Matt Delito - Confessions of a Police Constable

‘He smash the car! He smash the car!’ the man shouted in a Turkish accent. He was walking briskly, gesticulating wildly. I took another look at the Volvo. It could have done with a wash, for sure, but all the windows seemed to be intact, and I couldn’t see any obvious damage.

‘What did he do?’ I asked the man, as I gave him a once-over. He was wearing a pair of tracksuit bottoms, a food-stained T-shirt and the air of someone who had just rolled out of bed.

‘He smash the car!’ he said again.

I glanced back and forth at my colleagues. We deal with traffic collisions on a daily basis. We have seen a lot of smashed cars in our time.

This, I concluded, was not a smashed car.

‘In June! He smash the car!’

‘What exactly did you tell the people when you called 999?’ I asked him, as it dawned on me what was going on.

‘I say he smash the car!’

‘Sir,’ I said, ‘You can’t dial 999 about an incident that happened several months ago. If someone is smashing up your car, breaking into your house, or attacking you, call 999. With this—’ I sighed. Realising my approach was futile, I changed tack. ‘Do you know this young man?’ I asked him, as I pointed at the kid.

‘Yes,’ the man said. ‘He is my son.’

‘He stole my Blackberry!’ the kid piped up.

I’ll save you the confounding banality of reporting a running dialogue. It took us the best part of 40 minutes to complete the puzzle of what had happened – the kind of puzzle that sits on the shelf until the cat has taken off with half a dozen pieces, and nobody really cares whether it’s ever completed or not anyway.

I would be lying if I said that my job didn’t involve dealing with a lot of this type of puzzle.

It turned out that back in June the father had taken the son’s Blackberry as punishment for something or other – as parents are wont to do. In my day, we were sent to our room right after dinner, or deprived of watching Columbo for an evening. These days, the kids have to give up their Blackberry privileges.

Fair enough.

The boy retaliated for this grave miscarriage of justice by taking a cricket bat to the family car, smashing up the bonnet, the windshield and a couple of the side windows. The police were called, and the kid was taken in for criminal damage.

This time, the little scoundrel had started a fight at school, and once again the dad took his mobile away. Then ensued a lot of screaming and ranting. The dad thought he was going to smash up the car again, so he called the police.

I’d heard enough. I took the boy aside.

‘Mate, why do you do stuff like that?’ I asked him. ‘You can’t go around starting fights and smashing up cars – that’s not going to get you any friends. I understand you might get frustrated and angry, but you’re a clever kid, and it’s not good news if your own dad has to keep calling the police on you.’

The boy replied (I swear to god this isn’t a word of a lie), ‘I have anger-management issues.’

‘Uhm … Who told you that?’ I asked. ‘Have you been to see a doctor?’

He hadn’t. This was a 13-year-old kid who had self-diagnosed himself with anger-management issues. I didn’t know what to make of any of it.

‘He’s in a gang, you know,’ the kid suddenly said.

‘Who?’ I tried to clarify.

‘My dad. He’s in a gang.’

Over the past hour, I had already caught him out in half a dozen lies – was this another trick? As a precaution, I called Carl, one of my colleagues, over and asked him to run the father and the kid through the PNC 10, CAD, and Crimint 11to check whether we had any intel 12on them.

‘What does he do?’ I asked the boy, mostly just to keep him talking.

‘He has a gun,’ the kid replied, looking at the tips of his Converses as he spoke.

Carl was just getting off the radio. He came towards me, shrugged, and shook his head in a manner that I took to mean there was nothing particularly suspicious about either of them.

‘A gun? Really? Where does he keep it?’ I asked the kid.

‘In his car, under where the spare wheel is,’ he said, and glanced up at my face to gauge my reaction. ‘I’ve seen it. It’s black.’

Now, I was facing a choice. If there is a suspicion of guns, I can’t really do anything without Trojan assistance – i.e. armed police – but the kid had been lying to me all morning, and he had already implied several bad things about his dad, apparently only to get back at him. At the same time, I couldn’t ignore this piece of information, either. Since the dad indicated that the car was the suspected goal for the son’s attack, it gave me an idea.

‘Can I see your keys for a second?’ I asked the dad. He dug the car keys out of his pocket, and as he did, I took a closer look at him. He didn’t appear to have any clothing on him that could hide a firearm. I took the keys off him and turned back to Carl.

‘The kid’s just told me his dad has a gun in the car. Nick him for suspicion of possession of a section five firearm. Get Belinda to help you,’ I told him.

Carl walked over to Belinda, said a few words, and together they approached the dad. They cuffed him with his hands behind his back before he had any idea of what was happening.

He was handcuffed in a ‘back to back’ configuration, creatively named such because the backs of your hands are facing each other, behind your back. Other ways of handcuffing people are a ‘front stack’ (imagine folding your arms, and having a set of rigid handcuffs applied from wrist to wrist), or a ‘rear stack’ (the same, but on your back). It’s also possible to do a ‘palm-to-palm’, but since we use rigid handcuffs, if you’re going to cuff someone palm-to-palm you may as well not bother handcuffing them at all. It doesn’t do much to impede movement, and they could potentially use the rigid bar between the cuffs as a weapon.

The dad started struggling, shouting abuse at my colleagues whilst they searched him, but they didn’t find anything untoward. I kept an eye on them, just to make sure everything was okay, but Belinda and Carl seemed to have the situation under control.

I started walking over to the Volvo, but the kid stopped me.

‘Not that one! That one,’ he said, pointing towards a Mazda MX-5 parked further up the road.

I was rather doubtful at this point; I have owned an MX-5. They are great fun – proper little drivers’ cars – but there’s one thing they don’t have, and that’s a spare wheel. I take a look at the key ring the dad gave me but, unsurprisingly, the keys he gave me for the Volvo were Volvo keys. There weren’t any keys that would fit on the Mazda on the key ring.

‘Do you know where the keys are?’ I asked the boy.

‘Yeah,’ he said, and sprinted off. Two seconds later, he came running back out of the house, clutching a set of keys.

I opened the MX-5’s boot. There were a couple of holdalls in there, but they were empty. I was pissed off with the kid – lying about a gun in your father’s car? In my head, I was already formulating the stern ‘talking to’ I was going to give him; already envisioning the grovelling I would have to do to the dad after arresting him for no reason whatsoever. Images of formal complaints, and of me having to explain myself to the borough commander, flickered through my brain.

This was going to be a long day.

On a whim, partly to buy time before apologising to the Dad, I lifted up the floor carpet … and I noticed something. The whole carpet in the boot was raised up on a block of carefully cut Styrofoam. It was incredibly well done, and the minor alteration to the car boot raised the boot floor by just an inch or so. It was nearly invisible. The Styrofoam was clad in a thin layer of fabric, and there was a hole cut in the material. I could see a small loop of material, so I carefully manipulated it with the tip of my biro, lifting it up, ever so slowly.