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It really wasn’t my fault. I did my job. It’s really not easy being a community copper these days. The old hands complain about the lack of respect, the restrictions, like not being able to clout a hooligan when you catch him red-handed, all the extra paperwork, that sort of thing.
So anyway, I was doin’ my evening rounds of the Catskill Estate. I always goes round about twilight to see what’s happening. I knows that there are a lot of old people so I checks in on ‘em especially like, make sure they’s okay.
Mostly they is, but now and again there’s a problem, and, well I like helping, ‘s why I ‘came a copper.
So there’s this particular old woman, bit reclusive, private, not a snob exactly, but got high standards, you know. Usually I wouldn’t bother her, but normally as I walks past, she has her front light on, s’pose she’s readin’ or summat. Any road, this night her lights off, see, and the gate is wide open, so I wanders up to the front door and calls in through the letter-box.
“Hello” I says, “Are you all right?”
Well it took a second but she calls back “No, I’m all right.”
So I asks if she’s sure, as you do, as her light was off.
She told me she’d been having a nap. So I tells her to take care and wanders off to finish me rounds. I did shut the gate of course, only right.
Originally, I intended to go back and check again, you know, you can’t be too careful with old folks.
But as it happened, young Billy Thompson was up to his old tricks, vandalizing, though he calls it ‘tagging’.
So I went back to the station in the paddy wagon, along with Billy. He seems to forget that now he’s in his teens he can be nicked! So I never did get back to check on the old lady, Doris I think her name was.
Right well, next day, it was about midday, ‘cause I was on that side of the estate on my way to refs, that I saw this Afro-Caribbean woman, name of Zulema, home-help she is, and she’s waving at me franticly from this old woman’s gate. I goes over and she asks me to call an ambulance. Well, I gets on the radio, getting the station to request the ambulance, then I follows Zulema into the house. And there she was, sat up against the settee, cracker crumbs all down her front.
I knew she were dead, even if it were the first dead body I’d ever seen, no-one living looks that colour. I’m not proud of it, but I chucked up outside, when I went out to report. They didn’t cancel the ambulance though. The paramedic said it must have been shock and hypothermia, seems Doris had broken something, her leg I think, and the shock, plus the cold of the floor, had combined to freeze her to death. They reckoned that she probably didn’t feel anything, I hope not.
But like I said, it wasn’t my fault, she told me she was fine. She must have known she’d done her leg in, so why didn’t she ask me for help? Why do the old do anything?
Oh, have to excuse me, duty calls.
"Oi You! What do think your doin’?”