We were at the front door now.
Cal said, ‘I’ll let you know if I find out any more about the Renault, and I’ll get back to you about the memory card as soon as I can.’
‘Thanks.’
He opened the door.
I said, ‘Get some sleep, Cal. All right? I’ll see you later.’
He nodded, and I left him standing there in the doorway.
As I headed back to my car, I heard him call out, ‘See you later, Nunc.’
I was still smiling as I got into the car.
9
My father didn’t have a particularly happy life. He joined the police force when he was sixteen, and despite a lifelong struggle with often debilitating depression, he rose steadily through the ranks until he finally made Detective Inspector in 1989. It was during his time as a Detective Constable with Hey CID that my father first met and befriended Leon Mercer, who was then a DC too. Another officer based at Hey at this time, and already gaining something of a reputation, was PC Mick Bishop. Leon and my father continued working together throughout the late seventies and early eighties, and even when they were both promoted to Detective Sergeant and transferred to different divisions, they still remained close friends. Bishop, meanwhile, was also beginning to rise through the ranks. Although some years younger than Leon and my father, he was the first of the three to reach Detective Inspector. Leon made the grade about twelve months later, and my father was finally promoted two years after that, at the age of forty-four.
Three years later, he took his own life.
It’s a complicated story, and even now I don’t know all the details, but there’s no question that it all began with allegations and counter-allegations of police corruption.
My father was a good policeman. He didn’t possess any outstanding attributes — no stunning intellect or insight, no instinctive flashes of detective genius … in fact, if truth be told, in terms of the skills he had, he was no more than average at best. But he was methodical, committed, determined … and, above all, he believed in what he did. He truly believed that, as a police officer, it was his duty to keep and preserve the peace and to uphold fundamental human rights with fairness, integrity, impartiality, and diligence.
And that, to me, made him a good policeman.
But it also meant that he was unable to keep his mouth shut when his colleagues didn’t act with fairness and integrity, and that, in effect, was the root of his undoing. It wasn’t that he was a high-minded idealist, or in any way naive about the realities of police work. Far from it. He knew, and to a certain extent accepted, that police officers are no different to anyone else. They’re just people, human beings, with the same flaws, the same desires, the same weaknesses as the rest of us. So, inevitably, there will always be police officers who abuse their power and use it to their own advantage. My father knew that. He also knew, as most of his colleagues did, that throughout his career, Mick Bishop was one such officer. Bishop bent the rules, he broke the rules. He broke the law. He hurt people, humiliated people, corrupted people. He acted with neither fairness nor integrity.
But he got results.
And although my father was aware of Bishop’s criminality, he was never actually in a position to prove it until January 1992, when he received a video in the post. The video, captured by a hidden CCTV camera and sent anonymously, showed Bishop and two other men torturing a drug dealer in the bedroom of a house in Chelmsford. The dealer was tied to a chair, and Bishop and the other two took turns beating him with baseball bats and burning him with cigarettes until eventually he told them what they wanted to know. The final shot showed Bishop leaving the house carrying five kilos of cocaine in a black leather holdall.
My father personally passed this video and the accompanying letter — which gave further details of the incident — to his immediate superior, DCI Frank Curtis.
Some days later, having heard nothing back from Curtis, he went to see him. To my father’s utter disbelief, Curtis told him that there was no proof whatsoever that such an incident had ever occurred, that the video was a fake, that Bishop had been nowhere near Chelmsford at the alleged time and date, and that he had a cast-iron alibi to prove it. There was no trace of the supposed drug dealer, and the address given in the letter didn’t exist. Curtis then went on to accuse my father of making false statements about a fellow officer in a deliberate attempt to ruin his career.
My father, understandably, was dumbfounded.
Even more so when he was suspended from duties pending a full investigation.
Three weeks later, while still on suspension, he was summoned to a meeting with the Detective Chief Superintendent and asked to explain the presence in his station locker of two kilos of cocaine and?25,000 in cash. He was also asked if he had any comment to make about an alleged relationship he was having with an eighteen-year-old girl called Serina Mayo, who’d recently been a key witness for the prosecution in the high-profile trial of a serial paedophile.
According to Leon Mercer — from whom I gathered almost all of this information — my father was advised by his union representative to say nothing about these allegations, and that’s what he did. Even when further evidence was produced — including photographs — which proved beyond doubt that he had indeed been having an intimate relationship with Serina Mayo, my father still refused to make any comment.
Two days later, while my mother was visiting her sister for the day, he locked himself in his office at home, drank most of a full bottle of whisky, and shot himself in the head.
In a suicide note addressed to my mother, he categorically denied the allegations of corruption, insisting that the cocaine and cash had been planted in his locker, and that he suspected DI Bishop and possibly DCI Curtis of colluding in a plot to discredit him. But he didn’t deny that he’d been having an affair with Serina Mayo.
‘I’m so sorry, Alice,’ he wrote to my mother. ‘I don’t know how it happened or why. It just happened. It was, quite literally, an act of madness.’
My mother, of course, was devastated.
Five years later, she died of breast cancer.
The corruption charges against my father, and his allegations against DI Bishop, were never investigated.
It was 11.10 when I left my car (unlocked) in a small public car park at the back of the police station at Eastway. I followed a paved pathway round to the front of the building where smooth stone steps led me up to the main entrance doors. A thin grey drizzle had begun to fall, and the yellowing sky was dark and low. I paused on the steps, lit a cigarette, and stood there for a while watching the midweek traffic as it coiled back and forth along the Eastway approach. Headlights flashed dully in the rain, horns beeped, exhaust smoke hazed in the cold damp air. Just in front of the steps was a low-fenced quadrant of town grass, and beyond that a broad pavement with wooden benches and raised stone flower beds. In summer, the stretch of grass attracts school kids and lunching workers who sit around with ice creams and Cokes watching the Eastway traffic as if there’s nowhere else they’d rather be. But now, on this cold October day, the only sign of life was a tramp in a cheap plastic raincoat foraging in bins, and two street youths and a wet dog sitting on a bench in the rain.
I finished my cigarette, headed up the steps, and went through the main doors into a pale and empty reception area of Plexiglas, tile, and pinboards. A uniformed desk sergeant took my name and told me to take a seat. I sat down on a red metal chair that was bolted to the floor, expecting a longish wait, but two minutes later a podgy-faced young man in a thin white shirt came through the security doors and introduced himself to me as DC Wade. As he escorted me back through the security doors and along a grey-carpeted corridor, I could hear muffled sounds coming from behind half-closed doors — the quiet tapping of keyboards, computer beeps, muted voices. It all sounded surprisingly dull, more like a social-security office than a police station.