and touching for fear of what might happen if they stopped. They didn’t need to. So much between them went unspoken.
But he found it easy to talk to Andi in the car. It wasn’t that he dreaded eye contact. He adored eye contact with her, especially when they were making love. Conversation came easier when he was in the motor, that’s all.
Maybe it was a legacy of all those stakeouts, all those long nights in smelly squad cars, full of stale burgers, flatulence, boredom, anticipation and, yes, fear, real fear. He never knew whether the target would be tooled up, how he would react. He’d been trained, programmed, honed, briefed, but when push came to shove, fear and adrenalin kicked in.
And when it happened, there was farce and fuck-up, too. Like on the night he stopped the bullet which nearly killed him.
‘We don’t need to import criminals. We’ve got enough scum of our own,’ Mickey reflected, as the traffic again ground inexorably to a standstill.
It was a routine stakeout. Mickey and his colleagues from the armed response unit were parked up outside the Westshires Building Society in Homsey, north London.
They’d been in this situation dozens of times, acting on information received that rarely came to anything. For once, it was game on.
Chummy strolled round the corner and into the building society, wielding a shotgun, blissfully unaware that the police were lying in wait, courtesy of a friendly, neighbourhood grass who offered him up over Guinness and Jameson’s in the back bar of the Princess Alexandra in exchange for a bit of leeway on a handling charge he was facing in the not too distant.
Challenged by armed officers inside the building, the robber turned and ran. Mickey and two other firearms officers chased him through an industrial estate and onto the railway line.
He was a big lad, out of Seven Sisters, strapping, gangling, six foot tall, and, still clutching the shooter, he ran, ducking and weaving through the parked cars, dodging between the railway carriages.
The police got lucky when he caught his left size-twelve Timberland mountain boot in a badly maintained bit of track, snapped his ankle like a Twiglet and could only crawl underneath a derelict wooden goods van, which hadn’t moved since Dr Beeching.
Trapped, frightened, fuelled by cocaine, he started firing. He wasn’t much of a shot and Mickey and the lads fell back on their training, took cover and followed procedure, which was to lie low, not return fire and wait for the negotiator to arrive.
The temptation, the natural inclination, was always to storm the blagger and stick a shooter up his nose. But as a specialist weapons officer, Mickey knew to play the long game, the waiting game. It usually worked. Only very occasionally did someone get hurt.
When it went wrong, it went horribly wrong. Mickey had been on the Libyan Embassy siege when a gunman started firing out of the window into St James’s. He was only yards away from WPC Yvonne Fletcher when she went down.
The bastard who fired that fatal shot got diplomatic immunity and walked free. It still riled Mickey all these years later.
He had been in Tottenham, too, the night PC Keith Blakelock bought it at Broadwater Farm, hacked to death, his head severed and paraded on a pole.
In the railway siding, Mickey had bided his time, even though five minutes seemed like a lifetime in these circumstances. Then he saw one of his colleagues, Jimmy Needle, leap up and start to run in the direction of the embankment. Two young boys had wandered onto the line from the nearby playing field to see what all the excitement was about and had stumbled straight into the line of fire.
As Needle ran towards the boys, the blagger, Lincoln Philpott, he was called, panicked and loosed off a couple of shots.
By this time Mickey was on his feet. Philpott fired wildly and inaccurately, blasting anywhere. Mickey felt a sudden, almost dull, thud in his back, then a burning, piercing sensation, like acute kidney pain.
The next thing he was lying face down, paralysed in agony. One bullet had ricocheted off a carriage and thudded into Mickey’s lower back, smashing his discs.
I can’t feel my legs, he thought. For some reason the first thing that came into his mind was that old hospital joke.
‘Doctor, I can’t feel my legs.’
‘That’s because we’ve had to cut your arms off.’
Mickey, despite the pain, smiled inwardly. They say that from adversity comes humour. Something like that, anyway. And Mickey spent his life trying to see the funny side. If you didn’t, you’d end up like the Michael Douglas character in that movie, Falling Down, roaming the streets firing at random.
They put him back together in the spinal injury unit at Stoke Mandeville, but he was out of the game in plaster and traction and therapy for the best part of nine months.
They offered him counselling, but Mickey declined politely. He would have declined impolitely had they insisted.
Some time afterwards, he was talking about it with Ricky Sparke over a couple of large ones in Spider’s Bar, a downstairs drinker in Soho, run by a dubious Irishman called Dillon.
‘You know the worst thing about it, Rick?’
‘The pain?’
‘Nah, nothing like that.’
‘What then?’
‘Michael Winner.’
‘Michael Winner, what’s he got to do with it?’
‘He runs this police trust thing, for coppers who get shot on the job.’
‘And?’
‘Well, I’m lying there in Stoke Mandeville, minding my own, head down in a George V Higgins, more plaster than Paris, and in walks Winner with a posse of Fleet Street’s finest and a couple of film crews from the TV. He’s come to present me with an award.’
‘That must have been nice for you.’
‘I’d have done a runner but I couldn’t move. And the next thing I knew, he was on me. All that cigar smoke, all those dinners. After he’d gone I asked the nurse to give me a bed-bath – though it would have taken a fortnight in a Jacuzzi full of Swarfega to do the job properly.’
Dillon sent over a couple of glasses of his own special concoction – Polish spirit and schnapps marinaded with chilli peppers for a month in the deep freeze.
They swallowed the glutinous liquid whole, Eastern European-style. It was the only way. Otherwise it could strip the enamel off your teeth. If there had been a fireplace they would have thrown their glasses into it. There wasn’t, fortunately, just a battered sofa where the fireplace would have been, containing an actor who used to be in a cat food commercial sleeping off a three-day hangover.
‘Actually, Winner wasn’t the worst thing, mate,’ said Mickey, as the drink brought about its inevitable melancholic metamorphosis.
‘No? What’s worse than Michael Winner?’
‘Not much, it has to be said. But it wasn’t just being shot. I half-expected that. It wasn’t even Philpott walking
