Who'd Be a Copper?

by Jonathan Nicholas

  MORE LEAVE AND A NEW SERGEANT

  In January 1985 I bought my first house. It was a brand new one-bedroom studio house in Nottingham, and it cost £14,000. Yes, that’s right, a house, for fourteen grand. I was thrilled and moved in as soon as it was finished. I bought a cheap, tubular, steel two-seat sofa and some crockery but little else. I didn’t have a bed of any sort because I was still happy sleeping on the floor. Just before the end of the miners’ dispute at the beginning of March 1985 I returned to Israel for a week’s leave. This time I took my parents.

  We stayed at the Park Hotel near the American Embassy on the seafront in Tel Aviv and rented a car. I took them on a guided tour of Israel they would never forget. We drove north to Kiryat Shmona and then turned right to Kibbutz Dafna. I showed them the kibbutz I’d lived at in 1978 and then we headed up into the Golan hills. We were turned back by a group of rather bemused and heavily armed Israeli soldiers near the summit of Mount Hermon so we pulled over to a small coffee shop by the road. Mist and low cloud from the mountain drifted around the remote stone building and rather optimistically we sat outside at a small and very rusty tin table. Two Arab gents were arguing over a game of backgammon and eventually served us our Turkish coffee in small glass tumblers, which I managed to order in Arabic. They made little comment about our presence, even though we were probably the first strangers they’d seen in weeks. We then drove past the mine fields of the Golan back to Kiryat Shmona and from there to the Dead Sea.

  We climbed Masada, the spectacular flat-topped mountain that was once King Herod’s palace. The sun was setting as we reached the top, and the Judean hills appeared barren and a wonderful ochre colour in the calm evening. I later described Masada in one of my other books; suffice to say it is an incredible place. The next day we drove through the West Bank. We passed a very large bullet-riddled steel sign by the road which read in Arabic, Hebrew and English: ‘Entering the West Bank: Proceed at your own risk’. We stopped in Jericho to buy fruit from a roadside stall, the location of which was in the news the following week when it was blown up by a bomb.

  Jerusalem was incredibly interesting as always, and I bought more souvenirs from Arabs in the Muslim Quarter. South in the Negev desert near Gaza my parents were shocked at the Spartan conditions I’d happily lived in at Kibbutz Be’eri in 1982. We ate in the communal dining room and I decided then to stay for a few days and re-join my parents in Tel Aviv to fly home with them at the end of the week.

  Back in the real world I continued to immerse myself in my work. Each officer in the station had a pigeon hole used for storage of mail and paperwork, known as a docket. Mine began filling up. In those days the station was periodically given handfuls of pro-forma witness statements from the electricity board reporting domestic pre-payment meters broken into and the cash contents stolen. These were known colloquially as ‘meter breaks’. On the majority of occasions the occupants of the house were not surprised to see the police at their door and rarely offered any resistance. It was clear the man from the electricity board noticed the meter had been tampered with when he read it, and would report it to the police, so it was only a matter of time.

  Meter breaks were an excellent way to learn the process of arrest, interview and charge. What became evident to me was that most households caught breaking into their electricity meter often had common problems; the house was filthy, the kids scruffy, there were partially completed DIY projects everywhere, and there was a sad, desperate atmosphere. The average amount of cash stolen from a meter was about £45 and on almost every occasion the explanation given was: ‘We needed the money’. I became so relaxed about the procedure that very often I would attend these jobs on my own, when we were expected to make such planned arrests in pairs. I rarely encountered any trouble. The meter breaks continued for years before cash was eventually replaced with top-up cards.

  I was becoming increasingly confident and productive, and the work book under my name was one of the busiest. It was around this time that my relationship with my first sergeant, Dave, seemed to recover from the low point of several months before. One night after work at 10pm he virtually ordered me to follow him in my own car to an old pub in Hyson Green called The Smiths Arms. The two of us leaned against the public bar, Dave chain smoking and quaffing pints like it was the world’s end. He told me serious tales of policing usually punctuated with many colourful four-letter words, and his usual moribund expression lit up as he reminisced about the great days in the CID. When other customers entered the pub he seemed to know them as though they’d been his friend for years. Some would refer to him by his first name, then others would be very deferential and nod their heads with: “Hello Mr Greasley” and speak to him surreptitiously for a few moments before moving away with their drink. I nodded appreciatively and tried to remember the best bits of what he was saying to me.

  I felt honoured to have been invited into this shadowy world as though I was in the presence of DI Jack Regan himself, from The Sweeney. I was also desperately trying to keep pace with the drinking. We were wearing our uniforms but with a ‘civvie’ coat over the top, which was soon discarded after the first few pints. We were then joined by other members of the shift, and then at midnight by the 4/12 shift, until there were probably a dozen cops in the pub, all in uniform. I tend to lose count of how much I drink after about eight pints, and so I did that night. Several hours later we all staggered to our cars and drove home.

  Dave retired, or left Radford Road, I don’t quite remember which, and a new sergeant came my way. Colin was also close to retirement and was a gentle, softly spoken man with a quiet but keen sense of humour. He examined the work book with me and was astonished at the amount I’d accumulated and how much was unfinished. Crime-related matters were neatly finalised but all other things I’d been asked to deal with such as mundane road traffic accidents and similar jobs were quite frankly in a terrible mess, and I knew it. When a piece of work sits in your docket for so long and reaches a certain age, it becomes almost too embarrassing to sort out. That’s when the ‘dark hole’ comes in. It’s nothing to do with bottoms, but it’s equally embarrassing. Cops have an unhealthy talent for finding places in which to hide or dispose of work that has aged beyond redemption. I later realised that quite a lot of other things in the police could also disappear if they didn’t suit. Colin found my dark hole and he wasn’t impressed. It may also have been a reflection of Dave’s supervision. He’d been ex-CID so I’d had enough support when it came to crime, but he didn’t know one end of an accident report card from the other.

  “You’ve got to get rid of all this shit, or you’ll end up in the shit yourself...” Colin said to me earnestly, without an ounce of vitriol in his voice. For the next couple of days we sat together sifting through everything in great detail. Much of it was thrown into the bin, but the majority was written off in many imaginative ways until it had all gone. For the first time since being posted there I had a clear docket. I was still in my probation so I couldn’t afford to keep my dark hole, and I wasn’t expert enough yet to judge what I could ditch and what needed finalising. Colin was a great help and I got on with him very well. Like anyone at or approaching middle age he seemed ancient, as did all the other veteran cops who ambled slowly around the station in their characteristically unhurried demeanour.

  All the urgent jobs were given to the young cops like me, as we were keen to impress and learn the trade. The tradition at that time was that you learnt your craft on foot for the first few years before being sent on a driving course, which for me was still somewhere in the future.

  We were allowed in the station for forty-five minutes halfway through the shift for a meal break and a game of snooker, but then you had to be out on patrol until ten minutes before the end of the shift. If your inspector found you inside the station without a reasonable excuse you were in serious trouble and were ordered outside immediately. An inspector’s authority was never questioned, even for a moment.

  I remember o
ne very cold night on foot patrol in the Forest Fields area of Nottingham killing time before I was allowed back in the station. It was snowing hard and I positioned myself inside a covered jitty between rows of terraced houses in Burford Road. Snow whipped around the streets and into the narrow alley where I was standing, but I was quite comfortable in my long black overcoat, thick scarf and huge collar turned up fully around my face. Underneath I was wearing my neatly pressed tunic, a woolly pullover, a long-sleeved pale blue police shirt and clip-on tie, with a thermal vest underneath. Huge snowflakes blew into the jitty on the icy wind and settled on my greatcoat and helmet. The outer layers of my uniform must have been very cold because after a short time I was almost completely covered. It was 4am and all was quiet. Just as I considered moving on, a man stepped into the jitty from the street and collided with me. I didn’t hear him approach and he certainly didn’t know I was there.

  “Jesus Christ!” he shouted, “What the..!” and I’m sure he would have shouted other expletives had I been someone else. He shook his head and without any further comment took out his keys and stepped inside the house on my right. I wasn’t even offered a cup of tea!

  At 5am I wandered through the waking snowy streets to Beardsmore’s newsagents, a hundred yards down the road from the police station. A colleague, Phil, was already there, sipping tea and chatting to John, the proprietor. I was handed a large mug of hot tea which I was very grateful for, while Phil and I leafed through the newspapers on the counter drinking and chatting to John. This was the usual routine before the end of a night shift, providing you weren’t inside dealing with arrests or trying to complete urgent paperwork. Despite submitting a form detailing night shifts and rest days, this information was frequently ignored, causing a break in the shifts to attend court, a situation which remains today.

  The shift pattern was not conducive to good health and was backward rotating; this meant finishing a week of nights at 6am on a Monday, then back at work at 2pm on Thursday after only three rest days. By Saturday you were at work for 6am, the opposite end of the clock from Monday and only five days apart. This particular early start was frequently ‘blobbed’, when cops turned up late for work. It was not surprising.

  ‘Tea spots’ as they were known, were highly prized and cultivated wherever you could find them. They usually consisted of anyone willing to make a hot drink for a police officer. They were often commercial premises, but occasionally a private individual was ideal. They served an operational purpose too, because frequently your host would tell you important local information without realising they were actually passing on intelligence. Sometimes a tea spot could develop into a lasting relationship. In the latter years of my service I knew an Irishman on my beat area who I visited at least once a week, spending an hour with him in his flat watching TV and sipping coffee. He knew in detail everyone’s movements in the vicinity and his flat was ideally located with windows at the front and rear from which I could observe activity. As his health deteriorated I regularly took him his shopping after work, which he paid me for and which mainly consisted of eighteen cans of John Smith’s. He died a week after I retired.

  There was an ancient red brick factory at the rear of Radford Road police station called Hicking Pentecost where there was a night watchman who was always happy to make tea for police officers. He also had a vast collection of dirty magazines, the ladies in the photographs having their modesty covered with black pointy blobs. We often called in at a transport café in the Bobbersmill area of Nottingham called The Mill Café, usually very early in the morning. I remember wondering whether I could ask for the fat to be cut off my bacon, but I never did have the courage speak up.

  In the summer of 1985 the ‘Live Aid’ concert took place at Wembley, and I took part in a sponsored run around Wollaton Park in Nottingham. I held a party in my tiny house on the day of Live Aid with a mix of friends from Dishforth, Radford Road and my travelling days. It was strange to see people from such vastly different chapters of my life together in one place. It was interesting to be in the presence of my new and old self. The two were clearly very different people. I was becoming reasonably good at playing policeman, and it seemed I was starting to enjoy it at last.

  DEAD PEOPLE

  It was a particularly hot day when I was sent to my first ‘sudden death’. The fire brigade had been called to the living room of a ground floor flat on St Paul’s Terrace in the centre of Hyson Green. A member of the public had seen what appeared to be thick black smoke through dirty net curtains and there was no reply at the door from the elderly male resident. I wasn’t told much over my radio other than the fire brigade was requesting police attendance. I was just around the corner so I volunteered. When I arrived the fire engine was parked directly outside the address. The fire crew were very relaxed and in the process of packing away their equipment. I couldn’t see any sign of smoke or water spillage, so I wondered what they’d been doing. As I approached one of the fire officers just pointed to the front door of the flat, which had been forced open and said:

  “In there, mate.”

  I pushed open the remains of the splintered wooden door and stepped inside. The first thing that became apparent was the smell. A surge of foul odour swept over me, gripping my throat, a rancid smell like rotting meat. I opened the door into the front room and it was thick with flies. The insects were so numerous they moved around like a dense cloud of smoke. In an armchair in the centre of the room, facing a tiny portable television was a large, elderly gent, sitting motionless. His hands were resting on the chair arms, his legs were crossed and he was wearing slippers. His balding head was tilted back at thirty degrees on the high-backed chair. His mouth was wide open, and curiously I noticed he didn’t have any teeth.

  The visible skin on his face, arms and hands, was an olive green like the colour I’d painted so many Airfix models when I was a kid. The cloud of flies buzzed in and out his gaping mouth and I tried in vain to keep them away but there were just too many. There were no signs of a struggle, and the poor chap seemed peaceful enough, despite being food for so many insects. I thought at first that he was very fat until I realised that much of his size was due to putrefaction of his body as it had swollen like a balloon. It was full summer and he’d obviously been dead for days or even weeks. The doors and windows had been secure and I confirmed the fire crew had forced entry. I searched through some papers for a name and contact details of relatives. I told the control staff it was a 1/1, a dead body, and after a few minutes a couple of CID officers arrived. The three of us examined the body as it was, and a doctor attended to formally pronounce life extinct. There were no suspicious circumstances, so that was the end of the matter. He was removed to a mortuary and the flat was boarded up. I managed to trace an elderly sister and obtained enough information for a Sudden Death Report for the coroner, which was sent later that day via teleprinter message.

  Such calls are quite a routine occurrence but they are all distinctly different. Often the person is not deceased at all, and sometimes not even in the building. A concerned neighbour could have contacted the police thinking the occupant was ill in bed but in reality they’d gone shopping or even away on holiday.

  On one occasion I forced the back door to a particularly dark terraced house to find the kitchen floor completely obscured by buckets full of disgusting brown matter. Leading on from the kitchen there were similar containers covering the living room floor, on tables and shelves. Plastic buckets, metal buckets, watering cans, jam jars, cups, glasses, even yoghurt pots full of the same fetid matter. On closer inspection I could see the contents appeared to be human faeces and urine. There must have been hundreds of gallons of it. All around the room there were newspapers and other items piled high to the ceiling, and it was extremely difficult to navigate a path through the house as a result. The smell was such that I haven’t forgotten it to this day, as though the proceeds of a huge sewage works were trapped inside a small, airless house.

  In an upstairs
room I found an elderly man lying fully clothed on a double bed. He was barely alive and clearly had serious breathing problems. His hair was beyond his waist, and at first I thought he had something clasped in each hand until I realised his finger nails had grown so long that they’d rolled around and curled up on themselves like the claws of a big cat. His great bushy beard was matted with rotting food remnants, as were areas of his clothing. It was clear the man was suffering some sort of mental as well as physical illness, but it wasn’t until the ambulance arrived that I found out what it was. The famous aviator Howard Hughes had the same complaint in the latter part of his life, and the ambulance crew said it was surprisingly common. It was Diogenes Syndrome, and it meant the sufferer couldn’t bear to throw anything away, including their own waste.

  One aspect of sudden deaths is delivering the death message. In the days before the internet and mobile phones these were quite common. A relative had died somewhere in the world and it was our job to inform the family. It was Christmas morning when I knocked on a door in Hyson Green, feeling like the grim reaper. A sixty-two year old woman had passed away unexpectedly and so I knew the shock would be total. The door was opened by a smiling woman in her mid-thirties, wiping her hands on a tea-towel. I could smell the turkey, gravy and sprouts boiling in a pan.

  “Sorry I’m in a bit of a mess, officer, I’m in the middle of cooking the Christmas dinner, I’ve got my mum coming round soon.”

  No you haven’t, I thought to myself, just before I told her the bad news.

  I attended an address in the Sherwood Rise area of Nottingham later that same year following a call from a concerned neighbour. The tenant underneath had contacted the police after hearing some loud banging and desperate pleading shouts from the flat above. It was at the top of a tenement dwelling and I entered the scruffy bedsit by kicking the door repeatedly. Forcing doors to arrest someone or to preserve life and property was another practical skill we were not trained to do, yet it’s something you see cops doing frequently on the television. The door took several of my best kicks before it finally gave in. It had been locked and bolted from the inside. I was utterly shocked by what I found. Everywhere I looked blood was spattered across the walls in great sweeping arcs and occasional star patterns on the ceiling, as though from gunshots. There was one person in the flat, a painfully thin man in his early fifties lying face down on the filthy floor, with a dark pool of congealed blood surrounding his head. Small clumps of red matter like bits of sponge lay around the room and it all looked very suspicious. This must be a murder, I thought to myself. But the flat was on the top floor, there was no fire escape, I’d just forced entry and it had been bolted from the inside. The key was still in the lock, but furniture had been tipped over in a clear sign of a struggle. The man was very definitely dead, but as far as I could see there weren’t any injuries to his body, apart from the blood coming from his mouth. What on earth had happened?