Rs that let you switch off ’
FICTION BY INDIAN AUTHOR HOLDS A SPECIAL APPEAL FOR HIM
way life actually is, no one would watch the programme. Most murder is far from entertaining. It’s brutal and horrible and there is no humour in it apart from the black humour of cops.
I enjoyed the first three (Abir novels) so much I bought the fourth hardback. My job is absorbing massive amounts of information. I had forgotten how relaxing it is reading something that completely switches you off.
Can you recall the murder cases you investigated in the past? I can recall every murder investigation in intimate detail. I have dealt with 22, but 17 of them it was as the senior investigating officer (SIO).
In the Byfield case, for example, drug dealer Tony Byfield and his innocent seven-year-old daughter Toni-Ann were shot dead in London’s Kensal Rise in 2003. It was an attack with no forensic evidence, CCTV or witnesses, but I led an extraordinary team of detectives who tracked down and caught the suspect Joel Smith two years later. Smith is serving a 40-year sentence without parole for that double killing.
When I was in anti-corruption, I reinvestigated the murders of two individuals because the famous detectives who had investigated that in 1976 were accused of corruption and fitting up the two men convicted of the murders. All that was proved at the Royal Courts of Justice was there was an element of reasonable doubt in the convictions. In fact, it was interviewing the two legendary detectives about this case – “the torso in the Thames” – that made up my mind to follow in their footsteps.
I was taught on my SIO’s course in 2000 that ‘the greatest privilege was to investigate the death of another human being’. I can say in my sixth year in counter-terrorism that this is categorically untrue. The greatest privilege is to prevent the death of another human being. Stopping murderers before they kill is the essence of counter-terrorism work.
What is the difference between the oldfashioned murder cases from the past and the terrorism of today? The vast majority of murderers and victims are known to each other, including an unacceptable and horrific number of partners, almost always women killed by their other half.
The motives of sex, jealousy, greed and revenge are timeless.Most murderers I have met know right from wrong.
Terrorists who commit murder are in a different category. In fact, they believe they are absolutely right, and the society they are attacking is fundamentally wrong. Stopping terrorists is easily the most challenging task of my career.
In A Necessary Evil, you were apparently shocked by the elephant execution (when the animal is made to trample a man to death)? It’s a little odd to say, but it’s nice to be shocked after 28 years of doing this job.
My mother tells this story of my father coming home – he had been out on the M6 to certify death in a horrible, multiple-collision traffic accident. There was a young boy who had been decapitated. No one looked for the head because there was a deep fog, but my father went and found the head of this child.
When he came back to the house, my grandmother, who lived with us and was cooking, said to my father, ‘Do you want the head on or off,’ because she was cooking trout. My mother said it was the first time she had seen my father, an experienced doctor, look ill.
When I asked him about that story many years later, he said, ‘The first time you are not shocked by what you see is the day you should retire.’
Given he was a doctor for 50 years, I took that advice very seriously.
So, your take on Abir’s novels? I am impressed. Not just because of the emotional connection to Kolkata and my father, but because they transport the reader to the world of Wyndham and Banerjee, and to the Raj and pre-independence India that any British person should want to know more about given India’s place in our history and culture. I can smell and taste the atmosphere of the city.
Finally, what would your own book, were you to write one, be about? The book would be more about what it feels to be a police officer, particularly a black or Asian police officer, growing up in Britain over the last 30 years. My big ambition is get more people wanting to join what I think is a fantastic profession. I would want people to read my book and think, ‘God, I want to be a cop.’
‘I regret not talking to my dad more’
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