Dominic’s political stance was at least as surprising as his property ownership, since Carlyle had never previously heard him speak of anything other than football and girls. Even if it was the dope talking, which Carlyle was sure it was, he sounded nothing like the Dom he thought that he knew. He certainly sounded nothing like a copper. Carlyle wondered for a minute if he might suddenly whip a pile of newspapers from behind the sofa and try to sell him a copy of Socialist Worker.
The smoke was making Carlyle feel giddy. Getting slowly up from the sofa, he went to the window. Opening it, he felt the cold air sneak into the room and inhaled it deeply.
Dominic looked him up and down. ‘I’m leaving the Force,’ he announced though the haze.
Carlyle almost banged his head against the window frame. ‘You’re doing what?’
‘I’ve had enough of all this bollocks,’ Dom replied, looking round for an ashtray. ‘It’s not for me. I’m packing it in.’
‘Your family won’t like that,’ Carlyle said, knowing that Dom’s dad was a policeman. So, too, was his uncle. Blokes couldn’t do anything else in the Silver household.
‘It’s my decision,’ Dom said firmly, stubbing out the remainder of his joint on a saucer that he had finally discovered under the sofa.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going into business,’ he said. ‘Or, rather, I am going to focus on my existing business interests full time.’
‘And what might those “business interests” be?’ Carlyle asked warily, not really wanting to know the answer.
‘I’m looking for some help.’
Trying not to feel flattered, Carlyle asked a question that he did now quite want an answer to, even if he might not like it. ‘Why me?’
‘Why not?’ Dom stared into space, and then wound up his short sales pitch. ‘I know you. I know you’re straight. I know you’re dependable. I know that you’re not cut out to be a copper.’ That he had clearly anticipated the question wasn’t as surprising as his ability to push the right buttons.
‘What do you mean, cut out to be a copper’?’
Dom grinned slyly. ‘Come on, John. Coming from me that’s hardly a criticism, is it? Neither of us fits in. We can both see past the bullshit. I can’t play the game, and neither can you. If you stay, they’ll piss all over you – even more than they’ve done already.’
Carlyle leant against the windowsill. ‘I am a copper,’ he said, more for his own benefit than for Dom’s.
‘Yeah… right.’
‘It was my decision,’ Carlyle said, trying to sound convincing, ‘and I have no regrets.’ He already had his doubts – plenty of them – but he wasn’t going to share them with anyone. ‘Now all this coal bollocks is over, I’m enjoying it a lot more. It’s fine.’
Dom swung his legs on to the sofa and stretched them out like a cat. ‘Don’t you realise, though? This is what it’s always going to be like. There will always be something else. Last time it was the miners, next time it’ll be the steel workers, or the dockers, or the anti-apartheid mob or students or… whatever. There will always be an “enemy within”. We – they – can’t do without them. There always has to be someone to fight.’
‘Maybe,’ Carlyle said doubtfully, ‘but nothing as big as what we’ve had to deal with during this last year. Not like Orgreave.’ Without thinking, he raised a hand to his forehead and touched the small scar that remained from the flying brick that had caught him on the picket line.
‘Face it, you’ll be doing someone else’s dirty work forever.’ Dom picked the roach out of the saucer and rolled it between his fingers. He glanced over at Barbara and smiled a proprietorial smile. ‘How’s the Miller thing going?’
His question surprised Carlyle. He hadn’t thought about Trevor Miller for months. And he wasn’t aware that Dom had heard about their little run-in the previous summer, or its unresolved aftermath.
To Carlyle’s dismay, the woman in the garden that day at Orgreave, called Jill Shoesmith, had launched civil action and was claiming damages for the assault. She had tracked Miller down through Carlyle (unluckily, she had remembered his surname). Being the only witness, Carlyle’s statement was crucial. The obvious thing – the expected thing – was to clear Trevor from the off, but he was reluctant to do that, basically because Trevor was such a total cunt. Letting him get off would have meant some careful ‘interpretation’ of what had happened that day, and for a more sympathetic colleague, he could easily have managed it. Even for Miller, he could have been persuaded – not by the useless great lump himself, of course, but by others on The Job.
The Job, however, didn’t want to know. When Carlyle sought out his commanding officer at Shepherds Bush for some advice, the man was evasive and non-committal. The longer the conversation went on, the more the look on his superior’s face was that of a man who had just seen a stinking pile of dog shit dragged into his office. After a couple of minutes, however, he managed a lame smile, said that he knew that Carlyle would make ‘the right decision’ about what to say, and unceremoniously ushered him out the door, shutting it quickly behind him. This was Carlyle’s introduction to (non) man management, Metropolitan Police style.
In the end, Carlyle fell back on his father’s advice – don’t tell a lie but don’t tell the whole truth either – and provided the investigation with a statement that was as short and factual as possible. His angst was tempered by the belief that the Met would just bung the Shoesmith woman a few quid and get the matter over with as quickly and quietly as possible. He was surprised and horrified, a few weeks later, when his Federation rep told him that was not going to happen, and that the action would be allowed to run its course. Jill Shoesmith would have her day in court and Trevor would have to face a formal disciplinary hearing. The whole thing could take months, or even years. Worse, Miller could lose his job. If Carlyle wasn’t worried about that outcome for Trevor’s sake, he was certainly worried about it for his own. Getting another policemen sacked would destroy any nascent reputation that he might hope to cultivate within the Force. Never mind Trevor bloody Miller, it could easily kill Carlyle’s own career before it had even started.
Whatever was happening, however, Carlyle wasn’t now about to give Dom a blow-by-blow account of how he was managing to fuck his own career in slow motion. ‘I gave them a statement, and that’s it, I think,’ he said non- committally.
A drug-induced grin spread across Dom’s face. ‘And what did you say in your statement?’
‘I simply told them what I saw: Trevor pawing the woman’s chest and the woman running away.’
‘Crap answer!’ Dom shook his head. ‘You should have let it go, John.’
Carlyle shrugged, knowing Dom was right and – not for the first time – cursing himself for being so stupid. ‘It’s what I saw,’ he said lamely.
‘He could have been arresting her.’
‘He could have been, but he wasn’t. He was trying to pull her tits off. You normally have to go to Amsterdam to see that sort of thing!’ Like he would know.
Dom pushed himself up on his elbows. ‘So you’re the white knight for this slag?’ he shook his head. ‘How fucking noble of you.’
Carlyle had now had enough of being patronised. ‘You don’t know she’s a slag,’ he protested, ‘and even if she was, so what? I just said what I saw. I didn’t make any speculation or add anything that would cause the dickhead any more trouble than he’d already brought upon himself.’
Dom jumped off the sofa and started waving his arms about. ‘You didn’t watch his back, you idiot.’
‘No one else has mentioned it,’ Carlyle said sulkily, still knowing that he was right.
‘Word gets around. Your card will be well and truly marked, my son.’
‘Miller is an arsehole. He went too far.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Dom said. ‘If you don’t get that, you shouldn’t be on The Job. It’s their game, their rules. Anyway, I hear he’s up for a promotion.’
‘What?’ Carlyle gasped. ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding.’
Dom gave him a bemused ‘stoner’ look. ‘Why would I joke about something as serious as this? Trevor Miller, useless shithead that he is, came out of the strike with two commendations. He has friends.’
‘Friends?’
‘Yes, friends. Friends that will make sure this whole little mess gets quietly forgotten, whether your slag gets bought off or not. Trevor will come out of this smelling of roses. Unlike you.’
‘Fucking hell!’
