I started walking over to the Volvo, but the kid stopped me.
‘Not that one! That one,’ he said, pointing towards a Mazda MX-5 parked further up the road.
I was rather doubtful at this point; I have owned an MX-5. They are great fun – proper little drivers’ cars – but there’s one thing they don’t have, and that’s a spare wheel. I take a look at the key ring the dad gave me but, unsurprisingly, the keys he gave me for the Volvo were Volvo keys. There weren’t any keys that would fit on the Mazda on the key ring.
‘Do you know where the keys are?’ I asked the boy.
‘Yeah,’ he said, and sprinted off. Two seconds later, he came running back out of the house, clutching a set of keys.
I opened the MX-5’s boot. There were a couple of holdalls in there, but they were empty. I was pissed off with the kid – lying about a gun in your father’s car? In my head, I was already formulating the stern ‘talking to’ I was going to give him; already envisioning the grovelling I would have to do to the dad after arresting him for no reason whatsoever. Images of formal complaints, and of me having to explain myself to the borough commander, flickered through my brain.
This was going to be a long day.
On a whim, partly to buy time before apologising to the Dad, I lifted up the floor carpet … and I noticed something. The whole carpet in the boot was raised up on a block of carefully cut Styrofoam. It was incredibly well done, and the minor alteration to the car boot raised the boot floor by just an inch or so. It was nearly invisible. The Styrofoam was clad in a thin layer of fabric, and there was a hole cut in the material. I could see a small loop of material, so I carefully manipulated it with the tip of my biro, lifting it up, ever so slowly.
Bingo. There was a gun in there. A Glock, perhaps? I didn’t know for certain – I’m not great with firearms.
I pushed the flap shut with the tip of my pen, moved the floor carpet back into place and closed the boot, locking the car up carefully. I walked over to the father, and gave a nod to Belinda.
‘It’s a gun,’ I said. She arrested him for possession, and I got on the radio.
‘Mike Delta receiving five-nine-two,’ I transmitted.
‘Five-nine-two, go ahead.’
‘I’m going to need Trojan assistance. We found a gun in the boot of a car,’ I said.
‘Oh, and could you send a van on the hurry-up, please, I don’t know if anyone is watching us. We’ve also got a kid we’re going to have to take into custody.’
Every damn time I complain – even if it’s just in my head – that a shift is too quiet, something ridiculous happens.
I suppose this is why we generally use the acronym QT – in order to avoid saying ‘Quiet Time’.
In this instance, we were on the scene for another ten hours.
My colleagues returned to the nick13, taking with them the father and son duo, along with a further five officers who had to come out to do a section 18 search of the dad’s house. We found another two handguns, a rifle, a small amount of class-A drugs and a sizeable stash of ammunition for the weapons in the house. We also found another handgun carefully taped under the passenger seat, in another hollow cut into the upholstery of the MX-5. It turned out that the dad wasn’t an active gang member, but that the local gangs used him as a handler, to make sure their guns weren’t found during raids on the houses of known gang members.
I guess if there’s anything to learn from this, it is: don’t take your kid’s Blackberry away from him if you’ve got a gun in the back of your car. And if you do, don’t call the police on him yourself.
Or, you know, don’t hold weapons for gang members. That might be even easier.
A pinprick is nothing like a paper cut
‘GET BACK!’ I screamed at the top of my lungs, as I slowly shuffled away from the man standing opposite me on the seventh-floor landing of a council estate.
The staircase I had just ascended was behind me. To the right of me, there was a low black railing and a 70-foot drop. In front of me was a Customer14.
The man seemed dazed, not entirely with it in general, and absolutely, feather-spittingly furious.
Something had happened to him. He had completely lost the Ordinance Survey maps and headed out into the deepest, worst-lit corners of incoherence. He was sobbing, shouting, mumbling, drooling, spitting. The words ‘Elise’ and ‘I’m going to fucking kill him’ kept being repeated.
My adrenaline boost was giving me tunnel vision and aural exclusion. I was aware of it, but I wasn’t able to use it: I couldn’t hear or see anything apart from the man I was facing. He wasn’t a very tall man – about five foot seven, perhaps. He was around 40 years old, IC1, with a build that suggested a long, hard life of substance abuse. He was hunched forward, holding onto the railing with his left hand.
I reached for my radio and pressed the button – the orange one, right between the volume dial and the stubby antenna on my Motorola personal radio. Officially, it’s known as the Emergency Assistance Button. Frequently, it’s known as the ‘whoops’ or the ‘shit has hit the fan button’ too. In this case, it was the ‘I need some bloody backup, bloody quickly’ button.
As I pressed down, the other transmission that was in progress (something about an RTC15) was cancelled, and I could speak for ten seconds without having to clutch my radio’s transmit button.
‘Urgent assistance required,’ I said, as calmly as I could, without breaking eye contact with the man, who was edging closer to me very slowly. I told the radio where I was, and followed up with the words that I knew would catch everyone’s attention: ‘IC1 male with a knife.’
I took a firmer grip of the GFLB16 I had in my right hand, and crept back until I felt my foot touch something behind me. I realised with a jolt that the only direction I really wanted to go – further away from the addict in front of me – was blocked by a wall.
The man didn’t have an actual knife. ‘Knife’ is what you say over the radio to convey ‘sharp weapon’. Samurai sword? Knife. Bayonet? Knife. Stanley blade? Knife. Surgeon’s scalpel? Knife. Similarly, all bat-like weapons are ‘sticks’, and any projectile weapon is a ‘gun’. If that sounds a little bit backwards, well, I’d urge you not to worry about it too much. When you are dosed to the eyelids with adrenaline in an extreme situation, it’s a lot easier to say ‘knife’ than trying to decide whether you’re facing a madman with a foil, a sabre or an épée. From our point of view, if it cuts, slashes or stabs, it’s a knife.
This particular madman, however, was holding a whole different class of ‘knife’. In his hand he had an injection needle of some sort. It was tiny. The only reason I knew he was clutching it was the occasional flash of surgical steel in the overhead lighting.
I’ve faced suspects with a baffling array of weapons. Guns, of course. Bats, knives, tyre irons, rolling pins, cast-iron pans, and even a chainsaw once. Nothing scares me as much as a hypodermic needle. When you’re against somebody with a bat, it’s a fair fight: they have a stick, you have a stick, you both have a bit of a tussle, they get arrested, job done. You may walk away with some bruises, perhaps even a broken bone, but ultimately it’s a situation you’ve been trained to handle. Guns are slightly worse, of course, but there’s a solution for that too, and over my years in the Metropolitan Police, I’ve perfected the art of running-away-very-fast-and-waiting-for-the-cavalry-to-arrive.
When faced with a needle, you have a huge problem: if they come close enough to be wrestled to the ground and arrested, they’re