If You Enjoyed The Follow, Read on for an Extract From the New Gareth Bell Thriller.
In loving memory of Inspector Andy Parr and WPC “Aunty” Sue Elliott. Lost but not forgotten.
I’d been a copper for eight years the day I became an accessory to murder. But before I tell you about that, I need to go back to the beginning, back to that day in the summer of 2008 that Quentin Davey walked out of court with a grin on his face and the blood of one of my colleagues still on his hands.
The day started much as any other as I left my house on Wordsworth Street in Hove and drove to work, enjoying the morning sun streaming across the seafront. Early summer is my favourite time of year in Brighton, it makes it feel alive with the promise of things yet to come. I hummed along to the Snow Patrol track my MP3 player had selected, my Audi darting through the traffic as if it wasn’t there. In no time at all I was in the underground car park of John Street police station, trading jokes with people who were leaving from the night shift, their white shirts crumpled and their faces sagging as they finally shucked off their paperwork for another twelve hours.
I bounded up the stairs and through the locker rooms, then up two more flights of stairs to the first floor reserved for the CID teams and headed through into the DIU office.
The Divisional Intelligence Unit, in my opinion, is where the real heart of policing in Brighton sits. Intelligence from everywhere across the division, from coppers and the public, comes through the office and is sorted for relevance before being passed on to the Intelligence Development Officers: us, the IDOs. Everything involving the police is reduced to a three-letter code.
I strolled into the office, past the picture of our five-a-side team from last year that was still pinned up on the door, and the tension hit me like a slap in the face. The room holds about thirty people, officers and researchers with not a uniform in sight. We’re the ones who sneak around town and chase drug dealers, car thieves, rapists and burglars, and it’s hard to do that if they can see you coming, so the office was full of jeans and T-shirts, much to the annoyance of everyone else in the building. That morning all of them were muted as if waiting for something bad to happen.
The tension was for a very good reason, a reason that I had been trying hard not to think about. Six weeks earlier, I’d been on a surveillance job with a few others from the office, trying to catch a big-time heroin dealer called Quentin Davey, who lived in Hollingdean.
What we didn’t know at the time was that he had just blagged a load of heroin on tick, and that, if he didn’t get the money sorted out, he was in big trouble. So when we jumped him, instead of putting his hands up or running away, he pulled a knife and stabbed Jimmy Holdsworth, my partner of three years, piercing a lung and putting him on life support for two weeks before he began to recover.
Of course we’d taken Davey down, but it looked like Jimmy wasn’t going to get a payout, as he hadn’t been wearing a stab vest – everyone knows you can’t wear one on surveillance. Nothing screams copper like a covert vest; you look like the Michelin Man and move about as fast too.
So that day was the day of the court case and I was the star witness, having been inches away when it happened. Every time I thought about it I got butterflies in my stomach and goosebumps, so I was doing my best not to.
I smiled at our researcher, Sally, as I sank into my chair in the drugs pod. The room is split up into various different pods, or work areas, demarcated by brown felt dividers that stand to about chest height. I glanced around my littered desk, covered in reports both new and old, all filed with the care that only eighteen-hour days can produce. It was a pigsty.
The divider wall next to my computer was covered with pieces of paper, some tacked over others, showing the faces of local criminals, pictures of me and the lads on skiing and fishing holidays and a picture of a huge bride being fed cake by an equally large husband on their wedding day, with the legend ‘nom nom nom’ printed underneath. I had that up there so that I would see it every time I fancied a doughnut.
I’d been fighting to keep my chest from sagging into my stomach for a while, and it was a battle I was finally winning.
‘Anything relevant?’ I asked Sally as I waited for my computer to boot up.
She smiled at me as she turned her chair, displaying a heart-shaped face framed by golden curls and eyes that I regularly wanted to fall into. She should have been a model, not a police researcher.
‘Not really, Gareth, just a few serials about that BMW in Whitehawk again, and one about dealers in East Street by the taxi