'I'm being patient, Banksy, trying to be reasonable — and you playing the dumb bugger isn't helping. All right, all right, you can have it straight. I'm told you're on the outside of your team following your striking of a colleague, a blow that drew blood. I cannot think of much that is more serious than that.'
'You won't find me snitching, sir — and you shouldn't believe everything you hear.'
A hand slapped on to the desk. 'That's offensive, Banksy, bloody rude and unworthy of you. You struck a colleague and, as a result, blood was spilled. That's what I hear.'
'I have no comment to make, sir, except that what you may have been told is a parody of the truth.'
He had been with his father, on a November weekend, ploughing a field into which wheat would be sown. He hadn't noticed the pain that creased Henry Banks's face, had only been alerted by his last little gasp as the tractor had slewed off course. At nine he'd known how to halt it — and that his father was gone. He'd run a half-mile across sodden fields, mud caking on his boots, to the nearest farmhouse and had made the call for an ambulance, then gone back to the tractor and sat holding his father's hand till the crew had come. When his father's corpse had been taken away, he had walked two miles home, and had told his mother when she came back from work. It was the day he never spoke of, but it was inside him and always with him. It had shaped him.
'In denial, is what you are. You disappoint me, Banksy. I admit it, I'm surprised at your response. Well, I've put a deal of work into this. I have better places, right now, to be than here — at this God-awful hour — with you playing semantics.'
'Then, sir, why don't you go home?'
'Banksy, you're trying me…' Again the smile was used, but was not sufficient to disguise growing frustration. 'There was some horseplay in the canteen, some mucking about. You lost your temper, which is not something to be expected of an AFO. An Authorized Firearms Officer is supposed to have emotions, sudden anger attacks, well buckled down and under complete control. I'm looking at a failure on your part, and the failure led you to strike a colleague on the ear,and hard enough for it to bleed. True or false?'
His father had been a tenant, and their farmhouse had been reclaimed by the landlord. His mother had moved into a bungalow near the town of Frome. Mother and son lived off a small annuity and from her wages as a counter-staff librarian. He had applied to join the Metropolitan Police the day after he had finished school, a modest achiever but dogged in carrying the academic workload. London was about as far as it was possible to get from the fields, hedgerows and wildlife around him where the heart-attack had taken his father.
'With respect, sir, you were not there. You are ignorant of what happened and why.' He spoke as if to a child who had strayed far from his remit. 'I suggest that the matter is best left alone, and that you go home.'
'At this precise moment you are outside the culture of the team. The team is united against you by a count of eleven to one, and the one is you. Don't interrupt me and don't come up with another stonewall of what I'm saying. If you want it in your face I'll put it there. You're looking at the edge of a precipice. I have negotiated—'
In shock that was genuine and not play-acted, he rasped, 'You've what, sir?'
'I have negotiated — hear me out — what seems to me to be the best solution to a difficulty that has now become unacceptable. I feel that I have been rewarded with a generous response from the rest, the majority, of the team, and they have given me categoric assurances on how the curtain can be brought down on this piece of silliness. It is silliness, Banksy, and I will not tolerate anything as daft as this affecting the work of the team, now or ever. I have their agreement.'
That experience, death brought close to a child, had left him with a legacy of remoteness. He had nurtured, as a uniformed constable in west London and then as a detective constable in the south-west of the capital, the ability not to share his inner thoughts. The investigation of burglaries and domestic violence was not adequate to hold his attention: he had applied for and been transferred into S019, the firearms unit. His heritage from his father was the ability to handle a gun: from the age of six he had walked the fields with a single-barrel .410 shotgun and his spaniel. He had thought to find in the unit something challenging, exciting, dramatic and worthwhile, and still sought the Grail.
'I'm pleased to hear that, sir.' He had narrowed his eyes, and respect for rank was lost in the night. There was a hitch of insolence in his voice.
'It's not going to take much. In private, to the members of Delta only, you will put this matter behind you with a straightforward general apology. Then, to the colleague you struck in an unlikely moment of temper, you will make a specific apology — and that's the end of it. You should do that in the morning and turn a new leaf. Not bad, eh? An end to it.'
His studied gesture of contradiction was a slow shake of the head. 'If I have nothing to apologize for then I cannot, with any sincerity, apologize.'
'That's not what I'm looking to hear, Banksy.' The palms were clapped together, better to make the point.
'It's me that's owed the apology.'
It was his habit, guarding the privacy of his thoughts, to remain on the fringe of any group, and it could not be hidden from those he worked with that he did not share their enthusiasm for the fellowship of belonging. If he socialized he seldom drank. If there were off-duty recreations — sea-angling, a trip in a cabin on the London Eye, a theatre visit with tickets courtesy of the show's management — he would decline. If he had no conversation to contribute, he did not speak…But David Banks was as good at his job as any in the team. That could not be gainsaid.
'Right, right…I won't have it said that I didn't try. I've busted my bollocks on this one. I told you that you were looking at the edge of a precipice, and I'm saying that the step back for you is an apology — actually two, one general and one specific.' The desk's papers were abruptly shuffled together, then dumped in a drawer: meeting concluded, evening wasted. Bitter…'So, for the record, are you going over that cliff face? Are you refusing to apologize?'
'When it's not my call just to keep the waters calm — I do not apologize.'
The chair was pushed back. A snarl tinged the voice. 'Your head, Banksy, not mine. You that's going into free-fall, not me. I've tried very hard to be reasonable and adult. It was just some damn notebook, wasn't it? A bit of larking around, what's the damage in that? But you're on your high horse because somebody picked up your notebook in fun, harmless fun. What's so special?'
It was in his pocket, the right-hand pocket of his suit jacket. The notebook gave extra weight to the pocket and with it were coins and a couple of quartz pebbles he had picked out from the shingle on Brighton beach at last year's political conference. The weight of the money and the pebbles, augmented by the notebook, would make it easier to throw back the jacket's material if he had to reach for the Glock in its pancake holster. The notebook, the testament of Cecil Darke, was more a part of him than the pistol in its holster.
'You weren't there, sir.'
He stood and glowered across the cleared surface of his desk. 'I'll tell you what you have — and it's about as damaging to a copper's career as anything gets. You have, Banksy, an attitude problem.'
'If you say so, sir.'
A cupboard was opened, an overcoat retrieved, and a briefcase picked up. 'Just like that, have to have the last word. It's a bad, bad, attitude problem — and don't come running to me when you feel the consequences of it.'
'Good night, sir, and thank you for your time.' He turned and walked to the door.
A final volley, a fusillade of bullets, as if they were on automatic, was aimed at his back. 'I gather you gave a defence, a strident one, to the cult of a foreign suicide-bomber. A suicide-bomber, if you didn't know it, is our top-of-the-tower enemy. I hear you defended them: "brave and principled", yes? They are scum, and if they come where we can hit them, we bloody well will. You're out of line and out of kilter, Banksy. There might be just a half-second to decide whether to shoot, but not a half-second to have a bloody seminar on "brave and principled". I didn't want to say that but it's what the rest of Delta team thinks. You may not be up for it, dropping the scum in his tracks. Get out.'