Who Needs Flowers When They're Dead

by George Lincoln

  ‘Your dad and I are not going to live together any more,’ his mum eventually said.

  She immediately started crying. Then his dad started crying. Then his brother started bawling his head off like a big baby. Nobody was saying anything. They were just all crying. His brother looked like a Stretch Armstrong on the sofa in the middle of his mum and dad who were both trying to pull him over to their side so they could hug him to make him stop crying.

  Nobody wanted to hug the boy, who just carried on looking out of the window. He wasn’t crying.

  ‘Can I go to the roller disco now?’

  CHAPTER 8

  When David first joined the Met Police, he had the same noble ambitions to change the world and help people that most other people write on their application forms. The MacPherson Report had taken its toll on police recruitment in the late 1990s, so by the time David decided to join up they were taking pretty much anybody. By some fluke of having been to university, he found himself stomping around a parade square in north London within about three months of having first tentatively sent off his application. They didn’t get many graduates joining the police, and he could see why. He fucking hated doing drill. It was a complete waste of time. He never understood why it was so important for everybody to walk and think and act in exactly the same way.

  One of the consequences of being so enraptured by the suffering of others is it tends to create distance with others, David later realised. Create Distance. Use Cover. Transmit. That’s what the Met Police had taught him about how to deal with knives and weapons. Create Distance. Use Cover. Transmit. Or CUT for the simpletons. The Met loved a fucking mnemonic, loved to dumb-down and simplify even the simplest thing. As if when faced with the existential threat of a knife-wielding lunatic, David might feel inclined to get closer were it not for his first-class training. Create Distance. Use Cover. Transmit.

  David knew how to create distance.

  David picked up a few things along the way. People are stupid being the main thing. Stupid people doing stupid things making bad decisions and suffering terrible consequences and seeming genuinely shocked by the outcome. David never really understood how people got so emotionally attached to things or other people. It was usually this attachment that led to the anger, jealousy, rage, or whatever other uncontrollable emotion that stemmed from the attachment in the first place. David liked to think of himself like a ship without an anchor, just floating along and through whatever came in his path. Untethered. He didn’t really see the point of being attached to anything, least of all people.

  Because eventually everyone either dies or lets you down.

  Something David hadn’t encountered before he joined the Met was the sheer capacity for vindictive behaviour so many people possessed. Especially women. Men tend to do stupid things like fight, overpower or rape people physically weaker than they are. But women are very different. Lacking the physicality, they go for the complete mind-fuck when somebody really pisses them off. Like Amy. Young girl in her early twenties. Worked her way into the armed protection department, carrying around enough guns and ammo to start a small war every day. Starts shagging her supervising officer, inevitably. It was only a matter of time in such a male stronghold of a department that they would eventually all come sniffing around the young bit of skirt. Rank has its privileges.

  One thing the Met loves is order and numbering. Every officer has a number. Every gun has a number. Match the correct gun to the matching officer. Simple. Eventually the Police Sergeant number 9 gets bored of Amy and decides he’d better turn his attention back to the wife and kids. Maybe she wasn’t as good in bed as he’d hoped. Maybe he realised she’s just a person with problems and worries and unfulfilled ambitions too. Amy takes it hard. Amy takes out Glock number 9 from the armoury and blows the back of her own fucking head off.

  It’s a tragedy that nobody saw coming. Even with her brains and skull fragments sprayed all over the armoury wall, she’s forever made sure that Police Sergeant number 9 won’t forget about her.

  ‘A thorough investigation will be carried out and lessons will be learned,’ was the standard Met response to these types of incident. David was struck by Amy’s commitment. He felt no real sympathy for her – she was an adult who entered knowingly into a situation she should have known would end in tears. In David’s mind, she did the honourable thing. Was this a normal way to think, he wondered to himself? Why couldn’t he feel sympathy or compassion for her like everybody else?

  David met more than a few women not afraid to plunge the depths of humanity to get their own way. Like Colette, who decided one day she’d had enough of her long-term partner, Darrell. They never married of course; she was always hedging her bets something better would come along. Darrell hadn’t done anything wrong in particular; she just felt she could do better. There’s got to be something better out there for a woman in her forties with no career and two kids living on welfare in this part of London, she reasoned.

  Darrell went to stay with his mum, who loved having the grandchildren over every Sunday so she could cook their favourite dinner. Grandma loved to cook. This went on for a few weeks until Colette grew frustrated with the local authority’s decision not to re-house her in a nicer area, especially as Darrell had made a convincing claim that he could provide a more stable home for them with him and their grandma together. A child custody case beckoned. Colette thought she noticed a bruise on the younger child’s ankle that wasn’t there before they left to see their dad. The only logical conclusion must be that he was beating his own children and trying to hide it under their trouser legs, safe in the knowledge that their mother would never think to look there. No history of reported abuse. The court must be made aware of this, she thought. He had the stable home environment and career to provide for the children, so why wouldn’t he start beating them now on their weekend visits?

  Colette contacted the police and eventually the case lands on David’s desk. David knows how mothers can fail their children without ever intending to. Medical reports are gathered and statements taken from the children concerned. They have been coached. Nothing suspicious here. Even the child doesn’t know how the small bruise on her ankle got there. Colette is incandescent.

  ‘Can’t you see? They are much safer living with me.’

  Case. Fucking. Closed. No suffering for David to revel in here. He has learnt to see it on the victims’ faces and knows when it’s real by now. Hour after hour playing and re-playing Clare’s video statement taught him that much. Absorbed in every last detail, the minutia of anguish writ large across the poor victim’s face. Colette’s twisted malevolent intentions all too obvious to David, using their young children as pawns to hurt Darrell in the worst way. They tell you to have faith in the legal system and that everybody gets what’s fair in the end. David disagreed. Colette never got taken out and gang-raped by Darrell’s buddies. David thinks that would have been a fair outcome. And maybe she gets to visit them at Grandma’s house at the weekend, under supervision. But no family court judge will ever pass the sentence that’s fair.

  Darrell only sees his children at weekends now. They still love Grandma’s cooking. Darrell a shadow of his former self. Unable and afraid to trust anybody, unwilling to allow anybody to get too close for fear that they would twist the knife in his back even deeper. Lies awake at night re-playing over and over in his head the day he was arrested on suspicion of abusing his own beloved children. It wasn’t the officer’s fault; he was just doing his job, following procedure, trying to protect the children.

  Create Distance. Use Cover. Transmit.

  CHAPTER 9

  The boy arrived home from school to find his clothes in two black bin-bags on the doorstep of his house. The boy’s entire existence lovingly dumped at the front door by his mother earlier that afternoon. She didn’t even bother to put his Narnia books in there. There was a taxi already waiting for him, engine idling impatiently.

  ‘Now you go and live with your dad,’ h
is mum said.

  Deep down this was what he wanted, although not quite like this. Since his dad left two years ago, the boy’s relationship with his mother had deteriorated rapidly. He blamed her for his dad leaving. She was always arguing and making everything so difficult, he told her. No wonder Dad left, he would say. His dad would never have hit her. She was making it all up for attention, the boy said to her. At least that’s what his dad had told him, and why would he lie? The fourteen-year-old boy had the choice of believing he had a violent, abusive father or a delusional mother. Or both.

  The boy had arrived home from school that day the same as any other, wondering why everyone in his class was so stupid compared to him. Ever since his friend Alan left to go to a private school, the boy was easily top of his class in everything. Alan’s dad was a doctor and his mum a university professor so the boy didn’t really mind being second-place to their son at school. He accepted this as the natural order of things. They had this massive house that he used to go over and play in sometimes; it was like a mansion compared to any other house he’d ever been inside. He always felt a bit embarrassed when Alan came over to play at his house because Alan always used to make fun of how small it was.

  He was thinking he would probably go to his other friend, Jonathan’s, after tea that day. Jonathan had just got the new Amiga 500, and his mum used to let everyone come around and play on it. Jonathan’s mum was really nice but she got really angry once when they all drank from her liquor cabinet one evening. But she got over it and didn’t mind Jonathan’s friends all coming around, although the liquor cabinet had a lock on it now. The boy’s mum never let any of his friends come to his house any more.

  Home was just a five-minute walk from school. He never understood people who travelled miles and miles by car or bus to school every day. His favourite subject was maths, mainly because his maths teacher had huge tits, so he would often stay behind after school for extra tuition with her. He was pretty sure that she knew he fancied her, but she didn’t seem to mind. One day he wrote ‘Miss you have got amazing tits’ in the back of his maths book, and when he checked a few days later she had written in red pen ‘thanks’. Sometimes she would get these really bad migraines and just lie on her desk for the whole lesson. The boy would spend most of those lessons just gazing at her huge tits and the way her dress would seem to barely contain them, like someone had laid a small hanky over a pair of those massive oranges his mum used to buy sometimes. He’d never had a teacher he fancied before and besides, it was better than going home.

  The taxi ride seemed to take ages. He didn’t cry though, just thought about what his dad would make him for tea. His dad was always saying how much better it would be if the boy came to live with him because then the council would give him a bigger house, and he’d get more money to buy nicer things if the boy was living with him permanently. The boy didn’t understand why his mum didn’t just let him go and live with his dad when he first left two years ago if she was just going to throw him out anyway. He didn’t really care any more; he was glad. He wouldn’t have to live with his stupid brother, and his dad was always saying they would do loads of fun things when he came to live there. Eventually they arrived at his dad’s flat on the other side of town. It was miles away from school and only had one bedroom so he would have to sleep on the sofa until they got given a bigger place, which shouldn’t take very long, his dad said.

  At first things were great. The boy got used to walking a lot further to school but he didn’t really mind. His dad didn’t really understand how to cook a meal for just two people, so they always ended up eating massive portions. The boy said maybe it was too much, but his dad would get angry if any food got wasted so he just ate it. He didn’t really like sleeping on the sofa; he missed having his own room. He wasn’t allowed to put any posters up or anything, so he just had to put up with his dad’s pictures of pigs and dogs playing snooker. His dad had a thing about pigs which the boy always thought was a bit strange. He’d never been in anybody else’s house that had pictures of pigs all over the place. His dad said the boy should be grateful he agreed to look after him and stop complaining. The boy didn’t really understand this. His dad used to always say he wanted the boy to come and live with him.

  His dad started seeing some woman called Karin. She lived miles away and had three kids of her own, so there wasn’t much space for the boy to go and visit, his dad said. His dad started spending most evenings staying with her after a while. At first it was just Wednesdays and Saturdays. Then it was Fridays. Then Mondays. And then most Tuesdays. Eventually his dad barely ever stayed at home any more, unless one of Karin’s kids had done something to annoy him.

  The boy spent most of his time alone.

  He was too far away from most of his friends’ houses since he moved to be with his dad, and the buses were rubbish. At least he got to sleep in his dad’s empty bed most of the time which was much more comfortable than the sofa, and he didn’t have to eat so much. As time went on, he ate less and less. How much food he chose to eat was something he could control, he thought to himself. The kind dinner ladies at school always used to try and encourage him to use up his full free school meals allowance, but the boy just didn’t feel that hungry.

  The boy didn’t speak to his mother again for a long time. He couldn’t forgive her for what she had done. There’s no way his dad would have hit her, and he didn’t understand why she kept saying he did. If she had just stopped nagging all of the time, his dad would never have left in the first place and everything would be fine. The boy would still have his own bedroom with his Narnia books and Nirvana posters, and he wouldn’t have to walk so far to school every day, and he could just go and see his friends whenever he wanted.

  She took all of that away from him.

  CHAPTER 10

  David liked to visit famous suicide spots. Beachy Head was his favourite. There are around twenty suicides at Beachy Head every year. The popular tourist spot has its own dedicated chaplaincy team patrolling the cliff edges, ready to pounce on anybody looking suspiciously morose. The local council even banned family members of so-called ‘jumpers’ from leaving shrines on the cliffs to their loved ones, for fear of encouraging others to follow suit.

  David liked to peer over the edge into the rocky abyss below to see if he could feel anything for the recently deceased.

  Nothing.

  They chose to take the easy route out of whatever problems they had to deal with.

  Weak.

  If he managed to get lucky, sometimes David would spot a potential jumper hovering on the precipice. He would attract the attention of the chaplaincy team over to himself with a sufficiently sorrowful glance before they noticed the real jumper in time.

  David sees all life as a test – you pass or you fail.

  CHAPTER 11

  For a case to go to trial at Crown Court in England there are many stages of evidence and procedure to go through first, often taking months and months of painstaking planning and preparation. This process is made more complicated by having numerous different agencies involved, each with their own agenda and priorities. The police just want the suspect charged, convicted and locked away in prison as quickly as possible. Of course, there have to be checks and balances on this, so the Crown Prosecution Service review every single piece of evidence before they are prepared to let this happen. Evidence does not just fall from trees like on TV; it takes time to collect it properly, and the police are the errand-boys sent off to gather it. Then the solicitor for the defence wants to review everything available so they can find a way to get their client off the hook. The police aren’t allowed to hand anything directly to the defence, so everything has to go through the CPS, who are rather prone to losing things and blaming the police. Finally, when the numerous hearings and adjournments to allow the CPS more time have all passed, the barristers for both sides need to review everything so they can prepare to present their client’s case at trial.

  David always
admired the prosecution barristers the most. To him they were like the rock stars of the criminal justice system, just breezing in the day of a trial and barking orders at everybody wheeling along their encyclopaedias of legal knowledge behind them. Their Russell Group law degrees and Inns-of-Court pupillages bestowing upon them an air of self-righteous superiority over everybody else. Then off for lunch with the judge and defence barrister. All very cosy, David thought.

  The problem with this rather arduous process is the poor old victim is often forgotten about. He or she sits at home having poured out their heart and soul over some horrific experience they’ve had to endure, waiting for a phone call to tell them what day to turn up and sit around for hours waiting in court. It all just becomes a legal game of ‘whodunnit’ for the police, CPS, defence and prosecution – names on case files are just for filing; they don’t actually mean anything any more. Maybe one day, after the hours of counselling and cognitive behavioural therapy have failed to erase the damage, the evidence is found to be lacking by some unconnected bureaucrat. A curt, professional ‘thank you for reporting this matter, unfortunately we are unable to proceed’ letter drops through the victim’s letterbox and that’s the end of it. From a victim’s perspective, the system is fucked.

  It’s hard for people to turn up for work every day if you don’t really have faith in the system. But not for David. For David, the fact a case would take so long to ever get to trial, if at all, didn’t matter. For him, the thrill of the job came in those initial stages of first reporting, when the victim is all raw and exposed and humiliated. Ready to be caught on tape and endlessly replayed in David’s mind. That’s what got him motivated every day as he tried to feel something for somebody. Pity. Compassion. Empathy. Sympathy. Anything.