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: 2018-11-02

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

Loved The Follow? Enjoy the Next Thriller in the Gareth Bell Series …

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.

5

Ludlow is a chubby Brightonian born and bred – if you factored in the possibility of chimp DNA. He’s about five foot ten with heavy jowls that he doesn’t need to shave and a mess of ginger curls that make him stand out like a sore thumb wherever he is. Not surprising really that one glimpse had allowed Barker to recognize him as he ran away.

As I drove along the Lewes Road towards The Avenue, I spotted my quarry staggering past the university building on the far side of the road. He looked exhausted, his large gut heaving and his cheeks redder than his hair. Obviously being a dealer didn’t allow much time for the gym. I pulled into the road that he would be crossing shortly and got out of the car, making sure that my baton and spray were within easy reach. Wearing a covert harness is all well and good but I frequently forget which armpit is sheltering which piece of kit and I really didn’t want to pull out my radio instead of my baton if he got feisty.

I leaned casually against a wall, flicking my cigarette butt into the road, missing the drain I’d been aiming for by several inches. Walking over and scuffing it into the drain was the perfect excuse I needed to bump into Ludlow and, as he apologized and went to walk around me, it was the work of seconds to throw my arm around his throat and put him in a chokehold.

‘Police, keep your hands out in front of you,’ I growled into his ear.

He immediately tried to use his weight to throw me off balance, but I sawed my arm sideways across his Adam’s apple. His hands flew up to grab my arm as I cut off the circulation and breathing, fingers scrabbling at me in panic. He began to make pathetic retching sounds and I released the pressure just enough that he could breathe again, but not enough for him to try and slip away.

‘Now we’re going to walk back to the wall, and then you’re going to sit down like a good boy so that we can have a little chat, okay?’

He nodded, and I walked him out of public view down an alleyway between two houses. Once safely hidden, I released him, and he moved away from me faster than you’d expect.

‘You can’t do that to me. That’s illegal. You could have killed me!’ he whined, rubbing the vivid red marks on his neck.

‘Tough shit. You shouldn’t have run away from the car. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t nick you for possession.’

He looked around as if trying to find a way to escape, and I saw that he was shaking in fear. ‘You can’t nick me! I’ve got a kid on the way and if I go away again I won’t get to see it. I’m on licence; if I get nicked I go down.’ A look of animal cunning crossed his face, clear for all to see. I can only assume he was a terrible poker player. ‘Besides, I wasn’t even there, you can’t prove nothing!’

‘That’s a double negative, George, it means I can prove something. Anyway, we’ve got a full description of a fat ginger tosser in a stripy top running away from the scene. You see any other fat ginger tossers round here, George?’

He looked down at his top, as if only noticing for the first time that horizontal hoops in fact didn’t make you look slimmer. ‘Look, you can’t talk to me like that. I’m gonna make a complaint. What’s your number?’

I almost said 999, but managed not to at the last second. Riling him even more wasn’t going to get what I wanted, despite the fact that I wasn’t quite sure what that was, yet. ‘Listen George, I won’t nick you. I wouldn’t want your kid to grow up without seeing its father once before social services take him away. That would just be cruel.’

He nodded as if I wasn’t being sarcastic. Bless him.

‘All I need is a little bit of information, George. Then, you can go back to your missus and no one needs to know about our little conversation. I’ll tell my lot that I couldn’t find anyone matching your description and you get away scot free. Fair?’

He considered it for a minute, eyeing me as if I was about to bite him.

‘What d’you wanna know?’

‘Davey,’ I began, but stopped when he backed away, shaking his head.

‘No fucking way I’m gonna say shit about Davey, no way!’

I sighed again and reached under my jacket for my handcuffs before suddenly remembering that they were on a prisoner on his way to custody. I kept my hand there anyway and said the immortal words: ‘George, I’m arresting you on suspicion of possession of class A drugs. It is necessary to arrest you to ensure a prompt and thorough investigation. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’ I smiled and stepped towards him, watching his face carefully as he weighed up the options. Finally, he put his hands up and slumped against the wall.

‘You promise no one’s gonna know?’

‘Scouts honour.’

‘Go on then. Ask. I don’t know much though. He don’t tell me much.’

I thought carefully. What did I want to know? And how would I use it if I found out anything useful? Suddenly a question sprang to mind.

‘How do you re-supply?’

‘I call a number and a car drops it off to me.’

‘The same car each time or different ones?’

‘Different, depends who’s on.’

‘Okay, when are you next going to re-supply?’

‘Tonight at about six.’

I thought furiously, wondering where exactly I was going with this. Was I really considering doing this on my own, without authority? The answer was yes. I was. I was supposed to be on restricted duties and there was no way that they would let me anywhere near Davey’s operation until I was back out on the streets officially. It would be a PR nightmare otherwise. After what had happened in court, it would be seen as harassment if Davey happened to be in the car making the drop. I doubted he would be but, like any good boss, occasionally he went along with the workers to make sure that everything was going well, and to remind the people in the lower echelons who the boss really was. But then, if all I was going to do was have a little chat with them, what harm could that really do?

‘Just a couple more questions. How many people are usually in the car?’

‘Only two. More than that and the pigs notice.’

‘What, like we did down the road? So where are you going to re-supply tonight?’

He shook his head. ‘I can’t tell you that. If you turn up after what happened today, they’ll know I talked and they’ll fucking kill me. No way.’

I realized that I’d overplayed my hand and tried to reassure him. ‘I’m not going to turn up, mate, I just wanted to make sure you were telling me the truth, that’s all. Don’t worry about it. I’ll let you get on home now. Remember, not a word about this conversation from either of us, okay?’

He looked at me suspiciously, then lumbered off down the alleyway at what he laughingly thought was a run. My gran could have caught him and she’s been dead for years.

I waited until he was long gone, which took some time, before heading back to the car. I had a plan in mind, but I knew that first I would need to explain to Kev how I had been caught up in a drug bust while I was supposed to be at the hospital visiting Jimmy. Although he’s as relaxed as supervision can get without falling over backwards, there are some things that even he has a hard time believing, and I knew if I wanted to have my little chinwag with the dealers that night then I needed to look whiter than white.

6

I dropped the car back without getting grilled for my part in the earlier arrest, Kev understanding that you don’t ignore an assistance shout, no matter what.

I faffed around the office for the rest of the day getting no real work done, and studiously avoiding looking at any kind of intelligence that related to Davey or his business. I didn’t want anyone thinking that I was going to go out looking for revenge, and I was fairly sure that at least one person in the office would have been tasked to keep an eye on me.

I was more than a little nervous about my plan for that evening, especially on the back of the evidence being swapped. It would take very little for someone to decide that it was me who had done the fiddling and haul me in for questioning. If anyone saw or even suspected that I was going to have a chat with some of Davey’s boys, I would be for it.

Four o’clock rolled around with agonizing slowness and the moment the hands hit the right position I barrelled out of the office and down into the car park.

Fifteen minutes later I was home and getting changed, selecting my wardrobe with care. I chose a pair of faded blue jeans, an old beige jacket that I never wore but was currently vaguely in fashion and a plain blue T-shirt.

I drove across town to The Avenue, the day still warm enough that I began to wish I hadn’t worn the jacket. Late afternoon sunlight streamed in through the windscreen, a golden glow suffusing the air and making me feel as if I were trapped in amber. All too soon I was parked up outside Moulsecoomb Library, facing the end of The Avenue with a clear view of Ludlow’s house. When I say Ludlow’s, I mean the council’s, as God forbid should a drug dealer pay unsubsidized rent, that just wouldn’t be on. Instead, our taxes go towards paying for their umpteen kids and their bloated wives, getting fat off the fruits of our labour while hubby is out peddling death to desperate addicts. And my friends wonder why I’m so cynical.

As I sat there waiting patiently and trying to look as if I belonged, the nerves hit me again, far stronger than they had that morning at court. My palms were sweaty enough that I couldn’t have turned the wheel had I needed to and I had a lump in my throat the size of a melon. Part of me – a small part I might add – was telling me that I wasn’t going to achieve anything by doing this. I had a sudden fear that they would just laugh at me and tell me to piss off and that I should just drive back home and get on with my evening. I buried the nagging voice, concentrating instead on what I could say that would make them worried enough to stop dealing without actually threatening them. I couldn’t think of anything, but I’ve always done my best work on the fly and I was fairly confident that I would find something at the right moment.

Besides, if it all went wrong, I figured, I could book myself on duty. That’s the great thing about being a police officer. If you see something illegal while you’re off duty, you can deal with it and, technically, it puts you on duty. I’ll give you an example:

Say I’m down the pub with some mates and I bang into some bloke and spill his pint, so he takes a swing at me. At that point, I’m still off duty. If I swing back at him, I’m still off duty. But if I decide to arrest him instead, or if I identify myself as a police officer, I’m instantly on duty and covered by all the insurance and regulations that come with it.

So if it all went bent that night, I knew I would just tell the powers that be that I was out for a walk when I saw a suspicious vehicle and went to stop check it. They might not like it, but it was all legal and they wouldn’t be able to touch me. Hopefully.

An hour or so later, just as I was beginning to think about going home and eating something to calm my rumbling stomach, a green Nissan estate pulled up outside Ludlow’s house and beeped the horn. Subtle. I wrote down the registration, or the index as we call it in the police, for later use and sat up slightly straighter as tubby George waddled out of the house and up to the car, whereupon the passenger handed over a large package and took a roll of notes in exchange.

You might think that it’s a little unbelievable, being that blatant, but doing it in plain sight like that makes them more invisible than meeting in remote locations or taking Ludlow around the block in the car. Just another shady deal in Moulsecoomb.

The car pulled away, and I knew that the only way out of the estate was back past my position or down one of two side roads that I also had covered from where I sat. In a few moments my quarry drove back past me, heading north on the Lewes Road. I pulled out and followed, leaving two cars for cover between myself and the target vehicle.

I also drove in the other lane of the dual carriageway so that they wouldn’t see me unless they looked back and left, which drivers rarely do, even paranoid ones. I could see that there were two people in the car, both in the front, both male. Another bout of nerves hit me as I began to wonder if I was lying to myself and really I was looking for a fight to salve my wounded ego.

We carried on heading north for a few minutes, and I was nearly caught out as they did a sharp left turn into Wild Park and followed the gravel track that leads to the café. It was closed that time of night, so I could only assume that they were meeting someone else or picking up drugs from a stash point. I drove past and pulled up in a lay-by slightly further up the road before doubling back on foot with a choke chain held loosely in one hand.

I kept the chain in the car for emergencies, as it made a brutal weapon in close quarters but was totally legal to own and carry. It was also the perfect surveillance tool. How many people do you see walking in parks every day with a lead but no sign of a dog? Dozens, I’ll bet.

I ambled up the path, occasionally calling to my non-existent hound, and got up to the Nissan without so much as a raised eyebrow from the occupants. It was parked at the side of the café, well hidden from the main road with the engine off and both the windows wound down, while the occupants enjoyed what smelled like very good quality weed. As I drew nearer, I could see that the passenger was a man whom I knew well but who didn’t know me.

That’s the joy of my particular job: you know all the faces, places and cars, and no one recognizes you in turn unless you blow out on a surveillance job, and then you’re screwed. I’ve only done it once, but every time afterwards that my mark saw me in town he had shouted, ‘Copper!’ at the top of his voice so that everyone else would spot me. Sadly for him, he died of a heroin overdose a few weeks later, so it stopped being a problem. Had he not, I would have had to leave the unit and go back to uniform, or even change division.

So this particular chap, one Dave Budd by name, had been one of my nominal targets a few months before, which meant I knew more about him than his mother did, despite the fact we’d never met face to face.

He was known for drugs, violence, weapons and was on the sex offenders register for life after he sexually assaulted his five-year-old niece at a christening party last year. The driver was his brother, Billy, and if anything his record was worse. He was a distraction burglar, fooling old people into opening their doors so that he could check their meters and then robbing them blind.

On the odd occasion that they became suspicious, he would tie them up and beat them until they gave up their valuables. Somehow, he had only been given minor prison sentences so far, and the only reason we could think of was that he was a grass. Judges will sometimes shorten sentences if the defendant gives up useful information; although in Billy’s case it would have been more appropriate to ignore the information and throw him in the darkest hole we could find for as long as possible. He is also the father of the girl that Dave had assaulted, yet didn’t seem to care, which is apparent by their relaxed attitude to each other.

Both brothers are in their late thirties and hard to tell apart. They both have the same lank brown hair and squirrel-like faces, and are both five foot nine or so and wiry rather than skinny. The easiest way to tell them apart is that Billy’s nose has been broken so many times that it sticks out in several directions at once and he tends to grow a beard, if you can call it that. Other than that, they could be twins.

I got right up to the car, leaning into the driver’s window and smiling before Billy turned to look at me.

‘’Scuse me, lads,’ I asked in a cheerful tone, ‘you haven’t seen a springer spaniel come past, have you?’

Billy breathed a lungful of smoke into my face, and the smell of grass mixed with the odour of rotten teeth was almost enough to make me gag. ‘Police dog, is it, officer?’

So much for anonymity. I tried to bluff it instinctively, despite the fact I was about to show out anyway. ‘I’m sorry? What the hell are you talking about?’

He laughed at my miserable attempt at dissembling. ‘I saw you in the court this morning, mate, running out with your tail between your legs. Didn’t know pigs’ tails could do that!’

He and his brother both laughed, confident that I would be helpless to do anything.

As they laughed, something inside me settled, my nervousness washed away and was replaced by a cold anger that drove out all other feeling. ‘Step out of the fucking car, Billy, and don’t do anything stupid. We need to have a word.’

‘Why, you going to hit me with a rubber baton?’ he asked, sliding his right hand down the side of his seat surreptitiously.

‘No, mate, this is a personal call. I’m not carrying. I just want a chat.’ I opened my jacket to show that I was unarmed, and he didn’t seem to register the lead in my hand. ‘Keep your hands where I can see them and get out of the car.’

I moved back to give myself what we call a reactionary gap, so was fairly unsurprised when he hurled the door open and dove at me with a knife clenched in his right fist. I’d moved back quickly enough to avoid the door and, as he came out knife first, I kicked the opening door as hard as I could, slamming it shut on his arm. He howled in pain and dropped the knife, his arm hanging at an angle that told me it was broken.

I didn’t have time to care, as his brother leapt out of the car and skidded across the bonnet towards me holding a steering lock in his hand. I stepped back again and waited until he swung the weapon at me, ducking the blow aimed at my head and whipping the chain I held across his leg, hitting the nerve point on the outside of the thigh. He dropped as if stunned, and I stamped on his wrist hard enough that I heard the bones grinding together. He screamed in pain and let go of the steering lock, which I kicked away before taking the other foot off his wrist.

Both of them were crying in pain, and Billy was fumbling for his phone with his left hand. I reached down and took it from him, then moved to the car and took the keys out of the ignition as a precaution.

Ignoring their cries, I raised my voice to be heard. ‘Right, gentlemen, now that I have your attention I would very much like to know where the drugs are.’

Billy glared up at me, his face a mask of pain. ‘You’re fucking going down for this you wanker, you’re fucking dead!’

I smiled and shook my head. ‘No, mate, I’m not. I’ve got a dozen witnesses that clearly put me at a police leaving do tonight, and you know how we all stick together.’

It was a barefaced lie but I suspected that they were too preoccupied to tell. Hopefully, they also couldn’t see the horror I was feeling at what I’d just done. This was supposed to be a warning chat, not a brutal attack that left them broken and bloody. I’d slipped across the line without thinking, and the realization was making me shake more than the adrenaline ever could. I took a deep breath and forced my voice to come out steadily. ‘So you can either tell me where the drugs are or I can shove this chain up your nose and pull out the pathetic thing you call a brain. Your choice.’

Billy began to shake as shock set in, his arm already turning a dark purple and swelling badly. ‘Get me a fucking ambulance, I’m dying!’ he blubbed, clutching the injured arm.

‘Tell me where the drugs are and you can have your phone back,’ I countered. I needed something to show for this, otherwise I would be arrested without hesitation and my career would be in tatters.

‘Under the car, they’re under the fucking car, okay?’

I nodded and bent down to check under the car just in time to avoid being brained by Dave, who had recovered enough to retrieve the steering lock and swing it at the place my head had been a moment before. I back-kicked him, landing my foot right in his nuts, and he folded like a deckchair, collapsing with an oof! and a clatter before curling into a ball with both hands clutching his groin.

Once I was sure he was down and staying there, I rolled onto my side and looked under the car. Sure enough, there was a box welded onto the chassis with a combination lock on it. They were becoming more and more popular, as not many officers would look under a car on a stop check or even if the vehicle was taken away to be examined.

‘Code?’ I snapped at Billy, who was watching me with hatred stamped all over his skinny face.

‘Three one five,’ he replied, and I clicked the rollers into position. The side fell open instantly and I whistled as I pulled out a couple of bags of heroin about the size of a hen’s egg each. ‘Looks like you boys were planning to be busy for the next few days. Instead, you’ll have to spend them in a cell. Hard life.’

Billy looked down at me, confusion on his face. ‘I thought you said you was off duty. So how you gonna explain this? You’ve fucked yourself, mate!’ He managed to grin through the pain. The fear that flashed through me must have hit my face as I realized that he was right.

Even if I did book myself back on duty, I could never explain why I was in the park with a dog lead, no dog, and just happened to stumble across two of Davey’s lads. After the events of that morning in court, inference would be drawn, no matter what I said, and I would likely be out of a job and up on charges of GBH. I thought furiously for a second, trying to find a way out of the mess I had just created and finally an idea sprang to mind, stupid and dangerous as it was.

Scrambling to my feet, I carefully wiped my fingerprints off the phone and keys before handing them back. I held up the packages of drugs. ‘I’m going to hold on to this for insurance purposes. If there’s one sniff of you talking to the police, it appears in the front office with your prints all over it.’ So saying, I took hold of Billy’s injured arm and pressed his thumb firmly onto the plastic wrapping of one of the bags, ignoring the yelp of pain he produced.

‘Tell Davey that this stops or he’s going to find that every copper in Brighton will be looking for an excuse to take him down. Not that they don’t have one already.’

I put the packages in my pocket and scrambled up the roadside and into the bushes, heading back towards my car. Bad enough that I’d parked my own car nearby, but if anyone saw me walking back to it from here, I was as good as done for. Nausea hit me as I lost sight of the Nissan, and I paused for a moment, taking deep breaths to stop myself from throwing up and leaving chunks of my DNA spattered all over the grass. How could I have been so stupid? I pushed the thought to the back of my mind and focused on getting away clean. I would worry about the consequences later.

I waited in the bushes until the road was quiet, then darted to the car and pulled away quickly, turning left up Coldean Lane and losing myself on the A27 before turning off into Hove. My thoughts were churning, almost making me crash several times, but I managed to keep control. After what felt like a year of constant glances over my shoulder for blue lights, I finally parked up a few streets away from my house as the realization hit me.

What the fuck had I done? I’d assaulted two people, one of them a clear GBH, and stolen illegal drugs to the street value of, well, I wasn’t sure but it was one hell of a lot when I’d only been expecting a few wraps. I may as well hand in my warrant card now and get it over with. A feeling of sick exhaustion swept over me as I wondered what I was going to do with the packages. I pulled them out of my jacket and looked at them, trying to gauge their worth. If it was uncut heroin, it would probably be worth about ten grand, less if it had been cut already. I didn’t want to keep it, that would mean a jail sentence if I was caught, but I couldn’t just throw it away. It was my only leverage over the Budds after my ruthless attack on them.

An idea came to me and I almost ran from my car to the house and went straight through to the kitchen. I looked out the back at the garden next door, wild and unkempt where mine was neat and uncluttered. The house next door had been empty for weeks, and by the number of ‘to let’ signs clustered sadly by the front gate, I guessed that it wasn’t likely to be occupied any time soon.

I opened the back door and stepped out into my yard, looking around to make sure that none of the overlooking windows had people in them. Once I was sure it was clear, I rolled over the top of the flint stone wall into next door’s garden. The grass on the lawn came up to my knees and there was a buddleia that was threatening to dwarf the small shed in the back corner. I moved to the shed, struggling against the grass that pulled at my feet as if trying to stop me from intruding further into its domain. I eventually reached the shed, a small wooden affair perched on cracked and broken paving slabs.

With a little effort, I managed to lift one of the slabs and scoop out enough earth to hide the drugs, settling the stone back on top and scuffing the grass around the edges until I couldn’t see the result of my labours anymore. Satisfied, I climbed back over the wall and had just finished washing my hands when the doorbell rang.

I hadn’t been expecting anybody and I began to get nervous as I went to the front door. If this was a salesman, he was going to get a bloody good earful. I opened the door to a man and a woman in smart clothes standing on the top step. Everything about them said police and I took a step back in alarm.

‘Can I help you?’ I asked suspiciously.

The man stepped forward, holding up a Sussex Police warrant card. ‘Gareth?’ he asked, and the pit in my stomach yawned wide enough to swallow a battleship.

‘Yes,’ I answered, trying to stop my knees from shaking.

‘I’m sorry, there’s no easy way to say this. My name’s DC Steve Barnett from PSD Ops. I’m arresting you on suspicion of perverting the course of justice. We need you to come with us.’

7

They took me to Worthing custody instead of Brighton: a small mercy as I know far fewer people on West Downs division. The woman, Andrea Brown, was driving while Barnett sat in the back with me as if I was a common criminal.

They hadn’t searched me or cuffed me, but Barnett was clearly ready for me to try something, sitting half turned towards me with his hands within striking distance just in case. For the first ten minutes or so they had tried to make light conversation, but my fear was making me snappy, so they gave up and we carried on in silence.

I’m honestly not sure that I can describe how I felt at that moment. Everything inside me felt tight, as if my body was squeezing in on itself, and I couldn’t stop shaking from the shock. I felt angry, sad, scared, betrayed and exhausted all at the same time and thoughts kept popping unwarranted into my head. Did they know about the Budds and this was just a cover to get me in and throw questions at me with no evidence, what we called a fishing trip? Had someone pointed the finger at me about the knife going walkies? Or worse still, did Davey have someone inside PSD that had authorized my arrest as a final coup de grâce? It didn’t bear thinking about, unlikely as it was.

About a hundred years later, we pulled into the long drive that led to Centenary House in Worthing, the police station and custody centre. We parked by the doors, and Barnett let me out of the child-locked door and into the custody centre. Brown followed close behind me in case I had any last-minute ideas about making a break for freedom, and I felt a chill as the heavy metal door slid closed behind me, cutting off the real world.

My usual luck held. Standing on the bridge was DC Helen Watkins, who had been on my intake when I joined. Great. Not only did she have the biggest mouth in the force but we hadn’t got on from the moment we met and our relationship at that point could have been described as antagonistic at best. One look was all she needed to work out what was happening, and I saw the corners of her mouth quirk up in a poorly suppressed smile as she turned away and left the bridge. I guessed that in less than an hour, the whole force would know what had happened to me.

The bridge is a raised platform behind which sit three sergeants, separated from the prisoners they’re booking in by three feet of fake marble cladding. The floor nonslip, dirty green and the walls painted off-white, broken up by the occasional green-framed window. All in all, it’s just like any other custody centre in Sussex, bleak and depressing.

I was ushered in front of the only free sergeant, a man in his mid-forties with brown hair and the gut that inevitably comes with long hours behind a desk. Barnett gave the circumstances of arrest to the serious-looking man behind the desk, who eyed me with undisguised sympathy.

‘Gareth, do you understand why you’ve been arrested?’

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

‘Okay, you know your rights. Do you want a solicitor or anyone told that you’re here?’

I thought for a moment. ‘Yeah, can you tell the Federation? Hopefully they’ll get me a solicitor.’

He nodded and made some notes on my custody record. The Federation are the closest thing we’re allowed to a union as police officers, for all the good it does us. Normally, they’re about as much use as a chocolate teapot, but I paid £17 a month in case of situations like that and I was determined to get my money’s worth.

Barnett spoke to me while the sergeant was busy. ‘Look, we’re pretty much ready to go; you’ll be in and out in an hour.’

I raised one eyebrow but didn’t deign to comment. It doesn’t do any good to get too friendly with PSD; they see it as a sign of guilt.

The sergeant turned back to me, a thick wodge of paper in his hand. ‘We’re putting you on a paper custody record mate,’ he told me, ‘so you won’t show up on the system if anyone looks, okay?’

I nodded, grateful that the whole force wouldn’t be able to read what was happening to me like they would on an electronic record. I was taken down to a cell and searched rather than it being done in full view of the crowd that had gathered, presumably tipped off by Helen. My belt and shoes were taken, as was everything in my pockets. I was given a blanket and a cup of coffee before the door slammed shut, cutting me off even further from the outside world and leaving me alone with nothing but my fear for company.

I hate police cells, I always have. They’re small, grey, miserable and there’s a camera high up in the corner watching your every move, even when you have a shit. I slumped on the raised platform they laughingly called a bed, feeling the cold of the fake marble through the thin plastic mattress. I drew the blanket up to my neck in a useless effort to still the trembling that still affected me.

The minutes turned into hours and stretched away in a timeless blur. There was nothing to keep me occupied except my own dark thoughts and I went through almost every sour emotion you can think of, from rage, to fear, to despair. I knew that I hadn’t done anything wrong, at least not that they’d arrested me for, but being nicked is one of the worst things a police officer can face. No matter how innocent or guilty you are, rumours will spring up and a reputation that can take years to build is shattered in an instant.

Not only that, but PSD actually have targets to meet. They have to arrest, suspend and charge a certain number of officers per month or explain why they haven’t. Personally I think it’s disgusting, the same as giving targets to uniformed officers. How do you quantify the three hours spent with an elderly woman who’s been burgled, waiting for her family to show up? It doesn’t tick any boxes but I think it’s just as important as chasing down criminals, if not more so.

The same goes for PSD. What if there aren’t any coppers breaking the law? Well, they just arrest them anyway on any kind of flimsy evidence, in the hope that they’ll get lucky and find something to stick you with. I knew that if they’d had any idea what I’d just done they’d be dancing with glee, and their figures would soar. To be honest, I couldn’t help but think that I deserved it. Coppers should keep the peace, not break it. I’d crossed a line and I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to cross back over and carry on being one of the good guys.

I closed my eyes, seeking refuge in sleep that refused to come. Too many things were running through my head, keeping me awake and worried. A couple of times I got so scared that I nearly threw up, but managed to stop myself before I actually started retching.

Some indefinable time later the hatch to my cell slid open and a round, bearded face appeared at the slot. I heard the keypad outside being pressed and then the door clunked open, spilling bright light in from the corridor and making me realize that at some point they had dimmed the lights in my cell.

A portly inspector in a pristine uniform waddled into the cell, a smile fighting its way through the beard. ‘Gareth? I’m Inspector Reg Turner. You’ve been here for six hours, so I have to do a review. Do you need anything?’

Six hours? I figured I must have fallen asleep at some point, as they should have offered me food before then, despite the fact that I wasn’t in the least bit hungry.

‘I could do with some water; my mouth is dry as a bone.’

He nodded. ‘I’ll get you some. I don’t know why they’re taking so long; apparently they’re searching your house with the specialist search unit, so they should have been done hours ago. Unless you live in a mansion?’

I couldn’t raise a smile at his attempt at humour, much as I wanted to. ‘No, it’s only a two-bedroom. I could search it in an hour by myself; my ex-wife took most of the furnishings. And the bitch took the cat.’

He made an ah noise, as if trying to sympathize. I didn’t want his sympathy, I wanted to go home.

‘Your solicitor has been informed of what’s happening but they’re not going to come until the morning now. My advice is to get your head down and get some rest. Do you want any food?’

I shook my head. ‘No, just some sleep and the codes to all the doors.’

He laughed politely and swung the door shut as he left. So much for solidarity; it could have been my imagination but he seemed like he couldn’t get away quickly enough. Muttering to myself, I settled down and drifted into an uneasy sleep.

8

I was woken by the sound of a custody assistant opening the hatch in my cell door and, for a moment, I thought I was dreaming. Then I remembered where I was and the fear squeezed my heart again in greeting.

‘Do you want breakfast?’ a male voice asked through the hatch.

‘Uh yeah, is it a buffet or do I pay by the plate?’

‘Funny man. You want cornflakes or all-day breakfast?’

I should have known better than to order the breakfast. When it arrived, it was a microwaved mess consisting of potato wedges and baked beans and tasting like cardboard. Still, it was hot and filling, even if it did have all the nutritional content of sandpaper.

I did the best I could to wash away the stink of sleeping in my clothes, using the tiny sink that sat just above my toilet. It wasn’t the smallest en suite I’d ever had, but it came close.

I was just sticking a wet hand down my trousers to wash away the worst of the sweat when the hatch opened. I pulled my hand out guiltily, despite the fact that I’d only been washing. Masturbation is one of the most common pastimes for people in the cells and I didn’t want to be thought of as following that particular herd.

A very tired-looking Steve Barnett looked at me through the gap, and the door opened to reveal an equally tired-looking Angela Brown standing next to him.

‘Morning, Gareth, your solicitor is here. We’ve given disclosure and now she wants to speak to you.’

I nodded and walked out into the corridor, letting them lead me to a private consultation room. Inside the room was a woman in her early forties with dark curly hair and a serious manner. She was wearing a knee-length skirt with a matching jacket and cream blouse and her manner shouted competence at me as she shooed the other officers out. That done, she stuck out a hand and introduced herself as Kerry Nielson.

I took the proffered hand, shaking it firmly. ‘So,’ I said, sitting down opposite the chair she took for herself, ‘on a scale of one to ten, how shafted am I?’

She looked down at her notes, studying them intently. I could only assume that they were from the disclosure, which is where the police tell the solicitor most of the evidence they have, while holding a little back to ‘test for truth’.

‘Well I really don’t think that they have a lot to go on; it’s pretty shaky stuff. The reason you’ve been arrested is that on record you’re the last person to have touched the knife which has now gone missing, making you the most likely person to have swapped the evidence.’

I shook my head. ‘Look, I would have had to have done that at scene, still covered in Jimmy’s blood and in front of five other officers. Don’t you think someone would have noticed?’

She looked at me across the table. ‘Yes, Gareth, I do. So do they, probably, but from what I’m picking up they need to show that they’re doing something and the first logical step was to arrest you.’

I rose and began to pace the room. ‘Okay, the first thing I want to make clear is that I didn’t tamper with the evidence. Jimmy is my friend and my partner and there’s no way I would ever do something to stop the son of a bitch that did this to him from going down.’

‘I believe you, really I do, but we have to prepare for what they’re going to ask you in interview.’

I stopped pacing to look at her. ‘All I can do is tell the truth. If that isn’t good enough I don’t know what is.’

She smiled at me reassuringly. ‘I’m sure that will be fine, but just so I don’t have any surprises I need you to go through what happened that day, okay?’

I nodded and sat down, letting her grill me for about twenty minutes about the day Jimmy was stabbed. I was impressed with her manner as her sharp mind drove me to remember details that I’d almost forgotten. Once we had been through it all a good three times, she judged us ready for interview and we left the room to see my captors waiting impatiently in the corridor.

‘Ready? Good.’ Barnett could hardly wait to open the interview room door and gesture us inside.

The room was set up with the huge tape machine against the far wall and a table by the near wall surrounded by four chairs. Barnett sat and tried to make pleasant conversation, while Brown filled out tape labels with my custody number and got their file ready.

A few minutes later, Brown had everything prepared and pressed the button on the large tape machine. It buzzed annoyingly for a few seconds, and then the tapes began rolling. Brown began speaking, her clear voice echoing in the small room.

‘It is 08.37 hours on Wednesday, the 14th of May 2008. We are in an interview room at Worthing custody centre. I am DC Angela Brown, DB429, and the other officer present is …’

Barnett chimed in, looking bored. ‘DC Steve Barnett, CB776.’

Brown took the lead back. ‘Thank you. Also present is …’

‘Kerry Nielsen, solicitor for PC Bell.’

‘Thank you. Can you tell me your full name and date of birth, please?’ This to me, who was beginning to feel slightly left out.

‘PC Gareth Bell, CB925; 7th September 1976.’

I probably shouldn’t have added my rank and warrant number, but I was still a copper and I wanted that made clear.

‘Thank you, Gareth. Do you agree that there is no one else present in the room?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay, I’m going to caution you now. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand the caution?’

‘I should damn well hope so,’ I blurted before remembering I was on tape.

Angela smiled at me in understanding.

‘Okay, the reason you have been arrested is that yesterday, in court, during the trial of Quentin Davey, it was shown that evidence vital to the case had been removed and replaced with something else. Namely, exhibit GB/250308/1355, a black-handled knife which had either been removed or was never placed in the tube, and instead a rubber knife was found there. The records show that you were the last person that touched the unsealed tube. What can you tell me about that?’

Just thinking about it made me angry and my carefully planned answers evaporated as my emotions took over. ‘It’s a travesty, that’s what it is! That piece of crap stabbed my mate in front of me and somehow he paid someone off to swap the evidence over. I had no idea that it had happened. Do you really think that I would stand up in court against him if I’d tampered with the evidence? And how am I supposed to have done that if there were five other officers watching me when I put the knife in the tube?’

Angela looked slightly put out by my outburst. ‘That’s what we’re trying to find out, Gareth. So you’re saying that when you seized the knife, you put it in the tube and sealed it, is that correct?’

‘Yes, of course it is!’

‘Okay, I’m just trying to get things straight in my own head, there’s no need to get angry.’

‘No need to get angry? No need to get angry? You’ve arrested me and accused me of tampering with the evidence that would have convicted the bastard who stabbed Jimmy! How am I supposed to feel? He’s my best mate, I’ve known him for years and we’re completely loyal to each other. Not that I’d expect you worms from PSD to understand that, always looking for excuses to shop in another officer. Listen carefully, I’m not going to repeat myself. I had nothing to do with the evidence going missing. If I find out who did, I’m going to drag them in here by the hair and hand them to you. Other than that, I have nothing more to say.’

I crossed my arms and sat back. Who the hell did they think they were to imply that I’d had anything to do with something that would hurt Jimmy? I glared at my interviewers across the table, daring them to challenge me.

Angela tried to sound calming, despite the colour in her cheeks and the annoyance showing clearly in her eyes. ‘So you’re saying that you won’t answer anymore questions on this matter, is that correct?’

I just stared, knowing full well how frustrating it was as the interviewing officer to have nothing but silence on the tape.

Barnett leaned forward, taking his hand from the pepper spray it had strayed to during my outburst. ‘Come on, Gareth, we’re only trying to find out what happened. You can’t blame us for that. We’re trying to help Jimmy.’

I stared at the wall behind his head as I counted silently to ten. They tried a few more times, but I was having none of it, and at 08.43 hours they wrapped up the interview. Six minutes was probably the shortest PSD interview ever, but I didn’t feel particularly special as I was led back to the consultation room and left there with my solicitor.

When we were alone I looked at Kerry, trying to gauge her mood.

‘Uh, look, I’m sorry about that but this is bullshit and they know it. They’re just wasting time in the hopes of an easy outcome while the person that did it is laughing at us.’

She sighed and shuffled her notes. ‘We all know that but I really don’t think you helped yourself in there. You don’t respond well to pressure, do you?’

‘Actually, I do. It’s just bullshit that makes me lose my rag.’

‘I see. Well, all we can do is wait and see what happens. I can only assume that you’ll be suspended pending further investigation. With something this serious at least we can hope for a short bail date.’

I didn’t really listen to anything past the word ‘suspended’. My stomach tied itself up in knots again as I thought about the grief that Davey had wrought. Every time I thought the slimy little bastard had gone too far, he somehow managed to go still further. He couldn’t have had a better result if he’d planned it this way.

A few minutes later I was hauled in front of the custody sergeant again. This time he had a bail notice for me. I was to return to Worthing custody at 11.00 a.m. the Wednesday after next. Kerry had been right about the short date, usually bail was for a month or more while they, or should I say we, tried to put together a convincing case. Kerry said goodbye to me at the doors and after taking my mobile number she drove off, leaving me with my arresting officers.

‘You’re okay getting back to Hove I take it, mate?’ Barnett asked, his voice sweet as he turned and closed the door, shutting me outside with no hint of remorse.

Cursing under my breath, I began the long walk back to the train station, adding Barnett to the mental list I keep of people who will get their comeuppance come judgement day.

9

Two hours later I was sitting at home in my front room, enjoying the space that I hadn’t refilled since my ex-wife, Lucy, had taken all of the furniture, apart from the sofa and my widescreen TV. I flicked idly through the channels, unable to concentrate on anything in particular as I tried to ignore the frustration that was nagging at me.

They had taken my warrant card before they chucked me out of custody and I felt more than a little naked without it. It had been a constant companion for eight years, a shield that I could use to help people without being dragged through the court system myself. Some use it had turned out to be.

My phone rang for the fourth time since I’d been back and I didn’t even bother to take it out of my pocket, knowing it would be Kev Sands trying to make sure I was okay. I couldn’t face talking to him right then; I felt like I might dissolve into tears if anyone showed me the slightest sympathy.

Eventually the ringing stopped, and I got up to go into the kitchen, tripping over the worn patch in the grey carpet that I kept meaning to get around to replacing. One day. I’d intended to make a cup of tea but one look at the mess I’d left the kitchen in put me off. I’d been working so much recently that I had been literally dumping stuff on the worktops and running and it looked like a group of students had moved in. Dishes and takeaway boxes littered the worktops and the sink was piled high with dirty crockery. Just looking at it depressed me even more. I grabbed my jacket from the end of the banister and headed out, not sure where I was going but needing to get away.

I got into the car and drove on autopilot, fairly unsurprised when I ended up sitting outside my dad’s bungalow on Farm Hill in Woodingdean, where he’s lived alone since my mother died of cancer ten years ago. It’s a pleasant street, set back from the main road and dotted with a mixture of houses and bungalows that stretch up the hill towards the fields that separate the village from the A27.

I got out of the car and crunched up the gravel driveway, hearing Lily – my dad’s German shepherd – begin barking as I intruded on her territory. I walked up the side of the bungalow, past the half-finished shed that has been in that state since before I joined the job, and was greeted at the back gate by a whirling dervish of black-and-tan fur. Lily’s lips were pulled back to show her impressive teeth as she barked and snarled, but we knew each other of old and I knew that she was just showing off. As soon as I was through the gate, she turned the snarls into little yaps as she jumped up, trying to growl and lick my face at the same time.

True to form, my dad was ignoring the noise, trusting Lily to get rid of anyone who wasn’t welcome, no matter how many times I told him to listen to her just in case. I tried the back door handle and found it unlocked. Sometimes I wished that he would get burgled, just so that he’d take a little more care in future.

I kicked Lily’s football up the lawn, and she chased after it, grinding the leather with her back teeth as I walked into the kitchen. It was cleaner than mine and I set about figuring out the coffee machine as my dad finally came in from the front room to see who had invaded.

‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’ he asked, sounding old and tired.

‘Now there’s a story. Let me make coffee and I’ll tell you about it,’ I replied, turning to look at him over my shoulder.

He looked as tired as he sounded and had dark circles under his eyes, presumably from lack of sleep. He isn’t a tall man, only five foot six if he stretches, but he’s stocky, with a belly that has always inspired me to fight my genetics, most of which I have inherited from him. His shock of white hair was sticking out in all directions, the same as it always does, and several days’ worth of snowy stubble made him look older than his sixty years.

‘If you keep growing that beard, you’ll end up looking like Papa Smurf!’ I warned him, as the coffee machine finally yielded to my ministrations and began to make the right noises. ‘You having trouble sleeping still?’

He nodded, moving to the cupboards and getting out a couple of battered but serviceable ceramic mugs. ‘Yeah, I’ve been having the nightmares again.’

‘About Mum?’ She passed away while holding his hand, lying in a hospital bed with dozens of tubes coming out of her and he hasn’t been the same man since. When she died, something indefinable but vital went out of him at the same time. Then my brother Jake, already hooked on heroin, had disappeared without a trace, and it was a wonder the man hadn’t fallen apart completely.

‘Yeah. Anyway don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. What’s your news?’

More and more, my father had begun to live vicariously through me. He still worked when he felt like it, but he had made an absolute mint in the first dotcom explosion and he probably had more money squirreled away than I would earn in ten years. He’s always wanted to be a copper though, ever since he was a lad, and I had honestly thought he would cry with joy the day I passed out of Ashford Training School.

I sighed, dreading telling him my news, not wanting to disappoint him. ‘I think you’d better sit down before I tell you this one, Dad, it’s a biggie.’

He looked at me over the top of his glasses, a warning expression on his face. ‘You can stop treating me like I’m made of glass; I can read the papers as well as the next man. Probably better, seeing as the next man is you.’

I ignored his jibe, swallowing the echo of guilt I felt from having dropped out of my English degree so many years before. Although it has never bothered Dad, I felt like I had let Mum down. She had been so proud when her little boy got into university. Suddenly the words he had used actually registered with my brain. ‘Read the papers? Oh shit!’

He passed a folded copy of The Argus over to me while he took over coffee duty. The headline read, in massive letters:

POLICE OFFICER ARRESTED IN SHOCK ATTEMPTED MURDER EVIDENCE SWITCH!

It went on to explain in the article about the court case and the fact that one of the officers ‘who couldn’t be named for legal reasons’ had been arrested and bailed pending further enquiries. All the other officers in the case were named, and the lack of mine in print was a glaring indication of who they were talking about, to me at least. So much for keeping this one quiet.

‘You could have phoned to see if I was okay,’ I accused my dad, feeling hurt.

‘I did bloody phone you, twice! If you ever looked at the damn thing then maybe you’d know I called!’ he threw back at me as he delivered a steaming mug of coffee that suddenly I didn’t fancy, my stomach heaving as I read the rest of the article.

In a nutshell, it said that the police had screwed up in a case where a police officer had been stabbed and that, because of an evidence blunder, a notorious criminal had walked free.

It’s a good job most of the local criminals can’t read much more than the health warning on a cigarette packet; there’d be an open season on police otherwise.

I walked through into the lounge and sat down on the creaky old leather sofa, looking around the room and enjoying the sense of familiarity that took some of the sting out of my situation. The room hasn’t changed for years, the leather sofa accompanied by an ancientlooking leather recliner stacked up with cushions just the way Dad likes them. Dark wooden bookshelves line every available wall and at one end stands a dining table with four chairs around it, used only at Christmas and for the occasional poker nights.

A word of warning here, never, ever, play poker with my dad if you don’t want to go home broke. I swear he has a sixth sense when it comes to cards.

At the other end of the room stands a TV that dwarfs the small table it sits on. Last year on his birthday I bought him a widescreen plasma, which I suspect still sits in its box somewhere in the loft. He doesn’t believe in getting rid of things until they wear out and even then only when they can’t be fixed anymore. The whole room smells slightly of dog and books, which is actually quite a pleasant combination if you’ve grown up with it, which I had.

My dad came into the room juggling a plate of ginger creams, a bowl of peanuts and his mug of coffee. I waited until he got comfortable before I started talking.

‘So, I assume you can guess that I got arrested last night?’

He nodded, slurping his coffee noisily.

‘Well, they think I might have had something to do with the knife being replaced. I hope that I don’t need to tell you that I had nothing to do with it?’

The look he gave me told me everything I needed to know on that front.

‘Okay,’ I continued hastily, ‘well I told them where to stick it, basically, but I’ve been suspended and bailed out until the middle of the week after next. I’m not fucking happy.’

I try not to swear in front of my dad; he doesn’t mind but old habits die hard. Up until the age of eighteen I would get a smack round the head for anything worse than ‘bloody’.

He finished the ginger cream he was eating and stared off into space thoughtfully before looking back at me. ‘Is there any way that they can link you to anything that’s happened? I assume that this Davey chap was the one who managed to get the evidence lost?’

I nodded. ‘Yeah, he’s the one who must have done it. He was laughing at me in court before it came out but I’m the last person logged to have touched the knife.’

‘What about fingerprints, wouldn’t they have dusted the rubber knife?’

I’d already thought about that and came to a conclusion about it on the walk to the train station after my interview. ‘Well, PSD didn’t mention it, so I can only assume that they checked it for prints and didn’t find any. They probably neglected to disclose that so that there was more chance of me making an admission.’

Dad shook his head angrily. ‘They really are bastards, aren’t they? What did your sergeant, Kevin isn’t it, have to say about all of this?’

I finished my coffee just in time to avoid getting it spilled as Lily streaked into the room and threw herself on my lap. ‘I think he’s on my side,’ I said, fending the dog off, ‘but he has to try and stay as neutral as possible. The only link he has to the case is that he’s our supervisor. He wasn’t there that day until after the evidence had been bagged and Jimmy was en route to the hospital, so he’s in the clear, but if shit sticks to us it’ll stick to him as well by association, if he isn’t careful.’

Lily finally got the message and went off to hunt biscuits, leaving me brushing what looked like half her coat off my lap. Dad took pity and threw her one, which disappeared in a single gulp.

‘Well,’ he said, glancing at a picture of the family that hangs on the wall between bookcases, ‘I’m only glad your mother isn’t here or she’d be off down the PSD office dragging them around by the ear and shouting at them for being idiots!’

I smiled, knowing that he wasn’t far off the mark. ‘Yeah, well, in some ways I wish she was.’

We both lapsed into the awkward silence that springs up between us whenever Mum is mentioned. I’d been at university through the worst of it and carry a sense of guilt at not having been there that has never really faded, despite my dad’s best efforts to reassure me.

‘So what are you going to do?’ he asked, breaking the spell.

I sighed and shook my head. ‘I don’t know, Dad, I really don’t. All I can do is wait and see what happens, but I just feel so useless. I should be out hounding Davey’s every step but instead I’m sitting around feeling sorry for myself. What would you do?’

‘Just sit it out, son. Keep your nose clean. Don’t give them an excuse to turn it into a witch-hunt.’

I nodded, knowing he was right, not daring to tell him about my encounter with the Budds. No matter how much he loved me, he would never approve, and the less he knew, the less he had to lie about if anyone came asking.

‘You’re right. I suppose I’d better get back and get in touch with Kev; he’ll want to make sure I’m okay. Thanks for the coffee, I’ll call you later.’

He waved as I left, stooping to fuss Lily on the way out.

Back at the car, I put the key in the lock, and then paused as my peripheral vision caught something that my copper’s nose told me was out of place. I glanced around, trying to look casual, and saw a silver Clio parked about fifty yards up the road, right on the bend, with a person sitting in it reading a newspaper. It struck me as strange behaviour for a side street, and I automatically looked around for anything else out of place, only to see the curtains twitch on a house across the road as my eyes swept across it.

So PSD were having me followed. It didn’t surprise me; if they thought I had something to do with the evidence, it made sense that they would have a surveillance team on me, hoping that I would run to Davey.

Being an SV officer, and pretty good at it, I knew they should have been better than that. The first thing they teach you on the surveillance course is not to stand out. Had the person up the road in the car been on the phone or just sitting there with the engine running it wouldn’t have looked out of place, but reading a newspaper just screamed that they were prepared for a long wait. Add to that the fact that I would never have noticed the officer in the house opposite if they hadn’t jerked back when I looked in their direction, and you had an SV team that were either poorly trained or wanted me to know they were there.

Shaking my head, I gave the guy hidden behind the curtains a cheery wave as I drove away slowly, making sure that they didn’t lose me. If they wanted to know what I was up to I was equally keen to show them that I had nothing to hide. So long as they didn’t start looking in next door’s garden.

10

My situation hadn’t improved by the next day, and I was still followed everywhere I went. That morning I had taken my gaggle of followers on a walk over the downs and returned home feeling marginally better than I had since I’d been arrested. I parked up just around the corner from the house and was more than a little surprised to see a uniformed police officer standing on my front step as I trudged up the road.

I didn’t recognize him but, as he looked about twelve, I assumed that he was from the tutor unit. He looked at me with worry written all over his face as I approached and came up the steps towards him. He put out a hand that hovered hesitantly in front of my chest.

‘Uh, I’m sorry, sir, you can’t come in. This is a crime scene.’

I looked at him in amazement. ‘Crime scene? This is my bloody house!’

His cherubic face took on a look of anger as I swore. ‘Sir, I’m warning you under Section Five of the Public Order Act, if you swear again I will be forced to arrest you!’

I looked around ostentatiously. ‘Do you see anyone here who is likely to be harassed, alarmed or distressed by my swearing?’ I asked, seeing the doubt blossom on his face as I quoted the act right back at him. ‘I don’t – and, as you can’t be the one to feel any of that, I suggest you stop being a pillock and get someone who knows their job.’

I wasn’t making a friend here, I knew, but I wasn’t going to stand around and be dictated to by a kid who hadn’t even handcuffed someone on his own yet. We were saved by an officer I knew sticking his head out of the door, presumably to see what the commotion was about. Andy Coucher is a top-rate officer and, about a year before, had moved on to the tutor unit to pass on some of his hard-gained street knowledge.

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