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Back about six months ago, a visitor came into the station to talk to us. He gave the same talk to all the wards, but on that occasion we were night shift and so we were asked to return to the briefing room early morning, after booking off, to get our session done. His name was Steve too, or Stephen he preferred, but his colleagues and friends called him Sanchez. He paused when he said this, giving us time to join the dots. Russell and Smithy got there first, being the footie fans they are. Peghead wasn’t too far behind, and the rest of us followed soon after. The likeness to the Chilean footballer was uncanny. Or at least what he might look like in another ten years. Except he wasn’t there to discuss football, but his career in the Force and how it ended.
He’d seen it coming, he said. At least, looking back he could spot the signs, how he was running on fumes, not taking care of himself. Physically, yes. Like a lot of cops, he drowned himself in exercise routines that filled the space when he wasn’t at work. But mentally... Mentally he was stuck in high gear without even realising it. Until June 23rd, 2015, at approximately 1.45 in the morning.
He and his partner were attending a domestic, no different to any of the others. There was drink involved, an enraged man, his wife and daughter, yelling, a lot of noise, a lot of unnecessary panic and chaos that the two officers tried to calm. It was the kind of bedlam that would wear on the nerves of your average civvy at that time of the night, but nothing new for the officers, they’d worked this stuff a hundred times before. Except, the call before that one had been to a cot death. A young mum hysterical that her three-month-old son had stopped breathing, and why hadn’t she noticed, and what the hell had she done wrong to make that happen. The paramedics failed to revive the infant, only twelve weeks into the world, and it had been tough, Sanchez said, to forget the tiny face, still and colourless, lips parted, eyes open, gone. It had been tough to remove that image from his head, stood there in the centre of another stranger’s house less than an hour later, only this time with a shower of noise raining down all around him.
And that’s when he’d walked.
Just walked. Out of the front door and down the street. Kept right on walking even when his partner called after him. Instinct told him to get as far as possible from that noise. Because just then it was louder than at any other time, and he couldn’t see a way to cut through it to what was required of him. To do his job.
He remembers standing in the middle of the street in the darkness and crouching to the ground, touching his fingers to the tarmac to feel something real and solid under him. He remembers feeling like a part of him was giving way and he couldn’t do anything about it except let it. He remembers wishing it would rain, because that might wake him up, help him recall what he was meant to do, nudge him into action. He remembers thinking he was about to die.
He doesn’t remember how long he was there, or when his colleagues arrived, or who picked him up off the road. And he doesn’t remember exactly when it was he learned that the male in the domestic had stabbed his partner in the chest with a steak knife, his partner bleeding out on the sitting room floor, three pints already lost before the paramedics got there, and the charge of grievous bodily harm becoming one of murder in less than an hour. He doesn’t remember any of that. But in the weeks and months and years that followed, he wished he was the one that had died.
Sometimes still wishes that five years later, he’d said, perched on the edge of the desk and looking each of us in the eye. ‘But I’m working on it. Maybe if I can save one of you from ending up where I did, something good can come of it.’
The room was silent, warm and uncomfortable, every one of us struggling with the after-effects of a night shift, and with a hot meal, shower and bed on our minds. So when he got to the end of his suggestions for taking care of ourselves, recognising the signs, listing the people who were there to support us, he asked if anyone had any questions, and it took a long time before someone raised their hand.
‘Officer Russell, right?’ Sanchez said.
All eyes peered sideways at our most gregarious colleague, curious to see what he could possibly add to this conversation, and how we’d feel about it when he did, how we might feel about him, about ourselves.
‘That’s correct, sir,’ PC John Russell said, coughing and shifting in his seat from slouched to upright. ‘I was just wondering. With all this going on... Did you have any regrets about your move from Barcelona to Arsenal?’
*
The pounding at the front door brings me too quickly from sleep and I bolt upright, gasping for breath, the image of Anna still there in my mind. The back of my head throbs as it catches up with the movement and I grip it with my hand, feeling sick and empty and worthless, the same way Anna had made me feel in the dream. She’d turned away, looking at me over her shoulder with eyes grey and cold, before linking arms with the man at her side. Tall, skinny man. Not Simons, nothing like Simons. When I tried to shout to her, stop her leaving with this man, my voice didn’t work, nothing came out, and my feet wouldn’t move. Someone behind me said, ‘Forget about her, Steve. Move on. Move on to the next call.’ But I couldn’t do that, not when I knew who the man was, and that something was very, very wrong. The smug grin and the thinning hair were Zippo’s, I was certain of that. But it couldn’t really be Zippo, because Zippo was dead. I had killed him.
‘Steve!’
The voice is in the hallway, but muffled where it comes through the letterbox.
I swing my legs from the bed, step on last night’s clothes dumped in a pile on the floor. Bundling them up, I throw them in the bottom of the wardrobe, and from the drawer take some running joggers and a t-shirt. Peering through the curtains, the light stabs my eye and goes right through to my skull. It stabs a second time when I see the squad car parked on the driveway. I drop the curtain and run my hand over my mouth. My lips are dry, and when I swallow, it’s like my throat’s been cut.
‘Steve, it’s me. It’s Neil.’
Passing the mirror on the wall, I make the mistake of glancing in it. To say I look like shit would be a compliment. In a weak attempt, I brush my fingers through my hair, but it still springs up at an awkward angle so I could pass for fifty, not forty. I’m not the only one who notices.
‘Fuck me, Steve,’ Smithy says, when I get downstairs and open the door to find him standing there in uniform.
‘Not right now, I’m a little hungover.’ I shuffle down the hall to the kitchen, leaving him to let himself in. ‘You look rough yourself. You not booked off yet?’
‘Just on my way.’ The front door closes and his heavy boots peel over the floorboards.
At the sink, I fill the kettle and put it on to boil, pleased when I turn and hold up a cup to see that my visitor has taken off his utility vest and dropped it on the counter. Not an official call, then. He declines a drink but pulls out a stool, and I go back to the coffee. Once I’m sitting opposite him though, there’s no avoiding him. His face is ashen, brown eyes dark and bloodshot, the skin around their edges lined and folding in on itself. Your typical end of a shit shift complexion. Except I’m sensing he’s not quite done yet.
The radio on his vest speaks, breaking the silence. He reaches over to turn it down, and then he’s back to studying me.
‘Accidental death,’ he says, with a curl of the lips, as if even the words in his mouth are an affront to his old friend’s memory.
I shake my head, using a sigh as an excuse to press my fingers into the side of my forehead where someone’s drilling a hole. ‘That’s a real shit, mate, I’m sorry.’
‘Thought you said wait until tomorrow.’
He’s glaring at me hard when I look up. ‘Yeah, that’s right. I did.’
My eyes are stinging like hell, but I don’t blink under his scrutiny.
‘Was it you?’ he asks.
‘Me what?’
‘Don’t bullshit me, Steve.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
When he blinks, it’s with lids of stone, and I wonder as I watch him, if he’s in that place. The one Sanchez talked about. The one where you don’t notice you’ve gone over the edge until someone explains you’ve landed face first, pride second. He certainly looks like it, but don’t we all after a long night, and what would I suggest anyway – I’m hardly in the best position myself. How long would it be before Smithy told me to sod off, he was fine? Then what would it have achieved except to push another wedge between us?
‘They found Waterman at the empty warehouse down at the docks. Same one he burned on his spree last year,’ he says, then waits for me to say something but I don’t, only raise the cup to my lips and sip at the hot bitter coffee.
‘He’s alive but only just. Blunt force trauma, took a hell of a beating.’
‘He say who did it?’
‘Not saying diddly squat, he’s on life support. Touch and go.’
‘Any leads?’
His answer is a weary blink. He’s too exhausted for this.
‘Well,’ I say, wrapping my hands around the mug. ‘He’s upset a lot of people.’
‘Yes, he has.’
‘So maybe no one will give a shit either way.’
Smithy thinks about that even as he stares at me. Poetic justice is so rare in this line of work. His eyes soften and he rubs his fingers over his mouth, eyelids falling closed for a second. And when he drags them open again, the toll the night has taken on him is frightening.
‘Neil, head back and book off, mate. Get yourself home.’
‘Yeah,’ he says on an exhale, running his hand over his hair and gripping it in his fingers. But to the table, he mumbles, ‘Did you drive through the town, Steve?’
‘What?’
‘You heard. Did you go via the town?’
‘When?’
‘Were you seen on CCTV? Did you cover your face, Steve? Did you wear gloves? Did anyone see you? Did Waterman see you? Did he have someone with him? Did he know who you were?’ He brings his head up. ‘Did you do this to save my arse, Steve?’
I lift the cup, blow away the steam, and take a mouthful. When I set it down again, I tell him, ‘You’re a good officer, Neil.’
He tries, but he can’t hold eye contact this time. Looking to his vest, he pulls it towards him and stands to leave, tongue running over his bottom lip. I stare down into the cup, from where the steam comes up to cover my mouth, my nose.
‘So are you,’ he says, before his footsteps go down the hall, the front door clicking closed behind him.
Once I’ve heard the car drive away, I run to the toilet and throw up the coffee and what’s left of yesterday’s booze, choking it from me while hot tears sting my eyes.
