CHAPTER 7
“Who the hell are you?”

What a lovely welcome.

“Diane Owens. I’m on secondment here”

“Ah! The fresh meat! Kettle’s over there; white, two sugars for me”

I looked at him, all hair gel and crap tie, trying to work out how easily I could get away with telling him to go fuck himself, and tried a different tack.

“Yeah, cold morning. I’ll do you one while I do mine, and it’s white without for me. You are?”

He laughed, and someone else called over a remark about how it looked as if I would fit in ‘right tidy like’.

“I’m Harry Preece. Like the style, girl! Don’t take just any old shit in this place. Oh, and it’s D.I. Preece”

Oh shit. “Sorry, sir!”

“Bugger that game. Welcome to real policing. Now, get my tea and bring it with yours and we’ll have a chat”

No separate glass-walled office, no name plate on a door, just a corner of a busy, noisy shared space with piles of paper everywhere. I joined D.I. Preece at his desk, on a chair he cleared for me.

“Potted history, Diane? Just the juicy and relevant bits”

I talked him through selected parts of my life, leaving out any reference to two other policemen and a relative, and he was already nodding.

“Sergeant Gould had a chat with me and Sammy Patel, and they think you have the right attitude for a challenge. Trust me, this work IS challenging. Not as many times rolling round the floor, but it’s not easy. Now, I’ve got you teamed up with Derek Bradford for this week. Detective Sergeant, he is. Ears open, gob shut for now, unless you have something relevant, and then keep that between you and Des, not in front of the punters. Just remember, that there aren’t many stupid questions, and if you ask one you’ll be told why it’s stupid. You right with that?”

“I think so. What have you got for me?”

“Ah, boring shit for now. Bilking at a couple of petrol stations. We need someone to look at a dozen or so bits of CCTV and catalogue what you were probably told to call ‘evidence’. More than that, I want you to look at the footage specifically for any patterns”

“Er, this been done already, sir?”

“Harry in the office, love. Yes, it has, but I want a fresh look at it, and it’s the sort of boring, mind-numbing shite I use to filter out the wasters and wannabes. Room in the corner, there. Take your tea, and Alun over there in the polo neck will show you how it works. ALUN! FRESH MEAT FOR YOU!”

That began a pattern of work I became very familiar with, filtering CCTV footage. In the end, I asked Alun if they had another screen, so I could compare stuff directly, and he just grinned and wheeled in the other monitor and DVD player, which had been sitting by the kettle with a couple of tea towels over it. I had clearly passed the first test.

I actually got engrossed in it, and my reporter’s pad--- not my pocket-book--- got filled up with all sorts of notes, including drawing, diagrams, all sorts of things that made so much sense at the time. What I did notice, though, was that a cup of tea appeared at my elbow every half hour or so. The shift finished before I was ready for it to do so, and I was astonished to find myself lying in bed that night, after a bath and a microwaved shepherd’s pie, still running CCTV comparisons against my closed eyelids.

Something had caught the back end of my consciousness, and it kept me awake most of the night, so much so I felt like shit when I turned up for work the next day, this time in some looser trousers and a skinny sweater of my own. Almost nobody else was wearing a suit, so time to relax away from the professional bitch kit.

Two hours in, and I had the first part of a pattern.

“Alun!”

“Yup?”

“Why is it always the passenger who works the pump? I mean, they don’t exactly drive off all hot and hasty, do they?”

He laughed. “Part of a MIPSY idea, Di”

“You what?”

“Term we use here. Always someone as knows the law better than we do, always someone that thinks they have the cleverest scam since Baldrick found a turnip that looked a bit like a willy. ‘Man In Pub Said You’ can’t get done if, don’t get points if, won’t blow over 35 if, all sorts of rubbish. Blowing on breathalysers, walking backwards into the room you’re burgling, all sorts of schemes to keep you safe from the law. That one is the ‘I wasn’t the one who drove off without paying’ defence”

“Ah. Thought I’d got something new”

He sat down on the edge of the desk.

“Di, you just have. Not new to us, of course, but new to you, and what’s important is that it is not only very relevant, but you picked it up yourself, no prompting, isn’t it? Now…”

He scrolled the video feed along just a touch, and zoomed the picture in.

“Look at the licence plate. See anything missing?”

“No… Wait. Trade name?”

“Aye, and no EU marker. Home-made, or at least made to order by someone else. Not the real ones, see?”

He was right, of course, and I felt stupid. When he pointed out that what I could see of the driver showed them to be in just about identical kit to the passenger, I felt even more so.

“Alun, how do we sort this one out, then?”

“Ah, girl, that’s the bit you haven’t done. Time and place pattern, that’s what you need here, plus anything that specifically ties either the scrotes or their vehicle to the scene. We get them once, we get them for one offence. Black Ford Focus, aye? No real plates, and at least four sets we know about? How do we pick it out, track it down? What’s distinctive about it”

Bloody learning curve, but it wasn’t that steep, and he did open my eyes, and that is how I caught the time they clipped the advertising board with their nearside front bumper hard enough to leave a little bit of plastic on the ground.

“Alun, can we go out? Want to look at a site”

“What you got, girl?”

“Might have a bit of the car. This video’s only three days old”

“OK. I’m driving, though. Have you noted which pump it was?”

No I bloody hadn’t, but I did, and shortly we were down at some horrible little backstreet filling station, where he said the words to the cashier and Smiled the Smile, and then together we gloved up as per the rules and bagged the jagged piece of black plastic that lay hard against the kerb of the island that carried pump number six.

“Tea and a bacon sarnie, I think, while we complete our notes made contemporaneously in accordance with yadda yadda. You’re not a veggie, are you?”

“Not at all!”

“Thank fuck for that. The missus went through that kick for a while, and it was utter shite at ours for a month till she saw sense. Now, I know a great little greasy spoon…”

It was a great little greasy, and the sandwich was just right, and years later I would realise how, where and when the pattern of my working life had been set.

No, there was no sudden swoop on the miscreants, no show trial with evidence dramatically produced, but a few weeks later, a legitimately-plated black Focus with a damaged bumper was spotted by a beat copper, who sneakily snapped a picture, and the damage matched our piece of debris. Two weeks and an addition to the NPR file later, and said Automatic Reader picked up the Number Plate in question, and when the nice traffic officer opened the boot there were three spare sets of number plates, all of which were on my video files.

Bish, bosh, and a guilty plea from the driver later, the passenger opted for what Alun called MIPSY, the Magistrates laughed, and did him anyway. We made our way back to the nick in Alun’s car, but for some reason he insisted on stopping at the Sainsbury’s just down the road.

“What are we here for, butt?”

“Ah, Di, traditional, innit? Cakes”

“Uh?”

“Your case, solved. You get to buy cakes for the office!”

“Sod that you are!”

“I’ll go halves with you, girl, if you want”

“Hang on, Alun. Did you say it was my case?”

“Yup, and you solved it. Well done. I like choccy cake, me”

Oh. My purse took a bit of a hit, but he was right, and as I loaded up a tray of drinks for the crew, later that evening in the pub, I felt I had found something I would really like to stick at. I still stuck to soft drinks, though.