‘Oh yes, yes,’ Ryan says, his cheeks hot. ‘No, I did, I just – sorry, I thought … Mike confused me for just a second there.’
‘Right,’ the sergeant says, clearly unimpressed at the unbridled laughter. Just as it stops, it begins again, a wave coming from where CID are clustered. Great.
‘Echo Mike two four five,’ Bradford says, clearly trying to move on. He moves towards Ryan. ‘I’ll do the first response, then let you pick up the second,’ he adds, hurrying them out of the briefing room. Ryan daren’t ask what he means.
They walk down a green-carpeted corridor that smells of hoovering. They reach a locker and Bradford hands Ryan a radio. ‘All right. That’s yours. Calls come in like this: Echo Mike, your vehicle number. You respond with your collar number – yours is 2648, from your shoulder, right?’
‘Okay,’ Ryan says. ‘Okay.’ Every officer spends their first two years on 999 calls. Anything could come in. A burglary. A murder.
‘Right. Great,’ Bradford says. ‘Let’s go.’
He makes a gesture which says both This way, please and Christ, I hope you’re not a fucking idiot, and Ryan walks back out through the reception and into the rain.
‘This is EM two four five, all right, like Zamo said?’ Bradford says, gesturing to the police car. The stripes. The lights. Ryan can’t stop looking at it.
‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Sure.’ He opens the passenger seat and gets in. It smells of old cigarettes.
‘Echo Mike two four five, two four five from Echo,’ says the radio.
‘Echo from Mike two four five, go ahead,’ Bradford says tonelessly back. He hasn’t turned the engine on yet, is still twanging the gear stick. Next, he checks the lights work, hits a huge button on the dashboard which bathes them in blue. Ryan sits with his legs crossed in the footwell, listening to the radio.
‘Yes, thanks. We’ve got reports of an elderly male who appears drunk and is being offensive to passers-by.’
Ryan checks his watch. It’s five past eight in the morning.
‘Echo from Mike two four five, that’s received, on our way.’ Bradford finally starts the car’s engine and puts it into gear. ‘It’ll be Old Sandy,’ he remarks.
Ryan, terrified that there is also a letter of the police alphabet hidden in this sentence, says nothing.
‘Homeless guy, nice guy,’ Bradford says, checking his rear-view mirror as he pulls out. ‘We’ll just probably give him another warning. Call an ambo if he’s in a really bad way. Vodka’s his thing. Drinks pints and pints of it. Amazing constitution, really.’
Ryan watches the traffic as they wait at a set of lights. It is a totally different experience to driving his civilian car. You’d be forgiven for thinking everyone was an exemplary driver; it’s like something from The Truman Show, everyone acting. Hands at ten and two. Eyes straight ahead.
‘Amazing how well behaved everybody is,’ Ryan says, and Bradford says nothing. Ryan keeps thinking about Old Sandy and his vodka. And, of course, about his own brother. ‘What’s his history?’ Ryan says. ‘Old Sandy’s?’
‘No idea.’
‘Wonder if we could ask.’
‘Ha,’ Bradford says, his eyes looking straight ahead. ‘Yeah – if we did that for everyone, we’d be fucking heroes, right?’
‘Right,’ Ryan says softly. The rain has smudged the lines outside to a soft blur, the streets reflecting brake lights and the white skies.
‘First rule of the job: almost all 999 calls are boring or involve idiots. Usually both,’ Bradford says flatly. ‘You can’t save idiots.’
‘Okay, great,’ Ryan says sarcastically.
‘Second rule: the new recruits are always far too soft.’
They arrive at the beach and Bradford parks neatly in a space. Ryan doesn’t dignify his remarks with an answer.
‘Come on then, Mike,’ Bradford says as he gets out. Ryan blushes again. The nickname will stick, he knows it will. This is how it works. He once attended a stag do where one of the stags was called First-floor Wanker the entire weekend only because of where his hotel room was compared to theirs. Ryan never even learned his real name.
Old Sandy isn’t that old. He has the pink, bruised face of an alcoholic but a lithe body. He is ranting about God as they approach, the whipped-up ocean an apocalyptic background, the eeriness of the seafront in off-season.
‘All right, Old Sandy,’ Bradford says. Sandy stops and pulls his coarse hair back from his forehead in recognition.
‘It’s you,’ he says sincerely to Bradford. ‘I hoped it would be you.’
It turns out, later, that his name is Daniel, not Sandy. The police call him Sandy because he sleeps at the beach.
Ryan looks up at the rain on the way to the next call-out and sighs.
Six incidents later. One domestic violence – the fourteenth call-out made by the wife, who can never bring herself to press charges. That was the most depressing but also – inappropriately – the most interesting. The rest … well. A man who urinated through the letterbox of a funeral parlour. A fight between two dog-owners about littering. A cashpoint that had eaten a ten-pound note. Seriously. Mundane is the right word for it.
Ryan arrives back at the police station with Bradford at six o’clock, his police uniform soaked through, as exhausted as if he hasn’t slept.
‘See you in the morning, Mike,’ Bradford says, chuckling to himself as they head inside. But Ryan can’t clock off: he’s got to fill in a training record about each call-out before he can go home. He is actually looking forward to the quiet of a little meeting room, the chance to reflect, to get his thoughts in order. To have a fucking cup of tea at last. His brain feels like a shaken snow globe. He thought it would be … he thought it would be different to this.
He walks into the foyer, past the enquiry officer – a different one, but with the same bored expression – and through a quiet corridor with a panic strip along the side. He is hoping to catch a glimpse of a suspect being interviewed, or of the cells, of anything, really. Anything except 999 calls. Six calls a day. Four days on, three off. Forty-eight weeks a year. Two years. Ryan can’t be bothered to work out how many calls that is, but he knows it’s a lot. Maybe today was just an anomaly, a bad day. Maybe Bradford is just jaded. Maybe tomorrow will be interesting. Maybe, maybe.
He pushes open the door to an empty meeting room. It has two doors, for soundproofing. He pulls a chair up at a cheap metal table, the kind you’d find in a village hall. He gets a notebook out of his vest pocket and takes a pen from a red plastic pot in the corner of the table and scrawls the date along the top. He was supposed to make these notes at the time, but Bradford told him that was training-school bollocks.
He begins to write about Sandy, then stops, wanting to think, instead. Wanting to think about how he can make a difference.
Looking back, his brother had started to go wayward, as his mother used to say, when he was in his late teens. It started with nicking cars, which escalated to selling drugs. All the way from puff to gear as fast as nought to sixty. What would Bradford have to say about that? He’d probably have thought his brother was wasting police time, too. A predictable set of affairs – no male role model, no prospects. Their mum had tried her best, but she wasn’t always there, she had two jobs. His brother, in a funny sort of way, wanted to help with the finances. That’s all. And he did, for a while, he did bring the money in, though they all wondered where from.