The Department of Professional Standards – the internal police complaints unit that investigates all police shootings.
‘So – whatever happens – I am going to get whatever they decide to give to me.’ And now he finally looked me in the eye. ‘They’re not going to let me walk away from it, Max.’
He was a decent man. I wished there was more that I could do for him.
‘You served in Afghanistan, didn’t you, Ray?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you know Jackson when you were out there?’
He smiled his shy smile.
‘I was regular army. Jackson was something else. Something more. Jackson was playing with the big boys.’
He looked at me to see how much I knew.
‘I know Jackson was Special Forces,’ I said. ‘But I bet it was hard enough in the regular army.’
‘We don’t talk about it,’ he laughed. ‘Because we wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘Tell me,’ I said.
He stared at me until he believed that I really wanted to know. Then he took a breath and tried his best.
‘Twice a day we went on patrol and I had mates – too many mates – who had their legs and balls blown off by IEDs. Then, when the twice-a-day patrol was over, we went home to a camp with no running water, and no refrigerator, and no roof – all the better for the Taliban to lob in grenades. Our superior officers didn’t visit us because it was too dangerous. And then we would go out on another patrol and the legs and the bits of bodies that our mates – living and dead – had left behind would be tied to trees. And the Taliban knew that we left nobody behind, living or dead, so they would booby-trap the bodies – and the bits and pieces – of dead men. Very young, they were. Very young dead men, Max, their body parts up there in the trees. It was worse for the boys they took prisoner, of course. Castration. Scalping. Skinning alive. The usual Afghan hospitality.’
I looked away because the tears had started and his face was contorting with fierce effort as he tried to stop them. There was a choking sound in his throat that was not from emotion but his struggle to control emotion.
When the terrible sound had stopped I looked back at him and he was dry-eyed now and smiling at me in that gentle, diffident manner he had.
And finally I understood exactly why, just before we went into Borodino Street, Alice Stone had asked him how he was doing.
It was still just the two of us in that locker room.
I leaned closer to him.
‘What happened in that basement, Ray?’ I said.
‘They brought the war home, Max,’ he said. ‘And so did we.’
14
The next day the bulldozers and the skips went in to Borodino Street before first light and behind them a parameter was set up to keep members of the public a mile away from the clean-up operation. Early rising residents were free to come and go but when the first members of the public started arriving, they were politely stopped at the perimeter by uniformed officers and gently relieved of their flowers.
Borodino Street was cleared of flowers with as much respect and dignity as we could muster. Our press office released a statement saying that dying flowers would be used as fertiliser while fresh bouquets would be donated to local hospitals. Condolence cards, poems and letters were all carefully collected for the bereaved family of Alice Stone, should they wish to see them, while teddy bears and other toys would be donated to children’s charities.
But it was over.
In the roads surrounding Borodino Street, white vans full of police in riot gear waited for crowd trouble that never came. Their mood was joyful, almost euphoric, coppers who were happy and relieved to learn that they were not going to have anything thrown at their heads in the next few hours. Always a good feeling.
Members of the public were still arriving to pay their respects, and to lay their flowers, and to witness the great festival of mourning, but they did not protest or seem surprised when they were denied access to Borodino Street, and they were grateful when their flowers were taken from them by young uniformed policemen and women with real and unforced tenderness.
There were no photographers around when the bulldozers were filling the skips with their loads of rotting bouquets. By the time the sun was over the rooftops, the first convoy of lorries was already driving away, the battered yellow skips piled high with dead flowers, acres of cellophane flashing in the sunshine. Wary residents woke up and peered from their windows, as if not quite believing what they were seeing. Borodino Street was returning to something approaching normal.
The Met are good at this kind of thing. From Princess Diana to suddenly dead rock and pop stars, we have had a lot of practice. But there comes a point where a city street has to stop being a shrine.
‘How can anyone live here now?’ Edie said. ‘This is no place for a teenage girl to be growing.’
We were standing outside the Khan family home. The place was a ruin. The search teams had torn up the floorboards, ripped open the walls and collapsed the ceilings, dumping the debris in the front garden.
‘You saved Layla from care,’ I said. ‘But you can’t save her from her home.’
I suggested we get some breakfast inside us. It was going to be a long day.
Because in the afternoon they were burying Alice Stone.
The police had their own wake that evening.
The Fighting Temeraire is an old-fashioned pub round the back of Victoria, close enough to New Scotland Yard to be annexed by the Met for important occasions.
When I arrived with Edie and Joy at just after six the place was already heaving. One hundred hungry, beer-bleary eyes turned on the two women.
‘Or I might just go home,’ Adams said.
Edie laughed and took her by the hand.
‘We’re not scared of this lot,’ she said. ‘Come on.’ They pushed their way into the mob and were lost to me.
The Fighting Temeraire is one of those pubs that prides itself on being untouched by the modern world. There was no music, no dining area, no frills, although it does have giant TV screens for sport.
But tonight they were not showing any sport.
The entire pub looked up as they showed a clip from Alice Stone’s funeral, the same clip that they had been showing at every news bulletin for the last few hours.
Alice’s husband was standing by his wife’s coffin, his face a map of a man enduring the unendurable, one small child in his arms and the other holding his hand, the mourners behind them totally silent. Then the clip was gone and the noise level rose. I saw Edie and Joy at the bar. Two young DIs from New Scotland Yard were on either side of them, trying their luck. And I saw that Edie was not interested in this man and, all at once, I understood that TDC Joy Adams was not interested in any man, not in that way.
Edie caught my eye and smiled. I smiled back.
And then a shoulder slammed into me.
I stared into the face of the pale young man with the wispy beard who had carried a shotgun he never used to Borodino Street. I was about to apologise. Then I saw Jesse Tibbs didn’t want my apology.
‘You’ve been sucking up to the IPCC,’ he said. ‘You grassed on Ray Vann. If he goes down for unlawful killing, I will make you crawl, Wolfe.’
I turned to his friends, a silent invitation to intervene before it was too late.
‘Leave it, Jesse,’ one of them said without much enthusiasm. And that was it. They were letting him off his leash.