Prisoners, Property and Prostitutes (13 page)

However, the possession of a driving authority didn’t guarantee a car to drive every day – pecking order meant that
the ‘big hat and boots’ were still the norm. This in turn also carried the unenviable extra duty of ‘security’ at the Police Station. Various terrorist threats meant that the national level of security was increased, and the powers-that-be demanded that the yard at the Police Station have a uniformed officer trudging solemnly up and down 24 hours a day. To share the burden, everyone got allocated one hour each, unless there were less than 8 of us on for the shift. Then someone (again usually the lower in service) would have two, or even three or four hours of this mind-numbing duty. The worst part was that the yard itself was only about 150 feet long and hardly a security nightmare to check. A reasonably thorough check took about thirty seconds, or a minute if you adopted a very slow, deliberate walk.

There was a covered area up the left hand side wall reserved for senior officers’ cars, and the right hand side had parking for panda cars along the outer wall of the cells. Half way along this wall was a long narrow entry down which there was a bicycle rack and two dog kennels. This area was gated at its entrance in case any dogs escaped, but annoyingly was unlit, so at night general debris had to be felt for or you risked tripping over any odd bits and pieces of property which had been handed in but were too big to go in the normal property store. Beyond this the yard opened out a little and there was a downhill slope to a couple of garages which formed the Traffic bay. The garages held a few motorcycles, and two or three of the Traffic Rovers would be parked on the slope. Opposite the slope were two petrol pumps for refuelling. The yard ended in a sharp right turn which led down a short piece of tarmac, past
a few parking spaces to the main road. Any terrorist plotting an attack would probably have taken one look and decided someone had already beaten them to it, but still it had to be patrolled.

The stints of Winter ‘security’ meant cold boredom, interspersed with occasional hot drinks passed out from the radio room, whose window opened onto the yard. The Station Sergeant sympathised, but refused to allow a break to warm up in the office, as to do so would probably have coincided with a late night impromptu visit by some senior officer and the Sergeant would be in trouble for allowing you inside.

When it was my turn to patrol I would trudge up and down, watching the hands on my watch move ever more slowly round the dial and waiting for my turn to end. Often, with minutes to go, I would hear my relief get diverted to a domestic or road accident, and know that my bout of boredom had just doubled or trebled. The only relief I would get was to go and visit the lost dogs in the kennels. Some were regulars, handed in by well-meaning animal lovers, and who would probably have made their own way home perfectly happily if not ‘rescued’ by charitable members of the public. Others were obviously frightened by their unfamiliar surroundings and would growl, bark or snap if you went near, but a great number were just a bit bored and embarrassed at their predicament. They would happily come to the bars in the door and scrounge for biscuits, a large sack of which was kept in a cupboard close by.

I felt sorry for these animals – maybe I was a soft touch – but as an animal lover they were a welcome bit of companionship to pass a few dull minutes in a shift and share our
predicament, stuck in a place we didn’t want to be, but with no means of changing our situation.

One night I went in and was surprised to find a dog in the kennels. Normally you would have advance warning of an occupant from the barking that a stray would produce. But this animal was quiet. She was the only occupant, and came up to the bars wagging her tail as I went to the door. She readily ate a couple of biscuits, and again surprisingly didn’t bark when I left her so I could again scour the yard for explosives and errant terrorists. Through the night I went back a number of times, and was particularly touched when as I handed her a biscuit she raised a paw and placed it on my hand. When I moved my hand away the paw ‘gripped’, and the gentle brown eyes stared with a genuine ‘please take me home with you’ look. This was the sort of dog that was inevitably collected by a frantic owner within 24 hours, especially one as pretty as this – a black Labrador cross.

To my surprise she was still there the next night, and looking at the card with her details on it I found she had already been at one of our out-stations for two days. She had been found in a village square and taken to the Police Station, where with commendable practicality the officer on the desk had promptly taken her to the back door of the station and kicked her out, working on the assumption that she would go home. When he went back to the front door to deal with another caller a few minutes later, there was the dog again. Another exit from the back door followed, but the dog lay siege to the station and showed no signs of going home, so he was eventually forced to book her in. Unclaimed, she came to the main station to await
the local dogs’ home collection which she had missed that week due to her stay at the out-station.

The following afternoon I mentioned the dog to my wife.

‘She sounds very nice, but we can’t have a dog, you know that.’

She was absolutely right. Arthur the hamster, now long dead, had been as big a commitment as we felt we could manage as both of us worked full-time, me on shifts and my wife with her own career.

However, common sense and practicality have never been a strong point of mine, and I eventually persuaded my better half to come to the Police Station, ‘just to have a look.’ Surprisingly she agreed, and within a few minutes of meeting the dog she went quiet, then turned to me and said,‘Can we call her Jet?’

It seemed a most appropriate name, the dog was as dark as the stuff that makes such beautiful jewellery, and so a couple of days later she came home with me. In true ‘ We can fix anything’ Policeman mode, Paul Lineham and I decided to build a kennel for her, as she would have to live outside. An afternoon’s work resulted in a serviceable dog kennel, and also the accidental cutting in half of a wooden garden table. The dog took one look at the kennel and refused to go near it. She took up residence indoors, and about three years later I took the kennel to pieces and threw it on the local tip.

Jet, however was a different matter. She was fully grown when I brought her home, so her exact age was never known, but she was with us for just over fourteen years.

I have made many decisions over the years which would not stand up to logical examination – to take on a stray dog of
unknown history is not on the face of it a sensible thing to do. With hindsight it was one of the best things I ever did, so I suppose the drudgery of security duty on those long cold nights had an excellent by-product in the end.

My first summer as a driver at Newport saw a true heat wave. Not even the Chief Constable’s car had air conditioning in those days, so our pandas became uncomfortably hot.

Despite the training, Police drivers generally do not treat their cars very well – a public perception that Police cars are ‘souped up’ is derived from the fact they seem to go faster than privately owned versions, but this is simply because no-one in their right mind would subject their own car to such terrible abuse. If you don’t have to pay for the repairs, any incentive for mechanical sympathy is greatly reduced. To try and reduce the barbaric thrashing meted out to the poor little cars, each member of a block was allocated a specific car, so if there was anything wrong with it, it was in your interests to get it rectified as you would have the same car back on your next shift, instead of knowing which car not to pick. Getting it rectified was another matter unfortunately, as our maintenance garages seemed to do their utmost to avoid doing any work if at all possible.

‘Let it develop’ was the favourite phrase, applied to anything from a misfire to a wobbly wheel, as if the car had magical self-healing properties.

A traffic car once developed a rather sinister whine from the gearbox, which gradually turned into a rumbling which became louder by the mile. Anticipating the obvious the driver took it to the garages and got the usual instruction. The driver went from the garages to the ring road, where he put the car into second gear and then up to maximum revs. After about two miles the rumble turned briefly to a screech, at which point the gearbox disintegrated. Sitting in the car at the roadside, the driver radioed up: ‘Call the garages please, tell them I’m on the ring road, the gearbox problem has now “developed” and can they bring a trailer.’ Not the most responsible way of sorting the problem, but faced with such entrenched opposition to a request for repair it seemed reasonable to force the matter into the open rather than nurse the car along only to have it fail at some far more crucial moment.

When it came to road-testing a car after any repair the mechanics would take it out and drive it round for a bit, report on it and if all seemed well they would deem it fit for return to service. With a runabout-type panda car their test drive would usually be adequate to locate and diagnose most defects, but with the Traffic cars there were occasional problems between mechanics and the Police drivers.

The Traffic cars at this time were Rover SD1s, with a 3.5 litre V8 engine. By modern standards they are not desperately fast cars, but they were still capable of around 130 miles an hour most days.

One such Rover was put into the garages with a misfire, and returned the following day marked ‘no misfire found’.

The next day the same driver put it back in reporting the
same misfire, and again it was returned with no trace of the misfire located.

To resolve the matter, the traffic officer went to the garage and located the mechanic who had been allocated on both occasions to work on it.

In a commendable act of co-operation he took the mechanic out as passenger, and showed him under what circumstances the misfire happened. It usually started at about 5,000 revs in third gear, and continued to cause problems in the higher gears at higher revs, with the car pulling hard under load, either with hard acceleration on level ground, or even more pronounced when travelling up a gradient.

There is always a worry in these circumstances that the fault will not show up, as was presumed had happened when the mechanic had tried to locate it, but this time there was no such problem. Right on cue, 5,000 revs in third, pushing up around 100 miles an hour, in came the misfire.

‘There it is,’ said the driver as the car juddered and spluttered. ‘What d’you reckon? Fuel starvation or electrical?’

Concentrating on the road ahead he changed up a gear and continued the acceleration, the car misfiring obligingly as its speed rose well into three figures.

After a few moments he expected the mechanic to have made up his mind as to a possible cause, but no explanation was offered.

Taking his eyes off the road to look enquiringly across at his passenger, he saw the unfortunate man riveted to the passenger seat, eyes bulging, face pale with fear and hands gripping the side of the seat cushion.

‘Please stop,’ was all he could mutter.

The driver pulled into a lay by a little further up the road.

‘What’s up? Are you ill?’ he enquired.

‘I’ve never been that fast in my life,’ came the reply. ‘Please don’t do that again. We never go above 40 miles an hour when we test them.’

Future road tests had a little more involvement from the people who actually drove the cars.

To be fair, misfires in an engine are among the more difficult problems to trace and resolve – there are so many things that can cause one, and you don’t get points for a good guess. You either sort it or you don’t. From a Police driver’s point of view a misfire is incredibly annoying, especially in a chase. If the car you are after is simply faster or better driven then so be it, but a nagging fault is just pure frustration.

Misfires also have a habit of being at the upper end of the engine’s performance, but on one occasion a motorcyclist friend of mine found he had a chronic problem at the lower end of the rev range. His BMW bike would tick over perfectly well, and produce plenty of power with the throttle wide open, but in the mid range was completely flat, and gave no response on a part-throttle.

Obviously this had to go to the garages for repair, so off he set. He was travelling with two colleagues, also on motorcycles, and on a nice sunny day they made their way. Two of the bikes were running like sewing machines, the third behaving like an awkward horse, fluffing and hesitating one moment, flat out the next.

The problem became more aggravated as the journey
progressed, and eventually the engine would only work at full throttle or tick-over, so the bike was ridden as if it had an electric switch with a simple on/off setting and no finesse in between. This meant that on the approach to corners the rider had to lose more speed than he would do normally, then yank the throttle open, wait for the power to kick in, and gain speed through the bend and into the following straight, before repeating the procedure at the next slowing down point.

To avoid being run into by an out of control bike, and to afford some safety if it broke down completely, the two fully-functioning bikes took up second and third places in this irresponsible convoy.

They made good (in fact very good) progress across the countryside, and with only a couple of miles to go they slowed down going through a dip in order to set the speed for a slightly uphill left hand bend which lay a short way ahead.

The rider on the faulty bike closed the throttle, and then at the correct point opened it hard again, and waited for the power to kick in. Over the next few fractions of a second petrol was pumped into the engine, awaiting the arrival of a spark to turn it instantly from vapour to fireball.

A few yards away, adjacent to the bend, stood a small white cottage. This house was a picture of tranquillity in the English countryside, and the retired elderly couple who owned it were enjoying the fine summer weather by catching up on some garden jobs. The husband had just finished mowing the lawn and was at the bottom of the garden, near to the road. His wife was walking out to him bearing a tray with two cups of coffee on it, each on its own saucer.