City of Dreadful Night

by Peter Guttridge

  ‘I have utter faith in my officers,’ I said. ‘Whatever happened was, I’m sure, justified. I’ve asked Hampshire Police Authority to carry out a full investigation but I’m confident it will confirm my belief.’

  Hart had a spindly voice and always sounded tetchy.

  ‘Do you know exactly what happened?’ he said.

  ‘I know enough about my officers to stand by them.’

  When Hart and I had finished speaking I buzzed through to Macklin.

  ‘And?’

  ‘We’re still not clear, sir,’ he said. ‘The statements we took last night leave a lot unexplained. And we can’t locate DC Edwards. It was his man who gave us the tip about Grimes staying in that house. We think he was also the man monitoring the house.’

  As he spoke, I picked up the photo of Molly and the kids beside the phone and looked at their smiling faces. It was taken a long time ago.

  ‘Is Foster still around?’

  ‘They’re all on suspension but he’s writing up the debrief.’

  ‘Find him. I want to talk to him today. Listen, Philip, why wasn’t Danny Moynihan leading the operation? He’s our most experienced silver commander.’

  I put the photo back on the desk.

  ‘He’d done the morning shift. I called him but he stood himself down. He’d been drinking after his shift. He wasn’t drunk but—’

  ‘Yes, I get it. He was complying with the rules.’

  The regulations for armed operations stated that officers should have had no drink or drugs of any nature in the previous eight hours.

  ‘Philip, why don’t you have anything for me? You have responsibility for our use of firearms, for God’s sake. There’s a press conference this morning. People will expect me to have answers. I expect to have answers, but I don’t. I’m supposed to go out on a limb and stand up for my officers when I don’t in fact know what has happened.’

  ‘Don’t you think it might be a good idea to postpone the press conference?’ I could hear by the tone of his voice that he thought I’d been wrong to call the press conference so soon in the first place.

  ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘Well, then, why not keep it low-key?’

  ‘Were any weapons found at the house?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Have the people been identified yet?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘So we don’t know if Bernard Grimes was even there.’

  ‘It seems unlikely, sir.’

  ‘Do we know who Edwards’s informant was?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  I shook my head wearily.

  ‘Philip – give me something. Anything.’

  At the press conference I announced that I’d asked Hampshire police to investigate under the direction of the Police Complaints Authority.

  ‘All the officers involved in last night’s incident have been suspended pending that investigation. That should not, however, be taken as an indication of guilt.’ I looked round the room. ‘In fact, I’m sure they will be vindicated.’

  ‘How can you be so confident that your officers haven’t acted badly?’ It was the young woman from the radio station.

  I repeated what I had said to the chair of the Police Authority:

  ‘I have utter faith in my officers. Whatever happened was, I’m sure, justified.’

  I saw Jack Lawrence’s jaw clench.

  ‘Did you actually know about this before it happened?’ she asked.

  The jackals pricked up their ears.

  ‘I take full responsibility,’ I said.

  ‘Clever girl,’ I muttered to Jack as I left the room five minutes later.

  ‘She’s still learning, though – you don’t ask the decent questions when the pack is gathered – they just steal the answers for their own headlines.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Sir.’ Jack sounded awkward. ‘Do you think you should have—?’

  ‘No – but it’s done now.’

  Ten minutes after the end of the conference, William Simpson was phoning my mobile.

  ‘What was that, Bob?’

  ‘A press conference.’

  ‘And your resignation? I thought we had a conversation.’

  ‘I’ll be more effective if I remain in post.’

  There was a silence on the other end of the phone. Then, before he hung up:

  ‘I hope you’re ready for what’s about to happen to you.’

  The team from Hampshire arrived an hour or so later. I left them with Macklin. Mid-afternoon he phoned down to say that not only Edwards but also Finch and Charlie Foster were unavailable.

  ‘Unavailable?’

  ‘We can’t find them, sir.’

  When I put the phone down it immediately rang again. Catherine, my daughter, on the line from Edinburgh. She’d heard a report on the radio about the deaths.

  We had a difficult conversation. But, then, when didn’t we? She was appalled that I should defend my officers for such a horrendous crime without knowing the facts. I pointed out that she didn’t know the facts either. The conversation went downhill after that.

  The evening papers all over the country agreed with her. They questioned my ‘arrogant prejudgement’ of the case.

  The riot in Milldean started that night.

  It was the crime families taking the piss. Reminding us who really ran the estate; punishing us for carrying out an operation in their neighbourhood without their say-so.

  Those bastards could force almost anybody on the estate to do what they wanted because most of Milldean was in hock to them. The crime families between them, aside from all their other villainy, ran a big moneylending racket and had no shortage of clients too poor to get credit anywhere else. The ruinously high interest rates they charged meant people who borrowed money from them were pretty much indebted to them for life.

  We kept the street blocked off as our SoC investigators trawled the house where the incident had taken place. At six in the evening, a crowd began to gather at the north end, near the pub. Most of the rioters issued out of the pub, the worse for wear after a day’s drinking. Stones were thrown.

  The half dozen policemen at the barrier withdrew down the street to join their colleagues in front of the house. The crowd advanced.

  The men in it were stereotypes from video footage of rioting drunken English football fans. Faces distorted with primitive rage, mouths contorted in hate. Animal. Men walking from the shoulder or with arms swaying like simians. Mindless. Utterly animal roars.

  Riot control officers were waiting in a van at the other end of the street. Twenty of them. They came out with shields and advanced towards the mob. More stones. At the back of the crowd, a gang of men rolled a car over. Windows of the adjoining houses were smashed. Obscenities were hurled. The car was set on fire. Then, at 6.47 p.m., the first petrol bomb.

  Rioters overturned more cars at each ingress to the estate to prevent police getting through. Windows of shops were broken. There was looting. By 7.30 p.m. we had another fifty officers with riot equipment deployed on the estate.

  The riot continued through the evening. Three empty houses were torched. It wasn’t safe to send fire officers in. Other houses were broken into. Later, we heard about three rapes.

  I wanted to go down but thought it more sensible to stay at HQ, both for operational reasons and because I was myself a flashpoint. Chief Inspector Anderson was OPS1 for the evening so I avoided the Ops Room – he was easily alarmed.

  The Hampshire police, meanwhile, were hard at work. They hadn’t been able to locate Finch, Foster and Edwards, either. And the identity of Edwards’s snitch was not, of course, logged into the computer system.

  I phoned Molly to warn her I would be home late, if at all. She didn’t answer. I left a message on the voicemail.

  I don’t need much sleep. I can get by for weeks at a time on four hours a night. I dislike the fact that I share a common trait with Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill, but there it is. I don�
�t know about them, but my body tells me when I do need more rest – I crash for a couple of days, then, revitalized, start all over again.

  I stayed up until around four a.m. The rioting had calmed down by then so I used the sofa in my office to get a couple of hours’ rest.

  I was up again at seven, thickheaded, in time to see the morning newspapers. They all splashed on the riot and laid the blame squarely on me and my remarks.

  I spoke to Winston Hart, my chair, half an hour later. He alternated between panic and bluster. He was a long way out of his depth. Essentially he should have been a school governor and left it at that.

  At eight Molly phoned. It was another difficult conversation.

  At 8.15 a.m. I heard that Charlie Foster, the silver commander on the Milldean operation, was dead. A self-inflicted gunshot wound. I scarcely knew the man, so whilst I was sorry for his family’s loss, I cursed him for his selfishness.

  We got the riots under control during that day but they flared again in the early evening. We used tear gas. Baton charges. Rioters set more cars on fire and smashed windows. Smoke gushed up from the estate, an oily black pall drifting over the city and out to sea.

  The rioting was sorted by midnight, but by then the press were baying for my blood. I’d had two more conversations with Hart from the Police Authority. He was increasingly pissed off that I’d defended my officers before the investigation had taken place.

  My old pal William Simpson, government fixer, phoned again.

  ‘Well?’ He was icy.

  I put the phone down.

  I’ve struggled all my life to curb my temper, tried not to bridle when others tell me what to do. If I think you’re being reasonable, I’ll listen, but if I don’t . . . And don’t ever order me. That was my undoing in the army.

  By the end of that day, I told the press office not even to approach me with stuff until we had something to report.

  At home I ran a gauntlet of press hyenas hanging about outside my house, then ran into a shit storm with Molly.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  She was standing in the kitchen, hands on hips, almost vibrating with tension, a pulse clearly visible in her neck.

  ‘Trying to calm a situation.’

  ‘You know I’ve not been able to get out of the house today. Those bloody scavengers. They’ve been trying to climb over the walls. Telephoning every five minutes. How dare you put me through this?’

  She looked ashen and haggard. I wanted to put my arms round her but I couldn’t seem to take a step towards her. She was speaking slowly, precisely. I noted the almost empty bottle of wine on the kitchen table.

  ‘Tom called from Bristol. Your son wanted to know what’s going on. I had to tell him I had no bloody idea.’

  ‘I spoke to Catherine today. She’s OK.’

  Molly stepped towards me.

  ‘Like hell is she OK. I spoke to her too. She’s having a hard time with this. With you defending murderers.’

  ‘My officers are not murderers.’

  ‘How do you know? Were you there – or are you God and you were watching with your all-seeing eye?’ She waved a dismissive hand at me. Curled her lip as only she could. ‘The arrogance of you.’

  ‘A good leader has to stand up for his men and women.’

  ‘Not if they’ve done something wrong.’

  ‘Especially if they’ve done something wrong.’

  It sounded pompous, even to me. She sat down at the kitchen table. ‘Bollocks. So what are you going to do? You have to resign.’

  ‘I don’t and I won’t. I want to see the force through this.’

  ‘At whatever cost to your family.’

  ‘I’m a public servant.’

  ‘You’re a bag of wind.’

  I turned my back on her.

  I took a glass out of the cupboard and emptied into it what wine remained in the bottle. Thinking about the way the body count was rising.

  FOUR

  Sarah Gilchrist didn’t sleep much after the hot debrief. Her mind was flooded with images of the dead people in the house, whilst the analytical part of her was trying to work out what might have happened.

  Once she’d seen Connolly and White from Haywards Heath leave HQ at the end of the meeting, she had phoned Jack Jones, a scene of crime officer she’d once had a fling with.

  ‘You’re lucky, Sarah,’ he said. ‘I’m just taking a fag break out in the garden, otherwise you wouldn’t have got me.’

  ‘Haven’t managed to kick it, then?’ Jones had been a sixty-a-day man. One of the reasons their relationship hadn’t lasted longer was that she couldn’t bear the cigarette smell on his breath, on his clothes, on her. Another reason was because she didn’t want any kind of commitment. But that was another story entirely.

  For Jones to be smoking whilst attending a scene of crime meant he was still as hooked as ever. With the new DNA-based forensic examinations of crime scenes, inadvertent contamination was a real issue. Putting your hand on any kind of surface was enough to leave your own DNA evidence.

  SoC officers took special care. Having a fag part way through an investigation required a real palaver – taking the kit off then putting new kit back on.

  She could tell by the tone of Jones’s voice that he was up for a bit of flirting but she was too tense. She couldn’t be as relaxed as he was about sudden death. She told him about the man in the kitchen, the thing in his hand that went flying. He picked up on her mood, promised he’d get back to her the next day, let her know if they found anything.

  ‘Though if we do find something, I can’t say what,’ he said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

  She knew that.

  ‘I just want to know you’ve found something.’

  She had about four hours’ sleep then got up and prowled her flat waiting for Jones to call her. Finally, she called him.

  ‘I hadn’t forgotten,’ he said impatiently. ‘There was nothing there.’

  She put the phone down, her brain buzzing. She paced the flat, stood by the window looking down into the street, paced the flat again. Twenty minutes later she called DC Philippa Franks, the other woman involved in the Milldean operation. Franks had been terribly upset on the night. Gilchrist had comforted her as best she could.

  ‘Philippa, it’s Sarah.’

  There was silence on the line, although Sarah thought she could hear a man’s voice in the background. The television? Then, cautiously, Philippa said:

  ‘We’re not supposed to be in contact until the enquiry is over.’

  Standard procedure, so that the officers under investigation couldn’t cook up a story together.

  ‘I know. It’s just that I’m stumbling around in the dark here. I have no idea what happened upstairs.’

  ‘That makes two of us.’

  ‘But you were there. You saw it.’

  Franks’s voice was harsh.

  ‘I can’t talk about it.’

  ‘Who went up the stairs first?’

  More silence. Gilchrist thought she could hear Franks’s breath. Short, almost panting. Then there was a click and the sudden buzz of a phone hung up.

  She tried Harry Potter next. She hadn’t forgotten the sight of him leaning heavily against the wall at the top of the staircase in the house in Milldean. He had looked so defeated.

  Potter’s wife picked up the telephone.

  ‘Hello?’ she said cautiously.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Potter. It’s Sarah – Sarah Gilchrist. I work with Harry – with DS Potter. I wonder if I could have a word?’

  Mrs Potter put her hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone. Gilchrist could make out a muffled conversation then she heard Potter’s voice.

  ‘Sarah, this isn’t a good idea.’

  ‘I know – I’m sorry. I’m just so in the dark. Can you tell me anything?’

  Potter cleared his throat.

  ‘I was focusing on the back room. It was empty. The shooting started when I was in there. I went along
the landing but nobody was letting me through – and, anyway, the damage had been done.’

  ‘Were our men fired on?’

  ‘I have no way of knowing. I just heard shots. Finch would know.’

  ‘You looked shocked by it all when I came up the stairs.’

  ‘Weren’t you? I signed on to protect people not kill them. What happened was appalling.’

  ‘Do you blame our men? Do you think they were trigger happy?’

  Potter was silent.

  ‘Harry?’

  ‘Not for me to say, is it?’ Potter’s voice had changed. ‘Let the investigation decide that. Look, Sarah, I’ve got to go. My wife . . . you know.’

  Gilchrist tried Finch next. Aside from anything else she was curious about his relationship with Connolly and White from Haywards Heath. Judging by his appearance at the hot debrief, the cocky bastard had had the stuffing knocked out of him by the events in Milldean.

  Finch’s phone rang and rang and then voicemail clicked in, inviting her to leave a message. She declined the offer. The moment she put her own phone down, it rang. She jumped. It was an officer from the Hampshire police service asking her to come in for an interview later that morning.

  Bill Munro from the Hampshire force came to see me on Wednesday lunchtime.

  ‘Sorry to be talking to you in these circumstances, Bob.’

  Bill and I had served together for three years. We were of an age, though I’d risen higher. He was a stolid, methodical copper. Not much flair but then, except in novels, policing isn’t about flair. It’s about methodology and luck, in about equal measure.

  He was one of the few happily married policemen I knew. I put his girth – he was a couple of stone overweight – down to love of his domestic life. And love, more specifically, of his wife Alice’s cooking.

  Molly and I had been round to dinner once, years earlier, and Alice had produced a four-course blow-out that must have been from some fifties French cookbook – heavy on cream, butter and virtually every other fat-forming food.

  I was pleased to see Bill, despite the circumstances. My high regard for him was the reason I had chosen to bring in the Hampshire force rather than any of the others in our family.

  ‘I have to say, Bob, this is a bloody mess.’