Horse's Arse (37 page)

    'Hello,
he said hesitantly. 'We met at Bovril's funeral, I don't know if you remember .
. .'

    'Oh
yes, I remember you,' she said, taking his hand and shaking it with feeling,
yes, I remember you very well.'

    Pizza
was very flattered, but became tongue-tied and coloured up. Lisa rescued him by
continuing, 'I suppose you'll be giving evidence. I wanted to see what happens
to them all.'

    'Yes,
I found their clothing which they'd chucked away. It's quite important,' he
said proudly. Lisa slipped her arm through his and they began to walk slowly
along Crown Square towards the main door to the court.

    'You
don't mind if I listen to the trial, do you?' she asked.

    'Oh,
no,' replied Pizza urgently, 'I'm really pleased you're here. You know that the
girl who shot him and one of them that gave her the gun are dead, don't you?
There's only one called Baker facing any charges in relation to Bovril's
murder.'

    'Yes
I know,' she said quietly, 'but I wanted to see it finished. I need to draw a
line under it and get on with life.'

    He
understood perfectly and glanced down at her now obviously swelling stomach but
said nothing. She saw the glance and answered the unasked question.

    'Yes,
I'm pregnant.' She smiled happily.

    'Is
your husband happy about it?' asked Pizza, probing uncertainly for the answers
he wanted to hear.

    'I
don't have a husband - or a boyfriend,' she added quickly. 'I'm on my own now.
The father's gone.'

    'I'm
sorry,' lied Pizza. 'His loss, if you ask me.' They smiled at each other and
continued in silence to the main doors, where the other police officers were
waiting for Pizza.

    'I've
got to go now,' he said quietly to Lisa. 'Will you be around at the end of the
day?'

    'If
you'd like me to be, I will,' she said.

    'I'd
like that very much,' said Pizza, smiling broadly. He released his arm from
hers and joined the others, who by the quizzical looks on their faces had lots
to ask him. It was going to be a beautiful day.

    During
the winter of 1975, on a whim, I walked into my home town police station and
spoke to the desk sergeant about joining the police. He gave me a couple of
forms to fill in and sent me to the local branch of Woolworths where there was
a weighing machine which printed out a record of your weight. Shortly
afterwards I returned the completed forms to the sergeant with the record of my
weight and after passing an embarrassingly simple written test (because I
didn't have a mathematics qualification) I joined the Police Service on Monday
2 February 1976. I was eighteen years old. It was that easy. Today the process
takes years, with candidates required to fill in numerous forms and still
falling foul of quotas and psychological profiling.

    My
starting pay was £2400 per annum and I would be working shifts, weekends, Bank
Holidays, and Christmas. With several other wet-behind-the-ears eighteen year
olds, I was despatched to a Police Training Centre in the north of England
where we spent the next ten weeks alongside recruits from Greater Manchester,
Merseyside, North Wales, Cumbria, Kent and Surrey. I had led a relatively
sheltered life up to that point, and those ten weeks proved to be a real
eye-opener. I tagged along with a mate from Greater Manchester to an assembly
hall where the Merseyside and Manchester forces allocated postings to their
recruits. The officers going to Toxteth, Moss Side and other difficult areas
were either enormous, eye-wateringly ugly, or violent, or sometimes all three.

    Ten
weeks learning definitions and powers of arrest, engaging in 'real life'
scenarios and weekly written exams cooled my early flush of enthusiasm, but I
persevered and returned to the Force eager to try out everything I had learnt
on an unsuspecting public.

    Minutes
after walking into my first nick I knew the job I wanted to do. It took me
twenty-seven years to get it, but I ultimately spent the last three years of my
service as a shift inspector with my own group working a busy division in
central London. My last three years were as memorable as the first three and I
retired on the ultimate high - doing something I had always wanted to do.

    Those
first three years, before Margaret Thatcher came to power and recognised that
she needed the Police Service on board to deal with the unions, left an
indelible mark on my memory. Within weeks I found myself with another young
officer from a different station, guarding overnight the remains of Janie
Shepherd on the desolate Nomansland Common outside St Albans. She was a young
Australian who had been abducted in London and murdered. Standing just feet
from her I recall being amazed I had a role in a tragedy that was receiving
huge media attention. Very soon after Janie was found, the remains of Mickey
Cornwall, a London gangster, were recovered from a shallow grave in woods
nearby.

    Whilst
still in my teens I saw life and death at its most base and callous and, like every
other officer I know who stayed the course, relied on rough and ready gallows
humour to deal with it.

    I
remember walking into a bedroom in a slum flat during the summer of 1976 where
a man had died in bed three months earlier and had literally melted into the
mattress as he decomposed. My partner that day took a brief look at him and
said, 'He's let himself go a bit hasn't he?' It took the horror out of the
situation. There were endless occasions when humour took the edge off something
deeply unpleasant or difficult. I recall one young probationer (not me!) who
was tasked with searching a house by his tutor because the occupant had not
been seen for some time. He went upstairs and on returning was asked by his
tutor whom he had heard him talking to. He replied that he had located a black
bloke on the toilet up there but he wouldn't respond to any of his questions.
Puzzled, the tutor had gone to speak to the man only to find the occupier
sitting on the toilet, long dead.

    Illicit
sexual relations occasionally provided some light relief - as always. Officers
from my station took a call to reports of a woman screaming for help from the
back of a parked car. When they arrived they found an anxious woman whose
sexual extravaganza in the car had gone horribly wrong when her boyfriend had
sustained a serious back injury and could not be extracted from the vehicle.
Eventually they called the fire brigade who cut off the roof of the car to get
him out. The woman became hysterical, not as it turned out because of her
boyfriend's injury, but because she had no idea how to explain the damage to
her husband's car.

    The
years of Margaret Thatcher were halcyon days for the Police Service. Police
officers and their families no longer had to rely on state benefits to get by
and we were paid and continue to be paid a reasonable wage. Suddenly men and
women began to join the Job to pursue lucrative careers. Despite this,

    I
regard the period of my career from 1976 to 1979 as the last golden age of true
vocational coppering. My book is set in that period. It is a work of fiction
and should not by any means be regarded as an historical account.

    What
I hope comes across in this book is that a career in the Police Service
involves long periods of mundane routine punctuated by extremes at both ends of
the spectrum. Coppers who choose to remain operational see it all. They cope
with a dark, sharp, spontaneous humour, not always to everyone's taste - but it
helps.