Free Prisoners, Property and Prostitutes by Tom Ratcliffe Page A

freezing frame.
    The driver took pity on me. ‘Get in and have a warm.’
    I didn’t need asking twice.
    I settled into the rear seat, even the upholstery exuding warmth which it had absorbed through a night of closed windows and high heat. It was almost stifling, and I loved it. It wasn’t long before I started to doze, floating away on a blissful wave of luxury.
    After what felt like a few seconds this tranquillity was rudely interrupted by my radio crackling into life.
    ‘Your location for Sergeant York please.’
    Sergeant York was my patrol Sergeant at the time. He took delight in hounding the foot patrols to see they were exactly ontheir beats. He was generally disliked and left the older in service alone as he knew better than to try pushing them around. This meant that the probationers bore the brunt of his efforts.
    I sat up and looked out of the car window. I knew the town centre quite well by now, but worryingly didn’t recognise a single building.
    ‘Where are we?’ I asked.
    ‘Cuckenfold,’ said the driver.
    Cuckenfold?! I had obviously been more asleep than I realised. We were over five miles out of town, a long way on a snowy night. I needed to be back in town, and fast. Finding an explanation for being a matter of yards off my beat was difficult. To explain being several miles away in an outlying village meant trouble. I could claim I got lost in a blizzard, but I discounted that one straight away. An excuse on the lines of ‘I needed to warm up to avoid dying of exposure’ wouldn’t be good enough either.
    Although it was not strictly their fault I was so far off my patch, the traffic crew did their best for me. The roads had been gritted, but the snowfall was starting to win the battle again, and I admired the true skill with which the heavy car was made to hurtle through the night towards town. Meanwhile I had to buy time to stave off the Sergeant. First I ignored the transmissions until about the third time of calling, then said ‘receiving you, go ahead,’ let them give the entire message and then repeated ‘receiving you, go ahead,’ as if I had heard nothing. Eventually I could stall no longer, and gave my location as New Beam Street, a long road in the town centre. There werenumerous alleyways and back yards off it, in which I could maintain I had been unable to get proper radio reception. My stalling worked, and a few minutes later we slewed to a halt in the road and I jumped out. The traffic car shot off up one of the side streets, and moments later the Sergeant’s panda turned the corner into view. By some miracle we had avoided being seen.
    Sergeant York stopped next to me. I tried the passenger door handle and found it locked, and instead of opening it he gesticulated for me to walk round to the driver’s side. He wound the window down a couple of inches, not wanting too much cold to get in.
    ‘Anything going on?’ he asked.
    ‘Not really,’ I replied. ‘Quite quiet tonight.’
    ‘Right. Carry on then,’ he said, and drove off.
    This was nothing more than a spying expedition, seeing if I really was on my beat or not. He didn’t seem to notice that I was dry and relaxed, betraying none of the symptoms of frostbite that he probably expected. Maybe that was why he didn’t offer me a brief respite in his car, but more likely he took his usual satisfaction from being warm while others were not.
    John Morgan met up with me one night when we were both on foot patrol. He was wearing his cape, and with the falling snow he looked quite Dickensian. I was shivering with cold after about two hours of non-stop property checking. John also had a good covering of snow, but looked far warmer than me. The cape covered your arms and body in one, but this difference did not seem enough to justify John’s relative comfort.
    ‘How come you’re not shivering?’ I asked.
    ‘Central heating,’ he said with a comfortable grin.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Central heating,’ he repeated, and