The Follow

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!’