A Matter of Time

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A Matter of Time

Mike Harton sat, slumped and bored at the battered desk, the daylight outside slowly fading to a uniform sombre grey, coating the city in its penetrating dullness. The desk, like the person sitting behind it, was slightly worse for wear, the burn marks from decades of cigarettes left balanced on the edge, the rings from the bottom of endless cups of coffee ingrained to the wood so that they became a part of the furniture.
Harton himself felt like a part of that same furniture. Like the desk, he had the nicotine stains from too many years of smoking and like the desk he was probably past his best. Useful? Certainly. But no longer in the first flush of youth. No longer the most attractive thing in the building.
The desk had probably been in the office since it was built, that would make it about forty years old, a few years younger than Harton himself. The building was a drab grey concrete structure with featureless windows, featureless and bland exterior. The drab building was a monument to the 1960’s and a brave new world of architecture, most of which had now been demolished in an avalanche of cement dust and rusted iron and cast into history. But not this one. The owners wanted to knock it down but in no way could they afford the replacement they so desperately needed.
Harton sat back in the government issue chair and looked through the scratched and filthy windows. Sunderland. It never changed. You could knock it down and build it up again – and each new development was hailed as a new start – but it would always be Sunderland. A rueful smile crossed Harton’s stubbled face. He knew the city and knew the people. He had policed it for years. He thought he did the job properly but others thought differently and now he was bound to a desk and going nowhere.
Sunderland CID never sounded glamorous, not like Newcastle’s West End with its organised crime department and its high end drug squad. And you could forget comparisons with the Met or even other large urban forces lime Manchester or the West Midlands. No, not like them at all. Sunderland was different. Always had been. As Harton remembered his old DS telling him, Sunderland had no crime families, no big 'operators.’ Just scrotes. Annoying little toe-rags that grew up either to be annoying big toe rags or ran the local clubs or double-glazing firms. It made policing the place both easy and complicated at the same time.

Easy, because major crimes rarely happened. There was the occasional murder, but probably less than any other industrial city in the country. No, most crime in Sunderland was petty, annoying and perpetrated by petty and annoying people. Like traffic cops whom Harton detested with even more venom than his ‘clientele.’
But Sunderland was also difficult to police simply because there were very few informers. With any crime there was a wall of silence or even worse, indifference. Silence could be combated by action. Go in hard and worry later. Indifference was a tough one. When people gave up and no longer cared, any questions were merely answered with the shrug of the shoulders.
And that was why Harton was sitting at a battered desk, in a battered building in a battered city with a battered file in front of him. Going nowhere.
Was it his fault? He had been investigating a street robbery, there had been plenty of passers by but nobody had apparently seen anything. The victim was a young girl who had been punched to the ground and had her bag stolen and of course in it was her purse and her mobile. Harton looked to the ceiling. The government may have stopped smoking at work but it would take that longed for demolition to remove the decades of ugly brown stained evidence away from the building.

The girl had made her way to the front desk, bleeding from what turned out to be a broken nose sustained in the robbery. The uniformed coppers had piled out of the building en masse to try to apprehend the miscreant or miscreants. Imagine that, a street robbery within 50 yards of the police station. Yards, not metres. Sunderland was the city of the late metric martyr, publicly prosecuted by the City council, privately supported by everyone.

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