Night Shift

So you want to know the worst case I’ve ever had in my thirty years on the job? Get us two more teas in, Pete, and I’ll tell you.

It was June ’84 and I’d only just joined up. Not that you’d have been born then. Nineteen-ninety five, you say? Flipping heck, the Met’s hiring kids these days.

I was on the night shift when it happened. I was on the beat down by the Arndale Centre at four in the morning when a call came through on my radio that there’d been a suicide; some bloke had taken a dive off the top the multi-storey car park.

The female witness who called 999 had seen it all happen from her front room window in the tower block directly opposite. She couldn’t sleep, had got up to make a cuppa and had seen the bloke jump off. Said he looked like he was on the diving board at the swimming baths.

My first death, it was. It was one of the worst too, and believe me I’ve seen a few. I was the first one on the scene and he was just – bits. All smashed up on the way down, unrecognisable. What was left didn’t even look human.

I don’t mind telling you I was sick as a parrot at the sight of it. Called the ambulance when I’d pulled myself together but there was nothing they could do; one of the crew was sick all over his boots too; it was that bad. An undertaker job if ever there was one.

But that wasn’t the end of it, not by a long chalk.

It was almost clocking off time when the desk sergeant took a call from a Mrs. Hall who said her husband never came home last night. After what I’d seen I didn’t much fancy going home and trying to kip; every time I shut my eyes I kept seeing what was left of the bloke lying on the pavement and with blood and brains everywhere. So I offered to go round with one of the day shift WPCs to take some details.

It was a posh address, one of them big detached houses up by the golf club. Turns out the missing man was none other than the Mr. George Hall: before your time, lad, but back then he was a well-known local businessman. He owned the big vacuum cleaner factory on the ring-road. It’s all flats now, of course.

George Hall had left his wife a note before he went. The usual thing; it said how he was sorry but it was for the best, he’d got no other choice. It said how much he loved his wife and kids. He’d left his wedding ring with the note on the kitchen table for Mrs H. to find in the morning.

She told us he’d been having trouble with the business and they’d got money worries; the house was mortgaged twice over, not that she was meant to know. We asked her if she had a photo of her husband we could borrow, not that it would be much use because me and the WPC both knew full that it was Mr. Hall who had taken a jump sixty feet off the car-park roof.

We saw ourselves out. I went back to the section house, sunk a few large whiskies and went to bed.

The next day the hospital called and said they’d found a wallet in the trouser pocket of what was left of the body. No other identification, but that wasn’t surprising back in the Eighties, not everyone carried plastic like they do now. It was a nice brown pigskin wallet, holding twenty quid in cash. Shame about an enormous bloodstain all over the front.

The same WPC got the unenviable job of taking the wallet round to Mrs. Hall to ask if she could identify it as her husband’s. Which she did, very tearfully, and when the WPC explained about the suicide Mrs. Hall got so hysterical that the doctor had to be called out to sedate her. Her sister broke the news to their two boys. Ten and twelve they were.

The funeral was something else: George Hall was sent off in a plate-glass coach with a pair of black horses, plumes: the works. There were photos of it in the local paper because he’d been the chairman of the Rotary Club. It seemed as if everyone knew him and no-one had a bad word to say.

But not long afterwards it came out that the factory was on its knees, financially. Turned out he’d been involved in all sorts of rackets to try and keep up the lifestyle: the Jag in the drive, private school for the sons. He’d embezzled most of the factory’s pension fund, so it was no wonder he’d topped himself; it was only a matter of time before everything came crashing down.

But that wasn’t the end of it either.

Fast forward eighteen months and you can imagine what sort of a Christmas Day Mrs. Hall and her sons were having. The big house by the golf club had been repossessed, and the three of them were now living in rented flat on the other side of town, somewhere they didn’t get spat at in the street.

No sooner had she put the telly on for the Bond film than somebody rang the doorbell. When she went to answer it her husband was standing there on the doorstep as large as life and with a nice suntan to boot.

When she stopped screaming long enough to listen, it turned out it wasn’t him who had taken a dive off the car park. Oh no, George had skipped off to Spain once he knew the game was almost up. He took what was left of the staff pension fund and went with his fancy woman; a bit on the side half his age.

But the girlfriend left him and he missed the kids so much he decided to come home. He said it wasn’t a suicide note; he was only trying to tell his wife he was leaving her.

No. It wasn’t my best case, not by a long shot.