Unlawfully At Large, page 15
part #2 of DCI Tyler Series
“Sorry, Dill,” he said, sheepishly. “Been having a bit of a problem with my phone.” The problem being, he decided to omit, was that it hadn’t been turned on when it was meant to be.
The excuse didn’t wash. “Kelly been having the same problem, has she?” Dillon asked. His tone was acid.
Tyler felt himself blush. “Look, I’m really sorry mate,” he said, avoiding the question, “but I’m here now. Tell me what’s happened?”
Dillon gave him the main headlines, and then vented his frustration at how things had turned out. He clearly blamed himself for not being more insistent that an armed guard be put in place for the duration of Winston’s hospital incarceration.
“It’s not your fault,” Tyler said, angry that his friend felt responsible for something he had absolutely no control over.
The simple fact of the matter was that the drug squad skipper in charge of the production had carried out a thorough risk assessment in conjunction with the host borough. They had jointly concluded that Winston was only a medium risk and that, even though he had previously had access to guns, there was no current intelligence to suggest that he remained a firearms threat, or that his criminal associates had the means or the desire to facilitate a breakout. Dillon had made representations in the strongest possible terms that Winston ought to have armed officers guarding him for the duration of his hospital stay but, ultimately, he had no power to enforce his recommendations.
Dillon clearly didn’t share Jack’s view. “I’m not so sure that the dead officer, or the two beat cops who’ve been drugged, or the seriously injured pilot would agree with you,” he said. “Winston’s disappeared into thin air and, if the drug squad has any idea where he might be, they ain’t saying. One of the twats who turned up to collect Winston this afternoon had the temerity to tell me he that couldn’t share any information with us unless it’s cleared at a higher level. I nearly knocked him out when he said that.”
Despite the seriousness of the situation, Jack had to smile. He suspected the drug squad officer had been sent on his way with a flea in his ear. “Can’t you just ask your mate? What was his name, Frank Skinner?”
Dillon gave a derisive snort. “Turns out that Frankie boy isn’t quite the mate I thought he was. He’s the fucker who’s refusing to pool information.”
◆◆◆
When the marked police car swerved in front of him at the traffic lights, Errol’s heart nearly burst straight out of his chest.
He had been sitting there wracking his brains, trying to figure out a way to explain the mess he’d gotten himself into to Sonia, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t see any way of avoiding her wrath. She was a feisty cow at the best of times. She would hit the roof when she found out what he’d done, and then she would probably hit him.
When the funny South Park song had started playing on the radio, he’d turned the volume to max and sung along heartily to take his mind off of his predicament for a couple of minutes. The blaring music, he now realised, must have blocked out the noise of their approaching sirens because he hadn’t heard them coming.
With the windows all steamed up by condensation, he hadn’t seen them either, not until it was too late.
In the back of his mind, there was a vague recollection that black Taxi cabs were meant to have an amazing turning circle, and he decided that there would never be a better time to put that to the test.
Without even checking his mirror, he grabbed the gear selector and rammed it up a notch, moving it from neutral into reverse, and then he gunned the accelerator for all he was worth. He could clearly hear police officer shouting at him as they spilled out of the car and ran towards him, although most of what they were saying was muffled by Mr Hanky singing The Christmas Poo song.
The cab jolted backwards, but only about an inch, and then it came to an abrupt halt. He tried revving the gas pedal but nothing happened.
“What the fuck…?” Looking back over his shoulder, he saw that some stupid ginger-haired woman had stopped so close that there couldn’t have been more than a fag paper’s worth of gap between their bumpers.
Fucking women drivers, he fumed. It was the sort of dumb thing that he was always telling Sonia off for doing; that woman of his just didn’t have any spatial awareness.
Ignoring the muffled shouts from outside, he dragged the selector down into drive and spun the steering wheel as far as it would go to the right. He was dimly aware of two coppers standing right outside his window, pointing at him, but the side windows were too heavily misted for him to take in any detail. The good thing about the fogging, he realised, was that it would prevent the pigs from getting a detailed look at his features.
As the cab lurched forward, it almost collided with the side of the big police car blocking its path. So much for the cab’s fabled turning circle. He considered ramming the car, but it was too big and heavy, and it was so close that he would never be able to gain the momentum needed to shunt it out of the way. He had already tried and failed with the car behind, which was much smaller.
As a feeling of utter desperation swept over him, he knew he had an unpleasant choice to make – use the gun or be arrested. If he could intimidate them into backing off with the revolver, he could jack the police car in front and make good his escape in that.
He knew he would be crossing a line if he brandished the gun, and that there would be no going back once he did so. But what alternative was there?
Wishing there was another way, Errol reached over and snatched the revolver from the gap between his seat and the armrest, where he had wedged it for safekeeping.
The weight of the heavy gun in his hand was strangely reassuring. Adopting his hardest expression, the one he’d copied from watching the pugilist, Lenny Maclean, and now used when he was about to rough a punter up, he turned to face the policemen.
As he swivelled the gun around to point at them, he noticed two very disturbing things in quick succession: Firstly, there were a lot more cops out there than he’d realised – he counted six, but suspected there might be even more. Secondly, and far more importantly, they were all carrying big ‘fuck-off’ guns, and every single one of them was pointing straight at him. Bizarrely, it had never occurred to him that any of the cops trying to arrest him might be armed.
“Shit!”
PC Keith Cash was twenty-nine-years old. He had been a policeman for eight years, the last two of which had been spent on SO19. Unlike some of the other guys in the unit, Keith had no previous military experience and, before joining the Job, he had never even seen a gun in real life, let alone handled one. He wasn’t a ‘gun nut’ and he didn’t get a thrill or a buzz from carrying a firearm around. He had elected to become an Authorised Firearms Officer in order to save life, not take it, and although he had been required to draw his weapon countless times over the last two years, he had never fired a single shot in anger. He had been hoping to go through his entire career without ever having to do so.
Cash had been the front seat passenger in Trojan Five-Oh-Three, the Omega that had stopped directly in front of the Taxi. He had been the first of the three man crew to get out of the car, and since taking up a static position by the driver’s door he had been incessantly screaming instructions at the black man who was in sitting in the driver’s seat to stay still and show his hands. He was reaching the point where his voice was starting to become hoarse.
Overhead, he heard the distinctive whup, whup, whup of the helicopter arriving, and on risking a quick glance upwards, he saw India 99 was now hovering above them. It would, no doubt, be filming the incident, and it might even be transmitting the images back to Information Room at The Yard in real-time.
The suspect had no intention of coming quietly, that much had become very apparent. His first reaction had been to try and shunt the unmarked GP behind them out of the way. Fortunately, its driver, a pretty girl with strawberry blonde hair, had followed the instructions he’d given her over the Main-Set earlier, and she had stopped with her front bumper kissing the bandit’s exhaust pipe.
The suspect had then tried to whip the Taxi around the front of the Omega, but that had also failed. Now, instead of doing the sensible thing and surrendering, he was frantically scrabbling around for something inside the car, below Cash’s line of sight.
The fool was wilfully ignoring the chorus of shouts to sit still and show his hands, and although the radio inside the cab was playing ridiculously loudly, the man must have been able to see that he was surrounded by armed officers.
The hairs on the nape of Cash’s neck stood up. During SO19’s relentless training sessions, he had rehearsed scenarios like the one now unfolding in front of him many times, and in each and every one, the suspect had invariably pulled a gun on them and opened fire. Of course, this wasn’t a training scenario at Lippitt’s Hill; this was real life, and it might pan out very differently, but Keith knew that if he hesitated when the time came, as he had done several times during training, he or a colleague could end up every bit as dead as the divisional officer who had been fatally shot at the hospital.
“FACE THE FRONT AND SHOW ME YOUR FUCKING HANDS,” he screamed for the umpteenth time, praying that, on this occasion, the man in the cab would actually heed his words and comply with the instruction.
And then they reached the endgame, and the suspect was spinning around to face him, rapidly bringing his right hand up as he moved.
It was as though someone flicked a switch and the world suddenly moved into slow motion. Keith’s colleagues were still shouting, but their words now seemed painfully drawn out and distorted to him.
As the suspect’s hand appeared from beneath the door, Cash’s brain processed that it was holding a big black revolver with a barrel approximately four inches long.
“GUN!” he yelled at the top of his voice, at the same time sighting his weapon on the suspect’s centre mass and taking up pressure on the trigger.
Now that the moment of truth was finally here, a tremendous sense of calmness descended over Keith Cash. He had often wondered what he would do if he ever found himself standing face to face with a gunman and had a split-second to decide whether or not to end the man’s life. He had secretly feared that he would be found wanting at that moment and that he would be unable to pull the trigger, even if doing so would save the lives of countless others.
Now, though, his training kicked in, and he instinctively weighed up the danger to himself and his colleagues, concluding that non-lethal force would be insufficient to nullify it.
Knowing that it was him or the gunman, and holding an honest belief that his life was in imminent danger, Keith Cash did the only thing he could – he fired two well-placed rounds into the car.
His colleague, Lucy Cornwall, who had been the rear passenger in the ARV with him, had reached the same conclusion and, at almost exactly the same time, she had discharged her carbine, also firing two rounds.
As the window shattered inward, and the man inside the cab was driven backwards by the force of the bullets entering his torso, the world around Keith Cash sped up again, and suddenly there was frantic movement everywhere.
As he took a step backwards, stunned by what had happened, his AFO colleagues rushed forward to pull open the driver’s door and drag the unresisting suspect out of the cab. After making sure that he had no other firearms on him, they immediately commenced emergency life support. Their driver, Danny Marsh, was on the radio, requesting an ambulance and HEMS. Although the helicopter was out of service, they still had a fleet of fast response vehicles in which expert medical support could be deployed.
Lucy appeared at Keith’s side, looking every bit as shaken as he felt. “Why did he do that?” she asked in a daze. “He must’ve known how it would end.”
Keith could only shrug helplessly. He had been wondering exactly the same thing. “Perhaps he wanted suicide by police?” he suggested lamely, referring to the phenomenon in which a suspect deliberately behaved in a threatening manner in order to provoke a lethal response from law enforcement. From his training, Cash knew that this situation fit the profile perfectly. The man on the floor had committed a murder and was facing life imprisonment. Perhaps, when he realised the game was up, he decided that he would rather die than endure long-term incarceration, especially if he had only recently been released from another lengthy prison sentence and couldn’t bear the thought of going back inside.
Keith felt a flicker of anger as he considered this. He and Lucy would have to live with what they had just done for the rest of their lives, and if it transpired that the bastard had tricked them into killing him as an alternative to going to jail, that would just make him feel ten times worse.
There are three main areas of UK law covering the use of force. The first is Common Law, which allows someone to use reasonable force in order to prevent crime, carry out a lawful arrest, or recapture someone who is unlawfully at large. The second is Section 3 of The Criminal Law Act, which allows the reasonable use of force in the prevention of crime and in the defence of oneself or another, or in the protection of property. Lastly, there is Section 117 of The Police and Criminal Evidence Act, which allows a constable to use reasonable force in the lawful execution of any power, such as when they are making an arrest or carrying out a search.
Regardless of the legislation relied upon to justify their actions, officers were required to demonstrate that the force was both reasonable and necessary in all the circumstances – in other words, it had to be proportionate to the threat posed. Keith was well aware that the fatal use of force would be subjected to the most intensive scrutiny. After what had just happened, he and Lucy would be placed on restricted duties – desk-bound, in other words – until the Complaints Investigation Bureau and the Independent Police Complaint’s Commission had finished their respective investigations and had declared the incident a ‘clean shoot’. That could take a very long time, he knew, and if CIB and the IPCC decided it wasn’t a ‘clean shoot,’ then he and Lucy could find themselves gripping the rail – a police euphemism for standing trial – for murder or manslaughter. And the Job hierarchy wondered why rank and file officers were so opposed to routine arming of all officers?
Once the scene was secured, everyone involved would be taken straight to Leman Street police station for the Post Incident Procedure. Apart from the officers involved, there would be CIB, Police Federation representatives and a legal advisor present.
In accordance with established procedures, after the PIP debrief, the officers would make initial notes of the incident. They would then be sent home and would not make their individual full written statements until their return to duty in two days’ time.
“We did the right thing, Keith,” Lucy said, placing a reassuring hand on his arm and giving it a little squeeze. “We had to take the shot.”
He nodded. “I know we did,” he replied. “It was him or us.” He just hoped that if the suspect dies, the CIB and IPCC would see it the same way.
Chapter 12
It was almost 5 p.m. when Tyler and the others arrived back at Arbour Square. The appeal at the RCJ had been heard, and the presiding panel of senior Judges had decreed that they would deliver their judgement in three weeks’ time. Until then, there was nothing more that the enquiry team could do, and so the case could be put on the back-burner for a little while.
The office was practically deserted when Tyler and the three DCs who had accompanied him walked in. “Deano, where is everyone?” Jack asked.
Dean Fletcher, the lead researcher on his Intel Cell, was hunched over his desk, his stern features locked in fierce concentration as he ham-fistedly typed up a report. A radio was playing classical music in the background, and it sounded depressingly dull to Jack, like something you’d hear at a funeral parlour.
Dean turned to look at them over the top of his reading glasses. “The team’s been seconded to assist Mr Quinlan with the cop killer,” he explained gruffly. “Everyone else has gone over to his office for a briefing. Me and Wendy have been given a tonne of research to crack on with, but we can just as easily do that here as in there, and as it’s much quieter here, we decided that we might as well stay where we are.”
Jack nodded towards the radio, which was playing Tchaikovsky’s serenade for strings 1st movement. “Are you sure they haven’t all just fled the office to get away from that din?” he asked with a crooked grin.
Dean stiffened. “Can’t beat a bit of classical music, guv,” he insisted.
Not if you’re looking for something melancholy to listen to while you slit your wrists, Jack thought.
Just then, Wendy Blake, Jack’s other researcher, walked through the door carrying two mugs of steaming hot liquid. Her face brightened when she saw Tyler. “Hello, guv,” she greeted him warmly. “Didn’t know you were back. Do you want me to make you a hot drink?”
Jack shook his head. “Very kind of you to offer, Wendy, but I’d better not.”
He looked at Franklin, Jarvis, and Flowers in turn. “I think it’s probably best if we all drop our stuff off at our respective desks and then pop straight over to Andy Quinlan’s office to see if we can do anything to help out.”
◆◆◆
“So, I know you’ve already been through this separately with Andy Quinlan and George Holland,” Jack said, “but I want you to tell me what happened.”
He was sitting behind his desk, nursing a cup of coffee that Wendy had insisted on making him the moment he returned from Quinlan’s office. Dillon, Steve Bull, and George Copeland were sitting on the other side, facing him. Like Jack, they had also benefited from Wendy’s kind offer to make them a brew.
Dillon nodded. “Okay,” he said with a resigned sigh. “It all started when the hospital phoned to say that Winston was ready for collection. By the time we got there, the breakout was already in progress, and the three PCs guarding him had been overpowered: two drugged, one dead.” Dillon paused for a moment, and when he resumed speaking his eyes bored into Jack’s, imploring his friend to believe him. “There was nothing we could have done to save that officer. Nothing.”
