A blonde woman pulled back the curtain. She was holding a crying baby and looked frazzled. She waved at us, indicating she would come to the door.
When she clicked off the latch and pulled the door open, my radio burst alive. ‘Ash, have you told that woman her husband’s dead?’
Not the way to deliver a death message.
If someone says don’t look, you automatically get the urge to do just that, especially when it’s a mangled car wreck.
There was a fatal accident at the bottom of a very busy junction, on the corner where a street market began. Shops and a pub and a betting shop lined the parade. One of those heavy super-armoured vans that are used to convey money had taken out a blue Volvo estate.
I was instructed to make sure nobody went past the police tape. After six hours, I was weary.
‘But I live down there!’ said an old man.
‘Sorry. You’ll have to wait,’ I said.
‘I only want to go a hundred yards,’ said a man with a dog.
‘Sorry. You’ll have to wait.’
A woman with shopping bags approached. ‘I have to collect something before the supermarket shuts.’
‘Sorry. You’ll have to wait.’
And so it carried on. I deflected all the pleas and fended off those who’d come to gawp. It was tricky as the van was laden with cash and it had to be gathered up and accounted for.
An irate woman approached and wouldn’t accept that she wasn’t going through. She was insistent, persistent and annoying.
My legs were aching, I was desperate for the loo, the forensic examination would be another few hours, and the PC assigned to take over from me hadn’t turned up. I was grumpy and I wanted to go home.
‘I don’t care if you’re the Queen of England, you ain’t going down that road!’ I rationalised it was human nature to lose it, all things considered. ‘A man has been killed in that car this afternoon.’
She dropped her handbag and fell to the floor. She screamed and held her head in her hands and howled, oh how she howled.
I shouldn’t have spoken to her like that. It was no excuse that I hadn’t known it was her husband’s car. I had just delivered the cruellest of death messages.
They called us the Gruesome Twosome, my future husband and I. I suppose that’s why we paired up. It put everyone else off. Whenever we were posted together, we ended up with a cartload of bodies, often the arrested kind but frequently the dead.
Kenny was one of those policemen who knew everyone and everything, with a mind like an encyclopaedia. Or the internet, had we had such a thing when I was a lass. He was a walking intelligence unit. People would ring him at home for a snippet of information because Kenny always knew everything about everything.
Kenny was married when I first met him. He was quite a few years older than me and far more mature. I was a young girl. A slip of a thing, as people used to say. He was attractive, I supposed, but I never looked at him in that way. There was never any suggestion of us getting together. He was happily married and I knew his wife. I always thought he’d make a great dad because he was so good with us probationers, as well as everyone else. He was the sort of policeman that you’d want with you when your back was up against it or you were knee deep in the cack. And he could talk his way out of most situations, too. People responded to him well. Perhaps it was that good old cockney way of his that he had honed to perfection. And I don’t mean the likes of those you find on EastEnders. He was just an all-round good guy who treated people decently, whoever or whatever they were.
The first dead body we dealt with together was an old man, Mr George Chapman. He’d sat down in front of his television and died, his dog by his side. A neighbour who could see the man in his basement flat noticed he hadn’t moved in between the hours of him going to work and coming back. The neighbour had a key but called the police before using it.
I was on foot patrol on my own and given the job. When I arrived, the neighbour let us into the flat. I naively said him, ‘Have you seen a dead body before?
‘I was in the war, love. I’ve seen my fair share, don’t worry,’ he said, with a wink.
I felt stupid but it was a lesson learned and although I’d already dealt with a few sudden deaths I was disconcerted to see Mr Chapman sitting there with his eyes half open, seeming to look at me wherever I moved in the room.
I called all the people I needed to call and I took a statement from the neighbour. Then I called for a unit to come and collect the dog. He’d have to go into kennels until we found the next of kin of Mr Chapman.
Kenny came to the rescue. He’d been posted to a panda and agreed to pick up the pet. ‘Don’t forget to search the house, Ash. Old people are notorious for stashing money away. The local burglars get wind he’s died, they’ll be in looking for it.’
I knew old folk did that because my granddad had done the same. Kenny left with the dog. I waited for the doctor and the undertaker to come and set about searching the bedroom, away from the half-open eyes. First stop, the bed. Cliché, yes, but there it was: a stash of fivers and ten-pound notes. I gulped. I collected it all up and looked in the bedside cabinet drawer. Apart from some loose change there was nothing of note. Then I looked in the wardrobe. It was one of those old-fashioned polished wood, curve-fronted pieces of furniture that were beautifully designed but out of favour. Just like the one my granddad had. On the shelf with the pile of old underwear was an envelope containing fivers. I checked the pockets of all the jackets and found more money. I called Kenny on the radio.
‘When you’ve got a minute could you come back please?’ I asked. ‘And bring some property bags.’
‘Aah,’ he said. ‘You’ve found what I was talking about then?’
‘Umm. Just a bit.’
Kenny took it all in his stride. He checked the places I’d checked and then we searched some more. We counted it all up and it came to a few thousand quid.
‘The neighbour who called it in can witness we’ve taken it. Any luck with next of kin?’
‘I’ve got an address book. The neighbour said Mr Chapman had a couple of nieces who sometimes visit but he doesn’t know where they live. I thought I’d ring some of the numbers in his book when I got back to the nick.’
‘Good thinking,’ said Kenny. He went off to get the neighbour while I transferred all the money to the kitchen table.
We counted £3,225, all in ten- and five-pound notes. We counted it twice. The neighbour acted as a witness and counted it with us. He signed our notebooks to agree it was correct.
On the way back to the station with the money all signed and sealed up, Kenny joked, ‘They’ll have to strip-search us you know. Check we haven’t stolen any.’
I believed him. At first, anyway. He was a joker!
We booked it into Property and the station sergeant came to countersign it. He ripped open the seal and counted out the money. He counted it again. Then again. It was £100 short. What? How? I felt my insides go cold and I felt a little bit sick. I knew I hadn’t taken any. I was confident Kenny hadn’t either. I also doubted the neighbour had. So how?
Kenny checked the adding up on the original notebook entry. We’d