I got the knock in the middle of the night.
I didn’t know the time, but the solid darkness told me that it was still a long way from morning. I knew what the knock meant as soon as I heard it. It’s born from a fear that stalks everyone close to a police officer. It’s a fear of that cracked-out burglar, or that gone-wrong domestic, or those wrong-place wrong-time crazed psychos. As soon as I heard the knock, I knew it was my turn.
I ran down the stairs still dressed in my boxer shorts, my mind jerked awake, skipping steps, my mouth dry. I tried to compose myself as I got to the door, hoping to put off the moment long enough so that it would never arrive, but as soon as I flung open the door and saw two policemen there, I took a deep breath and steadied myself against the doorframe.
They didn’t say anything. They didn’t need to. There were two of them, one male, one female. He was there to break the news. She was there to break the fall.
I looked away and pushed myself off the doorframe before walking back into the house. I left the door swinging and I heard them follow me in. My knees didn’t feel strong so I sat down.
I don’t remember much else, apart from snatches of emotion. I remember the female officer putting her hand on my shoulder. There were no tears then. It was too soon. I felt many things rush at me, assaulting me so hard that I lost all sense of my surroundings: the nausea, shock, disbelief. But there were no tears. Not yet.
I think the female officer might have been crying. I can remember her mumbling words of comfort, but she wiped her eyes and sounded embarrassed. She was there for me, although maybe she didn’t realise that it helped me to know that I wasn’t alone, that other people felt a loss. I realised that they were my father’s friends and colleagues, and that their loss might mirror mine. I’d lost a man I loved, my father, but he was a man I didn’t really know. They had lost Bob Garrett, fellow officer, friend, someone much like them, facing the same risks as them. Maybe they saw themselves lying there.
I asked them what had happened, and I was told that he had been shot, but nothing more. But what more did I need to know? He was gone, dead. I felt deserted, desolate, nothing left, the last real connection with my childhood had disappeared.
The guilt set in next. It came at me in unforgiving waves. I felt guilt for leaving him and going to London. Guilt for not seeing his side of things enough, like I might have let him down too often. Guilt for not trusting him as a father, for not believing that he might have loved me whatever my faults were. Wasn’t that what parenthood was all about? Unconditional love. Why can’t a son’s love be unconditional? Why had I fought him so much, as if I had always wanted him to be different?
Guilt was eventually submerged by an overwhelming sadness and time became a blur.
The police were gone before daybreak. There was nothing else for them to do. I wasn’t speaking. I was just sitting on the sofa, staring into space, buffeted by flashes of my father, the father from my early years, not much older than myself now. My head was full of giggles and movement and colour, my father smiling, looking trim and young, happier, my mother in the background. It was a million times removed from the cold and empty house I sat in.
I’d expected more whenever I’d thought about this moment. As a reporter, I’d often had to speak with grieving relatives, intruded on private pain. I’ve seen people scream, collapse, be sedated. I never thought I would go that way. My mother’s death had taught me that life does carry on, that pain does become manageable, but I still expected more. All I had was a sudden emptiness, which is just a nothing, a blank, so all I could do was curl up and let the sounds of the house take over. The refrigerator hummed into life occasionally, competing with the occasional creak and knock of the house as it settled and cooled. A clock ticked, relentless, time slow-marching itself in light metallic knocks, each tick pushing me further away from when I last saw my father; from our last conversation, when I had questioned him, asked him to justify himself. Sirens wailed somewhere in the distance.
It was the growing daylight that hurt the most. The room became lighter and I began to hear birdsong outside. Each dawn always felt like a new start, and it was that which made me realise that I was moving into a new stage of my life; a day had started that my father would never see.
That’s when the tears came.
The tears wrung me out and so I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up and felt empty and cold. The house was lonely and bare, and I wondered whether my father had felt the same way every day when he woke here, my mother gone and me in London.
There was no warmth in the house at all. It lacked all those touches that my mother had brought, those artistic flourishes, flashes of colour. I glanced over to a photograph of my parents on the wall and felt another rush of sadness when I saw her smiling face. I wanted her back at that moment more than any other time. I’d forgotten the cancer years now. The woman I remembered was the one before the illness, the one who would hug and kiss me and call me her treasure. If she knew that my father had been taken away too, that I would be left all on my own, she would be heartbroken. Then I wondered whether she did know, whether they were together again and could look after me together once more, keep a constant watch.
That comforted me at first, but the more I looked at the photograph, the more I realised that this was it. There was no one watching over me. My parents had gone and it was all down to me now.
The short sleep had helped, though. It had somehow built a paper wall between the news of my dad’s death and the start of the next phase of my life. It was only a few short hours since I had found out, but the news didn’t feel new any more.
As I came round, I was surprised to find that I was angry. Not at anyone, just at the injustice of it all. A man like that just cut down. All he was doing was earning his pay, just like most other people in town. I had a flash that I wanted to do something about our recent indifferences. That thought made me feel stronger, so I nurtured it, grabbed at it like a drowning man at a sliver of air. I thought about the need to mark the man’s life, so that somewhere, somehow, he could watch me and know that what had once been there as a birthright, unconditional love, had never really gone away.
I remembered the conversation we’d had about David Watts. I wasn’t going to write about that, but I remembered my father lamenting his wasted police career. I could do something about that. I knew he’d been a good policeman. He didn’t have the stripes, but I knew he had the town’s affection, and that must somehow count for more.
I decided to mark his life in the only way I knew how: I would do all I could to get a front-page tribute to him. His death would make the front page of the Post. His life might as well join it in the headlines. The town owed him that much at least.