‘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
