Red Notice

37

It wasn’t just the SAS that had had their Saturday disrupted. The Chief Constable of Kent Constabulary, Michael Alderson, had been in the drive of his Maidstone home, loading his golf clubs into the boot of his Jag, when his wife had come running down the steps holding the phone. He waved her away. ‘Take a message, Jane,’ he said. ‘I’m already running late.’

‘I can’t.’ She thrust the instrument towards him. ‘It’s the office.’

‘Again?’ Alderson seemed to spend more of his life in fiscal control committees than actually doing his job. This was the third call about Monday’s pre-meeting to discuss the car-fleet budget-control session on Tuesday. He’d waited more than a year to wangle an invitation to play Royal St George’s, and finally had a day free to use it.

With a face like thunder, he barked into the mouthpiece, ‘Yes, what is it now?’

He listened, then turned and started pulling his clubs out of the boot. ‘Right, but if this turns out to be a false alarm…’ He broke the connection, got into the car and slammed the door.

His wife was left holding phone and golf bag.

‘Still Sandwich, sir?’ His driver knew very well it wasn’t, but liked to rub it in.

‘No, London — and blue-light it.’ With the scowl still on his face, he settled back in his seat and reached for his mobile. ‘I finally get the chance for a round, and what happens? I get to spend a day playing soldiers with Margaret Thatcher’s favourite fucking storm troopers instead.’

It wasn’t just the loss of a day at Royal St George’s that infuriated him. Alderson couldn’t understand why the system operated like this. Every time there was a COBRA-scale incident, heads of department scrambled their people — emergency services, intelligence agencies, government departments — and set about dealing with the situation. But then those department heads were pulled off the job and summoned to COBRA. Now he was one of them — instead of staying put and commanding the situation on the ground.

The UK emergency committee always seemed to make a drama out of a crisis. It had been set up to help co-ordinate emergency responses, but in practice it slowed everyone down. In Alderson’s view, it dragged people like him away from the sharp end in order to watch a bunch of politicians and civil servants elbowing each other out of the way as they rushed headlong towards the limelight.

Alderson took the view that it was high time to form a committee in which real experience was the criterion for membership — rather than the coincidence of the popular vote. But even though he hated what he knew would be happening, he wanted to be there. Someone needed to give them all a kick up the backside.

He wondered, not for the first time, if politicians should ever be allowed to make key decisions on tactical situations. If you had a broken leg, who would you want to operate on you? The Secretary of State for Health or an orthopaedic surgeon? He stuck his mobile to his ear and started directing his own people. At least they knew what they had to do, and how to do it.

He caught his driver grinning into the rear-view. ‘Yes, very funny. It’s all right for you, Mr Bloody Time-and-a-half. But what about St George’s?’

The driver hit the grille blues on the chief constable’s 5 series BMW and gunned it towards the motorway.