3.40 p.m.
With his PPS beside him and the horseshoe of members of the Home Affairs select committee arrayed in front, Peter stifled a yawn. ‘We appreciate your coming here,’ the chairman said (this the second time in as many minutes that he’d said this), ‘at such short notice, and of course in the face of the ongoing disturbances, which must be taking up a lot of your time. If you would just bear with us.’ There were papers passing along their table, and had been since Peter had taken the hot seat, adding to his sense of something cobbled together at the very last minute.
‘I’m not sure I understand why you want to talk to me,’ he said.
‘Bear with us.’ More furious paper passing.
‘It might help if you could at least tell me how this session fits in with your ongoing inquiries.’
The chairman looked up. ‘It doesn’t.’ And smiled. ‘This is an exploratory session. We’re considering an investigation into the citing of industrial facilities in inner cities.’
‘I see,’ he said, remembering how, at COBRA, Yares had used the solvent factory as his excuse for not containing the Rockham riots. Yares, or his puppet the PM, must have put the committee up to getting the issue on record.
‘In light of the impact that the solvent plant in Rockham has had on the security of the whole borough,’ the chairman was saying, ‘it seemed like a good place to start.’
‘What is it you want to know?’
‘To the point as ever, Home Secretary.’ Another unfolding of that smarmy smile. ‘Which is why we value you.’ He let this glance skitter from one member of his committee to the next, saying, ‘Ready?’ and then, addressing himself it seemed to the document in front of him, he said, ‘Can you confirm that permission to site the solvent factory in the built-up area of south Rockham was granted while you were at Environment?’
‘Yes, I can confirm that.’
‘And that permission was signed off by the then Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Environment? By you?’
‘Yes, I was the Under Secretary. And, yes, I did sign it. But that’s not as simple as it seems.’
‘How so?’
‘My signature was the rubber stamp required at the end of a long process that did not involve me in any way whatsoever.’
‘Are you saying that you signed it without knowing what it was?’
‘What I’m saying is that that diligence was carried out by my predecessor. He, I’m sure you will recall, tragically died in office. Mine was a sudden appointment. When I came in, the papers concerning the Rockham factory were in his in-tray. I consulted the civil servants who had overseen the process and, of course, I also talked to the Minister about it. I was told that everything had been properly carried out, the i’s dotted, the t’s crossed, and that only my predecessor’s heart attack had prevented him from signing. All that was required – and the paper trail makes this clear – was that I add my signature to a preapproved and scrutinised decision. Which I did.’
‘Thank you, Home Secretary.’ Head down, the chairman was writing furiously, which, given the presence of two stenographers, was either a trick to belittle the people before him or, and this was Peter’s bet, his way of stretching time to let his thinking catch up with his mouth.
Tick, tick – the sound of his bedroom clock – tick, tick. ‘Is there anything else?’ He looked at his watch and then, again, at the clock on the wall.
‘I know you’re busy, Home Secretary.’ Head still down, the chairman continued writing. ‘And again I’d like to underline how much we appreciate your being here. I can assure you that it won’t take much more time.’ Only now did he raise his gaze. ‘Can you tell us if you know any of the following: Nigel Harris, Frank Morris, Brendan Sonderland, John Wilson?’
‘Know them?’ Peter looked at his PPS, whose expression mirrored his own bewilderment. ‘In what capacity?’
‘I beg your pardon, I should have spoken with more clarity. I mean know them socially. Are any of them part of your social circle, for example. Do your wives know each other? Do your children play together? Could you have dined with them on more than one occasion? That kind of thing.’
With his PPS now rifling through his sheaf of papers, Peter said, ‘Run through those names again.’
‘Yes, of course. Probably wiser to take them one by one. Nigel Harris: do you know him or have you ever met him socially?’
The name meant nothing to him. ‘No.’
‘Frank Morris? Do you know him or have you ever met him socially?’
Not this one either. He said ‘No’ at the same time as his PPS leant over to whisper in his ear, ‘Take a look, Home Secretary.’ He was pointing at a list of the members of the board of the company that owned the solvent factory. Heading the list was Nigel Harris, with Frank Morris second in line.
‘Brendan Sonderland?
Did the name seem familiar because he’d just seen it? Or was there another reason why it rang a bell? Best to play safe. ‘Not to my knowledge, no.’
‘Not to your knowledge?’
The cheek of that incredulous tone. Peter drew himself upright. ‘In my capacity of Home Secretary, I meet scores of people every day. That name, Brendan S . . . S . . .’
‘Sonderland.’
‘. . . sounds vaguely familiar. If you’re asking me do I know him well enough to remember meeting him, then my answer is that I do not. But if you’re asking me whether I have ever met him, all I can say is I might have, but, if so, I cannot remember the occasion.’
‘I see.’ A supercilious curl of the lips now accompanied his follow-up. ‘How about John Wilson? Do you know him or have you ever met him socially?’
Another name he had just read. And a common enough name. ‘I’ve probably met one or two John Wilsons in my time.’
‘Well, do you know the John Wilson who is on the board of the Rockham solvent factory?’
‘Not to my knowledge.’ This is a stitch-up, he thought, a McCarthyite interrogation, and the members of the committee are sitting there like monkeys, letting this farce unfold.
Well, he wasn’t going to make it easy for them. He looked at each and every one of them in turn and was pleased to see that this eyeballing caused most of them to drop their gaze. They were embarrassed. As well they should be. They should also be ashamed to have let their committee – one of the most important of the checks and balances of a great parliamentary democracy – be used in this fashion by his enemies.
He’d had nothing, other than his scrawled signature, to do with the original decision. If they wanted to charge anybody, they’d have to dig up his Environment predecessor, who, come to think of it, had been cremated.
Tick, tick.
He glanced down at his watch and then looked up. Pointedly.
‘Thank you again, Home Secretary, for answering our questions.’ A quick glance round the horseshoe. ‘If there’s nothing anybody would like to ask?’ A question from which the men and women of his committee kept their eyes averted, allowing the chairman to nod and say to Peter, ‘And thank you so much for sparing the time to talk to us. We won’t detain you any further.’
9.30 p.m.
If Cathy had not come out of the kitchen just then she’d have missed Lyndall. But coming out, she saw her standing by the front door.
At the sight of her mother, Lyndall, who’d kept to her room the entire day, seemed to shrink against the door.
‘What are you up to?’
‘I’m going out.’ Lyndall dropped her gaze.
‘Out? Can’t you hear what’s happening out there?’
‘All I can hear is your TV. Which is blaringly loud. As usual.’
‘Well then . . .’ Cathy pushed past Lyndall to double lock the door before removing the key and taking it to the sitting room, where she also muted the TV. Lyndall was right. It had been on very loud. Now the banging and the shouts that had been ringing through the Lovelace for hours could clearly be heard.
She went back to the corridor to
find Lyndall still standing at the door. ‘Can you hear now?’
Lyndall nodded. ‘What is it?’
‘The police are out in force breaking down doors all over the estate. Must be trawling for rioters. And by the sounds of it, people are kicking back. It’s been going on for hours. How come you didn’t hear anything?’
Lyndall pointed to the earphones around her neck.
‘Is that all you’ve done all day?’
Another nod.
Despite having told herself to keep her cool, Cathy felt exasperation bubbling up. But then, noticing Lyndall’s red-rimmed eyes, she swallowed it down. She went up to Lyndall and, meaning to comfort her, put her arms around her.
The first thing she registered was the rigidity in Lyndall’s shoulders, the second how they further solidified at her touch. Not quite a flinching away, but near enough. She let go. Stepped back. ‘Come on,’ keeping her voice as soft as she was able, ‘tell me what the matter is.’
‘Nothing’s the matter.’ As Lyndall bit her bottom lip, Cathy saw the glint of tears in those dark eyes.
‘But there is. I can see there is.’
Lyndall shook her head and backed away. There was the sound of something hard hitting the door.
‘What’s that?’
Lyndall backed away some more, so that she ended up jammed against the door. Another clink.
‘Show me.’ Cathy could feel her anger rising, and it was further stoked by the stubborn shaking of Lyndall’s head. She slipped a hand round Lyndall’s waist. ‘Come on. Let me see.’
She tugged at the handle of the plastic bag Lyndall was holding. When Lyndall pulled back, she tightened her hold and twisted.
‘Mum,’ she heard, but distantly.
An hour before, she had found herself staring at a sunset so red that even after she had shut her eyes the redness had pursued her into darkness and now she saw that same red mist as, despite Lyndall’s cry of, ‘Mum, you’re hurting me,’ she continued to twist Lyndall’s arm.
The two of them were locked together in a struggle for the bag until, saying ‘Mum’ once more, Lyndall let go so suddenly that the bag shot up and hit her in the face before dropping back to the floor.
What did I do, Cathy thought, as Lyndall lifted up a hand to touch the blood that trickled from the cut on her cheek, red turning to pink as it mingled with her tears.
She never hit Lyndall. Never. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘What’s the point of being sorry?’ delivered on a ferocious glare.
‘I didn’t mean to hurt you.’
‘Don’t you dare touch me again.’ Lyndall was more angry than hurt. She pushed past Cathy and down the corridor to the bathroom. She opened the door, shut it, opened it again to poke out her head and say, ‘And, yes, I will clean the cut,’ before slamming the door shut.
There was the sound of the bolt being drawn, and after that Cathy could hear her own jagged breaths – as if she had been running – and to punctuate them the sound of someone really running outside on the landing. Someone being chased. Shouts of ‘Stop!’, which she ignored.
She looked down.
When the bag had fallen, it had also broken, and everything had spilt out. She saw a tin of condensed milk, a can of cola, half a loaf of sliced white, a tin of baked beans and a can opener. For what? she wondered, and then, refocusing the question, for who?
9.40 p.m.
That it had come to this, Billy thought. That they were actually contemplating using water cannons on the streets of London. I mean, yeah, they had them, but they’d had them in storage for years and every previous Home Secretary had, with the backing of most of the good guys in the service, refused to give them the green light. This Home Secretary had seemed no different from his successors: they all talked up law and order while cutting resources, but they also took their lead on operational matters from senior management. And yet this Home Secretary and his boss the Prime Minister were outdoing themselves in their promises of the methods they would use to quash the rioters, methods that the Commissioner had gone on record rejecting.
Something was going on behind the scenes. And, Billy thought, as he kept plodding forward, one foot in front of the next, when politicians manoeuvre it’s the police who end up picking up the pieces. Once the public got used to water cannons, there would no putting the genie back into the bottle. Before anybody knew it, every plod would be carrying a gun.
He caught this uncharacteristically gloomy thought. Told himself it was fatigue talking. Forget your average tour of duty, he’d been on his feet, with only the occasional half an hour of shut-eye, for over eighty hours. And counting, given he was on his way back to base in Rockham.
He should have been there already but had chosen to walk rather than be driven, and also to take the long way round, by the canal. It was a whim of his to breathe some air, although in this heat, and with smoke still hanging low, there didn’t feel to be much air around. But at least he was on his own, if only for this moment.
As this thought occurred, he realised that he wasn’t going to be alone for much longer. Ahead some fifty yards, two men were standing. They were facing each other and their voices were raised, although he couldn’t make out what they were saying. As he moved closer, he realised that only one of them, male IC3, was talking, at the same time jabbing his finger into the other’s chest.
Billy sighed. His minder was right: he should not be out here on his own. Not so close to angry Rockham and dressed in the full kit. He could so easily become a target.
The two men were caught up in their row; they hadn’t even noticed him. He could turn away. Leave them to it.
‘You’re a bastard,’ he heard. ‘You and all the rest.’
A falling out amongst thieves?
‘He wasn’t a danger,’ he heard. ‘Hit first, ask later: that’s your way, isn’t it?’ Another jab that pushed the second man backwards. ‘You were supposed to help him. Not kill him.’ More jabs, and the other man visibly staggering under their impact, which is when Billy saw that he couldn’t get away because his attacker had hold of him.
‘Bastard police.’
That’s when Billy saw that the victim, also IC3, was in uniform.
Stupid bloody plod, out here on his own. Even as he registered the irony of this judgement, Billy was already running towards the two, shouting, ‘Break it up.’
Adrenaline, and stupidity, had driven him thus far. Now, as he came upon them, he realised that the man in uniform was no policeman.
Billy’s baton was already in his hand. With a flick of his wrist, he expanded it to its fullest length. ‘Break it up.’
He pushed the presumed victim out of the way and flicked his baton so that the presumed attacker was forced back and against a fence.
‘Fuck off.’ The man shook his head wildly, as if that might be enough to shake Billy off.
‘Calm down,’ and, as the man tried to move forwards, he said it again, ‘Calm down,’ and poked the baton into the man’s clavicle.
The man went still.
‘That’s better. Now what’s all this about?’
The white of the man’s eyes were suffused with red and his breath stank of over-stewed onions and stale alcohol. He tried to turn away, but Billy held him speared. ‘I asked you a question. What’s going on?’
‘They killed a man who did no harm.’
‘So you thought you’d take that out on a traffic warden, did you?’
The man’s mouth opened. His jaw agape. Comical really. He twisted his head and looked. And what he saw made his fists unfurl.
This one under control. Out of the corner of his eye, Billy saw the other beginning to back away.
‘Oi, you. Come and stand where I can see you properly.’
The man shuffled into vision.
‘That’s better. Now, from what I saw, this man here,’ he jabbed with his truncheon, just enough to make sure he kept quiet, ‘looked to be in the process of assaulting you. Do you want to press charges?�
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‘No, sir.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I don’t want trouble.’
‘Okay. Go on home, then.’
That’s all he needed to say for the man to turn tail and, head down, begin to almost run.
‘Slow down,’ Billy called after him. ‘Stay calm. Use the back streets. And for pity’s sake, don’t wear your uniform after dark, not with the streets as restive as they are.’
As the man walked more slowly, Billy turned back to the other. ‘What are we going to do with you?’
No answer.
Billy didn’t have one either. On the one hand, he had seen enough to arrest the man. He’d clearly been drinking and, by the wild redness of his eyes, staying up all hours. Probable rioter. If they kept him in, they’d likely find him on the footage.
On the other hand, that could tie Billy up doing the paperwork, and the Rockham officers would hardly thank him for adding another body to the overcrowded nick, and . . . Well, that was the puzzling thing. Something about this man. How immediately he had stilled himself when the baton went up to his neck: as if he knew what would happen if he didn’t. How horrified he had been when he realised he’d attacked a traffic warden. How he met Billy’s gaze now rather than look away. How he held himself quietly but not because he was cowed. On the contrary, his expression showed defiance. As if he were daring Billy to take him in. And all this, despite having the look and the smell of a down-and-out.
If Billy did arrest him, he’d have to frogmarch the man along the bank until a squad car could get to them. He thought about the chaos, not only in the Rockham nick but in every station within a radius of ten miles. He thought about his minder, who’d be wanting him back, and about the men who’d think he’d sneaked in a rest they weren’t allowed. And then he thought about the water cannon, and the military men who were being parachuted into the higher ranks, and the way the politicians were talking, and he thought that soon the discretion that even the lowliest bobby was allowed and had been since the beginning of the force would be history.
Ten Days Page 23