Duty Guvnor

NIGHT DUTY, 1975 You book on at a quarter to eleven. You book off — if you book off — at six. In between: a milk float robbery, a member of Parliament in the cells, a visiting president who wants a night on the town, and a ticking suitcase nobody can account for. You have four constables, four cells, one radio, and a borough that rots by the half-hour. Every shift is a fresh deal from a deck of the strange, the sordid and the sad. Send your officers out and you can't send them twice. Book a body and it holds its cell till the van comes at six. Back a gamble and no amount of preparation buys a certainty. Everything you do is on the record — and the record follows you. A ROGUELIKE OF SMALL DECISIONS AND LARGE CONSEQUENCES - One page, eight hours, three meters. Keep STREETS, BRASS and RELIEF off zero. Lose one and your night — and your career — is over. - "A Week from Hell" — the campaign. Seven consecutive nights, Friday the 14th to Thursday the 20th of November 1975, worked as one posting. Favours, grudges and unfinished business follow you from parade to parade, and the small hours lean harder as the week wears on. - Marquee sagas that unfold across a shift and echo into the next: bring the visiting president home singing and tomorrow thanks you; lose a man up the recreation ground and tomorrow parades one short. - A career that remembers. Streaks, a casebook, a service record, twelve achievements, and letters from the Yard you'll wish you hadn't earned. - Ring Division for the feared Special Patrol Group, the dog section, or night-duty detective — each answers once a night, and Division remembers who asks.