Decay Inevitable

Slowing now, switching off the police lights, coasting into George Lane, the disused Hither Green hospital on their left a series of black shapes against the failing dark. Sally parked on Lullingstone Lane and they waited for a moment, the engine’s tick a strange comfort as it cooled.

Sean assessed the buildings. “Which one does the girl live in?” he asked.

“That one there. Number fifty-six. Bottom flat. The call came in from a neighbour who lives across the way. He said he saw someone creeping about outside her window.”

“Really? What’s he doing up so late? Wristing himself off watching her curtains?”

“He works nights. Security guard at the hospital.”

“We’re going to get piss-wet through,” Sean said.

Sally opened her door; late December wind knifed them. “It’s good for the skin. Come on.”

They searched the gardens and gulleys surrounding the flat, Sally with markedly greater conviction than her partner. Sean knocked on the door of fifty-six and was about to suggest to Sally that they visit the man who had made the emergency call when he saw movement: a face peering from the window of the woman’s home.

“Sally, there’s someone watching us,” he said, and, to the face, stridently: “Would you mind opening the front door, please, sir?”

It was a pasty-faced thirty-something in a towelling robe that greeted them. Nuggets of sleep in the corners of his eyes. Bed hair.

“Sorry to bother you, sir,” droned Sean, going through the motions. He felt like a glove puppet in an act that hadn’t changed for decades. “We’ve had word of a prowler in the area. Have you seen anything? Heard anything?”

The guy shook his head. “I was asleep. Your torches woke me up.”

“Is there anyone else in the flat that might have heard anything?”

The guy looked back over his shoulder. When he returned his gaze to Sean he was wearing a sleepy grin. “Luce, my girlfriend, she’s asleep too. You’d have had to drive your car through the wall to wake her up.”

“Very sorry... If you should happen... don’t hesitate... Goodnight, then.” All of that jargon made him ill. The constabulary vocabulary; nobody believed the politeness had any depth. He was even starting to speak like a policeman at home. It wouldn’t be long before he flipped his notebook out to give Rachel a report on how the weekly shop had gone.

Flapping through the rain, Sean and Sally hurried back to the car. While Sally negotiated the quiet roads back to the main street, Sean called in to let control know the score.

I hate this job.

It was a different job to the one that had been sold to him. A memory, unbidden, expanded in his mind like a drop of oil in water. Coming home one evening on the train with a friend who had recently enlisted, Christmas bags forming a barrier between them, Sean had been asked what he wanted to make of his life, the odd jobs and dole cheques having left him without any sense of progression.

“You could do worse than join up,” his friend had told him. His cheeks were florid from a spirited chill wind and the beer they had consumed with their dinner. “You could have a fantastic time, a young single lad on the money they pay you these days. It’s a doddle of a job.”

It was tempting enough for Sean to make a few enquiries. Within a week he had allowed himself to be persuaded to fill in an application form. Before he was fully aware of what was happening to him, Sean was six weeks deep into training and already hating everything about it. Showing aptitude for the work helped mask the mismatch. The first week on the beat, one of his new friends on a patrol in Hendon was set upon by six men wearing masks. While five of them held him down on the floor, the sixth carved up the probationer’s legs with a sixteen-inch machete.

Hard months followed when Sean had to battle with the realisation that he was not cut from the kind of cloth that formed a modern police officer; worse, he didn’t even possess a patch of it. Late-night telephone calls to his friends didn’t help. Sean was told to show some steel, to butch it out. Watching the traffic bristling along Amhurst Park where he rented a top-floor flat, he asked questions of himself that could only ever be answered in the negative. Empty vodka bottles piled up in the kitchen, a crass testament to the masculinity to which he felt unable to lay claim.

Somehow, thanks to discreet sessions with the division psychologist and the jockeying of his new partner, Sally, he was able to find cause for hope. Much of the job was dull but safe. Night shifts, however, would always scour the saliva from his mouth and have him on edge whenever the radio on the dash spat its codes of desperation at him.

“Can we stop?” he asked Sally. “Let’s get some coffee.”