Police, Arrests & Suspects Page 18

  It was three flights up before we saw the open window on the landing. A door to one of the adjacent apartments was slowly closing. That was all the evidence I needed. A good kick and the door swung open, crashing into the wall. The man inside looked back at me wide-eyed – a startled rabbit, panicking and desperately looking for somewhere to run to.

  Before I knew it he had charged at me, his head crashing into my stomach. He caught me off balance and sent me reeling backwards into my colleague, resulting in us both toppling back against the safety railings before sprawling out onto the landing. Like a shot, my assailant was up and back in his flat, slamming the door. My initial kick must have knocked the door slightly off its hinges as he was struggling to fully close it. Hearing him fumbling with the safety chain on the other side, it was now my colleague’s turn to do the honours. Now back on her feet, Jess leant back against the railings for leverage before raising her right leg to smash the flat of her boot at full force into the wooden door, sending it flying open and ploughing into the suspect’s face – his nose splattering in an explosion of blood and gristle. He staggered backwards into the room. If this had been a cartoon, we’d have heard tweeting noises and seen stars floating around his head. However, he wasn’t finished yet; his eyes darted around the room, searching for anything he could use as a weapon. A split second later, he had snatched a bottle off a low table and held it menacingly in his hand, raised and ready to smash down on anyone who dared approach him. A tense stand-off ensued as we each quickly weighed up our options.

  We stood in the doorway – me with my pepper spray poised and pointed at his face, Jess with her baton drawn, held above her right shoulder.

  Our suspect remained in the lounge, clearly ready for a fight; the neck of the bottle still grasped firmly in his hand. Next to him was a table littered with glass bottles of various sizes and different alcohol content; all of which could be used as makeshift weapons.

  We were at an impasse. We could spray him with the irritant and rush at him, but, even if it blinded him, he could still swing wildly with the bottle, smashing either me or my colleague across the skull. Alternatively, he could charge us again and, although we could eventually overpower him, he’d almost certainly cause us injury as he went down. But if Jess and I waited too long, it would give him the opportunity to scan the room for further potential weapons; and if he retreated into the kitchen, he’d have a veritable arsenal to choose from. If we withdrew, there was the possibility he might barricade himself in the room and then we would have to wait for negotiators and Uncle Tom Cobley to arrive.

  “Listen, you’re trapped in your flat,” I told him. “There are police everywhere. You’re going to be coming with us – one way or another. You can put up a struggle and get carried out, or you can give up now and at least leave with a little dignity. What’s it going to be?”

  It’s solely down to the offender which choice he makes: whether he is physically carried out kicking and screaming by three or four officers, bloody and bruised, eyes watering and nose running from the effects of pepper spray, hands cuffed and legs bound with restraints, or else he calmly walks out to the waiting police vehicle; either way, the end result is the same.

  He stared defiantly back at me. It was the first chance I’d had to get a clear look at him. He was in his late twenties, six-foot tall but thin and wiry. One of his fists was tightly clenched, the whites of his knuckles showing, while the other still firmly grasped the bottle. He was baring his teeth at us. He was a perfect anthropological study: the archetypal angry young man.

  “Well, what’s it going to be?”

  I got my answer when the bottle came flying through the air and smashed against the door frame above our heads, showering us with lager and shards of glass. Just as quickly, he grabbed another bottle and threw it. We ducked as it flew past our heads and exploded on the landing. Reaching out for a third, Jessica dived through the room in time to bring her baton down on his outstretched hand as it hovered over the table. As it made contact, all I heard was a sickening crunch followed by a piercing scream.

  He instinctively recoiled, bringing his hand into his chest, whilst shielding it with the other. He began to whimper, tears filling his eyes and rolling down his cheeks to mix with the blood from his shattered nose. Collapsing to his knees, he started to rock back and forth as a dark patch on his light grey jogging bottoms grew larger; a sure sign that he had wet himself.

  “I’d like to go out with a little dignity,” he informed me between sniffles.

  I told him that was a sensible choice, although in all honesty and judging by the state of him, that ship had definitely already sailed.

  I glanced down at Jess who had slipped on the wet floor during her heroic lunge.

  “I didn’t know you could do the splits.”

  “Neither did I,” she replied uncomfortably, whilst struggling to her feet using the table and my belt to assist her. She allowed herself a minute to regain her composure before eventually getting her cuffs out and applying them to our bottle thrower. As we led him down the stairs, we met Gwen and Andy, who had custody of the handcuffed and pensive-looking occupants of the flat below. The woman, who celebrated the fuller figure, appeared to be in her early forties. She had a shaven head and the customary homemade ink dots on her face and each knuckle, as well as some additional artwork that could easily have graced a heavy-metal album cover. Evidently, she was keen to show off all her other tattoos – her red vest top and shorts hiding little. Her husband looked almost identical, but without the huge breasts.

  “Alright, Donna?” our prisoner mumbled as we passed them on the landing, “Alright, Phil?”

  “Alright, Ralph?” she replied sotto voce, whilst her partner merely grunted a reply. “You finished with the hoover we loaned you?” she added as an afterthought as we started down the next set of stairs.

  “I was bringing it back when I got a bit distracted,” he muttered, looking back over his shoulder. I felt him tug on the cuffs as he quickened his pace in a bid to get out of earshot before she had the chance to ask him to elaborate.

  “Oh, it’s you!” the woman called cheerily as we began our descent. “Evening, PC Donoghue. I’m glad you’re here!” I looked back to see her trying desperately to get my attention.

  “We’re old friends,” she added by way of explanation to my colleagues who were now looking on, rather surprised at the enthusiastic level of her greeting on seeing me.

  “Not really friends,” I corrected her, in an attempt to downplay the whole affair. “I locked you up once. It’s really not the same thing.”

  I had actually arrested Donna at the start of the summer holidays for being drunk and disorderly. Early one Friday evening, a shy, well-dressed young woman had dashed into the local Tesco to make a last-minute purchase. Perhaps the vicar was calling round to her house and she needed to make some delicate triangular sandwiches, or maybe she fancied an alternative slice for her G&T; whatever the reason, she bought a cucumber.

  Unfortunately, outside the shop was a drunken Donna Shanks who, on seeing her walk out with the fruit (yes, it is actually a fruit), had proceeded to bombard the poor woman with a string of loud innuendos, declaring to shocked onlookers that they should be more than a little nervous if they were served a salad in this lady’s home. The young woman had clearly felt intimidated and was visibly mortified. Just as she was looking as though she wanted the ground to open up and swallow her, a knight in shining armour came to her aid or, to be more precise, I arrived on the scene. I had ordered Donna to leave the woman alone, to stop her crude remarks and go home. Instead, however, Donna had told me to ‘go fuck myself’ before trying to take a swing at me. So, not really a friend of mine at all.

  “I’m only going to talk to PC Donoghue,” she informed my colleagues loudly as we all stood on the landing of the flats. As I let out a sigh, Gwen and Andy smiled broadly. In case you are wondering, being the ‘only person they’ll speak to’ doesn’t actually carry any kudos
at all – far from it, as it usually means that you’re the one who is saddled with putting together the entire arrest package. I half wondered if Andy had put her up to it… but, before I could inform her that both these other officers were also excellent listeners, she was off again:

  “You know me, PC Donoghue, if I’m in the wrong, I’ll admit it.” True: she had confessed to haranguing the poor Cucumber Girl, but that was probably only because she had thought she was the wittiest thing since Dorothy Parker. “Well, I’ve done nowt wrong today – it was her downstairs who started it!”

  While Jess led our prisoner outside, I asked Donna what it was she wanted to tell me, thereby reluctantly taking over the mantle as the officer in charge. It had been absolute pandemonium when we had arrived, and I hadn’t the faintest idea what had caused it. I had been happy to remain blissfully ignorant when I was just backing up my colleagues, but now that I had unwittingly become the OIC, I needed a clear handle on the situation.

  “Well,” she continued with more than a glint of madness in her eyes, “after what she said to me, I swung at the bitch, but the coward ran back into her flat! I was up for a one-to-one fight, but she weren’t having none of it!”

  I’m not sure where in any sane world this could be classified as ‘doing nowt wrong’, but I let her continue. She had become quite animated as she acted out the scenario, swinging her arms about as far as the handcuffs would allow. “Well, I kicked the door in and wellied the fuck out of her! I managed to get a good few uppercuts in, too, before the rest of them laid into me!”

  “Excuse me, Officer,” her husband politely interrupted. “You don’t mind if I give my wife some legal advice, do you?”

  “Certainly,” I replied. “Go ahead.”

  He slowly turned to face his partner. “SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

  Turning back to me, he thanked me for my consideration. My colleagues then led the couple out to the waiting vehicles for onward transportation to the cells.

  As I made my way down the steps, avoiding the debris in my path, I surveyed the scene around me: every single window in the stairwell was smashed; doors had been kicked in; fixtures and fittings broken; weapons, which included knives, pickaxe handles and baseball bats, were lying discarded on the ground, either hastily thrown away when officers arrived or else forcibly taken from the assailants with the aid of our own batons. Now that the last of the protagonists had been removed, the whole place seemed eerily silent.

  The door of the ground-floor flat was hanging off its hinges and so I quickly glanced inside. As I entered, a greyhound that was sitting on the sofa casually looked up and then went back to eating its owner’s pizza. Well, I guess it was better than it going to waste. I went over and patted him on the head, telling him that he was a good boy, before pulling the front door shut as best I could and leaving.

  I still had no clear idea of what had happened. All I did know so far was that we had five people in custody, a further two who were under arrest and on their way to hospital, and we had a crime scene of utter carnage.

  Back at the station, the interviews weren’t throwing much light on the affair either. The gentleman who had given his wife his expert legal opinion now followed his own advice and stated: ‘No comment’ to every single question I asked him; or, in other words, he offered up no defence at all. In reality, this tactic is not actually the clever move that most criminals seem to think it is. As I led him back to his cell, he asked me if I’d get him a cup of tea.

  “No comment,” I replied.

  I did actually make him one – milk with two sugars, just in case you were wondering. Police have to play to a different set of rules.

  When interviewing the teenager from the fourth-floor flat, I asked him if he had understood the caution. He looked at me blankly.

  “Do you understand what lying is?” I continued, in a bid to clarify his level of understanding.

  “Yes. It’s like when you ask me if I was involved in the fight and I say no.”

  “That’s right. Were you involved in the fight?”

  “No.”

  “So, are you lying now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know the difference between right and wrong?”

  “Wrong is the fun one.”

  “So, is what you did right, or wrong?”

  “Yes. Errr… I mean no. No, I mean yes.” His decision-making powers seemed to resemble that of a squirrel deciding whether or not to cross the road.

  A third stated: “I didn’t do anything, but, if I did, I was drunk.”

  “I’ll mark you down as a ‘yes, I was involved in the mass brawl’, then?”

  “Yeah, suppose so.”

  The fourth prisoner complained that he had just come out of his flat to see what was going on because he had heard a commotion, and was shocked to have been arrested. He claimed that he only had the kitchen knife in his hand on the off-chance that someone might have had some cake. I raised my eyebrows at his solicitor as if to ask if that was really the best explanation his client could come up with, but he just shrugged and gave me a look as if to say that he would get paid, regardless of the outcome.

  Meanwhile, Ralph, the guy who had dropped the hoover out of the window, maintained that he hadn’t realised that there was a fight ongoing, and that he had simply been attempting to empty the dust bag when it had slipped out of his hands. He’d had a few hours in the cells to ponder over his predicament, and it was clear that he was now having regrets about his rash behaviour – in more ways than one: he began enquiring about the people at the bottom of the block of flats who had been showered with the dirt and debris.

  “They were taken to hospital,” I explained to him, “but they’re picking up nicely now… which is more than I can say for Donna’s hoover.”

  He suddenly became very pale, the colour draining from his face. I think he was far more worried about what his neighbour, Donna Shanks, was going to do to him when she found out, rather than any punishment we could give him.

  The two prisoners who had been taken to hospital had now returned and were being questioned over their version of events.

  ‘Her downstairs’, who had allegedly made the offensive comment to Donna, and had been covered in hoover dust whilst being treated by Geezer, was next to be interviewed. It was plain to see that she had been on the receiving end of a beating, but she was unwilling to tell me much about it. She did, however, let it slip that Donna had knocked on her door and demanded to be let in.

  “So when she told you to open up, what did you say?”

  “I told her that my parents never loved me and that I have a whole range of daddy issues.”

  I detected more than a hint of sarcasm in her reply. She then showed me her middle finger and flopped back in her chair with her arms folded across her chest, signalling that this was the end of our little chat.

  Her partner was in next. He had also been to the hospital where he had been treated for a head injury. From the outset, though, I had the feeling that I wasn’t going to get much sense out of him either: when someone starts moaning in faux sexual ecstasy when you’re searching them in the custody suite, it’s a pretty good indication that they’re not taking the whole procedure at all seriously. It was also pretty disconcerting for me!

  In interview, he categorically denied being in the block of flats even though we had clearly found and arrested him there. He told me he was offended by the accusation that he had been present, to which I then replied that I was offended at how easily offended he was. I reminded him that we had found him in the flats with a head injury, had taken him to casualty in cuffs, that an officer had been present with him for the entire duration of his hospital stay and that we had brought him back to the cells in those same cuffs. Undaunted by the facts I had just put before him, he maintained his story that it was all a case of mistaken identity. He told me that we’d have to agree to disagree, I informed him that I didn’t agree to that. In hindsight, I don’t think we really bonded that w
ell.

  It was eventually left to Donna to furnish me with the details. And furnish me she did, as only someone who is convinced that they are in the right can. When she had finished unburdening herself, it became apparent that the instigator in all this – the individual responsible for sparking off the whole debacle – was still at large. In fact, officers had walked straight past him when they had first raced into the block. It appears that I had even spoken to him but had failed to act; instead, I had just left him snacking on stolen pizza. Yes, it seems that the main offender in all of this violence and mayhem, the one responsible for the arrest of every resident in an entire block of flats including the two that had to be taken to Accident & Emergency, was the greyhound!

  The canine, it transpired, belonged to the woman downstairs. When Donna, who lived upstairs, had come home that evening, she was understandably upset to almost skid in one of the dog’s deposits that had been inconveniently left on the communal landing. Outranged and disgusted, Donna had gone down and banged on the door of ‘her downstairs’ and demanded that she clear up the mess. In all fairness, the woman had complied and, following some verbal haranguing, had picked up the poo with her bare hands. However, a brown watery stain remained on the lino… and when ‘her downstairs’ had asked if she could borrow a cloth to clean up the mark, that’s when the fun and games had really started.

  “You want to borrow MY cloth to clean up YOUR dog’s shit juice?” came the shocked reply.

  “Well, if you don’t mind.”

  “IF I DON’T FUCKING MIND!”

  Donna had flown into an apoplectic rage, grabbing the baseball bat that she keeps behind the door (in case anyone unexpectedly throws a ball at her, Your Honour) and swinging it at the woman before chasing her down the stairs. The woman had taken refuge in her flat but Donna had once again banged on the door, only this time it was to demand that she came out and fight her. When she refused, Donna stated that she had then kicked the door in and, to coin a phrase, ‘wellied the fuck out of her’.