The 17th Floor
My latest book, The Fallen, begins with a crisis negotiation on Westminster Bridge. With that in mind, I thought you might be interested to hear about a real-life case I dealt with in north London more than a decade ago. The story that follows is taken from the pages of my first book, Blue: A Memoir....
***
It’s another grainy, grey north London afternoon. I’m catching up with the team in the borough control room when local officers come through on the radio, requesting the assistance of hostage negotiators. They’ve got a man high up in a tower block, threatening to jump.
It’s been more than six months since Markham Square and I’ve not been out on a negotiator job since. I’m not on call now, but I’m almost certainly the nearest trained negotiator to the location. I don’t give it a second thought: instinct and adrenalin and that sense of duty combine and compel me.‘Are you ready to save a life?’
The flats in question are a short shout away from the Emirates Stadium – home of Arsenal – and, apparently, the man is on the seventeenth floor. It’s a hell of a long way down from there.
A swift blue-light run later, I arrive at the location and take the lift to the sixteenth floor. Always stop on the level below; never let the doors open directly into the unknown; give yourself time and space to think and prepare for whatever is to come. The stairwell between sixteen and seventeen is full of PCs, talking in whispers and standing by. None of them has much in the way of information they can give me, but local residents have been told to stay indoors and the area around the block has been cordoned off.
I head through the door on seventeen, onto the communal landing, and into a thin space between life and death. I take a deep breath. How do you start a conversation with a man on the edge?
I look to my left, absorbing the scene. At the far end of the landing – past an assortment of faceless front doors – there’s a huge window, stretching almost from floor to ceiling. Standing beside it is a uniformed PC and, on the other side of the glass, is a young man dressed in casual clothing. For reasons I can’t even begin to comprehend, the window can be opened from the inside – allowing the young man to climb outside and close it to a crack behind him. He’s now standing on a ledge that can be no more than about three inches wide, holding onto the metal frame with his left hand.
And so it begins. The PC, holding a mobile phone, looks at me. All I have to offer him and the stranger on the other side are my wits and my words. Our man is from Eastern Europe and English is far from being his first language. The PC has managed to get an interpreter on the phone and is doing the best he can in an almost impossibly challenging set of circumstances. As I approach, the man takes the phone from the PC, says something to the interpreter and passes it back through the tiny gap in the window. I step forward hesitantly to take it and, as I do so, take in the vast distance between us and the ground. Immediately, I regret having looked. In any other set of circumstances, the views across Islington would be spectacular, but not right now. Something doesn’t feel right. I’m unsettled in a way that I’ve never experienced before.
I speak on the phone and then give it back for the translation. The simple act of handing it over is hold-your-breath-and-shatter-your-nerves stuff. Communicating like this is impossible, and exceptionally dangerous. I dispense with the mobile and decide that broken English, however difficult, is the least bad option we have.
I listen to what I can make out of his story. He’s recently arrived in the UK and is having trouble finding a job and a place to stay. The struggle has evidently taken him to the end of himself. It’s just desperately sad – though I can work out no reason why he’s chosen this particular day and this particular block of flats. As he talks, I let my back slide down the bare concrete wall and sit on the hard floor – an attempt to put him at his ease. We continue our fractured conversation, with me trying my best to reason and reassure, and him trying to reveal his agony – each of us trying to understand the other. We are two complete strangers thrown together in this moment and it’s impossible not to feel responsible for whatever might happen next.
As we fumble words between us, my natural and usual optimism continues to fade. In my mind’s eye, I begin to imagine the moment he jumps. Or perhaps he slips. The unwelcome and desperately unnerving thoughts take hold and start to play on a loop in my head.
I am completely on my own. It’s just me on the landing now. The PC has retreated and everyone else is tucked away on the stairs and on the floor below. It all depends on me. And, suddenly, I find myself back in Markham Square.
Without any prior warning, the memories of that bleak day come flooding back and I am completely wrong-footed. Before Markham Square, I hadn’t had a single negative negotiating experience to look back on. I had always been able to play a part in saving the lives that had been hanging in the balance. I’d been called out and I’d done my bit. But last time out changed everything. It ended badly and now it seems to me that the chances are this one will as well. Mentally and emotionally, I’m trying to prepare myself for what is becoming inevitable. I’m not doing so well. But there is no option except to keep going.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see the hand of a colleague appearing round the base of the door frame – placing a tape recorder on the floor. I want to punch whoever it is that thinks this is a good time to be mucking about with recording equipment. I understand the desire to capture what’s being said – not least for the benefit of any post-incident review – but, just at this moment, it feels as though the smallest thing could be the last thing.
My man remains on the other side of the window. Time passes agonisingly slowly – my mouth caught up in disjointed talk, my ears straining to understand, my mind distracted by desperate possibilities. I am a muddled mixture of compassion and hidden desperation. I don’t think I’ll be able to cope if he goes.
Tick, tick, tick . . .
There can be never be time limits on a negotiation: things will always take as long as they take when the job is to save a life. But after an age – and entirely contrary to the sense of despair that has taken hold – I hear him saying that he wants to come back in.
I can’t remember how we got there; I just know that we did. But there’s no sense of relief. He’s on the wrong side of a window that hinges in the middle and I have no idea how to get him back in. The ledge is terrifyingly narrow and, beyond it, there is just empty space and gravity.
Tick, tick, tick . . .
It’s all in the balance, and to lose him now would certainly be more than I can bear. I inch towards him. The window is jammed.
Shit.
I’m terrified that I’m going to push too hard, terrified that I’m going to push him off.
Shit, shit, shit . . .
By now, I can barely breathe. I feel physically sick.Oh please, God . . .
I work gently on the catch from my side, like a nervous father handling a newborn for the first time. He works on the frame from his side – tiny movements with everlasting consequences. His life is in our two pairs of hands and I am scared beyond words. Somehow, though, we manage it and, suddenly, he’s standing on the right side of the glass with solid floor under his feet. I could almost weep with relief.
No more than sixty seconds later, it begins to absolutely sheet with rain – a downpour of truly biblical proportions. Goodness only knows what would have happened if he’d still been out there.
A group of PCs lead him away to whatever comes next – one of thousands of migrants who don’t show up on the census or on any other kind of official record, one more member of London’s hidden communities. I hope he does OK, that he manages to get back on his feet, that he doesn’t find himself back here again.
As the rest of us head down the stairs, there’s plenty of banter – the satisfaction and relief of a job well done. But I trail behind them, alone and lost in my thoughts. This particular happy ending has somehow passed me by and I find that I am haunted by the prospect of what could have been. I can still see him fall.
These are unfamiliar emotions and I have no idea what to do with them. I’m troubled and I don’t understand. I’m bothered and I don’t know why. But I don’t talk to anyone. Not even to Bear. What would I say?
I wait for the raw feelings to pass and try to bury the images of what might have happened up there on the seventeenth floor somewhere beyond my mind’s immediate view. I’m needed back at work