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a long day.
    On a whim, partly to buy time before apologising to the Dad, I lifted up the floor carpet … and I noticed something. The whole carpet in the boot was raised up on a block of carefully cut Styrofoam. It was incredibly well done, and the minor alteration to the car boot raised the boot floor by just an inch or so. It was nearly invisible. The Styrofoam was clad in a thin layer of fabric, and there was a hole cut in the material. I could see a small loop of material, so I carefully manipulated it with the tip of my biro, lifting it up, ever so slowly.
    Bingo. There
was
a gun in there. A Glock, perhaps? I didn’t know for certain – I’m not great with firearms.
    I pushed the flap shut with the tip of my pen, moved the floor carpet back into place and closed the boot, locking the car up carefully. I walked over to the father, and gave a nod to Belinda.
    â€˜It’s a gun,’ I said. She arrested him for possession, and I got on the radio.
    â€˜Mike Delta receiving five-nine-two,’ I transmitted.
    â€˜Five-nine-two, go ahead.’
    â€˜I’m going to need Trojan assistance. We found a gun in the boot of a car,’ I said.
    â€˜Oh, and could you send a van on the hurry-up, please, I don’t know if anyone is watching us. We’ve also got a kid we’re going to have to take into custody.’
    Every damn time I complain – even if it’s just in my head – that a shift is too quiet, something ridiculous happens.
    I suppose this is why we generally use the acronym QT – in order to avoid saying ‘Quiet Time’.
    In this instance, we were on the scene for another ten hours.
    My colleagues returned to the nick 13 , taking with them the father and son duo, along with a further five officers who had to come out to do a section 18 search of the dad’s house. We found another two handguns, a rifle, a small amount of class-A drugs and a sizeable stash of ammunition for the weapons in the house. We also found another handgun carefully taped under the passenger seat, in another hollow cut into the upholstery of the MX-5. It turned out that the dad wasn’t an active gang member, but that the local gangs used him as a handler, to make sure their guns weren’t found during raids on the houses of known gang members.
    I guess if there’s anything to learn from this, it is: don’t take your kid’s Blackberry away from him if you’ve got a gun in the back of your car. And if you do, don’t call the police on him yourself.
    Or, you know, don’t hold weapons for gang members. That might be even easier.

A pinprick is nothing like a paper cut
    â€˜GET BACK!’ I screamed at the top of my lungs, as I slowly shuffled away from the man standing opposite me on the seventh-floor landing of a council estate.
    The staircase I had just ascended was behind me. To the right of me, there was a low black railing and a 70-foot drop. In front of me was a Customer 14 .
    The man seemed dazed, not entirely with it in general, and absolutely, feather-spittingly furious.
    Something had happened to him. He had completely lost the Ordinance Survey maps and headed out into the deepest, worst-lit corners of incoherence. He was sobbing, shouting, mumbling, drooling, spitting. The words ‘Elise’ and ‘I’m going to fucking kill him’ kept being repeated.
    My adrenaline boost was giving me tunnel vision and aural exclusion. I was aware of it, but I wasn’t able to use it: I couldn’t hear or see anything apart from the man I was facing. He wasn’t a very tall man – about five foot seven, perhaps. He was around 40 years old, IC1, with a build that suggested a long, hard life of substance abuse. He was hunched forward, holding onto the railing with his left hand.
    I reached for my radio and pressed
the
button – the orange one, right between the volume dial and the stubby antenna on my Motorola personal radio.