Farrow calmed down as he was taken down to the interview room by two of the arresting officers, with me and the DC following a few yards behind. What happened next is still something of a mystery. As Farrow and the arresting officers turned and entered the room, he turned and said something to one of them that I didn’t quite catch but which I was told later went along the lines of ‘You pussies can’t do nothing with me’. The officer had then made a fatal mistake. He’d let his frustration with the legal system and the cocky criminals who frequented it get the better of him, and had apparently called Farrow ‘a black bastard’, causing a further, much more violent struggle to ensue. We’d hurried into the interview room at just the moment when one of the officers slammed Farrow’s head into the wall. Not hard enough to knock him out, but enough to open a nasty cut across his forehead. ‘Assault! Assault!’ he’d screamed. ‘They’re killing me! Get me a fucking brief! Now!’ The two arresting officers had let go, and we’d helped Farrow, who was handcuffed behind his back, into one of the chairs. ‘Get my brief,’ he’d said, all calm now, blood oozing out of the wound. ‘I want to make a formal complaint. I ain’t saying another word until I’ve seen my brief.’ And he didn’t. Not a word.
The formal complaint made, all four of us who’d been in the interview room were later questioned by representatives of the Police Complaints Authority, and all of us stuck to the same story: that Troy Farrow had stumbled during the struggle and had accidentally knocked his head against the wall. The arresting officer who Farrow claimed had racially abused him denied the charge but did admit calling him a bastard, and I couldn’t comment on this because I hadn’t heard the exchange. I know that a lot of people would think it was wrong for me not to say what I saw but at the time I thought no lasting harm had been done. Farrow was patched up by the station’s doctor and needed two stitches, and, anyway, it was no more than he deserved. Plus, I didn’t want to be the whistleblower. The police get enough flak as it is, and sometimes when you’re a copper it does feel like the whole world’s against you, so you don’t want to be putting the knife into your own side. In the end, I was never going to be the one who ruined a colleague’s career (which is what I would have done) over one second’s stupidity and hot-headedness. I just couldn’t justify it to myself.
And, at first, it looked like we might have got away with it. I don’t think the people from the PCA believed us but it was our word against that of a known criminal, and we weren’t budging, so eventually they had little choice but to conclude that the incident was accidental, and that Farrow had misheard what the arresting officer had said.
But that wasn’t the end of it. A couple of months later the second arresting uniform, the one who hadn’t pushed Farrow’s head into the wall, admitted what had happened to a bloke in his local pub after one beer too many, only to find out afterwards that the bloke was a local investigative journalist, doing an expose of racism in the Force. With the conversation recorded, the story appeared two days later in the local paper, and the case was suddenly reopened. I found the local media and even London Tonight parked on my doorstep, asking me if I was a liar and a racist. I might occasionally be the one, but I’m definitely not the other. The whole thing was a nightmare and, although my boss, DCI Renham, a guy I’d worked for for getting close to five years, fought to keep me in my position, the tide of attention was overwhelming, and in the end, with the story refusing to go away, the Brass were forced to act. Both arresting officers lost their jobs; the DC, with me, was put back in uniform; and I was demoted to DC.
It was a shameful episode, the whole thing, and for a long time I found it difficult to come to terms with. You see, in my eyes, I hadn’t done a lot wrong. I’d made a mistake but I thought the punishment far outweighed the crime. I took it out on my wife, made life difficult for her, and maybe things between us hadn’t been quite as strong as I’d thought, because three months later, after one argument too many, we separated. It turned out she’d been having an affair. I suppose this would have been understandable were it not for the fact that the other man happened to be the intrepid journalist who’d broken the story in the first place. The cheeky bastard had gone round to interview her about what effect the story was having on her and the family, and clearly it was having quite a big one because somehow, not long afterwards, maybe even that day, they’d ended up in the sack.
What do you do in that sort of situation? What can you do? Nothing except pick yourself up, dust yourself down, and remember that what goes around comes around. There is justice in this world, it’s just that sometimes it takes a long time before it bothers to show itself. I had no choice but to cling to that fact as I gathered up my possessions, put in for a transfer, and headed north of the river for the first time in my career, ending up at probably the most controversial station in the entire Met, a place still haunted by the betrayal of one of its most senior detectives.
DS Dennis Milne was without doubt Britain’s most corrupt police officer: a valued and long-standing member of CID by day, a hired killer with God knows how many corpses to his credit by night. His shadow still hung over the station like a noxious cloud, even though it had been close to two years since his grim secret had been uncovered and he’d disappeared into thin air. It didn’t matter. Time would be a slow healer here, and there were a number in CID, including DCI Knox, who’d be forever tainted by their long association with the station’s most infamous son. Mud sticks, and maybe that was why I’d settled in so easily there.
Since my arrival, I’d rented myself a half-decent flat in Tufnell Park, and had managed to pull myself back up to the rank of detective sergeant. A far cry from the old days, and I was still waiting for justice (my ex and the journalist were now shacked up together and my daughter even claimed that she quite liked him), but things could always have been worse. I still had a job and, against all the odds, I still got something out of it.
I left the restaurant at five past ten and headed round the corner to the Roving Wolf, a pub used by the station’s CID, to see if there was anyone in there. It was busy, but I spotted a couple of DCs I knew vaguely standing near the bar and joined them for a couple of pints. They were both interested in how the Matthews case was going but I couldn’t tell them a lot. Slowly was the word that about best described it. Conversation drifted on to other things and I left them at eleven, wandering down onto Upper Street in search of that elusive late-night creature, the black cab.
Upper Street was buzzing as usual, its constant stream of pavement cafes and trendy bistros bustling with custom as people of all ages, and pretty much every race under the sun, took advantage of the balmy evening. Strains of jazz, mamba, flamenco and half a dozen other musical styles drifted out of the open doors and windows of a dozen different establishments, giving the place a pleasant, continental feel. It almost felt like being on holiday and, for one who’d travelled up Upper Street a few times back in the 1980s, the transformation was incredible. Once a barren, dark place of nasty drinking hovels and little else where only the adventurous and the foolish came after dark, it had now become Islington’s version of Paris’s Left Bank. If you weren’t careful, you might even forget to watch your back.