Wrong Place Wrong Time(19)

‘Amazing how well behaved everybody is,’ Ryan says, and Bradford says nothing. Ryan keeps thinking about Old Sandy and his vodka. And, of course, about his own brother. ‘What’s his history?’ Ryan says. ‘Old Sandy’s?’

‘No idea.’

‘Wonder if we could ask.’

‘Ha,’ Bradford says, his eyes looking straight ahead. ‘Yeah – if we did that for everyone, we’d be fucking heroes, right?’

‘Right,’ Ryan says softly. The rain has smudged the lines outside to a soft blur, the streets reflecting brake lights and the white skies.

‘First rule of the job: almost all 999 calls are boring or involve idiots. Usually both,’ Bradford says flatly. ‘You can’t save idiots.’

‘Okay, great,’ Ryan says sarcastically.

‘Second rule: the new recruits are always far too soft.’

They arrive at the beach and Bradford parks neatly in a space. Ryan doesn’t dignify his remarks with an answer.

‘Come on then, Mike,’ Bradford says as he gets out. Ryan blushes again. The nickname will stick, he knows it will. This is how it works. He once attended a stag do where one of the stags was called First-floor Wanker the entire weekend only because of where his hotel room was compared to theirs. Ryan never even learned his real name.

Old Sandy isn’t that old. He has the pink, bruised face of an alcoholic but a lithe body. He is ranting about God as they approach, the whipped-up ocean an apocalyptic background, the eeriness of the seafront in off-season.

‘All right, Old Sandy,’ Bradford says. Sandy stops and pulls his coarse hair back from his forehead in recognition.

‘It’s you,’ he says sincerely to Bradford. ‘I hoped it would be you.’

It turns out, later, that his name is Daniel, not Sandy. The police call him Sandy because he sleeps at the beach.

Ryan looks up at the rain on the way to the next call-out and sighs.

Six incidents later. One domestic violence – the fourteenth call-out made by the wife, who can never bring herself to press charges. That was the most depressing but also – inappropriately – the most interesting. The rest … well. A man who urinated through the letterbox of a funeral parlour. A fight between two dog-owners about littering. A cashpoint that had eaten a ten-pound note. Seriously. Mundane is the right word for it.

Ryan arrives back at the police station with Bradford at six o’clock, his police uniform soaked through, as exhausted as if he hasn’t slept.

‘See you in the morning, Mike,’ Bradford says, chuckling to himself as they head inside. But Ryan can’t clock off: he’s got to fill in a training record about each call-out before he can go home. He is actually looking forward to the quiet of a little meeting room, the chance to reflect, to get his thoughts in order. To have a fucking cup of tea at last. His brain feels like a shaken snow globe. He thought it would be … he thought it would be different to this.

He walks into the foyer, past the enquiry officer – a different one, but with the same bored expression – and through a quiet corridor with a panic strip along the side. He is hoping to catch a glimpse of a suspect being interviewed, or of the cells, of anything, really. Anything except 999 calls. Six calls a day. Four days on, three off. Forty-eight weeks a year. Two years. Ryan can’t be bothered to work out how many calls that is, but he knows it’s a lot. Maybe today was just an anomaly, a bad day. Maybe Bradford is just jaded. Maybe tomorrow will be interesting. Maybe, maybe.

He pushes open the door to an empty meeting room. It has two doors, for soundproofing. He pulls a chair up at a cheap metal table, the kind you’d find in a village hall. He gets a notebook out of his vest pocket and takes a pen from a red plastic pot in the corner of the table and scrawls the date along the top. He was supposed to make these notes at the time, but Bradford told him that was training-school bollocks.

He begins to write about Sandy, then stops, wanting to think, instead. Wanting to think about how he can make a difference.

Looking back, his brother had started to go wayward, as his mother used to say, when he was in his late teens. It started with nicking cars, which escalated to selling drugs. All the way from puff to gear as fast as nought to sixty. What would Bradford have to say about that? He’d probably have thought his brother was wasting police time, too. A predictable set of affairs – no male role model, no prospects. Their mum had tried her best, but she wasn’t always there, she had two jobs. His brother, in a funny sort of way, wanted to help with the finances. That’s all. And he did, for a while, he did bring the money in, though they all wondered where from.

Ryan upends the pen against the notebook. Maybe he is making a difference to people like his brother. Old Sandy was pleased to see them – seemed to know Bradford well, anyway. Maybe they are helping him, just not in the way Ryan expected.

Bugger it, Ryan thinks. He’ll do the notebook tomorrow. He’s not in the right mood now.

He opens the door to the meeting room. A big guy is walking past. He’s wearing a suit. CID, maybe. Ryan feels something positive bloom across his chest. Yes, yes, yes, there’s still plenty of opportunities here. To do interesting things and to make a difference. That’s all Ryan wants to do. Isn’t that all anyone wants to do?

‘All right,’ Ryan says to the man. He’s tall, well over six feet, and thickset, too. Looks kind of like a computer-game villain.