Peter Guttridge - City of Dreadful Night

‘How can you be so confident that your officers haven’t acted badly?’ It was the young woman from the radio station.

I repeated what I had said to the chair of the Police Authority:

‘I have utter faith in my officers. Whatever happened was, I’m sure, justified.’

I saw Jack Lawrence’s jaw clench.

‘Did you actually know about this before it happened?’ she asked.

The jackals pricked up their ears.

‘I take full responsibility,’ I said.

‘Clever girl,’ I muttered to Jack as I left the room five minutes later.

‘She’s still learning, though – you don’t ask the decent questions when the pack is gathered – they just steal the answers for their own headlines.’

I nodded.

‘Sir.’ Jack sounded awkward. ‘Do you think you should have-?’

‘No – but it’s done now.’

Ten minutes after the end of the conference, William Simpson was phoning my mobile.

‘What was that, Bob?’

‘A press conference.’

‘And your resignation? I thought we had a conversation.’

‘I’ll be more effective if I remain in post.’

There was a silence on the other end of the phone. Then, before he hung up:

‘I hope you’re ready for what’s about to happen to you.’

The team from Hampshire arrived an hour or so later. I left them with Macklin. Mid-afternoon he phoned down to say that not only Edwards but also Finch and Charlie Foster were unavailable.

‘Unavailable?’

‘We can’t find them, sir.’

When I put the phone down it immediately rang again. Catherine, my daughter, on the line from Edinburgh. She’d heard a report on the radio about the deaths.

We had a difficult conversation. But, then, when didn’t we? She was appalled that I should defend my officers for such a horrendous crime without knowing the facts. I pointed out that she didn’t know the facts either. The conversation went downhill after that.

The evening papers all over the country agreed with her. They questioned my ‘arrogant prejudgement’ of the case.

The riot in Milldean started that night.

It was the crime families taking the piss. Reminding us who really ran the estate; punishing us for carrying out an operation in their neighbourhood without their say-so.

Those bastards could force almost anybody on the estate to do what they wanted because most of Milldean was in hock to them. The crime families between them, aside from all their other villainy, ran a big moneylending racket and had no shortage of clients too poor to get credit anywhere else. The ruinously high interest rates they charged meant people who borrowed money from them were pretty much indebted to them for life.

We kept the street blocked off as our SoC investigators trawled the house where the incident had taken place. At six in the evening, a crowd began to gather at the north end, near the pub. Most of the rioters issued out of the pub, the worse for wear after a day’s drinking. Stones were thrown.

The half dozen policemen at the barrier withdrew down the street to join their colleagues in front of the house. The crowd advanced.

The men in it were stereotypes from video footage of rioting drunken English football fans. Faces distorted with primitive rage, mouths contorted in hate. Animal. Men walking from the shoulder or with arms swaying like simians. Mindless. Utterly animal roars.

Riot control officers were waiting in a van at the other end of the street. Twenty of them. They came out with shields and advanced towards the mob. More stones. At the back of the crowd, a gang of men rolled a car over. Windows of the adjoining houses were smashed. Obscenities were hurled. The car was set on fire. Then, at 6.47 p.m., the first petrol bomb.

Rioters overturned more cars at each ingress to the estate to prevent police getting through. Windows of shops were broken. There was looting. By 7.30 p.m. we had another fifty officers with riot equipment deployed on the estate.

The riot continued through the evening. Three empty houses were torched. It wasn’t safe to send fire officers in. Other houses were broken into. Later, we heard about three rapes.

I wanted to go down but thought it more sensible to stay at HQ, both for operational reasons and because I was myself a flashpoint. Chief Inspector Anderson was OPS1 for the evening so I avoided the Ops Room – he was easily alarmed.

The Hampshire police, meanwhile, were hard at work. They hadn’t been able to locate Finch, Foster and Edwards, either. And the identity of Edwards’s snitch was not, of course, logged into the computer system.

I phoned Molly to warn her I would be home late, if at all. She didn’t answer. I left a message on the voicemail.

I don’t need much sleep. I can get by for weeks at a time on four hours a night. I dislike the fact that I share a common trait with Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill, but there it is. I don’t know about them, but my body tells me when I do need more rest – I crash for a couple of days, then, revitalized, start all over again.

I stayed up until around four a.m. The rioting had calmed down by then so I used the sofa in my office to get a couple of hours’ rest.

I was up again at seven, thickheaded, in time to see the morning newspapers. They all splashed on the riot and laid the blame squarely on me and my remarks.

I spoke to Winston Hart, my chair, half an hour later. He alternated between panic and bluster. He was a long way out of his depth. Essentially he should have been a school governor and left it at that.

At eight Molly phoned. It was another difficult conversation.

At 8.15 a.m. I heard that Charlie Foster, the silver commander on the Milldean operation, was dead. A self-inflicted gunshot wound. I scarcely knew the man, so whilst I was sorry for his family’s loss, I cursed him for his selfishness.

We got the riots under control during that day but they flared again in the early evening. We used tear gas. Baton charges. Rioters set more cars on fire and smashed windows. Smoke gushed up from the estate, an oily black pall drifting over the city and out to sea.

The rioting was sorted by midnight, but by then the press were baying for my blood. I’d had two more conversations with Hart from the Police Authority. He was increasingly pissed off that I’d defended my officers before the investigation had taken place.

My old pal William Simpson, government fixer, phoned again.

‘Well?’ He was icy.

I put the phone down.

I’ve struggled all my life to curb my temper, tried not to bridle when others tell me what to do. If I think you’re being reasonable, I’ll listen, but if I don’t… And don’t ever order me. That was my undoing in the army.

By the end of that day, I told the press office not even to approach me with stuff until we had something to report.

At home I ran a gauntlet of press hyenas hanging about outside my house, then ran into a shit storm with Molly.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

She was standing in the kitchen, hands on hips, almost vibrating with tension, a pulse clearly visible in her neck.

‘Trying to calm a situation.’

‘You know I’ve not been able to get out of the house today. Those bloody scavengers. They’ve been trying to climb over the walls. Telephoning every five minutes. How dare you put me through this?’

She looked ashen and haggard. I wanted to put my arms round her but I couldn’t seem to take a step towards her. She was speaking slowly, precisely. I noted the almost empty bottle of wine on the kitchen table.

‘Tom called from Bristol. Your son wanted to know what’s going on. I had to tell him I had no bloody idea.’

‘I spoke to Catherine today. She’s OK.’

Molly stepped towards me.