He recalled the night perfectly. It was in the days when mobile phones were still the size of house bricks, and long before Bolt had taken to carrying one as a matter of course. He'd arrived home after a few drinks with a couple of Flying Squad buddies to find that he had a message from Andrea on his answerphone, asking him to call her urgently if he received the message before 10.30, giving him a number he didn't recognize, and adding that under no circumstances was he to call the number after that time. If she didn't hear from him before then, she'd call back later when she got a chance. The message had been left at twenty to ten, just fifteen minutes earlier, and Andrea had sounded uncharacteristically scared. He'd called her back immediately, and she'd picked up on the first ring, obviously waiting for the call.
'Mike, thank God you've called. I don't know how to tell you this.'
'Whatever it is, you can talk to me about it, OK? I can help.'
She took a deep breath and spoke quietly. 'There's going to be an armed robbery. Tomorrow morning, between ten and ten thirty. A police van carrying a load of cocaine for incineration from Lewisham Nick to Orpington.'
The shock of her announcement left Bolt cold.
'How do you know about this, Andrea?' he asked.
'I just do,' she said unconvincingly.
'You're going to have to do better than that. I need details. Like where you got the information.'
There was a silence at the other end of the line.
'Andrea, I can't go to my bosses and get authorization to do anything about this until I know more.'
This wasn't entirely true. He could have done if he really wanted to, but the most important thing was to find out how the woman he, a Flying Squad officer, had been seeing for the past two months had details of exactly the kind of major crime he specialized in investigating.
'I've been seeing a guy,' she said. 'His name's Jimmy Galante.'
'While you've been seeing me?' he asked, knowing the answer already.
'Yes.' Pause. 'I'm sorry, Mike. I've been seeing him a while. Since before you.'
He resisted the urge to shout at her, even though he wanted to. Instead, he listened while she continued, telling him how she'd always known that Jimmy was a bit dodgy and operated on the wrong side of the law, but hadn't ever realized the extent of his misdemeanours. Until that evening, when she'd been at his place and overheard a conversation he'd had on the phone in which he'd discussed the robbery with a fellow conspirator. 'He was in the other room, and thought I couldn't hear him, but he's been jumpy all day so when the phone rang I listened at the wall and heard everything he said. When he came back in the bedroom, I was in bed, so he didn't suspect a thing. Then he said he had to go out, and he'd be back about half ten.'
To this day, Bolt remembered how gutted he felt when she told him about getting back into another man's bed, how he'd got that wrenching feeling in his stomach as if someone was tying it in knots. He hadn't seen Andrea for close to a week because she'd said she'd been so busy, and all the time she was fucking some lowlife robber.
'So, you're at his place now?' he said.
'Yeah. I'm meant to be staying tonight. Billy's away on business.'
Bolt sighed. 'And you're absolutely sure about this?'
'Positive. I'd bet my life on it.'
'So why are you telling me this now?'
'Isn't it obvious?'
'Not really, no. I'm surprised you're so keen to shop your . . . your boyfriend.'
'I'm scared of him, Mike. I've been wanting to finish it for a while, but he's not the sort to take no for an answer. He even threatened to hurt Billy if I left him.'
'Tell me something. When you met me, was it a coincidence, or did you plan it?'
'Course I didn't plan it. How could I have done that?'
Bolt was silent. He wanted to believe her, but even though he was a lot younger then, he wasn't entirely naive. Something didn't feel right with her story. But she was giving him a tip, and he felt duty bound to act.
'Do you know where they're meeting up to do this robbery?'
'No. I've given you all the details I know.'
'If we try to stop them, and they're armed, you know what might happen, don't you? Your boyfriend, the guys he's with . . . They might end up getting shot.'
Andrea said that she understood. 'He's the one going out there with a gun,' were her exact words.
And that had been that. The next day the Flying Squad had hastily set up an ambush, following the police van and its cargo of more than a hundred kilos of cocaine, which was being driven by their officers, on its journey from Lewisham police station to an incinerator in Orpington. Sure enough, the robbers made their move, boxing the van in on a busy dual carriageway and forcing it to a halt before appearing, balaclava-clad, weapons in hand. Such was their speed and brazenness that they caught the Flying Squad team off guard, but only for a couple of seconds.
The Flying Squad ambush ethos is surprise, aggression and overwhelming force. As their own cars roared on to the scene, forming a loose cordon around the van and the robbers' vehicles, and disgorged their screaming officers, the back of the security van flew open and more gun wielding cops leapt out. The shouts of 'Armed police, drop your weapons!' filled the air and Bolt felt an adrenalin kick like he'd never felt before as he stood, legs apart, Colt revolver held two-handed in front of him.
Which was the moment it all went wrong.
There were four robbers with guns outside the car, two more – the drivers – inside. One of them opened fire and a Flying Squad guy called Hammond, who was thirty-one and just celebrating the birth of his child, got hit in the shoulder. Passers-by dived for cover as another of the robbers raised his shotgun, but this time he never got the chance to pull the trigger. Bolt and the guy standing next to him both opened fire, hitting the robber a grand total of four times. Dean Hayes was twenty-five, only months older than Bolt, with a criminal record stretching back into his mid-teens. He died three hours later on the operating table. Only one of the bullets was fatal. It had pierced his heart. A later PCC investigation revealed that it was Bolt who'd fired it.
The cops from the back of the security van grabbed another of the robbers and slammed him to the tarmac with guns in his back, while the fourth robber got off a wild shot before taking a bullet in the shoulder that sent him sprawling. But the first robber, the one who'd shot Hammond, had managed to scramble into the back of one of the getaway cars, a powerful Sierra Cosworth, whose driver then reversed suddenly, knocking down one of the advancing cops and breaking his hipbone. It then smashed into the Flying Squad car that was blocking it in, pushing it into the central reservation and narrowly missing Bolt in the process, before accelerating through the narrow gap it had created.
Several of Bolt's team had been carrying pickaxe handles, and one of them managed to smash the driver's side window as the getaway car passed, showering the driver with glass, and another threw his into the windscreen; but, faced with no direct threat to their lives, they were unable to shoot at the occupants. Bolt remembered being cool-headed enough, even after shooting a person for the first time, to take aim at the Cosworth's tyres, but the car had taken off at such a speed that it was thirty metres away before he had a chance to fire, and with civilians everywhere he knew it would be too dangerous to pull the trigger again.