Peter Guttridge - City of Dreadful Night

‘I was about to address it.’

‘About to? Given current international circumstances, it should have had absolute priority.’

I was terse. ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

And I did know. Even so, I resented him saying it. My conceit, I suppose. When I was brought in, the Southern Force was in decline after years of liberal posturing and neglect. I’d put off doing something because I had vested interests to contend with and I was drowning in other procedures.

‘There is so little audit stuff in place that anyone can go in to the armoury and take whatever the hell they want. They can use it to shoot at anything or anyone they damned well please, then drop it back without the force being any the wiser.

‘And this particular operation is a total botch. Your officers are doing no one any favours by remaining silent. Nobody knows where the tip came from. The policeman who received it is unavailable. Your gold commander is watching his back and your silver commander – who should never have been in operational charge – has killed himself.’

‘The procedures in place are standard around the country.’

‘I well know that,’ Bill snapped. ‘It’s the way those procedures are carried out that matters.’

I nodded, looked down at my desk.

‘Is everybody covering up?’

‘Except for Gilchrist. But she’s got a fixation on the man shot in the kitchen. She claims he had something in his hand but it wasn’t entered into evidence. She claims someone took it.’

‘Another officer?’

‘That’s the implication.’

I looked up at him.

‘Who is the man in the kitchen?’

‘Still unidentified.’

‘Who shot him?’

‘None of your snipers are admitting to firing the fatal shot. We’re running tests on the rifles in the armoury to see which one has been fired. But we won’t know who checked it out because there’s no signing in and out of weapons. Any forensic evidence we get will be contaminated as everybody seemed to be handling everyone else’s weapons.’

He shook his head then leant back.

‘You’re being pretty squarely blamed for the rioting too. What are you going to do?’

‘Find out what went wrong.’

Munro shook his head again. Put his hand on his paunch.

‘I can’t let you near it, Bob. You’re part of the investigation now – and you’ve shot yourself in the foot by that damned stupid announcement.’

I sat up straighter.

‘Supporting my team, you mean?’

‘Anticipating the results of my enquiry. I can understand why you were tempted to do it. But I wish you’d resisted the temptation. Especially as, on the evidence I’ve been able to gather, you may well end up with egg on your face.’

‘I assume they didn’t just go in guns blazing – they fired because they thought they were about to be fired upon.’

He shifted in his seat.

‘Don’t be so sure. At least one of the killings looks horribly like an execution. The man on the toilet…’ He shifted in his seat again. ‘How’s Molly handling all this?’

‘Not well. She’s not good under pressure.’

He eased himself up in his chair.

‘Give her my best.’ He looked down at me. ‘So will you resign?’

‘Everybody and his dog wants or expects me to.’

He gave a small smile.

‘That’ll be a “no”, then.’

‘I came here to make a difference. I haven’t had a chance to do that yet. And it would be cowardly of me to resign. I want to be here to see this through.’

‘It’s not going to be pretty.’

‘Bill, I know I’m part of the investigation. But if you could keep me informed-’

He put up his hand, then got to his feet. He nodded and left the room without another word. But at least he hadn’t said ‘No’.

Sarah Gilchrist couldn’t recall a worse time in her life. The fucking insulting interrogation she’d endured from the two Hampshire policemen had been bad enough. Were they trained to act in a way guaranteed not to get information from people they questioned?

She’d told them about the evidence going missing. They didn’t seem interested. They thought, in fact, that she was using it as a plausible reason for discharging her firearm.

‘But I didn’t discharge it,’ she said. ‘The man in the kitchen was shot by a police sniper stationed outside the house.’

They didn’t respond. She decided there and then she’d rather stick needles in her eyeballs than give these assholes any help.

She kept mostly indoors for the next few days. From her flat near Seven Dials she emerged only to go to the gym, then get the papers and food from the local deli.

In her flat she would wait for the phone to ring, trying to figure out what was going on, trying to figure out what to do.

She knew something bad had happened. Not just that people had been killed, although that was bad enough. She couldn’t find out who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Was it the police or the people in the house? Had the police raided the wrong house? Nobody was saying.

Then there was the bastard with the missing teeth – Connolly. And the dead man on the kitchen floor.

At the end of that terrible evening, as they were all cooped up in the armed response vehicle, she’d got nowhere when – out of curiosity and because she was involved – she’d tried to find out exactly what had happened upstairs. And, more to the point, who had shot whom. She couldn’t decide if they were stonewalling or simply being patronizing. Either way, it pissed her off.

Now, three days later, she’d still been unable to get hold of Finch. She’d been told about Foster’s suicide. And, courtesy of the radio and TV, she’d heard about the riot. God, what a fuck-up.

The missing evidence was difficult for her. Automatically, she felt loyalty to her fellow officers. In such a situation, ranks closed. And if ranks closed, did she want to be the one on the outside of them?

Staying home was driving her nuts. She liked her own company well enough but she also liked to keep active. The gym helped. It was a women’s-only place up near the station. She tried to choose times when she was unlikely to run into people she knew. She hit the machines for an hour, used the sauna and the Turkish; tried to sweat the emotion out.

Occasionally she got hit on but she was used to that in Brighton. She didn’t mind, she just wasn’t that way inclined.

She jogged there and back. There was easy – it was all downhill. Coming back up was something else again. She took another shower when she got back to her flat.

She prepared her food, taking more time than she ever had. Marinating meat overnight, chopping the vegetables finer and finer, cleaning the skillet and pans. Again and again. Cooking slowly, adding herbs, really getting the timings right.

Then throwing the result in the bin. Instead, scarfing lumps of cheese, olives from the jar, rice cakes from the packet, spoonfuls of yoghurt from the pot.

On Thursday, the fourth day of her suspension, she became front page news.

On Thursday my home life ended. I’d been hoping things were quietening down. I didn’t see the papers until I got into work. As I walked through the ground floor office, I wondered why people avoided looking at me.

Then I saw the newspapers my secretary had left folded on my desk. The headlines.

The tabloids had gone for the jugular. ‘Top Cop’s Sex Romp With Massacre Shooter,’ said one headline. The story that followed suggested that perhaps the reason I was so eager to defend the probity of my officers at the Milldean murder was because I’d had a one-night stand at a conference with one of the female officers. Sarah Gilchrist.

I groaned. She’d sold her story to the papers.