MATT DELITO
Confessions of a Police Constable

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Who am I?

Pleased to meet you …

Can’t we all just be friends?

The A-hole who dropped the N-bomb

Hell hath no fury like an 11-year-old without BBM

A pinprick is nothing like a paper cut

Sudden Death

Bringing them back from the dead

So … you’re saying you were attacked by a ninja?

The mysterious case of the Belgian bike burglar

Is that a baton you have in your pocket?

Tinker, Tailor … Spy?

Crossing over to the other side

‘Going the Way of the Dojo’

You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone

A victim of fraud

A Day in the life of a special constable

A long climb

Twisted Sister

An irate customer

Stopping and searching

Slowing down for the weekend

The stolen iPad

One of those shifts

The arrest enquiry

A shot to the heart

Ambushed in the Riots

Epilogue

Footnotes

Glossary and abbreviations

Identity codes

Police ranks

Acknowledgements

Read On …

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

The stories in this book describe my experiences working as a police constable in London. To protect confidentiality, not everything I write can be one hundred per cent the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth – some parts have been fictionalised, and names and locations have been changed. I’m unable to share some of my favourite stories because they are part of investigations in progress. Others I must amend slightly because I don’t want to put my colleagues at risk by revealing operationally sensitive information. Most importantly, I really like my job, and I would rather not get dismissed.

Who am I?

Hi, my name is Matt Delito.

I am a police officer in London’s Metropolitan Police Force. Service. I mean Service. In the immortal words of Nicholas Angel in Hot Fuzz – which, incidentally, should certainly be introduced as mandatory viewing for new recruits to the Metropolitan Police – ‘We’re not calling it a “police force” any more; that’s too aggressive.’

You don’t have to call us the Metropolitan Police Service, or even the MPS – ‘The Met’ will do. Of course, I’m aware that people have an awful lot of other names for us, but many of them aren’t fit to print in a fine publication such as this.

When I’m on duty, I am usually on ‘team’. This is short for ‘response team’. We’re the guys who come rushing to your assistance when someone breaks into your house and you dial 999. The borough I work in is one of the busiest in London, and I’m part of one of the best teams around. If we are on duty, and you live, work or play in my part of town, you’re in good hands …

Okay, I haven’t been entirely upfront: my name isn’t, in fact, Matt Delito, although it does have a pretty good ring to it. And my collar number is not PC592MD, and I am not based at Southwark (which is what an ‘MD’ shoulder number would usually indicate).

If it turns out there’s a PC592MD: I’m sorry, buddy, the number was picked at random.

Matt Delito

Pleased to meet you …

I was slumped back against a tree stump at the edge of the park, watching the two youths run off into the distance. I was only dimly aware of the electronic device I was holding in my hand.

‘Hello? Hello!?’

The little machine was making sounds, but they barely registered in my consciousness. Somehow, I made out the noise of my watch beeping twice, signifying that it was 3 a.m.

‘This,’ I thought to myself, ‘has been a particularly rotten day.’

But I’m getting ahead of myself – introductions first.

I’m Matt.

I’m a police officer, but I haven’t always been. I’ve had quite a few different jobs in my time, including working in a petrol station (I would tell you that it was a barrel of laughs if it wasn’t such an easy-to-detect lie). I also worked as a runner for the BBC one particularly memorable summer. That was exciting; I got to meet all sorts of interesting people. Jeremy Clarkson, for example. He told me to fuck off once, which was probably the highlight of my pre-police career. I suppose that goes some way towards explaining why I prefer to talk about my career on the force than about life before I zipped up my Kevlar Metvest for the first time.

I’d like to invite you, for a minute, to think about what your average day consists of. No, go on, I’ll just sit back and have a few sips of my coffee whilst you ponder. Unless you’re my OP/IRV (this is the operator – aka the person who isn’t the driver – on an Incident Response Vehicle), your days will probably be slightly different from mine.

But what do I do all day? When I got tired of explaining this to my enquiring friends (and listening to their complaints about police officers: ‘I don’t like you lot – you gave my sister a ticket for speaking on her mobile when she was driving’), I decided it was time I started writing some of it down. That was well over a year ago now, and the result is the stack of dead trees, or the weightless, electron-powered virtual version thereof you are holding in your hands.

But I digress.

Where was I? Oh, yes, slumped against a tree.

I had just come off duty after a particularly long and dreary shift. It was late on a hot but rapidly cooling July evening and I was cycling home. Yes, ‘cycling’. I would not normally cycle so late but my motorbike had been involved in an unfortunate run-in with a bin lorry whilst it was parked outside the police station. I can’t really be sure that it was an accident rather than a particularly potent anti-police lash-out, but either way, the result was that my poor motorbike was stuck at the Yamaha dealership, and I was downgraded from triple-digit horsepower to zero-point-not-a-lot of horsepower, sweating and swearing in equal measure as I wrestled my pushbike along the godforsaken bicycle paths.

I was cycling through the park, through the dark, through the night, when out of the corner of my eye, I spotted some movement. At nearly 3 a.m., in a less-than-glamorous slice of town, movement generally signifies bad news, so I slowed down to take a closer look.

Slowing down, as it turned out, might very well have been a good idea; it may have saved my life, in fact. The next thing I knew, I was thrown from my bicycle. It transpired that the movement I’d noticed was a teenager ducking behind a tree, after he and a friend had spanned a length of steel wire across the cycle path, at roughly neck level.

This is an old trick: get the cyclist off the bike and then nick their bike and possessions whilst they are dazed and confused. Or, in some particularly unfortunate cases, dead.

As I lay flat on my back, the two youths came out of the darkness. One of them grabbed my bike, jumped on, and pedalled like a youth possessed into the night. The other quickly dug through my pockets, before running after his friend with my gym bag in his hand.

‘Hello? Is there anybody there? Can I help you? What is your emergency?’

I looked down at my hand.

My old, crappy Nokia was gripped between my fingers – clearly the thieves had not wanted it. The screen was lit up. It read 999. I realised that I must have dialled the emergency number, despite my barely sentient state.

‘Hello, this is Matt Delito, I’m a police constable, Mike Delta five-nine-two.’ I gave the operator my shoulder number completely automatically; I’m not actually sure whether they cared in the slightest.

‘I’ve just been attacked with a garrotte wire in the park by two youths. Both are IC1¹, around sixteen years of age, slim builds, just over five foot tall, both wearing black tracksuits. One had white trainers; the other was wearing a baseball cap. A red one, I think. Also, I need LAS. I think I may have broken my wrist.’ LAS are my brothers in arms: the London Ambulance Service.

Within moments of giving my details to the 999 operator, I heard the sirens of a passing police car flick on, and before long saw the silhouettes of my trusty colleagues Pete and Kim running towards me. A second car showed up minutes later with two more of my colleagues, and more importantly one of my assailants – the one with the red baseball cap.

I was still on the ground, heart pounding, with a god-awful pain in my wrist. I looked up at the young man being paraded towards me.

‘You’ve made a few pretty big mistakes today, young man,’ I said, as he half-heartedly struggled against his handcuffs.

‘You’re lucky I am tall,’ I continued. ‘If I’d been six inches shorter, that cable could have taken my windpipe off, and you would have found yourself staring at a prison wall for the foreseeable future.’

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that his other mistake was not stealing my little Nokia. It’s hardly the fanciest piece of equipment, but being able to dial 999 immediately was probably the only reason the boy was caught. If I had waited for even a couple of minutes, I have no doubt they would have got away with it.

The boy was bundled into a caged van a few minutes later. I sighed: I had already done a 14-hour shift, but I knew I’d be spending the next ten hours having my wrist set at the hospital, being lectured about concussions, giving witness statements back at the police station, and shaking my head at the idiocy of it all.

The arm hurt, and my chest ached from where the wire had cut into it. I’ll be honest with you, though: most of all, I was pissed off that I wouldn’t get a good night’s sleep.

God knows I needed one.

Can’t we all just be friends?

‘I want him out of here,’ the woman screeched, as she reached over my shoulder, the fingers of her hand curled into a claw, and her impressively long nails slashing, musketeer-style, through the air in the direction of her partner.

‘Shut it, you fucking whore,’ he barked back, and made a break for her, his hands balled into fleshy, white-knuckled fists.

I deduced from the trickle of blood coming from the man’s face that she’d managed to land at least a few scratches before we’d made it into the flat. Her face told a tale as well: her eye was practically swelling up as we stood there.

Seven minutes earlier, we’d received a call over the radio: ‘Domestic in progress, graded I, India.’

Our calls are graded in three levels of urgency: E-grade (or Echo) is, basically, whenever you can find the time to rock up. Court warnings, routine appointments and simple follow-ups tend to be graded E. The next step up is an S-grade (or Sierra), where we are meant to make it to the caller within the hour. Dealing with shoplifters, looking for suspicious persons, anything not super-urgent gets a Sierra grade.

Finally we have the most urgent calls, graded I, India. I-graded calls have to be responded to within 12 minutes, so that’s when my advanced driving gets put to the test. The flashing lights go on, the sirens are dusted off and put to good use, and my engine and brakes get a good workout.

This time, the address that showed up on the MDT² as relayed by the CAD³ operator made my heart sink. I knew the house well. It belonged to one of those couples that ‘love each other’ so much that they seem to celebrate their passion largely through beating seven bells out of each other after consuming a drink or 18 between them.

We would attend this address at least a couple of times per month. The training school at Hendon⁴ loves to remind us that ‘domestic violence intervention is murder prevention’, but I’ve got to admit to having thought more than once that perhaps we should just leave this particular couple to it. For as long as I have been a copper in this borough, they seem to have been completely hell-bent on putting new dents into each other, and it’s a pitiful mess every time.

‘Take him away! I don’t want him here,’ she squealed, as I walked in through the front door.

I was the second car on scene, which is just as well, because I’m single-crewed. The car that beat me there was triple-crewed – unusual, given that, in these times of relentless belt-tightening, we’re usually one-up in a car, not three. I was glad to see that my colleague Tim was there; he knows the couple well. In addition to Tim, there was Charlie, a relatively new probationer, fresh out of Hendon, and Syd, a special constable.

Specials are volunteers. Many people seem to confuse them with PCSO⁵ staff, but there are crucial differences between them, the main one being that special constables don’t get paid. Also, not many people realise this, but special constables have the same powers as myself: they have been sworn in, are warranted by the Queen to do arrests, talk sternly to inebriated teenagers, wag their fingers at people failing to wear seat belts, heroically rescue kittens out of trees, and so on and so forth.

I sneak a look at this particularly solidly built special’s Metvest. I think I’ve seen him before, but I can’t remember his name; his nametag reads Smith, which is profoundly unhelpful.

He was doing his best to keep the man from getting to his lady-love. Meanwhile, Tim was trying to reason with the woman, in the hope she would come down from being a squeaky, hyperventilating ball of fury.

‘Oi!’ I called out. ‘Can we all just shut up for ten seconds? I can’t hear myself think in this racket.’

Weirdly (and unusually), they listened to me. The flat fell quiet for a couple of seconds, except for the man’s heavy breathing, leaving all six of us staring back and forth at each other for a few seconds.

‘Right,’ I said, taking control of the situation in the brief moment of silence. ‘You—,’ I pointed at the man, ‘let’s go to the living room and have a chat.’

Tim started leading the woman out of the kitchen and into the bedroom. Good thinking. Kitchens are the most dangerous rooms in a house when there’s a chance a fight will break out. Heavy pans, plenty of knives, boiling water – it rarely ends well.

I waved the special over to me, and after we’d had a brief chat with the king of this particularly squalid castle, we explained to him that he needed to be arrested so we would be able to interview him properly. I decided to let the special get the body (which is police slang for ‘making the arrest’), mostly for my own amusement, but he promptly ruined my entertainment by knowing what to do, and the arrest went smoothly.

Or at least, it looked to be going smoothly … until the man suddenly changed his mind. Immediately after the special applied one handcuff to him, he decided he didn’t want to get arrested after all. At first, he started struggling half-heartedly, but then he found some strength and with it a burst of uninhibited inspiration for mayhem. He booted the special in the shins, and managed to swipe my legs from under me. I hit the floor with a rib-crunching crash, hitting the back of my head against the side of a table. Pain shot through me briefly, before fading away again.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ I shouted. In response, the probationer – PC McOwen – came running to help us out. And so developed an all-out fight between the three of us and the man. The TV was kicked – I have no idea by whom – and crashed into the wall. Chairs were knocked over, a series of pictures that were balanced on a shelf went flying across the living room, covering the floor in shards of glass, and the table I had already landed on once ended up in several pieces on the floor.

Amid the chaos I heard McOwen scream, ‘SPRAY, SPRAY.’

He had taken his CS spray out of its holder, and was applying a generous dose of noxious liquid (which is not entirely dissimilar to pepper spray) to the man’s face.

The man calmed down rapidly, which is great news, obviously, but in the process, I caught some of the CS splash-back, and my eyes filled with tears and a burning sensation I haven’t felt since The Stag Do That Must Not Be Mentioned.

I react terribly to CS. Generally, I’d prefer we didn’t use the stuff in any circumstances. In the probationer’s defence, I suppose it was rather effective in this case; chances are we would have continued our living-room-trashing wrestling session for at least a couple of minutes more.

We finally managed to get the man in both cuffs, lying on the floor with the special constable sitting on his legs, the man reeling off a vituperation of obscenities about our mothers, and the probationer holding the handcuffs.

Having reached this position of relative control, we allowed ourselves to relax. It was all over, right?

Right?

Rarely do we have such luck; charging out of the bedroom came the man’s girlfriend, holding a rather large box set of the TV series Friends.

Yes, really.

‘Leave him alone, he hasn’t done anything to you,’ she shouted, before lifting the box set above her head, and bringing it down on the special.

Tim came running into the living room after her – I am still not sure how she managed to give him the slip – and tried to grab her. She struggled violently, elbowing him in the face and sending him to the floor. Yowling like a doom-wraith she hit the special with the box set again, this time with enough force that it disintegrated. A flurry of CDs, booklets and bits of torn box flew everywhere.

Between the four of us, we restrained her as well, and started taking the man out of the flat, where a caged police van had just arrived with further reinforcements and a way of transporting the fine specimen of gentlemanhood to a night in the cells.

As we hauled the man off, the woman was roaring from within Tim and McOwen’s grasp.

‘LOVE YOU,’ she called to her partner, before directing her anger at us. ‘You are hurting him, I love him, leave him alone!’ she half-sobbed, half-shouted, conveniently forgetting her insistence that we take him away not ten minutes earlier.

We arranged another van to take her away as well, and they both spent the rest of the night in separate cells, shouting across the hallway between the cells, declaring their mutual undying love approximately 68 times, much to the chagrin of the sleep-deprived custody sergeant.

The next day, lover-boy woke up to yet another ABH (Actual Bodily Harm) charge for beating up his girlfriend for the hundredth time. Meanwhile she was awarded with an assault charge for her valiant rescue attempt.

Before long they were back in the flat, continuing on their previous path of loving each other to death.

The A-hole who dropped the N-bomb

‘Hey, Delito,’ the sarge said to me that morning, in the daily briefing. ‘Thompson is off ill today, can you take care of the Sierra Delta gang?’

Sierra Delta – or SD – is Street Duties. It is a programme where new police officers are put through their paces, dealing with cases from beginning to end. They might do an arrest for a shoplifting, for example, and go through the whole process, from alpha to omega. Arrest, booking into custody, interview on tape, investigation, and so on and so forth: the whole process right through to court. It means that each case you deal with takes a lot of time, but you also get a full understanding of how the processes work. It’s incredibly interesting, and I recall my street-duty sessions fondly – the PC who was my mentor/instructor is still one of my best friends to this day.

‘Delito. You listening?’ Daydreaming already? Oh dear, today really was going to be a long day.

‘Sure thing, sarge, I’ll do my best,’ I replied.

At the end of the briefing, I headed over to the classroom to meet Sasha and Pete, the street duties probationers. They were coming up to the end of their street duties, and they generally had their ducks in a row.

Pete is one of those people who seem to be fuelled purely by air and love for The Job. He also has a look that – when combined with the uniform – makes women swoon when they see him. In some officers – the ones able to pretend they don’t notice, or don’t know – that can be a fantastic trait, because it makes certain quick quests for information all that much quicker. Pete knows what he’s doing, and he’s a solid police officer. If the women think ‘He can fuck me’, the men think ‘He can fuck me up’. In short, Pete spends every minute he doesn’t spend in uniform in a gym. I’ve run into him at the gym a couple of times, and he doesn’t mess around; he may very well be the fittest officer on the entire borough. He’s not particularly tall – about five foot seven – but he’s built like a row of brick-and-mortar outhouses, and inspires confidence through and through.

Sasha is not entirely unlike Pete in many ways: she’s witty, knows her laws and white notes⁶ inside out, and she’s no slouch either – she regularly runs half marathons and is apparently trying for her taekwondo black belt. She’s about as tall as Pete. Her slender build, short hair and fragile-looking glasses make her positively androgynous-looking – especially when she’s fully kitted out in her Metvest. She famously disposed of the rumours of her being a lesbian by sleeping with Pete just for long enough that everybody knew about it, before dumping him and returning to single life. The ‘everybody knew about it’ part was secured when she, early one Tuesday morning, transmitted over the radio, on the open channel, ‘Mike Delta two-two-three, do you have any johnnies?’

She got into some trouble with the brass about that one, but she gained major points with the rest of the team, and she’s now well known as someone who doesn’t mince her words – quite refreshing, really.

Once we’ve all said our hellos, we sit down briefly and talk about some questions they have, before breaking out the boot polish, giving our shoes a quick shine, and hitting the streets. Street duties involve a lot of foot patrolling, so you get a proper workout in the process, but seeing as I spend most of my time either driving around in a car or doing quick sprints after naughty little toe-rags, I usually find a walking session to be no bad thing.

It was a pretty slow morning. The radio was so dead that people occasionally ran a radio check, just to make sure their radios hadn’t stopped working. So, without anything better to do, we decided to head out on ‘reassurance patrol’.

Reassurance patrolling is usually done in areas where something bad has happened recently. Not long ago, we’d had a series of stabbings in one particular part of the borough, so we decided we’d take a stroll down the streets that had been worst affected, stop to have a chat with some of the shop owners, and just see how things were looking, on the whole.

By the time the morning had crawled to an end, we’d handed out five traffic tickets (all for mobile phone use), taken weed off some young troublemakers and issued them with a formal warning, and spent a bit of time running after a shoplifter who was unlucky enough to come across our path, before continuing his unlucky streak by running straight into a blind alley, where Sasha quickly got her arrest in. We dealt with it swiftly – both Pete and Sasha had made dozens of arrests by this point – and once we were done, we decided to pop into KFC for some lunch.

This particular branch of the Kentucky Fried Chicken (or Unlucky Fried Kitten, as we tend to call it round these parts) is weirdly L-shaped, and we took our seats in the short leg of the ‘L’ to chomp down our meals.

As we were idly chatting, we heard some commotion by the counter. When we’d come in, we had spotted a security guard, so I figured he’d take care of things. But no such luck: things escalated rapidly.

‘I gave you 40 pounds, you fat bitch.’ A voice broke through to our table of three, ending our genteel luncheon abruptly. Sasha and Pete looked at each other, then at me.

‘Hey, you are the cops,’ I said, grinning, as I took the last bite of my Zinger Tower meal. With a full mouth, I continued, ‘Go deal with it.’

The dashing duo rounded the corner, with me following a few steps behind.

Leaning forward with one hand on the counter was a very large man in a bright patterned shirt. When I say large, I mean very, very large indeed. Positively obese, in fact – larger than any man I had ever seen before in my life. For every movement he made with his arm, another part of his body seemed to be moving, as if it were echoing it – or perhaps protesting under its own weight.

Behind him was a shorter but no less formidable woman, who turned out to be his wife. The couple were on their honeymoon from Texas and had decided to come to London ‘because we love musicals’, they told me at some point later in the proceedings.

I recognised the man’s accent as American, but I wasn’t really sure who he had shouted at. In addition to the couple, the security guard was standing very close to them, making sounds designed – but failing – to calm them down.

‘What’s going on here?’ Sasha interrupted.

‘Ah, thank fuck for that,’ the man exclaimed. ‘This fat bitch stole my money,’ he repeated. I half expected him to point to his wife, but he nodded to the serving counter. I looked. At first glance, the counter was empty, but then I spotted a girl – not older than 20 – cowering behind one of the fryers.

‘Excuse me, could you come out,’ Pete said, waving to the girl for her to come closer, and smiling that broad, winning smile of his. ‘We just want to find out what’s been going on here.’

Pete was in front of me, so I have no idea what he was doing, but based on how the girl reacted, I can’t help but think that he must at least have winked at her. For the briefest of moments, I entertained myself with the idea that he might conceivably have blown her a kiss.

The girl – her nametag revealed her name to be Cecilie – was five feet tall at the most. She could probably do with going jogging every now and again, perhaps, but calling her ‘fat’ hardly seemed fair, especially considering the girth of both the man and his wife. As soon as Cecilie stepped out, the man went off on one again.

‘I paid you forty pounds! You gave me change for thirty! Where is my change, you dim-witted bitch?’ the man hissed.

‘Hey,’ said the security guard, wearily, ‘There’s no need for that kind of language. We have CCTV covering all the cash registers, and can easily check whether you got short-changed. If that’s the case, we’ll of course make sure you get the right change.’

The way the security guard had taken control of the situation was admirable, a perfect example of conflict resolution: admit there may have been a mistake, offer to look into it, and propose a resolution. Surely, nobody could have a problem with that?

Very, very slowly, with all the eager acceleration of an iceberg, the man turned around, and took a couple of tiny, shuffling steps towards the security guard. The only reason they weren’t nose-to-nose was that the guest’s remarkably sized stomach prevented him from getting any closer.

‘Fuck you, you fucking nigger,’ the customer sneered, followed by what seemed an eternity of silence. The security guard just stared at him. I expected him to be angry, but instead he was completely shocked. Even working as a security guard in a fast-food restaurant in a relatively gritty part of town, he didn’t experience ‘the N word’ all that often.

‘Right, that’s it,’ Sasha said. ‘I’m arresting you for offences under sections 4a and 18 of the public order act. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if, when questioned, you fail to mention something you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand?’

‘What did he do?’ the man’s wife squealed, but her query was interrupted by her husband’s caged-animal roar.

‘What the fuck? No, you can’t arrest me. I haven’t done anything.’

He turned to me.

‘You can fuck off,’ he said.

He turned to Pete. ‘You can fuck off.’

Finally, he turned to Sasha. ‘And you, especially, can fuck off. Come on, Maggie, let’s get the fuck out of here.’

He extended a hand towards his wife, meaning for her to take it, but Sasha was quick. She whipped her handcuffs out of her holder, and slapped one side of the cuffs on his wrist.

‘You didn’t seem to hear me, sir, but I am arresting you for intending to cause alarm and distress, and for using a racial slur against this gentleman here,’ Sasha said.

It’s admirable that Sasha was able to get a cuff on him so quickly. I’ve seen her deal with prisoners very elegantly before – but there was no way she was going to be able to hold this ample-sized, gelatinous mess of misplaced anger by herself.

‘Pete, get some backup and a caged van,’ I said. He took half a step back to get outside of the angry man’s range, and reached for his radio immediately. The man pointed at me.

‘Are you in charge here? What happened to my rights, eh? I know my fucking rights. You can’t arrest me. You don’t have a fucking warrant. This is fucking kidnapping.’

As he was jabbing his finger half-heartedly in the direction of my eyes, I saw my chance. Keeping eye contact, I snuck my right hand to my handcuffs, took them out of the holster, and attached them to the hand that was pointing into my face.

We use Hiatt Speedcuffs, which are handcuffs with bars between the two cuffs, instead of a chain. They’re bulkier than the cuffs you tend to see police officers in cop shows carry around, but they do have a huge advantage: once you have one cuff attached to your prisoner, you can use the cuffs for leverage. Dubbed ‘pain compliance’ by the training team at Hendon, with these cuffs if it looks as though you’re liable to lose control of a prisoner, you can use the stiff bar to manipulate them to do what you want.

‘Place your hands behind your back, sir, and I will explain everything to you.’

‘Fuck you,’ he said once again, without showing any inclination to pay heed to my suggestion.

‘Sir, you do understand that swearing at me isn’t going to do you any good, right?’ I said.

‘What the fuck are you going to do? Isn’t this a fucking free country? I know my rights, and you’ve got no fucking reason for fucking kidnapping me! Now let me get the fuck out of these hand-fucking-cuffs, before I fuck you up.’ Clearly my strategy to get him to swear less was less than efficient.

‘Sir, are you threatening me?’ I asked, as light-heartedly as I could.

‘Fucking right I am. I’ll fuck you up, you little bastard. What are you gonna do? Shout at me a little? You’re not the police. You haven’t even got a fucking gun, you gutless pussy.’

‘My friend, you see this little badge here?’ I said, and pointed at the name badge on my Metvest. ‘You see where it says Police Constable? And here’s my identification.’ I whipped out my warrant card with one hand, as I was still holding on to the cuff that was holding his right hand. ‘Can you see the bit where it says “Warrant”? That’s all the warrant I need to arrest you. I assure you all three of us are police officers. You’re going to get arrested now, and we’ll have a chat about all of this at the station.’

Unappeased, the man suddenly moved both his hands up at high speed. I only just managed to hold on to the cuff on my side, but Sasha’s slipped out of her hand. The spare metal cuff glanced her across her face, and sent her glasses flying. She yelped in pain, but recomposed herself quickly. She took one step on to one of the chairs behind the man, then another to get on to the table. Through her swift climbing-on-the-table action, she was suddenly tall enough to reach the cuff. She jumped, grabbed the cuff, and came crashing back to the ground, taking the man’s arm with her.

‘Place your arms behind your back now,’ I said. As the word ‘now’ passed my lips, I twisted the cuffs towards his back. In training, this is a move we practise on each other all the time – you’ll have to take my word for this; a sharply twisted set of handcuffs is powerful tool for persuasion.

During this, Pete had finished his radio call, and approached the man’s wife. Flashing her a charm-buster of a smile, he had firmly guided her away from the struggle in progress.

Sasha and I somehow managed to get the man’s hands behind his back at the same time, and we connected the two empty cuffs together behind his back. With Sasha’s cuff holding his left hand, my cuff holding his right, and both sets of cuffs attached to each other, we finally had the man under control.

A small crowd had gathered around us, which Pete was in the middle of placating.

‘Let’s just step over this way,’ Sasha said, and pointed towards the awkwardly-shaped short leg of the L in an attempt to at least get this guy a little bit out of the way, away from the other guests in the restaurant.

To my surprise, the American went along with the command, but of course not without making a protest.

‘I have my First Amendment rights,’ the man shouted. ‘You can’t tell me what I can say and what I can’t say! You’ll hear from my embassy, you fucking Nazis! This is the last time I’ll visit your stinking little island! Fuck you, get off me,’ he screamed, as he struggled against the two sets of handcuffs.

It wasn’t a pretty sight.

‘I have the right to free speech! I didn’t punch anybody; I didn’t steal anything. Why the fuck am I wearing these handcuffs?’ he said, before reiterating, like a tediously skipping record, that he knew his rights.

‘Right, let me explain this to you,’ I started. ‘Your First Amendment doesn’t apply here—’

‘Fuck you. Like hell my First Amendment doesn’t apply,’ he shouted at the top of his considerable lung capacity and vocal volume. ‘Have you ever heard of the fucking Constitution? I want my lawyer. Why didn’t you offer me a lawyer? That’s one of my fucking rights, you know!’

‘Mate, I don’t care what you think your rights are,’ I exploded. I had had it with this guy; nothing pisses me off more than people who ‘know their rights’ after having watched one too many American cop shows. ‘You have the right to a solicitor, but not until we make it back to the police station. In the meantime, do you remember the bit Sasha here told you about “you do not have to say anything”? That’s basically the same as “your right to remain silent”, and I suggest you use it.’

He half-grunted, half-snorted, which I choose to interpret as: ‘My good sir, I do apologise for causing you such an inconvenience, and I would relish in silently listening to you for the foreseeable future.’

‘So, your First Amendment is part of the Bill of Rights. I appreciate that piece of legislation, but you are in the UK, and the First Amendment – along with the rest of the US Constitution – is part of US law. It does not apply here.’

‘But I’m an American citizen—’

‘When I am in the US, I have to adhere to US law,’ I interjected. ‘When I’m here, I have to stick to local laws. The same goes for you, when you’re in England you’re bound by English law. I don’t know how you normally speak to people in the US, but in the UK, we’ve got a piece of legislation known as the Public Order Act.

‘The POA is a set of laws that was designed to make England a nicer place. At its most serious, in section 1, it covers riots. At its least serious, it covers people wandering around in the streets yelling obscenities.

‘Do you recall what you said to the security guard earlier? A word starting with an N?’ I enquired.

‘Yeah. When someone is being a fucking nigger, I’ll call them a nigger,’ the man grunted.

‘Well, there’s a problem with that: your freedom of speech does not extend to swearing at random strangers, especially if you use racial slurs,’ I explained. ‘That’s a pretty serious matter, and I won’t stand for it. It’s bad enough that you were swearing at me and my colleagues, but swearing at the cashier and calling the security guy, who was only trying to help sort things out, what you did is not appropriate.’

I was about to explain in further depth exactly how much trouble he was in, when I spotted Pete waving at me to come over. I looked over at Sasha. She shrugged. ‘I got this,’ she said, and took a firmer grip of the man’s handcuff.

I believed her, and walked over to Pete.

‘Just got off the radio,’ he started. ‘Something’s kicked off in the next borough, and they’ve sent a load of support from our shift over there.’

‘Keep an eye on our American friend over here,’ I told Pete, and I walked over to the security guard.

‘Hey, have you had a chance to look at the security tape?’ I asked him.

‘Yeah, he clearly handed over a tenner and a twenty. I guess he’s just not used to the money over here,’ he said, with a shrug. He didn’t seem particularly upset.

‘We’ve got a bit of a problem. I don’t feel comfortable transporting this fellow on foot, and all the support is tied up on another incident in the next borough at the moment.’ The security guard nodded; he understood where this was going. ‘If I encourage him to calm down and apologise, would that be okay?’

‘I’m not happy, man,’ he said, and handed me Sasha’s glasses; they came off during the struggle, and he must have picked them up.

‘Thanks,’ I said, inspecting the glasses. They seemed to be more or less in one piece.

‘But yeah, if he apologises and gets the hell out of my shop, I’m happy. I’m not here to be abused, but I haven’t got time for shit like this neither.’

‘Yeah, I completely understand. I’m sorry about the lack of support, but our prisoner transport vans are deployed elsewhere. I’d much rather have taken him in, but apparently something serious is taking place, and I don’t really know what it is.’ I shrugged apologetically.

‘No worries, I understand,’ he said.

I went back to the American.

‘Right, buddy, there’s two ways we can do this. We can either sit here and wait for a van to arrive, check you into custody, interview you, and deal with you properly, or we can send you on your way. What would you prefer?’ I asked.

‘I get to choose?’ he asked, clearly thinking I was trying to catch him out with some sort of practical joke.

‘Well, yes. But if you just want to walk away, you’re going to need to do some serious apologising, starting with my colleagues here, then with me and then the staff here,’ I said.

‘Could you please take these handcuffs off me,’ he said. ‘I would like to shake everyone’s hands, and apologise properly.’

I wasn’t too sure what to do about that particular request. If I am being honest, I knew it was more luck than skill that enabled us to get him in cuffs in the first place, and I wasn’t sure we were going to be able to pull off the same stunt twice.

I conferred with Pete and Sasha. They were both sitting just behind the American. First I spotted Sasha; her face was completely red. Glancing over at Pete, I realised they were both shaking with laughter. Both of them were trying their best to keep the giggles under control, and I was getting pissed off. What the hell was going on?

‘Are you okay to take the cuffs off?’ I asked them. Pete opened his mouth, but didn’t trust his voice not to break into all-out laughter, and so simply nodded, produced his handcuff keys and let the giant free from his captivity.

‘So, about those apologies …’ I said.

‘Erm, yes. Of course, sir,’ he said. As if struck with a magic wand, his behaviour had completely changed. He was as polite as they come.

Turning to Sasha first: ‘I let anger get the better of me, ma’am. I am so very sorry. Please forgive me.’

Next to Pete, then to me with slight variations on the same apologetic theme.

With that out of the way, he bounded out to the main part of the restaurant, much faster than I would have expected from a man his size. I ran after him, but needn’t have panicked; he was the very picture of grace and politeness. He tried to tip both of the restaurant staff £20 for their trouble and the offence caused. They refused to take his money, although they were happy to accept a spectacularly well-performed grovel of an apology.

Finally, he turned to me again, apologised once more, and whisked himself and his wife out of the restaurant.

I immediately rang in to cancel the van, and was asked by the operator to return to Mike Delta (the station identifier for our home police station).

‘Yes, yes, received. We’ll take the bus!’ I radioed back.

‘What the hell happened back there?’ I asked, as I turned back into the area beside the counter to find Pete and Sasha collapsed on the floor, howling with laughter.

‘He …’ Sasha began, but had to abort her explanation attempt in favour of gasping for breath

‘She …’ Pete said, before being similarly overcome with giggles.

‘Jesus,’ I said, getting annoyed.

I decided to leave them to their fits of debilitating laughter, and I joined the restaurant staff to get confirmation in writing that they were happy that the case was resolved by the American apologising.

When we finally left the restaurant, my two colleagues had gathered their wits a little. A little, at least.

‘What the …?’ I asked.

‘Well, when you went to speak to the security guard,’ Pete said, ‘the wife walked up to her husband, and said that if they had to stay here for another five minutes he wouldn’t get any blow-jobs for the rest of the year.’ The last part of his sentence was barely audible, as both he and Sasha were in fits of laughter again.

‘Jeez,’ I said, fighting to stop my inner eye from envisioning any sort of sexual encounter between the two of them. ‘You are buying the beers at the end of this shift, Pete. I’m definitely going to need some mental bleach to get that picture out of my mind.’

Hell hath no fury like an 11-year-old without BBM

‘We’ve just had report of criminal damage in progress, outside 12 Church Walk. An IC2⁷ youth, around 11 years of age, smashing up a car. On an I-grade.’

On this shift, I was an Incident Response Vehicle (IRV) driver – meaning I was responding to emergency calls about incidences that had recently happened or were still taking place.

When we are on duty, we’re assigned call signs comprised of two different radio-calling identifiers. One of them is our shoulder number (in my case, Mike Delta 592), which only changes if you are promoted to a different rank or you transfer to another borough. The other is the call sign of the vehicle or unit we are assigned to. This changes from day to day, although most call signs have particular duties; for example, one will be the Missing Persons car, another will be an ‘odd jobs’ car, and others will be assigned only to super-urgent calls.

My call sign for the radio that day was Mike Delta 20. Thus far, it had been a dreadfully slow day, so the call coming in over the radio engaged me enough to stir myself me into some semblance of excitement. I don’t mind chasing after a group of troublemaking kids for a few minutes if it wakes me up.

I reached for the PTT⁸ lever in my car, and pushed it down.

‘Show two-zero,’ I spoke into the microphone mounted next to my sun visor, and heard a distorted version of my own voice, feeding back through the radio I had clipped to my Metvest.

‘Received,’ replied the operator above the echo.

I pressed the ‘999’ button on my dash, and the car’s mobile disco facilities sprang into life. As the siren wailed, I spun the car around. Church Walk was just around the corner. I careened around the last bend, the slightest hint of a squeal coming from my tyres against the asphalt, and saw a young chap climbing over a low fence.

He’s not running away, I thought. In fact, he’s coming towards me.

‘Show TOA⁹ for Mike Delta two-zero,’ I said, as I engaged the ‘run lock’ and climbed out of the Vauxhall Astra.

Run lock is one of the fun features built into a police car. It enables us to press a button, take the keys and lock the car with the engine running. If anyone tries to put the car in gear or open a door, the engine stops again. Run lock is useful when you have to leave your car parked somewhere with the radio and the flashing lights still operating: by leaving the engine running, it doesn’t run the battery flat, but nobody can steal the car either!

‘Hi there. You okay?’ I asked the kid, as he came towards me.

He nodded.

‘You haven’t seen anyone trying to smash up a car, have you?’

He nodded again.

‘That was me,’ he said, and shrugged with a lack of commitment that made me stop in my tracks. How do you make a motion showing a lack of caring without caring? Mentally, I was shaking my head at this kid’s utter lack of … well … anything.

I blinked a couple of times.

‘Uhm … okay. Why did you smash up a car? Where is it?’ He pointed at a dark red Volvo that was parked outside number ten.

We walked over to the car together, just as another police car showed up.

‘TOA two-six,’ my radio crackled, as the two officers climbed out of the car and started wandering towards us. I was about to send them on their way again, when a man emerged from one of the houses. An extremely agitated man.

‘He smash the car! He smash the car!’ the man shouted in a Turkish accent. He was walking briskly, gesticulating wildly. I took another look at the Volvo. It could have done with a wash, for sure, but all the windows seemed to be intact, and I couldn’t see any obvious damage.

‘What did he do?’ I asked the man, as I gave him a once-over. He was wearing a pair of tracksuit bottoms, a food-stained T-shirt and the air of someone who had just rolled out of bed.

‘He smash the car!’ he said again.

I glanced back and forth at my colleagues. We deal with traffic collisions on a daily basis. We have seen a lot of smashed cars in our time.

This, I concluded, was not a smashed car.

‘In June! He smash the car!’

‘What exactly did you tell the people when you called 999?’ I asked him, as it dawned on me what was going on.

‘I say he smash the car!’

‘Sir,’ I said, ‘You can’t dial 999 about an incident that happened several months ago. If someone is smashing up your car, breaking into your house, or attacking you, call 999. With this—’ I sighed. Realising my approach was futile, I changed tack. ‘Do you know this young man?’ I asked him, as I pointed at the kid.

‘Yes,’ the man said. ‘He is my son.’

‘He stole my Blackberry!’ the kid piped up.

I’ll save you the confounding banality of reporting a running dialogue. It took us the best part of 40 minutes to complete the puzzle of what had happened – the kind of puzzle that sits on the shelf until the cat has taken off with half a dozen pieces, and nobody really cares whether it’s ever completed or not anyway.

I would be lying if I said that my job didn’t involve dealing with a lot of this type of puzzle.

It turned out that back in June the father had taken the son’s Blackberry as punishment for something or other – as parents are wont to do. In my day, we were sent to our room right after dinner, or deprived of watching Columbo for an evening. These days, the kids have to give up their Blackberry privileges.

Fair enough.

The boy retaliated for this grave miscarriage of justice by taking a cricket bat to the family car, smashing up the bonnet, the windshield and a couple of the side windows. The police were called, and the kid was taken in for criminal damage.

This time, the little scoundrel had started a fight at school, and once again the dad took his mobile away. Then ensued a lot of screaming and ranting. The dad thought he was going to smash up the car again, so he called the police.

I’d heard enough. I took the boy aside.

‘Mate, why do you do stuff like that?’ I asked him. ‘You can’t go around starting fights and smashing up cars – that’s not going to get you any friends. I understand you might get frustrated and angry, but you’re a clever kid, and it’s not good news if your own dad has to keep calling the police on you.’

The boy replied (I swear to god this isn’t a word of a lie), ‘I have anger-management issues.’

‘Uhm … Who told you that?’ I asked. ‘Have you been to see a doctor?’

He hadn’t. This was a 13-year-old kid who had self-diagnosed himself with anger-management issues. I didn’t know what to make of any of it.

‘He’s in a gang, you know,’ the kid suddenly said.

‘Who?’ I tried to clarify.

‘My dad. He’s in a gang.’

Over the past hour, I had already caught him out in half a dozen lies – was this another trick? As a precaution, I called Carl, one of my colleagues, over and asked him to run the father and the kid through the PNC¹⁰, CAD, and Crimint¹¹ to check whether we had any intel¹² on them.

‘What does he do?’ I asked the boy, mostly just to keep him talking.

‘He has a gun,’ the kid replied, looking at the tips of his Converses as he spoke.

Carl was just getting off the radio. He came towards me, shrugged, and shook his head in a manner that I took to mean there was nothing particularly suspicious about either of them.

‘A gun? Really? Where does he keep it?’ I asked the kid.

‘In his car, under where the spare wheel is,’ he said, and glanced up at my face to gauge my reaction. ‘I’ve seen it. It’s black.’

Now, I was facing a choice. If there is a suspicion of guns, I can’t really do anything without Trojan assistance – i.e. armed police – but the kid had been lying to me all morning, and he had already implied several bad things about his dad, apparently only to get back at him. At the same time, I couldn’t ignore this piece of information, either. Since the dad indicated that the car was the suspected goal for the son’s attack, it gave me an idea.

‘Can I see your keys for a second?’ I asked the dad. He dug the car keys out of his pocket, and as he did, I took a closer look at him. He didn’t appear to have any clothing on him that could hide a firearm. I took the keys off him and turned back to Carl.

‘The kid’s just told me his dad has a gun in the car. Nick him for suspicion of possession of a section five firearm. Get Belinda to help you,’ I told him.

Carl walked over to Belinda, said a few words, and together they approached the dad. They cuffed him with his hands behind his back before he had any idea of what was happening.

He was handcuffed in a ‘back to back’ configuration, creatively named such because the backs of your hands are facing each other, behind your back. Other ways of handcuffing people are a ‘front stack’ (imagine folding your arms, and having a set of rigid handcuffs applied from wrist to wrist), or a ‘rear stack’ (the same, but on your back). It’s also possible to do a ‘palm-to-palm’, but since we use rigid handcuffs, if you’re going to cuff someone palm-to-palm you may as well not bother handcuffing them at all. It doesn’t do much to impede movement, and they could potentially use the rigid bar between the cuffs as a weapon.

The dad started struggling, shouting abuse at my colleagues whilst they searched him, but they didn’t find anything untoward. I kept an eye on them, just to make sure everything was okay, but Belinda and Carl seemed to have the situation under control.

I started walking over to the Volvo, but the kid stopped me.

‘Not that one! That one,’ he said, pointing towards a Mazda MX-5 parked further up the road.

I was rather doubtful at this point; I have owned an MX-5. They are great fun – proper little drivers’ cars – but there’s one thing they don’t have, and that’s a spare wheel. I take a look at the key ring the dad gave me but, unsurprisingly, the keys he gave me for the Volvo were Volvo keys. There weren’t any keys that would fit on the Mazda on the key ring.

‘Do you know where the keys are?’ I asked the boy.

‘Yeah,’ he said, and sprinted off. Two seconds later, he came running back out of the house, clutching a set of keys.

I opened the MX-5’s boot. There were a couple of holdalls in there, but they were empty. I was pissed off with the kid – lying about a gun in your father’s car? In my head, I was already formulating the stern ‘talking to’ I was going to give him; already envisioning the grovelling I would have to do to the dad after arresting him for no reason whatsoever. Images of formal complaints, and of me having to explain myself to the borough commander, flickered through my brain.

This was going to be a long day.

On a whim, partly to buy time before apologising to the Dad, I lifted up the floor carpet … and I noticed something. The whole carpet in the boot was raised up on a block of carefully cut Styrofoam. It was incredibly well done, and the minor alteration to the car boot raised the boot floor by just an inch or so. It was nearly invisible. The Styrofoam was clad in a thin layer of fabric, and there was a hole cut in the material. I could see a small loop of material, so I carefully manipulated it with the tip of my biro, lifting it up, ever so slowly.

Bingo. There was a gun in there. A Glock, perhaps? I didn’t know for certain – I’m not great with firearms.

I pushed the flap shut with the tip of my pen, moved the floor carpet back into place and closed the boot, locking the car up carefully. I walked over to the father, and gave a nod to Belinda.

‘It’s a gun,’ I said. She arrested him for possession, and I got on the radio.

‘Mike Delta receiving five-nine-two,’ I transmitted.

‘Five-nine-two, go ahead.’

‘I’m going to need Trojan assistance. We found a gun in the boot of a car,’ I said.

‘Oh, and could you send a van on the hurry-up, please, I don’t know if anyone is watching us. We’ve also got a kid we’re going to have to take into custody.’

Every damn time I complain – even if it’s just in my head – that a shift is too quiet, something ridiculous happens.

I suppose this is why we generally use the acronym QT – in order to avoid saying ‘Quiet Time’.

In this instance, we were on the scene for another ten hours.

My colleagues returned to the nick¹³, taking with them the father and son duo, along with a further five officers who had to come out to do a section 18 search of the dad’s house. We found another two handguns, a rifle, a small amount of class-A drugs and a sizeable stash of ammunition for the weapons in the house. We also found another handgun carefully taped under the passenger seat, in another hollow cut into the upholstery of the MX-5. It turned out that the dad wasn’t an active gang member, but that the local gangs used him as a handler, to make sure their guns weren’t found during raids on the houses of known gang members.

I guess if there’s anything to learn from this, it is: don’t take your kid’s Blackberry away from him if you’ve got a gun in the back of your car. And if you do, don’t call the police on him yourself.

Or, you know, don’t hold weapons for gang members. That might be even easier.

A pinprick is nothing like a paper cut

‘GET BACK!’ I screamed at the top of my lungs, as I slowly shuffled away from the man standing opposite me on the seventh-floor landing of a council estate.

The staircase I had just ascended was behind me. To the right of me, there was a low black railing and a 70-foot drop. In front of me was a Customer¹⁴.

The man seemed dazed, not entirely with it in general, and absolutely, feather-spittingly furious.

Something had happened to him. He had completely lost the Ordinance Survey maps and headed out into the deepest, worst-lit corners of incoherence. He was sobbing, shouting, mumbling, drooling, spitting. The words ‘Elise’ and ‘I’m going to fucking kill him’ kept being repeated.

My adrenaline boost was giving me tunnel vision and aural exclusion. I was aware of it, but I wasn’t able to use it: I couldn’t hear or see anything apart from the man I was facing. He wasn’t a very tall man – about five foot seven, perhaps. He was around 40 years old, IC1, with a build that suggested a long, hard life of substance abuse. He was hunched forward, holding onto the railing with his left hand.

I reached for my radio and pressed the button – the orange one, right between the volume dial and the stubby antenna on my Motorola personal radio. Officially, it’s known as the Emergency Assistance Button. Frequently, it’s known as the ‘whoops’ or the ‘shit has hit the fan button’ too. In this case, it was the ‘I need some bloody backup, bloody quickly’ button.

As I pressed down, the other transmission that was in progress (something about an RTC¹⁵) was cancelled, and I could speak for ten seconds without having to clutch my radio’s transmit button.

‘Urgent assistance required,’ I said, as calmly as I could, without breaking eye contact with the man, who was edging closer to me very slowly. I told the radio where I was, and followed up with the words that I knew would catch everyone’s attention: ‘IC1 male with a knife.’

I took a firmer grip of the GFLB¹⁶ I had in my right hand, and crept back until I felt my foot touch something behind me. I realised with a jolt that the only direction I really wanted to go – further away from the addict in front of me – was blocked by a wall.

The man didn’t have an actual knife. ‘Knife’ is what you say over the radio to convey ‘sharp weapon’. Samurai sword? Knife. Bayonet? Knife. Stanley blade? Knife. Surgeon’s scalpel? Knife. Similarly, all bat-like weapons are ‘sticks’, and any projectile weapon is a ‘gun’. If that sounds a little bit backwards, well, I’d urge you not to worry about it too much. When you are dosed to the eyelids with adrenaline in an extreme situation, it’s a lot easier to say ‘knife’ than trying to decide whether you’re facing a madman with a foil, a sabre or an épée. From our point of view, if it cuts, slashes or stabs, it’s a knife.

This particular madman, however, was holding a whole different class of ‘knife’. In his hand he had an injection needle of some sort. It was tiny. The only reason I knew he was clutching it was the occasional flash of surgical steel in the overhead lighting.

I’ve faced suspects with a baffling array of weapons. Guns, of course. Bats, knives, tyre irons, rolling pins, cast-iron pans, and even a chainsaw once. Nothing scares me as much as a hypodermic needle. When you’re against somebody with a bat, it’s a fair fight: they have a stick, you have a stick, you both have a bit of a tussle, they get arrested, job done. You may walk away with some bruises, perhaps even a broken bone, but ultimately it’s a situation you’ve been trained to handle. Guns are slightly worse, of course, but there’s a solution for that too, and over my years in the Metropolitan Police, I’ve perfected the art of running-away-very-fast-and-waiting-for-the-cavalry-to-arrive.

When faced with a needle, you have a huge problem: if they come close enough to be wrestled to the ground and arrested, they’re close enough to give you a tiny scratch. It seems strange to be completely out of your head on adrenaline because of a weapon you can barely see, and yet a million statistics back you up. For example, in England, injecting drugs causes 90 per cent of all cases of hepatitis C and 6 per cent of all HIV cases. I’ve had my hepatitis jabs, of course, but a cure for HIV is still far enough away that I’d rather not have to deal with it.

The man took a step closer just as my radio jumped back into life. ‘Mike Delta five-nine-two. Status update?’ I briefly touched my PTT¹⁷.

‘Could do with some help here, guys. He’s armed with a hypodermic needle.’

‘Received. ETA one minute,’ the operator fired back.

I tried talking to the man again, interrupting his incoherent tirade: ‘Mate, let’s get you some help. We’ll find out what’s happening, and I’ll help you. I promise.’

He took a step closer still, but some of the wildness seemed to have been extinguished from his eyes; a sign that I was getting through to him, I hoped.

‘Mate, I know you’re hurting. I can help you. I don’t want anyone to get hurt,’ I said, and involuntarily moved my baton side to side a little. My knuckles were white from gripping my 21 inches of extendable stainless steel. The movement caught his eye. He straightened up slightly and, in the process, slumped lightly against the railing.

Behind him, I spotted two of my colleagues. They must have gone up the wrong stairway into the estate and ended up behind the man. Or perhaps they knew the layout better, and went around on purpose?

Whatever the reason, they held an advantage by being behind him and it suddenly became my job to keep that advantage. I started talking, careful not to stop. I knew that I had to keep his attention on me.

‘What’s your name? Can I call you Simon?’ This is an old trick of psychology: call someone by the wrong name, and they will be rattled enough to give up their real name.

‘Matthew,’ he barked back.

‘Matthew? That’s great. My name is Matthew too. We’re like brothers, you and I. You’re not that much older than me. Perhaps you could have been my bigger brother, and we could have been Matthew and Matthew. That would have been confusing, wouldn’t it?’ I forced a laugh. Matthew looked confused; he started to laugh, but then remembered whatever it was that was bothering him in the first place, and a look of determination came over his face.

My colleagues advanced behind him. Our tactics worked. Matthew was oblivious to the impending attack. Craig grabbed his arm and Tim put him in a headlock.

‘Drop the needle,’ Tim shouted.

Immediately Matthew did as he was told. For a brief moment I thought he might try to throw himself off the balcony, but the three of us held him back, and minutes later he was led downstairs in handcuffs.

When we finally had Matthew under arrest, we ran him through the PNC. His PNC record had warnings for drugs, violence and for being a known carrier of hepatitis A and C.

The three of us looked at each other, and a shiver ran down my spine.

‘I’ll take a knife fight over this any day of the week,’ I half joked. Instead of laughing, my colleagues nodded silently in agreement.

We had all walked a little bit closer to the edge than we were comfortable with.

Sudden Death

My Ticket had expired.

The ticket I’m referring to is my police driving licence. As well as a standard DVLA driving licence, in order to be allowed to drive any police vehicle, you need to have a special driving licence. To receive this licence, officers do a course, followed by theoretical and practical exams.

Police driving licences come in different levels, starting at ‘level 4’. This is the ‘boring’ ticket that allows you to drive from one place to another, but not on blues and twos¹⁸. You can do a ‘compliant stop’ – which means that you can drive behind somebody and turn your blue lights on to pull them over – but if they drive off, you have to call off the pursuit. This happened to me once when I had only the basic ticket, and I felt pretty daft having to let the guy drive away. Thankfully, in London there’s never a helicopter far off. The helicopter followed him to a petrol station, where I was able to go and arrest them. It transpired that he had a sizeable amount of drugs in the car. ‘Sorry, I didn’t see you, officer,’ the driver had said. Nice touch.

There are dozens of different driving courses you can take. I have a solo ticket (that’s for riding police motorbikes) and the advanced driving qualification. The advanced course is rather interesting, and includes all sorts of high-speed pursuit stuff. It’s a shame that my end of the borough has 40mph limits (or less) everywhere, so I never get to open the cars up properly.

Much like normal driving licences, police licences expire. Unlike normal driving licences, they expire rather quickly. When I’d realised mine was almost up, I’d gone to the driving school at Hendon to have it renewed, but the instructor I was meant to go out with had had to break his appointment when he was called off to something or other. You’d be surprised how often that sort of thing happens; I have a feeling he moonlights for the DPG¹⁹, which would explain a lot.

An expired ticket isn’t a disaster. It normally means you end up ‘operating’ on a Panda – a term still in use despite police patrol cars having not been black and white for several decades – or one of the area cars, with someone else driving. However, on one occasion, I also managed to make it to work late. As a punishment the skipper²⁰ decided to send me out on foot patrols through some of the shopping centres and markets that had recently been plagued with drugs and shoplifting.

Whilst assigning the job, the skipper explained it would ‘help build character’. I had pretended to be insulted and grumpy as I left. ‘Pretended’ because, honestly, I don’t really mind foot patrols all that much. It does mean you’re not on response duties, but it’s actually quite nice to have an opportunity to stroll around the borough for a day. You talk to people, you get some exercise, and it’s a completely different experience to spending all day flying, tyres a-screeching, from call to call.

The morning’s foot patrol, however, had turned out to be less than pleasant. Heavy clouds were sagging with the weight of grey depression, ready to ejaculate their heavy, sleety load all over my freshly washed overcoat. January will always be a dreadful time to be on foot patrol.

Thankfully, I’d managed to spend a fair bit of time getting to know the café owners around my sector of the borough. A chat and a coffee here, a quick vandalism report and a cup of tea there – it all makes the world spin merrily on.

Lunchtime came along eventually and, since it was a Friday, I decided to treat myself to a greasy delicacy from Burger King.

Just as I finished the last bite of my double whopper, my radio interrupted my daydreaming.

‘Five-nine-two receiving Mike Delta?’ it squawked.

‘Retheifsglowblead,’ I replied, with my mouth full of burger and my last two fries.

The couple sitting on the next table glanced over momentarily, before hunching over their trays, laughing so hard I briefly thought they might do themselves an injury.

‘You broke up there, say again?’

‘Receiving, go ahead!’ I repeated, smiling at the couple, with a shrug. I ended my transmission.

‘Hey, they don’t like waiting, what can I say?’ I said to the giggling couple, and winked.

‘We have a Code Zulu up on Eastern Terrace. Are you free to deal?’ the CAD operator asked.

It has been a long time since you were able to buy an off-the-shelf ‘police scanner’ to listen in on police conversations, like they do in the movies, but there remains a rather obvious security flaw: as I sit there, finishing my lunch, the couple at the table next to mine will be able to overhear everything my colleagues talk about. Mostly, it will be boring stuff: a shoplifter, a colleague needing an Op Reclaim recovery of an uninsured car, or CCTV reporting some youths drinking in the park. However, occasionally, much more serious matters will be transmitted over radio.

As a precaution, our Airwave radios are encrypted. Not as heavily as elsewhere, though. On American cop shows, you often hear them say things like ‘10-4’ (we’d say, ‘Received’), ‘10-23’ (we say, ‘Stand by, please’) or ‘417A’ (we say, ‘Suspect with a knife’). You don’t really want to have to look up all sorts of inane codes for every thinkable situation (apparently ‘10-41’ means ‘Will you be requiring an ambulance?’ What’s wrong with saying, ‘Will you be requiring an ambulance?’). However, in the UK we do have a few codes that we use, even over the military-grade-encrypted radios. We’d use a code like ‘Code X-ray’ for a sexual assault, for example; ‘Code Yankee’ could be a bomb threat.

The situation the operator was asking me to attend was a Code Zulu – a Sudden Death.

Sudden Deaths are the bread-and-butter of policing; whenever a ‘sudden death’ happens, police are called as a matter of course. I’m actually a little bit fuzzy on what defines a ‘sudden death’, but I believe it is any death that doesn’t happen as the cause of an obvious accident, and to someone who has not seen a doctor in a couple of weeks.

‘A few weeks? Oh my, I haven’t been to my GP in over a year,’ you might say. That was certainly my reaction when I first found out what a sudden death was. However, the two-week rule means that anybody who has had recent medical issues – heart attacks, late-stage cancer and so on – isn’t automatically classed as ‘sudden’, because, well, they’re not technically sudden.

As a police officer, I sometimes fear I have become a little bit blasé about death. I see dead bodies relatively routinely as part of my job. Whether a person expires through a traffic accident, work accident, suicide or violence, they will end up across our desks sooner or later, and as a response copper, I’m sent to deal with all of it first-hand.

Sudden deaths are always eerie, though, because they are unexpected. I suppose being side-swiped by a lorry is also unexpected, but at least there’s something oddly honest about a traffic death. One particularly memorable sudden death I attended was at a cinema. We had received a call from a very distressed cinema manager. Apparently, a 25-year-old girl had bought a ticket to a matinee showing and quietly sat down in one of the back rows of the cinema, where she remained seated until the credits had finished. The cleaners poked her to wake her up, and she flopped over, dead as last week’s kebab dinner. At first, we thought she was a suicide case (either that, or she simply lost her will to live halfway through M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, which, to be fair, is a conclusion any coroner worth their salt would accept). However, it turned out that she had had an obscure type of heart failure.

Today’s case was at a residential property a short distance from me.

‘Yeah, I’m free. I’m on foot, but I’ll stroll over. I’ll be about ten minutes,’ I responded (much sooner than the length of the digressing monologue above would indicate).

‘Great. Please liaise with thirty-four and seventy-one, they are en route,’ the CAD operator concluded. I slowed my pace a little. No point in getting to the party early.

Just as I walked through the front doorway of the property, Jeff, one of the newer members on our team, burst out of the living room and launched himself full-speed into the toilet. I suppressed a giggle. I could hear him throwing up his lunch as I walked towards the living room. I noticed immediately that the house was in absolutely meticulous condition. Every photograph was so perfectly straight that I suspected the owner had used a spirit level. The carpets looked crisply shampooed, the windows were spotless; apart from an incredible swarm of flies, the house was practically a model home. It was a far cry from some of the crack dens we have to wade around, some of which are so bad you feel obliged to wipe your boots on the doormat on the way out of the flat, so that you don’t make the street dirty when you leave.

I turned the corner into the living room, and the sight that met me was, put simply, grim. A man, who must have been quite obese, had died sitting on a chair in his living room. As he’d drawn his last breath, he’d fallen from his seat, and his ample body had come to rest against the radiator. Of course, seeing as it was January – and a pretty nippy January at that – the radiator had been at full blast.

The combination of the radiator heat and the dead body was not a good thing: the man had probably only been dead for about a week, but the warmth meant that the flies had bred much faster.

I am not sure what in particular had made Jeff bolt from the room to the bathroom. It could have been the sight of the maggots boring their way through the skin on the man’s face and neck. It could have been the large stains where his gas-bloated skin had burst, spilling flies, maggots and bodily fluids on the carpet. My money would have been on the smell, though. The aroma of somebody who has been dead for a couple of weeks is something that stays with you for days. It is such a distinctive, persistent and piercing stench that I swear I can smell it now as I type this – even though I haven’t had the misfortune of attending a sudden death in weeks.

‘You all right, Matt?’ I heard a weak voice behind me. It was Jeff.

‘Yeah, bud. You feeling better?’ I asked

‘Man … I can just never get used to seeing people like that.’

‘You will, eventually. Trust me. Who called it in?’ I asked.

‘A neighbour smelled him this morning, and called the landlord to complain, of all people.’

‘Hah, the landlord, eh? You’d have thought people would have the sense to call us.’

‘I spoke to the neighbour. He was in a state of complete shock,’ Jeff said. ‘He apologised so many times I thought for a moment he might have killed the guy himself. Turns out he’s never seen a dead body before; he thought it was the smell of cat litter. The complaint to the landlord was about his neighbour having pets!’

I shuddered at the mention of furry little felines. The funny, cute videos on YouTube are only half the story: sure, cats are cute enough, but they’re also vicious little carnivores. I’ve attended a sudden death where a pair of cats were in the house when their owner died. Suffice to say, the cats did not go hungry despite not being fed.

‘Who would have known, eh?’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ Jeff said, still standing at the door, looking at the bloated body slumped against the radiator. ‘So … er … what do you reckon?’

‘No idea, mate. He doesn’t look that old,’ I said. ‘How did you get into the flat?’

‘We had to kick the door in,’ Jeff replied. ‘Landlord couldn’t get in; the latch was on.’

‘Clearly, nobody killed the poor sod, so whatever he died of, it’s probably nothing criminal. Best get him ready for the coroner, though, eh?’

Jeff excused himself and ran off to throw up some more. By now, I wasn’t feeling too hot either.

Preparing someone for the coroner includes checking all the property of the deceased – including their pockets. I could tell that this particular pockets-check was going to be unpleasant.

When Jeff returned, one of the sergeants was with him.

‘What have we got, Delito?’ the sergeant barked.

It was Mike Delta 71 – only ever known as 71. I’m sure he must have a name, and I’m sure his name is printed directly underneath ‘Police Sergeant’ on the Velcro nametag on his Metvest, but nobody ever uses it. I had made a dreadful mistake in the station café a few months before by doing my impersonation of 71’s wife, as she, in the throes of carnal enlightenment, screams out ‘Oh! Ooh! My god! Yes! seventy-one! I’m coming! Coming so hard! Your truncheon is making me come! Sevent—’ and that, ladies and gentlemen, is of course the precise moment when 71 walked into the café.

We haven’t really been on speaking terms since.

I explained the goings-on so far, and 71 nodded in response. Meanwhile, Jeff had ducked away from the door again, except this time it was to laugh, not to throw up. He was one of the people who had cheered on my impersonation of Mrs 71.

‘Jeff,’ 71 barked. ‘Come help Delito with this body.’

We had to place Mr Bloggs on his back in order to search him properly. Once we’d both put on gloves, Jeff moved the chair out of the way and took the body under one arm, whilst I picked up his other arm.

‘Onto his back,’ I said. ‘Slowly. One … Two …’

We moved him on three, but the side of his head seemed to stick to the radiator. I watched the skin of his face stretch, ever so slowly, until finally it gave way. The dead man’s head flopped back with a crunch. My eyes were glued to the radiator, where a disturbingly large amount of cheek skin was still sticking to the metal. Jeff let go of his side and leapt from the room. I dropped my side of the body as well, and the man hit the carpet with a thud.

The combination of the cheek stuck on the radiator and the sound of Jeff retching pushed me over the edge. I moved towards the doorway, but found my way blocked by Jeff, who had thrown up on 71’s leg. I decided to take my hat off, and leave my lunch in it instead. I should have known Burger King would be a bad idea.

Bringing them back from the dead

Usually, we find out about traffic incidents over the radio. Either someone dials 999, or CCTV cameras pick up weird traffic movements and discover that two finely engineered boxes of iron and plastic have reduced each other to a set of insurance claims, and their drivers and passengers to ‘casualties’.

However, I once drove by the scene of one accident just as it happened. My friend Kim, who also happened to be my operator that day, and I had just finished with an incredibly grievous case of a sudden death caused by a drugs overdose. As I pulled out of a junction, a motorcyclist who had been thrown from his bike came skidding past us.

We immediately stopped our car – blue lights blazing – using it to block the road, and got out to see what had happened.

‘He’s not breathing,’ Kim said, once she had run over to him and flipped his visor open. ‘I don’t think he’s breathing!’

I checked the road quickly; our vehicle was holding back any traffic from coming our way, which would have to do in terms of protecting us.

To be able to do fully effective CPR²¹, you usually also need to be able to give rescue breaths. To do that, you need access to the patient’s mouth, and you’ll be unsurprised to hear that a full-face motorcycle helmet doesn’t really help in that respect.

It is commonly believed that you should never remove a motorcyclist’s helmet if he’s been in an accident. As a general rule, that is true; motorcycle accidents have a high rate of spinal and head injuries, and removing the helmet can cause further injury to the spinal column. However, in many cases, you don’t have the luxury of a choice: if someone stops breathing they have, at most, four minutes before they start suffering brain damage. They need CPR, which means the helmet has to come off – pronto.

I quickly got on my radio to get some more help.

‘Mike Delta receiving?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘I need LAS on the hurry-up. IC1 male, aged around forty, has come off a motorbike. He’s not breathing or responding, but no obvious injuries. No other casualties.’

‘Received. LAS on the way. What’s his status?’

‘Not sure, we’re starting ELS²² now!’ I barked back and cut the line. A bit rude, perhaps, but I didn’t really have time for chit-chatting with the radio operator.

An ambulance was on its way, which meant that we would only have to deal with this fellow on our own for about 15 minutes at most.

Kim and I started the painfully slow process of taking his helmet off. We undid the chinstrap (which was a goddamn double-D clasp; great for motorcyclists, but a royal pain for rescue personnel). I stuck my hands into the helmet – one hand on each side of his neck, as far into the helmet as I could get – to steady his head. Kim, swearing under her breath, was gently rocking the helmet back and forth, to very carefully get it off him. All the while, the motorcyclist didn’t move a muscle.

After what felt like an eternity, we finally managed to remove his helmet. Kim produced a CPR mask out of nowhere – I had no idea she carried one around with her – and started performing rescue breaths as I unzipped the motorcyclist’s jacket, ready to perform chest compressions.

Once he had had his rescue breaths, I started the compressions. The first push gave a horrible crunching sound. Here’s something they don’t often tell you in the first aid course: if you’re doing CPR correctly, you’re more than likely to break their sternum and ribs in the process. The first time it happened to me, I was so surprised and sickened that I dry-heaved. I was lucky not to throw up all over my own arms and my victim, but to my credit I didn’t stop giving CPR.

With this particular patient, we only made it through two cycles before the ambulance arrived. They had an AED²³ on them, and started hooking the man up right away.

‘Shock advised,’ the AED machine bleated out.

‘Stand clear,’ one of the paramedics said, glancing around quickly to make sure no one was touching the patient, before pressing the button on the AED.

‘Shock delivered,’ an unnaturally calm voice spoke from the AED machine.

Almost immediately, our motorcyclist shot back to life. The change was rapid, and downright incredible. From the increasingly white colour he had had in the minutes since we’d found him, his face and lips turned instantly red, as he groaned and gasped for air.

I too felt a rush of blood run to my ears, face and fingertips. It was almost as though my heart had decided to stop beating in sympathy with the motorcyclist’s.

It is a rare thing to see someone brought back from the dead, and the feeling when it happens is indescribable.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the reasons why I absolutely love my job.

With the motorcyclist’s chances looking a little bit better, I let my mind wander back to the accident. I was puzzled about what may have happened to the motorcyclist: the road was clear and dry, the visibility was good, it was early afternoon so there wasn’t a lot of traffic around, and no one else appeared to have been involved. I looked at the bike, and other than the damage of the accident itself, I couldn’t really see anything obviously wrong with it.

After hooking the man up to another one of their machines (I’m not a medic, so you’ll have to forgive the vague terms – it was a machine that went ‘beep’ a lot), one of the paramedics provided a solution to the mystery.

‘This guy has just had a heart attack,’ he said, looking at the readouts on the little display. ‘We’ll take him with us, he’s going to need to be looked after, but I think he’ll be fine.’

As the paramedics loaded the motorcyclist into the back of their ambulance, the Traffic Police arrived to do an investigation. Traffic are usually called if there’s a risk a collision is ‘life changing or life threatening’. It didn’t take long before they concurred with my initial assessment: nothing was wrong with the road or the bike. There was no sign that he even tried to hit the brakes – he just tumbled off the side of the motorcycle at about 30mph.

‘Seems like the LAS guys were right,’ the traffic copper said. ‘Heart attack makes sense.’

The man was conveyed to hospital at full speed. Later we discovered he had a broken shin, a gallery of bruises and his very own, very first heart attack, but he did walk (well, hobble) out a few days later.

So … you’re saying you were attacked by a ninja?

‘Umm, I don’t really know how to put this, officer. Last night I was walking up the street with my Xbox 360, and then a ninja came and punched me in the face. He stole my Xbox!’

‘Why were you walking around with an Xbox on a Friday night?’

The fellow was about 15 seconds into his statement and already the officer taking the statement was desperately wishing he’d stayed in the café for another five minutes, just so he wouldn’t have had to deal with this particular madman.

‘Well, I was coming home from a company Christmas party. I was dressed in my gi.’

‘What’s a gi?’

‘It’s a suit. Kind of like pyjamas. You wear them in a dojo when you’re competing in judo.’

‘Do you do judo?’

‘No.’

‘So …’

‘Well, I used to do judo. I used to be pretty good, actually.’

‘Right, well, please do start from the beginning. Why were you wearing a judo suit on a Friday night?’

‘Well, it was a costume party. As I said, the company Christmas do, so I wore my gi.’

‘Right. And the Xbox?’ the officer said, rapidly approaching the end of his tether.

If you draw the short straw at the beginning of your shift, you probably end up manning the front office – this is where MOPs²⁴ come in person to report incidents to the police. I’m not a huge fan of that job, for obvious reasons. The front office attracts a rather peculiar clientele – and I don’t think I’m exaggerating by saying that at least a dozen people a few pennies short of a pound come through the front office every week. It’s not all bad; at least you are warm, and you don’t have to do a lot of running.

You just have to deal with a lot of nutters.

I hear you thinking: ‘So, apart from clearly being “a bit nuts”, what was so special about this particular fellow who had been attacked by a ninja?’

Well, he was me, before I became a police officer.

Maybe I should go back to the beginning …

I was working for a large company at the time, and we were having our annual Christmas party. As usual, there was a theme, and this time – thanks to a large deal that had been secured about a month earlier – the theme was Asia. There was a fancy-dress element, but – as per usual – I hadn’t got around to doing anything for it.

The day before the party, a couple of my mates from the office discussed dressing up as kung-fu heroes. One of them had bought a bright yellow tracksuit and intended to go as Bruce Lee. In a moment of inspiration, I formed a plan: I would dust off my old martial arts gi, and go as a judoka.

It was immediately obvious to me that this was a plan so brilliant it outshone a thousand suns: it was tenaciously Asia-related, and carried the additional bonus of me not having to actually do or buy anything – I could simply throw the gi on, and then go to the party. Score.

I made a point of shaving my head that morning, just to look extra ’ard, and went to the office as usual. I had a couple of comments about looking like a skinhead, but I shrugged them off; I’d been called worse in the office. At the end of the day, I went to a quick dinner at the local sushi restaurant (we were committed to the theme) with a couple of colleagues, before changing into my judo gi in the loos and heading to the party.

I’ll spare you the details of the party itself. Suffice to say that there was an open bar, and my colleagues and I were damned if we were going to let a single drop of booze go to waste. I was 15 sheets to the wind by the time they started handing out awards. The first was for the best costume, which went to the PA to one of the executives; she was looking rather smouldering as a geisha, so no surprise there. I have an embarrassing recollection of proposing she and I have a quick wrestle, but unsurprisingly she turned me down. What was a surprise, however, was hearing my name over the PA system.

‘Huh?’ I asked the colleague who was standing closest to me, with all the eloquence I could muster given my blood alcohol level.

‘Dude!’ he said, swaying as if he were standing on the deck of an ocean liner in a storm. ‘You won closer of the year! Great stuff.’

Through my alcohol-fuelled haze, it came back to me: I had, in fact, done a couple of shit-hot deals that year, and it did stand to reason that I would be recognised for some of the money I had earned for the company. I stumbled my way to the stage, and gratefully received an Xbox 360 (they had only just been launched, if I recall correctly) for my efforts.

Ace. A load of free booze and an Xbox 360, too? Tonight was turning out to be a much better evening than expected.

A few hours later, my friends decided that I had consumed quite enough alcohol for the rest of the year, and shoved me out the front door in the general direction of a row of waiting taxis. I don’t recall putting up too much of a struggle, which probably was an indication that I had, indeed, had enough to drink for an evening.

I didn’t live far away from the venue, so I decided to walk home instead of taking the cab. With my coat under one arm and my brand-new Xbox 360 under the other, I took off into the freezing cold December night in my slightly red-wine-stained judo gi.

I nearly made it home.

Nearly.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a guy dressed like a ninja appeared. He was dressed all in black, with a raised hood. All I could see was his eyes as he squared up to me.

‘Oi. Are you some sort of karate champion, then?’ he said.

In retrospect, I should have seen that for what it was: a threat.

Instead, I started a profoundly incoherent tirade in which I intended to compare and contrast the differences between karate and judo. I believe I may have got as far as six syllables into my diatribe, when he took a step forward, and clocked me square in the face.

I woke up a couple of minutes later.

Blood was pouring from my nose, my Xbox 360 was gone, and I was resting against a brick wall, my coat over me for warmth.

‘An ambulance is on the way,’ a female voice said. I looked up at her.

She was cute.

I asked for her phone number, and she sighed, ignoring me. I told her to cancel the ambulance, but as I did so, I heard a siren coming closer. It was a police car.

‘What happened to you?’ the constable asked.

‘I was attacked by a ninja,’ I said, fully in earnest. The constable looked at me.

‘Riiiight. How about you come and tell us about it at the station tomorrow. You look like you could do with some sleep.’ The constable asked where I lived and I told him.

‘That’s only up the road,’ he said, pointing at my house.

‘Yeah, I know,’ I said, adding drily: ‘I live there.’

The next morning, I went to the police station to report being mugged for my games console …

The main reason I’m telling you this story is to illustrate the kind of things we sometimes have reported to us; people come in to the front office with all sorts of grievances, spanning from the most inane, inconsequential complaints to the most serious of crimes.

It’s extremely hard to keep a straight face sometimes, and I’ll admit that if someone had walked into my police station and told me that they had been attacked by a ninja, I would probably have sighed rather deeply myself. ‘Not another one …’

I’ll be honest. I’m not proud of this episode; I acted like a prat, drank far too much, and should have been more street-wise than walking home alone through a dodgy part of town with an expensive, shiny piece of kit under my arm.

The moral of the story is that not everybody who sounds like a complete nutjob is.

Only most of ’em.

The mysterious case of the Belgian bike burglar

‘Two-six receiving Mike Delta,’ my radio buzzed. I was slumped in the driver’s seat of my Astra, which I’d parked in an employees-only car park behind a local shopping centre. Kim was snoozing in the seat next to me.

We were coming to the end of a 12-hour shift and bloody knackered. It was one of the last shifts on an unusually difficult pattern. All the officers were running at about 60 per cent mental capacity, which makes policing particularly difficult, because in many of the situations we run into we’ve really got to have our wits about us.

‘Two-six. Two-six. Are you receiving, Mike Delta?’ the radio buzzed again.

‘Shit, that’s us,’ I realised, shaking my head. Had I been sleeping? I looked down at my hand; my coffee cup was precariously balanced on my lap, nearly – but not quite – tipping its scalding hot contents onto my leg. I straightened the cup carefully, and reached for the PTT lever on the dash.

‘Yeah, two-six receiving. I apologise for the delay,’ I added, ‘I was on a private call.’

I immediately regretted lying to the CAD operator. They, and anybody else who had overheard that conversation, would have known it was a lie – we never apologise for delays in getting back to the CAD operator; either you respond in good time, or you’re too busy to respond (for example, if you’re in the middle of an arrest) and you’ll call up as soon as you can.

‘Er, yeah. Right. We’ve had a call about a theft. Shoplifter. You guys free?’

‘At your service!’ I said as brightly as I could. Next to me, Kim stretched and yawned, before zipping up her Metvest and fastening her seatbelt.

‘Great, on its way to your MDT,’ the operator said, just before the Mobile Data Terminal in our car used its ghastly pre-recorded voice to announce that the CAD had been updated.

Kim pressed the touch-screen on the MDT.

‘The Bike Shack in Main Street detained a shoplifter, apparently, but then he got away,’ she said.

‘Call the bike shop, get a description,’ I replied. We weren’t that far away from Main Street, so I flicked the blue lights on and placed my coffee in the car’s cup holder.

Kim made the call on speakerphone, so she wouldn’t have to relay the description to me later. Clever.

‘He was wearing a bright red T-shirt,’ I heard Kim’s radio say. ‘And stole a very distinctive bike. It’s a large-tubed bike, and the owner had taken all the paint off, sand-blasting the tubes to bare aluminium.’

As the bike shop manager continued his description, we went through a red light, sirens blaring. Suddenly, Kim made a squeaking sound – she does that when she can’t think of words to describe what’s going on – and pointed at the intersection we had just gone through. I slammed on the brakes, and looked in the direction of her gesticulations. There he was. Bright red T-shirt with a white logo on the front, and a bike that gleamed in the bright August sun. He had calmly stopped, letting us fly through the intersection unimpeded.

‘I’ll call you back,’ Kim blurted at the bike shop owner, cancelling the call and getting straight back on the radio.

‘Mike Delta receiving two-six,’ she said.

‘Go ahead.’

‘We see a possible suspect for our bike theft; he’s crossing Main Street at City Road, going east. We’re just spinning the car around now. He’s wearing a red tee, and riding an aluminium-coloured bike,’ she said.

‘Any units in the area who can assist with the last?’ the operator asked.

‘Show six-eight,’ responded a gruff voice I recognised as Simon. ‘One minute.’

Six-eight is the caged van we use for transporting prisoners. Excellent.

I could hear Simon’s sirens come on at the far side of City Road, just as I had managed to turn my Astra around. I half expected a bit of a chase, but the cyclist simply stopped, pulling his bike half up on the pavement to let us pass him. He seemed a little bit confused when we came to a stop next to him.

Kim leapt out of the car and took a firm grip of his bike, before asking the suspect to please wait there. Simon arrived not ten seconds later, and stepped out of the van, along with his operator.

‘Do you know why we’ve stopped you?’ Kim asked.

‘I suspect it is because of my bike,’ he said.

‘That’s correct,’ Kim said. ‘Do you know why, specifically?’

‘I’m guessing because I just took it from the bike shop up the road,’ he said.

‘Did you have permission to take the bike? A test ride, perhaps?’ Kim said.

‘No,’ he said, and I saw Kim start reaching for her handcuffs. ‘It’s my bike, though. It was stolen from me.’

‘Riiii-ight,’ Kim said. ‘Well, we are going to need to figure out exactly what has happened. I’m arresting you for theft; the arrest is necessary in order to assure a prompt and effective investigation. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you don’t mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’

‘Yeah, yeah. But I can explain—’ the man began.

‘Time of arrest is eleven forty-six,’ Kim interrupted, writing the time on the back of her hand with her biro.

Simon tapped my shoulder and beckoned me to step aside for a second.

‘Cells are full, mate. We just had to take someone to Yankee Romeo, and that was the last of their cells, as well. We’ll be taking bodies²⁵ to Essex next,’ he huffed.

Yankee Romeo is the borough code for Lewisham – and it’s nowhere near our own borough. It was no big surprise that cells were full everywhere: many boroughs had been doing a series of raids at the homes of people identified, thanks to CCTV, as having been involved in recent riots across London. However, having to take our prisoner all the way outside the Metropolitan Police area because of full cells would be a royal pain, not least because there was only 15 minutes left of my shift, and a trip to Essex would mean several hours’ overtime. Usually, I’d welcome the overtime for the wage bump it implies, but after my tenth straight 12-hour shift, I’d gladly have paid to be able to go home and sleep for a few … well … days.

‘I don’t really fancy a two-hour round-trip,’ I said. Simon grunted in agreement.

‘Kim,’ I said, ‘can you put the guy in the cage for now? I’m going to try and find out what we need to do with him.’

Kim lead our prisoner to the van’s back doors, as Simon took the bike and put it in the middle section. I reached for my radio.

‘Is there a duty skipper available?’ I asked.

‘Unit calling for duty skipper,’ replied the CAD operator. ‘Please call up Mike Delta eight-eight.’

‘Received,’ I transmitted. ‘Eight-eight receiving five-nine-two’.

‘Eight-eight receiving, go ahead.’

‘Spare please.’

‘Changing,’ the sergeant replied. I changed my radio to the spare channel.

‘Mike Delta five-nine-two receiving.’

‘Hi skip, I’m here. We’ve just arrested a suspected bike thief, but he claims the bike is his.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Well, I was just wondering if it would be okay to take him to the bike shop and see if we can square things up there; I don’t really fancy a trip to Essex.’

‘The clock’s running, Matt,’ the sergeant said, his voice garbled with exhaustion.

Someone later told me that this particular sergeant had recently finished an 18-hour shift, had six hours’ sleep, and gone straight in for another 14 hours. Some of the skippers were completely unstoppable; bloody superheroes, the lot of them. The clock he was referring to is the force target of getting prisoners to custody within an hour of arrest.

‘But yeah, knock yourself out,’ he added. ‘Keep me posted.’

‘Thanks, sarge,’ I said.

‘Out,’ he replied, and vanished from the spare channel.

I walked to the back of the police van.

‘What’s your name, mate?’ I said.

‘It’s Case Jacobs,’ he said.

‘Case?’ I replied. ‘Unusual name, where’s that from?’

‘It’s spelled K-E-E-S,’ he said. ‘I’m from Belgium.’

‘Nice to meet you, Kees,’ I said. ‘Normally, we’d have taken you straight to a police station, but I propose we go talk to the bicycle shop owner first. Is that okay by you?’

‘Of course,’ he said.

‘Good,’ I said, closing the back doors on the caged Transit van, before throwing the keys to the Astra to Kim and climbing into the van through the side door.

Simon and Kim drove the vehicles to the bike shop, whilst I had a quick chat with Kees in the back of the Transit van.

‘So, what happened, then?’

‘I went into the bike shop to buy a new lock, as my last one was cut in half by the thieves, and I saw my bike there! I told the shop owner, but he said it wasn’t my bike and that I couldn’t have it back. So I took it.’

‘How can you know it’s your bike?’ I asked.

‘Look at it!’ he laughed. ‘Have you ever seen a bike like that? I fixed it up myself. There’s no way that’s not my bike. I changed the seat, and I can tell you every detail of every part of that bike.’

Then began a monologue about the various bits and pieces he had used to make it ‘the perfect bike’.

‘It has Shimano XTR components all around, even the chain,’ he said, ‘but I blasted off the markings so thieves wouldn’t see them,’ he said.

I took a closer look at the bike; true enough, every part was gleaming from having been sandblasted, and no markings were visible anywhere.

‘That puts us in a bit of a weird situation, though,’ I said. ‘You say you’ve done it so thieves won’t know that the bike is valuable, right?’

Kees replied with a nod.

‘But that’s a pretty common thing for thieves to do as well, so owners won’t recognise their own bikes …’

We arrived at the bike shop.

‘Hang on here for a second,’ I told Kees. ‘I’m just going to have a chat with the owner.’ I turned to Kim, who’d just finished calling in an update about our situation. ‘Wanna keep our friend company?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, sure,’ she said, and walked to the back of the van, opening one of the doors to give our prisoner some fresh air.

I walked into the bike shop. The owner was there, looking none too pleased.

‘Took you fucking long enough,’ he said.

‘True,’ I said. ‘But we caught the guy.’

The shopkeeper did a double take, then leaned forward and looked at the van. He couldn’t see into it.

‘Seriously?’

‘Yeah, we spotted him as he was cycling along, so we stopped him.’

‘Wow, that’s great!’

‘One little thing, though: he says the bike is his.’

‘Yeah, he told me the same,’ the shopkeeper said. ‘But no … no way. Some kid brought it in the other day to get a flat tyre fixed.’

‘In your opinion,’ I said, ‘is that a valuable bike?’

‘It’s a funny one, actually,’ the shopkeeper said. ‘It’s a pretty standard Cannondale. They’re popular bikes, but it’s a mid-range bike, not usually particularly expensive. This particular one has had just about every component upgraded, though – high-end everything.’

‘Did you do the upgrades for him?’ I asked.

‘Nope,’ he replied. ‘I’ve never seen the bike before.’

‘Is it hard to replace a flat tyre?’ I asked.

‘No! Not at all.’

‘It seems to me that this bike would have been owned by a bike lover, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Yeah, definitely. It came in super-clean. Seems as if the kid really loved his bike, definitely kept it in pristine condition.’

‘So, forgive me if I’m asking a silly question – if someone is a huge bike fan, wouldn’t they just replace their own inner tubes?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, I suppose so. But people are weird, y’know,’ he shrugged.

‘I don’t suppose you have CCTV, do you?’

‘Are you joking? We’re CCTV’d to the rafters. I’ve got several bikes in here that are worth thousands and thousands of pounds; no way would I not have CCTV,’ he said. ‘In fact, I already took a look at the footage of the guy who brought the bike in, and of the fellow who nicked it.’

‘Can I have a look?’ I asked.

‘Sure,’ he replied, and waved me to the back of the shop.

It took me all of six seconds of the first video to recognise the lad who had brought the bike in for repair.

‘I’ve got some bad news for you,’ I said. ‘That’s Tommy, he’s a drug addict and a notorious bike thief around here.’

‘Seriously?’ the owner said. ‘I’ve seen him around the shop several times. He’s never stolen anything,’ he added, before pausing for several seconds. ‘I don’t think …’

‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ I added. ‘I haven’t heard of him getting nicked for a good while, perhaps he’s taken the straight and narrow …’

The shop owner shrugged and queued up the next video.

‘Here you go,’ he said. ‘The guy had a funny accent. German or something. He came in to buy a lock, but then he spotted the bike …’

The video didn’t have sound, but it was unusually clear for CCTV. Surprisingly so, in fact. A lot of the CCTV footage we see is utterly useless, and some of it looks like it has been scrambled to hell and back, as if the entire file has been run through the blocking-out filter they apply to genitalia in Japanese pornography. Not that I would know what that looks like, of course.

In the video, I could clearly see Kees getting more and more aggravated. At one point, he simply takes the bike out of the rack, rips off a label that was zip-tied to the seat and starts pushing the bike towards the doors. The shop owner quickly blocks his way, but Kees runs his bike into the owner, before taking a swing at him with the lock he is holding in his hand.

‘Stop there for a moment,’ I said, and took a closer look at the shopkeeper. ‘Did he hit you with the lock?’ I asked him, looking at his face carefully.

‘Yeah. He didn’t hit me properly, though. That would have hurt,’ he replied, as he lifted his hand to his face, rubbing his chin.

‘Your eye still looks a bit swollen,’ I said, thoughtfully.

‘Yeah, well, I’ve had worse,’ the shopkeeper said grimly. I looked at him, waiting for the rest of the story.

‘Rugby,’ he said, and grinned.

I smiled back.

‘Hah, yeah, that makes sense,’ I said. ‘Would you excuse me for a moment?’

I went back to the van.

‘Kees, do you have any receipts or anything for the bike?’ I asked.

‘Do you have an iPhone?’ he replied.

‘What for?’ I asked, confused.

‘I love my bike,’ he replied, ‘and I’ve kept a blog of all the work I’ve done on it. The website I keep for my bike has all the receipts on it as well,’ he said.

‘Well, damn …’ I said.

‘I’ve run the bike through the box,’ Kim said. ‘It was reported stolen six days ago, by Kees here, and the serial number of the bike matches up with the police report. Also, when he filed his report, he showed the original purchase receipt of the bike, which matched the serial number as well.’

‘Oh,’ said Kees, ‘and if you still doubt it, take the seat stem out of the bike’.

I walked around to the bike, unlocked the quick-release clasp, and took the seat off the bike. It looked pretty normal to me.

‘What am I looking for here?’ I asked.

‘Look inside,’ Kees said.

I felt around the bottom of the seat stem with my finger, and found something. I took it out and took a look. It was a piece of laminated paper that read: ‘Property of Kees Jacobs’, with a telephone number.

‘It’s a normal thing to do in Belgium,’ Kees said, with a shrug.

‘Hang on a sec,’ I said, and went back to the bike shop.

‘I’m starting to believe that the bike belongs to the “thief”,’ I told the shopkeeper. ‘He reported it stolen six days ago. When did the lad drop it off to have the tyre fixed?’

The shopkeeper picked up the piece of paper that Kees had torn off the bike, and read it.

‘Six days ago,’ he said.

‘So it seems as if someone stole the bike whilst the riots were raging, and Tommy dropped it off at your shop to get the tyre fixed soon after,’ I said.

‘Well … Fuck,’ the proprietor contributed, summarising the culmination of our predicament perfectly.

‘Yeah,’ I agreed.

‘We’ll take the bike to the station, as it’s stolen property. The owner can come and claim it when they produce their receipt,’ I said.

‘I bloody hate bike thieves,’ he said.

‘Yeah, I imagine you must do,’ I replied. I paused, and looked at the shopkeeper for a few moments. His eye had swollen even further. The words ‘Crikey, that’s gonna hurt in the mornin’, son’ from that annoying Fosters advert echoed around in my head.

‘That leaves only one thing,’ I said. ‘The bike owner assaulted you. We have all the evidence we need to prosecute him, I think. All we need is your video footage, and a statement …’

‘Ah,’ the shopkeeper said, rubbing the side of his head. ‘You’re positive he’s not a bike thief?’

‘You can never be sure,’ I said. ‘But he does seem to have all the receipts to back up his claims. He bought most of the parts off eBay and put the whole bike together himself. He showed me a blog of the work in progress; it looks like it all checks out.’

‘Can I talk to him?’ he asked.

I hesitated.

‘Not really, to be honest. If we’re going to charge him, we need to interview him at the police station.’

‘Can I go stand by your van and just think out loud for a bit, then?’ he asked, with a conspiratory smile on his face.

‘Do you have a bathroom?’ I asked.

‘I do,’ he said, pointing with his thumb towards a door in the corner of his workshop.

‘I’m going to go use the loo, then, if you don’t mind. What you do whilst I’m gone is up to you, really,’ I said, and walked to the bathroom.

When I came back out, the shopkeeper was standing next to the van, laughing with Kim.

Kim came up to me.

‘The shopkeeper is refusing to make a statement about the assault, and says that he may have “accidentally” deleted the footage of it,’ she said. ‘What should we do?’

‘Well, if there’s no evidence of an assault, no allegations of any sort …’ I said, adding: ‘Obviously, Kees can’t have stolen his own bike.’

Kim let our suspect out of the caged van but kept him in handcuffs.

‘So, just to confirm, I’ve written here: “I, Dan Smith, proprietor of the Bike Shack on seventy-three Main Street, confirm that I do not allege any crimes in connection with my 999 call. CAD eight-seven-four-nine refers”. If that sounds accurate, all you need to do is to sign here, and we’ll be out of your hair,’ I said.

‘Yeah, no worries. Turns out Kees and I have friends in common, and to be honest, I’d punch anyone who got in the way of stealing my pride and joy as well,’ he said, laughing.

‘Just for future reference,’ I said, ‘I probably wouldn’t say that to a police officer if I were you. What he should have done is to dial 999 himself; that would have solved the whole incident without anyone getting any black eyes.’

‘Yeah, of course. Of course,’ the shopkeeper said, as he signed and dated my pocketbook. ‘Keep up the good work, officer!’ he added, and walked off.

‘Get some ice on that eye,’ I called after him. He raised a hand and waved a thank you, as he strolled back to his shop. I doubted he would actually bother with the ice.

‘Kees,’ I said, turning to the young man, who was leant against the police van, flirting with Kim.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘We’ve got a bit of a problem,’ I said. ‘The shopkeeper showed me some CCTV footage of what happened in the shop. You took a swing at him with a bike lock and hit him across the face.’

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