Prisoners, Property and Prostitutes

by Tom Ratcliffe

  Prisoners

  Property and

  Prostitutes

  TOM RATCLIFFE

  Copyright © 2010 Tom Ratcliffe

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  Matador

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  ISBN 978 1848762 169

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Typeset in 12pt Perpetua by Troubador Publishing Ltd, Leicester, UK

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  To my wife and family, for everything

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Author’s Note

  The stories and observations in this book have been assembled from experiences during my career as a policeman. Some have, of necessity, been simplified or streamlined, and are naturally subject to the passage of time on memory.

  Many of the protagonists will by now have moved on and forgotten their involvement, indeed some of them have even died. Others only feature after, and because of, their deaths, but all have in common the fact that, at some point or another, they were part of that minority who come into contact with the Police world, whether as an offender, a victim, or any employee.

  This book is not just for them. It is also for those people who do not fall into any of those categories, to have an idea of what they have been missing, and be grateful.

  Prologue

  The view from the outside.

  A Sunday night, shortly after midnight.

  An unnamed man walked slowly along a tree-lined road. Inside him he carried a decent quantity of beer, and outside him he carried a portion of chips to fortify him on his way home. The evening was calm, the weather warm for early February, and it was dry. His life, in a low key sort of way, was presumably quite good.

  His tranquility was suddenly shattered most unexpectedly.

  He became aware of noises in the distance, which increased in volume as they drew rapidly closer. Turning, he saw the headlights of a BMW saloon approaching at very high speed, followed closely by a marked Police Rover, lights full on, horns sounding, obviously in pursuit, both travelling far in excess of the 30 mile per hour limit in this quiet residential area.

  Moments later the BMW clipped the kerb, the slight impact being enough to throw it completely out of control, slewing sideways before rolling over and landing back on its wheels in the opposite side of the road. As the BMW performed its wild antics, the Rover skidded to a stop, all four tyres smoking with braking effort. Before it came to a complete halt both front doors opened and two Policemen jumped out, truncheons drawn, and ran to the BMW. They pulled the doors open and immediately beat the two occupants before dragging them half stunned onto the road and handcuffing them. The passer by felt he had to make his point. He knew the Police had a difficult job at times and he knew joyriding was a problem in his and many other cities, but in his inebriated, lethargic way he knew that what he had witnessed could not go uncriticised.

  Walking up to one of the Policemen he continued to munch gently on his chips, but as he drew near said,‘Eh! You’re bang out of order there lads, bang out of order.’

  His protest delivered he placed another chip in his mouth and walked away.

  For that brief moment he was the voice of reason, the flagship of fair play and compassion, delivering a message of restraint to an incident of unjustifiable one-sided violence. He did not know that in the passenger door pocket of the BMW was a sawn off pump-action shotgun.

  And it was loaded.

  The view from the inside.

  For the officers in the Rover, the evening had been a quiet one. A Sunday night, the last night shift of seven in a row, they had started work at 10pm and spent the first two hours driving round their area, stopping the occasional car and listening to their personal radios for any call which they might be sent to, but none came. It looked set to be a nice quiet end to the week.

  A few miles away, a terrified man dialled 999. He and his wife had been enjoying a dinner party as the guests of his next door neighbours in a pleasant, affluent country village. A good meal, a moderate quantity of wine, interesting conversation in tranquil surroundings – in fact in many ways an up-market version of the chip-eating pedestrian. But the evening had gone very sour when four masked men had entered the room in which he and his friends had been relaxing after the meal. The intruders had scaled a drainpipe at the rear of the house and climbed in through an upper window to emerge down the stairs and into the dining room – a most upsetting and unexpected intrusion. More worrying was the sawn-off shotgun, which one of the four brandished as they all went about relieving the diners of their personal valuables before demanding access to the safe. Unfortunately for all concerned there was no safe, so a fairly violent and unpleasant ‘question and answer’ session ensued before they left with sundry valuables and jewellery, cutting the phone wires, tying up the occupants of the house, and leaving in a car belonging to the householder.

  The man who was now dialling 999 had managed to free his bonds almost immediately and with very commendable presence of mind went straight back to his own house next door to phone, and was also able to provide the registration number of the car stolen – a BMW saloon.

  Within a couple of minutes of the raiders leaving the house, details of the incident were relayed over the radio, and in response to this the Police Rover went to a pull-in on the approach to a bridge, which was the only direct route into the nearby city.

  They didn’t have long to wait. Not more than five minutes later, the BMW saloon drove unobtrusively past them. It observed the speed limit, did nothing to draw attention to itself, and to the uninformed observer there was no reason for a Police car to take any interest in it at all.

  The Rover pulled out and followed it.

  After a few moments the Police became aware of another car, an Austin Montego, following a little way behind with two men in it. They checked the registration and found that it had been stolen hours earlier from the city towards which they were now heading. I
t was a very fair bet that this was the car used to ferry the four criminals on the outbound leg of their journey.

  And so the bizarre convoy travelled at a sedate and law-abiding pace towards the city, the criminals thinking that on balance the presence of the Police car must be coincidental – they had made no effort to stop them, and the alarm should not yet have been raised. The Policemen drove like the meat in a criminal sandwich – two stolen cars, four violent unpleasant men (six if you don’t like Policemen), and armed only with the knowledge that there was at least one firearm in one of the cars. The officers decided that if a pursuit started they would follow the BMW, as it was a definite link to the crime, the Montego could (unlikely though it was) be coincidental. They hoped that as a result of their radio call other cars would be with them before things got lively, or better still that arrests could be carried out without any chase, but from experience they knew that the odds were generally against that sort of conclusion.

  The little procession carried on, quiet as you like, and finally reached a large intersection on the city outskirts. The traffic lights at the junction turned to red as they drew near, and to the amazement of the Police the BMW stopped at the line, as did the Montego behind them. For a few seconds all remained quiet. Then, from the left, another Police car appeared at high speed, hurrying to try and get in on the action which the driver felt must be about to happen. Seeing the cars stationary at the lights, the driver promptly slammed on the brakes to sail across the junction in a cloud of rubber smoke.

  The game was up, and the BMW took off from the line like a rocket with the Rover in hot pursuit, all lights and sirens now firmly on. The Montego executed a smart right turn and was never seen again, but for several more miles the BMW and Rover stayed in close contact as other cars tried to make their way towards them. Then came the point where the BMW clipped the kerb, skidded and crashed.

  The Police had to assume the occupants were armed, and the occupants in turn would know that to be arrested carried a high chance of several years in prison. The odds were against them surrendering without a fight, and a gun would be a trump card in any confrontation. The choice was either to back right off, or go in as fast and hard as possible. Would you back off in these circumstances?

  If you would, then you shouldn’t have followed the criminals in the first place.

  Seconds after the crash, both officers had a prisoner each, handcuffed and subdued.

  The job was done, a good result.

  Adrenaline was still coursing round their bodies, hearts pounding, trying to catch their breath, overjoyed at not having had to face the business end of a gun and still too much in shock to communicate beyond making relieved eye contact with each other, when a drunk holding a bag of chips walked up and said, ‘Eh! You’re bang out of order there lads, bang out of order.’

  If either of the policemen had a hand free they could cheerfully have hit the drunk – ungrateful, uninformed and intrusive. Did he not understand how they had put their lives on the line just to make his insignificant life a bit safer?

  Had the drunk been in possession of the full circumstances his approach could well have been very different, but such is the gulf of understanding that can exist between two groups – neither sets out to cause problems to the other, but like many things, your view depends so much on where you are standing.

  At the age of 24, the standpoint from which I obtained my view was about to change forever.

  One

  When I was a small boy I had no real idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. I admired both my parents – my father was a businessman who always seemed calm, confident and compassionate, well turned out and efficient. My mother performed that unsung role of being the woman behind a successful man, or more accurately right beside him through all the problems that life throws at a couple. This included myself and my older brother, who I am sure unwittingly provided the usual round of ups and downs that offspring do, and which my parents managed to survive without too much permanent emotional and financial scarring.

  In my later teens I had visions of combining my ability with languages with my love of money by learning Arabic, and thus making a fortune in the Middle East. Doing exactly what in the Middle East I was unsure, but it seemed a good idea. Unfortunately Arabic eventually proved to be beyond me, and I ended up scraping a degree in French and Italian at a level too low to do much else but teach, a career which (with all due respect to those who actually do teach) did not appeal in the slightest. A career as a solicitor was briefly mooted, but at the time it was such a popular choice – everyone wanted to do it. I often wondered if their motivation was more out of financial greed than a wish to be a champion of justice and fair play, but maybe I’m cynical. In any event I never felt I had the necessary killer instinct to achieve in an area where there was such avaricious competition, hence the attempts at language study instead.

  I liked the idea of something involving ‘man management’ in one form or another, and I knew for certain I wanted to do something where one day was not exactly like the next. I also wanted to be able to go home at the end of a day’s work feeling I’d actually done something useful, or made some tangible progress. This feeling was accentuated by watching my brother’s career which consisted of working in London and moving mythical money in and out of investment accounts, which to me didn’t really do anything visibly useful. Maybe there was also a hint of guilt after spending almost five years as a student, producing absolutely nothing.

  Eventually however I joined the Police, for which I have to thank the woman who became my mother-in-law. With me being too poor to buy a newspaper, she would scour the Daily Telegraph jobs section on my behalf for anything starting with the words ‘graduates wanted’. She would cut out any promising advertisements and post them to me, and I would open the letters and read the latest offerings, usually at about 10.30am while lying in bed with her daughter and a hangover and wondering which lecture I was missing. It wasn’t quite the right spirit, but I felt it was one way of putting my career choice ahead of everything else.

  One day a cutting arrived advertising ‘Graduate entry into the Police Service’. It had a certain appeal – a friend of my father’s had been a senior officer in a Scottish force, and on the odd occasion I met him he seemed a sensible man who was happy with his life. He also let me have a go with a revolver he used to carry at all times – a permitted consequence of a career spent locking up Glasgow’s finest.

  As I thought about it I saw that this career fitted a lot of my criteria. Working with people, varied conditions and doing something useful. Something whereby at the end of a career I might be able to look back and think I had (possibly) made a slight difference.

  Despite what you may read later, I am pleased to say that in this respect I was right. Another rather urgent aspect was that I was getting nearer and nearer to the end of my final year at University, and I had developed an amazing ability to talk myself into whatever job I felt I had even the remotest hope of getting.

  So I applied for the Accelerated Promotion entry scheme for the Police. This was a scheme open to graduates, which as the name suggests allowed for rapid promotion through the ranks. I liked the sound of this – I didn’t have a mission to save humanity so much as a wish to be paid lots of money, and this looked like the way to do it. I filled in a long form on which I had to tell far fewer lies than on most applications, and was eventually called to interview at the headquarters of my chosen force.

  Wearing my ‘interview’ suit and looking uncharacteristically well-groomed for a student, I sat before the Chief and Deputy Chief Constable and gave polite, reasoned answers to a number of questions, and at the end of it was asked if I had any questions. Only one – ‘when will I know the outcome of the interview?’ My confidence was never high during interviews, and although I thought I had done reasonably well in this one, I had by now convinced myself I had probably not persuaded these very powerful men that they were looking at the future of modern po
licing. So after my 80 or more other job applications and a dozen or so unsuccessful interviews, my hopes were once again dwindling.

  ‘Wait outside and we’ll let you know in a few minutes,’ they said. Wow! At least that was a change from the two or three week delay before most employers sent their rejection letters, which usually thanked me for my interest in their company (pull the other one) and wished me luck in my chosen career (like hell they did).

  Ten minutes later I had my news – no, not good enough for accelerated promotion, but was I interested in joining on the normal scheme? Yes, of course I was. Who ends an interview saying they didn’t basically want the job? I was still confident that by the time they recontacted me with a vacancy I would already be on the executive ladder elsewhere, but they seemed nice people and I didn’t want to be in the bad books of my local Police.

  Three months later, still no job offers, and they wrote to me – come for a weekend assessment, very ‘outward bound’ and no smoking allowed, so low-scoring on two counts for me. But the prospect of any job was better than none, so off I went. To my enormous surprise I enjoyed it – I was put with nine other men, none of whom I had ever met before, and made to do things ranging from raft building to standing up and talking non stop for a minute on spontaneously nominated subjects. It wasn’t difficult to see what they were looking for – ability to think fast, assess different situations, and most importantly get on well with a group of strangers when you are all tired and under pressure. So the lad who blew his nut and called everyone a ‘bunch of wankers’ may have been correct, but was out. The rest of them must have been pretty unpromising because only two of us got through, me and an ex-merchant Navy bloke. We hit it off from the start and worked as a pair for much of the weekend, both of us seeming to share the same sense of humour and a slightly cynical, laconic approach to life. At the end of the weekend I asked him how he thought he had done, and was slightly disappointed when he said he usually did well in selection procedures as he made a point of keeping close to someone far more hopeless than himself. Oddly enough we have remained in contact and on good terms since.