Prisoners, Property and Prostitutes (31 page)

‘D’you want some mushrooms?’ he would ask.

‘Errrm’ (drip) ‘No thanks. Some beans please’ (watch for the next one appearing) ‘and some sausage’ (drip) ‘no make it bacon instead. And a few tomatoes’ (drip) ‘on second thoughts some fried bread’.

Watching the nose rather than the food, the trick was to hesitate at the stuff you didn’t fancy, then give a decisive order just after the most recent drip. On a bad day you could end up with just a couple of pieces of toast, but time it right and an unadulterated breakfast could be had.

Of course there must have been other drips that went into the food which we never saw, but what the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over.

Nor, it would appear, does the digestive system struggle with.

Chris’s explosion of anger at the wife-beating man and the woman who had accosted us was partly due to his very direct character, but it was also a means of releasing the pent-up frustrations that the job built up in each individual. If enough pressure builds up in something, then it has to escape somewhere. Chris was one of those who could direct his frustrations at a deserving target, and move on with his stress suitably diminished. Others found other ways of managing these things, some by drink, some by exercise, and some in religion.

I worked for some time with the appropriately named Matthew, a deeply religious man and devout churchgoer, who had a genuine calmness about him. Unlike many a zealous Bible-basher he never once pushed his religious beliefs on anyone, but his approach to life and the way he treated others was a more powerful advertisement for his faith than any direct approach could ever have been. But sometimes even the best prop will fail.

We got into a chase one night, a stolen car with four youths in it took off at high speed and we went after it. Through the town it went up a narrow street with terraced houses on either side, and straight through a red traffic light at the crossroads at the end of the road. It was gone three o’clock in the morning, but Matthew still prudently slowed as we came to the red light. As we got to the junction he accelerated again to take us through. Any car approaching would have seen the stolen one
moments earlier, and our blue lights were reflecting off the buildings to give a clear if indirect warning of our presence. It was a reasonable gamble that we could carry on safely, but as we emerged into the junction I looked to my left and saw a white car about a foot from my door and still moving at some speed. It was too late to do anything, and we ended up with a badly damaged car and no chase. We were in the wrong, but the driver of the other car kept apologising for having stopped us, which was very sporting of him. The whole affair was very good-natured but ultimately frustrating. Matthew had his driving authority taken off him pending a rubber-stamp from an office somewhere, so I drove for the remaining three nights to complete that run of shifts.

We finished for a couple of days off on the Monday morning, and I thought little of the fact Matthew had been quiet as I did all the driving. I would have been the same in those circumstances.

During the days off I suffered terrible back pain as a delayed result of the impact. Matthew went home and took a huge paracetamol overdose. Not a cry for help, but an organised, well thought-out attempt to kill himself. By sheer chance his wife came back from work mid-morning after forgetting something she needed, and found him. Without this coincidental intervention he would have died.

He suffered a complete mental breakdown – some said a week of working nights with me would do the same to anyone – and spent almost two years off work. He was sighted a few times being driven round in the car by his wife, and on one occasion I spoke to him, but what I spoke to was a shell, an
empty body that looked like Matthew, but so tired and haggard and unresponsive.

He did eventually return to work, but after a few more years was pensioned out early. By chance I bumped into him a couple of years after that and was delighted to see that the empty body was now decidedly refilled better than ever, at ease with the world and very much as he deserved to be.

His problem had been one of going to minor tragedy after minor tragedy, none of them unbearable in isolation, and having to cope with each one in turn. But for every job he dealt with, each one left a small residue, and after more than 20 years he simply caved in. Losing a chase and damaging a car is something that any Police driver would normally get over in a short while, but in his case it was that one upset too many, just that little bit more than even he could bear.

Whatever the longer-term upset caused by emotional conflicts, physically I think everybody was affected one way or another by working shifts that basically don’t agree with the body. Some couldn’t sleep in the daytime, others had digestive upsets or relentless headaches. Strangely, in my case night shifts would create a near insatiable desire to eat crisps. Working back with Lou it became a regular event at the town’s 24-hour petrol station that we would turn up about one o’clock in the morning for a brew and leave ten minutes later with a carrier bag holding perhaps ten packets of e-number and fat-saturated potato snacks. Sometimes Lou would drive for a while as I munched packet after packet, on other occasions it would be my turn to drive and he would pass me whatever was next out of the carrier bag and I would shovel the contents down like a
kid at a party. Inevitably by about 4 o’clock the bag would be empty, and while normally we would break local tradition and dispose of it in a litter bin, one night Lou had an odd idea as we meandered along the empty and endless dual carriageways.

‘What d’you reckon would happen if you held this carrier bag out of the window at 100 miles an hour?’ he asked.

‘There’s one way to find out,’ I replied, changed down a gear and started to push the car up to the proposed speed. With the speedometer being calibrated we could be sure that if it said 100, then you really were doing 100, at which exact speed Lou opened the window and, one hand on each bag handle, held it out into the airflow. The result was quite utterly predictable as the flimsy bag expired with a feeble ‘pop’, but the intoxication of tiredness and boredom made the whole experiment seem incredibly funny. When the very childish laughter had stopped we were quiet again, but Lou’s mind was at work. After a minute he pondered aloud.

‘I wonder what would happen if we did the same thing with a bin liner? You know, a proper big black plastic one.’

‘You’d either lose the bin liner or it would rip your arms out of their sockets I reckon,’ was my reply.

It was an interesting thought, but proposals of silly experiments faded as a job came over the radio and real life interrupted an amusing diversion.

The next night was basically more of the same – an accident, a couple of speeders, a bit of hunting, and another ten bags of crisps. For no other reason than ‘because it was there’, that night’s carier bag was subjected to the same fate as the first one. Same speed, same result, same laughter. Then came the surprise.
Lou reached into his coat pocket and with delighted pride produced an enormous heavy duty bin liner.

‘I kept waking up during the day,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t sleep for wondering what really would happen...’

This was so daft and pointless that it was just too good to pass up.

Like the two little kids that we had effectively become, I drove to the start of the dual carriageway system and set off, building up speed steadily. Lou composed himself for his
magnum opus
. As we passed the 90 mile an hour mark he opened the window and took as firm a grip as he could on the edges of the bin liner. It had no handles so was a more formidable proposition than its lightweight predecessors, and at 100 miles an hour he braced his feet in the footwell and in one swift movement offered the open end of the bag to the outside world. He was instantly engaged in a titanic struggle as the bag fought for its life with the wind which threatened to tear it apart, and the two forces conspired to drag Lou out of the car. For a few brief seconds this ludicrous battle raged, before once again the plastic gave out, but this time with an almighty explosion, followed by hysterical laughter from the pair of us in what must be one of the most useless scientific experiments ever carried out in a moving Police car.

We never repeated the bin liner project, but there was one final act of ‘out of the window’ lunacy the following night. Bored with bags, Lou pondered the effect of slipstreams once more.

‘What do you think would happen,’ came the familiar line, ‘if I stuck my head out at 120 miles an hour and opened my eyes?’

I didn’t reply, just changed down two gears and floored it. While the car could get to 120 quite happily, it would still need a couple of miles of clear road to conduct this experiment, but we managed it. 120 on the clock, seat belt off and holding recklessly onto the window frame, Lou cast caution to the wind in the interests of science and thrust his head and shoulders out of the car, facing the oncoming gale like an airborne King Canute.

After a few seconds he flopped back into his seat, laughing uncontrollably.

‘That was amazing!’ he panted. ‘My eyeballs dried out in about a billionth of a second! Incredible!’

‘And the experience seems to have restyled your hair into a passable impression of Albert Einstein,’ I added as I took in his new ‘startled rabbit’ look.

When it was Lou’s turn to drive I declined his kind offer to repeat the experiment for myself. I was by this time losing some of my hair and didn’t feel like accelerating the process, however much of a thrill I might be passing over.

Prior to his unexpected departure from the Police to run a scrap yard, and when not performing strange high-speed stunts, Lou and I also had some entertaining successes in the job we were actually meant to do. Late one evening we heard over the radio of a car involved in the theft of a laptop computer. Weighing up its last known direction with the address to which the car was registered, we sat at a chosen point and waited as the traffic passed, but time ticked by and after more than half an hour we had almost given up hope of seeing it when to our delight it came past right in front of us.

From near-despondency to ‘battle-stations’ in an instant, I pulled out to follow it and we discussed how we would do the ‘stop’. There was a man driving and a teenage girl in the front passenger seat, and we guessed that they would try to play it cool, so a chase was unlikely. As we followed, Lou could see the girl moving about in her seat, as if she was putting some items down the front of her top. This was a reasonable ploy from her point of view, as if it really was a routine check, any loose incriminating items would be well out of sight.

Lou pressed the buttons to light up the ‘Police’ and ‘Stop’ signs, and the car stopped in response to our request.

I got out and walked to the driver’s window which opened to greet me.

‘What’s the problem?’ came the very predictable question.

‘Just a stop check,’ I said, giving the hoped-for and suspicion-reducing answer.

My plan was to get the ignition keys as quickly as I could, and as I started my familiar ‘stop check’ patter, I suddenly reached in and grabbed the keys, turning the engine off in the process. A moment later, Lou opened the passenger door, and had decided that in order to recover whatever the girl might have secreted in her top, he would yank her upper clothing upwards, just enough to let anything within fall out.

He put his plan into action and in one movement put a hand either side of the girl and pulled.

Hard.

It was designed to be an upward yank of about four to six inches, very abrupt and very firm. To Lou’s surprise and despite the force he used, the clothing stayed resolutely in place
while the girl’s eyes popped slightly, and she gave a shriek. It turned out she was wearing an all-in-one ‘body’, which was firmly joined in an area which was promptly and intimately invaded by what was only meant to cover it.

Lou’s observation was ultimately proved correct however, and although the laptop had obviously been disposed of en route, we eventually recovered several hundred pounds in cash, four mobile phones, five stolen driving licences and a dozen or more stolen credit cards; a good haul with an entertaining twist – at least for us. More significant for me was the revelation that the girl was not just a thief, she also turned out to be a ‘lady of the night’ – a prostitute.

Something from long ago stirred in the dim recesses of my mind, and I felt myself drawn back to the words of my instructor during my initial training – ‘There are lots of things out there that will get you sacked, but the three most dangerous are prisoners, property and prostitutes’. I pondered the responsibility as at last I found myself taking charge of property from a prostitute prisoner, and was pleased that the advice from years before had been given to be heeded. I also reflected that during the intervening years I could have done with the same warning in respect of many other things beginning with ‘P’, such as paperwork, publicans, piss artists and on at least one occasion promotion-seeking policemen to name a few.

But for now, with the two prisoners secure we turned round and headed back towards the Police station. It was odd to see that although it had only felt like a short distance between seeing the car and stopping it, it was actually several miles. The distance had been covered while we had discussed our options
and turned a raw plan into action, and this concentration had somehow reduced our perception of how much ground we had covered.

On reflection, the same sort of effect had happened to me since I had joined the Police. I did not feel I had changed very much over the years of my service, but if I retraced my steps to look back at the point at which I had started, I had covered a huge amount of ground. The experiences I had gone through, the sights I had seen, and the way my view of humanity had altered by seeing it from the unusual, almost privileged standpoint of a Policeman was fantastic. It was something of which I had been barely aware while it was actually happening, but I was a long way down a road which had left me very different to how I had been as a penniless student on the day I filled in my application form.