Concentr8

by William Sutcliffe

  It is important to be clear. Surrounded, perhaps, is an exaggeration. The entrance to the facility is fully policed, as is most of the perimeter, but the rear frontage on to the railway tracks is presenting logistical difficulties as yet unsurmounted. Truthfulness can sometimes be sacrificed in the interests of clarity, though the build-up of trust between negotiator and hostage-taker cannot be underestimated as a crucial element in attaining satisfactory resolutions.

  As is usual in these situations, no immediate response is forthcoming.

  All eyes are on me. An armed unit is at the scene, guns at the ready, but I bide my time. For several minutes, I do nothing and say nothing. Successful police work is as much about what you don’t do as what you do do. One could say the same about pleasuring a woman, but I shan’t get into that here.

  ‘We know exactly where you are,’ I say (also not entirely true), ‘and we just want to talk to you.’ (Definitely not true. We want to lock up the little bastards and throw away the key.)

  Another long silence.

  ‘I am a negotiator from the Metropolitan Police.’

  A head appears at a high window. ‘Fuck off,’ she says.

  First contact usually follows a similar path, though I must say this girl is unusually succinct.

  ‘We want to help you,’ I say.

  ‘Like fuck you do.’

  ‘Do you have access to food and water?’

  Not what you would have said in the circumstances, no doubt, but you haven’t had the benefit of my training and experience.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Have you got any food and water? I need to know you are OK,’ I continue, megaphone to lips, ‘and I need to know your hostage is OK. That is my first priority. After that, we can talk.’ Note the simplistic but non-patronising vocabulary. Textbook.

  She disappears from the window. There is a long silence, then a new face appears. A boy in a green T-shirt. White, skinny, unwashed hair, acne at the corners of his mouth. The following is not a term whose usage I condone but I think we will be taking a useful shortcut if I say that what we are faced with here is your classic chav. Which is hardly a surprise. I mean, who else would do anything this brainless?

  ‘Nando’s,’ he barks.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nando’s. Jumbo Platter. Two of them. And some chicken burgers and chips and steak. And Concentr8. Shitloads of it. Fifty packets.’

  ‘I’m not sure we can do that.’

  ‘You’ve got an hour. After that we’ll . . . we’ll . . . cut one of his toes off.’

  I can dimly hear laughter emanate from the window. A different face appears. ‘And Coke and Red Bull and Lucozade Sport. Loads of it. Or we’ll do a finger.’

  More laughter. I decide this is a prudent moment to terminate the dialogue and phone head office.

  A few hours later, I give my first press conference. I’m quite used to such events, to the frenzy of excitement, to the illusion a few cameras and TV lights produce that the whole world is watching you. The most important thing is to avoid, at all costs, giving the impression that you might be enjoying yourself. Though, of course, I am.

  Appalling crimes are taking place all over the city, but today this is the top story. There’s nothing quite like a hostage crisis to get news editors going. It’s never a hostage situation, never a hostage event. Always a hostage crisis.

  The room is crammed with journalists – every chair taken, every inch of carpet space fought over – and the air is stifling. All the windows are open, but they may as well not be, because nothing is moving. From floor to ceiling, it’s just 100 per cent exhaled journo-breath. Not pleasant. (This isn’t a question of halitosis – merely of oxygen supply. The aroma is the usual conference-room stew of deodorant, perfume and coffee. Journalists, I hate to admit, probably have the edge over my own profession on the personal hygiene front.)

  I deliver a short statement.

  ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, good evening. Significant progress was made today in the case of Anthony Paxton. His abduction from in front of the mayor’s office has been confirmed. His abductors have been cornered and are in the process of being identified and traced. An area around the abandoned warehouses formerly used by Bundren Panel Beaters in Hackney has been cordoned off, inside of which a negotiation is underway. The full range of police assets has been put into this equation, including armed officers, and I would like to remind members of the press to respect this cordon at all costs. Direct verbal contact with the hostage has not yet been established, but we are confident of his whereabouts and that he is in good health. The hostage-takers are young, and are believed to be part of the city-wide unrest which has flared up in the last week. Their demands, as yet, are obscure, but we are confident Mr Paxton can be extracted soon. However, we need to take a measured approach to achieve this without incurring unnecessary risk to his person. These situations are known to evolve according to unpredictable and fast-changing patterns, and we are therefore proceeding with extreme caution.’

  Questions fly in, flashbulbs pop, microphones and Dictaphones are shoved in my face. Were I of a vain temperament, which is the precise antithesis of my nature, it might occur to me that the sensation is somewhat akin to being, for a brief while, some kind of movie star. But of course such thoughts could not be further from my mind. I am a police officer, a seasoned professional who is always focused on the humble task of protecting the public and bringing criminals to justice. These people may be clamouring after every syllable that drops from my lips, but I never allow myself to forget that I am their servant.

  I shan’t dwell on the exact questions: they are always the same, always shrill, always ignorant of the patience required in following the procedural demands of effective police work. In highly dramatic circumstances, with a tinderbox of malcontented youth ready to be provoked into costly conflagrations by a single inopportune comment from a uniformed officer, a conference of this type must be tackled with near surgical precision.

  I nearly slip up once, almost allowing the words ‘lazy, ungrateful scum’ to slip out, but I rein myself in and manage to summon up a more PC formulation. Other than that, I think I put in a damn good performance.

  Cognitive enhancers and Ritalin exemplify two important features of the psychocivilised society into which we are moving: on the one hand its essential individualism, on the other, increasingly sophisticated methods of control and seemingly non-violent coercion.

  Steven Rose, The 21st Century Brain

  THE JOURNALIST

  ‘Officer Densworth! Officer Densworth!’ It’s always good to use their name. You’re far more likely to be picked. ‘Officer Densworth!’

  ‘Yes? Over there.’ He points at me. Being female doesn’t do any harm either.

  ‘Thank you. I’m interested to know if you’ve singled out a cause for the rioting.’

  ‘Well, these people, they’re a bunch of . . . I mean . . . there are . . . I mean, social issues can be a factor, of course . . . but that’s a matter for the politicians. My job, and the job of my colleagues throughout the force . . . I mean the service . . . the police service . . . is to uphold law and order, which under very testing circumstances we are striving to achieve in so much as our capacities at the present time will allow.’

  I dive in with the follow-up before the last word is out of his mouth. ‘Do you support the change of government policy on Concentr8? Since this was clearly the trigger for the rioting, do you think its reintroduction would be the quickest way to return calm to the streets?’

  ‘Again, that’s a matter for the politicians.’

  ‘Do you hold the mayor responsible?’

  ‘I . . . er . . . I’m here to answer questions on police matters. Next, please. You, sir.’

  Predictable. Sometimes the point isn’t to get an answer. Just asking the question is a way of putting an idea into play. When asked if he held the mayor responsible, Officer Densworth declined to comment. Job done. You’ve blamed the mayor.

&nbs
p; The press conference rattles on, the policeman in front of the mikes lapping up his fifteen minutes of fame, relishing each opportunity to pick one journalist from the howling, begging pack, but nobody has an intelligent question, and he doesn’t offer any interesting answers.

  I’m first out of the door, and I know exactly where I’m going.

  The offices of Professor Pyle aren’t what I expected. The address in west London, on one of the busy roads out towards the airport, is hardly impressive, but the building turns out to be a glass-fronted low-rise office block, discreetly costly, recently built in the international corporate a-little-bit-modern-but-nothing-risky style. The building is set back from the road, behind a small car park jammed with high-end executive saloons and a wisp of pseudo-Japanese garden. If I’d had to guess what this place housed, I probably would have plumped for a secretive hedge fund. It’s the opposite, in other words, of a university campus.

  Pyle’s secretary greets me with a smile that is without approval, disapproval, curiosity, recognition or warmth. She has exceptionally good teeth, the kind that could make short work of rare steak, though they probably haven’t bitten into anything more nourishing than a salad for weeks.

  ‘Do you have an appointment?’ she says, through pursed lips. These people can sniff out a journalist and they don’t like us. An expression somewhere between surprise and mild dismay settles on her features when I give her a name that corresponds to the next meeting on her calendar.

  As she ushers me into the adjoining office, I thank her with as much insincerity as I can load on to two words.

  Pyle is a small man behind a large desk. He wears rimless glasses and has a line of closely cropped hair at the outer limits of his head, like the stripe of seaweed you find along a beach at low tide. He has no lips, just a horizontal, expressionless slot under his nose – an orifice that looks less suited to eating or kissing than to the insertion of a CD-ROM.

  His office is not so much air-conditioned as refrigerated. He stands and extends an arm across his desk. ‘Ms . . .?’

  ‘Giotta.’

  It’s a curious handshake – my hand hot and sweaty; his cold and dry.

  ‘Giotta? Are you Italian?’ he asks, his voice all pub-quiz smug.

  ‘No. British.’

  ‘But your family?’ He’s persistent, still staking a claim for that pub quiz point.

  ‘My grandfather. One of them.’

  ‘Your father’s father.’

  The man is a genius. There’s something about this interchange that gives me a sense of how I should play the interview. Fragile ego. Wants to be right. Wants to be Daddy. There’s a playbook for this kind of person, and I have a sense it isn’t going to be hard. I warm up my smile and ask if I can take a seat.

  ‘Sicily,’ I say, shifting my voice a little higher than usual. ‘Have you ever been there?’

  ‘No, but I often take my wife to . . .’ And he’s off. Everyone has something to say about Italy. I do lots of oh-reallying, that-sounds-deliciousing and how-fascinatinging. After ten minutes of this, his posture and tone of voice have changed completely. He thinks we’re friends. He’s forgotten that the mayor’s office forced him into taking the meeting. He’s forgotten I’m there to catch him out. In dog-speak, I’ve got him on his back and I’m tickling his tummy, all before I’ve uttered my first question. It’s perfect. If you can get your interviewee to mistake your interview for a cosy chat between friends you’re going to hit pay dirt. It’s not often, these days, you can find someone dumb enough to fall for it. Sometimes I forget this technique is even possible.

  ‘Do you mind if I record? I’m really sorry, it’s protocol these days.’

  ‘No problem. Go ahead.’

  I put the Dictaphone carefully out of his eye line.

  ‘I’m doing a piece on the mayor and there were a few technicalities on the subject of Concentr8 that he wasn’t in a position to answer, so he put me on to you. He described you as the leading authority.’

  ‘Well, that’s very nice of him, but I . . . well . . . I suppose he’s probably right. It is my area, and he hired me to be the Youth Mental Health Tsar, if you like. I mean, that wasn’t the official job title, but that’s how I came to be seen.’

  I smile and lean towards him, sensing that I don’t even need to ask any questions. The best tactic is to just let him off the leash and see where he leads me.

  ‘You see, for decades, centuries, we’ve treated youth crime simply as a matter for the police. Experts like myself, who have dedicated our lives to the treatment of troubled youngsters, were simply ignored. There is a wealth of methods available to the modern clinician for helping young people who are distracted, hyperactive or unproductive back on to the straight and narrow. The connection between young people exhibiting these behaviours and people who fall down in the employment market is incontrovertible. And from there, you’re into petty crime, gang culture, etc.’

  ‘Stick rather than carrot?’

  ‘Exactly. The traditional approach is all stick and no carrot. Hugo Nelson was the first politician to act on the idea that you have to help these people before they begin to help themselves in socially destructive ways.’ He pokes the table on the word ‘before’, in a gesture that looks like his version of passionate animation. ‘The symptoms of criminality can be treated before they develop into the full-blown disease.’

  ‘So you’re a pioneer in making a connection between mental health and crime?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say pioneer. But I am one of the few people in this area who’s been lucky enough to have the ear of a policy-maker with real budgets at his disposal, and a desire to take action.’

  ‘So you were pleased to have a chance to help young people who you thought were likely to end up on the wrong side of the law?’

  He smiles, revealing for the first time the presence of human lips. ‘Exactly. ADHD is reaching epidemic proportions throughout the Western world, and children who aren’t helped with this issue are at enormous risk of failing at school and subsequently failing at life. Disruptive children, put on Ritalin, can be pacified within days, sometimes hours. The downward trajectory of their lives can be halted, just like that. The trouble is, Ritalin requires three doses a day. This new drug, Concentr8, is a huge leap forward. It lasts eight hours rather than four, hence the name, which eliminates the need for a child to self-medicate during school, along with all the uncertainties that introduces. Other long-acting drugs have been around for a while, but they’ve always been expensive. Concentr8 is cheap. It’s the wonder drug the entire field has been waiting for. That’s why I recommended its use to the mayor, and was delighted when he took up my proposal so wholeheartedly.’

  ‘So was the idea yours or his?’

  He spreads his arms, palms upward, pompous-humble. ‘Well, of course, the mayor is the policymaker. After the last riots he commissioned me to do a wide-ranging study and come up with a proposal for a forward course of action. I’m simply an advisor, trying to do his job.’

  ‘What were the parameters of the study?’

  ‘Well, it was a question of what could we do to get these wild kids under control. Blue-sky thinking. My conclusion was that with a cheaper drug than Ritalin now on the market, we didn’t in fact need to do anything new. We just needed to find the political will, and the budget, to extend what we were already doing.’

  ‘Extend what, exactly?’

  ‘Well, difficult children . . . I mean . . . sufferers from ADHD . . . have been prescribed Ritalin for considerable time. This has proved highly effective, and the numbers of children receiving this help has been going up year after year. It’s been the case for a long time that if your child gets an ADHD diagnosis, the parent becomes eligible for disability living allowance. All I did was point out to the mayor that the existing policy was the perfect incentive scheme for containing the kind of children who go on to exhibit antisocial behaviours. With this cheaper drug, and a more proactive approach, I felt like we could make inr
oads into new areas, and produce tangible results for society as a whole.’

  He’s perched on the front of his seat again, back in table-poking mode. I notice for the first time that his desk is entirely clear. Not one pen, no lamp, no paper, not even a phone. Just one laptop moored on a lake of glistening cherry-brown wood.

  ‘And how did you do that?’

  ‘The key element was the idea of sending mental health visitors to schools rather than insisting that children travel to a separate location to get an assessment. This had a huge effect on de-stigmatising the diagnosis. That, and greater clarity in explaining the benefits system to parents.’

  ‘So is this a question of mental health or social control?’

  ‘Both. It’s about joining the dots.’

  ‘Between medicine and policing?’

  He coughs, as if a fragment of gourmet food has unexpectedly gone down the wrong way, detecting for the first time a note of potential criticism in my voice.

  ‘No. Absolutely not. Those two areas are quite separate. But if you step back from the situation and think about these issues in an intelligent way, you begin to see that where you have mental-health-related destructive behaviours spreading widely through certain communities, the question is as much of sick individuals as a sick society. And only if doctors join hands with politicians do we stand a chance of really solving the problem.’

  ‘Thank you so much,’ I say. ‘That was great. So kind of you to give up your time.’

  ‘My pleasure. If you have any other questions . . .’

  I pick up the Dictaphone, click it off and place it in my bag. ‘Oh no. You’ve been great. And if you remember the name of that pizza place in Venice, do let me know. My email’s on there.’ I hand him a card. ‘It’s such a beautiful city, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, exquisite. Quite wonderful.’

  I leave slowly. More on Venice. Lots of attentive listening to his theories on the psychological effects of water, on Renaissance art, on Italian coffee . . . blah blah blah.