Ex-chapter 18 - Bank robbers and buried noses part 1

PC David Daindridge stared out of the police car at a world from which he was separated by the width of a car window on one side and 32 stone of bastard on the other. Sergeant M was relating one of his horrifying anecdotes, punctuating each of the myriad obscenities, with a sharp poke into the young officer’s ribcage. It was more an assault than a conversation and Daindridge found himself wondering, as he often did, just how painful it would be to sprint into the waves of the winter sea and never stop.

“Every single day for 6 months I walked past a man in a set of threadbare fatigues on my way to work. Explosion of white hair, reeking of piss, carrying a canvass ruck sack. I would get to the chemist on the High Street just as he was coming out of The Crescent and he would always have the biggest smile on his face, the kind that makes you want to punch it away. This particular morning, my wife came into the kitchen where I was preparing my usual pre breakfast snack of 12 rashers of bacon and a king size black pudding, picked up the frying pan with which I was prepared said feast, shouted “enjoy your breakfast you fat fuck” and smashed it into my face with such force that I fell off my chair onto the floor and shat myself. It was one of those moments which really make you question where all the romance in your relationship has gone.”

“So, rather than walk up Haverstock Hill to Hampstead Police station, I decided, on balance , given that my cheekbone had been shattered and the word “Teflon” had been burnt in reverse onto my forehead, that I had better pop in to A and E.”

“Just at the bottom of Hampstead Heath I saw the white haired man with the canvass ruck sack darting off into a bush and despite the obvious inconvenience of having only half a face, my police instincts kicked in and I decided to follow him. When he reached this small area of dense undergrowth, he crawled inside, singing “Flash, ah ah, saviour of the universe, Flash, ah ah, saved every one of us”, in a discordant falsetto, took something out of his bag, buried it and left. I managed to scramble in with no little difficulty and discovered, inside a plastic zip lock bag, a small red velvet gift box, tied with a silk bow and inside that a nose, lovingly severed from its owner, not a trace of blood. I dug around a bit more and found another bag and another nose. 10 minutes later and I must have dug up 30 bags, all containing human noses and do you know what I did Dangerous Dave?” Each word was punctuated by another painful prod in the ribs.

Daindridge drank in the world through the distorting facets of a raindrop as it bled down the passenger window of the car in pursuit of oblivion. How much pain would he feel if he was hit by a train? Would there be a moment of such revelatory agony that his mind would become a perpetual bedlam or would it just be a full stop at the end of the incoherent sentence that his life had become?

“I buried all the boxes exactly where I found them and got up10 minutes later every day so I would never see the murderous old twat again and do you know why - the paperwork, can you imagine the fucking paperwork? 30 fucking noses. Fuck me. No thanks.”

The tributaries of a dozen raindrop rivers traversed the car’s passenger window, allowing Daindridge to view the world through a bleeding spectrum of convergent colours. He watched a disembodied man in a green balaclava, the sleeves of his red and black leather jacket melting down and around his sawn off shotgun as he entered NatWest Bank in Haverstock Hill.

“Errrrr” Daindridge sat bolt upright pointing at the door of the bank.

Sergeant M crammed the last of the 12 doughnuts he had joylessly consumed into his mouth and tutted.

“Sir, I think.....”

“You’re not here to think Desperate Dan, you’re here to drive, listen to my diabolical anecdotes and shut the fuck up.”

“There’s a bank robbery happening.”

Sergeant M had been pouring fossilized sugar fragments from the upturned empty doughnut bag into his gaping mouth and as he turned, the sugar spilt down his uniform and into his ample lap. He was not best pleased.

“There’s a bank robbery happening where?”

“In the bank sir.”

“Oh for fucks sake.” grunted Sergeant M, commencing the arduous process of convincing his momentous arse to accept the pleading missives it was receiving from his brain seriously and move.

“Shouldn’t we call this in?” Asked Daindridge who wanted to cry, urinate, vomit and scream at the same time and would have done so, had he been left to his own devices. He had picked up the car radio but a leather gloved trotter encased his wrist and forced him to drop it.

“If we call it in, its a KN33(22), a LN43 and two N9.3’s. If we deal with it ourselves its a G41 and I can be sitting at home tonight curled up in front of the football with two plates of curry and a pizza.” This was a less than persuasive argument but Daindridge knew that Sergeant M was far more dangerous than a man with a shot gun and he leapt unenthusiastically into the North London deluge.

As they entered the bank the man in the balaclava was standing on the security guard and had already blown a hole through the ceiling and the bank manager’s left arm. He turned to see what appeared to be a hippopotamus in a police uniform bearing down on him. The hippopotamus was not moving quickly but as anyone facing an impending impact with such a beast will testify, that does not really matter. He tried to re-load the sawn off, realized he had not brought any more cartridges, swung the shotgun at the creature and then the world became a black velvet coffin.

As he lay amongst the remnants of bank robber 1, Sergeant M felt the barrel of a low calibre pistol press against the side of his face. It probably should have occurred to him that there would be two bank robbers but his reasoning was as coherent as a portrait defaced by an acid attack and the only mystery the world still held for him was how it continued to accommodate his increasingly mammoth frame.