No Human Enemy (Suzie Mountford Mysteries) by John Gardner Page B

her head, touching the nerve ends.
    Mr Livermore says you’re above average and can keep things to yourself. Then she thought it was funny, Bear’s reaction to Tommy being in Sheffield. Not funny ha-ha, but funny peculiar.
    Really? She thought again, then reflected on how lucky she was. Only in the Reserve Squad, only under Tommy Livermore would she, and the other girls, get any proper respect. They certainly wouldn’t in Mr Bear’s Special Branch. Tea girls and typists, that’s all they’d be there.
    When Suzie first joined the Met she realised double quick that her job would probably not be tracking down criminals or keeping order on the streets. In training they were acclimatised to obeying orders.
    Usually without a second thought.
    Someone of higher rank gave you an order on the parade ground and you conformed to the instruction without considering the outcome. It was the way of conditioning the mind and body. Through bullying hot afternoons drill sergeants screamed at them. At the time much of this had seemed facile to Suzie, who recalled the near hysterical tantrum an unpolished button had caused – ‘Reprehensible!’ the parade inspector had screeched, almost levitating. ‘Absolutely reprehensible and unforgivable.’ A tarnished button. But she never had dirty buttons again.
    On another occasion the drill sergeant shouted at her, ‘What’s the matter with you, girl? You, Mountford? What’s the matter? Got itchy-coo?’
    It had taken much detection to discover that ‘Itchy-Coo’ had been the title of some popular song from a previous generation.
    The shouting, screaming and bullying did the trick and her class of policewomen went off to their first postings safe in the knowledge that as long as you obeyed an order nothing much could go wrong. Obey orders to the letter and you were as safe as a mouse in a cheese shop.
    This was in the late 1930s, when Suzie first joined the Met, and even then the public perception of women policing the capital was mixed and strange: clergymen agonised over whether to give up their seats on the underground to allow uniformed policewomen to sit down; magistrates pondered the question of men feeling emasculated if arrested by a woman.
    One magistrate said, ‘It must hurt a man’s feelings, to be arrested by a woman.’
    It should hurt his feelings, Suzie thought with a touch of bite and bile. Quite rightly so.
    But it was a long time before Suzie even had the opportunity of arresting a male. In many ways she grew to feel that she was not in the job to fight crime; she was there to serve the male police officers – do the typing and filing, even the occasional bit of shopping, make the tea, do the odd spot of cooking, making sandwiches or knocking up fried sausages while nipping out to get a few penn’orth of chips so that the blokes went to bed with full stomachs.
    When not doing office or household chores the policewomen as often as not were nurses, looked after children, comforted the bereaved, dealt with people in shock and guarded women prisoners. Sometimes reports came in of women police officers working in plain clothes to trap drug dealers selling cocaine in the underground lavatories of Piccadilly Circus. Suzie even knew one of them when she was on the beat working out of Vine Street Police Station in the West End, but that kind of excitement did not seem to come her way: until 1940 when she was working in the Criminal Records Office at Scotland Yard itself.
    By 1940 times were changing something chronic: women manning anti-aircraft guns in city parks, women riding motorbikes through bomb blasts to get messages to other units, brave women driving ambulances through the horror that was the nightly bombing. Women starting to do a hundred and one other things.
    At the time, Suzie was vaguely aware of the idea that a lot of women were unlikely to be happy when their lives returned to the old normality of peacetime; When it was all over, when they sounded the last all