Prisoners, Property and Prostitutes (27 page)

Until the day it disappeared.

Witch hunts had nothing on the aftermath of this. There were obvious operational problems caused by its disappearance, as it was the only record that any file had actually left our office for the deeper admin offices of headquarters, but until the new book was well under way, the ‘league table’ was effectively suspended, as would have been the culprit for its disappearance had they been found. Being some eighteen inches square and two inches thick it was not the sort of book that might be accidentally disposed of by the cleaners, for example. Dirty work was afoot, but no culprit ever found.

Years later I discovered the truth. Two officers had spent so many years in the shadow of the process book that having been in the middle of the ‘league’ for a while, and thus above suspicion, they decided the time had come to dispose of it. They felt that the most apt (and secure) way was to give it a proper send off. This was done à la Viking.

The book was taken to a slipway on a nearby large river at dead of night, liberally doused with petrol, and floated gently onto the water. A match was then thrown at it, and after the explosive ignition it settled into a steady blaze as it drifted
languidly downstream. The two officers stood to attention and saluted until it was a respectful distance away, made a pact of silence, and returned to their car, laughing uncontrollably.

But while I was learning my new trade and enjoying every minute of it, Great Men were doing Great Things at Headquarters.

A major project was nearing its end, and the net result of many hours of committee decisions was that the whole force should be reorganised and the administrative areas made fewer and larger. To this end there would be just four divisions instead of the existing seven, and from my perspective this meant four traffic groups, each covering a much larger area than before. This was wonderful news at first, bigger areas meant more flexibility, more freedom, and more variety. Then came the bad news. When the seven smaller traffic units merged into four, the actual total number of men in the bigger groups would reduce. In my new Division it was decided a reduction of two was sufficient. Being in a temporary spot I expected to be moved off, but not to worry I thought, after all I was only filling in so up to now it had all been a bonus. Anyway there would be some retirements before long, so in the interim I would simply drop to the top of the waiting list. The man I had been filling in for was promoted permanently, so that was one obstacle out of the way. Alas it was not so simple for me. One of the other divisions had ended up short-staffed due to a clerical miscalculation. (Well they had only been working it out for two years, after all.) A number of volunteers were called for to transfer across, and to nobody’s surprise there were none. The first signs of democracy in the Police were becoming visible, and in this spirit a series of presentations were
made to convince people to volunteer, much like the efforts made by Highland landowners to convince crofters that a better life awaited them in the colonies. When this approach still yielded no raised hands, the green shoots of democracy were ripped up by the roots, and the crofting model was continued. Maintaining the spirit of the Highland clearances, two from Newport were selected, and as absolutely no surprise to me at all, I was one of the ‘lucky winners’.

The reason, I was told, was that I lived nearer to the other area than most of the rest of the staff, so this move would save me money and time (as if I hadn’t worked that one out for myself). I put forward various arguments – Did the fact I had not volunteered show that I would rather travel further to avoid the other postings available? Did the fact I was next in line for a permanent traffic place not count? Did they realise that I had bought my house to suit my private life, not so I could be moved to fill inadequacies of the Force’s making? Most annoying of all, when I had bought my house I had been required by regulations to seek the approval of the Chief Constable to live there, and had signed a form to acknowledge that permission was given on the understanding that I would be prepared to work anywhere in the County. Everyone else had signed the same form in respect of their own house purchases, and so to move me on the grounds of where I lived was not a factor they should have considered. But they did. I contemplated dressing in women’s clothing and addressing everyone as ‘Your Grace’, but decided they might see through that one. Nowadays it would probably get me promoted, but the levels of paranoid enlightenment were far lower then.

As a sweetener I was promised a place on the Traffic group of the new area ‘as and when a vacancy arose’, but I knew very well that verbal promises counted for nothing. It seemed just a way of trying to keep me quiet.

The bottom line is that in a uniformed, disciplined organisation you should go where you are told, and I would have preferred the blunt approach to the short-change done up with ribbons that I got. I was sent a two-page letter from someone high-ranking, the first page having a load of flannel about ‘progress, change and the spirit of co-operation’. The second was more terse, giving a date of moving and a station to report to. It contained the ominous line that the Police Federation had already been consulted and was in agreement on the matter. This meant ‘shut up and accept it, no appeals allowed.’

It was all a bit hollow with hindsight, as the bold reorganisation only lasted about 18 months, less time than was actually spent organising it. We then went from the four new divisions (which it was decided had been a mistake) to nine, then ten, then eleven, and eventually back to four, which apparently was not a mistake after all.

Worst of all was the choice of town to which I was going. Benbridge. Thirty years earlier the area had been little more than a minor industrial town and a few nearby villages surrounded by farmland. Unfortunately like a number of other towns around the country that had done nothing to deserve it, it was identified for development as a ‘new town’. The farms were bought up, the planners given carte blanche, and the destruction began, thinly disguised as progress. When the
building was complete, all they needed was people to live there, and it seemed that every ne’er do well and his wife, or perhaps someone else’s wife, had descended on the place. Despite the subsequent efforts of numerous ‘regeneration initiatives’ and the spending of countless millions of pounds, the area remained a pit of depravity. The welfare state had been established nationally to act as a safety net for those unable to provide for themselves, but most of Benbridge had turned the net into a mattress, and a comfortable one at that. Soon there arose a culture based around a system that pandered to your every whim without any expectation of effort or return on your part. If you didn’t want to work, you simply signed on and the system gave you money. If you needed a house, the council provided one. If you spent your dole money on drink and drugs and became too mad to look after yourself unaided, then the system gave you a social worker, and if you wanted to take up a life of petty crime, then you could expect a solicitor, probation officer and so on, all at someone else’s expense.

Large, unwelcoming estates greeted the Police, filled with large unwelcoming women with broods of unruly children. A very matriarchal, almost tribal society had developed as men came and went apparently at will. The standard system seemed to be on these lines –

Man meets woman, man lives with woman, woman has baby by man to make him settle down with her, man sees child and exits rapidly at the thought of responsibility. Woman finds new man, lives with new man, has child by him to make him love her and settle down, man has same reaction and so on; the
forces of evolution forever in conflict with the benefits system. The whole place was a moral vacuum where a virgin was defined as a girl who could run faster than her Dad, and rather than being a day of thanks and celebration, Father’s Day caused scenes of utter confusion.

Left morally and socially unsupervised, the men evolved into two distinct groups. Some became skinny, whining weasel-like types, oozing untrustworthiness from those pores not blocked with spots. Others became tattooed, beer-gutted barrels of men, who spent their time in whichever watering hole was closest to their current home, endlessly telling each other how the England football team should be managed, and discussing conspiracy theories in a haze of cigarette smoke. Those who lacked the skill to become professional football coaches became taxi drivers. Those who couldn’t drive became unemployed. When finally old age and infirmity overtook them, which didn’t take long, their lives became a quest for further benefits to reflect their newfound relevance to the welfare state, and they were able to add another subject to the topics discussed in their pub-living environment – the appalling state of the National Health Service, and how it was failing the most needy, that is to say, themselves.

On a Saturday night in their prime, however, these men were known as ‘carpet carriers’, swaggering self-importantly down the High Street, arms held out to their sides as if an invisible rolled up carpet were inserted under each one. They were in their element, lords of what little they surveyed, their lives full of beer and curry until the money ran out and they returned to their miserable homes to beat their wife or girlfriend of the moment.

Visiting almost any house in the area you were met by the same sight – small children, large women, blurred generations, very few men, and inevitably an enormous television and a big mongrel dog. Regular newspaper headlines would highlight various local crises, showing how the area led or was in the top few towns in any national league table of everything from teenage pregnancy to premature death from a range of diseases, most of which could be traced to excessive alcohol consumption, smoking and bad diet. All manner of campaigns were launched to promote healthier lifestyles, but the fast food shops and discount off licences flourished along the High Street, interspersed with solicitors’ offices and ‘pound shops’. Being a salaried professional I had to restrict myself to intermittent takeaways, I gave up smoking on economic grounds and drank in moderation. I must have been getting something wrong somewhere.

It was interesting if predictable to note that the designers of this modern Utopia had not shown any interest in actually setting up home there themselves, presumably leaving at high speed as soon as the consultancy fees hit their bank accounts.

Worst of all, this not-very-brave New World was now a fixture. What man had joined together, no god could put asunder, it seemed. Colloquially known as ‘giro valley’ or ‘incest gulch’, it was as welcoming to me as the Antarctic to Scott.

My only hope of salvation was to climb onto the life raft of a traffic unit, but to do that I had to retain my advanced driving authority. This meant no accidents, at least none that were my fault, and all went according to plan until one night when I came horribly close to this nightmare becoming a reality.

Pending a space on the Traffic Unit proper, I had been posted to work an ‘area car’. This was attached to the block, and in reality was no more than a fast panda, but at least I was driving the same car as used by the traffic unit, so my credibility as an aspirant to traffic was retained.

I was usually assigned an ‘observer’, in theory someone to create a double manned car such as might be required at a quick response job. In reality the observer acted as a navigator, all the estates being joined by a maze of winding anonymous lanes and overlaid with a grotesque system of dual carriageways. It was widely supposed that the designer of the road layout had accidentally spilled a bowl of spaghetti on his plans, but neglected to clean it all off when he submitted them to the road builders. It was probably over three months before I even grasped the basic layout of the area.

Late one night I was with a probationer observer. We had been sent to the usual run of domestics and petty crime, and had spent about half an hour at one dingy house listening to a tale of woe from a mother of several grimy, unappealing kids. We gave copious amounts of advice which probably sounded good but boiled down to ‘get a grip of your own life and stop bothering us’, and fled into the night. I decided we would try to hunt a drunk driver as some form of relief, and after a mile or so were cruising round when a battered car with four lads in it went the opposite way at speed. The road was too narrow to allow a three-point turn, but I knew there was an entrance to some offices a few yards ahead. I stopped just beyond the entrance, threw the car into reverse, and started to back in. There was a horrible crunching noise and the car stopped. I got out to
investigate, and discovered to my horror that while the entrance was wide open during the day, at night it was sealed off with a long low chain, which had neatly smashed the corner-mounted rearlight on my car. This must mean the end of my driving authority – damage to a car, entirely my fault, so welcome back to the world of panda driving which I thought I had escaped.

They say necessity is the mother of invention, and she came to me in an unexpected and devious flash. I examined the Rover more carefully, and found there was no damage to any of the bodywork at all, purely the plastic light lens. In a fit of inspiration I picked up as many of the pieces as I could recover and put them in my coat pocket. Praying that we would not get a call for a few minutes, I drove back to the scene of our previous job and scattered the fragments at the corner of one of the parking spaces near to the address and drove off. About half an hour later we went to some other nondescript incident on the other side of town, and a discreet few moments after booking off there I called up over the radio, ‘Can you tell the patrol Sergeant I’ve got some damage to the car – looks like someone’s kicked the back light in.’

The Sergeant came back over the air ‘Where were you parked up last?’

I gave the address and sure enough after a few minutes he came back on the air again.

‘Whereabouts in the close was the car unattended?’

‘In the far corner, outside number 32,’ I lied.

His reply sounded almost triumphant, and I felt a few pangs of guilt, but managed easily to suppress them.