I’ve known Danny for about eight years now. He was the brother of a girl I used to go out with. Her name was Jean Ashcroft and she was the only non-Force girl I’ve ever had a relationship with since joining up. We were together about a year, and for a while it looked like it was going to get serious. We’d even started looking at places to rent together, which is the closest I’ve ever been to any sort of real commitment, and I think it’s probably fair to say that I loved her, as much as I’ve loved anybody in the sexual sense. But then Danny fouled things up. Not intentionally, mind, but a foul-up all the same. You see, in those days he was a bit of a rascal. Although he was intelligent and came from a respectable family, he didn’t have a job, nor did he want one. He preferred dope dealing. It was easier, and it was more profitable. Somehow he managed to keep his illicit activities hidden from the rest of his family, including his sister, and so it turned out to be a terrible shock for them when one of his pathetically small-time deals went pear-shaped, and he ended up on the wrong end of a savage beating.
It was a typical piece of middle-class naivety, really. He was holding half a pound of speed he was meant to be selling to a contact of his, but the contact, deciding it was easier to steal the goods rather than buy them, set him up. On his way over to the contact’s flat, three of the guy’s mates ambushed him in the stairwell. However, since Danny hadn’t yet paid for the stuff, he was loath to give it up. A very one-sided battle ensued and Danny ended up with a fractured jaw, smashed cheekbone, severe concussion, and God knows how many busted ribs. And he still lost the speed, which, by all accounts, had to be prised from between his broken fingers.
He was in hospital three weeks altogether, which, when you consider it was on the NHS, gives you some idea of the extent of his injuries. It really threw the cat among the pigeons as well. His dad seemed to think that, because it had happened on our patch, I should have known something about his activities and put a stop to them, or at least told him about them. So he turned against me. Danny’s mum followed suit, being one of those people who are incapable of their own opinion. The thing was, I could have lived with that, no problem. I’d never liked either of them much anyway. The problem was Danny. Once he got out of hospital he wanted revenge on the man who’d set him up. He was also worried because the guy he’d bought the stuff from now wanted paying as well. In fact, he wanted a lot of favours and the only person he knew who was in a position to grant him any was me. I’d always got on well with Danny, even though he’d never been able to hide his dope dealing activities from me. In fact, I genuinely liked him.
So when he came to me begging for help, I said I’d do what I could. The guy who’d sold him the speed was a pretty low-level player, so a quick threat of prosecution and the possibility of worse got him out of the picture. It was the revenge thing that represented a problem. Danny wanted me to help him take the guy out, though help wasn’t exactly the operative word since it looked like I would be the one doing most of the work. Danny was only five feet six and of proportionate build, so he wasn’t what you’d call a useful ally. He wanted to ambush the guy in the same way he’d been ambushed, and return the kicking, but I talked him out of that one. I don’t even know why I agreed to get involved at all. I could have just told him to cut his losses and be thankful that he no longer owed the other guy money, but I didn’t. Maybe it was a pride thing. Maybe I wanted him to look up to me. I don’t know.
Anyway, I devised a compromise. A couple of months earlier I’d uncovered about fifty ecstasy pills in an unrelated search of a suspect’s premises. Because we already had the suspect bang to rights on about a dozen other charges, I’d put the pills in my pocket, thinking they might come in useful at a later date, not so much as a commodity – even in those days there was a lot of controversy over the effects of E, and I didn’t want anyone dropping dead of anything I sold them – but of course they had another use, and that was helping put away criminals who were proving particularly hard to pin down for their crimes. I’d never planted anything on anyone before, but I’d heard about enough cases to know that it usually worked. If it was carried out properly.
Which was the difficult part. The guy, whose name was Darren Frennick, didn’t tend to leave his flat very much, apart from to do the odd deal, and we needed uninterrupted access. We thought about it for weeks, racking our brains for a way to get in there, before we came up with a simple yet foolproof solution. Frennick was an ugly bastard but, like all young men, he had a healthy sex drive. I knew a girl at the time who was a professional escort and who could be trusted with difficult jobs. So what we did was this. Having paid her a substantial amount, funded by Danny, and
