64 Monday 25 April

The Sussex Police Force Control Room is housed in a futuristic-looking red-brick structure on the headquarters campus. Inside is a large, open-plan area, covering two floors, with rows of computer terminals, many of their screens showing multiple images — some small-scale street maps, others live images from the Sussex Police’s 85 °CCTV cameras located around the county.

To the casual observer, with its atmosphere of quiet, purposeful concentration, it could be the offices of any number of different organizations — perhaps an insurance company, an online retailer, or a financial institution. But it is actually the nerve centre of policing the county, the hub where every emergency call to the force is received and responded to.

Evie Leigh looked at her watch and yawned. Two minutes to eight. Another four hours to go till the end of her twelve-hour shift. She looked at the clock up on the wall, as if expecting — willing — the hands to have jumped forward to hours later. But it said the same as her watch. 7.58 p.m.

Slow time. That police expression had a whole new meaning at the moment. What a dull day — quieter than she could ever remember. Not that anyone in here — or in the police in general — would ever dare say the Q word, as ‘quiet’ was known. It was an instant jinx. But she really felt like shouting it out now, just to liven things up.

She wasn’t going to need to.

Evie loved her job as an emergency controller, because you literally never knew what was going to happen in ten seconds’ time — a bank robbery, a serious accident, someone threatening to jump off a building, a pub brawl, someone breaking into a house — and normally the days shot by, often seeming too short when she was really busy and the adrenaline was pumping.

But today, she thought, you could be forgiven for thinking Sussex Police had done their job zealously and eliminated crime in the county. Sure, Mondays were never the liveliest of nights, particularly a wet one, but even so!

Fifty people worked down on this level and a further thirty on the upper level; most of them were civilians, a good third of whom were retired police officers who had returned to work, despite their pension pots, either because they needed the money or because they missed the job. The civilians here, like herself, were identifiable by their royal blue polo shirts with the words POLICE SUPPORT STAFF embroidered in white on their sleeves, as opposed to the black shirts worn by the serving police officers.

They were presided over around the clock by a rota of Ops-1 Inspectors. The current duty Ops-1 was Kim Sherwood. In her early fifties, with a youthful face topped with short, fair hair, she was a year away from retirement — and dreading it. Kim loved every second of this job which carried huge responsibilities. Between the hours of 2 a.m. and 7 a.m. the Ops-1 Inspector was the most senior officer on duty in the whole of Sussex Police.

Her work station was a screened-off command centre with a battery of monitors. One, a touchscreen, operated as her eyes and ears on this whole department. Above her desk was a screen on which she could view the images from any of the county’s CCTV cameras. With the toggle lever on her desk, Kim Sherwood could rotate and zoom over half of them directly.

At the rows of desks in front of her, and to either side, as well as on the split-level floor above, sat the radio operators and the controllers, each wearing a headset. The latter’s role was to assess all emergency calls, grade them in terms of level of urgency and dispatch police officers — either in vehicles or on foot — to respond, to liaise with them until they were on the scene, and where possible follow progress on the monitors.

On an average day here they would get between 1,500 to 2,500 calls. Many of them were not emergencies at all — someone locked out of their flat, or a cat gone missing, or someone’s lawnmower stolen from their garden shed. And some were downright ridiculous, such as one she’d had yesterday from a drunk, saying he’d had too much in a pub and didn’t think he should drive so he’d like the police to send a car over to give him a lift home.

Calls like that were a menace because they could block and delay a real emergency where every second counted — and those were the ones Evie liked best, the real heart-thumping, against-the-clock emergencies. So far, she’d not had one all day. Looking at the wall clock yet again, she realized the boredom was making her hungry. She was trying to diet, but one of her colleagues was going round collecting orders for a curry run to a balti house. The thought of eating her cold tuna salad whilst the room filled with the aroma of Indian spices, and everyone around her was munching on a poppadum, was too much, and her resolve crumbled. She added her name to the list, and as usual ordered far too much — an onion bhaji, chicken korma, garlic naan, two poppadums and basmati rice.

Then her phone warbled.

‘Sussex Police, emergency, how can I help?’ she answered, and immediately looked at the number and approximate location that showed on the screen. A mobile phone in the Hangleton area.

She could barely hear a response, a tiny voice, just a whisper. She wondered for an instant if it was a child playing around with a phone — that happened often.

‘Hello, caller, can you speak up please, I can’t hear you.’

The terror in the woman’s voice that came back chilled her bones. It was only very slightly louder, still whispering as if fearful of being heard, but now Evie could just about make out what she was saying.

‘Help me, please God, help me, help me, he’s coming up the stairs — he’s got an axe — he’s going to kill me.’

Загрузка...