FOURTEEN

I’ve never been entirely sure why I decided to become a police surgeon; I hate being on call – it had always been the worst aspect of medicine for me – yet this entirely voluntarily (albeit paid) duty involved a lot of the bloody stuff. I suppose part of it was because my father had been one in his day and I rather love him; when I announced my decision to him, I was unaccountably moved almost to tears that he was so delighted. If I’m honest (which I try not to be and, as a doctor, tend not to be out of habit) part of it too was the money, and part of it was stupidity because we had just amalgamated with the London Road practice, so that the on-call rota had gone from one in three to one in seven; as a consequence of all this I had thought, Why not?

Anyway, whatever the reason, the phone rang that Saturday night and I knew immediately that it wasn’t Dad telling me how bracing the weather was down in Brighton. ‘Dr Elliot?’

It was Sergeant Abelson; she sounded bored. I, however, could have done without being called out; not that I was doing much, what with Max having disappeared two hours before because of a Great Dane with a brain tumour. ‘I was last time I checked.’

‘I’m afraid we need your help, Dr Elliot.’

‘Where?’

‘At the central nick in Croydon.’

‘What’s the problem?’ Usually it was drunk drivers.

‘One of our customers is complaining of chest pains.’

Which could mean anything, from complete fakery (far from unknown) to injuries unavoidably obtained when ‘resisting arrest’ (also, lamentably, far from unknown). I looked at my watch. ‘Give me half an hour.’

‘No hurry,’ she assured me.

Bruce Forsyth was doing what only he could do – making an imbecilic game show interesting and not making the contestants look undignified – but duty called. I was halfway through eating with some delight something I had recently discovered – ‘Toast Toppers’ (strangely, Dad had looked at me with some despair when I had informed him of my epiphany) – but in no time at all I had polished these off, and then I was on my way. The traffic was light and the tarmac at least beginning to harden up as I drove into the centre of Croydon, along Wellesley Road and into Park Lane; I had special dispensation and parked in the police station’s ample car park beside a heavily armoured police van. There was still plenty of light, although there was all about the late evening’s crepuscular remnant of a hot day’s dust, the kind that seems to hide more than it reveals, that seems to suffocate. The central police station had never been a particularly beautiful building – red-brick, rectangular, old before it was born, and possessing only the character of characterlessness. The entrance hall smelled of disinfectant; it might have been my imagination but I had the impression that it masked a faint tang of vomitus; at which, I suddenly wondered if it was poo. It wasn’t that many years since the foundation stone of the imposing headquarters of the Croydon stretch of the thin blue line had first been laid but, internally at least, the constant battering and physical abuse from the less than enthusiastic customers had left their marks; there were holes in the wall caused either by fists or toecaps, while the once pristine magnolia emulsion was badly scuffed and covered in what I can only describe as an ‘interesting and thought-provoking’ variety of graffiti (much of which was most appallingly spelt and gave me scant optimism in the Labour government’s faith in comprehensive education).

Having presented my credentials, I was forced to wait for fifteen minutes in the company of a drunken gentleman of the road who possessed the reddest face, the longest beard and the most pungent body stench I have ever encountered (and believe me, I have worked in NHS casualty departments where I have experienced a fairly broad range of bad breath, body odour, gangrene and smelly feet). He mumbled a lot too, looking towards me but not at me; I moved to sit diagonally opposite him but it seemed to make no discernible difference in the intensity of his perfume, as if no matter how far I travelled, I was doomed to share the same atmosphere with this harbinger of pong for ever. During this time, there was a string of visitors, all in the company of police officers, all professing very little enthusiasm for their environment and all doing so in ripe language.

Eventually I was dragged away from the entertainment by a tall, saturnine constable who seemed not to notice that life’s rich pageant was being displayed before him for his entertainment. Having asked of me briefly, ‘Dr Elliot?’ and received an affirmative, he punched a five-digit code into a lock on a door, carefully shielding his actions with his other hand and thereby demonstrating a highly commendable attitude towards security, despite the fact that it was only the drunk and I who were in the room at the time, and he was a good twenty feet away. He led me down a short corridor, then down two flights of stairs, then along another, longer corridor; the atmosphere improved for a short while, then deteriorated again, although now the overwhelming note was one of perspiration and cabbage stewed for a week or two, so that it had been turned back into primeval pond life. My guide saying nothing, I decided to make a venture at conversation as we walked along the drab corridor.

‘Busy night so far?’ I asked, by way of a start on this resolve. My escort looked at me, his expression suggesting that he had heard there was an imbecile in the vicinity and nothing else that he could see would fit the bill so perfectly. He said after a short pause and in a voice that was both sepulchral and vexed, ‘It’s not yet nine o’clock and the cells are already almost full.’

‘Oh, dear,’ was all I could find to say. I could understand how the working environment might predispose to a distinctly pessimistic view of life.

At the end of the corridor was a T-junction at which seated at a desk was another uniformed police officer, this one no sunnier than his colleague. Along the sides of the perpendicular corridor were arrayed the cells, sixteen in all. The smell here was a heady mix of odours that did not so much assault the olfactory organs as decimate them, while there was an equally disagreeable attack on the auscultatory apparatus from the cells’ inhabitants as they sang, groaned, shouted and profaned with gay abandon. This custody sergeant – for thus it was – looked up after writing with intense concentration something in a ledger. He was a tall, well-built man of middle age, running to fat and beginning to lose his hair. Fearful that he should consider me a felon and instantly incarcerate me, I said quickly, ‘I’m Dr Elliot, the police surgeon,’

This evoked no enthusiasm, even when my escort nodded assent at the questioning look from this stout guardian of the cells. Returning his attention to me, he said without noticeable gusto, ‘He’s in number three. Making a terrible fuss, he was.’ How he had determined this given the unholy cacophony that seemed part of normal life down there was beyond me. My escort, keys clanking on his thigh, moved forward and I followed. We turned left and walked perhaps twenty yards along the corridor, passing through a bedlam of sound that changed with every three steps. We stopped before a door that was like all the rest; it was made of heavy steel, painted in a sort of green-grey paint that was curiously reminiscent of the contents of a boil. There was a small semicircular indentation in the door at eye level at the base of which was a small window of thick glass; the constable grasped his key ring but looked into the cell through this before selecting a key.

He said suddenly, ‘Oh, Christ!’ and began fumbling in earnest for the correct key.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

He didn’t reply and I was in the metaphysical dark until I followed him as we hurriedly entered the cell. There was a body, face down on the floor by the side of the bunk; the feet were near the slop bucket but thankfully they hadn’t made contact with it. There was vomitus on the floor under the head. ‘Get out of the way,’ I ordered, feeling some enjoyment at being able to boss him around. He obliged at once and I was able to lean down beside the body, although there was precious little room. I felt around the side of the neck for a pulse and, albeit with some difficulty, found one. I said, ‘Help me turn him.’

The constable took a moment to react, but then squeezed in beside me. Together and with some difficulty in the cramped space, we turned the man over. It was George Cotterill.