spinal and head injuries, and removing the helmet can cause further injury to the spinal column. However, in many cases, you don't have the luxury of a choice: if someone stops breathing they have, at most, four minutes before they start suffering brain damage. They need CPR, which means the helmet has to come off –
pronto
.

I quickly got on my radio to get some more help.

‘Mike Delta receiving?'

‘Go ahead.'

‘I need LAS on the hurry-up. IC1 male, aged around forty, has come off a motorbike. He's not breathing or responding, but no obvious injuries. No other casualties.'

‘Received. LAS on the way. What's his status?'

‘Not sure, we're starting ELS
²²
now!' I barked back and cut the line. A bit rude, perhaps, but I didn't really have time for chit-chatting with the radio operator.

An ambulance was on its way, which meant that we would only have to deal with this fellow on our own for about 15 minutes at most.

Kim and I started the painfully slow process of taking his helmet off. We undid the chinstrap (which was a goddamn double-D clasp; great for motorcyclists, but a royal pain for rescue personnel). I stuck my hands into the helmet – one hand on each side of his neck, as far into the helmet as I could get – to steady his head. Kim, swearing under her breath, was gently rocking the helmet back and forth, to very carefully get it off him. All the while, the motorcyclist didn't move a muscle.

After what felt like an eternity, we finally managed to remove his helmet. Kim produced a CPR mask out of nowhere – I had no idea she carried one around with her – and started performing rescue breaths as I unzipped the motorcyclist's jacket, ready to perform chest compressions.

Once he had had his rescue breaths, I started the compressions. The first push gave a horrible crunching sound. Here's something they don't often tell you in the first aid course: if you're doing CPR correctly, you're more than likely to break their sternum and ribs in the process. The first time it happened to me, I was so surprised and sickened that I dry-heaved. I was lucky not to throw up all over my own arms and my victim, but to my credit I didn't stop giving CPR.

With this particular patient, we only made it through two cycles before the ambulance arrived. They had an AED
²³
on them, and started hooking the man up right away.

‘Shock advised,' the AED machine bleated out.

‘Stand clear,' one of the paramedics said, glancing around quickly to make sure no one was touching the patient, before pressing the button on the AED.

‘Shock delivered,' an unnaturally calm voice spoke from the AED machine.

Almost immediately, our motorcyclist shot back to life. The change was rapid, and downright incredible. From the increasingly white colour he had had in the minutes since we'd found him, his face and lips turned instantly red, as he groaned and gasped for air.

I too felt a rush of blood run to my ears, face and fingertips. It was almost as though my heart had decided to stop beating in sympathy with the motorcyclist's.

It is a rare thing to see someone brought back from the dead, and the feeling when it happens is indescribable.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the reasons why I absolutely love my job.

With the motorcyclist's chances looking a little bit better, I let my mind wander back to the accident. I was puzzled about what may have happened to the motorcyclist: the road was clear and dry, the visibility was good, it was early afternoon so there wasn't a lot of traffic around, and no one else appeared to have been involved. I looked at the bike, and other than the damage of the accident itself, I couldn't really see anything obviously wrong with it.

After hooking the man up to another one of their machines (I'm not a medic, so you'll have to forgive the vague terms – it was a machine that went ‘beep' a lot), one of the paramedics provided a solution to the mystery.