Knocking on… Well, a door, of course.

“Eight-six receiving Mike Delta”, my radio murmurs into life quietly. I turn the volume up. Today, I’m running the Misper car, the oh-so-joyous task of looking for missing persons who rarely are missing (and occasionally aren’t even persons*) had taken me into a care home, where the lady who was reporting somebody missing had been utterly aghast by the fact that the CAD operator kept rudely interrupting our conversation. It took me the best part of a cup of tea to explain that the operator wasn’t speaking to me specifically, but instead to all officers.

The Password

“Mike Delta 592 receiving Mike Delta” my radio encroaches on my rather pleasant chat with Kim in the cafeteria.

Kim is a police constable. She is also married, and I really shouldn’t be talking to her at the moment; she’s going through a tough time with her husband, who used to be a custody skipper on the borough. Due to the Olympics, however, and as it’s causing an additional demand for AFOs (Authorised Firearms Officers), he was lured back to the gun-carrying elite of the Metropolitan Police, and has subsequently been doing a lot of training to get his firearms certificate back in good standing. Kim has been confiding in me about her suspicions of her husband having found someone on the sly, and I’m having to bite my tongue about the indecent fantasies I’ve been having about her for several years now. I’m recently (I say recently… It happened about six months ago) out of a relationship myself, and have been going through a bit of a romantic dry spell. It’s very hard not to offer to take Kim out for a drink or six and see where that takes us, but…

An Eviction

Pete and I were standing outside a block of towards the north end of the borough. Our destination was on the eleventh floor, but sod’s law struck gold, and of course the lifts were out of order. We started the long climb.

I started whistling a song, but noticed that Pete didn’t join in – quite unusual, for him.

“What’s wrong, mate, you’re awfully quiet today.” I asked.

“I had a dog of a shift yesterday.” he said.

“That bad, huh?”

“Yeah, I couldn’t sleep, to be honest. I’m knackered.”

“Bloody hell. What happened?”

“Mate, it was grim.”

“Go on…”

Sudden Death

“Elementary, my dear Watson”, I said, jokingly. “Clearly, nobody killed the poor sod, so whatever he died of, it’s probably nothing criminal. Best had get him ready for the coroner though, eh?”

January is a dreadful time to be on foot patrol, but due almost exclusively to my own daft stupidity, my Ticket had expired. The ticket is my police driving licence – you need your own driving licence as well, of course, but in order to be allowed to drive any patrol car, you have to special driving licence. To get your licence, you do a course, a theoretical exam, and a practical exam.

Police driving licences come in different levels, starting at ‘level 4′, which is the boring ticket that allows you to drive from somewhere to somewhere else, but not on blues and twos. 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. It happened to me only once when I was on the basic ticket, and I felt pretty daft having to let the guy drive off. Of course, with London being London, we had a helicopter in the air; they followed him to a petrol station, where I was able to go and arrest them. Turns out they had a sizeable amount of drugs in the car. “Sorry, I didn’t see you officer.” Nice touch. Anyway, there are dozens of different courses you can take. Personally, I have my solo ticket (that’s for riding police motorbikes), and my advanced driving course. That one is rather interesting, and includes all sorts of high-speed pursuit stuff. It’s a shame, then, that our end of the borough has 40 mph limits – or less – everywhere, so you never get to open the cars up properly.