Authors: Clarissa Fenton
'Is there a problem, officer?'
I grinned back. 'No problem madam. Sorry to
have bothered you.'
And with that I was out of the car. Five
minutes later I was driving home, my uniform safely
stowed
under the back seat.
2
You've probably already guessed that I wasn't
a real copper. My name's Carl Sanders, I'm 31 and I am, or was, a kitchen and
bathroom salesman. I suppose what I did was some kind of compulsion, but it
didn't feel like that. It just felt like something to get the adrenaline going.
Some men drink to get it, some take drugs, some go dogging and some throw
themselves out of aeroplanes or join the TA. With me it was the IPO game
-
Impersonating a Police Officer.
An offence under section 90, Police Act, 1996.
I’d learnt
that bit of the law off by heart. Christ only knew why I was doing it, but the
more I did it the deeper I got myself involved in it, and the more I had to do
to get the same high.
I did things properly. Most IPO offenders are
amateurs; one step up from gippos who charge old biddies thousands of pounds
for building work they don't need doing. In most cases two blokes will fake a
warrant card on a computer, knock on some old girl's door and one will distract
her by asking questions while the other goes through her handbag. They're
idiots, because the penalties for IPO are severe and they could do the job just
as well with some other excuse. Then you've got the occasional fantasist who
tries to get off paying his train fare or something by saying he's a copper and
then gets caught out. They're just compulsive liars
really,
the kind of bloke who sits in the corner of the pub trying to convince people
he worked for the
Krays
or was in the SAS.
With me it was different. I'd done my
research, and planned things so that I always had a way out if they went wrong.
Like I said before, I don't reckon I've ever forced a woman to have sex with
me. As far as I can see most of them are up for a bit of no strings sex if they
think they can get away with it and have someone to blame it on
so's
they can keep a clear conscience.
Anyway, the fun was over; it was the next day
and I was driving to
work
,crawling
along in the traffic to the retail park where I worked. I've got a decent car,
a Skoda Octavia the same kind that they use for unmarked police cars round
here. It cost me a bomb with painful monthly payments but I needed the right
look for what I was doing. I'd had it kitted out with lights and a siren,
hidden behind the radiator grill so nobody knew they were there until I used
them. It was piss easy to find all that stuff on the internet though it took a
while for me to get it rigged up properly. A few years ago you hardly ever saw
an unmarked car flashing blue lights and using a siren but there were more of
them about nowadays so that was fine for me.
Just before nine a.m. I arrived at
Ultima
Kitchens and Bathrooms where I'd been working for
the last ten years or so, getting progressively more frustrated and bored with
the place, but I needed the money and jobs had been thin on the ground since
the recession started. I'd like to have told them to shove it, but my ex had
left me with a big mortgage and I was in negative equity on the house; there
was no way I could just give up and move on.
Derek Anderson, my arsehole of a boss and the
man responsible for the day to day running of the showroom, frowned as I
sauntered in, checking his watch to see if I was late, but I knew I still had a
few minutes to spare. He knew I needed my job and he made sure I knew he knew.
'Morning Derek!'
I said brightly,
going through the showroom to the backroom to my desk and taking off my jacket.
'Nearly late, Carl.
Staff should be here
a few minutes before opening time. You know that.'
I looked at him and as usual his face made me
sick. Pudgy and overweight and going bald, though he was only a couple of years
older than me, with the sweaty, shifty look he always had about him. I was
about to make a smart comeback but then he noticed a couple of pensioners
coming in and smarmed over to them, probably trying to demonstrate his superior
sales tactics while I could see them.
I'm not a bad salesman and I'd been doing
alright at
Ultima
. The guy who owned it was someone
called Clive
Rowlings
, a flashy,
permatanned
type who spent most of his time in his holiday home in Spain, coming back from
time to time to keep an eye on a string of businesses he owned. He was a bit of
a dodgy character, I reckoned, but decent
enough,
and
it was him who'd given me the job. Things had gone well for a couple of years
and I was making money for him, but then the recession had hit and he'd started
spending more time running some of his other showrooms that weren't doing so
well. That was when Derek got appointed as manager.
The thing was, Derek realised this and quite
frankly, he was jealous. He just hated the idea of me chatting up the women
customers and the fact that I was free and single, while he was chained down to
an overweight wife, two kids and an even bigger mortgage than me. I used to
work for a chain of dodgy electrical shops, now gone bust, but the bloke who
trained me said if you're good at selling, you'll be good at getting women too,
and that's been true enough for me.
One time when he caught me getting the mobile
number of a busty blonde who'd been coming in and giving me the eye (though
never buying anything) he made up some cock and bull story about how I was
needed for admin work in the back room instead of front line sales. I tried
talking to
Rowlings
about it but he didn't want to
know, and said Derek had control of the day to day staffing rotas, and that was
that. I wondered if Derek had sussed something about what
Rowlings
was up to and had some sort of hold over him. Anyway, so that was that. My job
now consisted of going through invoices, answering the phone and emails, and
trying to stop myself climbing the walls with boredom.
That day though there
was a break in the boredom
-
a really welcome break.
I was pretending to work, surfing some police chat
forums that I look at, when Derek walked up to my desk with one of the
prettiest girls I've seen in a long time.
Putting on a show of politeness, he ushered
her forward to me.
'Carl, this is Mandy Evans, she's the work
experience girl I told you about.'
I vaguely remembered some email about this
but had forgotten about it. Derek had some connection with the local college or
university or whatever it was, and sometimes got kids who were on business
course in to do a couple of week's 'work experience' which was basically just a
way of getting free labour to clear some of the admin backlog. I'd had to cope
with a couple of them before
-
clueless
wankers
with silver spoons in their mouths
and a massive sense of entitlement, but unable to do the most basic work
without having to be shown how to do it three times. I knew right away this one
was different though.
Derek went on, in his smarmy voice trying to
sound like everybody's best mate. 'This is Carl Sanders, he's our admin man.
He's the one who keeps us all going while we're out the front selling hard.' We
all laughed, though I'm not sure at what, and I had a chance to look at Mandy
properly.
She was only about 19 or 20 I guessed, and on
the short side but breathtakingly pretty and I realised why Derek was oiling
all over her. She looked like someone had taken a leggy model but then squashed
her down a bit, so that she still looked beautiful but everything was a little
shorter and wider. She had dark glossy hair in a sort of bob, a clear
complexion and bright blue eyes above a little upturned nose and a red
cupid's
bow mouth. She was wearing some kind of little dark
polka dot dress which clung to her perfectly, showing off a full chest which I
guessed was held down with some sort of minimiser bra, a narrow waist and a
round, bubbly arse and legs which were perfectly shaped but just a little too
short. I don't notice women's clothes much but everything went well on her,
even the little blue and cream shoes she had on.
'Pleased to meet
you.'
She was smiling at me but her voice was trembling a bit and I realised she was
probably a little intimidated, and Derek's hand on her shoulder probably didn't
help. She held out her hand and I took it, realising I was staring. She held my
gaze a little longer as well, until Derek pulled up a chair and pressed her down
into it. I noticed with pleasure that she leant forward to get out of his
grasp.
'This will be your desk, Mandy,' said Derek,
as he swept away a load of papers I'd been collating on the desk next to me,
'so I'll leave Carl to show you the ropes. But remember my door is always open.
Come and see me anytime, as we'll start you on the real sales work soon.'
I noticed a stress on 'real' and realised
Derek was doing his best to put me down in front of her without actually saying
anything. Just then Dean, one of the other sales staff, stuck his head round
the door and said 'Customer, Derek, we've got nobody else on the floor out
here.' Derek chuckled and said 'duty calls' then left, straightening his greasy
tie and putting his shiny jacket on.
I started showing Mandy how we processed
invoices, dealt with enquiries and other boring stuff but the time passed
quickly as we hit it off instantly, chatting and joking until Derek came back
and dragged her off for some 'sales training', his eyes fixed firmly on her
cleavage.
3.
The next night I was out again, this time in
a posh wine bar in an office and retail development on the other side of the
county. I used to vary the routes I worked on. I knew if I just stuck to one
place I'd get found out eventually. At the same time I had to know the route
well, where the best places to pull them over without being seen were, and so
on, so it couldn't just be any old road. I had three carefully planned routes
which I used at random so I never kept to a recognisable pattern. Even if
someone got suspicious and took my number plate, I was prepared with the false
number plates I mentioned earlier. Those were a doddle to make; mocked up on
the computer then printed out life-size and laminated with just a bit of
blu-tac
to keep them in place. I'd even used a kind of
reflective paper that looked right in headlights.
As for what number I used
-
well, that was the bit I was most
proud of. I'd driven to a few large cities and gone past the police station,
finally finding one with a car the same make and colour as mine. It's easy to
spot an unmarked police car once you know the signs. Then I just took the
number down and that was it. So if anybody, even a copper, took my number, all
they'd get would be the details of a police car from another city. Of course, I
could just have driven round the streets until I found a car the same make and
model as mine and used that number
-
but I didn't like the idea of some poor innocent sod getting into trouble because
of me. I'm all heart like that.
It was a quiet night with few customers and
as I sat in the corner with my orange juice and paper, I started thinking back
on how I got into all this. I'd always been keen on uniforms and the police,
even since I can remember. I used to love watching 'The Bill' and other police
programmes and I even tried to join the force years ago when I left school, but
I'd already got a couple of minor convictions under my belt by then and there
was no way they'd take me. I also tried joining the army at one stage, thinking
I might get into the military police, but they wouldn't take me and the
Territorial Army didn't want to know either.
It might sound odd but I'd always fancied
myself as a bit of an actor as well. I was in school plays and stuff like that,
and I got a kick out of putting on a costume and becoming a different person. I
even thought about going to drama school, but my old man soon talked me out of
that; said actors were a stuck up lot who spent most of their time out of work
and I should knuckle down and get a proper job. That's when I went into sales
and have been there ever since; well, until arsehole Derek had tried his best
to turn me into a glorified office boy.
The IPO stuff had started as a joke, really.
It wasn't like I woke up one morning and said to myself 'I'm going to pretend
to be a copper today.' Actually it started because of acting. As I said, I'd
given up the idea of being an actor, but I still wanted to keep my hand in, so
to speak, so I'd signed up with an extras agency. It was easy work because you
didn't need to be members of Equity, the actors' union, to get non-speaking
parts. Stuff like standing around in the background in a pub pretending to be
having a drink or whatever.