The cyclist frowned. ‘That’s why you stopped me, innit?’
Grace shook his head. ‘You’re wearing a mask, a jacket zipped to the neck and gloves. You could have been a Martian inside that lot for all we knew. Riding a bike on a pavement is an offence, but that’s not why we stopped you. Your ethnicity doesn’t come into it, but if you go around wearing a mask that scares and intimidates people, we are going to stop you. It’s early evening, don’t you think it might be frightening for any young children to see that?’ Grace smiled. ‘The way you’re making us feel, we should be the ones in the mask. We’re the monsters and you are OK. Is that right?’
‘What you mean?’
‘What I mean, Darius, is that I care about one thing only, and that’s that ordinary folk can walk down the street — any street they choose — without being afraid, without being intimidated, without someone in a terrifying mask hurtling down the pavement towards them. Am I being racist for wanting that?’
Darius looked at him as if trying to figure him out.
‘Well?’ Grace pressed. ‘I’m not going to search you, I’m not booking you for riding on a pavement, or for riding after dark without any lights, which I could. I’m going to let you go on your way, on one condition.’
‘Condition?’
Grace nodded. ‘One condition.’
‘And that’s, like, what?’
‘That when you get to wherever you are going, you give your mates a message. Will you do that, Darius?’
‘What message?’
‘That not all cops are bastards. Tell them we are your cops, too. We care for everyone, regardless of their colour, their gender or their faith. Tell them to stop mistrusting us and work with us, instead, to help make this city better. Go on your way and give them that message. Tell them we didn’t search you and we didn’t ticket you for riding on the pavement, OK?’
Darius looked at him, warily, as if still waiting for the sting.
‘Tell them what my mum used to tell me,’ Grace said.
‘Huh?’
‘My mum used to tell me: If you’re ever in trouble, go to a policeman.’
‘In your fucking dreams.’ He lowered the mask and raced off, pedalling like fury.
Grace turned to his colleagues with a shrug. ‘Win some, lose some.’
Paul Davey patted him on the back. ‘A ten for effort, boss.’
‘And a one for results, sir,’ Horton added.
And the whole enormity of what they were up against, this vast clash of cultures, hit Roy Grace yet again.
An instant later, Horton inclined his head to listen to the radio in his breast pocket. Then he looked up. ‘We’re on!’ he said, gleefully, and sprinted back towards the car, followed by Grace and Davey.
9
Tuesday 27 November
Horton accelerated as Grace and Davey struggled to clip on their seat belts, then turned the car around, racing back down to the intersection with the main road, where he waited. ‘Little fucker on a red moped, green helmet, just threw acid in a man’s face and grabbed his mobile phone. Heading north down this road. Part index, Charlie Alpha Zero Eight—’
At that moment, a bright red moped raced across their path.
‘That’s him!’
In a long-rehearsed move, Paul Davey, in the front passenger seat, leaned forward and punched on the blue lights and siren, as Horton pulled out in front of a line of traffic and accelerated hard. The car, whup-whup-whupping, raced past several vehicles, gaining speed, seemingly oblivious — to Roy Grace in the rear seat — to the oncoming traffic, which melted away as Horton swerved through an impossible gap between a bus and a taxi.
The moped rider appeared ahead between a van and a minicab, a hundred metres or so in front.
They were gaining on him.
Horton swung out, overtaking the van. A red traffic light was against them. The moped ran it. Taking a risk that Roy Grace would not have done in Brighton, Horton barely slowed, following it straight over the lights, cars braking sharply to their right and left. Grace held his breath. His buddy Glenn Branson’s driving used to scare the shit out of him, but Glenn drove like a dawdler compared to this guy. Although he had to admit, Horton was a brilliant driver.
They were gaining.
Twenty metres behind the moped now.
Of all the methods employed by muggers, those using acid — mainly sulphuric, car-battery acid — were the ones Grace hated the most. The young guy, whoever he was, who had just had the hideous stuff thrown in his face for nothing more than the pathetic value of a black-market mobile phone, was now going to be facing life-changing injuries. Perhaps blinded. Years of agonizing plastic surgery. Whatever looks he might have once had destroyed. And probably terrified to ever go out in public again.
Still gaining.
Ten metres.
‘There’s an alleyway coming up in five hundred metres, guv,’ Horton cautioned, and Paul Davey nodded in confirmation. ‘He swings left down that and we’ve lost him. Permission to take him down?’
Like an armed officer faced with a gunman, who had a split-second to decide whether the gun pointing at him was real or fake, Grace was aware he had only seconds to make the call.
A few months ago, the Commissioner of the Met had given an instruction to her officers to go ahead and knock riders off their bikes if there was no other means of stopping them, but this was not universally supported. Protests in the papers and all over social media. Poor little moped riders should be free to throw acid in people’s faces without having the nasty big bully police knock them off and scrape their little knees. And the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) had recently issued a statement questioning the morality of the Commissioner’s decision.
Morality? thought Roy. Some people had a damned skewed idea of morality.
The car accelerated, drew level with the moped’s rear wheel. Roy could hear the rasping of its exhaust. Saw the rider’s green helmet with some jagged motif on it. His blood boiled as he saw the arrogant stance of the rider, glee in his body language. Glee at what he had done.
‘Knock the bastard off, Dave,’ he commanded.
‘Knock the bastard off, with pleasure, sir.’
Horton swung the car sharply left, striking the centre of the moped’s rear wheel hard. The effect was instant and catastrophic for the machine and its rider.
The rear kicked out hard left, hitting the kerb in front of a Kebab House, catapulting the rider several feet through the air before he struck the ground with his helmet, somersaulted and lay still.
Horton pulled the car up in the middle of the road beside him and the three officers leaped out. Two black youths were racing up to the motionless figure. One of them shouted out at the police, ‘You fucking racist murderers!’
The rider was already stirring, and climbed up onto his knees.
‘What did you do that for, you filth?’ the other youth shouted.
Horton, followed by his colleagues, ran up to the rider before he could get to his feet, silently relieved he wasn’t seriously hurt — to avoid the inquiry that would go with any injury. He grabbed the rider’s right arm, pulled it behind his back and snap-cuffed him. Then he yanked back his left arm and cuffed that, too. Paul Davey, wearing protective gloves, shoved up the rider’s tinted visor and said, ‘You’re nicked, mate.’
Davey began to pat him down, carefully, aware of the youth’s hostile eyes peering out from under his helmet. An instant later, the Inspector pulled out of a pocket a small glass bottle containing a clear liquid, half of which had gone. Shaking with fury, he held it up to the youth. ‘Thirsty? Like a swig, would you?’