Peter Guttridge - City of Dreadful Night

‘Like hell is she OK. I spoke to her too. She’s having a hard time with this. With you defending murderers.’

‘My officers are not murderers.’

‘How do you know? Were you there – or are you God and you were watching with your all-seeing eye?’ She waved a dismissive hand at me. Curled her lip as only she could. ‘The arrogance of you.’

‘A good leader has to stand up for his men and women.’

‘Not if they’ve done something wrong.’

‘Especially if they’ve done something wrong.’

It sounded pompous, even to me. She sat down at the kitchen table. ‘Bollocks. So what are you going to do? You have to resign.’

‘I don’t and I won’t. I want to see the force through this.’

‘At whatever cost to your family.’

‘I’m a public servant.’

‘You’re a bag of wind.’

I turned my back on her.

I took a glass out of the cupboard and emptied into it what wine remained in the bottle. Thinking about the way the body count was rising.

S arah Gilchrist didn’t sleep much after the hot debrief. Her mind was flooded with images of the dead people in the house, whilst the analytical part of her was trying to work out what might have happened.

Once she’d seen Connolly and White from Haywards Heath leave HQ at the end of the meeting, she had phoned Jack Jones, a scene of crime officer she’d once had a fling with.

‘You’re lucky, Sarah,’ he said. ‘I’m just taking a fag break out in the garden, otherwise you wouldn’t have got me.’

‘Haven’t managed to kick it, then?’ Jones had been a sixty-a-day man. One of the reasons their relationship hadn’t lasted longer was that she couldn’t bear the cigarette smell on his breath, on his clothes, on her. Another reason was because she didn’t want any kind of commitment. But that was another story entirely.

For Jones to be smoking whilst attending a scene of crime meant he was still as hooked as ever. With the new DNA-based forensic examinations of crime scenes, inadvertent contamination was a real issue. Putting your hand on any kind of surface was enough to leave your own DNA evidence.

SoC officers took special care. Having a fag part way through an investigation required a real palaver – taking the kit off then putting new kit back on.

She could tell by the tone of Jones’s voice that he was up for a bit of flirting but she was too tense. She couldn’t be as relaxed as he was about sudden death. She told him about the man in the kitchen, the thing in his hand that went flying. He picked up on her mood, promised he’d get back to her the next day, let her know if they found anything.

‘Though if we do find something, I can’t say what,’ he said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

She knew that.

‘I just want to know you’ve found something.’

She had about four hours’ sleep then got up and prowled her flat waiting for Jones to call her. Finally, she called him.

‘I hadn’t forgotten,’ he said impatiently. ‘There was nothing there.’

She put the phone down, her brain buzzing. She paced the flat, stood by the window looking down into the street, paced the flat again. Twenty minutes later she called DC Philippa Franks, the other woman involved in the Milldean operation. Franks had been terribly upset on the night. Gilchrist had comforted her as best she could.

‘Philippa, it’s Sarah.’

There was silence on the line, although Sarah thought she could hear a man’s voice in the background. The television? Then, cautiously, Philippa said:

‘We’re not supposed to be in contact until the enquiry is over.’

Standard procedure, so that the officers under investigation couldn’t cook up a story together.

‘I know. It’s just that I’m stumbling around in the dark here. I have no idea what happened upstairs.’

‘That makes two of us.’

‘But you were there. You saw it.’

Franks’s voice was harsh.

‘I can’t talk about it.’

‘Who went up the stairs first?’

More silence. Gilchrist thought she could hear Franks’s breath. Short, almost panting. Then there was a click and the sudden buzz of a phone hung up.

She tried Harry Potter next. She hadn’t forgotten the sight of him leaning heavily against the wall at the top of the staircase in the house in Milldean. He had looked so defeated.

Potter’s wife picked up the telephone.

‘Hello?’ she said cautiously.

‘Hello, Mrs Potter. It’s Sarah – Sarah Gilchrist. I work with Harry – with DS Potter. I wonder if I could have a word?’

Mrs Potter put her hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone. Gilchrist could make out a muffled conversation then she heard Potter’s voice.

‘Sarah, this isn’t a good idea.’

‘I know – I’m sorry. I’m just so in the dark. Can you tell me anything?’

Potter cleared his throat.

‘I was focusing on the back room. It was empty. The shooting started when I was in there. I went along the landing but nobody was letting me through – and, anyway, the damage had been done.’

‘Were our men fired on?’

‘I have no way of knowing. I just heard shots. Finch would know.’

‘You looked shocked by it all when I came up the stairs.’

‘Weren’t you? I signed on to protect people not kill them. What happened was appalling.’

‘Do you blame our men? Do you think they were trigger happy?’

Potter was silent.

‘Harry?’

‘Not for me to say, is it?’ Potter’s voice had changed. ‘Let the investigation decide that. Look, Sarah, I’ve got to go. My wife… you know.’

Gilchrist tried Finch next. Aside from anything else she was curious about his relationship with Connolly and White from Haywards Heath. Judging by his appearance at the hot debrief, the cocky bastard had had the stuffing knocked out of him by the events in Milldean.

Finch’s phone rang and rang and then voicemail clicked in, inviting her to leave a message. She declined the offer. The moment she put her own phone down, it rang. She jumped. It was an officer from the Hampshire police service asking her to come in for an interview later that morning.

Bill Munro from the Hampshire force came to see me on Wednesday lunchtime.

‘Sorry to be talking to you in these circumstances, Bob.’

Bill and I had served together for three years. We were of an age, though I’d risen higher. He was a stolid, methodical copper. Not much flair but then, except in novels, policing isn’t about flair. It’s about methodology and luck, in about equal measure.

He was one of the few happily married policemen I knew. I put his girth – he was a couple of stone overweight – down to love of his domestic life. And love, more specifically, of his wife Alice’s cooking.

Molly and I had been round to dinner once, years earlier, and Alice had produced a four-course blow-out that must have been from some fifties French cookbook – heavy on cream, butter and virtually every other fat-forming food.

I was pleased to see Bill, despite the circumstances. My high regard for him was the reason I had chosen to bring in the Hampshire force rather than any of the others in our family.

‘I have to say, Bob, this is a bloody mess.’

‘Five people killed – I can see why you would think that.’

‘Five? Oh, you mean your officer, too. Yes, it’s especially bad when one of ours go down – though I’m not sure what I think about suicide. But you’re in deep shit for more than that. This riot. And I have to say you’re utterly exposed. The procedures you have in place here for armed response operations – or rather the procedures you don’t have in place – frankly, the whole thing is a disgrace.’