‘Right,’ the skipper said, as his eyes slid around the small assembly of plain-clothes officers in front of him. ‘Jesus, you’re a messy bunch.’
‘If you were the fashion police,’ he said to me and Simon, the only two in full uniform in the stuffy room, ‘you’d have to arrest us all!’
We were on Operation Slate, an undercover job. Two female officers were to be placed, plain-clothed, in a busy bar that had become a hotspot for theft. The hope was that their tablet computer – an iPad – would be stolen, so we would be able to arrest the thieves right away.
Twenty minutes after the briefing, we had installed ourselves in and outside the bar we were covering.
Though we were all in close vicinity, we would communicate by radio alone. I went on the Event 2 channel that was reserved for our sting operation. Simon stayed on the normal despatch channel on the radio, to keep half an ear on things going on around the rest of the borough.
‘Radio check from uniformed units on Operation Slate,’ I radioed in.
‘CCTV receiving,’ one of the team members in the bar’s CCTV room radioed back.
‘Safety receiving,’ the team guarding Lisa and Miranda – our officers with the iPad – added.
‘Spotter Alpha receiving,’ said another officer who was charged with just milling around the nightclub looking for known suspects and keeping an eye on things.
Then my radio beeped twice. One of the undercover officers had a radio in their purse, with a pair of buttons on the inside of the bag. One of the buttons sends a beep; the other sends an urgent assistance signal. Two beeps meant ‘okay’, so I guess they were receiving us.
We are involved in operations like this every few weeks, targeting whatever crime hotspots we have around the borough. We usually target different types of theft, including bicycle theft, pick-pocketing, shoplifting, among others, usually guided by the areas where the SMT63 in the borough feels our statistics are weakest.
The jobs tend to be either incredibly busy or completely dead. So far, this was the latter. Simon and I were strolling up and down the street outside the nightclub, with my radio silent apart from the occasional radio check.
The streets around the club quarter were relatively well patrolled; six officers were doing big loops around the bar district, and every 20 minutes or so, I’d have a chance for a quick chat to catch up on some of the gossip. It’s a perk of these operations; you’re working with people that aren’t on the same team as you, so you get a chance to catch up and have a natter with officers you don’t know as well, or haven’t seen in a while.
At one in the morning, about three hours into the operation, my radio woke up from its slumber.
‘All teams stand by; we have some suspicious activity near the girls.’
‘Standing by,’ the safety team replied.
I whistled to Simon, who was giving incredibly detailed directions to two attractive blondes in high heels. He waved back, said his fond farewell and started walking towards the club on his side of the street.
‘It’s an IC1 male, around five foot tall, blue striped shirt, carrying a small backpack over one shoulder,’ the CCTV team transmitted. ‘He is sitting down, looking around. He is at the end of the cubicle with the bag holding our package. Don’t look at him.’
Inside the club, there were six officers who desperately wanted to get a closer look at their suspect, but forced themselves to stare at each other instead.
‘Our view is blocked,’ the CCTV operator said. ‘No visual.’
‘I see him,’ one of the safety officers radioed back, barely legible over the music in the background.
Simon and I were on opposite sides of the door to the nightclub; if the thief did steal the iPad, he would probably try to make a quick exit, and then it would be our turn to leap into action. Simon was leaning against a barrier where about 20 people were waiting to be let into the club.
My radio suddenly spat out a 15-second burst of loud club music, but no recognisable words.
‘Safety, are you okay?’ the CCTV team transmitted, followed by a long burst of silence, during which my full concentration was on the earpiece I was wearing.
‘Safety, confirm status. Spotters, go check on them,’ the CCTV team transmitted, after what seemed like an absolute eternity.
I was waiting for my radio to give a meaningful response, when I heard a commotion on the far side of the club doors. Simon had turned around, and was shouting at a young man.
‘Mate, shut up and listen,’ he shouted. ‘If this gentleman says you have had enough to drink, then that’s his prerogative. Go home.’
I sighed; it’s a scene we see a dozen times on any given Friday or Saturday night; a group of young lads had been ejected from one club for being a drunken gaggle of nuisance-makers and were trying to sneak into the next club. The bouncers use their own radios to warn each other about the worst grief-magnets, and so when the inebriated good-for-noughts are ejected from one club, chances are they won’t be doing any more drinking that night. It’s a pretty good system, particularly because it’s a lot easier to deal with troublemakers outside a club than inside one.
The group of youths was six strong, and they were obviously disinclined to listen to Simon. I glanced at the door for a second, then reached for my radio, changed the channel to despatch and quickly transmitted.
‘Mike Delta receiving five-nine-two.’
‘Five-nine-two, go ahead.’
‘We’re on Operation Slate. I’m outside the Summer Fiesta nightclub, and could do with some additional help to clear away a group of six inebriated males.’
‘Received,’ the operator replied, and then proceeded to transmit a request for some extra backup.
I switched back to the operation channel and caught the tail end of a transmission.
‘… the door.’
‘I was on another channel,’ I said. ‘Update, please?’
‘Coming, Matt! Yellow shirt!’ one of the safety officers shouted down the radio. I whirled around, and spotted a man with a yellow shirt dart out of the club, clutching Lisa’s bag. He didn’t even pause long enough to spot me in my uniform; he simply ran straight past me.
‘Shit,’ I transmitted. ‘Get some guys out here, I can’t leave Simon by himself,’ I said, my eyes on the man who was sprinting down the road. The argument between Simon and the young men was escalating.
About 30 seconds later, several of the spotters and the two safety officers came bursting out through the doors.
‘What the fuck?’ one of them shouted. ‘All you had to do was to stop the little bastard!’
I waved him off, and turned my attention to Simon, who was now physically intervening between the ‘ingress/egress security advisor’ (that’s a bouncer to you and me) and two of the lads who were causing trouble. I walked over and got involved, and half a second later the three spotters joined us.
‘Stand back,’ one of them called. ‘Police!’
The group of youths was momentarily confused. The plain-clothes officers had hauled warrant cards attached to lanyards out of their pockets and donned them around their necks to identify them as police, but at the same time, two additional security guys had shown up; they were also wearing their IDs around their necks.
‘Fuck you, you ain’t police,’ one of the youngsters said to the bouncers, as one of his friends was dragging at his arm.
‘Dude, they’re totally police, let’s get out of here,’ he said.
Slowly, the guys gathered their wits. Just when they had decided to go, a van containing half a dozen uniformed units arrived. The drunk boys seemed to sober up rather impressively quickly at the sight of them, and executed their previously made plan of making a hasty disappearance. They started running down the road. We let them go; they had been loud and obnoxious, and perhaps shoved Simon around a little bit, but nothing they’d get prosecuted for. Besides, we had bigger fish to fry.
I turned around. The whole operation team had come out of the nightclub.
‘Why didn’t you stop him, Delito?’ Seventy-one’s voice boomed.
‘Er … Simon …’ I stuttered.
Sergeant Thomas, who had been leading the operation, piped up.
‘Not to worry, lads,’ he said, and fished an iPhone out of his pocket. ‘I can track the iPad with this thing.’
Apple’s Find My iPhone/iPod/iPad feature is great, but it’s not perfect – it’s useful for finding out where your iPhone is at any given time, but if it gets stolen and ends up in a council estate somewhere – as stolen things are often wont to do – you’ve got a problem: we can tell which building the device is in, but there could be dozens, if not hundreds, of flats stacked on top of each other, and we wouldn’t be able to bust in through every single door looking for one device.
‘What does this mean?’ the skipper said, pointing non-specifically at the iPhone’s screen.
‘Can I?’ I asked. I’m a bit of an Apple fanboy, and I’ve used the system before.
‘It says it can’t find the iPad,’ I said, after pressing various options on his iPhone screen for a while.
‘Damn,’ the sarge said. ‘He must have disconnected from the WiFi.’
‘Umm … What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Well, if he disconnects from the WiFi, we can’t find him until he connects to a different WiFi.’
‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ I said. ‘Is it not a 3G iPad?’
The sergeant stared at me blankly.
‘What …’ he said, ‘do you mean?’
‘You bought the iPad thing especially for these operations, right?’ I said to the boss of the Clubs and Vice team.
‘Yeah.’
‘So, er, which iPad did you buy?’
‘Don’t be an idiot, Delito,’ he said. ‘This is the Metropolitan Police. You shouldn’t have to ask; I bought the cheapest one, of course.’
‘Oh, Jesus,’ I said, rubbing my forehead with my fingertips.
‘What?’ demanded Simon.
‘The top-model iPads have 3G and GPS built in. Like on a phone. So, if we’d bought one of those, the iPad would know exactly where it was, and it would have an Internet connection anywhere there is mobile phone coverage,’ I explained. ‘But instead, we bought the cheapest version, which only has WiFi, and no GPS. The one we bought never knows exactly where it is, it can only guess its location based on what WiFi networks it can see … And it only has a network when it is connected to WiFi.’
Nine pairs of eyes stared at me blankly.
‘Fer feck’s sake,’ I said. ‘Do I really have to spell it out? Basically, we won’t have any idea where that iPad is until our thief connects it to a WiFi network. Which, if he has any sense, he won’t do. If he formats the damn thing, we’re royally fucked; we won’t get our iPad back, and the guy will get away with it.’
‘But … I have Find My iPad right here,’ Sergeant Thomas said, wiggling his iPhone in the air desperately. ‘Bollocks,’ he concluded, wisely.
The sarge stood still for a second, weighing his options. Then he started ordering people around: ‘Okay, Delito, you know about this geek stuff. Simon, stick with me, and Tracy, you come with us as well. The rest of you, you’re dismissed. Write up a quick MG1164 about the theft, and email it to me before you head home.’
‘Let’s see if we can’t find our iPad,’ he added grimly to those of us who had been ‘lucky’ enough to be chosen to stay behind.
‘Bollocks to that,’ Tracy said. ‘I need a cuppa.’
The sergeant sighed.
‘Yeah, me too. Let’s go,’ he said, and led the way to one of the late-night coffee bars that had recently popped up in the area. The coffee bars were apparently opened especially to cater to stoned hipsters, hip stoners – and us.
As we leaned over our steaming cups of coffee, the sarge prodded his iPhone whilst the rest of us looked beaten.
‘Do you know what the kid looks like?’ Simon asked, half-heartedly.
‘Yes, but we were tracking the wrong guy on the CCTV for most of the evening. We had the fella in the striped shirt, he was looking well dodgy, but after the other guy ran off with the iPad we finally took him aside and it turned out he was just pilled off his face,’ Sergeant Thomas said, shaking his head. ‘We did catch the little bastard on one of the cameras, though. I emailed a copy of the image to my phone, hang on …’
After a couple of minutes’ worth of fiddling – about a minute and 57 seconds longer than it ought to have taken – Sergeant Thomas held up his phone.
‘Never seen ’im before,’ Simon said, after poring over the shot for a moment. The rest of us repeated similar sentiments.
We spent another ten minutes in the café finishing our coffee. Just before we got up to leave, Thomas had another look at his iPhone.
‘I’ve got him!’ he said.
Simon and I leapt up and slid around the table to look over the sergeant’s shoulder.
Tracy, who was sitting next to the sarge had a clear view: ‘He’s just off the borough,’ he said, ‘but only about ten minutes away. Have we got a car?’
‘Er …’ the skipper replied, tentatively. ‘Technically, no. We sent them all on their way home. I figured we could catch a lift later.’
‘Any units near the Coffee Bucket?’ I threw myself on my radio.
Tracy walked to the counter to pay for our coffees, whilst Simon and Sergeant Thomas kept their eyes on the little iPad icon in the middle of the map display.
‘Unit calling for backup near Coffee Bucket; Mike Delta two-eight receiving.’
‘Two-eight, cancel, cancel, we don’t need backup. We just need a lift. Do you have ten minutes?’
‘Yeah, of course,’ came the reply. ‘On the hurry-up?’ he asked.
‘Yes, yes.’
‘Aaaalrighty then,’ the driver said, and halfway through his atrocious Jim Carrey impression, we heard the sirens of a caged van whine into life over the radio. ‘For you? Special price. Get me a brew, will ya?’
Tracy overheard the conversation via his radio, turned around and retraced his steps back to the counter to order a cup of tea for the van driver.
Moments later, sirens came to a halt outside the coffee shop, and we all poured out and climbed into the van.
‘Hey, Joe,’ I said, recognising the driver and passing him his tea.
‘Thank you for your expedience,’ Thomas said. ‘Step on it, we need to get to Garyson Rise double-quick.’
He flashed his iPhone at Joe to show where we were going.
‘Aye, boss,’ Joe said. He placed his drink in the cup holder and pulled away. Laughing, he added, ‘Are you going to the Starbucks up there? I thought you guys just had a coffee’.
Tracy and I looked at each other. Garyson Rise is just outside our borough, in an area where there isn’t usually a lot of trouble, so I’m not very familiar with it.
‘Seriously? There’s a Starbucks?’ I asked. ‘What else is there?’
‘Oh, not much, really,’ Joe said. ‘Couple of pizza joints. Delivery places, mostly. One of those Internet places and a Tesco, but I think it closes at midnight,’ he rambled on.
‘Screw the Starbucks,’ I said.
‘Take us to the Internet place,’ Tracy added, finishing my thought.
‘But kill the sirens and lights before we get there,’ Simon said completing our train of thought.
Finally, for the first time all night, we were working as a team.
As we came up to Garyson Rise, Joe cut the sirens. He left the blues on as we pulled through a red light. Then he shut the flashers off as well, and stopped in a bus stop a few doors down from the Internet shop. The shutters covering the windows were down, but the door shutter was open and there was a dim ray of light spilling out onto the pavement.
‘I’ll go in. You guys stop him from getting away again,’ Tracy said.
Simon and Tracy got out of the van and Tracy took up position next to the shop.
‘Fuck me, where did you learn to drive, Joe?’ I said, keeping my eyes on the shop front. Joe mumbled something about hiring a limo instead, if I didn’t like his driving. The sergeant and I climbed out of the van and approached the door from the other side.
Once we were in position, Tracy nodded to Simon, before turning back and nodding to me. We were ready … He quickly checked to make sure none of his police paraphernalia was showing, before he casually strolled into the Internet shop, his police radio on mute in his back pocket. Tracy’s undercover stab vest and other equipment in a covert vest were hidden under his oversized zippered hoodie.
He came walking out again after a minute, sipping a can of Coke. He didn’t look at any of us, until he was out of the dull light-cone from the door. When he was out of sight, he looked over his shoulder to see if he’d been followed, before quickly unzipping his hoodie and shooting some instructions over to Simon. A second later, Simon’s voice came over the radio.
‘There are two guys in there, and they’re using an iPad. Tracy says it doesn’t have that hideous pink cover on it, but it looks like they have a fair amount of second-hand stuff for sale behind the counter. It could be anywhere. One of the men is our man from the bar,’ Simon said.
Tracy grabbed the radio from Simon, ignoring the one he had sticking out of his back pocket.
‘I recognise the other guy, too; he’s a nasty piece of work. I don’t think he clocked me, but I nicked him for running a prostitution racket a few year years back. Turkish bloke, in a blue shirt. He put up quite a fight last time I nicked him, so be careful.’
‘Should we go in now or wait?’ the skipper asked.
‘Now. Let’s get the little fucker,’ Tracy said.
‘Let’s do it,’ the skipper said, reaching for his torch. I did the same, and saw Simon producing a torch as well.
Simon was first in though the door.
‘Police, don’t move,’ he shouted, and pointed his torch straight in the face of the guy with the yellow shirt.
I aimed my torch into the eyes of the second man, who was seated behind the table, but he dropped the iPad in front of him, leapt to his feet and dived out of sight to the left of us. Tracy leapt forward and grabbed hold of our yellow-shirted scoundrel, and within seconds he had his prisoner bent over the table with a set of handcuffs keeping his arms behind his back.
Simon and I edged forward, trying to locate the man in blue over the racket being caused by Tracy trying to search his prisoner and Sergeant Thomas radioing in a status report. The man seemed to have vanished into thin air. I stuck my head carefully around the corner and spotted a stairway going down into darkness.
‘He’s gone down the stairs,’ I called. I turned around to see whether Simon was still following me, and caught a face-full of his ludicrously bright LED torch, which caused me to lose whatever night vision I might have had up to that point.
‘Sorry, mate,’ he mumbled.
‘Let’s see if we can find him,’ I said, and started descending the stairs, my torch piercing the darkness. I heard a clicking sound next to my head; it was Simon, trying a light switch. Nothing.
We continued down the creaking stair. At the bottom, there was a small, narrow hallway going left and right. We stopped and listened, and I took a step to the right, letting Simon step off the stairs with a step to the left. We couldn’t hear anything.
Simon swung his torch around, and took a couple of steps down the corridor.
Suddenly, I heard an almighty crash and a shout.
‘Whattafuuuuuuuuu—’ Simon wailed, as his torch went spinning away into the dark corridor, creating a ghoulish shadow play on the walls as the light from his torch picked up all sorts of rubbish on the floor.
‘Aaaaaaaaaah,’ Simon shouted again. In the light of my own torch, I could see him grabbing his arm. I also spotted his assailant; it was the Turkish man Tracy had warned us about before we entered the shop.
I reached up to my radio and pressed the orange button next to my antenna.
‘Urgent assistance required,’ I shouted. ‘Basement of the Internet shop, 33 Garyson Rise, we’re under attack from a man with a stick.’
I paused briefly to think whether there’s anything else I needed to say: ‘Get us an ambulance as well, Mike Delta two-eight-eight got whacked.’
With that, I turned my torch off.
There are few things police officers care about more than their torches. You’ll inevitably lose your torch eventually, but that doesn’t stop me from investing some serious cash into a top-quality light source; I use the thing nearly every night shift, so it makes sense to get a proper one. Some officers choose to use Maglite-style torches so they can double as nightsticks, but I don’t quite see the point. I already have a police-issue Asp – or a gravity friction-lock baton, as it’s officially called – which is manufactured specifically for slapping people about, so I have no idea why anyone would choose to carry a heavy flashlight. My torch is a Night-Ops Gladius, a tactical flashlight that was apparently made for mounting on an assault rifle or a pistol. Since the Met hasn’t deigned to provide me with one of these lead-redistribution devices, I use the torch on its own. I chose it for several reasons: it’s as solid as can be; it’s the right size to be used as a Kubotan (a small hand-to-hand combat weapon); and, most importantly, it has a rapid strobe mode, a feature that has saved my bacon more than once.
With a quick twist of the torch’s rear cap, you can prepare the strobe mode. Next, point it at someone’s eyes and press the back of the cap to activate it. If you’re at the receiving end of that treatment, it’s extremely disorienting; the only thing you’ll see is the strobing of the light – the person behind the light becomes completely invisible.
This seemed a perfect occasion to exploit my torch’s functionality. I flicked my Gladius into the strobe mode, passed it into my left hand, and drew and racked my Asp with my right.
I could just make out the man from the light of Simon’s torch, which had come to rest pointing at the wall behind him. He was hiding next to the half-opened door, as Simon lay yelping on the floor, pushing himself towards me with his legs.
‘You okay?’ I asked him, knowing the answer.
‘Do I fucking sound all right?’ he barked. ‘He twatted me in the fucking arm, didn’t he?’
‘Hey! You!’ I called out to the man. ‘You saw us, you know we’ve got two more officers upstairs, and we’ve got a vanload more coppers coming. Put down the bat, you can’t win.’
An unprintable malediction ruptured from behind the door.
‘I’ll give you five seconds,’ I said. ‘Then I’m coming for you.’
I could see him take a firmer grip of his aluminium bat as he tensed in anticipation; I also heard a faint creaking on the stairs next to me. They must have finished loading our other prisoner into the back of the van, because both Tracy and Sergeant Thomas were on the stairs, batons drawn, ready to spring into action.
‘Five …’ I said. Simon staggered to his feet next to the stairs, and leant against the walls.
‘Four …’ I called a few seconds later. I whispered to Simon, ‘Take my torch. When I say One, lean as far forward as you can.’
‘Three …’ I said out loud, before dropping my voice to a whisper again ‘… and hold the button on the back pressed in. Whatever happens, keep it aimed at his eyes.’
‘Two …’ I called out to the man. Then slid my torch into the hand of Simon’s uninjured arm, double-checking he had a firm grip of the torch before I let go of his hand.
‘Got that?’ I whispered.
‘ONE!’ I called, and dropped to the floor with all the grace and finesse of a narcoleptic cow.
Simon shouted a battle cry that would make a banshee sob with envy, as he pressed the button on the back of the torch. The super-bright LED bulb started strobing rapidly, catching the man square in the face. I crawled as fast as I could, on all fours like a dog, along the floor.
With the first few strobes, I could see his wide-open eyes. The next few flashes illuminated his whole face as he moved out of his hiding place, taking a firmer grip of his bat and trying to shrink away from the bright light being beamed at him.
I could see the expression on his face change with each pulse of light.
It showed his gritted teeth.
It showed a face that was making the decision to fight for his life.
He raised his bat. But then, suddenly, realised something was wrong; the source of the strobing light and manic cry wasn’t coming closer.
Just as the penny dropped, my baton connected with the side of his left shin. The man screamed and I didn’t waste any time. I leapt to a position behind him. He was holding his bat with his right hand, as his left went down to his shin. I whirled around and put my whole weight behind my baton, aiming for the side of his upper arm. To the sound of a nausea-inducing snap, the baton thumped into his arm less than a second after it had reduced the nerves in his lower leg to a concerto of agony. From the ‘snap’, I was pretty certain I had broken his arm.
I grabbed my cuffs out of their holder, but before I was able to get close enough to apply them to the now-squealing man, another set of hands reached out of the dark, grabbed him and hauled him to the ground, pressing his face against the dusty floor. Tracy’s torch clicked on and suddenly the whole messy scene was well lit.
He wasn’t one for wasting time; Simon’s attacker was in handcuffs before he had time to take another breath.
By now I was sitting on the floor, my back to a wall, panting. As the adrenaline of our sneak attack wore off, I could feel my knees hurting. I looked down to see I was bleeding from my right knee; my left one was badly scraped as well but somehow wasn’t leaking, though the trouser legs on both legs were torn.
‘Extra points for creativity,’ Simon said drily, and limped his way up the stairs, muttering something about ambulances.