by Neil Woods
I tried to reply, but my mouth didn’t open. On sheer instinct I ripped a note from my pocket and gasped, ‘Yeah, thanks mate – top geezer.’ And with that Alec just walked off, giggling to himself.
Phil got me the hell out of there as fast as he could without drawing too much attention, and slung me in the back of the car. By now the initial white-light-white-heat rush had settled into a steady, soaring amphetamine high. Everything was too clear, too bright, too real. My hands beat a twitchy, compulsive rhythm on the dashboard.
We got to the station and Phil wrote up our evidence as fast as possible – leaving out the fact that I had boshed a load of amphetamine. Then he put me back in the car and took me home.
Sam and the baby were asleep. I went straight to the fridge and found eight cans of Stella Artois. Thank God. I necked them all down in under two hours, just hoping for something, anything, to take the edge off.
Nothing worked.
I didn’t sleep for three days. That was the Friday night. I had the weekend off and was due back in uniform on the Monday morning. By 4 a.m. on Sunday I had to admit I couldn’t face it, and left a message for my uniformed shift Sergeant that I was going off sick.
That weekend was a stage-managed hell. I couldn’t let on to Sam what was happening, so I just kept things as under control as possible and stayed out of her way. But I felt unutterably vile. I’ve tried a few drugs in my time but speed is just not for me. That chemical rush feels like being dragged out to sea by an undertow.
On the upside, though, our house had never been cleaner, and I was able to let Sam sleep through a few nights without having to get up to feed Tanith.
When I next checked in with the Drugs Squad, Phil pulled me aside. The chemical analysis on Alec’s speed had come back 40% pure. The best street-level stuff in Britain is usually around 5–7%. With zero tolerance, no wonder that pink ooze had sent me arse over tit.
Thankfully though, Alec never had the opportunity to put me in that position again. The Lord Stanley bust was about to go down.
Our plans were made, our positions set, our teams in place.
This bust was always going to be messy. With the regulars at the Lord Stanley being who they were, we knew we were going to be dealing with a chaotic scene and multiple arrests. But Alec was always the primary target.
The plan was that Phil and I would go in and take our usual places at the bar. The team would have spotters outside the pub – the second they saw Alec enter, they would give the signal and our armed response teams could rush in.
It all started so well.
Phil and I sat at our usual table, keeping our eyes on the door. I scoped Alec as he walked in. The spotters must have seen him too, and given their signal.
The door flew open and thirty hard-as-nails Leicestershire task force cops, in full body armour, burst in. It was pandemonium. Pretty much everyone in there was either carrying gear or on an outstanding warrant. The main drug stash in the back room was thrown open, and many arrests made.
But there was no Alec. The team tore the place apart, but he simply wasn’t there.
We knew he had entered the pub. I saw him come through the door with my own eyes. He must have walked in, triggering our signal, then immediately slipped right out the back.
Something felt very wrong about this. After months of dangerous work, I was fuming – our main suspect had just slipped away. It didn’t make any sense.
When I burst into his office later that evening, Jim Horner looked completely defeated, smoking a cigarette and staring into space.
‘What the fuck happened today?’
‘Well, he went in one door and out the other,’ Jim replied in a stoic leaden monotone.
‘What are you on about? How could this fucking happen?’
‘Well, there’s two options, aren’t there?’ Jim looked me in the eye. ‘Either someone was working for him, or he was working for someone else.’
‘Jim, what are you bloody talking about?’
‘He got tipped off, Neil – it’s fucking obvious. He knew he had to be seen entering the pub, and he knew he had to get the fuck out again.’
My eyes widened in horror as Jim continued.
‘Our operations are secret, right? So, either he’s got someone in this department – but I doubt that, or you’d would have been dead months ago – or he’s working for another agency.’
This stopped me in my tracks. ‘Another agency? Christ, you mean Alec is a… ’
‘Yes Neil – he’s a fucking informant. Could be Regional Crime Squad, could be National, could be fucking MI5. I don’t know… and we’ll never know.’
I walked out of Jim’s office completely stunned. Could it be? It seemed completely impossible, totally absurd. But as I sank into a chair at the police bar and turned it all over in my mind, the more it seemed like the only explanation.
Even most of our own squad didn’t know about my operations. We kept information tightly controlled to protect against leaks. Guys like Bomb Damage were brought in only as the deployment moved into the arrest phase.
But other agencies were also running their own covert ops. When we had set up the bust, our tight ring of secrecy had been broken – and someone, somewhere, had moved to protect their own intelligence asset. But, if violent, borderline-sociopath gangsters like Alec were now our allies, what did that mean for my sense of purpose, for fighting the good fight?
Perhaps for the first time I began to gain an understanding that I wasn’t involved in some simple battle of good versus evil. This was a labyrinthine complex of worlds upon worlds. There were forces at work that I could not comprehend, and decisions being made over which I had no control. Actions had consequences, outcomes and reverberations that no one could foresee, let alone claim to have intended.
I needed to set aside what I thought I understood, and make myself willing to begin learning everything anew.
The first thing I needed to learn about was drugs themselves.
I could still taste the toxic alkaline horror of that 40% amphetamine – I could still feel the panic shooting up my torso. I had put myself in that situation out of sheer ignorance. I was hunting down drug dealers, yet I knew next to nothing about the commodities on which their empires were built. Most worrying of all, even in my ignorance, I probably already knew considerably more than most of my colleagues on the force.
Obviously I wasn’t about to start smoking crack or slamming needles into my arm. But what I could do was dive into the police archives and hit the library.
Once again, the geeky side of my character came out, and I was soon spending hours poring over everything from university pharmacology textbooks to William Burroughs novels. It wasn’t long before I became a walking narcotics encyclopaedia, and other cops started coming to fact-check with me about their own casework.
Over the course of my research I noticed an ad somewhere that Narcotics Anonymous were doing their first European-wide conference in Manchester. I decided to take one of my rest days to go along and see what knowledge I could pick up.
It blew my mind.
I heard story after story of struggle, hope, relapse and redemption. These were no woolly, self-pitying, New Age confessionals – they were hard-headed, ultra-realist analyses of the processes and cycles of addiction.
There were people from all walks of life, from coddled privilege to the most desperate grinding poverty. But they all had this one thing in common – they were locked in a life and death struggle against the disease of addiction.
As I was scanning the programme I noticed a keynote seminar on ‘Addiction and Criminal Justice’. Obviously, I made a point of sitting in.
The thrust of the argument was that addicts would be better off being released to recovery programmes rather than sent to prison, where their addictions tended to get worse and their life chances narrowed yet further.
The second they opened the floor for questions I raised my hand. I was a cop; I wrestled with these issues every da
y, and was sure I could see the fundamental flaw in their argument.
‘Don’t you think it’s a bit pointless sending people to recovery when they aren’t ready? Don’t they have to make the first move? If someone doesn’t want to address their own addiction, can they really be forced into it?’
I suppose I had expected people to be impressed with my hard-hitting insight. I was caught off guard as a deathly silence fell over the room. People looked around at me with thinly disguised contempt, as if to say who let this this ignorant schmuck in the room?
The chair of the panel gave a patient sigh and turned to his fellow speakers. ‘Is there anyone on this panel – in fact, is there anyone in this room – who first came here out of choice? Is there anyone here who was not dragged in kicking and screaming? This isn’t a simple question of making a decision to quit drugs. That has to be earned over time through serious work and self-questioning… ultimately we each only save our own lives, but that’s no reason not to throw a drowning man a rope.’
I collapsed back in my chair. In that one moment I recognised that I needed to fundamentally reassess everything I knew, or thought I knew, about what addiction meant.
I realised that deep down I still had that Ronald Reagan news clip I had seen as a child playing in my head. Like most of my police colleagues, I thought addiction was fundamentally just a question of willpower. People simply needed to make a decision to stop – and if they couldn’t then it was down to their own moral failings. This was the standard police mentality. It was certainly the prevailing attitude on the Drugs Squad.
What I now understood was that I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. And neither did my fellow cops. I didn’t have any answers. But I emerged from that conference at least knowing that I hadn’t even been asking the right questions.
Even my previous revelation after the speed incident with Alec had been misguided. I thought my job meant I needed to learn about drugs, but what I really needed to learn about was people.
Law enforcement agencies could follow drug-supply lines from the mountains of Colombia and poppy fields of Afghanistan to the council estates of British cities, but to what end? If you don’t understand people – how they operate, what they need, why they do what they do – how can you hope to protect them, or even investigate them?
Don’t get me wrong – I hadn’t suddenly turned into a utopian pacifist hippy. I had enough experience of gangsters and thugs to know that fighting the good fight meant getting some bloody knuckles. I was prepared for that. I just realised now that the assumptions I had been working under were totally skewed.
Fighting tough meant fighting smart. I needed to start asking better questions.
Looking after a newborn baby is never easy. Sam and I were as strung out as all new parents have been since the dawn of time. But with tiredness came the shouting. Once again, it felt like I was under attack – throughout the day and night – it was utterly, excruciatingly exhausting. Even if Sam and Tanith were asleep, after each episode I would find myself unable to shut off – lying in bed, twitching and turning for hours, my eyes screwed shut, but my heart racing. It got to the point where I was almost convinced that Sam was keeping me awake purposefully. I’d lie there, doing my best to ignore her, trying not to respond – but then the alarm would blast, and once again it was time for work.
The constant exhaustion got to the point of physical pain. Maybe this helped with my pose as a smack addict on the streets, but as a uniformed officer you need to be ultra-alert. The safety of fellow officers and the public relies on you having your wits about you.
But, in those moments that things were good, I still loved being around Sam. We were childhood sweethearts and that kind of bond doesn’t break easily. It was in one of our moments of reconciliation that our second child was conceived.
And once again, the moment I held our son Gareth in my arms I felt a surge of love and pride that obliterated every negative emotion I had ever known. Whatever issues Sam and I might have, I swore to myself I would give my children the best life I could, and do everything to hold our family together.
Somehow we would piece our relationship back together. We had to try to make this family work.
CHAPTER 8
STOKE
I HAVE TO warn you Neil, this bloke sounds like a stone-cold psychopath.’
The call had come in from Staffordshire police. They were tracking a heroin dealer named Kyle who had seized control of the smack trade in Fenton, one of the six towns that make up the city of Stoke-on-Trent.
Kyle had established himself by repeatedly stabbing anyone who failed on a payment or got in his way. He was leaving a bloody trail in his wake, but the Staffordshire force couldn’t seem to catch him. So now here I was receiving my briefing from Jim Horner and Ronny Braddock, the Staffordshire Detective Sergeant who would act as my handler for the case.
Of all the places I worked as a cop, Fenton was probably the most run-down, hopeless and desolate. Row after row of terraced houses stared out at you like empty skulls. About half were already abandoned and boarded up, the rest may as well have been. This place had never recovered from the collapse of manufacturing, and seemed like it never would. There was simply nothing there – no activity, no hope, no life. It was a ghost town, and the only thing that kept the ghosts from rattling their chains was heroin.
I had no direct way in with Kyle. He was by far the biggest dealer in Fenton, and operated between three different addresses to store and cut his product. A guy like that would never sell to someone he hadn’t met. Once again, I needed to find an introduction.
That meant making connections among the town’s junkies and addicts. I had to become one of the ghosts.
I put together my roughest charity shop outfit yet, and spent hours pacing the dead streets to get my face seen. Eventually I started approaching down-and-out smackheads, posing as a fellow addict and offering to kick in a few quid for their own wrap if they knew where we could score. These people were desperate. For them a couple of pounds meant the difference between their next fix or their next rattle. Of course they agreed to help.
I did one score after another in filthy abandoned houses – most with the electricity shut off and the copper piping ripped out of the walls to pay for skag.
The people were as broken as the homes they squatted. Each had their own story of poverty, domestic violence, sexual abuse, parental abandonment, and beatings at the hands of dealers or pimps.
No one can encounter that sort of misery day after day without taking some of it on oneself. After that NA meeting in Manchester I had vowed to make people the focus of my investigations. Only now did I begin to realise just what kind of commitment that entailed.
And yet I was no closer to Kyle. The junkies I was dealing with scored from other addicts or small-time local dealers. I would occasionally hear the odd terrified whisper about ‘the boss’, but nothing that would ever give me an entry to ask who that was.
These people lived in fear. Any mention of the boss and they immediately fell quiet, their eyes locked on the floor. There was an obvious code of silence in place. The weeks slipped by. I did deal after small-time deal, and heard countless stories of misery and horror, but Kyle was still out there beating and stabbing the people of Fenton into submission.
What first marked Stan out was that he tooled around in an ancient, beaten-up Ford Cortina. A career junkie who actually manages to keep hold of his car is pretty unique. He was a long-term addict with filthy clothes and missing teeth, but somehow he managed to hold his life a little more together than the other skagheads. I figured that if a connection to Kyle was going to come from anywhere, this was it.
But obviously I couldn’t just ask him. I had to engineer it so he would lead me in without even knowing what was happening.
‘Mate, mate, you won’t believe what happened.’ I pounded on the door of Stan’s freezing bedsit. ‘This woman left her bag on the bus, right in front of me. I got sixty fucking
quid mate.’
Stan’s eyes widened. In the street junkie netherworld, a ‘left handbag’ is like striking Texas oil. I knew I had his attention and leaned in close. ‘Listen, I was thinking… since I’ve got this cash, maybe we could buy a proper bit of gear, a weight y’know – maybe like a-half T or something. You know anyone that could sort that out? I’ll give you a shot off my bag.’
Stan’s eyes narrowed. ‘Give us a tenner too, and I’ll do it.’
Of course. A free shot was fine, but I had told Stan I had £60, and he’d calculated exactly how much he could get out of me. In the drugs world there is always a better deal to be had, always a better scam to be pulled.
Of course what he didn’t know was that unlike every other junkie in town, I didn’t care about the money. The calculation in my head was that the only dealer in Fenton slinging half-T’s was Kyle.
To explain – in those days heroin was usually sold at £10 for a 0.2-gram bag. If you were really flush you could buy a teenth or T – which was 1.75 grams – for around £60. Between that, there was the half-T of 0.8 grams, which would generally go for about £30.
Obviously, from the addict’s point of view it’s better to spend £30 and get 0.8 grams, rather than buying four separate £10 bags. But, most smackheads usually can’t put £30 together for a single score. A half-T is for special occasions like a stolen handbag or successful house burglary.
If that all sounds a bit confusing, imagine trying to figure it out on the street, knowing the smallest mistake will expose you as an undercover cop and put you in either the hospital or the morgue.
We drove over in Stan’s Cortina. The door swung open and I instantly recognised Kyle from the surveillance photos. He was the archetypal northern scally: tough and wiry, wearing a Kappa tracksuit and Nike trainers, hair cropped short and an expression of pure malevolent aggression.
‘Who the fuck’s this?’ he demanded, glowering at me.
