Police, Arrests & Suspects

by John Donoghue

  Whilst Chad volunteered to wait with my vehicle until the recovery truck came, I got a lift back to the station with the dog section. When I arrived, I peered through the bars of the custody suite to see who was on duty. Tonight, it was Brian Firby.

  It is widely believed that working in custody does an odd thing to sergeants. In the outside world, they may be the nicest people you could possibly meet, but put them on a twelve-hour shift in the pokey and they turn into humourless grumps. Multiply that by years of custody duty, and you have someone who would make Ebenezer Scrooge seem cheerful.

  Sergeant Ingarfield once told me that it was like being Jonah – stuck inside a whale. You can hear all the fun that people are getting up to outside, but you’re trapped inside a concrete behemoth with bars on the windows as though you are a criminal too.

  “What’s that disease where the tiniest sound can annoy you to the point of rage?” he asked me.

  “Marriage?” I suggested.

  “No. That other one – the other one. I feel like I’ve got it when I’m in here. Cocky males and lippy women, all making their demands: shouting continually; none of them exercising their right to remain silent; the constant banging on the doors; the incessant pressing on the cell buzzer; everyone wanting my attention. Sometimes I think if I died and went straight to hell, it would take me a week to realise I wasn’t still at work.”

  I bore this in mind as I rang the custody bell. I could see Firby shoot me a disapproving glare as he looked up. He seemed to take it personally when I brought prisoners in – as if I was doing it to ruin his day! He signalled that he would be with me in two minutes – at least I think that’s what he meant.

  I used the opportunity to go outside and liaise with Gwen and Lloyd who had just arrived with our charge. It had been an eventful journey, by all accounts. I told them that I would explain the circumstances of the arrest to the sergeant if they could bring our prisoner in (well, it seemed pointless for us all to get messed up when they were already liberally covered with the contents of the wheelie bin). They reluctantly agreed, telling me that I owed them one. I went back inside to see if Firby was ready to let me in.

  “How are you, Sergeant?” I enquired.

  “Living the nightmare, living the nightmare,” he replied. “Well, Donoghue, what are you lumbering me with tonight?”

  “Angry male with a list of offences as long as your arm, Sarge.”

  “It’s always the same with you. Why don’t you ever bring me someone who’s in a good mood?”

  “This one might entertain you all shift with his self-defecating humour?” I suggested.

  “I think you mean self-deprecating,” he replied, shaking his head.

  “No, self-defecating,” I asserted. “He soiled himself in the back of the van on the way here, and he thinks it’s funny.”

  Chapter 8

  Death Comes to Sandford

  “Can anyone do me a quick favour?”

  Inspector Dunbar poked her head around the parade-room door accompanying her request with a warm, friendly smile.

  “It’s just that we’re going off duty shortly and we need someone to deliver a death message.”

  “I’d be more than happy to,” I volunteered. Well, who could refuse when she’d asked so nicely?

  She gave me a decidedly odd stare, and told me to pop through to her office. I sat there for a few seconds to try and work out what I had done to deserve such a look. The horrible truth then dawned on me: she wasn’t thinking what a nice, pleasant individual I was, willing to help her in her hour of need; no, she now regarded me as some kind of sick sadist who actually enjoyed telling people that their loved ones had just died.

  Why had I sounded so enthusiastic when I had piped up? Damn you hindsight! With my colleagues shaking their heads in disbelief, I did the walk of shame out of the parade room and along the corridor.

  The truth is that everyone dreads delivering a death message. It’s probably the singularly worst thing we ever have to do throughout our entire careers. Books unread, words unsaid; a life half lived. How do you tell a person that someone close to them is dead: that the hopes and dreams they shared will never be realised; that they will never hear their loved one’s laughter again, and never be able to tell them how they really feel? Sometimes I say: ‘I can imagine’ when I break the news, when really, I can’t.

  During police training there are no workshops on how to deliver the devastating news or words of advice from the force chaplain. The responsibility lies entirely on the shoulders of each individual officer. I just hope that I broach the subject as tactfully as I can, and with as much compassion and empathy as I can muster. But what do you do once the tears have dried? How can you possibly lift them from their darkest pain? How do you tell them that no one is ever really gone – they just stop being there?

  Delivering that fateful message is an awful burden, and Inspector Dunbar now believed it was something I looked forward to! I knocked on her office door and she ushered me in, inviting me to take a seat whilst she went and got the details of the job.

  As I sat alone, I began ruminating over the folly of my impetuous decision. Thankfully, it had been some time since I had last carried out this painful duty. Gwen had been the last on the shift to carry out the unpleasant task, although I was intrinsically linked to the whole episode.

  It had been late spring, and the report of a particularly nasty collision on the bypass had come in over the radio. It had been pelting with rain all that morning, and a juggernaut that had been thundering down the hill had ploughed straight into the side of a small works van that had pulled out of a side junction. I was the first officer to arrive at the crash site and had been met by a scene of utter carnage.

  The road had been littered with smashed vehicle parts, and tins of paint that were being carried in the van had spilled their garish colours across the wet tarmac. The lorry had jackknifed and was blocking both carriageways. In the sheeting rain the driver had sat at the side of the road, crying and covered in blood. The van had been on its side in a ditch; its driver slumped over, dead at the wheel. His passenger had been located thirty feet away, having been thrown from the vehicle and then smashing through a fence to land unceremoniously in a field; his body twisted like a collapsed marionette whose strings had just been cut. Amazingly, he had survived – but only just, and was being cared for by some brave passing motorists.

  Backup had arrived in due course and little by little the scene had been contained, diversions set in place, witness details taken and vehicles recovered. It was the air ambulance who had finally taken the patient to hospital, where he had been reported as critical but stable. Eventually, from the unpleasant task of going through his blood-soaked pockets to find his wallet, I managed to establish who the dead man was, but it was left to Gwen, who had never even set foot near the incident, to carry out the hardest task of breaking the sad news to the deceased’s partner. Perhaps for the wife, the day would have started out like any other, but as she waved him off that morning she could never have envisaged that that would be the last time she would ever see her husband.

  Having located the address, Gwen told me that she had walked down the garden path to the front door with the usual trepidation that we all feel when we have to deliver the awful news. Prior to knocking, some officers attempt to identify a neighbour or friend who is willing to come to the house and support the bereaved; someone who can stay with them while the news sinks in. In this instance, none of that proved necessary as the wife merely laughed in my colleague’s face, and told her that she had been planning to leave her husband for ages and he’d just saved her the trouble. Gwen left as the black widow began enthusiastically dialling the insurance company to find out how much his life-policy payout would be.

  “Mrs Lavender, the lady who died today, lived in one of the outlying villages.” The inspector had returned, breaking my train of thought. “It took a while to work out if her death was suspicious or not,” she added, handing me
the incident log.

  Neighbours had notified police, expressing concern that they hadn’t seen Celia Lavender for a number of days. An officer had been summarily tasked to attend the address to check on her welfare. After knocking, and checking both the front and back doors and getting no reply, he had then checked the windows, but all were locked and secure. Standing on his tiptoes, he had then proceeded to peer through each one, cupping his hands against the glass to get a better look, but nothing seemed amiss. Eventually, he had pushed open the letter box to look inside, and that’s when he had detected that telltale odour of a decaying corpse.

  Entry was duly forced and the body was found in the hall at the foot of the stairs. She was an elderly lady and the cause of her death seemed consistent with a fall (in actual fact, more people die from falling down the stairs than being murdered). Her neck appeared to be broken, giving strength to the theory. There were no signs of a struggle, no marks on the body and no traces of blood were found. There were no signs of a break-in either; the house was secure. Nothing appeared to be disturbed or missing. The keys to the doors were still in the locks on the inside and all the windows were closed. With no other extenuating factors that would have been it: case closed; an unfortunate, accidental death. And yet there was something strange about this job – something that no one could explain.

  Bizarrely, both the body and the rest of the hallway were covered in coils and coils of brand new bright-yellow garden hose. It was everywhere. It was clear that the deceased hadn’t tripped over it – the hose was on top of her. The only logical explanation was that it must have been placed there after she had died. But why?

  If someone else had been in the house when Mrs Lavender had fallen down the stairs, why hadn’t they reported the incident? Why go to the trouble of placing the coils of garden hose over the body? And how did they get in and out of the property?

  CSI had attended and had checked over the scene, inch by inch. CID had been out in force, pondering over the significance of the garden piping, and checking previous records to see if there had been any other killings with the same modus operandi. Neighbourhood officers had knocked on doors up and down the street, trying to establish if anyone had seen anything. Everyone had drawn a blank.

  Then, just as the detective inspector had ordered the whole scene to be gone over again with a fine-tooth comb, a delivery van driver had turned up at the address and casually asked if he could have his hosepipe back. He had soon found himself down at the station to explain. An hour later, he had been de-arrested and taken back to his vehicle after it was discovered that he was guilty of little more than stupidity.

  It turned out that he had tried to deliver the hosepipe to Mrs Lavender’s house but getting no reply, as she was already lying dead in the hall, he had decided to post it. Instead of leaving it around the back of the property or posting a note through the door as any normal-thinking person might have done, he had posted it through the letter box. Unravelling the hose, he had fed all fifty metres – one hundred and sixty-four feet – bit by bit through the opening, where it had resumed its original state, coiling itself up on the other side of the door, the hallway and all over the prostrate form of our victim. To add insult to injury, it wasn’t even the right address!

  With everyone satisfied that there was no mysterious hosepipe killer on the loose, officers then resumed the routine aspect of any sudden death: establishing who the immediate family were.

  Sometimes, however, identifying next of kin can be easier said than done. Usually, people don’t die leaving beside them a convenient list of who to contact in the event of an emergency. Even when people do keep a diary or have an address book, in the section at the front where it says: who to contact in the event of an emergency, most of the time it’s either blank or some wag has written: an ambulance. I’ve done it myself, but I don’t really know why; maybe I thought it would give the coroner a little giggle when I was laid out cold on a mortuary slab. I made a mental note to start acting like a sensible human being… perhaps in the new year.

  There was no useful information in Mrs Lavender’s diary, nor had any family member arrived at the address while the police had been there. The hour-long search to establish details of any living relative had resulted in officers hunting high and low through decades of accumulated documents, papers, letters and notes that had been shoved in cupboards, drawers, boxes and tins. Personally speaking, the main reason why I don’t really want to die is that I don’t relish the thought of a complete stranger rifling through all my stuff. Nowadays, some people even have what is called a ‘Porn Buddy’, tasked with locating and destroying any such dubious material before loved ones find it; obviously, their primary role being to delete browser history straight away!

  However, the searchers were not going to give up that easily, and had eventually come up trumps when they had looked in the favourite hiding place of all old people: the biscuit barrel. Along with a savings book and a wad of cash was an old envelope marked NOK. It contained the name Emily and an address in Sandford.

  “I’m sorry, but we don’t have an awful lot more information.” Inspector Dunbar sounded quite apologetic as I looked up from reading the log. “We’ve no idea of Emily’s surname, relationship to the deceased or even her age.”

  Five minutes later, I was in a panda car heading to the address. I had managed to establish that it belonged to a private care home for the elderly, but I still had no idea whether Emily was a resident or a member of staff. The reason for my visit would require a very careful and tactful explanation, and I certainly hoped that there wouldn’t be more than one person by the name of Emily present. On arrival, I pressed the button on the intercom and waited patiently. Eventually, I was buzzed in…

  “How do I know you’re a real policeman?” The smartly dressed woman, whom I estimated to be in her late fifties, resplendent in a crisp white blouse and dark-blue pencil skirt, was questioning my credentials.

  I was standing in front of her dressed in full police uniform, but it was still a legitimate question. It was only a few weeks ago that we had swapped our ties and smartly ironed white shirts for black open-necked polo shirts, so perhaps I no longer fulfilled her expectation of what a traditional British bobby ought to look like.

  “I have some ID here,” I explained, reaching into my pocket and showing it to her. I flipped open the wallet to display the silver constabulary crest on one side and my warrant card on the other.

  “Anyone could have got a badge and stuck it on, and I don’t know what the warrant card is supposed to look like. That could be any old thing you’ve made at home.”

  Fair point. I don’t suppose many people would know what our actual identity cards look like, although I think she was grossly overestimating my technical abilities to make one.

  “Well, my police car is outside,” I joked.

  She peered out of the window. “You could have hired that from a props company – just like your uniform.”

  “Why don’t you ring the police switchboard and they can confirm that an officer has been dispatched here?” I suggested.

  “Oh, I’m not falling for that one! You could have one of your accomplices answering it and saying any old thing to me!”

  I was racking my brain to think of some other way that I could prove I was genuine, when I heard a buzzing in my earpiece heralding a call from Comms. I apologised for the interruption before answering the call. They wanted an update from an incident I had attended the day before. I informed the dispatcher that I was unable to speak at present as the information they needed was sensitive and I wasn’t alone; he told me that they would call again later.

  “And what was that?” demanded my interrogator.

  “I’m sorry,” I apologised again. “It was just the control room. I’ll get back to them later.”

  “No, the gobbledegook you were just talking. That was just utter gibberish.”

  I played back in my mind what I had said: ‘Go ahead… Say again… Ver
bal altercation… a bilking… Wait one, not state 12. Standby… Much obliged.’

  Admittedly, ‘police speak’ can sound incredibly strange to anyone listening in to one side of the conversation as we change from clipped formalities into code and then occasionally stray into something that sounds like it’s straight out of a Dickens’ novel. In an attempt to win her over, I explained what it all meant.

  Go ahead = Hello, pleasure to speak to you. How can I help?

  Say again = I’m sorry, I didn’t quite understand what you were saying there. Could you repeat it, please?

  Verbal altercation = It was just an argument and there was no violence used by either party.

  A bilking = A term used to describe a situation where a customer makes off without paying for goods or a service.

  Wait one = Steady on, stop what you’re saying for a second.

  Not state 12 = I’m not actually alone at the moment and someone who is not supposed to listen into what I’m about to say might overhear.

  Standby = Give me a few seconds and I’ll go and find somewhere out of earshot of anyone else.

  Much obliged = Oh, you’ll give me a call later when I’m free from this detail? Thank you very much.

  It’s the ‘much obliged’ that sounds Dickensian. Who on earth nowadays says they’re ‘obliged’, let alone ‘much obliged’? Well, we do – on the radio.

  “I mean to say,” she continued, despite my explanation, “you didn’t say ‘roger’ once!”

  Recently, we had actually been told that there was far too much rogering going on, and it was now officially banned from the airwaves. I was going to tell her that there were a number of reasons why police radio-speak had to be brief and to the point, and not least because we are charged by the telecommunications company that runs the network for every word spoken. In order to demonstrate to her that is how every officer speaks on the radio I pulled out my earpiece so she could listen to a random transmission. At that very moment, it burst into life: