inquest verdict was ‘lawful killing’, but a senior officer at the Met was quoted as saying that V71 would have to undergo ‘extensive psychological assessment’ to decide whether she was fit to return to operational duties.
Janusz closed the paper, a frown corrugating his brow. ‘You remember that girl cop, Natalia?’ he said, after Oskar had hung up.
‘Blondie, you mean? The one who tried to get you arrested once?’
‘Yeah, that’s her. I think she’s the one who shot that guy in Leytonstone, outside McDonald’s, last year.’
‘Naprawde?’ said Oskar. ‘Still, what do they expect, handing guns out to girls? She probably had a row with her boyfriend at breakfast, then some poor kutas looks at her the wrong way.’ Holding the steering wheel steady with his knees, he used both hands to aim an imaginary gun at Janusz. ‘Boum!’
‘Oskar!’ Janusz pressed himself back into his seat as the van veered to the left. ‘Anyway, this guy had it coming – he went for her with a samurai sword.’
‘Kurwa mac!’ Oskar gave an appreciative whistle. ‘The girl’s got bigger jaja than you, kolego!’
‘Yeah, and in any sane country they’d give the girl a medal, but here she’ll probably get a big black mark on her record.’
‘It’s “health and safety gone mad”,’ said Oskar. It was one of his favourite English phrases and one he used often, even when it signally failed to fit the circumstances.
Janusz stared at the front-page headline. The girl might have threatened him with arrest in the past, it was true, but she’d also saved his life once, and he’d grown to respect her uncompromising stance, her determination to nail the bad guys. He wondered if he should call her. And say what, exactly? That shooting the fruitcake had clearly been the right thing to do? As though his opinion on the subject would mean anything to her.
The last time he’d seen her, in a Walthamstow pub, she’d been recovering from the knifing, an attack that he still felt responsible for. He remembered sensing a change in her then, a feeling that beneath her usual tough girl bravado she was as raw as a freshly skinned blister.
‘Perhaps I can turn the question around. Why do you think you’re here?’ The sunlight streaming through the window bounced off the letterbox specs of the lady shrink, making it impossible for PC Natalie Kershaw to make out the expression in her eyes.
Kershaw picked at a loose thread that had escaped the inside seam of her jacket sleeve. ‘Because I shot a paranoid schizophrenic who was about to disembowel me on Leytonstone High Street.’
The shrink didn’t respond, but as Kershaw was already learning, Pamela – or was it Paula? – had the disconcerting ability to fill even her silences with meaning. She risked a sideways glance at the wall clock: barely twenty minutes into her first session of psych assessment and already she felt like chewing her own arm off. In the eleven months since she’d shot Kyle Furnell, every tiny detail of her actions on that day had already been picked apart, first by internal investigators, then by counsel at the inquest – and now she had to go through it all over again. She swallowed a sigh, hearing again her old Sarge and confidant, DS ‘Streaky’ Bacon, telling her to play the game and get it over with so she could get back to operational duties.
‘I totally understand it’s a big deal when somebody gets shot,’ said Kershaw, trying for a more conciliatory tone. ‘But like I told everyone from the start, when I pulled the trigger, I honestly believed there was an immediate threat to my life.’
Pamela/Paula bestowed a half-smile of what could be encouragement but still said nothing.
Christ on a bike.
‘The inquest did exonerate me,’ Kershaw went on, feeling sweat prickle on her scalp – it was stifling in here. ‘The coroner said it was wholly understandable, in the circumstances, for me to shoot him.’ She remembered his summing-up, and how he’d described Furnell as a ‘profoundly disturbed young man’. He’d gone on to remind the jury what Furnell had ingested that day, in the hours leading up to his fateful realisation that the staff at Leytonstone Maccy D’s were secret members of a cult bent on eliminating the citizens of E11 – presumably by poisoning their Chicken McNuggets. The list had included Temazepam, Ketamine, a four-pack of Special Brew and a bottle of Night Nurse, the last item prompting a few titters from the public benches. On hearing the coroner’s words, a great wave of relief had engulfed Kershaw as she sensed which way the verdict would go.
When she’d watched the TV coverage of the inquest at home that night, well on her way through the evening’s first bottle of red wine, it had stirred more complex emotions. The family’s solicitor – all sharp suit and professional outrage – did most of the talking on the court steps after the verdict, but it was the figure standing alongside him whom Kershaw’s eyes kept being drawn back to. Furnell’s mum.
Tanya Furnell was a shapeless lump of a woman in a shabby fake fur jacket with badly dyed red hair. She looked nearer fifty than her actual age of thirty-eight – and yet she held herself ramrod-straight on those steps, her expression defiant yet dignified. When the reporter asked for her response to the verdict, she said that all she’d ever wanted was some word of regret from the Met about the way her son had died. Dream on, Kershaw had thought, not unsympathetically. That just wasn’t gonna happen – not after the Met had won the case.
Almost a year on, Kershaw could barely remember the shooting itself beyond a series of blurred freeze-frame images, but for some reason, the look on Tanya Furnell’s face in the news report – that had burned itself indelibly into her memory.
She pulled at the errant thread on her sleeve again, before snapping it clean off.
‘Are you sure you wouldn’t be more comfortable taking your jacket off?’ asked the shrink.
‘I’m fine, thanks,’ Kershaw bared her teeth in a facsimile of a grin. She’d never been on the wrong end of an interrogation before and she wasn’t enjoying the experience.
The therapist checked something in the file she had open on her knee. ‘The coroner did also say, didn’t he, that a more experienced officer would probably have reached for their Taser, rather than the, um …’
‘Glock 17.’
Oops. Now she was looking at Kershaw like she just said something really interesting.
‘And the other weapon you were carrying?’
‘A Heckler and Koch MP5.’
‘How would you describe that to a lay person?’
Kershaw shrugged, looked at the floor. ‘It’s a 9mm semi-automatic carbine, set to single fire.’
‘Carrying lethal weapons like that, I’d imagine it must give you a great feeling of power?’
‘Not really. It’s not like we go out planning to use them.’
The shrink’s face was arranged in a caring expression but behind the glasses, her gaze was unblinking. ‘It would be understandable though, to imagine shooting
