Simon Kernick - The Last 10 Seconds

And then, in August 1990, Saddam Hussein’s forces invaded Kuwait and the Gulf War began. John was one of forty-five thousand British troops sent out to help liberate the country, along with half a million others from a wide coalition of countries, and I remember him being excited at the prospect of finally seeing some real action. My mum was worried about him. She didn’t want him to go, but on his last visit home before he went he’d put a big protective arm around her and told her not to worry. He’d then shaken hands with my dad and me, and headed out the door with a final wave goodbye.

When the ground war broke out at last in February 1991, it was one of the biggest mismatches in history. The Iraqi army was routed and Allied casualties were minimal. Unfortunately, they included members of John’s unit, whose armoured personnel carrier was targeted by mistake by an American A10 war plane. John survived the attack, unlike six of his colleagues, but he suffered serious burns to his face and body, and lost three of the fingers on his left hand. He spent two months in hospital, and when they first removed his bandages, Mum fainted. He was unrecognizable, his face a cruel tangle of scar tissue. Even I flinched, and had to fight back tears.

At twenty-one, John was invalided out of the army. Extensive plastic surgery and skin grafts helped to improve his appearance, but the mental scars proved harder to heal. He became withdrawn and depressed, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition I don’t think was even recognized at the time. He argued constantly with Mum and Dad, and ended up moving to a small flat in north London where he lived alone, preferring not to venture out so he couldn’t be seen.

But the thing about John was that he was a fighter, and, though it took a long time and a number of setbacks, including an arrest for drunk and disorderly and assault after a row in a pub when someone made a disparaging comment about his face, he slowly began to come out of his shell and get his life back together. He even got himself a job in a second-hand bookshop, which he was really enjoying. I’d just joined the Met as a trainee based out of Holborn, and had moved down from the family home in Herefordshire, so I often used to visit him. We’d go for drinks together in the pubs near his flat, and I was impressed at how he was turning his life around. He was even talking about running the London Marathon to raise money for an ex-services charity.

But he never got the chance, because a few weeks later he was dead.

It happened one lunchtime. John had just finished his morning shift at the bookshop and was walking down the high street to pick up a sandwich when he walked straight into an armed robbery. Two masked men armed with shotguns were holding up a cash delivery van outside a NatWest Bank branch. As they forced the two security guards to their knees, and ran to their getaway car, where a driver was waiting with the engine running, John sprang into action and gave chase, rugby-tackling one of them.

It was a crazy move, but just the kind of one John would make. He was like me in that respect. He never liked to see the bad guys get away with their crimes. And he’d always been recklessly brave, even more so, I suspect, since his injuries, because now he had a point to prove, and this was just the opportunity for the glory he’d always craved, yet had never quite attained.

Unfortunately, he’d picked on the wrong bad guys. According to one of the dozens of witnesses at the scene, the robber John had rugby-tackled was powerfully built and had managed to throw him off. At this point, the second robber strode over, shouted the words ‘Oi, freak!’, and as John, down on one knee and presenting no threat, raised his hands in surrender, the gunman had shot him once in the head from a distance of no more than five feet, killing him almost instantly. They’d then escaped with their haul intact.

Forty-six thousand three hundred and twenty pounds — the price of my only brother’s life.

Oi, freak! I’ll always remember those words. They still sting now. Not only did they murder someone who was a hundred times the man either of them would ever be, but his executioner had even seen fit to mock him for the injuries he’d suffered in the service of his country.

There was a huge public outcry at the killing. No one likes it when an innocent man’s killed standing up to thugs, especially when that man is a wounded war hero. But unfortunately an outcry on its own is not enough. Although there was huge pressure to find and prosecute the gang, who were believed to be responsible for a further five armed raids over a two-year period, they’d left behind very little evidence for the investigating team to work with.

That wasn’t to say that the police didn’t know who they were. Three names were quickly in the frame: Tyrone Wolfe, Clarence Haddock and Thomas Allen, career criminals from Hackney with at least twenty convictions between them. They were all arrested and taken to separate police stations for questioning, but none of them gave up a thing, and searches of their homes unearthed no evidence linking them to the crimes. So no charges were brought, and although they were put under surveillance for a while, eventually they fell off the radar.

It was a different story for my family. First the bomb and John’s injuries, then him being killed, ripped my parents apart. My father never recovered from it. He’d always had a strong exterior, but he was more brittle inside than he’d ever let on, and he was gone within two years. My mother hung on for another seven — I think, because of me — but she was never the same, and in her last years, as she aged and withered and fell apart, we saw each other less and less. She couldn’t stand the idea of me risking my life as a cop, not after what had happened to John, and didn’t see why I couldn’t just get a normal job, as an accountant or a lawyer or something equally boring. She would nag, I’d get sick of it and shout at her, she’d cry, I’d apologize. And our own small domestic tragedy played out the same way again and again like a broken tape, until finally I buried her, five years back now.

But I never forgot about the men who killed my brother, and throughout my career I kept pushing my various bosses to investigate them. And there were investigations. Wolfe and Haddock later went down for three years apiece for supplying cocaine and heroin, while Tommy Allen did eighteen months for tax evasion, but it wasn’t enough, and when they came out they went back to drug importation, as well as running brothels and people smuggling, except this time they were a lot more careful. I kept pushing. I kept following their progress. I kept looking for chinks in their armour.

Then, six months ago, while I was on another job, I finally got my breakthrough. An informant of mine told me that he’d heard Tyrone Wolfe bragging that he was the man who’d shot my brother, and I decided then and there that I had to infiltrate his crew. Although they were a tightly knit unit, they did use other people in the commission of their crimes, particularly on the brothel and people-smuggling sides of the business, and I was convinced that if I could just get close enough I could get Wolfe to admit on tape that he’d killed my brother, and then we’d have them all bang to rights.

But when I went to see Captain Bob in his office at the CO10 HQ in Brixton to get the authorization to go ahead, he turned me down flat.

Captain Bob’s a bald, cadaverous ex-public schoolboy in his late fifties with a plummy accent who’s been my boss at CO10 for more than ten years. He sits on his arse and supplies the jobs. I go out and do them. He gets paid twice what I do (I sneaked a look at one of his payslips once) and I take all the risks, which seems to encompass perfectly how the world of work works.