The Follow Page 3

  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 only have taken me 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 to the office. I was mindful of my promise not to 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 was a little red button on top that, when pressed (occasionally by my armpit, much to comms’ annoyance) produced 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 was that it sent a GPS signal back to comms so they knew exactly where the officer needed 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 (the press to talk switch) 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 seventy miles per hour in a thirty 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 sold drugs seemed to object to simple things, like paying for petrol, and you could almost guarantee that if a car was associated with drugs, it would also be known for driving off from petrol stations, or bilkings as we called them.

  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 CL92, better known as LST Sergeant Mike Barker, 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 for us to 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 realised 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 foot in the face.’

  He nodded and began ushering the crowd back as more sirens approached. I liked Steve, he was solid and dependable and had years of experience which gave him a calm manner that few would 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 placed 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. This 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 th
at I was hurting him far less than I would have been if I was 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 once more, 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 whilst 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 knew who was watching and it wasn’t unknown for some of our ‘customers’ to try and take phone pictures of plain-clothed officers so that they could 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 small-time 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 after that to see where he went.’

  ‘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. 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 in. He lived on the Avenue in Moulsecoomb and, 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 WAS a chubby Brightonian born and bred – if you factored in the possibility of chimp DNA. He was about five foot ten with heavy jowls that he didn’t need to shave and a mess of ginger curls that made him stand out like a sore thumb wherever he was. Not surprising really that one glimpse had allowed LST to recognise 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 was all well and good, but I frequently forgot which armpit was 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 apologised and went to walk around me, it was the work of seconds to throw my arm around his throat and put him in a choke-hold.

  ‘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 up 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?