Manhunt: The Night Stalker by Colin Sutton

Author:Colin Sutton [Sutton, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Blake Publishing Ltd
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

THE FIRST NIGHT OF SURVEILLANCE

T

he arrangements took a few weeks to get put into place. In the meantime, while I was visiting Central 3000 for the first time to be led, agog, around its wonderful facilities, officers from my team and those coming over to help were busy finding observation posts, putting together briefings and working out who was going to do what. The operational details took a few days to work out and refine, and in some ways, given the scale of the undertaking, it is remarkable that they were completed as quickly as they were.

Wednesday, 28 October 2009 was to be the first day of surveillance. Having done my day job, as it were, and gone home for dinner, a shower and a change of clothes, I battled back through late rush-hour traffic on the M25 to return to Lewisham by 8 pm; the briefing was set to start at 9 – it would, I hoped, be 9.30 thereafter, but I had added an extra half an hour to the first day so there would be time to iron out any last-minute creases.

I sat at my desk in the unusually quiet major incident suite, knowing without doubt that this was to be the most important briefing I would ever give. I had been supervising and leading police officers for many years, I had stood in front of a group of officers to give them information and instructions literally thousands of times – but somehow this was different. It was not the subject matter. As serious as Minstead was, there had been those with lives at immediate risk, firearms operations – briefings of the most momentous consequences – in the past which had never felt the same. My heart was racing, my mouth was dry and as I scanned my notes the bubbles in the mind-map I had drawn seemed to dance like some cruel video game. This was, I concluded, because it was just so vital that what we were about to commence was done properly. One slip, one giveaway chink of light from a curtain, one piece of paper dropped in the street… That’s all it would take for the ever-vigilant Night Stalker to realise all was not normal, to abort his wicked mission and slip back into the darkness. I found myself thinking of how I should play it, how I ought to write down almost exactly what I was going to say. I turned to a clean page in my red book and began writing.

I got as far as the full stop after ‘Good evening ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming.’ I stopped and stared at the sentence, at the book, and asked myself another question:

‘What the bloody hell are you doing?’

There I was, the longest-serving senior investigating officer in the Met. I had been leading major investigations for fourteen years, I had been supervising, briefing and leading police officers for twenty-six. I’d never read a script; I’d always relied just on a few notes and trusted my ability to speak to them in an engaging and human way.

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