Prisoners, Property and Prostitutes

by Tom Ratcliffe

  The local detective went to investigate, and was amazed to find that despite (or perhaps because of) the committee based approach to tackling crime, the three men between them had not only failed to take the registration number of the car, they couldn’t even agree on the make, model or colour.

  The exasperated detective asked the man who had first seen the car why he hadn’t rung 999 there and then.

  ‘Well the Co-ordinator told us we weren’t to ring the Police under any circumstances without consulting him first.’

  After he had calmed down, the next port of call was the Co-ordinator, whose instruction must surely have been a little ambiguous to have made such a mockery of the idea of a Neighbourhood Watch scheme.

  But the worst was yet to come – ‘What did you tell your members to do if they saw something that could be a burglary in progress?’ asked the detective.

  ‘I told them to contact me for advice,’ came the reply.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell them to ring 999? Especially in circumstances like today’s matter – we could have caught them if you hadn’t wasted so much time.’

  The Co-ordinator puffed himself out and set the Detective straight:

  ‘There is a rank structure in the Neighbourhood Watch which must be observed,’ he replied pompously.

  The detective’s reply was unprintable and profuse.

  The Neighbourhood Watch scheme in that area swiftly collapsed, to the relief of many.

  It was to this slightly odd area that I would occasionally be seconded to provide cover. This only tended to arise on night shifts, as Barton had plenty of Community Police who did the day to day non-urgent stuff, but at night there was always a double-manned car to do the more immediate work in what was on reflection a vast area, and as you drove round it you realised that you really were a long way from help.

  The benefit was that you were also a long way from your supervision. A Sergeant did his best to keep order during office hours, but apart from that the Police of Barton were left well alone. On one of my early visits to the station I had a look at the Occurrence Book – there was one of these at the desk of every nick in the County – a large heavy blank book about two feet square, in which the officer on the desk would record pretty well anything of note for the rest of the staff to read. From serious crime to minor snippets of information, it all went in the Occurrence Book, a practice probably unchanged in more than a century. The book was signed almost daily by the Sergeant, and to my surprise I found it was signed every Sunday by the Divisional Chief Superintendent.

  I queried this with Simon Trent, one of the Barton men on my shift.

  ‘Didn’t know the Chief Super was so diligent – how come he’s here every Sunday because he’s never at Newport.’

  ‘That’s because Newport isn’t on the route from his house to his golf club. He plays golf every Sunday, then stops in on his way home to have a brew, sign the book and then claims back all his mileage by putting it down as ‘touring the Division.’

  This was innovative if unprofessional, but perhaps just a symptom of the goings on in this rural backwater.

  Another quaint feature was that the Police Station also housed a Magistrates’ Court on the first floor. This provided plenty of scope for activities to pass the time on a quiet night, when many a hapless drunk would find themselves awoken around four in the morning after a couple of hours in their cell, and be very upset to find their trial was not only taking place before they were fully sober, but that it also culminated in a finding of guilt and the imposition of the death penalty or transportation to the Colonies by a stern-faced judge who would tell them there was ‘far too much of this sort of thing, and it is time to set an example.’

  At the appointed hour of execution, usually 8am, the now penitent and bewildered man would be relieved to find he was given a cup of tea and sent on his way home by the day shift who, suitably briefed, would explain the nightmare of the trial as just an alcohol-induced hallucination and perhaps a warning from their conscience to drink less in future.

  While the Barton area was a backwater during the day, at night it became even more isolated. Apart from a major road running north to south just to the west of the town, the place was really just a maze of unlit lanes joining a number of small villages of which Barton happened to be the biggest. Many were ‘chocolate-box’ pretty, with beautiful cottage gardens, tended by retired gentlefolk who took an intense pride in their surroundings. There would be village fêtes, Rose Queen festivals, and numerous things that made the area a particularly English corner of the world. Time seemed to run slower here. Less quaint but still desirable were a number of small estates of modern houses inhabited by the families of local businessmen whose children went to private schools in the area, and who were on course to carry on a family tradition of becoming respectable members of society.

  As teenagers these children were often trusted to look after the house while parents were out for an evening or even overnight, and of course being teenagers, some would seize such an opportunity to have a few friends round for a party without the actual or perceived intrusion of a parental presence.

  It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, to one of these parties that Simon and I had a call. It came over the radio as ‘a disturbance in the street’, but when we arrived at the expensive detached house all was quiet. There was just a group of slightly despondent teenagers standing in a contemplative group on the front lawn.

  ‘What’s happened here then?’ asked Simon as we got out of the car.

  After a brief silence a youth who turned out to be the host of the party, and elder son of the household, spoke.

  ‘We had a bit of a party, but some lads who we don’t know turned up. They were OK at first so we let them stay, but then they got a bit wild and started damaging stuff so we had to get them out. There was a bit of a fight but they’ve gone now.’

  ‘Any idea who they are?’ asked Simon.

  ‘No, I think they were in a car. They weren’t from round here. I think they’d heard about the party through college and sort of gate crashed.’

  The party grapevine had let these kids down badly. Someone must have been rather too keen on advertising the words ‘party’ and ‘parents away’, and word had spread a bit too far.

  Simon got ready to go. After all, the party was over from everyone’s point of view.

  ‘So nobody’s hurt, the gatecrashers have gone and we’ve no way of finding them. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ said the lad. His friends nodded meekly. Something still didn’t feel right; there was a whiff of unease. As we moved towards the car the lad spoke again.

  ‘Excuse me, but you don’t know of a cheap plumber do you?’

  Good old Police – they can help you and sort things out. But not this time.

  ‘The words “plumber” and “cheap” don’t come in the same sentence at any time and certainly not at’ – he checked his watch -‘not at one fifteen in the morning,’ said Simon. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Could you just come and look and see if you can help?’ asked the lad.

  More out of curiosity than a feeling we could do much, we followed the lad and his small, humble entourage through the house and out into the rear garden. A powerful floodlight illuminated a number of well-kept flower beds, a large level lawn, and at one side a very impressive ornamental pond. Floating in the pond was the source of the lad’s problem. One of the bathrooms in the house had obviously been expensively fitted out, with bath, washbasin, toilet and bidet – but not now. The whole suite sat majestic and useless in a foot or so of water in the pond.

  Simon looked at the group. ‘How did they do this then?’

  ‘Dunno,’ said the lad. ‘I never heard much as we had the music on loud, and it wasn’t till after they’d gone I went to the loo and found it wasn’t in the house – it’s in that clump of reeds. It can’t have taken them more than fifteen minutes to do this. Do you think it can be sorted before our parents get back?�
��

  ‘When’s that?’ asked Simon.

  ‘Around lunchtime tomorrow. Well lunchtime today I suppose it is. What d’you reckon?’

  ‘Well today’s Sunday, so I think you’d need a few hundred quid ready for a plumber, if you can find one. Failing that I’d go to church and pray hard if I were you. Do you want me to speak to your parents or do you just want my details in case they want to ring me – I’m on duty again at 10 o’clock tomorrow night.’

  To our slight surprise and great relief they just opted for the phone number of the Police Station and Simon’s collar number. I would love to have been a fly on the wall when the parents did come home, but strangely we never heard another thing from any member of the family.

  The following night was a quiet one. It was strange, but over the years every Police Officer seems to develop some sort of instinct as to how a night shift will go. Mondays to Thursdays start gently and become progressively busier as the week goes on. Fridays and Saturdays are generally quite active as most of the world has fun in one form or another, usually at the expense of the rest of the world. Sundays are traditionally quiet, with about every sixth one bucking the trend and going berserk for no readily apparent reason. Whether it was some primeval force, a phase of the moon, the alignment of the planets or some more rational factor I don’t know, but simply driving or walking through a town on one of these ‘Mad Sundays’ you would pick up on an atmosphere of unease and conflict which raised your senses, and you knew that a shift of mayhem lay ahead with chases, domestics, pub fights, burglaries and all manner of disorder to come.

  But this particular Sunday was quiet. The whole feeling of Barton and its surroundings was one of an area soundly asleep, and we drove round deserted streets and lanes. We had decided to stop a few cars just to see if we could generate any road traffic related process, but there was absolutely nothing worth looking at.

  Towards midnight we drove round the car parks of a few pubs, idly hoping to find a late drink-driver, but again drew a blank. Eventually we pulled up behind the Butcher’s Arms, a large former coaching inn on the main road. The bar was in darkness but a couple of figures could be seen inside.

  ‘Come on,’ said Simon, ‘let’s go and have a word – the landlord’s a mate of mine.’

  The back door was unlocked and without knocking we entered into an atmosphere of stale cigarette smoke and beer fumes, to be greeted by the licensee. From his demeanour he was obviously a keen promoter of his wares, and regularly sampled them, presumably to ensure good quality control. He was plastered.

  ‘Simon me old mate. Long time no see. Come on in. What yer havin’ then?’

  Simon turned politely to me. ‘Pint is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Is it?’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’ he countered, and turned to the landlord.

  ‘Two pints of bitter then please.’

  Just two hours into the shift was a bit early to be holing up in a boozer, but Simon was driving and the night was promisingly tranquil. Unprofessional it might feel to turn up at a job smelling of beer, but any late Sunday night call would almost certainly have been alcohol related, so a couple more sets of beery breath would go unnoticed. Probably.

  After a few minutes I began to think the landlord was serving short measures, because the pint glass in front of me was almost empty, yet I barely recalled drinking any of it. Without asking, he solved this dilemma by refilling our glasses. Simon’s had also emptied at a surprising rate, so if we were being served short, at least it was being done to both of us. Not that it mattered, as we weren’t even paying for it – we did offer, but he refused on two counts – ‘I can’t sell beer outside hours,’ he slurred, ‘and you aren’t allowed to buy alcohol on duty anyway, so there.’ My conscience eased in the face of such law-abiding and considerate logic, and became easier still with the subsequent half-gallon of finest bitter which lubricated it, and I relaxed as a willing audience to the drunken landlord’s seemingly endless repertoire of tales from the licensing trade. There were quite a few parallels with my own career – moments of great joy, times of hard unrewarding toil, bosses who seemed out of touch and uncaring, and a public who held a permanent belief that you were there purely to serve them, that you loved them, and that you never needed or took time off or had any life beyond the one they saw.

  After what seemed a very short space of time in this convivial environment, Simon got unsteadily to his feet.

  ‘Well, we’d better be on our way now – check the patch before we have to go off.’

  My watch said it was just after 4 in the morning. I checked my radio and found it had been correctly switched on and only then realised there hadn’t been a call on it all night, not even over in Newport.

  We said our goodbyes and walked back to the car. The checking of the patch that night consisted of driving the half mile back to the Police Station, drinking a few strong coffees and dozing in the armchairs near the full-size snooker table that took up most of the floor space in the recreation room. By the time the day shift came on we were passably sober, and made our separate ways home after what must have been one of the easiest night’s work in the history of policing.

  While the landlord had been correct in not accepting money for the drink provided, drinking on duty was normally forbidden under pretty well any circumstances according to the discipline rules. Fortunately these rules were enforced by senior officers, most of whom had drunk so much on duty throughout their careers that unless one’s intoxication was blatant or resulted in an uncoverable mishap, it meant drinking on duty was a way of life for some rather than a luxury. The only limiting factor was one’s own judgement and conscience. The ‘quiet night’ incident was exceptional for me, and even as a passenger in a Police vehicle I thought it generally unprofessional – I would be unhappy to be a member of the public and have an intoxicated Policeman turn up at my house – but it did happen on occasion and never seemed to raise any concerns among those who had such a visit. (On the other hand, the public expect to see a human face to policing, to err is human, and therefore I allowed myself to err occasionally, just to show how human I was.) There was only one occasion I can recall of actually driving a Police car while ‘under the influence’. It was a Christmas Day and I was on a late shift. Like most Christmas Days it was quiet, the shops were shut so there were no shoplifters, and even the more low-life families managed to raise enough Christmas cheer to avoid falling out to an extent where they felt in need of our services. My Cockney colleague Paul and I were enjoying being paid double time to do virtually no work, but after several hours we were finding time was dragging. We had ‘done’ our respective patches by driving round for an hour or two, done a bit of paperwork back at the nick, but boredom soon set in as the often-wished for opportunity to catch up uninterrupted on paperwork lost its charm. Paul then had a very charitable and pleasant suggestion, to go and do the rounds of the old folks’ homes. To be elderly and institutionalised seems unfair. To have lived through numerous Christmas celebrations and end up with no true family to celebrate it with is a sad way to be in, so Paul reasoned that any visit must be better than none.

  As we were nominally covering separate beats we drove a car each to the home nearest to the Police Station, and Paul burst into the day room like an infusion of true cheer, talking non-stop, cracking jokes and bringing smiles to some quite unseasonably glum faces. He didn’t even seem to pause for breath as he went from resident to resident. I trailed in his wake, but the whole atmosphere soon became one of cheer, and sure enough after a few minutes someone uttered the magic words – ‘would either of you like a sherry?’

  The very predictable answer – in short ‘Yes please’ – was arrived at via comments of ‘shouldn’t really’, ‘on duty’, ‘frowned upon’, but we allowed ourselves to be ‘persuaded’ and had a very pleasant drink listening to some of the old dears who took an instant shine to Paul and were soon regaling him with tales of Christmases and family long past.

  Havin
g done our bit we eventually said our festive goodbyes, and walked back out to the car park.

  ‘Where to now?’ I asked Paul.

  ‘Well, we could go back to the nick, but there are three other homes full of low flying angels with far more sherry than they’ll ever drink. What say you we do a bit more missionary work?’

  My charitable instincts up and running, I followed Paul to more such institutions where the performance was repeated, and on each visit the sherry bottle was produced right on cue. It was good to do this visiting, but seeing how many lost souls were in these places made me wonder if the words ‘long life’ and ‘happiness’ really do belong in the same sentence. Certainly not without some qualification.

  After the fourth home, Paul and I agreed that we had probably had sufficient alcohol that to push it further would be to risk driving while above the limit, so decided to return to base and have something to eat and a coffee.

  Getting out of our cars in the rear yard I had an idea.

  ‘Why don’t we go on the breathalyser machine and see what our levels really are?’

  ‘OK,’ said Paul. ‘Have a guess and see who’s nearest.’

  The breathalyser machine at the station was an accurate machine that would analyse a breath sample and give a readout of complete accuracy. The opportunity to see how close to or even how far over the limit I was fascinated me. The bars of pubs up and down the land were filled with ‘experts’ who would tell you how to fool the machine, or how many drinks you could have without going over the limit, what to eat to ‘soak up’ the alcohol and so on. Almost all this advice falls in the territory of snake oil and quack medicine, and none of them had the luxury of a Home Office approved machine to try out. We were also safe in the knowledge that the Sergeant who operated the machine would not say anything if we were over, such was the mixture of teamwork, camaraderie and culture at the time.