Confessions of a Police Constable

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.

Bringing them back from the dead

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 CPR21, 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 ELS22 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 AED23 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.

‘This guy has just had a heart attack,’ he said, looking at the readouts on the little display. ‘We’ll take him with us, he’s going to need to be looked after, but I think he’ll be fine.’

As the paramedics loaded the motorcyclist into the back of their ambulance, the Traffic Police arrived to do an investigation. Traffic are usually called if there’s a risk a collision is ‘life changing or life threatening’. It didn’t take long before they concurred with my initial assessment: nothing was wrong with the road or the bike. There was no sign that he even tried to hit the brakes – he just tumbled off the side of the motorcycle at about 30mph.

‘Seems like the LAS guys were right,’ the traffic copper said. ‘Heart attack makes sense.’

The man was conveyed to hospital at full speed. Later we discovered he had a broken shin, a gallery of bruises and his very own, very first heart attack, but he did walk (well, hobble) out a few days later.

So … you’re saying you were attacked by a ninja?

‘Umm, I don’t really know how to put this, officer. Last night I was walking up the street with my Xbox 360, and then a ninja came and punched me in the face. He stole my Xbox!’

‘Why were you walking around with an Xbox on a Friday night?’

The fellow was about 15 seconds into his statement and already the officer taking the statement was desperately wishing he’d stayed in the café for another five minutes, just so he wouldn’t have had to deal with this particular madman.

‘Well, I was coming home from a company Christmas party. I was dressed in my gi.’

‘What’s a gi?’

‘It’s a suit. Kind of like pyjamas. You wear them in a dojo when you’re competing in judo.’

‘Do you do judo?’

‘No.’

‘So …’

‘Well, I used to do judo. I used to be pretty good, actually.’

‘Right, well, please do start from the beginning. Why were you wearing a judo suit on a Friday night?’

‘Well, it was a costume party. As I said, the company Christmas do, so I wore my gi.’

‘Right. And the Xbox?’ the officer said, rapidly approaching the end of his tether.

If you draw the short straw at the beginning of your shift, you probably end up manning the front office – this is where MOPs24 come in person to report incidents to the police. I’m not a huge fan of that job, for obvious reasons. The front office attracts a rather peculiar clientele – and I don’t think I’m exaggerating by saying that at least a dozen people a few pennies short of a pound come through the front office every week. It’s not all bad; at least you are warm, and you don’t have to do a lot of running.

You just have to deal with a lot of nutters.

I hear you thinking: ‘So, apart from clearly being “a bit nuts”, what was so special about this particular fellow who had been attacked by a ninja?’

Well, he was me, before I became a police officer.

Maybe I should go back to the beginning …

I was working for a large company at the time, and we were having our annual Christmas party. As usual, there was a theme, and this time – thanks to a large deal that had been secured about a month earlier – the theme was Asia. There was a fancy-dress element, but – as per usual – I hadn’t got around to doing anything for it.

The day before the party, a couple of my mates from the office discussed dressing up as kung-fu heroes. One of them had bought a bright yellow tracksuit and intended to go as Bruce Lee. In a moment of inspiration, I formed a plan: I would dust off my old martial arts gi, and go as a judoka.

It was immediately obvious to me that this was a plan so brilliant it outshone a thousand suns: it was tenaciously Asia-related, and carried the additional bonus of me not having to actually do or buy anything – I could simply throw the gi on, and then go to the party. Score.

I made a point of shaving my head that morning, just to look extra ’ard, and went to the office as usual. I had a couple of comments about looking like a skinhead, but I shrugged them off; I’d been called worse in the office. At the end of the day, I went to a quick dinner at the local sushi restaurant (we were committed to the theme) with a couple of colleagues, before changing into my judo gi in the loos and heading to the party.

I’ll spare you the details of the party itself. Suffice to say that there was an open bar, and my colleagues and I were damned if we were going to let a single drop of booze go to waste. I was 15 sheets to the wind by the time they started handing out awards. The first was for the best costume, which went to the PA to one of the executives; she was looking rather smouldering as a geisha, so no surprise there. I have an embarrassing recollection of proposing she and I have a quick wrestle, but unsurprisingly she turned me down. What was a surprise, however, was hearing my name over the PA system.

‘Huh?’ I asked the colleague who was standing closest to me, with all the eloquence I could muster given my blood alcohol level.

‘Dude!’ he said, swaying as if he were standing on the deck of an ocean liner in a storm. ‘You won closer of the year! Great stuff.’

Through my alcohol-fuelled haze, it came back to me: I had, in fact, done a couple of shit-hot deals that year, and it did stand to reason that I would be recognised for some of the money I had earned for the company. I stumbled my way to the stage, and gratefully received an Xbox 360 (they had only just been launched, if I recall correctly) for my efforts.

Ace. A load of free booze and an Xbox 360, too? Tonight was turning out to be a much better evening than expected.

A few hours later, my friends decided that I had consumed quite enough alcohol for the rest of the year, and shoved me out the front door in the general direction of a row of waiting taxis. I don’t recall putting up too much of a struggle, which probably was an indication that I had, indeed, had enough to drink for an evening.

I didn’t live far away from the venue, so I decided to walk home instead of taking the cab. With my coat under one arm and my brand-new Xbox 360 under the other, I took off into the freezing cold December night in my slightly red-wine-stained judo gi.

I nearly made it home.

Nearly.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a guy dressed like a ninja appeared. He was dressed all in black, with a raised hood. All I could see was his eyes as he squared up to me.

‘Oi. Are you some sort of karate champion, then?’ he said.

In retrospect, I should have seen that for what it was: a threat.

Instead, I started a profoundly incoherent tirade in which I intended to compare and contrast the differences between karate and judo. I believe I may have got as far as six syllables into my diatribe, when he took a step forward, and clocked me square in the face.

I woke up a couple of minutes later.

Blood was pouring from my nose, my Xbox 360 was gone, and I was resting against a brick wall, my coat over me for warmth.

‘An ambulance is on the way,’ a female voice said. I looked up at her.

She was cute.

I asked for her phone number, and she sighed, ignoring me. I told her to cancel the ambulance, but as I did so, I heard a siren coming closer. It was a police car.

‘What happened to you?’ the constable asked.

‘I was attacked by a ninja,’ I said, fully in earnest. The constable looked at me.

‘Riiiight. How about you come and tell us about it at the station tomorrow. You look like you could do with some sleep.’ The constable asked where I lived and I told him.

‘That’s only up the road,’ he said, pointing at my house.

‘Yeah, I know,’ I said, adding drily: ‘I live there.’

The next morning, I went to the police station to report being mugged for my games console …

The main reason I’m telling you this story is to illustrate the kind of things we sometimes have reported to us; people come in to the front office with all sorts of grievances, spanning from the most inane, inconsequential complaints to the most serious of crimes.

It’s extremely hard to keep a straight face sometimes, and I’ll admit that if someone had walked into my police station and told me that they had been attacked by a ninja, I would probably have sighed rather deeply myself. ‘Not another one …’

I’ll be honest. I’m not proud of this episode; I acted like a prat, drank far too much, and should have been more street-wise than walking home alone through a dodgy part of town with an expensive, shiny piece of kit under my arm.

The moral of the story is that not everybody who sounds like a complete nutjob is.

Only most of ’em.

The mysterious case of the Belgian bike burglar

‘Two-six receiving Mike Delta,’ my radio buzzed. I was slumped in the driver’s seat of my Astra, which I’d parked in an employees-only car park behind a local shopping centre. Kim was snoozing in the seat next to me.

We were coming to the end of a 12-hour shift and bloody knackered. It was one of the last shifts on an unusually difficult pattern. All the officers were running at about 60 per cent mental capacity, which makes policing particularly difficult, because in many of the situations we run into we’ve really got to have our wits about us.

‘Two-six. Two-six. Are you receiving, Mike Delta?’ the radio buzzed again.

‘Shit, that’s us,’ I realised, shaking my head. Had I been sleeping? I looked down at my hand; my coffee cup was precariously balanced on my lap, nearly – but not quite – tipping its scalding hot contents onto my leg. I straightened the cup carefully, and reached for the PTT lever on the dash.

‘Yeah, two-six receiving. I apologise for the delay,’ I added, ‘I was on a private call.’

I immediately regretted lying to the CAD operator. They, and anybody else who had overheard that conversation, would have known it was a lie – we never apologise for delays in getting back to the CAD operator; either you respond in good time, or you’re too busy to respond (for example, if you’re in the middle of an arrest) and you’ll call up as soon as you can.

‘Er, yeah. Right. We’ve had a call about a theft. Shoplifter. You guys free?’

‘At your service!’ I said as brightly as I could. Next to me, Kim stretched and yawned, before zipping up her Metvest and fastening her seatbelt.

‘Great, on its way to your MDT,’ the operator said, just before the Mobile Data Terminal in our car used its ghastly pre-recorded voice to announce that the CAD had been updated.

Kim pressed the touch-screen on the MDT.

‘The Bike Shack in Main Street detained a shoplifter, apparently, but then he got away,’ she said.

‘Call the bike shop, get a description,’ I replied. We weren’t that far away from Main Street, so I flicked the blue lights on and placed my coffee in the car’s cup holder.

Kim made the call on speakerphone, so she wouldn’t have to relay the description to me later. Clever.

‘He was wearing a bright red T-shirt,’ I heard Kim’s radio say. ‘And stole a very distinctive bike. It’s a large-tubed bike, and the owner had taken all the paint off, sand-blasting the tubes to bare aluminium.’

As the bike shop manager continued his description, we went through a red light, sirens blaring. Suddenly, Kim made a squeaking sound – she does that when she can’t think of words to describe what’s going on – and pointed at the intersection we had just gone through. I slammed on the brakes, and looked in the direction of her gesticulations. There he was. Bright red T-shirt with a white logo on the front, and a bike that gleamed in the bright August sun. He had calmly stopped, letting us fly through the intersection unimpeded.

‘I’ll call you back,’ Kim blurted at the bike shop owner, cancelling the call and getting straight back on the radio.

‘Mike Delta receiving two-six,’ she said.

‘Go ahead.’

‘We see a possible suspect for our bike theft; he’s crossing Main Street at City Road, going east. We’re just spinning the car around now. He’s wearing a red tee, and riding an aluminium-coloured bike,’ she said.

‘Any units in the area who can assist with the last?’ the operator asked.

‘Show six-eight,’ responded a gruff voice I recognised as Simon. ‘One minute.’

Six-eight is the caged van we use for transporting prisoners. Excellent.

I could hear Simon’s sirens come on at the far side of City Road, just as I had managed to turn my Astra around. I half expected a bit of a chase, but the cyclist simply stopped, pulling his bike half up on the pavement to let us pass him. He seemed a little bit confused when we came to a stop next to him.

Kim leapt out of the car and took a firm grip of his bike, before asking the suspect to please wait there. Simon arrived not ten seconds later, and stepped out of the van, along with his operator.

‘Do you know why we’ve stopped you?’ Kim asked.

‘I suspect it is because of my bike,’ he said.

‘That’s correct,’ Kim said. ‘Do you know why, specifically?’

‘I’m guessing because I just took it from the bike shop up the road,’ he said.

‘Did you have permission to take the bike? A test ride, perhaps?’ Kim said.

‘No,’ he said, and I saw Kim start reaching for her handcuffs. ‘It’s my bike, though. It was stolen from me.’

‘Riiii-ight,’ Kim said. ‘Well, we are going to need to figure out exactly what has happened. I’m arresting you for theft; the arrest is necessary in order to assure a prompt and effective investigation. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you don’t mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’