But McWilliam grew used to the military discipline and he came to feel at home in the academy. The course load was light. McWilliam spent a couple of hours each day learning about British common law—derived from tradition and precedent rather than from statutes—and took training in police tactics and martial arts. Since the era of Sir Robert Peel, a Conservative Party politician (and future prime minister) who founded London’s Metropolitan Police in the 1820s, British law enforcement officers followed a policy of “policing by consent,” in recognition that the power of the police rested on public approval of their behavior, not on force. McWilliam was regularly reminded that the key to good policing was public outreach, and learning how “to talk down a situation.” British law enforcement officers proudly went about their duties unarmed, a policy that had earned the force respect around the world.
When he wasn’t in class or marching on the parade ground, McWilliam was free to explore London’s West End and other lively neighborhoods, and do what he enjoyed most—playing sports. He competed in rugby, football, and cricket. He race-walked and ran track. He developed a passion for weight lifting, impressing and amusing his peers with his intense competitive streak. Desperate to slim down to his weight class before one match, he donned two judo suits and ran dozens of laps around the gym. Then, bathed in sweat and in danger of overheating, he tore off his clothes and performed twenty sets of jumping jacks nude. As he swung his arms and legs feverishly to shed the final ounces, his eyes were drawn to a large picture window that looked out over the campus. A dozen cadets in a driver’s education class had gathered on the pavement below, gaping and laughing at the naked, flailing figure. McWilliam nodded at them, grinned, and kept going.
McWilliam graduated from police college after one year, and then took a ten-week intensive training course in Kent. On the first of September, 1975, the British government, intent on increasing the number of police officers, lowered the minimum age from nineteen to eighteen and a half. McWilliam reached that age on the third of September, and joined the Surrey Police Force the same day—becoming the youngest policeman, by his reckoning, in the British Isles.
* * *
The Surrey command dispatched McWilliam to a precinct in Woking, a drab commuter town south of London, with a population of about sixty thousand. His first week, he learned the ropes with a veteran. Then he was told, “That’s it, mate. You’re on your own.” Soon he was both walking the beat and patrolling the streets by car: a teenage cop, proudly wearing a blue uniform with shiny brass buttons and, while on foot, a tall rounded custodian helmet. He carried a pair of handcuffs and a twelve-inch wooden truncheon for protection. One evening a friend introduced him to an attractive and spirited eighteen-year-old named Linda Gilbart, who grimaced when he told her he worked as a cop.
“Don’t you like the police?” he asked.
“No,” she replied, explaining that she’d been arrested and fined at sixteen for riding a motorcycle with learner plates. Undaunted, he popped up the courage and asked her on a date. They spent the evening at a pub in Staines, an old market town alongside the River Thames.
McWilliam enjoyed being a constable in Surrey. But after three years of trying to afford housing in the London suburbs on £40 a month (£600 today, or about $780), he realized that he would never escape from financial worries as long as he lived there. McWilliam transferred back to Liverpool, to the Merseyside Police Force. He married Lin a few months later. He was happy to be back home among his fellow “Scousers,” or born-and-bred Liverpudlians—a name deriving from “lobscouse,” a cheap salted-lamb-onion-and-pepper stew that Liverpool seamen first ate about three hundred years ago.
In the late nineteenth century, when McWilliam’s great-grandparents were growing up in Liverpool, the city had been one of the world’s richest ports, described in an 1851 issue of The Bankers’ Magazine as “the New York of Europe.” McWilliam’s maternal grandfather had been a merchant seaman in the early twentieth century; his paternal grandfather had joined the flood of young men who proudly left the port during the Great War for Continental Europe, where he inhaled the poison gas that would ultimately take his life. McWilliam’s family was also present for the city’s most traumatic chapter: a relentless eight-day aerial bombardment in May 1941 that became known as the Liverpool blitz. McWilliam’s father, then an apprentice electrician, served fire-watch duty near the docks, dodging rats in total darkness, and was sheltering in a bomb-proof bunker in his front garden when the house across the street took a direct hit. He was called up to serve the following year, and joined the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy. McWilliam’s mother, the daughter of the seaman, also survived the blitz, then entered the Women’s Royal Naval Service in 1942 and left for a base in Scotland. (They would meet in Liverpool soon after the war.)
All told, the Luftwaffe bombed the docks and other parts of Merseyside eighty-eight times between August 1940 and January 1942, killing four thousand people, destroying ten thousand houses, and damaging a hundred eighty thousand more—the worst aerial bombardment suffered by any British city outside of London. Liverpool never recovered. Factories closed, trade moved to other ports, and the unemployment rate soared to among the highest in the country. The postwar government threw up shoddy council housing in the bombed-out districts but by the late 1970s, when McWilliam returned there from Surrey, an average of twelve thousand people each year fled the city, and a fifth of its land stood abandoned.
It wasn’t long before McWilliam came face-to-face with his city’s desperation in a once-grand neighborhood called Toxteth. During its commercial heyday, merchants and sea captains had built brick-and-stucco Georgian mansions along the portside quarter’s boulevards and side streets. But most were subdivided or boarded up after the war. The houses “faced stretches of waste ground, where uncleared rubble from the war mixed with fly-tippings and dog shit,” wrote Andy Beckett in Promised You a Miracle, a history of Britain in the early eighties. “Inhabited streets ended abruptly or degenerated into roofless shells … After dark, prostitutes used the shadows.” Liverpool had long been one of the most racially diverse cities in England, with a large black population that dated to the 1730s, and a recent wave of Afro-Carribean and African immigrants. But largely black communities like Toxteth had suffered most from the city’s postwar decline, and the police practice of stopping and searching black youths—known as the “sus” laws—had generated ill will. McWilliam rarely entered Toxteth, but from speaking to other policemen who patrolled there and simply living in Liverpool he knew that it was a neighborhood on the brink of an explosion.
In July 1981, three years after McWilliam’s return, an unmarked police car was chasing a young motorbike-riding black man on Selbourne Street in the heart of Toxteth. The man lost his balance and fell. As the police moved in, apparently to arrest him, an angry crowd gathered and began throwing bricks and stones. The confrontation escalated into what would become a week of bloody street battles between the police and local residents, some of the worst riots in England’s history.
McWilliam, a twenty-four-year-old who worked out of a station house eight miles north along the Mersey, was bused down to man the police line on Upper Parliament Street, ground zero in the urban war zone. He had a shield and a nightstick to defend himself; the rioters threw stones, chunks of pavement, and firebombs. The bobby helmets, made of molded cork, offered no protection from the barrage. A well-placed rock could drive the sharp metal badge straight through the cork, causing deep lacerations. A colleague beside McWilliam collapsed after he was hit in the head. Another suffered a fractured skull.
When they weren’t hurling projectiles, the rioters stole cars and weighed the accelerators with rocks, so they could send them racing downhill at the police. They charged the lines with spear-like pieces of scaffolding, attacked fire engines, and hacked police vans with axes. McWilliam took a painful whack on the hip and had his helmet nearly torn off by a well-placed stone, but otherwise he escaped the rioting unscathed. Hundre
ds of officers, however, were injured. At the time, McWilliam had no sympathy for the rioters—“It was us against them,” he would say—and after the violence subsided he mostly felt grateful for the extra pay. He and Lin were hard up, and the overtime meant that they could replace some windows in their home.
Soon after the Toxteth riots, McWilliam was called out to police another violent dispute. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had ordered the shutdown of dozens of unproductive coal mines across Great Britain, and the National Union of Mineworkers declared a countrywide strike. Thatcher tried to reduce the unions’ power by protecting workers who chose to remain on the job, and McWilliam was bused to bleak mining towns in Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire to stand between strikers and strikebreakers and prevent the conflict from escalating into a bloody melee. He knew almost nothing about the reasons for the strife. He was simply told, “You’re going to the Linby Colliery for a week.” Thatcher made almost no concessions, and after a yearlong standoff, the strike ended with many coal mines shut for good, and Great Britain’s once-powerful unions badly weakened. Families in the old mining regions were permanently divided. “There are fathers and sons who never spoke again,” McWilliam said.
* * *
But most of McWilliam’s work was closer to home. Based at the Crosby Police Station in Sefton, a fourteen-mile stretch of towns along the Mersey Estuary near Liverpool, McWilliam arrested burglars, thieves, and drug dealers, and executed search warrants against the organized crime gangs that had seized control of the heroin trade. By the mid-1980s they had flooded the streets with so much junk that Liverpool had become known as “Smack City.” One drug baron, Colin “Smigger” Smith, amassed a fortune of £200 million; another, Curtis Warren, was reportedly even wealthier, earning a spot on the Sunday Times’s Rich List. Nearby Manchester Airport had become a transit point for drugs from Asia and North Africa, and McWilliam regularly provided relevant intelligence that he had gathered on the street.
One evening his colleagues in customs invited him to witness a multiple arrest based on information that he had supplied: three drug runners were about to land, carrying high-quality cannabis oil from Morocco. McWilliam watched real-time footage of the three stepping off the plane and going their separate ways, and he was waiting inside the customs office when one suspect was brought in for a search. The drug mule was grinning and laughing, playing pals with the agents. He’s a cocky little sod, acting like he’s one step ahead of us, McWilliam thought. The man looked McWilliam’s uniform up and down and smirked. “All right, blue?” he said. “How you doin’, blue?” Minutes later the customs men cut away the false sides of his suitcase, and pulled out dozens of pouches of cannabis oil. As the trafficker was handcuffed and led to a holding cell, McWilliam caught his eye and grinned. “How you doin’, blue?” he asked, in a near-perfect imitation of the mule.
He worked night shifts and day shifts, in uniform and in street clothes, on the drug squad and the special crime unit. He cleaned up after suicides and investigated murders. He led a three-man team that broke up a ring responsible for an epidemic of bike thefts in Merseyside, arresting sixty-six people. He cultivated informants, and came to know almost all the local hoodlums, known in the lingo as “scrotes” and “scallies.” The thugs got violent from time to time, but McWilliam, a rugby standout known on the pitch for both meting out and taking punishment, wasn’t averse to—even welcomed—the occasional scrap.
Then, in 1984, he got into a scuffle that almost cost him his life. Serving on the plainclothes unit, driving “an old shat of a car” around Sefton, he received a radio dispatch about two men who had fled a stolen vehicle on foot and were reportedly armed. McWilliam and his partner spotted the suspects, who took off in two directions. McWilliam chased one to the end of a cul-de-sac, and pulled out his radio to call for assistance. The man hurled himself at McWilliam, knocking the radio from his hands and pinning him against a gate. One of his arms became trapped between rails. Immobilized, McWilliam thrashed as the assailant squeezed his forearm against his throat. He couldn’t breathe, and realized with terror that he was blacking out. As he slipped into unconsciousness, McWilliam thought of the Scotland Yard investigator who’d been stabbed ten times, fatally, the year before, while staking out a suspect in a £26 million gold bullion and jewel heist. John Fordham, John Fordham, John Fordham, ran the voice in his head. What must have been going through his mind? A moment later, two constables arrived and pulled off the assailant. They stuck him in their van and drove away. McWilliam was left gasping on the ground.
McWilliam could have come in from the streets after a few years as a patrolman and settled into a comfortable desk job, but he had no desire to advance in his career. “You become detached” when you leave the beat, he would explain to friends, when asked why he never pressed to become a sergeant. “I’ve always provided for me family and paid the mortgage. I’ve never been that driven.” His bosses questioned his absence of ambition at his annual job appraisal. “You’ve been at this station for fifteen years,” they would say. “Why?” McWilliam would shrug. “I like it here,” he replied. “I know everybody, and everybody knows me.” Living in the area where he worked meant he was never far from the people who needed his help, or those who meant to do harm.
The proximity worked both ways. Sound asleep at home at two a.m. after an evening shift, he once awoke to furious banging on his front door. The assistant headmaster of a local school, an ex-neighbor whom he’d arrested years earlier for being drunk and disorderly, had decided to confront him. The schoolmaster, obviously intoxicated, grabbed McWilliam. “Listen here, you bastard,” he began, before McWilliam sternly ordered him to leave the property. There were gratifying moments, too. Summoned to a wrecked car that had smashed into a tree, he discovered the driver unconscious, a hose leading from the exhaust pipe into the vehicle and an overdose of barbiturates in the man’s system. McWilliam dragged the would-be suicide from the wreckage, roused him, and kept talking to him as he was rushed to the hospital. Three years later, when he answered a call about a burglary, he thought the victim looked familiar. “Do you remember me?” the caller asked. It was the man who’d attempted suicide, who wept as he thanked McWilliam for saving his life.
Still, the misery wore him down: Once, McWilliam broke into the house of a physician who’d been reported missing. The doctor’s corpse was sprawled on his bed, soaked in blood. “Christ! This is murder,” McWilliam exclaimed to his partner. Then he found a suicide note addressed to the doctor’s son: the man had taken a knife, surgically cut a main artery, and lay down until he bled out. On another occasion, he inspected the corpse of a young hoodlum who’d been clubbed to death by a chain binder—a mace-like tool used to secure loads on trucks. The victim’s skull was smashed in like a rotten fruit.
Then there was the woman strangled in her flat by a perennial sex offender nicknamed “Dirty Bertie.” Dirty Bertie, whom McWilliam had often arrested and come to know well, lay in the next room, unconscious from an overdose he’d taken after killing her, and died a short time later. Beyond these quotidian horrors, there was the decomposed body in the trash, the mangled jumper on the railroad tracks. The worst were the crib deaths. He dealt with a few, the parents waking up and finding their baby motionless, unresponsive, for no understandable reason. For a man with a family, that was as bad as it got.
The athletic field provided McWilliam with a regular escape. Throughout the early eighties he ran track at the National Police Athletics Championships, one year winning silver medals in both the one-hundred- and two-hundred-meter dashes. For a decade and a half he competed every Saturday for the Merseyside Police Rugby Union team, which played an eighteen-match season in the North West Division 1 League, one of the top amateur associations in England. McWilliam starred as the team’s inside center, a position that required both hard, head-on tackles and acrobatic passing. But in the mid-1990s, he started feeling his age. A painful tear in a stomach muscle needed surgery. Then it was a torn pat
ellar tendon. He had a second operation to stitch it back together, returned to the field, and soon afterward took a hard hit to the face. He stayed in the match, with blood oozing from his nose, but when he stopped to clear his sinuses, something peculiar happened to his vision. “Suddenly,” he recalled, “the opposition had twice as many players as they should have had.” McWilliam had broken his cheekbone in four places, and blowing through his nose had dislodged his eye from its socket. After a third surgery, he packed it in for good. “This didn’t pay the mortgage,” he had to acknowledge. “Keeping at it didn’t make any sense.”
That’s when he began to rediscover the local wildlife. McWilliam hadn’t had a real brush with nature since he was six years old, when his grandmother had given him a copy of The Observer’s Book of British Birds, a pocket guide by S. Vere Benson to the 236 species that inhabit the United Kingdom. The black-and-white photographs made it difficult to tell many species apart, and McWilliam had soon lost interest. But three decades later he began making weekend trips with his three young sons—ages ten, eight, and two—and six-year-old daughter to an adventure playground at the Martin Mere Wetland Centre in Lancashire County, a low-lying depression of open water, marsh, and grassland, gouged out by receding glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age. It wasn’t long before McWilliam was venturing deeper into the reserve to watch birds. The children didn’t join in that, although McWilliam sometimes brought his wife, Lin—or, as he liked to refer to her, “Mrs. McW.”
He hiked along nature trails bordered by whorled caraway, golden dock, tubular water dropwort, early marsh orchids, purple ramping fumitory, and large-flowered hemp-nettle, peering through binoculars at the remarkable variety of avian life that gathered in the marshes and fields. He came to know several rangers who shared their expertise with him, and who would prove helpful in the next phase of his career. Weekend by weekend, McWilliam became a regular. In springtime, the wildflowers bloomed, and lapwings, redshanks, and other waders dove for fish in the marshes. Summer brought out the harrier hawks, merlins, buzzards, peregrine falcons, and other raptors, gliding on upward currents of warm air known as thermals and stooping in pursuit of their prey. In autumn, tens of thousands of pink-footed geese returned from Iceland, long, wavering V formations soaring inland from the coastal mudflats, filling the air with their cacophonous honks. During the winter, migrating families of whooper swans and widgeons engaged in boisterous, clamorous displays in the sky. McWilliam loved to plant himself in a blind beside two adjoining fields that were flooded with pumped-in water every September, attracting huge numbers of teals, pintails, shovelers, and mallards. By April, the fields began to dry, bringing in new populations of migrating snipes, black-tailed godwits, and dunlins.
The Falcon Thief Page 7
