Nick Bailey had been speaking for 40 minutes about what had happened to him when he said, “as soon as I started to forgive myself …”, but he was unable to finish his sentence and had to leave the lecture theatre.
You might not remember Nick – even if the actor Rafe Spall played him in BBC1’s The Salisbury Poisonings in 2020 – but he’s the former Detective Sergeant who, on March, 2018, opened the front door to the house where Sergei and Yulia Skripal had once lived, and in doing so was poisoned by the weapons-grade chemical Novichok which had been smeared on the handle by two Russian agents.
Nick would spend the next 17 days in hospital, fearing the worst.
He describes being poisoned as like having “a tsunami of pure heat and fire” enter his body, causing him to hallucinate and sweat, and said: “I cried a lot because I was so scared. I thought it’s only a matter of time before I slip into a coma and die.”
Thankfully he survived but thereafter his life changed forever and despite trying three times to go back to work, he has simply been unable to cope with the stresses of the job – that’s what he wanted to forgive himself for.
As he explained to the students at Birmingham City University last week, until that moment he had been “just a normal guy, a normal police officer doing my job but that day changed my life”.
He’s now no longer a police officer – a career that he had always dreamed of since he’d been a teenager – and is thinking about what to do with the rest of his life.
I went out of the lecture theatre to try and offer some comfort – Nick was in tears and I told him that it was beyond brave even to want to discuss this with a therapist, never mind 150 criminology students.
After a few minutes he was sufficiently re-composed to finish his lecture and take questions.
Two things really surprised me about what he revealed.
No one in the Wiltshire police – a force that Nick had joined in 2002 – seemed to have any idea an ex-Russian double agent was living in Salisbury. No one.
The first time anyone knew anything about the Skripals was when Nick’s detective constable googled the name “Sergei Skripal” only to discover a picture of him being released from a Russian prison.
Surely, I asked, someone must have known that a former Russian spy had been re-housed in Salisbury but Nick was adamant that no one did.
It was all a secret, although clearly not that much of a secret as Skripal continued to use his own name and was eventually discovered by two of Putin’s agents.
I could tell that still annoyed Nick, although he of course reserves his greatest anger for the two Russian agents – Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga and Denis Sergeev – who smeared the Novichok on the handle of the Skripals’ front door.
What made things even worse was that in the days after the incident had become an international story, various Russian counter-intelligence posts spread rumours on social media that Nick was actually an MI6 agent and Skripal’s “handler”.
All nonsense but as Nick put it to the students, “in the absence of facts, people start to imagine all kinds of conspiracies”.
Chepiga, who had served in Chechnya and also in Eastern Ukraine, was made a “Hero of the Russian Federation” by Putin in 2014 and is perhaps even now with Russian troops camped out on the Ukrainian border threatening to invade.
I don’t know what happened to Sergeev.
Meanwhile, Nick is still trying to put his life back together, and I really do hope that he has forgiven himself.
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