‘Of course, mate, what is it?’ I replied, my heart sinking.
‘It’s a bit hush-hush,’ added Ken.
‘Are you in your office? I’m at HQ.’
‘Yes, come over,’ he suggested.
His department’s offices were among the most secure in the force, one of the few areas where my access card was impotent. No-one got in unaccompanied unless they worked there.
I patiently waited to be permitted entry and escorted to see my old friend Ken.
‘Graham, thanks for coming. This won’t take long. Tomorrow morning one of your sergeants is going to be arrested by Op Elveden for accepting corrupt payments.’
‘Oh, right,’ I mumbled, trying to hide my shock that I had a wrong’un on the division. ‘Do you want to tell me who? What have they done and when?’
‘Love to answer, Graham, but the Metropolitan Police have asked us to give you no more than that. Just so you know.’
‘Well, you can tell them that’s worse than bloody useless. I suppose I am being told so I can prepare the division and the public for any fallout but unless I know who it is and what their role is, I can’t do anything but guess. What world are they in? Can’t you tell me?’ I asked, more in hope than anticipation.
I knew he would not reply and it was wrong of me to press him. Someone else was calling the shots and despite my outburst I appreciated the position he found himself in.
‘DI Emma Brice will be in your office at eight tomorrow. She will tell you everything,’ he said. ‘Until then, that’s all you can know.’
Overnight, I tried to compile a mental list of likely suspects. I did not get very far. Despite the sergeants under my command having a huge variety of roles and backgrounds, I could not think of any who would sell their soul to the press.
Emma had a fabulously caring yet forthright way of breaking bad news. A consummate professional, she would say what was needed but knew the impact it would have. We sat at my round table, each with a steaming cup of tea. Emma wasted no time in getting to the point.
‘Graham, Sergeant James Bowes has been arrested by Op Elveden on suspicion of receiving corrupt payments from the Sun.’
‘James Bowes? Are you sure?’ I was incredulous. ‘I’ve been trying to work out who it might be since I spoke to Ken. James never entered my head. He’s so nice, so quiet, so loyal.’
I was flabbergasted. James was a stalwart of the Neighbourhood Policing Team. He was not your usual copper though. An ex-public schoolboy, he had spurned the draw of the City to join the police. He was in his element in his early years, revelling in the cut and thrust of response policing. His move to the street community team — the officers who dealt with the drunks, drugged and homeless — angered him. However, he soon found that he was starting to make a difference to people’s lives, rather than sticking plasters over problems that response work inevitably entailed. His gently assertive manner encouraged some of the city’s most desperate people to enter treatment, find hostels and start to turn their life round. He had found new meaning in his job.
Following his promotion he had taken on a sector of the city centre and led a small team of police officers and Police Community Support Officers to clean it up. An electrician in his spare time, he was forever sourcing the latest gadget or gizmo to keep one step ahead of the villains. His highly technical and imaginative funding requests read like reports from the fictional Q, the Mr Fixit of the James Bond films.
‘He offered to give them details of a girl who was bitten by a fox,’ Emma continued. ‘They paid him £500.’
‘How strong is the evidence? I mean, how certain are they that he did this?’ I probed.
‘Well, they paid him by cheque which he put in his bank, so it’s pretty cut and dried.’
‘So what now?’ I asked.
‘His house is being searched and he is being taken to a London police station. I believe he has already offered his resignation.’
‘I hope we aren’t going to accept it. If he’s done what you say he needs sacking, not being able to sneak out with a month’s notice and his reputation intact.’
‘Yes, that’s the plan. The Met are clear that we shouldn’t accept it and our Chief Officers agree.’
In that short exchange one of my supposedly finest sergeants had gone from hero to zero. I can forgive a lot of things, see them in context, but leaking information, especially for money, cuts to the heart of all the police stand for. He was finished.
To his credit, his admissions were swift. Taking his sacking with good grace and his early guilty plea must have helped cap his prison sentence at ten months. He was lucky, as selling the fox story was not the only time his greed had usurped his oath of office.
Two more leaks emerged, one involving a child protection visit to a local celebrity and the second regarding a search for dead bodies. Just as no-one suspected Andy ‘Weatherman’ Gidney of being the corrupt computer investigator in Looking Good Dead, who kept evil Carl Venner plied with expertise and confidential information, so no-one had seen Bowes was a mole.
It does pain me to think what he must have gone through in prison. Corrupt police officers are just a shade higher in the pecking order than paedophiles. However, he knew the stakes and got what he deserved.
Most cops have flawless characters and integrity. Most have impeccable morals. When the bad apples are exposed, however, we all feel shame. Every one of us feels let down. We all have to work that little bit harder to regain lost trust. But we do, as the pride we have in the job is indestructible and we can never let those outlaws within prevail.
14: Taking Chances, Saving Lives
Drugs hurt everyone. It’s a startling statistic that 80 per cent of all property crime in the UK is drug-related.
As Peter James says when quantifying Skunk’s drug habit in Not Dead Enough, few users are on a £10 per day habit; it’s more like £30. So, with 2,500 people in Brighton and Hove whose lives revolve around sticking needles in what’s left of their veins and pumping in an unknown cocktail of poisons, that’s at least £75,000 (nearly three times the UK average annual wage in 2015) going into the hands of drug dealers and organized crime every day. To get that kind of money most have to steal, and they never get market value for their booty. That, therefore, results in excess of an estimated quarter of a million pounds of goods stolen every day.
Many users will do anything they can to get the gear they so desperately need. They steal, cheat, rob and, if necessary, kill. Skunk is horrible, the scum of the earth. Relentlessly pursued by DC Paul Packer, whose finger he had bitten off in a previous encounter, few will feel sad at his grisly comeuppance, being flame-grilled in Cleo’s MG. While his waking each morning ‘to the sensation that the world was a hostile cave about to entomb him, sweating and hallucinating scorpions crawling across his face’ is unlikely to evoke much sympathy, perhaps there will be at least some understanding of his single-minded determination to do whatever it took to score the drugs he craved.
No-one starts out deciding to become a drug addict. No-one is born evil either, but we are all a product of our upbringing and environment. Who we love. Who loves us. Who we hate. What’s right. What’s wrong. Nothing can change that. Unless of course, like me, you experience a shocking revelation which makes you question all your values.
I was a detective through and through. Even when I wasn’t officially a detective I behaved like one, being inquisitive, tenacious and with a pretty clear notion of right and wrong. Police locked up the bad people to protect the good. The law told us who was bad and who was good. Simple. Thieves, fraudsters, drunks, yobs, druggies, whoever — they were our enemies, they were the ones whose imprisonment we celebrated. Job done. Good Guys 1, Villains 0. People like us were always the virtuous. We had the upbringing, the principles that stopped us stepping over to the dark side.