Shepherds Bush, London W12, March 1985

Slumped on the sofa, Carlyle tried to ignore Barbara Edwards, 1984’s Playmate of the Year, winking at him from the well-thumbed copy of Playboy resting next to his feet on the glass coffee table. With a heavy heart, he turned his gaze from Barbara’s incredibly perky breasts to a poster of the West Ham footballer Clyde Best on the wall behind the television, and then to the screen which was showing the BBC lunchtime news. The glum faces revealed that the miners’ strike was finally, officially, mercifully over. It had been a long slow death and the men trudging back to work could only muster the feeblest shouts of defiance. Having lost the war, they knew that they faced a slow, relentless defeat during the ensuing peace as well.

Not that the police were celebrating victory, for many officers had enjoyed the escape from home life, the camaraderie of the picket line and the excitement of the rucks. Even more of them had become nicely accustomed to the overtime pay. Now it was back to the basics of normal life.

At least, Carlyle thought dolefully, they had lives to go back to. Not all coppers could say that. A couple of days earlier, the Irish Republican Army had mortared a police station in Newry. Nine fellow officers from the Royal Ulster Constabulary had been killed. Northern Ireland was a long way off, but the IRA also regularly attacked London. There had been a steady stream of bombings in the city over the last few years, and the most recent, a car bomb at the Harrods department store in December 1983, had killed six innocent people. Being a policeman seemed more dangerous than ever.

The terrorists might not be beaten, but at least the miners were. Carlyle himself had not been on a picket line since before Christmas, so already, the strike felt like a distant memory. After several months pounding the streets around Shepherds Bush and Hammersmith, he was finally beginning to feel like a normal copper. And now he was on the cusp of being transferred south of the river, to Southwark. That suited him fine, as a new beat would offer a welcome change.

Between his postings, Carlyle had a week’s leave to use up. Two days in, though, and he was bored and restless. So when he got a message from Dominic Silver, saying that he wanted ‘a chat’, Carlyle was perfectly happy to oblige. He hadn’t seen Dom for about six months.

The last time they had been together was outside Maltby Colliery, east of Rotherham. After a long, exhausting shift, they had played marbles on the pavement, like two kids just out of school. The recently acquired marbles already had a certain sentimental value, since they had been catapulted towards police lines by the strikers during one of the more vicious scuffles of their conflict.

‘This is great,’ Dom had laughed, as he won another game, taking a couple of quid off Carlyle in the process. ‘If marbles are all they can fight with, we’ve got absolutely nothing to worry about. They are really, truly fucked.’

Sitting in Silver’s new bachelor pad, enviously eyeing his stroke mags and watching his new twenty-inch Philips television, Carlyle wondered where the money to pay for all this luxury had come from. It certainly wasn’t from playing marbles, or even from police overtime payments. Carlyle himself was still living with his parents in Fulham, and couldn’t afford to buy as much as an outside toilet anywhere within two hundred miles of London. Renting wasn’t much easier. Dom’s place seemed way, way out of his league. Covering the top floor of a Victorian house, Carlyle reckoned that the flat must have cost him twenty grand, maybe more. That was a hell of a lot of money for a twenty-something kid. For sure, no one would give you a mortgage for that amount on a constable’s salary.

‘Stupid buggers. They should have seen the writing on the wall long ago.’ Dom stood in the doorway, wearing a Van Morrison Wavelength tour T-shirt, as he waved a large spliff in the direction of the television. It struck Carlyle that Dom was turning into a right old hippy bastard. What ever happened to punk? It was almost as if The Clash, still struggling along in name only, had never happened,

The smell was good, but Carlyle declined Dom’s offer of a toke. Dope wasn’t really his thing; invariably it would give him a splitting headache and make him puke. He liked his drugs to get him going, rather than slow him down.

Carlyle watched the embers glow as Dom took another greedy drag. Back in television land, one of the union leaders appeared on the screen and started talking about ‘dignity’, ‘solidarity’ and ‘the need to keep fighting’. The man looked haggard, and so haunted that you almost expected him to burst into tears at any minute.

‘Idiots!’ Dominic snarled. ‘Donkeys leading lions.’

‘If the lions really were lions,’ Carlyle asked, ‘would they really allow themselves to be led by donkeys?’

‘Smart-arse.’ Dom took another puff.

Carlyle shrugged.

Dom failed to blow a smoke ring and coughed. ‘Seriously though,’ he said through the haze, ‘that’s a bloody good question, Johnny boy … now shift up.’

Carlyle moved to one end of the sofa and Dom flopped down beside him. For the next few minutes, Dom stared at the television screen intently, without saying a word. Eventually the news bulletin moved on to other stories. Apparently, Nelson Mandela had refused a deal from the South African government which would see him released from jail in return for renouncing armed struggle.

‘Bad move, Nelson, old son,’ Dom remarked airily.

‘If he does a deal with them, it will damage his credibilty,’ Carlyle said earnestly.

‘Credibility’s overrated,’ said Dom sharply. ‘He’s been in jail for what … twenty years? He’s old … what, in his sixties?’

‘Something like that.’

Dom pointed the spliff at the screen. ‘Now he should get out while he’s got the chance. Once he’s out, Botha and his boys are finished. Even that bitch Thatcher won’t be able to stop him.’ He clenched his fist: ‘Nelson! You’re a lion! It’s time to roar!’

Dominic’s political stance was at least as surprising as his property ownership, since Carlyle had never previously heard him speak of anything other than football and girls. Even if it was the dope talking, which Carlyle was sure it was, he sounded nothing like the Dom he thought that he knew. He certainly sounded nothing like a copper. Carlyle wondered for a minute if he might suddenly whip a pile of newspapers from behind the sofa and try to sell him a copy of Socialist Worker.

The smoke was making Carlyle feel giddy. Getting slowly up from the sofa, he went to the window. Opening it, he felt the cold air sneak into the room and inhaled it deeply.

Dominic looked him up and down. ‘I’m leaving the Force,’ he announced though the haze.

Carlyle almost banged his head against the window frame. ‘You’re doing what?’

‘I’ve had enough of all this bollocks,’ Dom replied, looking round for an ashtray. ‘It’s not for me. I’m packing it in.’

‘Your family won’t like that,’ Carlyle said, knowing that Dom’s dad was a policeman. So, too, was his uncle. Blokes couldn’t do anything else in the Silver household.

‘It’s my decision,’ Dom said firmly, stubbing out the remainder of his joint on a saucer that he had finally discovered under the sofa.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going into business,’ he said. ‘Or, rather, I am going to focus on my existing business interests full time.’

‘And what might those “business interests” be?’ Carlyle asked warily, not really wanting to know the answer.

‘I’m looking for some help.’

Trying not to feel flattered, Carlyle asked a question that he did now quite want an answer to, even if he might not like it. ‘Why me?’

‘Why not?’ Dom stared into space, and then wound up his short sales pitch. ‘I know you. I know you’re straight. I know you’re dependable. I know that you’re not cut out to be a copper.’ That he had clearly anticipated the question wasn’t as surprising as his ability to push the right buttons.

‘What do you mean, cut out to be a copper’?’

Dom grinned slyly. ‘Come on, John. Coming from me that’s hardly a criticism, is it? Neither of us fits in. We can both see past the bullshit. I can’t play the game, and neither can you. If you stay, they’ll piss all over you – even more than they’ve done already.’

Carlyle leant against the windowsill. ‘I am a copper,’ he said, more for his own benefit than for Dom’s.

‘Yeah … right.’

‘It was my decision,’ Carlyle said, trying to sound convincing, ‘and I have no regrets.’ He already had his doubts – plenty of them – but he wasn’t going to share them with anyone. ‘Now all this coal bollocks is over, I’m enjoying it a lot more. It’s fine.’

Dom swung his legs on to the sofa and stretched them out like a cat. ‘Don’t you realise, though? This is what it’s always going to be like. There will always be something else. Last time it was the miners, next time it’ll be the steel workers, or the dockers, or the anti-apartheid mob or students or … whatever. There will always be an “enemy within”. We – they – can’t do without them. There always has to be someone to fight.’

‘Maybe,’ Carlyle said doubtfully, ‘but nothing as big as what we’ve had to deal with during this last year. Not like Orgreave.’ Without thinking, he raised a hand to his forehead and touched the small scar that remained from the flying brick that had caught him on the picket line.

‘Face it, you’ll be doing someone else’s dirty work forever.’ Dom picked the roach out of the saucer and rolled it between his fingers. He glanced over at Barbara and smiled a proprietorial smile. ‘How’s the Miller thing going?’

His question surprised Carlyle. He hadn’t thought about Trevor Miller for months. And he wasn’t aware that Dom had heard about their little run-in the previous summer, or its unresolved aftermath.

To Carlyle’s dismay, the woman in the garden that day at Orgreave, called Jill Shoesmith, had launched civil action and was claiming damages for the assault. She had tracked Miller down through Carlyle (unluckily, she had remembered his surname). Being the only witness, Carlyle’s statement was crucial. The obvious thing – the expected thing – was to clear Trevor from the off, but he was reluctant to do that, basically because Trevor was such a total cunt. Letting him get off would have meant some careful ‘interpretation’ of what had happened that day, and for a more sympathetic colleague, he could easily have managed it. Even for Miller, he could have been persuaded – not by the useless great lump himself, of course, but by others on The Job.

The Job, however, didn’t want to know. When Carlyle sought out his commanding officer at Shepherds Bush for some advice, the man was evasive and non-committal. The longer the conversation went on, the more the look on his superior’s face was that of a man who had just seen a stinking pile of dog shit dragged into his office. After a couple of minutes, however, he managed a lame smile, said that he knew that Carlyle would make ‘the right decision’ about what to say, and unceremoniously ushered him out the door, shutting it quickly behind him. This was Carlyle’s introduction to (non) man management, Metropolitan Police style.

In the end, Carlyle fell back on his father’s advice – don’t tell a lie but don’t tell the whole truth either – and provided the investigation with a statement that was as short and factual as possible. His angst was tempered by the belief that the Met would just bung the Shoesmith woman a few quid and get the matter over with as quickly and quietly as possible. He was surprised and horrified, a few weeks later, when his Federation rep told him that was not going to happen, and that the action would be allowed to run its course. Jill Shoesmith would have her day in court and Trevor would have to face a formal disciplinary hearing. The whole thing could take months, or even years. Worse, Miller could lose his job. If Carlyle wasn’t worried about that outcome for Trevor’s sake, he was certainly worried about it for his own. Getting another policemen sacked would destroy any nascent reputation that he might hope to cultivate within the Force. Never mind Trevor bloody Miller, it could easily kill Carlyle’s own career before it had even started.

Whatever was happening, however, Carlyle wasn’t now about to give Dom a blow-by-blow account of how he was managing to fuck his own career in slow motion. ‘I gave them a statement, and that’s it, I think,’ he said non-committally.

A drug-induced grin spread across Dom’s face. ‘And what did you say in your statement?’

‘I simply told them what I saw: Trevor pawing the woman’s chest and the woman running away.’

‘Crap answer!’ Dom shook his head. ‘You should have let it go, John.’

Carlyle shrugged, knowing Dom was right and – not for the first time – cursing himself for being so stupid. ‘It’s what I saw,’ he said lamely.

‘He could have been arresting her.’

‘He could have been, but he wasn’t. He was trying to pull her tits off. You normally have to go to Amsterdam to see that sort of thing!’ Like he would know.

Dom pushed himself up on his elbows. ‘So you’re the white knight for this slag?’ he shook his head. ‘How fucking noble of you.’

Carlyle had now had enough of being patronised. ‘You don’t know she’s a slag,’ he protested, ‘and even if she was, so what? I just said what I saw. I didn’t make any speculation or add anything that would cause the dickhead any more trouble than he’d already brought upon himself.’

Dom jumped off the sofa and started waving his arms about. ‘You didn’t watch his back, you idiot.’

‘No one else has mentioned it,’ Carlyle said sulkily, still knowing that he was right.

‘Word gets around. Your card will be well and truly marked, my son.’

‘Miller is an arsehole. He went too far.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Dom said. ‘If you don’t get that, you shouldn’t be on The Job. It’s their game, their rules. Anyway, I hear he’s up for a promotion.’

‘What?’ Carlyle gasped. ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding.’

Dom gave him a bemused ‘stoner’ look. ‘Why would I joke about something as serious as this? Trevor Miller, useless shithead that he is, came out of the strike with two commendations. He has friends.’

‘Friends?’

‘Yes, friends. Friends that will make sure this whole little mess gets quietly forgotten, whether your slag gets bought off or not. Trevor will come out of this smelling of roses. Unlike you.’

‘Fucking hell!’

‘You can fuck in hell or you can fuck in heaven,’ Dom continued. ‘Either way, the only person you’re fucking is yourself. Face it, Johnny, you’re not a team player.’ He smiled. ‘At least, not when it comes to the Police. So it’s just as well that I can offer you alternative employment.’

‘Doing what?’ Carlyle asked again. Again, he didn’t really want to know.

‘Just some organising, a bit of man management.’ Dom grinned. ‘This and that.’

Carlyle knew exactly what he was talking about.

‘It’s a chance for you to get in at the beginning of something big. Something lucrative.’ Dom raised his eyebrows. ‘What do you say?’

Carlyle looked at Dom, at his cheeky smile and dilated pupils. He needed a haircut and a shave. The man was right about Trevor Miller, but Carlyle knew that he would have to sort out his own mess. Going into business with a drug dealer was not the way to deal with that situation.

‘I’ve got to go,’ he said, smiling as best he could. ‘I’ll think about it.’

Dom shrugged. ‘Fair enough. Let me know before you go back to work.’

Carlyle headed for the door. ‘Sure.’

‘OK … great.’ Smiling, Dom saw him off with a friendly wave, both of them knowing that Carlyle wouldn’t meet Dom’s deadline.

Walking down Percy Road, Carlyle quickly realised that he had developed a splitting headache. The world was spinning gently. He stopped and tried to breathe in deeply though his mouth, but all he got for his trouble was the taste of car fumes.