Prisoners, Property and Prostitutes (18 page)

‘I’m generally against the idea, but with exceptions.’

The DI remained impressed – a thoughtful answer must be on the way – ‘What do you mean by exceptions Jeff?’

Another sip of coffee.

‘Well as I say, not my cup of tea, but you seem OK.’

The spray of coffee from the DI covered half the desk, but after a flustered pause the interview continued and was soon apparently back on track – more questions about crime detection, interview technique and personal experience, but the atmosphere remained edgy.

Then.

‘Jeff – what do you understand about
mens rea
?’

Quick as a flash came the reply – ‘Men’s rears? You’re on about these homosexuals again aren’t you?’

‘GET OUT!’ shouted the DI. ‘Don’t ever apply to me to be a detective again.’

And so ended another unsuccessful application.

Not all movements were away from the block, however, and newcomers would arrive to replace those who moved on. Most who joined us were new Probationers, and as at my own first posting each one pushed the preceding one a little further up the ladder of career maturity. Intensely proud as I have always been of basic uniform work, it is a fact that anyone who returns to a block usually does so either because their career has gone into reverse or because it needs a boost. It might be that after a few years on traffic, CID or Special Branch someone would decide to go for promotion, and the best thing to impress an interview board was to be able to say they had returned to their career roots to get a feel for street-level policing again to ready themselves for supervisory duty. This type of returnee to ‘section’ generally didn’t want to be there
per se
, and didn’t intend to stay long. Others who had been pushed back, rather than jumped, often came to the realisation that they had little chance of moving off before retirement, and settled down to working their last few years as quietly as possible. It didn’t always mean they were lazy, often far from it, and they would be a source of knowledge and advice highly valued by those of us who were younger in service.

The other category of block member was the ‘plodder’; the man who was happy with his lot, had no dreams of promotion
or specialisation, probably lived in or near the town, and was happy to gain a good level of stability in exchange for years of more routine, less specialised work. It was on these that the service relied to provide a backbone to support the more ambitious. I remember a senior officer who once said to me that he was amazed to find figures showing that around 70 per cent of Bobbies never tried for promotion.

My reply was that it was just as well. He couldn’t work out why, as to his promotion-focussed mind it was an act of folly
not
to contemplate climbing the ladder at every opportunity. My view was that if everyone spent their time seeking promotion, then about 70 per cent would be disappointed and risked losing motivation when their dreams were not realised. The service depended on those who saw the life of a Constable as a vocation, not a starting point. Although I wanted to specialise, I could fully understand the attraction of this philosophy – any problems you couldn’t cope with you would pass to your Sergeant, as they were the ones who were meant to supervise, so they could be passed anything you felt you needed help with. And the life of a Constable was never really truly routine – a shoplifter was the same round of arrest, interview and paperwork, but the individual, the circumstances, the excuses, the result – they were different every time.

I had wanted a career dealing with people – I’d landed the very best. I was seeing a cross-section of humanity I couldn’t even have dreamed of; the rich, the poor, the gifted, the stupid, the clever, every emotion under the sun, every facet of character you can imagine and a few more besides. This was the result of crossing that line, going from being an everyday
member of society to what was effectively an outside observer, enforcing the laws laid down to produce a little peace and quiet as an end result.

It is said that a Police Force is a mirror of society, and this has to be broadly true, as society after all provides the people who become Police men and women. I say
broadly
true, because you would hope the selection procedure would weed out those with undesirable attributes which might affect their ability to maintain the standards expected (and sometimes even achieved) of a guardian of the law.

Of course, some slip through the net, resulting in a few very odd characters who I had the dubious pleasure of working alongside.

One such man was Harold Meacher. He was very much on the last lap as far as service was concerned. He had spent nearly 30 years as a uniform copper, so had joined before I was born. He never worked quickly, he did his bit and went home at the end of each shift; no one ever expected him to be the one catching a burglar red-handed, or saving anyone from anything particularly life-threatening. He would avoid driving a car if possible, preferring to patrol by bicycle. While this was a nice traditional touch, it also meant he would not be sent to anything urgent. His driving record was poor – he managed to cause some slight damage to a police car almost every time he took one out. This meant paperwork for him, and also for his Sergeant, and by this possibly deliberate trail of minor motoring incidents he ensured that he was never forced to go motorised. He was a ‘plodder’ if ever there was one.

In the light of this, it was therefore a great surprise when he
came in for his food one night shift sporting a black eye and a slightly dishevelled air.

Paul Lenehan asked him first – ‘Been fighting Harold?’

‘No,’ came the reply. ‘I fell off me bike.’

After a brief silence Paul spoke again. ‘How come you’ve got a black eye from falling off a bike? No grazes on your forehead or anything. What exactly did you do?’

‘I was standing on the seat and lost my footing.’

I think everyone had a mental picture of this rotund, middle-aged Bobby performing some sort of circus trick in the High Street at midnight on a dark green, 3 speed bicycle, complete with turned in handlebars – but his next words complicated the picture further.

‘I got punched by a bloke I’d been watching, you see.’

‘So have you locked him up then? What was he doing? Why didn’t you shout for assistance?’ asked Paul. ‘ We never heard you call up.’

Levels of concern were now raised quite high. The idea of a colleague suffering an assault and not having the rest of the block come to his help gave a feeling of failure, but Harold went on:

‘I saw a light on at a window in those new flats by the dock, the posh expensive ones. The curtains were open but I couldn’t see in because the ground floor windows are quite high, so I put my bike against the wall and stood on the seat to get a proper view in. There was a couple shagging on the settee, at it like knives they were, and after a while the bloke saw me at the window, leapt up, opened the window and belted me one. I lost my balance and fell off the bike seat, and he just shut the
window and left me there. I suppose you’d call it quits really. I’d been watching them for over twenty minutes.’

We were all a mixture of surprised and amused by this, but it was not untypical of the sort of bizarre thing you would expect to come across in a day’s work, and we thought little more of it.

On the next set of nights however Harold was again the focus of comment. He came in for his food with the front of his raincoat covered in mud and grass cuttings, but smiling and happy.

‘Harold – you been fighting naked men again?’ quipped Paul in reference to the previous month’s incident.

‘No, just checking property like any good Bobby.’

‘Not implying that we’re not doing the job just because we don’t come in covered in mud and grass are you?’ asked another.

‘No,’ said Harold, ‘I found another couple at it hammer and tongs in one of the bungalows at the top end of town. I could see them through the patio windows.’

‘How come the mud then?’ asked another member of the block.

‘Well they’ve got long curtains, so I couldn’t get a proper view unless I got right down on the ground to look underneath,’ came the rather worrying reply.

Harold retired a few months later, but I am sure he found plenty to do in his retirement.

It was a little disturbing thinking that we had a closet pervert on the block, but then there are probably plenty of bank managers and accountants with similar past times, so maybe this was just another reflection of society in the police, albeit a slightly distorted one.

I found more and more that the days went past quickly at Newport. I think it was a case of more experience breeding more confidence which seemed to generate more enthusiasm, within limits of course. But I still had to pace myself with over a quarter of a century to survive.

In among the obvious work which revolved around the inevitable crime and traffic matters was a wide variety of the sort of work that goes unnoticed by society and generally uncommented on by Police. This is the work that ‘someone else’ fixes up, that everyone knows is done but most don’t want to get their hands dirty with.

Near to the town was a canal, and beyond that a tidal river with big expanses of marsh at its banks. The river only came up to the edges of its banks in the highest tides, and consequently a farmer kept sheep on this land as the animals could survive on the available grass and retreated to the high banking between the river and canal in the event of a high spring tide.

One February morning, as the farmer checked the flock after a storm, he found a bit more than he bargained for in the shape of a body at the edge of the high tide mark. Being a bit
squeamish he did what society does and phoned the Police. From the corporate entity that is the Police, an individual would go forth and pick up the bits, so to speak. On that cold, windy, wet morning, I had the joyous task of being that individual.

There were two routes to the river bank – one involved a twenty mile round trip by car, the other a short trip by canal boat from a nearby chemical works.

I think the boat was retained as a fire tender of some sort, and was equipped with medical equipment and a stretcher. As a student I had had a couple of holidays on canal boats, both very enjoyable with some memorable events. Perhaps the best involved two newspapers, a dozen raw eggs and a group of American tourists outside the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, but that is another story.

This day, however, was to have no such fun. My Inspector and I went on board and had a reasonably pleasant start to the trip, although the scenery and possible end to the journey were less inviting. There was always a hope that the ‘body’ would turn out to be a mannequin or some other debris, or even that we wouldn’t find it as the description of the location was vague. However, after about an hour of trudging up and down the embankment we found it. Had we been more pedantic we could have insisted that it was in fact on the next divisional area, but in a rare fit of self-sacrifice and duty we didn’t.

Still fully clothed, it was the body of a man – he appeared fairly old, and was completely bald, dressed in a long beige mackintosh, dark trousers and shoes. There was a freezing gale blowing, flakes of snow in the air, and just desolate scrub and marsh around us, but at least there were no grieving relatives to
make small talk with, although this also meant there was no-one to put on the kettle for a hot cup of tea, something that would have been very well received.

As with most matters in the Police, there was a form to be filled in. This was a generic form to cover missing and found adults, children and bodies. Most of the time they were used for missing persons, and instinctively I went to strike out the options in the ‘delete as applicable’ sections to leave the words ‘missing child’, as most of these forms were used to deal with. Instead however I had to pause and amend it to show ‘found body’. (The form allowed a permutation to cater for ‘lost body’, but despite many calamities in my service and that of many fellow officers, I don’t recall anyone having to use that particular option). Again in contrast to the normal filling in of this form, I was unable to enter anything in relation to name, date of birth or address. Sections to take physical description were completed with brief details – about 5 feet 10 inches tall, average build, white male and so on. Nothing conclusive there really.

Thought bald, it was possible the corpse had lost his hair through exposure to the elements, as it soon became obvious that he had been in the open for a while. The cold weather had prevented any particular onset of decay, but where the form asked for eye description (and I usually put something like ‘blue’ or ‘hazel’) I wrote the words ‘Two. Probably’.

Then came the fun part of getting the body onto the metal stretcher from the boat. Someone had thoughtfully provided a large polythene sheet with the stretcher, and we decided to roll the body onto the sheet and then lift it onto the stretcher with
that. Undignified it may have been, but we also decided to use a couple of long pieces of driftwood to roll him over, as the uniform issue leather gloves didn’t seem remote enough for manhandling someone as dead as this man.

A lever under his shoulders and another one around the area of his pelvis eventually gave enough purchase to achieve the desired movement, and the body rolled stiffly over. There was a pause and we both started to move to the corners of the plastic sheet, when a loud ‘glug’ sound came from the head, and about a teacup-full of pink liquid flowed out from the area of his eye sockets. (I have never bothered to watch a horror film since.)

This caused a further, speechless pause, before we resumed the job and after a short time had the body more or less enclosed in plastic and placed on the stretcher. Moving it onto the canal boat was interesting, as we had to go down a four foot high steep muddy canal bank and then transfer it to a small area of deck at the front of the boat.

I did ponder whether we could just do a quick burial at sea and forget all about it, but the Coroner would probably have asked a few awkward questions, and the British Waterways Board doesn’t like corpses in their canals either.