Free The Face (Harry Tyler Book 1) by Garry Bushell Page A

had been shot in the shoulder, was kicked more than once as his colleagues attempted to form a human barricade around him.
    Gary Shaw looked on open-mouthed. The street-fighting was in danger of becoming a full-scale riot. The Dixons in the nearby main-drag had just been ramraided. Aid was piling into Rotherhithe from all surrounding areas, but that meant opportunist thieves as well as the boys in blue. The Central London police reserve units were urgently pushing traffic out of their way.
    In the midst of the fighting, Dougie The Dog was in his element. He always felt the same when it went off, like he wasn’t really there, like he was caught up in a film and totally invulnerable. The sounds, sights and smells at the eye of the storm filled his senses to overload and he lashed out every which way. Maybe this was what they meant by Beserker Rage.
    It took the police over an hour to quell the disturbance. As the Police Inspector handed Johnny Baker the drugs search warrant, Trevor’s fist flew through what was left of the birthday crowd and laid him out cold. All the Baker clan were arrested. Prisoners were bussed to all nearby stations and hastily charged: assault on police, threatening behaviour, affray, criminal damage, possession of cannabis. “Everything,” Johnny laughed later, “short of being drunk in charge of a birthday party.”
    DS Shaw stared into the Ned Kelly in total disbelief. The floor was awash with white powder, pills and lumps of cannabis. It looked like an explosion in a pharmacy, he thought. There must have been three grand’s worth of illicit substances – whiz, Charlie, puff and Es – coating the carpet.
    “Get everybody out,” he barked finally. “Get me a photographer . Get a lab scientist. Get me a new job …” Shaw couldn’t have been more gutted. This was a major incident scene. A policeman had been shot, no gun had been recovered, half of Bolivia’s national export was on the floor but only one of 48 prisoners had been found in possession of drugs, and that was a minor amount of Moroccan. Mission fucking accomplished.
    Shaw edged out of the door. The rest of the revellers were being held outside. Shaw shouted to the uniformed officers in earshot who were still standing. “Get all their names and addresses, they’ve all got to be seen about the shooting.”
    DO Hitchcock called over, “Shouldn’t we arrest them all as suspects for shooting the PCT?”
    “Matter for you, sir,” Gary Shaw said. “Matter for you.”

     
     
    Later that night, much later, Jane Shaw lay in bed with her husband and tried to calm him down. Gary had raged about Hitchcock for half an hour when he’d got in. He’d woken up the kids and drunk too much Scotch. It was, he assured her, “the biggest fucking cock-up in all my years in the force”.
    “The fucking papers say Old Bill are institutionally racist,” he went on, “but believe me, darling, the only thing institutionalised in the Metropolitan Police is sheer fucking incompetence.”
    Jane massaged his back and purred sympathetically. When she finally dropped off, Gary ran the night’s events through his head one more time. Years ago pub raids like that wouldn’t have fucked up because all that shit on the floor would have ended up in someone’s pockets. You wouldn’t dare fit up a suspect now, with an army of bleeding heart barristers on hand to kick up a stink. But how wrong was it to bend the rules a little if it meant putting away the bad guys? In Shaw’s early days as a Flying Squad detective it was common practice to tap telephones illicitly, invent surveillance records, plant evidence, and make up verbal confessions. Not because detectives were lazy or they wanted to frame the innocent. On the contrary, The Sweeney did it to nail criminals they knew to be guilty. They did deals with guilty villains, too, to put bigger fish away. They turned a blind eye to others in return for information. That was the system. It was imperfect, and