Jack paused for a moment outside the entrance to CID. This was it. The moment he walked through that door, he’d be Detective Constable Culverhouse. His foot would be in the door of CID and it was up to him not to bollocks it up. He was fairly sure he could manage that. After all, how hard could it be?
Taking a deep breath, he pulled down on the handle, pushed the door and walked in.
He straight away felt the eyes of the people in the room turn to him. All conversation stopped. He recognised DI Taylor from the photographs he’d seen of him in the papers over the past few years, usually after receiving commendations from the mayor. In the flesh, though, he seemed a lot bigger, and the look he was giving Jack made him feel extremely uncomfortable.
‘PC... Uh, DC Culverhouse, sir,’ Jack said. ‘I’m joining your team today.’
‘I know,’ Taylor said, without moving. ‘And the first thing you need to learn is to knock before opening fucking doors.’
‘Sorry, sir.’
‘You will be. So. Culverhouse. Got a first name?’
‘Yes. Jack.’
‘Right, well that’s my name, so you can’t be having that. We’ll call you No-Knock.’
Jack shuffled slightly. ‘Sir.’
‘Fortunately for you, you’re just in time for the morning briefing. Otherwise you’d have a whole new nickname altogether. Sit down.’
Jack walked over towards the desk Taylor had indicated. It was bare, other than a stack of blank paper and a telephone. This was where it all began. This was where he’d call witnesses, take down notes, draw up the connections that led to murderers, gangsters and fraudsters being caught and banged up.
In his reverie, he’d completely tuned out from what Taylor was saying. He blinked to turn his blank gaze into focus on the DI and picked up what was being said.
‘I don’t think there’s much further we can go down that path,’ Taylor said, speaking to another detective, who Jack assumed was aged around thirty-five, although the slight beer belly added a couple of years. The detective nodded at Taylor and tapped a chunk of ash from his cigarette into the ashtray on his desk.
‘Onto another case altogether,’ Taylor said, raising his voice slightly as he addressed the room, ‘yesterday afternoon we received a call from a woman in Wilman Street, reporting a burglary in progress at a neighbour’s house. By the time officers got there, the kid had gone. She got a good look at him, though, and one of the officers reckoned it sounded just like someone he’d had a word with a few days earlier after some cars were getting broken into. Local kid by the name of Gary McCann, apparently,’ the DI said, looking at the name he’d scribbled down in his notebook. ‘I reckon if a couple of us go over there and lean on him, he’s more likely to cough than if the old woodentops wander in with their truncheons hanging out.’
Jack tried to force a laugh in order to join in with his new colleagues. Just a couple of days before he’d been a woodentop — or uniformed PC — himself.
‘What say you and me go over there this morning, No Knock?’
Jack blinked and nodded. ‘Sure, sir. Would be a pleasure.’
The other detectives sniggered and muttered to each other. Jack could see he was going to have to do things a little differently now. His new colleagues were all older than him and seemed to have formed a clique that he’d have to fight to be accepted into.
It had been similar when he’d first joined the force. As in many jobs, newcomers were either treated with an air of suspicion or as a plaything. Jack had never considered himself to be a jumpy sort of person, but the first few weeks on the job had soon steeled nerves he didn’t even realise he had. His first few nighttime beat shifts were punctuated by colleagues jumping off rooftops and out of bins with the sole intention of frightening the life out of him for their own amusement. He’d heard the stories of CID officers getting physical with suspects or local toerags, but he’d never seen anything himself. If that sort of thing went on, it was something kept well behind closed doors.
Right now, he didn’t care what else went on. The only thing on his mind was knuckling down and getting on with the job. And that meant going to see this suspect.