Need You Dead

63 Monday 25 April

Juliet Solomon and Matt Robinson, partnered again on B Section, were an hour and a half into their eight-hour shift on lates. It was just gone 7.30 p.m. After catching up on paperwork whilst waiting around at Brighton’s John Street police station for a shout — a call-out to an incident — they decided to take a car and go out hunting, as Matt called it. Cruising around, being the visible police that the Police and Crime Commissioner Nicola Roigard, and the public, wanted.

Juliet Solomon drove, heading down towards the seafront. They crossed the roundabout in front of the Palace Pier and headed along Kingsway. As they drove they were watching the streets and the occupants of cars, looking for the usual suspects — local drug dealers, criminals who had absconded from prison or failed to meet bail or probation terms, drink drivers, someone on their mobile phone whilst driving.

It was a foul night, with rain pelting down. ‘PC Rain’, the police jokingly called it. The streets were almost deserted. Not many people ventured out on a wet Monday night. But the overcast sky wasn’t completely dark yet.

‘I like this time of year,’ Juliet said. ‘After the clocks have gone forward and it’s suddenly lighter much longer in the evenings. Spring on its way. It always cheers me up.’

Peering at the road ahead through the wipers, then at the deserted pavements on both sides, Matt Robinson retorted, ‘Spring? You must have good vision!’

‘Ha ha.’

As they approached The Grand and Metropole hotels she nodded at the tower coming up on their left, which rose 160 metres into the sky. A mirrored doughnut-shaped glass pod — the viewing platform — was slowly rising, like a vertical cable car. Its construction had caused much local controversy.

‘What do you think now it’s finished? You didn’t like it when it first started going up, did you?’ asked Juliet.

‘Yeah, actually I really like it now. It’s pretty cool — took Steph and the boys on it a couple of weeks ago — awesome view! How about you?’

‘I’m getting more used to it. I love the underneath of the pod, all mirrored — very UFO!’ she conceded. ‘I guess we now have to wait for the first jumper.’

‘You’re a right cynic!’ he said. ‘Or should I say pessimist.’

‘You know the definition of a pessimist?’

‘I think I’m about to. What is it?’

‘An optimist with experience.’

He shook his head, grinning. ‘I think it’s sealed — no one could get up there to jump.’

‘Sure they could, there’s an inspection ladder up the inside — metal rungs.’

Matt Robinson shuddered. ‘I don’t have a head for heights.’

‘I’m fine with them, my dad was a builder — I was always scaling ladders with him and crawling over rooftops when I was a kid.’

‘Bloody hell — hadn’t he heard of health and safety?’

‘Clearly not, he fell to his death when I was eighteen, off one of the roofs at the Pavilion.’

‘Wow, I’m sorry, that’s so sad.’

They drove on along the seafront, but there was barely a soul around, and the traffic was light. They stopped a van with a tail light that was out, and Robinson hurried through the rain to the cab to advise the driver. Then as he got back in the car, and began wiping his glasses, a Grade One call came in. A man reported acting suspiciously outside an electrical goods depot on the Lewes Road.

Pleased at having some action, he leaned forward and switched on the blue lights and siren as his colleague accelerated forward, racing past two vehicles, and tapped in the address on the satnav. Then, as they turned right into Grand Avenue, they were told to stand down as two other response cars were now at the scene and the suspect was being spoken to.

They turned the car round, deciding to head back into central Brighton and cruise around there. As they drove they passed the time by discussing their favourite — and least favourite — kinds of incidents. He loathed minor road traffic collisions, he told his work buddy, when both sides were arguing hammer and tongs with each other and you could get no sense out of anyone. She replied that what she disliked most of all were domestics — fights between couples. Not many officers enjoyed intervening in those — too often a chair would come flying at you as you went in through the door, or one or other of the parties would turn on you.

Juliet said she liked blue-light runs most of all — the money-can’t-buy adrenaline rush that was better than any fairground ride, in her view. Matt said he enjoyed getting in a roll-around in a pub fight.

As they turned left up Preston Street, a road lined with restaurants on both sides, and a regular hotspot of trouble later in the week, a swarthy man in a bomber jacket suddenly jumped into the road in front of them, flagging them down urgently.

Juliet Solomon halted the car, and Robinson lowered his window. Before he could say anything, the man, very agitated, pointed at a Ferrari parked just behind him.

‘Look! Those fuckers in that shitbox Prius just reversed into me — and they’re saying I drove into them!’

Robinson turned to Solomon with a quizzical expression. ‘Want it?’

‘It’s all yours,’ she replied.

Pulling on his cap, Robinson opened his door and climbed out into the rain, which was coming down even harder now. Although not tall, his hefty frame gave him the aura of a nightclub bouncer, and he had a particular glare for confronting troublemakers that he had honed to perfection over the years — and it generally worked.

Two men climbed out of the small saloon parked just up the hill from the Ferrari. One was tall, wearing a beanie, most of his face and hands covered in tattoos, the other short and mean-looking, whom Robinson recognized. A local scrote, with a barbed-wire tattoo round his neck, who had a long record of mostly petty crime — and jail.

‘All right,’ Robinson said calmly. ‘Who are the drivers of both cars?’

The swarthy man and the scrote each said they were.

Robinson could have sworn that through the windscreen, in the dry warm interior of the Ford Mondeo, he could see his colleague grinning.

He raised two fingers at her behind his back.