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
S arah 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.’
