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in the hot sun waiting for him to make some kind of move, stymied by the hugely strict rules that govern all armed British police operations, it wasn’t something anyone wanted to risk finding out.
    And then, naked from the waist up, he’d appeared at the front window, flinging it open and shouting something slurred and unintelligible at us. He’d raised the gun and pointed it out of thewindow. I’d already received instructions through my earpiece telling me not to fire, but that was before the gun had been aimed in my general direction. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t hit me, his gun hand was too unsteady for that, but my nerves and my patience were frayed, and suddenly, in one epiphany-like moment, I’d had enough. There were further instructions coming through the earpiece but to this day I couldn’t tell you what they were. I wasn’t listening. I was already squeezing the trigger.
    I shot him twice in the chest, killing him near enough instantly, and from that moment on, my fate was sealed. The gun turned out to be a replica; I was suspended for two months while a detailed investigation was carried out as to whether I’d been justified in my actions, with criminal charges hanging over me the whole time. Even after I was reinstated, when it was found that I had no case to answer, I was permanently removed from firearms duty, and my path up the career ladder ground to a resounding halt. Innocent I might have been of any crime, but as far as the brass were concerned there was an unpleasant aura of controversy about me that meant I was best avoided.
    Before that August day I would have considered myself a good cop. No liberal idealist – I’ve never been one of them – but at least a man who cared passionately about his job and the people he was paid to protect, and who wanted to do it to the best of his ability until he was forced by age to retire.
    After that, I never really recovered. Perhaps there was more self-pity in my actions than I ever would have admitted at the time, but I became progressively more cynical. The law became a subject of contempt for me, as I came to realize that it was designed to protect the rights of the criminals, not the victims. The job became a battle. Us against them. But ‘them’ wasn’t just the criminals. It was the establishment who paid my wages and made the laws, which nowbegan to seem totally unjust. It was the bosses more interested in kissing arses and meeting quotas than in protecting their people. It was the members of the public who didn’t seem to care what was happening on the streets around them, who hurried on by when they saw crimes being committed, too cowardly to intervene. Sometimes it seemed like the ‘them’ was everyone, and the ‘us’ was simply me, a lone copper engaged in a one-man battle against the injustices of the world.
    I was twice the subject of complaints by prisoners regarding my treatment of them. The first was made by a violent thug wanted for two counts of GBH who’d spat in my face during an arrest, and then made the mistake of laughing about it while wearing handcuffs. We were in his mum’s house at the time, where he’d been hiding out, and in front of four other arresting officers I’d headbutted him and broken one of his teeth.
    His complaint hadn’t been upheld, but only because all five of us had stuck to the same story, that he’d injured himself trying to escape. But suspicion had still hung over me as a result, and when three years later another complaint was made against me, this one was taken very seriously by the Police Complaints Commission.
    The complainant was a convicted paedophile who I’d arrested on suspicion of raping the five-year-old daughter of the woman he was living with. He’d looked so incredibly smug as I’d put him in the back of the car, claiming in smooth, educated tones that it was all a mistake and that the child was lying, that I’d got in after him, and while my colleague waited outside I’d