his room pointing guns at his head.
‘Turn over, turn the fuck over,’ shouted the nearest policeman. Behind and outside he could hear an extraordinary amount of banging and crashing. Shahid had once, when he was in bed with flu, seen a television programme in which a group of people with ambitions to be builders had knocked down and torn out everything inside a house except the supporting walls. The noises they had made were similar to those now coming from his sitting room and kitchen. That was part of what he said to himself; while at the same time, and suddenly, he felt a surging, physical fear. I might die here, right now, today. He turned over. Something – with a man’s full body weight behind it – pressed down on the point between his shoulder blades, while his arms were very roughly pulled behind his back. There was a touch of cold plastic and a click as what must be handcuffs were put on him. What they never showed you on television was how much the position of being cuffed hurt, and how uncomfortable it was, and how completely vulnerable it made you feel. Face-down and cuffed, he was as immobile and trapped as a beetle on its back.
Two or more sets of hands pulled Shahid up and began shoving him out of the room. He could see six policemen in front of him, and hear others behind, and knew that there were others elsewhere in the flat. All of them were white and all of them looked pinched and angry. As he collected himself a tiny bit, Shahid could see that about half of them were firearms officers, and the others were gloved and overalled for searching. One of them had already booted up his computer and was sitting at the keyboard. Whatever they were looking for, they were certainly looking for something. Through the bedroom door he could see that all the drawers in the kitchen had been turned out on the floor. He’d never realised just how much cutlery and crockery he had.
From behind, so he didn’t see who did it, somebody put a waxy jacket over his shoulders and then another policeman stood in front of him holding up a pair of tracksuit bottoms. For a moment Shahid didn’t understand. Then he realised that he was supposed to put the tracksuit bottoms on. From shouting at him, the police had now gone silent, as if they expected him to work out for himself what he was to do. The policeman held the trouser legs up and Shahid, like a child being helped to put on his pyjamas, stepped forward into them. Then his treatment abruptly became ungentle again as he was shoved forwards, out through the chaos, the flat full of police but looking as if it had been burgled, and then downstairs, this frightening as he was half pushed and half carried, never really in balance thanks to the handcuffs, skidding down the stairs, past the cafe’s side door which he could see opening just as he was carried out the front of the house.
A police van was outside the building; it was stopped in the middle of the street with its back door open, facing the flat’s front door. If it were a civilian piece of parking it would have been illegal. The man pushing Shahid, always keeping him at the limit of his balance so he felt he could fall at any moment, pushed him against the back of the van so that he barked his knees. Then another policeman banged on the back of the van three times, and another one opened it from the inside, and he was pushed, roughly but not violently, upwards, and hoicked into the back of the vehicle, where two policemen, not firearms officers, were sitting waiting for him. The van had benches along the sides, and a railing from which sets of handcuffs hung suspended. There was a thick glass wall between the passenger compartment and the front of the van, and there was also a separate compartment, a kind of cage with metal bars, in which a prisoner could be kept separate from other passengers. Shahid could not stop himself from thinking random, completely inappropriate thoughts, and one of them, looking at this cage, was: if I was Hannibal Lecter, they’d put me in there.
The two policemen who had shoved and pushed him into the van sat down on either side of him, so now there were four of them in the back. The door was slammed shut from the outside, and the van moved off. Both of the police across from him were staring at him, one of them smiling, the other scowling. The scowling policeman was chewing gum. No one had spoken to Shahid yet, and he began to feel, as well as confused and angry and frightened, a wave of stubbornness. Whatever this is, it’s completely wrong, and I’m not going to play along with it.
The van was travelling at speed. Not much traffic at this time of the morning.
71
From all the police dramas Shahid had seen, he knew that what would happen next was that he would be read his rights, all that stuff about you don’t have to say anything but if you don’t it means you’re guilty, then be taken up to a counter in a police station and booked, have his details taken, his personal belongings logged, then an interview room, and at some point he’s allowed to call his lawyer, all that. If you were lucky the police person in charge of your case would be Helen Mirren, if you were unlucky it would be David Jason, but underneath they were the same hard but fair basically decent truth-seeker.
It didn’t work like that. The van, noisy on the outside and silent within, drove for about twenty minutes, then pulled up in an underground garage. Shahid was pulled and manhandled out of the van, then shoved into a lift, the four policemen with him all the time. Then he was led down a corridor decorated in institutional green paint, and shoved into a brightly lit room, and left on his own. He still hadn’t been spoken to, not once.
There was a toilet in one corner of the room, with no lid and, now that he studied it, no seat. Shahid looked at it for a moment. Rooms did not tend to have toilets in them. There were four strip lights, of which one had a slight flicker, giving the whole room the sense that it was vibrating, uneven, as if something had gone wrong with your head and you were about to have a stroke, an aneurysm, a freak-out. There was a single folding chair at a table with a plastic wipe-clean top, and a horizontal plank in the corner of the room – no, looking at it, it wasn’t a plank. It was a small single bed whose sheet and blanket were folded so tightly they looked like a tablecloth. There was no pillow. The earliness of the morning and the horror of what was happening had slowed Shahid’s brain, but now he realised: this was a cell. He was in a cell. Something had gone horribly, eerily, impossibly, grotesquely wrong. He had an intuition what it was, too. In fact it could really be only one thing. But now there was nothing to do but wait.
72
Detective Inspector Mill had a talent for distinguishing between what needed to be done and what didn’t, between make-work and real work; he was good at asking people to do things and letting them get on with it. A clear brief and a free hand, that was the formula, and how he looked forward to being able to apply it all day long.
At the moment, though, there were times when he had to do a lot of his own shitwork. Routine legwork, routine paperwork, other people’s idea of how his time should be spent. That was how it was. He didn’t enjoy that so much, and a part of him couldn’t help but feel, when he was doing routine repetitive work, that it was the equivalent of harnessing a racehorse to a plough. He was philosophical about it, and his police career would either take off or it wouldn’t; for now he kept his head down and did what he was told. Today, that meant a. getting hold of a list of traffic wardens who served the area including Pepys Road, and b. going to talk to them.
Mill knew that being a traffic warden is a lousy job and as such is done by recent immigrants. They tend to cluster together – somebody from some part of the world gets a job, tells their family and their mates, they get jobs too. Same the world over. In this part of town, most of the traffic wardens were from West Africa, a fact which caused racial tensions, especially with indigenous blacks of Caribbean descent. Mill was braced for a wasted day talking to wary, uncommunicative West African traffic wardens whose skills in English wouldn’t be great and who would be pretending they were even worse than they were. I could quit, he thought. I could quit right now… and that thought helped him to get out of bed and get on with it.
The morning’s work began with a visit to the offices of Control Services, the company which supervised the borough’s parking. The contract for parking had been enforced with such lack of sensitivity, such aggressive pursuit of the officially non-existent quotas and bonuses, such a festival of clamped and towed residents, such a bonanza of gotcha! tickets and removals, such an orgy of unjust, malicious, erroneous, and just plain wrong parking tickets, that in local elections it had cost the incumbent council control of the borough not once but twice. And there was nothing the borough could do, because the terms of the contract were set out by central government, so that there
