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