I was home before Scout woke up.
The meat market was over for the night. The dancers at Fabric were all tucked up in bed. The first of the office workers were loading up with fuel in Smiths of Smithfield. And maybe it was my imagination, but among the locals I felt a palpable sense of excitement.
It was the last day of the school year.
I collected our mail – Boxing Monthly, Your Dog, offers of free pizza and an official-looking letter from a firm I had never heard of – and took the steps to our loft two at a time.
Mrs Murphy and Stan were foggy-eyed. The Cavalier stretched like a little furry four-legged lord and idly smacked his lips as Mrs Murphy prepared his breakfast.
‘Everything all right?’ she said. ‘Everybody still in one piece?’
I thought of the young bearded copper with a cracked skull. PC Sykes.
‘No fatalities,’ I said, and she was happy with that.
Scout was not up yet so, after Stan had wolfed down his Nature’s Menu breakfast, Mrs Murphy took him for his walk while I brewed myself a pot of strong black coffee.
Anthony Joshua was on the cover of Boxing Monthly.
‘The Misunderstood Staffie’ was on the cover of Your Dog.
And I confirmed that it was really my name and address on the envelope that said Butterfield, Hunt and West – Solicitors.
Scout bounded into the room, barefoot and still in her pyjamas, her long brown hair flying. She was grinning from ear to ear and suddenly I remembered exactly what the last day of the summer term felt like when I was that age.
‘So is today better than Christmas?’ I asked her, scooping her up, and smelling that Scout scent of sugar and shampoo.
She laughed. ‘It’s very close!’
She squirmed away from me and I gently put her down.
‘We’re all going to do our hair!’ she said. ‘Because it’s a special day! We’re going to do our hair like – you know – the Angry Princess.’
‘But I thought you grew out of the Angry Princess.’
‘I did. We have. But we thought it would be fun if we all did our hair like the Angry Princess for the last day of the year. Can we? Can I?’
The nostalgia of seven-year-old girls. They could feel the world turning, too. Even at that age they could sense the seasons slipping by. To me it only felt like five minutes ago since we were watching The Angry Princess in a packed cinema. But Scout and her friends missed her already as a long-lost part of their childhood.
‘Sure, Scout.’
I was reaching for the cereal, milk and cutlery. Scout was looking at me expectantly. A small cloud passed across her face.
‘Daddy?’
‘Angel?’
‘But you have to do it for me. You have to do my hair. Like – you know – the Angry Princess.’
My spirits sank. The Angry Princess was animated royalty. As I recalled, Her Majesty wore her hair up – an impossible pile of golden curls and swirls sitting on top of her head that was then allowed to drop into her eyes in carefully tousled tendrils.
So it was sort of up but falling down. I looked at Scout’s tangled mess of long brown hair, with just a slight natural kink in it. And I did not know where to begin.
‘OK,’ I said.
Scout brightened.
‘I’ll get the hairclips, comb, brush and all that stuff,’ she said, and disappeared into her bedroom.
By the time Mrs Murphy returned, my daughter was white-faced with shock. She was sitting in front of the mirror with what looked like a small collapsed hedge on top of her head. My attempt to replicate the coiffure of an animated princess had failed miserably.
Mrs Murphy laughed. ‘Let me,’ she said.
Scout and I smiled with gratitude. Mrs Murphy combed Scout’s hair straight, deftly piled it up on top of her and, as if by magic, pinned it in place. Scout was a dead ringer for the Angry Princess.
I was smiling as I opened the letter from Butterfield, Hunt & West.
Dear Sir,
Our client, Mrs Anne Lewis (née Wolfe), has instructed us to obtain a child arrangements court order pertaining to the residency of her daughter, Scout Wolfe. The court will arrange a directions hearing which you will be obliged to attend. You will shortly be contacted by the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass) for an interview prior to the court hearing …
I didn’t understand what I was looking at.
I didn’t understand what any of it meant.
None of it. Not a word. Who were these people? What did they have to do with our life?
Mrs Murphy was putting the finishing touches to Scout’s hair.
Scout smiled at me and I smiled back.
‘I like your hair,’ I said.
‘Thank you.’
We had breakfast and then Scout brushed her teeth and got into her grass-stained summer dress without one hair on her head even moving. We both thanked Mrs Murphy for her hairdressing skills and then I took Scout to school.
Some people have said to me that I was both mum and dad to my daughter. But the truth was that every day of my life I was confronted with the hard fact that I would never be a mother to her.
It was tough enough just trying to be a father.
I went up to Room 101 of New Scotland Yard, the Crime Museum of the Metropolitan Police, also known as the Black Museum.
Visits to Room 101 were meant to be strictly by appointment only – the happy days when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was given his own set of keys were long gone – but over the years I had often come here when I did not know where else to turn.
The Crime Museum is cold, dark and full of secrets, ranging from the casework on the Jack the Ripper investigation to the remains of the drone that brought down the Air Ambulance helicopter on Lake Meadows. The faces of the dead stared at me from the darkness. Some of them were familiar – the old gangs of London, the Krays, the Richardsons and the Warboys – and some were the smiling faces of victims, who the world rarely remembers so well.
One living face loomed out of the Room 101’s twilight. Sergeant John Caine, curator of the Crime Museum, was a detective with thirty years’ service on his face and not a gram of flab on his body.
‘Put the kettle on, son,’ he told me. ‘I’ll just finish off here.’
John was showing around a dozen young recruits from the police academy at Hendon. They were about to finish their training and there is no place better than the Crime Museum – valued as much as a training facility as a museum by the Met – for an understanding how every day at work would put them in harm’s way.
‘We call it The Job but it’s not a job,’ John was telling their serious young faces. ‘You will run towards danger when others are running away from it, and your training and your trust in your colleagues will enable you to do this without hesitation. You will put yourself in harm’s way to protect people you will never know and you will do it every day of your lives. We call it The Job but when one of us falls then we mourn like a family.’ He paused to smile at them. ‘Take care of yourself and each other out there. Thank you and goodbye.’
They gave him a round of applause.
When they had filed out he came into the small office that acts as a lobby to the Crime Museum proper.
‘I’ve got some chocolate digestives,’ he said. ‘What’s on your mind – this nutter Bad Moses?’
I shook my head and gave him the letter from Butterfield, Hunt & West. I knew that John had his own grown-up children and I knew that not all of them had managed to keep their marriages together. And I didn’t know who else to ask.
‘What does it mean, John?’
He read it through and handed it back to me.
The kettle began to boil.
‘Your ex-wife wants your daughter,’ he said. ‘And she is going to fight you like hell for her.’
‘Thanks for joining us,’ Whitestone told me when I walked into the MIR-1. ‘We’re charging George Halfpenny and I would like you to do the honours, Max.’
Whitestone and I got the lift down to the custody suite.
She did not say much.
But she said enough.
George Halfpenny was sitting on the little bed that is built low to the ground so you can’t fall off and hurt yourself. That struck me as bitterly ironic as the custody sergeant locked the door behind us.
‘George Halfpenny,’ I said.
He was on his feet, shaking his head.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t kill Ahmed Khan. Please believe me. I was swimming with my brother.’ He sank back on the low bed, his face crumbling. ‘I’m innocent,’ he said.
Whitestone laughed, a short bitter bark of loathing.
‘I’m not arresting you for the murder of Ahmed Khan,’ I said. ‘I’m arresting you for the assault on PC Simon Sykes.’
‘Remember him?’ Whitestone said. ‘The police officer you dropped?’
‘The cracked skull caused a blood clot on the brain,’ I said. ‘PC Sykes is still in a coma. He may never wake up. And if he does, he may never walk again.’
‘Unlucky for him,’ Whitestone told Halfpenny. ‘And unlucky for you, too.’
I took a step closer to the man on the bed.
‘George Halfpenny, I am charging you with inflicting grievous bodily harm with intent against a police officer executing his duty within the meaning of Chapter Five of the Criminal Justice Act.’ I rattled it out: ‘You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something you later rely on in court.’
He looked up at us with his mouth half open but he said nothing and he did not need to say a word because at this moment they are all thinking exactly the same thing.
What will they do to me?
How long will I get?
‘Life,’ Whitestone told him, so softly that it was almost a sigh.