left the letter there, as I didn’t know what would need to be photographed by Scenes of Crime. I looked at the man’s face again. Half of me felt gut-wrenching pity for a person who had obviously been unable to cope with life, and half of me felt irritated that he could do such a thing to his family. The body carried on slowly rotating. It didn’t even enter my mind to get him down. Anyone could see that he was dead and, indeed, when the ambulance arrived they didn’t get him down either. One of the ambulance crew held the dead man’s wrist for about ten seconds and told me that he had been dead overnight. He was very matter-of-fact about the process. I knew I would have to get him down at some point, but I decided to wait for my shift sergeant to arrive.
I went outside again with the ambulance crew and watched as they drove off. Then I went back into my car and reluctantly looked for the dreaded Form 49. Just as I found it, my sergeant arrived and my ordeal of being alone with this situation was over.
‘What have we got here, Mick?’ he asked.
‘It’s a male hanging from the loft by electric cable, Sarge. Ambulance have been and gone. I’ve checked the house. There’s no sign of foul play and I found a note from the deceased. It looks like suicide.’
‘Good lad. Are you okay?’
‘Fine, Sarge.’
We entered together and I pointed Sergeant Hopkins in the right direction. As we walked up the stairs, he pulled out a handkerchief and covered his nose and mouth with it. I was reassured that he, too, found the odour too much to bear. I would always carry a handkerchief with me at work after this particular incident. For now, though, I had to resort to burying my face in my jumper again.
Sergeant Hopkins looked closely at the man’s face. ‘Oh dear,’ he muttered. ‘Oh dear, oh dear. Come on, Mick, let’s get him down.’
We both looked at the position of the body. There wasn’t much room on the landing so getting him down was going to be awkward. Sergeant Hopkins climbed up the stepladder immediately next to the man’s body and removed an impressive-looking folded utility knife from his pocket. ‘Come on then, Mick. Grab him.’
‘How do you mean, Sarge?’
‘I’m gonna cut the flex and you catch him.’
I stood next to the hanging body. His waist was at the level of my head and the stench became almost too much to take. With straight, locked arms I took a firm hold of the man’s belt around his trousers. Then I turned my face away.
‘Go on then, Sarge. I’m ready.’
‘Mick, I said grab him. It’s dead weight. He’ll flatten you like that. Really get hold of him.’ As he said this, he gestured a bear hug with his arms. He wanted me to take hold of the man and catch him. My face would have to be touching him for this. I had to do it.
‘Sarge…Are you sure?’
‘Just do it, lad. I know it’s not nice. We’ve all had to do it.’
I knew he meant it. I took hold of the man’s waist with a bear hug and braced myself ready for the fall. ‘Go on then, Sarge. I’ve got him.’
So there I was, hugging a dead man with my sergeant standing next to me on the top step of the ladder with his Swiss army knife, about to cut the flex. Maybe one day I will be able to see an amusing side to this, but this man was someone’s son, and someone’s brother, and his last moments must have been desperate. I still look back on this with great sorrow. I tensed up, as I knew that catching the dead weight wouldn’t be an easy task. ‘Here goes, then.’
With these words, I felt the man’s body weight plunge down onto me. I had no chance. The weight crashed down and the man’s body came directly on top of me, forcing me to fall to the floor. The next thing I knew, I was flat on my back with the man’s face directly above mine. All the trapped air slowly released from his lungs and out of his mouth. His eyes stared into mine and our noses touched. His inflated tongue brushed across my cheek. ‘Shit!’ I bellowed and I momentarily developed superhuman strength and shifted fourteen stones of dead weight from myself. Sergeant Hopkins looked down and despairingly shook his head. I stood up and shouted the same word again. I couldn’t help it.
Once the body was down, we carefully placed the man flat and waited for the Scenes of Crime Officer (SOCO) to come and photograph the knot around his neck. This is necessary, because it’s possible to tell from the way the knot is tied whether or not the deceased tied it. This obviously helps to determine whether the death is suicide or murder.
With this specific incident there were no suspicious circumstances. We later found out that the man had been on antidepressants for around seven months, but he hadn’t taken his tablets for the previous nine days. Clinical depression had killed him.
Such was the effect of the suicide on me that I needed to see my best friend, Tim, just to talk about it. I described to him what I’d seen that day. During the telling of the story, I kept referring to the deceased as the ‘rich man hanging,’ and that’s how I’ll always remember him.
Tim was a great help to me that evening just because he was a mate and he listened. I didn’t know it then, but he and his wife Cath were to help me again in the future.
Within two years of becoming a police officer, I had established myself as a member of the PSU (Police Support Unit). Better known as riot police, the PSU are available for large-scale incidents both planned and unplanned, like high category football matches and riots, as well as carnivals and demonstrations and the like.
I enjoyed the training for the PSU as it was physically demanding and was based mainly on teamwork. From about my teens, I was always a keen sportsman and I have trained hard in the gym since before I can remember. It might seem odd, but it had been my ambition to be a contestant on the Gladiators TV programme and in 1998 I passed the physical fitness test for it. I managed to get down to the final hundred out of over sixteen thousand male applicants. Sport has always been a passion, and working long shifts in the police service hindered my training. I used to find this aspect of the job very frustrating.
The PSU training was done in the grounds of an old hospital and the derelict buildings were very useful for practising ‘building entries’ in riot situations. On training days, there would be maybe fifteen or twenty police officers who would role-play rioters. They would throw blocks of wood and petrol bombs at our line of shields in order to prevent us from advancing to a certain point given to us by the PSU commander. I remember that on one of our training days, I was in a line of eight officers all with full-length shields. We were on the front of three lines. One of the mock rioters threw a petrol bomb high in the air towards us. We were standing directly next to an old storeroom-type building. The petrol bomb landed on the roof, which unfortunately sloped directly down onto the officer at the end of the line. In a flash of flames, the whole roof lit with fire and as the petrol spilled down the slope, the officer was engulfed. His supposed flameproof overall was inadvertently put to the test. It failed miserably. He ran around in panic, screaming for help. The flames soared from his feet to his head. Three short blasts of the instructor’s whistle sounded to indicate an immediate termination of the exercise. Three safety officers ran to the burning man, who by now looked like a stuntman as he walked, still ablaze, with his arms out in the crucifix position. One of the safety officers charged at him and rugby-tackled him to the ground. The other two used fire extinguishers on him and, within seconds, the flames were put out. We all lifted our helmet visors and watched with concern. To our relief, the officer got to his feet and removed his helmet. He shook his head, but was smiling. Due to the skill and speed of the safety officers, he’d escaped uninjured. One of them asked us to congregate at the car park so that he could debrief the incident. There was an unusual silence as we walked back. Occasionally, I would hear a shield crash to the ground, as an officer got too fatigued to keep it up. They weighed over twenty pounds.
For you to hear me say I loved these kind of things might