'Bloody marvellous,' said Pascoe. it's just that sometimes I get this awful feeling that if I'm not careful, I may turn into a policeman.'
3
BLACK BOY
Police Cadet Shaheed Singh too was beginning to have serious doubts about the wisdom of his choice of career.
His superiors were far from encouraging. He had not been surprised to find in his course-instructors that combination of hectoring sarcasm and patronizing familiarity which he remembered from his not too distant schooldays, but he'd looked for something different from the working cops he met on his four weeks' attachment.
Well, he'd found it. Inspectors and sergeants of the uniform branch were not unhelpful but seemed to take it as axiomatic that he was thick and idle. As for the CID, Mr Dalziel terrified him, Sergeant Wield clearly hated him and even the amiable Mr Pascoe seemed to have developed some of Dalziel's brusqueness in his superior's absence.
At the constable level, while he had a friendly, jokey relationship with most of the PCs, he found their instinctive if unmalicious racism very trying. Even George Wedderburn, with whom he spent most mornings sorting out the traffic at the market roundabout, had taken to using him as a kind of personal servant.
'Here, young Shady,' he'd said this morning, glancing at his watch, 'it's slackening off. You cut along, get me twenty Park Drive and a Mirror, and get the teas set up in the Caff, OK? And no sloping off for a bit of how's-your- father!'This jocular injunction dated from his lateness the morning he had visited the car park. After Wedderburn had got over his annoyance, he had affected to believe that Singh's halting explanation was a cover-up for an amorous rendezvous. Constable Grainger, still smarting from Singh's jokes about his weight, had knowledgeably opined, 'Aye, they can't do without it, these darkies. They're at it all the time where they come from. It's the heat, tha' knows, and them loin-cloths.'
A sociologist would have seen this as a classic manifestation of the white man's feeling of cultural superiority and sexual inferiority, but Singh had just grinned and gone on his way, secretly wishing that these allegations about his active sex life were even partially true.
As he came out of the tobacconist's with Wedderburn's paper and cigarettes and began to cross the market place, he encountered two more reasons for self doubt.
The first was a young man with very long hair, wearing faded jeans and a grubby T-shirt printed with a clenched fist and pinned with CND and Stuff-The-Tories badges. He was handing out pamphlets headlined Police Brutality - The Facts. He looked at Singh's uniform and bared his teeth in a defiant sneer as the boy passed.
On the other side of the market place, Singh met another young man. This one had very short hair and was wearing faded jeans and a grubby T-shirt on which was printed a large Union Jack. He was handing out pamphlets headlined Immigration - The Facts. He looked at Singh's face and bared his teeth in a contemptuous sneer as he passed.
The Market Caff with its steamed-up windows and inadequate fan, which seemed to act on the bacon fat odours and loud Yorkshire breath which filled the air as an electric whisk acts on cream, thickening the mixture rather than dispersing it, loomed ahead like a sanctuary this morning. But before he could pass through the door and inhale its turgid incense, he felt his arm seized.
'Hello, Shady. You all right?'
Singh turned and found himself facing Mick Feaver. He viewed him with grave suspicion.
'I'm all right. What do you want, Mick?' he asked brusquely.
'Just a word.'
It dawned on Singh that far from being menacing, Feaver looked as if he could do with some comfort himself. His usual uncertain expression was exaggerated to the point of extra anxiety, though perhaps this was partly due to the physical underlining given by a bruised cheek and a split lip.
Someone came out of the Caff, and through the open door, Singh ascertained that PC Wedderburn had not yet arrived.
'I'm just going to have a mug of tea,' he said. 'Fancy one?'
He didn't wait for an answer but went into the Caff. At the counter, he found Feaver close behind. He ordered three mugs of tea and Wedderburn's usual chocolate wafer bar.
'Fetch them two,' he instructed, and picking up one mug and the wafer bar he went in search of a seat.
Mrs Pascoe was here again, he noted, with her baby. He wondered if Mrs Aldermann was coming too and whether she would recognize Mick Feaver as one of the youths in the car park. But it was too late, or too soon, to worry. Mrs Pascoe spotted him and gave him a friendly smile. The only two empty chairs in the place seemed to be at her table, but fortunately a group of market workers began to extract themselves grumbling from a distant corner and he was able to divert to the vacant seats.
Mick Feaver didn't seem disposed to open the conversation and though Singh's natural inclination was to outlast his silence, he guessed that anything the lad was likely to say would have to be said before Wedderburn arrived.
He indicated the third mug and the chocolate wafer and said, 'He'll be along just now.'
'Yes,' said Feaver. 'Look, Shady, thanks for saying what you did at the nick yesterday.'
'Saying what I did?' said Singh in puzzlement.
'Yeah. That copper, not the ugly one, the other, he said someone had put in a good word for us and I knew it could only be you.'
'Oh aye,' said Singh. 'Well, that's all right.'
'Nothing's going to happen, is it?' pursued Feaver.
'What about?'
