The commissioner nodded. “Since it appears that Grant had no choice but to act as he did, I am willing to chalk this up to a failure of supervision on your part. This will be considered a verbal reprimand and a note will be entered into your record.” He turned to me, and I kept my eye on a nice safe patch of the wall an inch to the left of his head.

“While I accept that you are inexperienced and being forced to use your own judgment in circumstances that lie—” The commissioner paused to choose his words. “—outside of conventional police work, I would like to remind you that you swore an oath both as a constable and as an apprentice. And you were warned when you did so that extraordinary things were expected of you. At this point no disciplinary action will be taken and no note will be appended to your record. However, in the future I wish to see you exercise more tact, more discretion, and to try to keep the property damage to a bare minimum. Do you understand?”

“Yes sir,” I said.

“The property damage,” said the commissioner, turning back to Nightingale, “including that to the ambulance, will be paid for out of the Folly’s budget, not the Met’s general contingency fund. As will any legal costs and damages that arise out of civil litigation taken against the Metropolitan Police. Is that understood?”

We both said yes sir.

I was sweating with relief. The only reason that I wasn’t facing a serious disciplinary hearing was because the commissioner probably didn’t want to explain to the Metropolitan Police Authority why a lowly constable was currently de facto head of an Operational Command Unit. Any advocate I called in from the Police Federation would have had a field day with my lack of effective supervision by a senior officer—Nightingale being on sick leave, remember. Not to mention the health and safety implications of being forced to jump into the Thames in the middle of the night.

I thought it was all over but it wasn’t. The commissioner touched his intercom. “You can send them in now, please.”