Unfinished Business...
SEVENTEEN
Senior Sergeant Armstrong was in the latter category. He also had a physique not unlike that of Sergeant Owens and a disagreeable temperament to match. I’d no sooner announced myself than he jutted his jaw forward and scowled. “You took your bloody time.”
He snatched St Pete’s letter of appointment and scanned it. His eyes narrowed, almost disappearing behind fleshy cheeks. Plainly, he was disappointed; perhaps he’d expected a superintendent. “Well, I suppose we can put you to some use,” he growled. “Follow me.”
I got the recruit’s tour of the station, which was four ground-floor rooms in one of the ubiquitous apartment blocks, distinguished externally from its neighbours only by the ‘Police’ sign over the entrance. I was introduced to his two morose coots of sergeants, got the briefest squiz at the equipment room, had a glance at the ablution/cell block out back and finished up in the muster room. All the time, Armstrong kept up a running commentary on how the system worked, punctuating it at intervals with unsubtle suggestions about being punctual. And tidy. And well groomed. And conscientious.
And deferential, I reckoned.
The map pinned to the notice board intrigued me. It was a bird’s eye view of Purgatory, or at least the part of it I was in. I’d been pretty good at my estimation of its size; it was in fact ten kilometres square. The layout was depressingly rectilinear, with all the design features of a cake rack. There were no parks or recreational buildings that I could see, just row upon row of identical streets. The Styx formed one boundary; the other three were marked with broad green bands.
“Agriculture?” I asked.
Armstrong nodded. “P.I.Z. Primary industry zone.”
“And beyond that?”
He shrugged. “More of this, I suppose.”
“You’ve never seen it?”
“Nope. And neither will you. Where the P.I.Z. starts, you stop. Not our jurisdiction.” His glower reinforced the stricture. He pointed to the equipment room as he waddled off to his office. “Get yourself a uniform, then report back to me.”
The uniform was your basic black shoes, navy trousers and shirt made from what felt like cheap cotton, and a black belt from which hung a pair of cuffs and a baton. not exactly what I was used to but I had a feeling that asking for something more sartorial would achieve nought. I wandered back to Armstrong.
“Couldn’t find a raincoat,” I said.
He was scribbling out some kind of timetable and didn’t even look up. “It doesn’t rain here.”
Very matter-of-fact. I heard, but it didn’t penetrate very far. “Doesn’t...? You mean...never?” I shot a quick glance through his window to where grey clouds were massed. “It never rains?”
This time he looked up, and I wished he hadn’t. He was taking perverse pleasure in adding to my disillusionment. “That’s what I said. Only place you get rain is the P.I.Z. You might see it one day, if you’re lucky.” He followed my glance through the window. “The sky’s always like that. Never changes.”
“Even at night?”
“Even at night.” He must have thought he’d shocked me far enough because his grin became amicable. “One thing we don’t get is complaints about changeable weather.”
Not funny. He was telling me I’d been consigned to a world where the sun didn’t shine. It was news I found hard to get my head around. I felt a cold stricture in my belly, like the one that grips you when you realise you’ve made a serious mistake you can’t correct.
“How long have you been here, sarge?”
There was pain in the reply. “Since nineteen ninety.” To my unspoken question, he added, “I was in the Drug Squad. Took bribes. Turned my back too often.”
Eleven years! Christ! And he hadn’t shot anyone!
“You’ve got a lot to get used to, Mason,” he told me, his grin disappearing. He thrust his scribbling at me. “And now is as good a time as any to start.” It was a roster, my roster, for the next month. I’d be patrolling First District, which took in Pete’s courthouse.
The policing system, as he explained it, was remarkably simple. Our little piece of Purgatory was divided into twenty districts – one copper to each – and we patrolled on foot, twelve hours per shift. Communication was via a primitive phone system, a switchboard in the sergeants’ office linked to police phones scattered around each district. If I wanted to call in, I simply went to the nearest one and rang. If HQ wanted my attention, a light would show on all the phones on my beat.
“Not that you’ll have much cause to use ‘em,” Armstrong continued. “By and large, the community’s pretty law-abiding, as you can imagine.”
I could. So what sort of offences should I expect?
“Mainly assault. Usually by some bloke who’s gone troppo...bored out of his brain, frustrated, loses his cool and whacks somebody.”
“Anybody ever get seriously hurt? Killed?”
I didn’t realise it until Armstrong’s nasty grin returned. It was a ridiculous question.
“Killed? Here? Have you forgotten already?”
I flushed. Then a corollary question arose. “But, if there’s violence, what happens to the victim?”
“Nothing. Just a bit of temporary pain then good as new. Here...”
I tried to duck but Armstrong was too quick. His baton caught me over the left ear, full and hard. For a brief moment, my skull seemed to explode in a kaleidoscope of incandescent pain. I felt myself stagger, and then the blackness of unconsciousness rushed up at me. Then stopped. And faded. As did the pain. A second later, I was as good as new. Except I wanted to hit Armstrong back.
“You want to hit me back, don’t you?” Armstrong went on. “Often happens when one bloke whacks another. That’s when you’ll find yourself collaring two blokes instead of one, and that’s when you phone in for backup.”
Bugger the backup. What I wanted to know was: “But if there’s no injury, where’s the evidence? Where’s the proof?”
Armstrong looked at me as if I was a moron. He sighed affectatiously.
“Mason, here it doesn’t matter a rat’s arse about evidence.” He waved in the general direction of the Courthouse. He knows, and it all goes into that bloody great ledger of his. That’s why, when you really step out of line, he orders me to have you busted and brought before him. So, every time you collar some bastard, call in and I’ll tell you where to take him…here or the Courthouse. Simple.”
I had to agree. It was a system that cut out the middle man, and it had me thinking that lawyers would be redundant. Assuming any of them ever made it to here.
Armstrong thrust a large key into my hand. “This gets you into the Courthouse,” he told me. “It is not, repeat not, to be used by anyone but you. Got it?” Before I could even nod, he barked on. “It also gets you from the Courthouse to the ferry landing. Being in First District, you also double as a member of the ferry detail, helping to load the bloody thing and all that. Clear?”
It was. So were the map and roster he next thrust at me.
“Then get on with it.”