Good Cop, Bad War

by Neil Woods

  When I mentioned the incident to Davo the next day, he explained, ‘Oh yeah, Chris makes everyone do that. It’s his little test. He thinks if you know where the needle exchange is then you’re obviously not a cop.’

  I’d been posing as a junkie in this town for weeks, of course I knew where the exchange was. It felt almost insulting to be so underestimated.

  As we chatted I noticed Davo was looking happier than I’d ever seen him. I gave him a friendly pat on the arm. ‘You look fucking chipper mate, what’s going on?’

  ‘Ah Cookie, man,’ he beamed, using my undercover nickname, ‘I’m having a great bloody day mate – there’s this vein in my arm that’s been dead for years, and this morning it just opened up again… great bloody day.’

  I realised this was the first time I’d ever actually seen Davo smile.

  This was the squalor and deprivation in which these people lived. For Davo, Gary and Cammy the only sources of joy were a dead vein reopening to squirt more poison into, or someone giving them a shitty stolen baseball cap. It took me a moment to process this.

  ‘Well, come on,’ continued Davo, ‘let’s go get ourselves a little something.’ I snapped out of my reverie, and we went to make another score.

  But on the way back from Chris’s place, we got a shock that wiped the smile off Davo’s face. As we strolled along the high street, two policemen burst out of Marks & Spencer. Between them was Gary, handcuffed and grimacing in discomfort as they bundled him roughly towards the car. Just as they swung the door open and pushed him inside, he turned and for a second we locked eyes. He gave me one sorrowful shake of his head, then he was gone.

  Cammy and Davo were fatalistic. Neither had much hope of seeing Gary again; they were sure he’d pushed his luck with the shoplifting too far this time, and would be sent down for sure.

  But, about a week later, who should reappear but Gary himself. Somehow, despite all his previous convictions, he had been let off, on condition that he begin a course of Suboxone, an opioid inhibitor used to treat heroin addiction.

  ‘Yeah mate,’ he laughed stoically, ‘pushed my luck robbing M&S – should’ve stuck to Woollies mate… should’ve stuck to Woollies.’

  Gary immediately replaced the smack with Special Brew to give the Suboxone an edge. He’d get us all laughing, saying, ‘Yeah, it’s weird – with the subbies instead of the skag, I’m getting horny thoughts again. It’s like my dick’s been cut off for five years and suddenly it’s back… and back with five years of rent due. I’m going bloody mad here!’

  But as ever, there was a tragic undercurrent to his one-liners. Aside from his daily dose of the subbies, he received no other support. So, he just kept hanging out on the benches, nursing tins of high-strength lager and gazing after us with forlorn envy every time we went off to score. He lasted about two months before slipping on his bail conditions and drifting back onto the skag. It was the only life he knew.

  Cammy was crying.

  He was leaning against a wall, his head in his hands, tears streaming down his face. I immediately raced over to ask what was up.

  ‘Ah mate, it’s just this friend I had years ago, when I was a kid – before all this – he was my best mate, my best friend… I just heard he died. He wasn’t like us – he was clean, y’know. But he was playing football and just had a fucking heart attack.’

  ‘Ah mate, I’m so sorry. Is there a funeral or something?’

  ‘On Tuesday,’ sighed Cammy.

  ‘Well, at least you’ll get to say goodbye.’

  Cammy turned and gave me a look as if I’d lost my mind. ‘I’m not going to the funeral. I wouldn’t do that to his family. The last thing they want is some dirty junkie turning up and ruining everything.’ Once again he buried his face in his hands.

  I just stood there looking at him, thinking back to that NA meeting in Manchester all those years ago. It was there I had first realised that fighting drug cartels meant understanding people. Well, here was the human face of our war right in front of me. No matter how society may condemn and look down on the addict, it is never, ever as low a view as he has of himself.

  I desperately wanted to help Cammy, to offer some comfort or advice that might push him to rebuild his life. But that would have meant breaking character. I was Cookie the junkie. I couldn’t step outside the role, no matter how grindingly miserable the heartache got.

  But by this point, I was having my own troubles. The investigation couldn’t get past the street-level dealers. People were just too paranoid. I could score off Chris from Pleasley as much as I liked, but that wasn’t going to help us bring down any real criminal empires.

  Patrick and Simon at EMSOU maintained absolute professionalism, and never put pressure on me personally, but undercover operations are expensive. To justify continuing, we needed to show progress.

  The break came from the most unexpected place: McDonald’s.

  In the early 2000s, McDonald’s brought out one of their new ice-cream fudge sundae monstrosities, which was served with a little plastic spoon. That spoon just happened to be the precise size and shape to measure out a perfect 0.1 gram, £5 dose of heroin.

  So, to save them from having to carry scales around, smack dealers just started carrying these little spoons. They were everywhere, becoming part of the standard paraphernalia of the British drug user. That spoon even became part of my own standard set of junkie props, as much a part of the costume as my filthy beaten-up Reeboks, torn bomber jacket and packs of Rizla with the corners torn off.

  But dealers were using these spoons to evade searches. So, I took a whole box of them from a McDonald’s outlet at home in Buxton, and brought it in to Jim Horner to explain the situation. Jim made some calls to the corporate bigwigs at McDonald’s UK, and they actually agreed to change the spoon’s design.

  These spoons were so useful to the dealers, though, that all that happened was a new black market developed, trading in the old McDonald’s spoons. Dealers would offer junkies free bags of gear in return for a ‘Mickey D’s spoon’. It got to the point where spoons were going for upwards of forty quid – a lottery jackpot in the world of the street junkie.

  By sheer good luck, I still had that full box of spoons that I had brought in for Jim Horner, sitting in our evidence locker. Suddenly I became ‘the spoons guy’ in Mansfield. Word got around. All of a sudden, I wasn’t having to work the streets to worm my way in with dealers – they were coming to me.

  That’s how I met Emma and Jason.

  They were another couple of user-dealers, but several rungs above the likes of Chris from Pleasley. Jason was a dour, miserable scally with anger management issues, and Emma was about the same in female form. Together they ran a crack and heroin racket out of their low-rise council house, and were connected to the serious Nottingham gangs.

  I got to know them trading spoons for skag, and gradually made them my main connection. I was able to listen in on their endless bickering, and began to pick up scraps of information about how the drugs trade between Mansfield and Nottingham functioned. One name seemed to pop up again and again: ‘Stitz’. I got the sense that this was the boss who Emma and Jason worked under.

  They were incessantly angry, paranoid, awful people to spend time with, but somehow I knew these two would lead me on to something big.

  Mansfield had been dry for crack for almost a week. My gang from the benches were going out of their minds with desperation. I volunteered to go and see my new dealers to see if I could beg any scraps.

  By now the gang trusted me. Thanks to our same day lab results, I always knew who was selling the purest gear. It became a running joke: ‘Well, if Cookie says it’s the bollocks, then it’s definitely the bollocks.’ After a dry spell, though, they would smoke or shoot anything they could get their hands on.

  ‘Yeah, all right, get in mate,’ snarled Jason, pulling the door shut behind me. ‘We ain’t got nothing on us mate, fucking nothing. Gotta go into town to pick it up, innit.’

&
nbsp; That’s when Emma piped up, shouting from the next room, ‘He’s got a car ain’t he? He can bloody drive us.’

  Jason looked at me. ‘Wanna earn a ten-rock?’

  I just nodded. I’d be only too happy to drive these two around and figure out where they got their product.

  We piled into my car and drove out to a run-down estate on the outskirts of Nottingham. I noted the address, and stayed in the background as they negotiated with two huge, rough-looking geezers. Six ounces of crack – half in cash and half on tic. This was a serious deal by anyone’s standards.

  The second they were in the car Jason whipped out his crack pipe and flick knife, and started carving himself off a chunk of one of the huge white blocks. The entire car quickly filled with the industrial, alkaline stink of crack smoke.

  The moment that smoke hit his lungs, though, Jason was completely transformed. In an instant he was no longer his aggressively miserable self, but a hyperactive kid clowning around in the passenger seat.

  He thrust the pipe in my face. ‘Have a toot, bruv. Have a fucking toot.’

  ‘Mate, I am driving.’ Jason gave me a look like I was some sort of Victorian prude, and went back to huffing on his pipe.

  Then, unable to sit still, he whipped out his mobile. ‘Stitzy mate, I‘ve got the white-ly-ite, I’ve got the white-ly-ite.’ He was half-singing in a gleeful crack nursery rhyme.

  This made me sit up and pay attention. I made a mental note of the time of the call, so intelligence could cross-reference his phone records. But then he proceeded to make six or seven more calls, getting more and more excited each time, squealing, ‘Mate, I’ve got the white-ly-ite’, ‘Guess who’s got the white-ly-ite?’

  It was all I could do to resist singing along, ‘Yeah, the white-ly-ite, it goes really well with browny-wown.’ But I restrained myself and just concentrated on snapping pictures with the car’s pinhole cameras, as Jason and Emma passed the crack pipe back and forth.

  They were getting stratospherically high, lolling around the car, almost vibrating in their seats. Then Jason went suddenly quiet. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a black and white photo, shoving it in my face as I did my best to stay on the road.

  ‘That’s me, that is,’ he slurred through his crack mania.

  The photo showed a young boy, perhaps four or five years old, smiling in a paddling pool. A slice of nostalgic childhood bliss that seemed an impossible world away as we rumbled through the Nottingham sink estates enveloped in a fog of crack smoke.

  ‘That’s me when I was a kid,’ Jason continued, his voice trembling as he reeled between existential despair and crack-induced euphoria. ‘It’s me… that’s me… ’ he kept mumbling over and over, holding the photo like a religious artefact. He’d long since stopped communicating with me, and was just desperately trying to hold on to whatever thread remained to that smiling young boy in the picture. His head lolled forward in a twitchy stupor. All I could do was try to keep my eyes on the road, and my finger on the switch that controlled the camera.

  Demand was high after the dry spell. Emma and Jason sold and smoked their way through their big score in lightning speed. By the time I tried to score off them again a week later they were sold out.

  Seeing my forlorn expression, Emma blurted out, ‘You know who might have a bit left is Stitzy—’

  She suddenly stopped herself, realising she had gone too far. She glanced nervously over to Jason. He seemed to be back to his usual grumpy self, but gave a dismissive nod. I suppose our episode in the car must have earned their trust. I tapped Stitz’s number into my phone.

  I was told to meet him on a patch of isolated wasteland beside some derelict railway arches. The light from a few tower blocks shone in the distance, but the place itself was deserted. Stitz’s black Toyota sat stationary beneath a sickly yellow-grey Nottingham sunset; families of rats scattered from discarded bin bags as I approached. I began the mental calculations of how long it would take an ambulance to reach this isolated spot.

  The car door swung open and Stitz motioned me near.

  He was a vicious-looking skinhead hard-man, with a violent look in his eye and classic scally-gangster chic – white tracksuit, Reebok classics and big gold rings. Beside him in the passenger seat was a boy, probably around twelve or thirteen, and very obviously Stitz Jr. He was a carbon copy of his father, a little scally Mini-Me in an identical tracksuit.

  I walked up and leaned on the roof over the open door. ‘Who’re you then?’ snarled Stitz.

  ‘I’m Cookie, Emma’s friend.’

  The move was instant and violent. Stitz’s left arm shot out, wrapping round my neck and pulling me down. I saw something flash in his right hand. Then I felt the knife.

  It was pointing straight into my crotch, just hard enough that I could feel the point on the base of my penis.

  ‘I said who the fuck are you?’ His voice dropped to a poisonous rasp.

  ‘Mate, I’m Cookie. Emma sent me. What the fuck?’

  My entire consciousness zeroed down to the tip of that knife. Fighting the good fight was all well and good, but I wasn’t getting my cock sliced up for it.

  ‘Where the fuck you from?’ Stitz gave the knife a twist to punctuate the question.

  I could almost smell the aggression coming off him. My brain was spinning like a fucked record.

  ‘I live in Sutton,’ I gasped as Stitz squeezed my neck tighter. The Mini-Me in the passenger seat started giggling.

  ‘What the fuck d’you mean you live in Sutton?’

  ‘I just live in Sutton. With Jackie – maybe you know her,’ I pleaded. ‘I’m just a mate of Emma’s, she said to call you.’

  ‘Well I don’t know you… I don’t fucking know you.’ I felt the knife twist again in my groin. Mini-Me was still cackling in the passenger seat like a demented scally gargoyle.

  My mind went blank – I had nothing left.

  ‘Well… I’ve only just met you as well,’ I heard myself saying weakly.

  Then I felt his posture relax. I saw the knife move away, though my brain could still feel it pressing on me, like a phantom limb. Stitz’s arm slid back from round my neck, allowing me to breathe. Mini-me stopped his giggling – I guess the show was over.

  ‘What you want, then?’ spat Stitz.

  ‘I’ll take one bones and one brown, if you got ’em.’

  Stitz snorted, handed me a rock of crack and a wrap of heroin, snatched the money from my hand and slammed the car door. As they pulled away I could still feel the point of that knife, pressing just hard enough to send a shudder of terror snaking up my spine.

  I made it back to ‘our’ flat, and collapsed on the sofa. Jackie immediately rushed over, but it took a few minutes before I could even speak.

  I put a call in to HQ to organise an evidence drop. I told Simon what had happened and the line suddenly went silent. After a few seconds, he said very quietly, ‘I think the two of you had better come in.’

  The entire team sat across the briefing room table, as Jim Horner began, ‘I know it’s EMSOU policy to restrict the intelligence you’re given, but in light of what you’ve reported there are three pieces of information it would be a dereliction of duty not to share with you.’ Jim stood and began to pace the room as he spoke.

  ‘First, this character, Stitz – we know him. He’s one of Colin Gunn’s main lieutenants, and runs all his operations north of Nottingham – all the way up to Sheffield. That phone number you gave us may well lead us straight to Gunn himself.

  ‘Second – you should be aware that Colin Gunn has put an order out to his entire crew that any undercover police who are discovered will be killed, without question or hesitation.

  ‘Third – your man Stitz is a fucking knife-happy psychopath. Word on the street is that he was slicing so many people up that it was drawing police attention. So Colin Gunn took him to a field, stripped him naked, stuck a shotgun in his mouth and told him to mind his manners. Judging by your meeting, he hasn’t ta
ken the advice to heart.’

  Jim sat back down across from us, and finished quietly and seriously. ‘You two bloody watch it out there, all right?’

  I was moving up in the world of Mansfield junkies. But, my main set of connections in the town was still very much the gang from the benches. And things there were falling apart.

  Davo liked to pepper his heroin shots with a bit of crack to make a speedball. It’s a recipe for serious trouble. When he began feeling the pain in his leg he just loaded up on more smack to get himself through. Within weeks he collapsed and had to be rushed to the hospital. The paramedics rolled up his trouser leg to reveal a virulent, pus-spewing abscess the size of a tennis ball.

  Following surgery, Davo was held at the hospital in Nottingham for a few days. Jackie and I figured the NHS dosage of painkillers would never be enough for an addict like Davo, and he’d probably have a dealer coming through the hospital. So we picked up some petrol station flowers, and visited our friend in the recovery ward.

  Davo had never had anyone visit him in hospital before. The fact that we’d spent £3.99 on flowers for him, instead of on drugs, made his eyes go moist. I could see his heart melting right in front of us as we made small talk, and he showed us the hole they had cut out of his leg. It was big enough to fit your fist through.

  And naturally, amidst all this outpouring of emotion, I leaned in and said, ‘Hey Davo, all our guys are dry. If you’ve got a number, we’ve got a bit of cash. We could all share a couple of bags.’ Davo’s eyes lit up at this expression of true junkie friendship. Of course he had a guy. Of course we called him in. And of course Jackie and I took his number to pass on to EMSOU.

  This was our job. We visited people who thought of us as friends, at their most vulnerable, lying in a hospital bed, and manipulated them into gaining us intelligence for the fight, the War on Drugs.

  As we walked away after divvying up the score, Davo’s eyes were still glowing at the idea that he had friends who cared enough to visit him.