He had been produced in order that he could escape.
As soon as the second bail application had been refused, Winston had started exploring other ways of getting out, and it hadn’t taken him long to come up with a viable plan to regain his freedom.
He had set the wheels in motion in early December by having his puppet solicitor approach the drug squad with a cryptic suggestion that it might be in everyone’s best interest if they arranged to visit him at The Ville as soon as possible.
His solicitor, Oliver Clarke, was a man with a serious drug dependency and far fewer ethics than most of the criminals he represented. At Winston’s behest, he had claimed his client was in a position to provide them with all the information they needed to shut down a multi-million-pound drug operation being run by one of the UK’s largest crime cartels. Clarke had also implied that Winston had enough dirt to put several influential cartel members away for a string of unsolved murders, all of which were drug-related. If the right deal were to be tabled, Winston might be willing to turn Queen’s Evidence and testify against them.
Clarke had met with DS Frank Skinner, the detective who had run an unsuccessful operation against Winston’s gang the previous year. Unable to resist such a juicy proposition, Skinner had booked a legal visit for the following week.
When they’d met, facing off against each other across a Formica prison table like a couple of poker players, Winston had laid it on thick for Skinner, who was, in his opinion, an ineffectual copper who spent his waking hours dreaming of glory that would never be his.
Winston had bragged that he could – if properly incentivised – unquestionably help Skinner to put away some of the UK’s biggest crime bosses.
Of course, Winston had absolutely no intention of selling anyone out. It wasn’t that he had reservations about becoming a super-grass; he simply didn’t possess a fraction of the information that he’d claimed to hold.
Following the initial contact, there had been three further visits to assess his suitability. Winston had worked incredibly hard during these interactions, sowing little seeds of hope here and there, manipulating conversations to make himself look good, and drip-feeding Skinner little titbits of information that resulted in the drug squad making a few minor arrests.
As soon as they started talking about producing him for a proper debrief, he knew that they had taken the bait. This was great news because security procedures inside HMP Pentonville were far too tight for him to attempt a breakout from within. An escape while being transported to a police station, on the other hand, was an entirely different proposition. Generally speaking, the police tended to use normal cars or mini-vans to collect prisoners in, and they usually only provided three escorts.
Of course, the police weren’t totally stupid; for security reasons, they were never going to let him know the exact date and time that they intended to produce him in advance, but that didn’t matter in the slightest. Once housed at a police station, he would have unrestricted access to his bent solicitor, who could then pass information about his return date to his associates.
Using his unscrupulous solicitor as a conduit, Winston had sent word to his nephew, Deontay Garston, to start organising the breakout. Within a week, Deontay had reported back that everything was in place. All he needed now was the details of Winston’s return journey and the name of the police station he would be departing from.
After what seemed like an eternity, the people carrier finally pulled into the back yard of Forest Gate police station and drove around the back of the building to the custody entrance.
As it pulled up next to a caged-off area outside the redbrick building, Winston experienced a crippling bout of stomach pain. This was the worst so far, and it took his breath away. He leaned forward to disguise his discomfort, knowing that he couldn’t say anything to his escorts in case they decided to return him to The Ville for medical treatment and reschedule the production for another date.
The pains had started a couple of days ago, but during the past twenty four hours, they had grown steadily worse. At first, he’d assumed it was either a minor stomach bug or something that he’d eaten, but when no one else on the wing complained about being ill, he had begun to fear it might be something far more serious.
Winston prayed that, whatever the ailment was, his body would hold on for a few more days before succumbing to it. That was all the time that he needed to break out of jail and flee the country.
◆◆◆
To say that Detective Inspector Tony Dillon was unhappy was a massive understatement. The former competitive powerlifter was seething as he tried to digest the unsavoury news that Jack Tyler had just fed him. “I can’t believe this,” he said, not for the first time. “What do they think they’re playing at?” As he spoke, he paced up and down Tyler’s office restlessly, reminding Tyler of a caged animal.
“They must think they’re going to get something really big out of him,” Jack said from behind his desk. “It wouldn’t be worth their effort otherwise.”
Dillon grunted his disapproval and scrunched his shovel sized hands into fists. “That low life piece of shit probably thinks he can trade information for time off, even though he’s looking at a life sentence for what he did.”
During their pursuit of him two months earlier, Winston had shot one of their colleagues, Colin Franklin, in the chest. Had it not been for the fact that Colin was wearing his Met-vest, he would probably have died. As it was, Winston had gone on to shoot a young British Transport Police officer twice, and it was a miracle that the boy – PC Jenkins
