The Final Cut

by Steven Suttie

  “Just…”

  “Well imagine that you and your classmates were all really excited about going on a school trip, say. Alton Towers, or somewhere really exciting like that. The whole class are absolutely thrilled for weeks. But then one kid in the class breaks the pencil sharpener, and won’t own up to it. So, the teacher cancels the trip for everybody.”

  “Well, that would be harsh!”

  “Exactly. That’s the sadistic mentality behind these benefit reforms Alan.”

  “Okay Ruth, this is your world, I know very little about it, but I will use our little disclaimer here to remind listeners that Piccadilly Radio does not endorse the views of our callers.”

  “You can say your disclaimer Alan, but rest assured, nothing I have said is libellous. It’s the truth.”

  “So Ruth, let me ask you, apart from the fact that these two victims work for the DWP, what else are you basing your theory on?”

  “Well, it’s rather simple Alan. Both of the victims have been made disabled themselves now, haven’t they?”

  Chapter Eight

  Miller was in a meeting with his boss, DCS Dixon. They were finalising the details of the upcoming press conference. DC Helen Grant was watching through the windows, nervously waiting for her appointment to see Miller. When she had asked him “for a word” earlier, she had no idea that he was putting a press conference together, as well as having the morning’s team brief to present. As bad-timing went, Grant’s request for a few minutes of her boss’s time was spectacular. But to Miller’s credit, he had politely accepted the request, and advised to her “hang on a bit, we’ll have a chat after I’ve got rid of Dixon.”

  Grant’s nerves were jangling now. She was the newest member of the SCIU department, and she was also living with the Detective Inspector. Every day, she felt she was walking a tight-rope trying to fit in, and find acceptance as a decent detective. Her desire to pursue this matter with Miller was part of that objective. If he did agree with her, and they led the enquiry based on her suggestion, it would be a great day for Grant being judged on her work, rather than who her boyfriend was. Her nerves jangled further as she saw Dixon stand up. This was a nightmare. Her idea was to have a relaxed, informal chat about the line of enquiry that she wanted to pursue, it certainly wasn’t to be chucked into a two-minute window on the busiest morning in weeks.

  Glancing up again, she saw that Dixon was starting to shuffle about the office. Miller looked pretty pissed off. “Shit,” muttered Grant under her breath as Dixon made to leave Miller’s office. As soon as Dixon departed, Miller looked out through the glass, pointed to Grant, and waved her towards the office door. He still looked a bit pissed off, she thought.

  Confidence! Thought Grant as she stood, and walked across the open-plan office floor towards the DCI’s office.

  “Sir, sorry, this can wait…” she said as she entered.

  “No, don’t be daft.”

  “But I had no idea you had so much on this morning… seriously, I can catch you later.”

  “It’s fine. What’s up?” Miller had a kind expression on his face. Grant had no idea how to start this off with small-talk so she dived right in.

  “Well, Sir, with all due respect…”

  “Ha ha!” Miller laughed loudly, throwing his head back as he did so.

  “What?”

  “Oh, nowt. I just laugh when people start off saying “with all due respect,” it usually means I’m about to get a bollocking!”

  “Well, it’s not… I’m not…”

  “Come on Helen, what’s up?”

  “The thing is, I have been thinking long and hard about this DWP link, the fact is that the DWP have been doing some outrageously nasty stuff over the last few years. And now suddenly, two members of their staff have been targeted in horrific attacks. I really think that the motive for these crimes is linked to the hostile activities they’re accountable for, and, well, I thought you were a bit quick to dismiss it yesterday.” Grant sat back, her shoulders relaxed slightly. She looked like she was glad to have it off her chest, and Miller had been pretty cool about it so far.

  “Okay, I accept your point-of-view. And I may have got it wrong to dismiss this idea so quickly.”

  “Thank you, Sir.”

  “For the record, Dixon has just told me that there are very similar conspiracy theories being passed about on the internet, and Piccadilly Radio sent us a recording of a call they received last night, which says pretty much the same thing as what you are saying. Wait up, I’ll stick it on now…” Miller leant across to his computer and looked through his e-mails. Once he found the one from the local radio station, he started playing the clip.

  Both Grant and Miller sat in silence as the caller “Ruth” explained her theory on the attacks to the DJ. Once the call ended, Miller looked up and across the desk at his DC.

  “So, I think I owe you an apology. Get yourself a presentation together based on your theory, you can address the team with this line of enquiry. I’ll e-mail that call across to you as well. We might as well play it to everybody. She makes some interesting points, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes, she does. Thanks Sir.”

  “No, thank you. I appreciate you pursuing it with me as well. Well done.”

  *****

  Miller was trying to get ready for his press conference, but there was a minor irritation on the phone. It was the manager of Wellesley House DWP. He sounded like a drone, and despite the fact that he had only been on the phone a couple of minutes, Miller was gutted with himself for leaving his number behind.

  “I cannot tell you how distressed my staff are. This is a situation that is completely unheard of, Mr Miller. Half of my staff have failed to arrive at work.”

  “Well, I suppose that it’s understandable really, under the circumstances…”

  “It may be understandable to you, but it is very far from understandable to me and my superior management quadrant. It is my team that are absent, and that is my failing as their immediate line manager. I would like to add that I hold you and your scare-mongering activities yesterday wholly responsible. It’s completely outrageous. I am going to fail to reach my most basic of productivity indicators today, and as I say, this is your fault.” The line went silent, and the furious DWP manager seemed surprised not to get a response. “Did you hear me?” he barked down the line after an awkward silence of ten seconds or so. There was another silence. It went on for an uncomfortable amount of time before the DWP manager snapped again. “Are you there? This is beyond anything I’ve….”

  “Hello.”

  “Yes, DCI Miller, did you hear what I said?”

  “No”

  “No… what do you mean, no?”

  “I haven’t heard what you said. I stopped listening.”

  “You stopped… are you…”

  “I went to make a brew when you started giving me jip. And now I’ve got my brew. Bye.” Miller ended the call and looked up at the ceiling, making a loud raspberry sound with his lips as he did so. Time was getting on, and he had a lot to get through. He decided it was time to make a list.

  *****

  Just after 10am Miller left his office and joined the rest of his team in the incident room. The tight-knit group of SCIU detectives were once again joined by the support officers that had been seconded over from various divisions across the Greater Manchester area. The uniformed PC’s and plain-clothed DC’s were glad to be back on this temporary job, and there was even more of them today. Dixon had agreed to throw unlimited resources at this case, and although it was bad news for the local police stations who had lost staff to the SCIU, it was extremely good news for Miller.

  Everybody seemed relaxed and eager to get on with some work, except for DC Helen Grant, who looked a little nervous. Miller smiled at her supportively as he walked past her. He was really pleased that she’d had the confidence to come and speak to him. In hindsight, he’d been a dick to dismiss her suggestion so quickly, and in front of the w
hole team as well. He decided he was going to make it up to her, as she smiled back at him nervously.

  “Okay, morning guys. Let’s start with a joke. What’s a horse’s favourite TV show?” Miller answered his joke with a ridiculously camp and over-the-top “nay” impression of a horse. “Nayyy – bours.”

  The newcomers in the SCIU office laughed. Some uncomfortably, some with genuine amusement. Some of them remained completely still and felt embarrassed. Miller’s stupid joke received the standard amount of mirth from his team, although Rudovsky seemed particularly fond of today’s shit joke. She had tears in her eyes, and Miller couldn’t be sure if she was genuinely tickled by the shit joke, or if she was taking the piss out of him.

  “Alright simmer down Jo, it wasn’t that funny!”

  Rudovsky was dabbing her eyes, grinning from ear-to-ear.

  “Yeah, it really wasn’t mate. Are you on spice, again?” asked her partner DC Peter Kenyon.

  “She’s after a promotion!” suggested DC Bill Chapman, to a wave of nervous laughter. Rudovsky was still laughing as she showed Chapman the two fingers he was most familiar with seeing.

  “Right, let’s just settle down, I’ve got to go and do a press conference at noon… who wants to come and do it with me?” Miller looked around his team who were sat in front of the support officers. Miller was looking high above their heads where their hands should be. But there were none raised.

  “Right, well, I’ll just pick one of you at random then! Okay, let’s get cracking, back to this case in Stockport. Since I last spoke to you all, I’ve been to visit the two victims in hospital, and Jo came along with me.” Miller walked over to Kath Palmer’s picture and pointed at it, and repeated the same gesture at Jason Brown’s mug-shoot. “Now, I know we heard it all day yesterday about how nice these people are… but for the record, they really are. Would you agree Jo?”

  “Yes Sir, very nice, warm, genuine, down-to-earth people.”

  “And as you can probably guess, that’s bad for the enquiry. If we found out that these people were involved with a bad crowd, or owed some loan-shark twenty-grand or summat, we’d be able to pick up a scent, and we’d no doubt have the personal responsible for these vile attacks locked up by tea-time. However, it’s not looking quite as straight-forward as that. Now, last night, I shot down the only sensible lead that we have been offered for this enquiry. So, DC Grant, please accept my apologies.”

  Grant looked as though she wanted to die. Her pale complexion turned an instant shade of red, and she could feel the heat rising in her cheeks. She swept her long auburn hair over her shoulder nervously.

  “But if you’ll forgive me, I’d like you to come and speak to everybody about your theory.”

  Grant stood up and nodded to the crowd of thirty or so colleagues, only six of whom she actually knew. She wasn’t nervous about presenting her ideas, but it did look as though she was. It was just the embarrassment of Miller’s cringe-worthy introduction that had given her the crimson complexion.

  “Okay, thank you Sir. Good morning everybody. I just wanted to share some thoughts about this case. Once we started investigating these two crimes yesterday, I was reminded of the many news stories that I have read about the DWP in the last few years, particularly some of the nastier aspects of their activities. Now, without this becoming a political issue, I’ll summarise what has been happening in as neatly, and as concisely a manner as I can.”

  Grant leaned forward towards the desk and turned on the projector, which beamed onto the wall behind her, onto the investigation wall which contained Kath and Jason’s mugshots.

  “Can you all see okay?”

  There was a loud, enthusiastic response from the hopeful new faces in the incident room.

  “Alright. In 2010, the new government launched a review of the welfare state in the UK. From the off, they introduced a number of unpopular policies, most of which you will have heard of, the bedroom tax, the sanctions, the removal of the disability living allowance, tax credits, it goes on and on. Basically, the DWP are the department who have been given the dirty jobs to do. The government, under the umbrella of austerity saw this as a brilliant opportunity to reform the benefits system. Now I can see, from many of the faces in here, that there is a desire to see a change in this regard. That is why I don’t wish to make this a political issue. However, whether you believe that benefits need changing, or not, the main argument against the DWP is that they have acted callously, and without apology. There are no hard-facts, but there are many estimates from extremely respectable sources that hundreds of thousands of poor people have died in this country, lots were suicides, many were stress related illnesses, many more were drink or drug related deaths. Now, the people who are trying to argue against the way the DWP are operating are suggesting that the deaths were intentional. They are campaigning that poor people are being murdered by the state.”

  There was a shift of mood in the room, it was obvious that the people before her had different views on these matters. Grant looked up and waited for the team to refocus their attention. “The argument is not against the government, the DWP and other agencies revising benefits. The campaign is in defence of the people affected by nasty, humiliating, often brutal, in-humane treatment. The campaigners, who range from MPs to GPs, Headmasters, a TV news reporter and even a Chief Constable, say that these policies have been targeted at the most vulnerable people in our society. The sick, the disabled, the handicapped, the people with learning-difficulties, people with absolutely no self-confidence, or educational attainments. These are people who literally can’t fight back.”

  Grant looked up again from her presentation on the projector. The wall contained bullet-points of the issues she was discussing. The officers all seemed to be following. “I am of the opinion that the person who carried out these brutal attacks against Jason and Kath, has carried them out in some misguided, ridiculous notion of getting revenge for those people that have been affected by the DWP’s actions and sanctions over the past seven years.”

  Suddenly there was sense of disquiet in the room. Subtle moans and exasperated breaths gave the sense that not everybody was buying this.

  “Stay with me guys, I’m getting the impression that this is sounding a bit crazy, but let me summarise the extent of what I’m talking about, with cold-hard facts.” Grant put her first story on the projector screen. She showed newspaper clippings of several stories which had appeared in The Mirror, The Guardian and The Independent. The Conservative supporting papers such as The Sun and The Mail rarely reported on the issues. The newspaper clippings included the story of a paraplegic woman who had her disability benefit stopped, after being found “fit for work” by the DWP’s arms-length assessors, and a report about a Hartlepool woman who was told her appointment for a work capability assessment was cancelled. She was then sanctioned for failing to attend the cancelled appointment, despite holding the letter which confirmed the cancellation, in her hands.

  “So, to conclude, I’m of the opinion that our attacker is a man who is aggrieved by the DWP’s activities. I went to speak to DCI Miller about this matter this morning, and when I did, he told me that similar theories were beginning to be passed around online. He also told me that Piccadilly Radio sent him a recording of a phone call that they aired last night. I’d now like to play this to you.”

  Grant was doing a great job, and Miller was beginning to think that she’d make a better politician than a detective. She seemed to have swung the group around to her way of thinking in a matter of minutes, and he had to acknowledge that she had swung him around too.

  The police officers all listened to the recording of the late-night talk show call. Once it was finished, Grant stood again and addressed her colleagues.

  “That’s all from me. DCI Miller asked me to share this theory with you. I don’t know where it will go now, if anywhere. But thanks for listening.” Grant switched the projector off and sat down.

  Miller stood and thanked Grant
for her presentation, and her closing remarks.

  “Now, before we go any further with this, we need to be putting any political viewpoints to one side, let’s remember that we are police officers. We may not like guarding fracking sites, and we may have political views about it. But we do it, because we have to do it. It’s our job.”

  Miller allowed a little room for chatter and muttering amongst the officers. They all knew that politics was an area that they had to remain impartial of. Regardless of their opinions or beliefs, a police officer’s job is to uphold the law. Whether they agreed with it or not, they had a duty to be seen to uphold the law, even at demonstrations and rallies organised to get them better pay. They all had to participate in many arrests that they may or may not agree with, dealing with matters that they held strong opinions about. Such as locking up prostitutes, wasting court and police time dealing with cannabis offences, chasing mentally-ill people all around the town all night because the mental homes have been closed. The police have hundreds of complex matters to deal with on a daily basis, and a great many of them result from short-sighted, ideological political decisions.

  “So, I want this suggestion to become a major part of this investigation. I want to know from local DWP offices, who are the biggest complainers? Who are the people that have been making the most noise? We will start to build a picture of who the most vocal demonstrators are, particularly at the Wellesley House building, but also at other DWP offices across the city.”

  The team looked happy, they sensed that the briefing was finally coming to a conclusion, and that they could now start getting on with some work. For every one of the temporary officers, this was an excellent opportunity to impress the best-known CID department in the city. Many of them felt as though this was an audition, and they were desperate to get to work and make a positive impression on the SCIU team.

  Miller looked calm and relaxed as he thanked everybody for their support with the previous day’s exhaustive interviews. “I’m going off to do a press conference now. At this point in time, this new line of enquiry which DC Grant presented us with is strictly confidential. This topic is not suitable for public consumption, not yet at least. I do not want to be accused of dragging party politics into day-to-day police work. So, not a word publicly about this until I give the say-so. Okay?”