11. Peter Blackmore, IOPC.

THE ACCUSED Part 11

The one part of his job that Peter Blackmore liked more than any other was sweeping in. He did it with such a flare for the dramatic that his name was feared throughout the land … feared, that is, by police officers who might have bent the rules a bit too much, and been caught out.

The main office where the bulk of the work was done by the detectives at Brumpton Police Station, a large first-floor space, was on tenterhooks because everyone, (and that included the cleaning lady) knew that something was afoot. Peter Blackmore, nobody was quite sure of his rank and he tended to blur it whenever he could, had swept in, made everyone freeze from the moment he issued his first order (to freeze) and having put his nose in the Superintendent’s office (vacant for the time being) had swept out again with everyone still frozen, even the cleaning lady.

But he was due back.

And when he returned it was with half a dozen fellow representatives of the Independent Office for Police Conduct and an extremely disconsolate Superintendent Knott.

Word was spreading. In the dark corners where whispers might pass safely secret, all sorts of things were being put up for scrutiny. The Superintendent was not a popular man and other ranks had been appalled by his cavalier attitude to Detective Inspector Rosie Baur, whose brain was as respected as were her legs. The woman had been very popular for two very important reasons: she was clever and she was tactful. Yes: and as already alluded to, she had the best pair of legs in Brumpton, though that wasn’t considered so important as her other qualities.

“I knew it,” whispered Detective Constable Harry Grimes, “the man’s three sheets to the wind. It’s the pressure of too much power.”

The nautical term aside, he might have been right. Harry Grimes was what you might call the Everyman of Brumpton nick. If he expressed a view it was one that he had sifted through himself until he was quite sure it would receive a majority support. The Harry Grimeses of this world are quite important. They are the pegs that hold democracy flapping on the clothes line of prejudice.

“I reckon he’s gone one step too far,” he muttered to a pretty young constable, Petronella Parker who knew that the best side for one to have their bread buttered was that chosen by the Everyman even if it might end up in the bin later.

“You do?” asked Petronella, “why?”

“Well, it’s well known,” grunted Harry knowingly, “he don’t go for women. Personally, I reckon his old lady’s put him off the fair sex, which brings me to ask what you’re doing after work this evening?”

“Washing my hair,” was her automatic reply. She knew she was too good for any Everyman. She liked people who could think outside any box they were presented with and the trouble with Everyman types was they always seemed to need to stay inside the box.

The sweeping-in began, then. Two grey-suited officers with lean and hungry looks pushed their way into the room. The entrance doors to the main office were of the swing variety, and a great deal of effective fear can be generated by the simple opening and slamming of them.

After the first two officers there was a lull and then Peter Blackmore came in. More swinging of the door, and as it closed it slammed into the shoulder of the man just behind him: Superintendent Knott, who looked to be possibly more furious than at any time since his birth almost seven decades earlier.

“Attention!” rapped Peter Blackmore. He’d practised that word until he had honed it to perfection, even managing to generate a kind of echo no matter how inhospitable the acoustics might be.

Then, because it was common parlance on television detective stories one of his cohorts bellowed “Listen up!”

The hush that descended on an already subdued room was tangible. D.C. Harry Grimes even thought he might see a floating ball of tumbleweed disturbing the sudden silence as a breese from nowhere blew across the room, and was almost disappointed when none came.

“You will all stop what you are doing,” ordered Peter Blackmore importantly, “and you will gather in the anteroom where one of my senior officers will have some questions for you to answer fully and without prejudice.”

Then a blushing and fuming Superintendent Knott was propelled rather than guided into his own office and invited to sit in his own chair.

“That it should come to this,” murmured Peter Blackmore, being deliberately vague because he hadn’t yet once suggested what it was that things had come to.

“I demand an explanation!” bellowed the Superintendent, employing sufficient decibels for his question to reverberate throughout the building and even into the gents toilets on the ground floor.

“Detective Inspector Rosie Baur. Where might she be?” asked Blackmore.

“You know as well as I do!” shouted the Superintendent without giving any thought to editing the contents of his own mind before exposing it to public scrutiny, “she’s banged up for murder!”

“And that murder is one she actually committed?” asked Blackmore, “I mean, we know that, do we? We have the evidence? Forensic bits and pieces supporting your charge? There can be no two ways, can there? No possibility that your collection of evidence could tell a completely different story if looked at under a different light? No chance that your personal well-known dislike for beauty in its female incarnation has tarnished your interpretation of that evidence?”

“Now Inspector or whatever it is you are, I’m not having my personality put under a microscope because you’ve got a fetish!”

Peter Blackmore shook his head sadly.

“A word to the wise, Superintendent,” he said, “everyone involved in what is a most tragic case, one that is at this very moment in time putting a line under your own career, sees one picture and yet you, no doubt with the corrupting brushstrokes of a prejudiced imagination, see another. Well, all will be out, sir, in the open and clear. I will be seeing D.I Baur this afternoon and listen to what she has to say…”

“To her lies, you mean!” spat the Superintendent.

“Whatever she says,” said Peter Blackmore suddenly contriving to put his nose mere millimetres away from the blustering officer’s own proboscis, “whatever she says will be judged by me and not by the closed mind of a racist policeman who should have taken retirement a decade ago. Now, sir, I suggest you start clearing your desk…”

© Peter Rogerson 24.04.21

...