Chapter 1: Bury my heart in Bury St Edmunds

0900 Monday, April Fool’s Day, 2019. Thurston Hall, Suffolk.

DAY 1

April the First was a fitting day to start my new job and no prizes for guessing who was The Fool.

My fiancée, my ex-fiancée, considered the education I received at Barking Comprehensive School to be inadequate, and compared to her private education at Cheltenham Ladies College no doubt it was. She persuaded me to take an online course with the Open University – ‘The impact of architecture on British society, 1720-1960’. Thus when my taxi came to a stop in front of Thurston Hall, Headquarters of the East Anglian Constabulary (Central Division), I was able to air my new-found knowledge. ‘A fine example of Gothic Revival, influenced by William Burges and the Arts and Craft Movement,’ I thought to myself, there being no one else around to question my erudition other than the bored looking taxi driver.

I paid the cabbie and then strode up to the porticoed entrance, pushing through a revolving door that rather shattered the Gothic ambience. The entrance hall was notable for its oak wood parquet flooring, stained-glass windows, and an overpowering smell of floor polish.

The reception desk was manned – womanned, in fact – by a bespectacled female of indeterminate age but of definite Indian extraction.

“Detective Sergeant Dolihaye, reporting for duty,” I announced.

“May I see your... ?”

I forestalled the rest of her request by opening and proffering my warrant card.

She frowned on seeing the crest. “I didn’t know Scotland Yard was...”

“I’ve transferred from the Metropolitan Police; this warrant card will be exchanged for an East Anglian Constabulary one when I’ve been officially taken on strength,” I said.

She nodded. “I see, Sergeant. You will have a Visitor’s Pass until you are logged into our HR database. I’ll ring them now and someone will come down and collect you. Please enter your details in the visitors’ book.” She pushed a ledger across the desk to me and then picked up her telephone and punched in three numbers. As she spoke into the handset I filled in my name, rank, and mobile number in the visitors’ book.

The receptionist put down the phone and gave me a slight smile. “The deputy HR manager will be down directly.” She pointed to a set of straight back chairs grouped around a table to the left of the reception desk. “You can wait for him over there.”

I nodded my thanks and moved to the table, found a chair with a cushion and sat down. There were a few periodicals scattered on the table top and I picked up one published by the Suffolk Tourist Board and idly flipped through the pages. One page headed ‘Things to do in Bury St Edmunds’ caught my eye. Someone had written across the page with a red fibre tipped pen: Bugger All. St Edmund died of boredom!

I grinned and then frowned, thinking of the implications of that statement. ‘What the hell have I let myself in for?’ I asked myself. However, I read the page extolling the delights of the town. Charles Dickens evidently thought the place worth visiting as there is a blue plaque at the Angel Hotel where the famous author stayed during his many visits to the town. Bury St Edmunds is also famous for The Pillar of Salt, which has nothing to do with Lot’s wife or Sodom and Gomorrah but is a Grade II listed monument, in fact an illuminated, whitewashed, concrete and metal road sign. I certainly hadn’t come across that particular piece of architecture on my course.

I skimmed the rest of the pages until reaching the back page. Written in the same red pen was another piece of information, presumably penned by the same author.

Don’t waste your time hunting for minge here. Get up to Norwich where the girls are lusty and busty, proving Noel Coward was wrong about Norfolk.

I was digesting that piece of advice when a voice intruded on my thoughts.

“Detective Sergeant Dolihaye?”

I looked up at the man standing before me. The pugnacious set of his jaw and his stocky build indicated him being Welsh, although his ‘Kairdiff’ accent had already apprised me of that fact.

“Yes, that’s me,” I said, and rose to my feet.

“Welcome to the East Anglian Constabulary,” the Welshman said, holding out his hand. “I’m Meredith Owen, deputy manager of Human Resources (HR), which some of us dinosaurs still refer to as the Personnel Department.”

We shook hands and I weighed him up. No taller than 5 ft 6 ins, broad-shouldered, silver-grey hair with a residue of its original reddish hue. I suspected Owen had played rugby when a younger man as he was built like a front-row forward, and although probably well into his 50’s his muscles had not yet turned to fat. I noticed he had put the emphasis on ‘red’ when pronouncing his given name, as the Welsh do.

“My office is on the first floor,” Owen said as he led the way across the parquet floored entrance hall to a wide stone staircase. “This must be the only HQ where the bosses are not on the top floor. Thurston Hall is a Grade II listed building and English Heritage refused the building of a lift, so all the big beasts – the Assistant Chief Constable in charge of the Division and the Chief Superintendents in charge of departments – have offices on the ground floor. The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) and Forensics are on the top floor. Uniforms – Traffic and Plods – and the Control Room are on the second. HR and Community Plods are on the first floor along with a lecture hall and a couple of meeting rooms. The basement houses a gymnasium and a custody suite. The good news, for you, is that the canteen is also on the top floor!”

(‘Plods’ is the rather disparaging term applied to those uniformed police officers who carry out foot patrols. Community Plods refer to PCSOs, Police Community Support Officers, who work with police officers and share some, but not all, of their legal powers. PCSOs are spat at, sworn at, and generally suffer the same abuse from Joe Public as ‘real’ police officers but get paid a lot less for the privilege.)

We reached a door halfway along the corridor on the first floor and entered an office. I noted Owen had limped as we climbed the staircase and as soon as we entered his office, rather small for executive status staff, Owen subsided gratefully into a chair behind his desk. There was a woman, quite attractive and probably in her late forties, seated at a smaller desk near the window. Owen made the introductions.

“This is Janice, my right- and left-hand woman,” he said, pointing to the female at the adjacent desk. “Janice, meet Detective Sergeant Dolihaye, a refugee from The Met.”

Janice smiled at me. “You will find it very quiet here after working in London, Sergeant – Detective Sergeant.”

I smiled back at her and nodded, but did not answer the unasked question as to why I had made the change.

“First things first, we must get you an East Anglian Constabulary warrant card,” Owen said and brought his desktop PC back online. “First I have to generate a new service number for you; the one given you by the Met has been, or soon will be, deactivated.” He waved me into a chair at the side of the desk. “Bear with me while I get into the HR database. There are several levels of security to go through when inputting new data, and I have to recall the different passwords.”

He typed in a password and waited for the screen to change. A few keystrokes later he gave a grunt of satisfaction. “Right, now we can begin. Your new number is,” he squinted at the screen, “Delta one zero four eight seven. Delta indicates you are in Central Division. Alpha is Northern Division with its HQ in Norwich Bravo is Western, HQ in Cambridge, and Charlie is Southern with HQ in Ipswich. If you are transferred to another division only that first letter of your service number needs to be changed. This HR database is Constabulary wide, which is why it is a pig’s orphan to get into some areas of it.” He typed more information into the PC and waited. “I am now at the warrant card production screen. As you can imagine it is a highly sensitive area and only a handful of us have access. Imagine if someone got in and started manufacturing police warrant cards. It would be a field day for all sorts of criminals.” He looked back at the screen, made a few keystrokes and the screen went white. “One more stage to go and then I will enter your number, rank, name and... “ The screen flashed and a text box appeared. Owen typed in ‘Dolihaye’. “What are your initials, Sergeant?” He asked.

“A.J” I replied.

Owen typed in the initials. “And your first given name?”

“Ajay.”

Owen swung around and faced me with an angry scowl on his face. “Your given name, not your initials. You’ve already given me them!” It was obvious he thought I was being inattentive.

“My given names are Ajay, spelt A, J, A, Y, and Joshua,” I said. “The first is Indian, reflecting my four times great grandmother’s ancestry, and means, ‘invincible’; the second name has been carried down the male generations on my mother’s side of my family.” I shrugged my shoulders. “I know it is confusing, and you can blame my father’s misplaced sense of humour.”

“I’m sorry I snapped at you,” Owen said. “I thought you were taking the piss or had fallen asleep.” He rubbed his left knee, “and my leg is giving me gyp.”

“I offered to meet the sergeant downstairs, to save your legs,” Janice said from her desk.

Owen looked contrite. “I know I’m a curmudgeonly old bugger, and I apologise to you both.” He stood up and stretched. “Anyway, Janice, you can now go to the machine and print off Detective Sergeant Ajay Joshua Dolihaye’s warrant card.” He walked over to a table and shook the coffee pot that was sitting on the top “How old is this coffee, Janice?”

“Probably too old for your tastes, Red. I’ll make a fresh pot after I’ve printed off the sergeant’s warrant card, unless you want to get a takeaway from the canteen?”

“Stuff that for a game of soldiers,” Owen said. “I’ll make a brew while you’re doing the printing.”

“I could go to the canteen for you,” I said.

“That’s very generous of you, Sergeant, but at the moment you don’t officially exist,” Owen said with a grin. “You would need to show a warrant card to get service but your Met warrant card has been deactivated and your East Anglian warrant card not yet produced. You are cardless and stateless, unable to leave the building or enter the canteen, although the bogs aren’t ID protected. You could wander the corridors of the building until fading away to nothing.”

“In that case, I withdraw my offer!”

“Wise choice. I’ll put the kettle on; I’ll use the tap in the executive bogs, a better class of water, in all senses of the word.” He chuckled as he left the room.

Janice gave a despairing ‘men are just overgrown schoolboys’ shrug, and disappeared to do the card printing.

“Did you get your injury with the Job, Mister Owen?” I asked when he returned with a full kettle of water. (The Job’ is how police refer to their occupation)

“I did in a way. Twenty-five years ago I was the tight head prop of the Suffolk Police rugby team in a match against the Cambridgeshire Constabulary. There was a lot of aggro’ between the two forces in those days, still is in some quarters although we were amalgamated with the Cambridgeshire and Norfolk Police forces ten years ago. It was the final of the Police National Championship Cup. Both teams played like Gurkhas; they took no prisoners. There was a rolling maul and somehow my left knee went in a direction it had not been designed for.” Owen plugged the kettle into a socket and switched it on before continuing his tale. “The Cambridgeshire Constabulary always had a superior air about them; having the best university in the land on their manor, they imagined it rubbed off on them, and it is true there were more graduates in their ranks than average, although none from Cambridge University, I might add. Anyway, they looked upon us in Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex as hayseeds, swede bashers, and carrot crunchers, in fact in much the same way as The Met regard all other police forces.” He grinned at me, and I acknowledged his accurate comment with a slight nod of my head.

“Cambridgeshire Constabulary had a superiority complex because of the university, and maybe we in Suffolk had an inferiority complex – much like that between the Welsh and the English, which gives us Welsh the edge when it comes to rugby, and it was the same for Suffolk in that match. We beat the buggers by grit, determination, and having bigger balls when it mattered. When we lifted the trophy it was worth my busted leg, although it was the end of my police career. I worked in the control room at Ipswich for a while, but it was bloody awful having to dispatch my butties to calls and not being able to join in...”