Czytaj książkę: «The Follow»
The Follow
PAUL GRZEGORZEK
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers
www.harpercollins.co.uk
Copyright
KillerReads
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by Endeavour Press Ltd 2011
Copyright © Paul Grzegorzek 2011
Cover design by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com
Paul Grzegorzek asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © December 2018 ISBN: 9780008329976
Version: 2019-03-01
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Epilogue
If You Enjoyed The Follow, Read on for an Extract From the New Gareth Bell Thriller.
About the Author
Also by Paul Grzegorzek
About the Publisher
In loving memory of Inspector Andy Parr and WPC “Aunty” Sue Elliott. Lost but not forgotten.
1
I’d been a copper for eight years the day I became an accessory to murder. But before I tell you about that, I need to go back to the beginning, back to that day in the summer of 2008 that Quentin Davey walked out of court with a grin on his face and the blood of one of my colleagues still on his hands.
The day started much as any other as I left my house on Wordsworth Street in Hove and drove to work, enjoying the morning sun streaming across the seafront. Early summer is my favourite time of year in Brighton, it makes it feel alive with the promise of things yet to come. I hummed along to the Snow Patrol track my MP3 player had selected, my Audi darting through the traffic as if it wasn’t there. In no time at all I was in the underground car park of John Street police station, trading jokes with people who were leaving from the night shift, their white shirts crumpled and their faces sagging as they finally shucked off their paperwork for another twelve hours.
I bounded up the stairs and through the locker rooms, then up two more flights of stairs to the first floor reserved for the CID teams and headed through into the DIU office.
The Divisional Intelligence Unit, in my opinion, is where the real heart of policing in Brighton sits. Intelligence from everywhere across the division, from coppers and the public, comes through the office and is sorted for relevance before being passed on to the Intelligence Development Officers: us, the IDOs. Everything involving the police is reduced to a three-letter code.
I strolled into the office, past the picture of our five-a-side team from last year that was still pinned up on the door, and the tension hit me like a slap in the face. The room holds about thirty people, officers and researchers with not a uniform in sight. We’re the ones who sneak around town and chase drug dealers, car thieves, rapists and burglars, and it’s hard to do that if they can see you coming, so the office was full of jeans and T-shirts, much to the annoyance of everyone else in the building. That morning all of them were muted as if waiting for something bad to happen.
The tension was for a very good reason, a reason that I had been trying hard not to think about. Six weeks earlier, I’d been on a surveillance job with a few others from the office, trying to catch a big-time heroin dealer called Quentin Davey, who lived in Hollingdean.
What we didn’t know at the time was that he had just blagged a load of heroin on tick, and that, if he didn’t get the money sorted out, he was in big trouble. So when we jumped him, instead of putting his hands up or running away, he pulled a knife and stabbed Jimmy Holdsworth, my partner of three years, piercing a lung and putting him on life support for two weeks before he began to recover.
Of course we’d taken Davey down, but it looked like Jimmy wasn’t going to get a payout, as he hadn’t been wearing a stab vest – everyone knows you can’t wear one on surveillance. Nothing screams copper like a covert vest; you look like the Michelin Man and move about as fast too.
So that day was the day of the court case and I was the star witness, having been inches away when it happened. Every time I thought about it I got butterflies in my stomach and goosebumps, so I was doing my best not to.
I smiled at our researcher, Sally, as I sank into my chair in the drugs pod. The room is split up into various different pods, or work areas, demarcated by brown felt dividers that stand to about chest height. I glanced around my littered desk, covered in reports both new and old, all filed with the care that only eighteen-hour days can produce. It was a pigsty.
The divider wall next to my computer was covered with pieces of paper, some tacked over others, showing the faces of local criminals, pictures of me and the lads on skiing and fishing holidays and a picture of a huge bride being fed cake by an equally large husband on their wedding day, with the legend ‘nom nom nom’ printed underneath. I had that up there so that I would see it every time I fancied a doughnut.
I’d been fighting to keep my chest from sagging into my stomach for a while, and it was a battle I was finally winning.
‘Anything relevant?’ I asked Sally as I waited for my computer to boot up.
She smiled at me as she turned her chair, displaying a heart-shaped face framed by golden curls and eyes that I regularly wanted to fall into. She should have been a model, not a police researcher.
‘Not really, Gareth, just a few serials about that BMW in Whitehawk again, and one about dealers in East Street by the taxi rank; they’re probably coming over from the YMCA.’
Nothing new there then. Despite the fact that the YMCAs were set up to help people living on the streets, they had quickly become hotbeds of crime, mainly heroin and crack dealing and petty thefts, and you could guarantee that wherever a YMCA opened, the crime rate would rise. They seemed to be filled with people too stupid to realize that you didn’t shit on your own doorstep. Not that all of the occupants were like that, some of them were genuinely just down on their luck, but sadly they were tarred with the same brush as the majority.
The hamster that ran my computer finally woke up and started turning the wheel, allowing me to check my emails and update the intelligence sheets before the morning meeting.
The rest of the drugs pod was on a job in Hove, but I was exempt that day because I was giving evidence in court, so I got to do all their reports as well as mine. Not that it was a problem, since the previous day had been a series of dead ends and poor leads that amounted to almost no paperwork for once.
Paperwork is the bane of any copper’s existence. The poor bastards downstairs on uniform (and I mean no disrespect, I was one for years) are supposed to run about eight crime reports at a time per officer, as well as respond to calls and make enquiries, assisting the CID teams and generally doing all the other work that no one else has time to do. Most officers I know have somewhere over twenty reports each and are snowed under with paperwork. The truth is, you won’t get in trouble for not answering a 999 call, but you can lose your job for not doing your paperwork properly, so officers will turn their radios down and sit in the corner of the office, frantically trying to finish their reports before a sergeant finds them and turfs them out to pick up yet more jobs.
I felt more than lucky that I had managed to find a way into DIU. I had come somewhat of an unusual route, having gone onto Local Support Team, the LST, which specializes in warrants, riots, protests, bashing in doors and violent prisoners. Dealing with the latter, not bashing them in, I should add. After I’d been on the unit for a few months, our remit had changed and we had become half- plain clothes, half-uniform, so you could come in in the morning, do a drugs warrant in uniform, then change into plain clothes and go out hunting scallies in the town centre. I’d quickly discovered that I had an aptitude for the surveillance work, and when I got an attachment to DIU I’d just kind of stayed for a few years, and had no intention of leaving.
I really feel like I have my finger on the pulse of the city, and I probably know as much about what’s happening in it as anyone else in the world. It’s a funny feeling, but one that I’ve grown to love.
My inbox was full of pointless emails from other units with three-letter names and none of them applied to me. At least I’d hoped not, because as per usual I deleted them without really looking. If they had been important they’d have emailed me again.
Sally leaned over with a cup of tea as a waft of her perfume tickled my nose.
‘Thanks, Sally. How was the film last night?’ I vaguely remembered that she had been going out with one of the string of boyfriends that treated her like shit, despite our regular advice about the type of man she should go for.
‘Yeah, it was okay, but Darren made me pay for the film and dinner again. He’s such a jerk!’
Another voice floated over the partition, and I swung round to see Kevin Sands, one of the three detective sergeants that run the office, leaning casually against a nearby pillar.
‘Sally, I’ve told you before, all you have to do is dump him, and I’ll kick Mrs Sands out. You can have her half of the bed.’
From anyone else it would be harassment, but Kev has the ability to be rude, sexist, and generally as non-PC as you can get, yet make it clear that he doesn’t mean any of it. He had spent more than thirty years in the force and came back on the ‘thirty plus’ deal, which meant that he could do another five years. He’s one of the funniest men I have ever met. Not only does he have a mind that’s more devious than a politician’s, he has comic timing that Bill Bailey would kill for.
Sally laughed at him and went back to her desk while Sands took the empty chair at the desk behind mine.
‘You all ready for court this morning, Gareth?’ he asked, trying unsuccessfully to press the height lever on my chair with his foot.
I nodded. ‘I think so. What’s not to be ready for? I saw him stab Jimmy; if I’d been any closer I would have been the one that got stabbed.’ Just the memory of it made me angry, seeing again the look of pleasure on Davey’s face as he jammed the knife into Jimmy’s chest.
It’s a common misconception that most stabbings are done with combat knives. Nine out of ten are done with kitchen knives that you can pick up in almost any store for a few quid. Every other car I’ve stopped in my career has one tucked somewhere, whether it be in a tool box or hidden under the driver’s seat. But they rarely get turned on us.
‘Come on now,’ Kev said, obviously seeing my faraway look. ‘You know the drill; just concentrate on the questions they ask you and don’t babble. Answer “yes” or “no” if you can, and don’t try to explain unless you think they’re trying to lead you. Not that I’m trying to teach you to suck eggs.’
I smiled, appreciating the pep talk. I’d been to court dozens of times but each time I still got stage fright, especially in crown. Not only did you have a judge, the defendant and the lawyers to deal with, but you also had twelve members of the public staring at you, trying to decide if they believed you or not.
One of the first things I had learned about court was that your evidence didn’t matter if you didn’t come across well. If you could convince the jury that you were solid, dependable and honest, they would believe you if you told them that the sky was green. If they thought you were bent, however, the case was lost no matter how compelling the evidence. You may think that’s an exaggeration, but trust me it isn’t. I’ve seen watertight cases lost because an officer got a bad bout of nerves and mumbled their evidence like they didn’t know what they were saying.
‘Oi, wake up,’ Kev said, leaning forward and pinching the fleshy bit of my arm above the triceps hard enough to make me yelp.
‘Ouch, that’s assault!’ I complained as he got up and ambled out of the pod, studiously ignoring me. I shook my head and turned back to finish the reports, hurrying as I glanced at the clock and saw that I had to be in court in little less than an hour.
2
Hove Crown Court looks more like a library than a courthouse from the outside, with dark brown brick and dirty white walls. It’s situated on the corner of Holland Road, with no parking for anyone other than workers, and it sits several streets away from any of the bus routes. It is as convenient and well thought out as the rest of the justice system.
I paced up and down in the police waiting room trying not to annoy DI Jones, the officer in charge of the case. Normally, the OIC was a detective constable but, since it was a police officer who had been stabbed, they’d bumped it all the way up to an inspector.
She looked very smart in a no-nonsense trouser suit, with her hair scraped back into a tight bun and just a hint of make-up to hide the strain of a four-week court case. She sighed as I walked past her for the eighth time in the tiny room.
‘Gareth, can you please sit down?’ she asked, looking threateningly at me over her glasses.
‘Sorry, ma’am, I’m just nervous. I want him to go down and I’m a bit wound up.’
‘We all want him to go down, Gareth. But right now I’m trying to read through the file and you’re putting me off.’
I stopped pacing and stood in front of the mirror, checking myself for the twentieth time since I’d been in the room. I’m not used to wearing a suit and it had felt strange to be looking smart. I’d chosen a grey double-breasted affair with a lavender shirt and tie, and was extremely grateful that I’d remembered to shave that morning. Usually I don’t, due to the fact that a few days’ stubble makes you look less like a police officer when you’re on the streets. I hadn’t, however, managed to get my hair cut and my brown locks were getting long enough that they were starting to curl over my ears.
The door opened and a court usher stepped in, the black gown looking strange over the security-style uniform she wore underneath.
‘PC Bell?’
‘Here,’ I said, sounding like a naughty schoolboy as the nerves made my palms sweat and my stomach flip over.
‘They’re ready for you now. Would you like to swear or affirm?’
‘Affirm, please.’ Not that I have a problem with swearing on the Bible, but not being religious, it had felt to me like I would be lying from the outset, which isn’t a good frame of mind in court.
She led me across the corridor and into the court, situated right at the back of the building on the top floor. As I entered, I headed towards the stand, nodding at both the judge and jury as I went in.
Once I had been safely escorted to my position, the usher placed a card in my hand and I read the words with barely a quiver in my voice. ‘I do solemnly, sincerely and truly declare and affirm that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’
As I introduced myself, I let my eyes drift around the courtroom, taking in the jury, all trying to look thoughtful and solemn, the barristers in their ridiculous gowns and wigs, and Quentin Davey himself, secure behind a Perspex screen.
Davey was staring at me intently, with a half-smile that I didn’t like playing around his lips. Although not an imposing man at five feet six inches, four inches shorter than me and only half my build, there was an air about him that had made the hackles rise on the back of my neck. He has a blatant disregard for anyone or anything else, and that shows in almost everything he does.
I once jumped one of his runners, Peter Finn, a heroin user trusted just enough to sell small amounts of the drug for Davey, and had arrested Finn and seized the five bags of heroin he had left on him. For the loss of the £50 the drugs would have made, Davey had thrown an entire kettle of boiling water into Finn’s face, disfiguring him for life. Try as we might to get Finn to prosecute, some kind of twisted loyalty, or maybe just fear, had held him and he still works for Davey even to this day.
The man that would scar someone for life and stab a copper was staring at me and trying not to laugh. He had to have something up his sleeve that I hadn’t thought of, but what?
‘PC Bell, did you get enough sleep last night?’ The judge’s voice brought my head round with an almost audible snap.
‘I’m sorry, Your Honour, I was just looking at the man who stabbed my partner.’ When lost, confused or cornered, go for the throat.
The defence barrister shot out of his seat like a cork out of a bottle. ‘Objection!’ he called, putting one hand to the wig that had nearly slipped off during his heroic launch.
‘Sustained,’ said the judge, one that unfortunately I didn’t recognize. ‘PC Bell, I don’t want you leading the jury with unsolicited statements, am I clear?’
‘Yes, Your Honour.’ I did my best to sound repentant, but I could see a few members of the jury giving me looks of approval. Strike one.
After my little outburst, I was first given to the prosecution barrister, who very neatly led me through my statement asking no awkward questions, but instead asking me regularly how I felt as I first subdued Jimmy’s assailant and then applied the first aid that had saved my colleague’s life. I spoke vividly of the minutes I waited for the ambulance, my hands covered in Jimmy’s blood as I held a credit card to the outside of his chest to prevent the lung from collapsing as it filled with fluid.
I told the jury about the looks and threats that Davey had thrown at us as I laboured to save Jimmy’s life, about his laughter rolling over me as I was busy keeping my friend alive.
I told them about the blood that had flowed down Hollingdean Road like a flood, staining the pavement while the ambulance crew worked on Jimmy, trying to stop the bleeding before they moved him. I knew as I glanced at the jury that I had them. I could feel tears in my eyes as I finished, and my fingers were white as they gripped the edge of the box. I glared at Davey as if daring him to challenge anything I’d said but he just looked right back at me, his thin face still struggling not to break into a grin.
Soon enough it was the defence barrister’s turn to question me, and he began without preamble. ‘PC Bell, am I right in thinking that it was you who seized the knife in question, after PC Holdsworth had been removed in the ambulance?’
‘That’s correct.’ I didn’t like his tone; he sounded like he was about to unleash something nasty at me.
‘And did you follow the correct procedure when you seized this knife?’
‘Yes, I did. I placed it in a knife tube, sealed the tube and wrote out an exhibit label, which I then applied to the tube. I then placed it all in a clear plastic bag which I sealed with a cable tie.’
‘So, PC Bell, would you say that you are confident that the tube has not been opened since you sealed it?’
I thought for a second, realizing that the only option the barrister had was to discredit the evidence; the rest of the case was too strong to touch. ‘I haven’t had hands on the tube since it went into the store at John Street. I would have no way of knowing, but I presume that if someone had opened it then they would have followed the correct procedure.’
Let him work his way around that and still find a way to blame me for whatever was coming.
‘Your Honour, I would like to produce exhibit GB/250308/1355, which should be a black-handled kitchen knife, stained with the blood of PC Holdsworth.’
The judge motioned with a lazy hand, indicating his approval.
The defence barrister, with slow, deliberate movements accepted the exhibit from the court usher with both hands, holding up the clear plastic bag for the jury to see. Inside the bag sat a knife tube, a plastic cylinder of two halves that screwed together to make varying lengths of tube for holding sharp objects.
‘So, PC Bell, you are saying that this is the knife that you claim my client used to stab PC Holdsworth, is that correct?’
A cold feeling blossomed in the pit of my stomach, trying to claw its way up into my throat and stop me from speaking. What the hell was he playing at, I wondered? Of course it was the knife.
‘Uh, yes.’
The barrister slowly undid the plastic bag, then pulled out the knife tube. From that distance I could see the knife within, but not make out any details. I wondered whether it was my imagination or it looked different somehow.
He unscrewed the knife tube, stripping off the tape that sealed it first then tipping the knife onto the desk in front of him. Instead of the clatter I was expecting, there was a dull thud, as if the knife was made of rubber.
Which, somehow, it was.
He held the knife up, wiggling the rubber blade from side to side with one finger, while I stood there with my jaw hanging open almost to my chest.
‘So, PC Bell, you are saying that my client stabbed PC Holdsworth with a rubber knife, which you then seized and exhibited falsely as a real knife? Would you like to tell us what really happened that day, officer?’
I could only stand there stunned, unable to work out what had happened. Then it clicked. Davey must have someone inside the police station on his payroll; it was the only thing that made sense. I looked over at him, seeing him almost doubled up with repressed laughter, and something inside me snapped. I swung back to glare at the barrister, standing there triumphantly waving a rubber knife at the now thoroughly confused jury.
‘Davey stabbed my partner, then I took the knife off him. I administered first aid to Jimmy, then I seized the knife, the real knife, not the one your client paid someone off to swap. I should arrest you both right now for perverting the course of justice.’
My voice rose at the end, and I spat the words at him as if they were sharp things that would cut and tear at him. I stepped towards him, intent on carrying out my threat, and I’d made it halfway across the court when the insistent hammering of the judge’s gavel brought me back to myself and I remembered where I was.
‘PC Bell!’ he shouted, spit flying from the corners of his mouth. ‘You will not treat my courtroom like a police station. There are rules here and you will follow them. You are dismissed from court while we adjourn to sort this mess out. The police’s mess, I might add.’
I froze, my fists still clenching as I saw the barrister throw a quick, knowing look at Davey. He must have been in on it. Somehow, God only knows how, they had managed to find someone in the nick who was dirty enough that they would screw with the evidence in a case that involved another copper being stabbed. Just thinking about it made me want to throw my head back and scream in anger.
Game, set and match to Davey and his empire.
I turned and strode from the court before I could do anything they’d regret, kicking open the door to the police waiting room.
DI Jones had been in the back of the court but was now standing in the corner of the room on her mobile, a look of sick fear mixed with anger on her face. As I slammed into the room she snapped her mobile shut and glared at me, as if it was somehow all my fault.
‘We’re going back to John Street; the chief super wants to see us. What kind of wanker would do something like that to the evidence?’
The look she gave me clearly said that she thought I might be that kind of wanker, and I felt my hackles rise in response to the implied accusation. ‘Don’t look at me. I’ve been working with Jimmy for years. I don’t think we’ll help each other by throwing shit and arguing, so let’s get back and see what Pearson has to say, huh?’
Jones picked up her bag and strode past me without another word, leaving me to follow in her wake as her heels clicked angrily down the stairs towards the exit.
3
Thirty minutes later, I found myself sitting on one of the far-from-comfortable chairs that occupy a little alcove near the chief superintendent’s office on the second floor of John Street police station. My only companions were a photocopier the size of a car and a ball of cold fear and anger in my guts which dwarfed the machine a hundredfold.
DI Jones had been in the office with the chief super, Derek Pearson, for about ten minutes, and I could hear raised voices through the wall, albeit not well enough to make out what was being said.
I tried to look relaxed and casual as people walked past, but I could tell from the looks I was getting that the rumour mill had once again beaten any other form of communication and everyone already knew what had happened.
I loosened my tie and top button, then did it up again as the smell of my own nervous sweat hit me. It was a copper’s worst nightmare. Not only did it look like a criminal who had stabbed one of us was about to go free, but evidence had gone missing in a high-profile case. It would be all over the news by evening, and the force would be looking for a scapegoat. It was either me or Christine Jones and, knowing the system, I felt that as the OIC she was more likely to get the chop. Not that it made me feel any better; I wanted blood for this and, by hook or by crook, I was going to get it.
A few minutes later, the door opened and DI Jones came out looking flushed and angry. She didn’t speak to me as she walked past, looking down instead at the faded blue carpet and avoiding my eye.
Pearson’s PA, Sarah, came out from her adjoining office and fixed me with a sympathetic smile. ‘Gareth, he’s ready to see you now. Don’t worry, it’ll be fine.’
I smiled back, a weak attempt, and entered the room with a heavy feeling in my heart.
Derek Pearson is a tall man in his mid-fifties, with dark hair going grey and the build of a scrapper. As with all officers, he had spent his time on the street before rising through the ranks and, as far as senior officers go, he’s one of the good guys. Usually.
That day, however, he had a face like thunder and his hands were folded carefully in his lap as he sat behind the desk in his otherwise bare office; a sure sign that he was angry and wanted to hit something. ‘Gareth, sit.’
I sat.
‘What do you think happened today?’ His voice was low and even, and I had the strong feeling that if I were to say the wrong thing, he would explode, his tightly controlled temper unleashed.
‘I think that Davey found someone in the nick that he could get leverage on or pay off, sir.’ I was proud of how calm I sounded.
‘And do you have any idea who that might have been?’
I shook my head. ‘Haven’t a clue, sir, but I can assure you I intend to find out. Jimmy is still weeks away from even leaving the hospital, and I can’t let it stand without justice being done.’
Pearson stared at me over his desk for so long that I began to get nervous, before he finally spoke. ‘I’m sorry, Gareth, but I’m going to have to put you on restricted duties. PSD will probably want to suspend and interview you, maybe even have you arrested, but I personally don’t think that you have anything to do with this and you’ll have my support. That’s all.’
I stood and left the room, my anger and fear surrounding me like a swarm of biting insects, all attacking me at once. Professional Standards has a horrendous track record of ruining officers’ lives and reputations and then discovering that the charges they’re trying to bring are false. They are every honest copper’s nightmare; they never seem to find the bent ones, few though they are.
Restricted duties meant that I wasn’t allowed any contact with the public, so I would have to stay in the office for however long it took, stewing slowly in my own juices as Davey sat around drinking, laughing at us and selling drugs.
As soon as I walked into DIU, Kevin waved me over and ushered me into the inspector’s office, which was empty owing to the fact that our guv’nor was off long-term sick with stress. He thought his job was stressful; he should have been where I was standing.
Kev sat down in the chair, leaving me to perch on the edge of a filing cabinet. ‘Talk to me.’
I shrugged. ‘What can I say? Someone found their way into the evidence and planted a rubber knife. God only knows what they did with the real one.’
He stared off into space as he asked, ‘Do you think it was someone from this office?’
I shook my head. ‘No way. No one in here would do that to Jimmy. I’d bet my job on it. My guess is that it was one of the temps they’ve been using in the store.’
The property store – G83 as it is known to us – is one of the dullest places in the building to work, and owing to the heavy lifting, long hours and lack of daylight, we have a hell of a time retaining store clerks, so over the previous eighteen months or so we had had a string of temps come in to do the job. It made it confusing as they all seemed to use a different system and, personally, I had already wondered how good a security check they were given before they were allowed to work in the building.
‘That’s not a bad thought; I’ll pass it on. You know you’re on restricted duties?’
I nodded. ‘Word travels fast, huh?’
Kev smiled and shook his head. ‘Not really. Pearson came down to see me, and I told him that if you were suspended you’d probably end up chasing after Davey on your own. He agreed, and decided to restrict you instead.’
‘No way!’ I exploded. ‘He told me it was his decision to just put me on restricted duties and that he was on my side! Just goes to show who you can really trust, doesn’t it?’
Kev just looked at me, smiling the smile that told me that he agreed, but wouldn’t say so openly.
‘I’m sure the chief super would never take someone else’s idea and pass it off as his own, Gareth. Who would ever dream of a senior officer doing that?’
It’s well known that if someone wants a promotion, they either steal a lower rank’s idea or invent a new form that makes life for the lower ranks even more complicated.
I shook my head in disgust and headed back into the office, throwing myself into my chair hard enough that it almost tipped over.
Sally turned to look at me, sympathy written all over her face. ‘Are you okay, Gareth?’ she asked, and for once I had no wish to drown in her eyes.
‘Not really. Someone screwed around with the evidence, I’m stuck in front of this damn desk for God knows how long, and Davey is probably in a bar somewhere drinking champagne and laughing at us right now.’ I tried hard not to sound like a whining teenager but I could hear it in my voice.
‘Has anyone told Jimmy yet?’ she asked as she turned back to her computer.
‘I hope not. I’ll grab a car and go and tell him. I’m sure they won’t mind me going up to the hospital.’
I jumped out of my chair, glad to be getting out of the office. Kev threw me a set of keys when I checked in with him, and within ten minutes I was walking into the ward at the Royal Sussex, where Jimmy was being looked after.
His little curtained off cubicle was awash with flowers, grapes and books of crossword puzzles, all sent by concerned colleagues and friends, and somehow they made Jimmy himself look smaller, as if he were shrinking under the weight of the gifts. His usually tanned complexion was pale and he had lost a good stone and a half since he had been in hospital. Where once he was all gym muscle and sense of humour, he was pale and skinny, a shadow of his former robust self.
‘How’s the knife magnet?’ I asked, sitting on the edge of the bed near his feet.
‘Almost ready to go home apparently,’ he said listlessly, not bothering to put on a brave face; we know each other too well. ‘How did the court case go?’ A hint of hunger entered his voice as he asked, a need for closure on what was probably the worst experience of his life.
I couldn’t meet his eyes as I explained the whole debacle, but I could still see his face drop as he realized that any hope of that closure was gone forever. Even with our statements and Davey being at the scene, the loss of evidence effectively stopped us from ever prosecuting him for what he did to Jimmy.
‘Any chance you can pop round to his house and cut his balls off?’ Jimmy asked, sensing my distress and trying to make me smile. That’s typical of Jimmy. He’s always the one to bring people out of bad moods with a joke or some idiot act that makes everyone laugh. On the morning that my marriage had finally fallen apart, he had strapped one of our removable blue lights to the top of his helmet and walked into a briefing for a murder inquiry. I laughed so much that I nearly choked and he got stuck on for inappropriate behaviour, but it had helped and I’d been pulled out of the depressive mood I’d been in.
I smiled at him and picked a grape off its stem, throwing it at his face with pinpoint accuracy. ‘Don’t be a knob. I wish I could, but they’d know it was me and then I’d be in a cell next to one of his friends, I have no doubt.’
He nodded and lay back, rubbing at the cannula embedded in the back of his left hand. ‘It’s a shame we can’t destroy his business then. Can you imagine what would happen if he started having trouble with his suppliers? They’d do the job for us!’
I started to laugh, then stopped as the idea ran through my mind, gathering speed as it went. We had details of his whole operation: who was working for him, where they dealt, who bought from them. In fact, there was so much information that we simply couldn’t deal with it all and we left many of his dealers in place purely so that we knew who to watch.
If someone were to use that information to make life difficult for Davey, it might indeed have the effect Jimmy had just mentioned. Suppliers were notoriously hard on people who had difficulty paying, so maybe it was time to get a little old school and let them solve our problem for us.
As usual Jimmy knew what I was thinking before I did and he threw me a warning look. ‘Don’t even think about it, fella. If you start screwing around using police intelligence, they’ll fucking crucify you. And besides, he’s not worth it. His time will come.’
I nodded distractedly, still thinking about how best to get hold of the information without it being traced back to me. All the Sussex computer systems have a keystroke program built in so that they can trace who is doing what and when. The only way around it is to find someone who hasn’t shut their computer down and use it, while making sure that you haven’t used your swipe card to get into that office, effectively making you invisible to the system.
‘Oi, Muppet!’ Jimmy’s call made me look up and realize that I had been staring into space. ‘If you even think about doing anything like that, I’m gonna smack you in the face. Just as soon as I can get out of bed, that is.’
I looked at him with my best innocent smile. ‘Who, me? Wouldn’t dream of it, mate. I’m in enough trouble as it is, what with the knife going walkies. It’s typical of Davey that he couldn’t make the knife just disappear, he had to make us look extra stupid in court, the bastard. Rubber knife my arse. You know we’re never going to live this down, don’t you?’
He nodded, tiring fast from the effort of conversation.
‘There’s no point getting so worked up over it, he’s just one of a hundred dealers in the city. I mean, I know he stabbed me and I’d love to see him swing for it, but his time will come, you know it will. And he didn’t stab me because of me, if you know what I mean, it was just because I was stopping him from getting away. It could have been any one of us, and I just haven’t got the energy to take it personally. Neither should you.’
I nodded, struggling to put what I was feeling into words.
‘It just seems to me that no matter what we do, no matter how hard we try, they keep getting away with it. Drugs took my brother away from me; they nearly took you away from me; and I don’t intend to keep watching it happen with my hands shoved in my pockets.’
Jimmy shook his head. ‘Easy mate. You can’t go taking out all your crap on people like Davey or you’ll end up doing something stupid, and then you’ll be for it.’
‘We’ll just have to agree to disagree there, but don’t worry, I promise I won’t go doing anything stupid. Not too stupid, anyway.’ I gave him my best winning smile, and he did his best to match it before glancing around hopefully as if he had just remembered something.
‘Look fella, you’d better chip off. I’m getting a sponge bath in a minute and I’m hoping it’s gonna be that fit Filipino nurse that’s around somewhere!’
I rose, being careful not to jostle him too much. ‘All right, mate, well you take care. I’ll let you know if anything comes up, okay?’
He nodded and waved, as I walked out through the ward, pausing next to a hugely overweight male nurse who barely squeezed into his blue uniform. As I got close, I could smell his sweat, strong enough to make me want to gag.
‘Uh, excuse me, mate, the chap in bed four is expecting a sponge bath. You couldn’t pop over and do it for him, could you? He was injured in the line of duty.’
I flashed the nurse my badge and he smiled and nodded as I left the ward, wishing I could see the look on Jimmy’s face when bath time came.
4
The trip back to the office should have taken me only a few minutes but I drove out and over the back of Whitehawk instead, needing to clear my head. I couldn’t shake the idea Jimmy had given me about ruining Davey’s empire, and I wanted either to be rid of it or to have a plan by the time I got back. I was mindful of my promise to not do anything stupid, but I couldn’t help but wonder if a few friendly warnings would make things a little warmer for Davey and let him know that we weren’t ready to give up.
I was just driving down Elm Grove towards The Level when my radio blurted an assistance call. On the old radios we had been reduced to shouting for help, but on the new Nokia handsets there’s a little red button on top that, when pressed (occasionally by my armpit, much to comms’ annoyance) produces the horrendous blatting sound that I now heard.
It also opened the radio mic so that I could hear an officer shouting in the background and the sounds of heavy breathing and fighting. One of the better features of the system is that it sends a GPS signal back to comms so they know exactly where the officer needs help. As soon as the air cleared, an operator came on the line.
‘Charlie Lima 92 needs assistance, Vogue Gyratory. Units to acknowledge.’
I flicked the switch nestled between the front seats, just behind the handbrake. Blue lights flashed and sirens screamed out from the grille. The Gyratory was only a few hundred yards away and as I shot down the hill, weaving through the traffic like a madman, I managed to find the pressel with my left hand, joining in the chorus of officers booking on to assist.
‘Charlie Papa 281, I’ve got a short ETA. Any update?’
I let go of the button just before swearing loudly at a man in a Clio who didn’t seem to know how to react to me driving at him at 70 miles per hour in a 30 area. When he finally finished panicking and drove up a kerb, I shot past and gave my attention back to the radio.
‘… Stop check on a vehicle, black Ford Mondeo near the Gyratory, four up, markers on the vehicle for drugs and bilkings.’
The usual then. People who sell drugs seem to object to simple things, like paying for petrol, and you can almost guarantee that if a car is associated with drugs, it will also be known for bilking – driving off from a petrol station.
I made a sharp turn into a side road that I knew joined the Lewes Road about halfway along and tore down the hill, wincing as I wrecked the suspension on the speed bumps. I barely paused at the bottom, swinging right and accelerating towards the BP garage at the Gyratory. The line of stationary cars told me exactly where my colleagues were and I drove down the wrong side of the road until I was level with the aforementioned black Mondeo.
As I got out, I could see Sergeant Mike Barker from LST – CL92 – rolling around on the ground with a wiry chap in his early twenties. He was being assisted by Adam Werther, another LST officer, and it didn’t surprise me at all that it was my old team rolling around with drug dealers once again. A third officer, Nigel Coleshill, was keeping the other two occupants of the car contained by way of pointing his pepper spray at them through the open passenger window. All the officers were in plain clothes and a large crowd was gathering as they struggled with the man on the floor. He was bucking and writhing, forcing Adam to put his hand around the man’s throat to prevent him from swallowing whatever he was clenching his teeth to keep hidden.
I ran over, throwing myself on the guy’s back with both knees landing first in the hope that I would wind him and make him spit out his mouthful. He groaned but didn’t unclench his teeth, so I grabbed both of his legs to stop him from squirming and lay back on them so that he couldn’t gain the leverage to rise to his feet.
‘It’s always you, isn’t it, Barker-boy?’ I called over my wriggling charge. ‘What’s he got in his mouth?’
Barker’s face was a study of concentration as he fought to keep control of the arm he had. Believe it or not, it’s incredibly difficult to restrain someone safely when they want to fight, no matter how many of you there are.
Next time you see four coppers lying on someone, just remember they’re doing it so that they don’t hurt him. It would be so much easier if we could hit them a few times, and sometimes you have to, but generally it’s safer and less damaging to them if we use locks and pressure points. I wish criminals felt the same about us, then maybe we wouldn’t go home with as many lumps and bruises as we do.
‘He threw a bag of heroin wraps into the front of the car when we stopped it, and Adam saw him put something in his mouth. He thinks it was crack,’ he gasped, fighting for breath. It’s also extremely tiring fighting someone for more than about twenty seconds, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
‘Open your mouth, unclench your teeth!’ Adam shouted as I opened my mouth to speak again, much to the apparent amusement of our audience, some of whom now had mobile phones out to record our brutality.
A pair of booted feet appeared by my head and I jerked out of the way of a potential kick before I realized that they belonged to another officer, Steve Warnham. As per usual he had neglected to put on his stab vest and his white shirt was so bright in the sunlight that I had to squint to look at him.
‘Hi Steve, do you think you could move the crowds back a bit? I don’t fancy getting a boot in the face.’
He nodded and began ushering the crowd back as more sirens approached. I like Steve, he’s solid and dependable and has years of experience which gives him a calm manner that few argue with. Other officers began arriving, accompanied by the double blip of sirens shutting off as the numerous cars disgorged their uniformed loads. Another officer, a young chap whose name I could never remember, took over my leg hold, allowing me to sit up and move towards the head, dusting my back off as I went.
Werther still had his hand on the man’s throat and I could see the muscles working against it as he tried frantically to swallow. Werther couldn’t do a lot else, what with his other hand keeping an arm locked up, so I placed a hand on one side of the man’s head and stuck the knuckle of my index finger into the nerve point under the ear, the mandibular angle, right where the neck and the jaw meet. I held it there for a second before pressing, and leaned in so that only he could hear me.
‘I want you to listen to me very carefully,’ I whispered, just loud enough for him to hear. ‘I’m going to dig my knuckle into your nerve point unless you open your mouth, and it’s going to be the most painful thing you’ve ever felt. It’s going to feel like I’m sticking a hot needle into your neck.’
Now please don’t think I was being cruel. It’s been proven that if you set people up for pain before using a nerve point, the anticipation makes it hurt far more and you get the result you want with less chance of harm to the person. That was the safest and easiest way to get him to open his mouth and not swallow the package, which I could just make out as a white lump behind his teeth.
The man looked at me and then tried to turn his head away, which I took to mean that he wasn’t playing ball, so I dug the knuckle in hard, shouting, ‘Open your mouth, open your mouth NOW!’
I held it there for a few seconds, and his body went rigid as the pain shot through him. I’ve had it done to me in training and it really is horrible; it feels like your head is going to explode, so I felt more than a little sympathy for him as I did it, despite knowing that I was hurting him far less than I would have if I’d been hitting him.
His teeth remained firmly closed, so I released the pressure. There’s no point keeping it on if it doesn’t work, that’s torture, and I think the human rights people have an article or two that deal with that.
Steve Warnham, still dealing with the crowd but close enough to overhear what was happening, turned at that point and called out in a voice pitched to carry to everyone watching: ‘Please sir, open your mouth; we’re concerned that you may have heroin or crack cocaine in your mouth and if you swallow it you could put yourself in danger. We can’t allow that to happen for your own safety!’
Someone give that man a fucking medal, I thought, as I saw the crowd nodding and muttering to each other.
Adam was still shouting at the guy to open his mouth, foolishly trying to reach into it armed only with a pair of purple rubber gloves. Our prisoner unclenched his teeth just long enough to bite Werther hard on the finger, then clamped them together again and tried to laugh.
I drove my knuckle back into the pressure point, hoping to surprise him into opening his mouth again – but it didn’t work, as he went rigid once more against the pain but somehow held on. I released the pressure, getting frustrated but knowing that if I kept going, I would only be doing so in revenge for Werther’s finger.
His body relaxed as I let go, but Adam had pulled his hand away from its place on the throat to nurse his bleeding finger, and the guy swallowed whatever was in his mouth, then began shouting about police brutality in a coarse south London accent.
Now that the excitement was over, I pulled a pair of handcuffs from my covert rig and slapped them on his wrists while Barker arrested him for the drugs in the car and assaulting Adam. A pair of uniforms hauled him upright and into the back of a waiting police van; just one of about seven marked units that had come in response to the call.
Barker motioned me over to a nearby wall once his charge was safely locked in the van, and I followed, glad to be moving away from the view of the crowd. You never know who’s watching and it isn’t unknown for some of our ‘customers’ to try and take phone pictures of plain-clothed officers so that they can pass them on to anyone interested.
‘There was another one who got away,’ he began, massaging the wrist that had been keeping a lock on the prisoner. ‘He was a white male, about twenty-five, with a horizontal stripy top. I think it was George Ludlow.’
My ears pricked up at this little titbit of information. Ludlow had started off as a smalltime user, but recently had started working for Davey. ‘Oh really? Which way did he go?’ I asked, now eager to go out and search.
‘He ran off towards Bear Road, but I was too busy to see where he went after that.’
‘I’m not bloody surprised; he was a handful. Any idea who gnasher is?’ I nodded in the direction of the van.
‘Nope, never seen him before, which is unusual. Adam thinks he might have nicked him on the seafront a couple of years ago but he’s not sure.’
That didn’t surprise me. Then, there seemed to be a pecking order with drug dealing in Brighton. Either you were local and you did what you liked, you were from Liverpool and you stabbed local people until they let you do what you liked, or you were from London and you started dealing shit on the beach in the evenings until you got caught. If you managed to keep your mouth shut, you progressed to being driven around the city by a user who was paid in heroin, delivering to phone boxes and alleyways across Brighton. That way you could just claim that you were getting a lift and knew nothing about the drugs in the car. Sadly, the British justice system tended to believe this little lie on a regular basis and people got away with it in droves.
I turned my attention back to Barker, who was trying to light a cigarette with shaking fingers. I aided him by plucking the cigarette out of his mouth and placing it in my own.
He scowled and drew another from the crumpled packet. ‘Help yourself.’
‘Thanks, I did.’ I lit them both, then headed back to my car with a final wave, palming the cigarette so that no one would see and complain.
I remembered to turn the flashers off before I pulled away and then drove in the direction that Ludlow had been seen fleeing. He lived on The Avenue in Moulsecoomb, and I figured if I knew him like I thought I did, he would run straight back home to his constantly pregnant girlfriend. I was fairly sure they wouldn’t mind me stopping in for a little cup of tea and a chat and, if they did, well I’d just have to find a reason to arrest him.
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