Gilded Edge, The by Danny Miller

hustings hustle. The minute Michael X had opened the bedroom door and reviewed the scenario before him he’d known it was too good an opportunity not to grab. He drove a groggy Vince and a bloody Tyrell Lightly straight to Scotland Yard. Vince didn’t protest. Tyrell Lightly wasn’t too happy about it, but Michael X assured him that to be seen to be giving himself up was good for the cause and good for himself. Tyrell Lightly now sat in his cell refusing to say a word; in fact he was refusing to open his mouth at all: not to eat, drink water or swallow painkillers for his broken nose. With Michael X hanging over the proceedings, and offering counsel to Lightly, Vince thought the gangster-turned-revolutionary was hoping to have his first martyr for the cause.
    ‘Look at them . . . the usual agitators.’ Markham shook his head in withering disgust. ‘There’s a great unpleasantness moving through this land, Treadwell. Do you not feel it?’
    ‘Not especially, sir.’
    Markham turned away from the window and looked at Vince questioningly.
    Vince shrugged. ‘Freedom of speech, sir.’
    ‘Freedom of speech ,’ Markham repeated with a slurry of contempt in his voice. ‘It’s you they want, Treadwell! You are the centre of their ire. ’Tis you they bay for. Does that not concern you?’
    ‘Regarding their opinion, sir, they’re wrong, but that’s their right. It’s what attracted me to the job in the first place, to protect their right to be wrong.’
    Vince said all this with his tongue if not firmly in his cheek, then certainly positioned around that area. But sarcasm and irony had become his natural register when talking to the pompous Chief Superintendent. Vince wasn’t looking at his superior as he said this, but straight ahead at the picture on the wall behind Markham’s desk. The official portrait of the Queen was still in place, but she had been joined by a framed portrait of Sir Winston Churchill. Vince considered the great man, deciding there was a strange parallel between the photograph of the freshly assassinated Malcolm X hanging in the office of Michael X and Markham’s portrait here of the recently deceased Churchill; and it wasn’t just sharing the year of their death that drew them together. Both men knew how to coin a phrase, both men were flawed natural-born leaders, and both men were now hanging on the walls of men who, in Vince’s opinion, weren’t fit to black their boots. And yet, looking at the familiar image on the wall, Vince felt no more at home in Markham’s Scotland Yard office than he did in Michael X’s one in Notting Hill. He still felt like the outsider, the interloper waiting to be uncovered.
    ‘Just like he fought for, sir,’ said Vince, with a nod towards Churchill. He meant it, too, but also knew it would curry him some favour.
    The Chief Superintendent was a big fan, and had taken the death of Churchill earlier in the year very badly. But he was determined to carry on the great fight, though the enemy had changed. Now they were not only on the beaches, and on the streets, but right outside his bloody window! Markham wanted them moved. Break out the white horses, baton charge them if necessary, but get them shifted on to the more traditional protesting patch of Trafalgar Square, which Markham had renamed ‘Red Square’. But cooler heads and voices from higher up the chain of command, both authoritatively and intellectually, had prevailed, and successfully warned him against such action. But talk about parking their tanks on his front lawn, the very sight of them outside his window was tantamount to someone taking a big fat steaming dump right here in his office. And for this he blamed the young detective standing in front of him.
    ‘You went rogue, Treadwell.’
    ‘I was just carrying out my duty, sir.’
    ‘If you’d have called for back-up, you wouldn’t have compromised your position.’
    ‘Like I said in my statement, sir, I didn’t have time for that.