London Calling - James Craig [36]
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.