Peter Helton - Falling More Slowly

‘I’m glad to have been of some small service to you, DS Sorbie.’ McLusky walked past him on his way to the tea kettle.

‘Ah, ehm, sorry, sir, didn’t see you there.’ Sorbie sat down heavily at his desk and busied himself with logging on.

McLusky took his time making himself a mug of instant coffee, leaving Sorbie to squirm in the ensuing silence. Secretly he had to agree with the sergeant’s assessment. In terms of his own investigation the car park CCTV had been of no help at all. Yet the prodigious number of man-hours spent marrying faces to number plates from the endless footage had resulted in no fewer than three arrests of known criminals. The hapless suspects hadn’t counted on police officers looking at the footage, which only ever attracted police attention if an incident occurred. Once they had been recognized and their number plates read it had only been a matter of time until they were picked up. Two had been outstanding warrants in Fairfield and Sorbie’s open files. A third was a missed court appearance who had been scooped up because an officer spotted a 2002 number plate on a 2003 car. That man too was now in custody.

McLusky thought he could hear the CID room breathe out collectively behind him as he left carrying his mug of coffee. He hadn’t really meant to pour cold water on Sorbie’s celebration; there was never quite enough to celebrate for police officers as it was, and the sergeant had made good use of the footage and followed up well. Only there was something about DS Sorbie that made McLusky suspect that he probably deserved the odd bucket of cold water occasionally. He would mention Sorbie’s good work in his report while not forgetting to point out that only the footage watched by police officers had yielded fortuitous results. Those worked on by civilian operators had drawn a blank since they were unfamiliar with the faces of the suspects.

Perhaps he should have mentioned to Sorbie though that he thought smelling of quite so much booze after lunch was never a good idea in a nick where the superintendent had a habit of prowling about.

Two hours later Sorbie viewed his dispiriting surroundings through the metallic pulse of a dehydration headache; Nelson Close was an unheroic huddle of three dozen prefabs, a third of them with their flimsy backs to a ghostly road that once serviced a now derelict industrial estate. The council ought to have bulldozed them years ago only some of these poor deluded people refused to be rehoused into nice new high-rise flats with a view. They liked their ‘bit of garden’ and didn’t want to move. The council had lost their court case against them and now they had to wait for the tenants to die off before they could develop the site along with the rest of the area.

He burped acidly. His stomach had turned sour after all that cider he had gulped earlier. Kicking about impatiently at a mouldering cardboard box in one of the empty plots he looked about for a place to relieve himself. He just couldn’t bring himself to ask one of these weirdos for permission to use their toilet. Only a dozen of the creepy little bungalows were still being lived in, if you could call this living. The rest did service for target practice by passing kids. The ones that were inhabited were being broken into one by one, three so far. The empty ones had now been boarded up to try and keep the junkies out.

Behind him he could hear Kat doing her ‘reassuring the public’ bit with two wrinklies, probably a lot better than he could himself, he had to admit. But then women were always going to be better at that kind of thing. What a dump this was. It had probably been all right fifty years ago but even then these flimsy things must have been freezing in winter and roasting in summer. And anyone in possession of a tin opener could break in. Pathetic.

DI Fairfield said her goodbyes to the old couple and soon joined him with her clipboard. ‘You didn’t spend a lot of time with your lot, did you?’

‘Well, there isn’t really all that much to say, is there? If you live in a stupid place like this it’s no wonder you get broken into.’

‘You didn’t tell them that, did you?’

‘Not in so many words, though I did point out that if they don’t have locks on their windows then they might as well leave them open. Same thing to a burglar.’ Sorbie rubbed his unruly stomach, which was churning. ‘I’ve never been any good at this stuff, not when I was in uniform and not now. And this is definitely a uniform job.’

‘I know. They’ve been round too.’ Fairfield sniffed the air and didn’t look at all put out. The sun was going in and out of the clouds, beginning to burn away the greyness that had hung around her mind all winter. When she first joined the force she’d never imagined it would mean spending so much time sitting indoors hammering on keyboards, filling in forms, chasing targets, following initiatives. She much preferred being outside, talking to people away from neon lights and computer screens. She should move away from the city, get a job in a little seaside town … it would take forever to make DCI. ‘You know exactly why we’re here.’

‘Yes, so Denkhaus doesn’t get his gold stars tarnished.’

‘It’s politics, Jack. People need to see that we take this seriously, that’s why the ACC wants us to show our faces. To reassure people. We’ll have one more chat before we go. That chap standing in the door, last-but-one house.’ Fairfield cheerfully waved at a man in his sixties standing in his front door. He didn’t wave back. ‘That’s the last of the inhabited ones. It’s vulnerable that one, it’s the last-but-one, has empty houses on either side and it backs on to the old service road. He hasn’t been burgled yet, perhaps we can convince him to get some security. This is all about perception of crime anyway, not actual crime. Denkhaus doesn’t want another newspaper crusade over this one. Or more suggestions that we’re not protecting these people because the city wants them to pack up and go. Of course the fact that these prefabs are isolated and full of old folks was publicized by the stupid papers in the first place.’

The morose expression of the man didn’t change when Fairfield showed her ID and introduced DS Sorbie. ‘Caught them yet?’ He snorted dismissively before Fairfield could draw breath to answer. ‘Thought not. According to your own statistics it isn’t likely you ever will. And if you do, the courts will let them off with a slap on the wrist so they can go and do it again.’

‘Not quite, Mr …’ She looked down her list.

‘Cooke.’

‘Mr Cooke. We have been quite successful in driving down the rate of burglaries in the city. One of the ways in which householders themselves can help of course is by fitting locks and shutters to windows. Has anyone spoken to you about that yet?’

‘They have. I told them what I’m telling you now: fitting window locks won’t make a blind bit of difference to the criminals. They just go somewhere else. Do you think they’ll go, “Oh dear, window locks, well, I’d better go straight then and get a respectable job”? Rubbish! It won’t stop a professional housebreaker and it’ll just make the drug addict try next door. You don’t stop criminals with locks on your windows, you stop them with locks on their cells. And by keeping them locked up.’

‘There might be something in that, Mr Cooke. In the meantime I hope you’re not making it easy for them.’ She looked down the sad cul-de-sac. One more boarded-up house separated Mr Cooke from a derelict and overgrown site where a brickworks had been demolished. She certainly wouldn’t feel safe living here.

‘Making it easy? It’s the council who are making it easy for them. The burglars and the kids who throw empty beer bottles at our houses and the drug addicts who leave their needles lying about, they all come down the service road. Then they come through the fence. We’ve asked the council to put in a decent fence several times but they’d rather wait until we’ve all been robbed blind or brained by a flying bottle.’