Peter Guttridge - City of Dreadful Night

Most of the policemen were crowded in the doorway of the front bedroom, looking in, guns dangling. She could hear a television blaring somewhere in the room.

She was tall enough to see over the shoulders of the two who were blocking her way. She saw the double bed, saw the man sitting up in it. He was bare-chested, tilted to one side. There was a spray of blood and other material on the wall behind him and a red jagged hole in the centre of his forehead. Someone hadn’t been aiming at body mass.

The naked woman sitting dead beside him had no face left to speak of.

Gilchrist seemed to have a heightened sense of smell. The man and woman had been having sex, she could tell. But there was also the smell of cordite, sweat, blood and shit.

She could hear the heavy breathing of the policemen all around her. Ragged, snorting. Animal.

‘I was told I was needed upstairs,’ she said to the first policeman to notice her presence. He looked at her coldly. Slowly, they all turned to her. She shivered.

‘Chief Superintendent Foster?’ she said.

The first man she’d addressed tilted his head as if to get a better look at her. He frowned.

‘Outside.’

She went back down the stairs. She glanced down the corridor to the kitchen as if she could picture tomorrow’s headline there, printed in large letters on the fridge. Neatly alliterative: Massacre in Milldean.

Finch and the other two policemen had gone. The body of the skinny man was still there. The pool of blood had spread wider across the floor, thick and syrupy, though other footprints had now joined her own. Finch and the others she assumed.

She walked to the door of the kitchen and, crouching, peered under the cupboards. She was thinking about what had fallen from the man’s hand. But she could see nothing.

I was at an official dinner in the banqueting room of the Royal Pavilion when the roof fell in on my career. My beeper vibrated in my belt just as Bernard Rafferty was beginning to grate.

Rafferty was the director of the Pavilion, a pompous little man who also wrote political biographies. I saw him all the time in Brighton – for though it might be a city, it is still a small town – but I also regularly encountered him in national radio and TV studios. We were both used as pundits, although his favourite topic of conversation was himself. Tonight he was launching a fund-raising initiative to turn a rundown part of the city near the station into a cultural quarter.

I was sitting at one of a number of round tables in the ornately decorated room. They were ordered around the long central table set for a Victorian banquet. A huge dragon chandelier hung over it from the canopied ceiling decorated with fantastic animals. Around the perimeter of the room were Spode blue lampstands and rosewood sideboards and the walls were hung with large canvases of Chinese domestic scenes. The room was an incredible confection. As was this gathering.

The top table was filled with local politicians and wealthy businessmen. Both the city’s MPs were there with the Leader of the Council, Rupert Colley, sandwiched between them. All three looked to be texting on their phones. Winston Hart, the head of the Southern Police Authority, was gazing up at the ceiling.

I was hoping the Prince Regent had more fun when he stayed here than I’d ever had at these dinners. A young woman from the council’s tourism department had been mildly flirting. She’d pressed her business card into my hand and insisted I call her if I ever wanted a private tour of the Pavilion. I’d enjoyed the attention but had not taken it seriously. I loved my wife, Molly, who was at home in the grip of another migraine.

Events like this were enough to induce migraine in anyone. Molly, however, was particularly unsuited to her role as company wife. She suffered from depression. It had come on after the birth of our second child, Tom, and had never really gone away.

Medication lifted her moods but, in common with many depressives, when her mood was lifted she chose not to take the medication, thus prompting a new bout of despair.

I whispered an excuse to the tourism officer and left the banqueting room unobtrusively, looking at the number on the beeper only when I was in the corridor.

My deputy, Philip Macklin. I frowned. I’m an obsessive by nature. I’ve always found it difficult to delegate. Once I made Chief Constable – the youngest in the country – I recognized that was neither practicable nor good management practice. I resolved that my management style would be as liberal as my policing policies – well, all but one of my policing policies.

Delegation was key, I knew, and because I was reluctant I overcompensated. I delegated too much. The difficulty I had with delegation was compounded in my deputy’s case by the fact that I wasn’t sure he was up to the job.

I speed-dialled him.

‘Philip, it’s Bob.’

‘Sorry to disturb you, sir, but we have a major situation.’ Macklin sounded panicked. No change there, then. ‘A dynamic entry by the tactical firearms unit. Home arrest. The information was sound… Seemed sound.’

‘Terrorists?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You were the gold commander?’

My force operated the standard gold/silver/bronze system of command and control for firearms operations and incidents. Gold commanders, who were at least chief inspectors or superintendents, could take responsibility for authorizing firearms issue for specific operations. They took strategic command with the help of a tactical adviser.

One of the things I intended to address was that we had far too many officers qualified to be gold commanders. There were around seventy, which meant that none of them got an opportunity to gain much experience of this most sensitive of duties.

For dynamic entry, the gold commander needed to be one of my four assistant chief constables. Macklin, as my deputy, was the most senior, though not the best.

‘I’m gold commander, yes, sir.’

‘Pre-planned or spontaneous?’

We divided firearms operations into those two categories.

‘It falls somewhere between the two. We had about two hours’ notice.’

I could hear muffled applause in the banqueting room. Rafferty had finally stopped preening.

‘Any of our people hurt?’

‘None, sir.’

‘Good. What happened?’

‘Information was received from an impeccable source. A violent criminal, wanted for two shootings and suspicion of involvement in three others, was holed up in a house in Milldean before crossing to France tomorrow. He was known to be armed and dangerous.’ Macklin cleared his throat. ‘I approved an operation to enter the premises forcibly and arrest him.’

‘And did we arrest him?’

‘No, sir.’

‘He resisted arrest?’

Macklin hesitated. I could hear his strained breathing on the other end of the phone. I felt my stomach knot.

‘Philip, just tell me what happened.’

Macklin reverted to formality.

‘Four people have been killed in a house in Milldean.’

‘Jesus Christ. What was this – the Gunfight at the OK Corral?’ I looked around to see if anyone could overhear but the nearest security guard was a good thirty yards down the long corridor. ‘I take it he wasn’t alone, then.’

Macklin was silent. My mind racing, I continued:

‘Kratos?’

There were regular rules for firearm incidents – officers should shoot to incapacitate suspects and aim at the upper body because it provided the largest target and offered the best chance of knocking out the central nervous system. Then there were Operation Kratos tactics.

These allowed police to shoot dead suspected suicide bombers without the need to issue a warning. Under Operation Kratos, a senior officer was on standby twenty-four hours a day to authorize the deployment of special armed squads to track and maybe shoot dead suspected suicide bombers. Shoot dead in any damned way they could.