Читать книгу The Confessions Series - Ash Cameron - Страница 29

When you’re due to move stations or into another role, you ideally clear up your current and outstanding cases. You also need to keep out of trouble. It’s not unusual to be posted as station officer, or gaoler, or be given some other inside position during the weeks before you move on.

I was due to go off and work incognito, so the sergeant posted me to the clamp van. I hated working the clamp van. If you want to go to Traffic or had an interest in motors, then it might be a good posting, but for those like me who preferred dealing with crime and with people, it was loathsome.

As a probationer I did my quota of traffic offences. I reported people for driving in a bus lane, for doing red lights (which I agree is very wrong), for parking on a zebra crossing and for driving a car in a dangerous condition. I did what I had to do as directed by my performance indicators. Once out of my probation, if I presented my sergeant with a traffic process book, once he had picked himself up off the floor, he knew the offence must have been something bad.

Speed kills, yes it does, but I much prefer nicking those involved with a different kind of speed. Therefore, to be posted to the clamp van was my worst nightmare. Not only did it mean getting to work for 9 a.m. and travelling during rush hour, but it also meant I’d have to upset at least thirty people a day, which I hated doing. And I went home smelling of man-van, metal and oil.

The local council ran the clamping department. It had been agreed at a high level that each clamp van should be manned by a trained clamp person (a clamper) and a police officer who had to write the tickets. I can’t remember exactly how much it cost the driver to have the clamp removed but the total cost of ticket and clamp was very expensive. The clampers were council workers not trained in people skills. Nor did they have the vetting police officers had. Some of them were great guys (there were no women clampers) but others were like bulldogs, or gorillas. Neanderthals. And I had a thirty-day posting with them.

The sergeant warned me not to put holiday leave in. ‘Just do it, Ash. And keep out of trouble.’

‘Me, sarge? I don’t know what you mean.’ Like a truculent child, I knew exactly what he meant. Keep my eyes and ears focused on the job. No running off after someone, no nabbing shoplifters who just happened to run out of a shop and into my path, no being sidetracked …

‘If you see anything, or get involved in anything, call for assistance for someone else to deal with it. You’re not getting out of clamping,’ he warned.

Clamps were huge things, all fangled metal and heavy, and I hated them. The objective was thirty a day but sometimes you did a few less, sometimes more. If you consistently did less, you’d get a bollocking. I tried to make sure I did what I had to do, but I didn’t like it.

There was an art to fixing a clamp and some of the clampers had it down to nth seconds. They had a competition to see who did it the fastest. The officer posted with them had to write out the ticket as quickly as possible, slap it onto the car windscreen and then leg it. It pleased me to be posted with a fast clamper. I hated lingering. Once the clamp was on, the only way for it to come off was for the driver to pay the fine and then the de-clamping van would turn up and take it off. We couldn’t. Or at least that’s what they always told me.

If the driver of the car appeared before we left there was often a showdown. I had sympathy but, ultimately, they shouldn’t have parked there. And they should have looked out for the clamping van. We took a lot of verbal abuse. Sometimes it was physical.

Like all cities, parking in London is very difficult and very expensive. If you find a space it’s easy to overrun your meter by a few minutes. Some people took liberties and constantly parked where they shouldn’t and they deserved to be clamped. Some folk, usually the yuppies, would deal with it as an occupational hazard. If they got clamped early in the day, they wouldn’t phone up and pay the fine until much later. They’d treat it as a parking cost and put it on expenses.

If a vehicle was parked in such a way as to cause an obstruction, we would call the towing lorry who would turn up and cart the offending vehicle off somewhere deep in south London. I had less sympathy with them. It was difficult enough to drive in London, especially driving emergency vehicles through the packed streets. If you caused an obstruction, you were fair game to be towed. A few people reported their car as stolen only to discover it had been towed off. A sharp and harsh lesson.

Some clampers took great delight in finding expensive top-of-the-range cars to clamp, and those with exclusive private registrations. If they nabbed someone famous they’d lord about it for ever. The same with fancy cars. I hated being posted with that type of clamper. We’d spend most of the time in Mayfair and the posh streets of Westminster looking for the best and biggest cars. It drove me mad and those shifts were the longest.

Every clamp van had an hour for lunch. Police officers’ breaks were constantly interrupted; you always had to be ready to drop-and-go in an instant and you frequently didn’t get a break. It was different on the clamp van. They always had a full hour. You’d either get 12–1 or 1–2 for lunch, varying it to fit in with the second van. Except for Fridays.

Every Friday lunchtime the clamp van would travel to Lambeth, pull up outside a grotty little pub and park alongside the clamp vans of other local authorities, builders’ vans and other assorted lunchtime drinkers. I suspect some CID from nearby police stations may have imbibed too, back in the day when lunchtime drinking was almost a convention.

I’d buy a takeaway coffee from the tiny café opposite the pub and sit in the clamp van with my sandwich, bag of crisps and an apple while my clamper would enjoy his hour with colleagues. I’d read the tabloid newspaper bought by the clamper that morning and I’d skip over the pages of bare-breasted ladies. I’d get ahead on the paperwork while he’d be in the pub watching the strippers.

I hated my time clamping and was so glad when I never, ever had to do it again.