Given that I wished to avoid an inquest into Jilly O’Sullivan’s death, it wasn’t much to ask of medical science that it should back up my false contention that she’d died from natural causes. Something will invariably be found in the lungs after death, so bronchopneumonia would provide a suitable explanation of Jilly’s passing, as it had in so many other instances where I found it imperative to avoid a full-scale investigation. Death, of course, is always the result of the failure of one of the major organs, and according to the legal rule book, what matters is the chain of events leading up to such a failure. In practice, the letter of the law can be safely ignored in favor of its spirit. Only the elderly and homeless die from bronchopneumonia in truly unsuspicious circumstances. Bronchopneumonia is often brought on by a drug overdose, but my colleagues and I will nonetheless routinely treat it as a natural cause of death in a young addict. We see no point in arriving at an accurate conclusion that will only upset and confuse the family of some wastrel who didn’t deserve the loving home she grew up in. Grieving is a difficult process and I’ve done countless decent parents a huge favor by making it possible for them to avoid facing up to the fact that their child was a good-for-nothing junkie degenerate.
To shift the focus once again to the particular, there wasn’t much in O’Sullivan’s basement flat. Jilly and her pimp Garrett had only lived there for a few weeks. They’d occupied an equally spartan Bayswater bedsit over the autumn. Junkies mainly use possessions as a form of collateral, they rarely hang onto stuff, personal items tend to be stolen and sold as required. However, Jilly’s diary was in the flat and the final entry was dedicated to Garrett:
COMPUTER IN PURSUIT OF A DREAM
You lie there, legs straddled, an easy lay
Like some “gloomy fucker” (your words)
For hours you have put me through mental torture
Because I desired you
Sure I wanted love anyway I could
But you denied me both fuck & fix
And then dropping a Tuinal, like an over-the-hill whore
You became an easy lay
I knew this nonsense was merely one of many pieces of proof that Jilly’s drug use had been ongoing. That meant jack shit to me because my considered professional opinion was that O’Sullivan’s death was entirely unsuspicious and solely due to natural causes. Any police officer worth his or her salt knows that to lie effectively one must stick reasonably closely to the truth. Therefore, in my official report I wouldn’t gloss over the fact that Jilly had been a long-term drug addict. Aside from anything else, the pathologist couldn’t ignore the track marks on her arms. All I needed to do was claim that her addiction was well in the past.
After acquiring some cash from Jilly’s landlord in return for overlooking the fact that drug dealing was taking place in his gaff, I phoned my chum Paul Lever to acquire suitable evidence to back up the fictional content of the report I was in the process of compiling. PC Lever had a thick file on Jilly and this included several of the fraudulent job applications he’d directed her to make. Back in the mid-’70s Paul had wanted to know exactly what was going on in various local drug charities, so he’d sent Jilly into them as a spy. He provided me with a copy of a successful application she’d made for a job as a social worker at the Westbourne Project. In this Jilly claimed to have a degree and postgraduate qualifications in philosophy from UCL, despite the fact that she’d left school at sixteen and had never attended a university. Something else that made the document Lever handed me fraudulent was Jilly’s claim that although she’d been a smack addict, she’d cleaned up in 1972. While I knew this was untrue, it placed her long-term drug addiction seven years in the past, which was good enough for my purposes.
Since the general public is blissfully ignorant of the problems police officers face, people are often surprised to learn of my working methods, should I choose to speak openly about them. What needs to be stressed in relation to this is that since it is impossible for the police to completely suppress the West London drug scene, the next best thing for us to do is control it. Only dealers we approve of are allowed to carry on their business, and cuts from their profits serve to top up our inadequate pay. Likewise, Paul Lever and various other police officers, including me, had been getting our jollies with Jilly during the early ’70s.
Lever had the evidence, both real and fabricated, to get O’Sullivan banged up for a very long time. To avoid jail, Jilly had made a deal with him. O’Sullivan had to sell drugs on Paul’s behalf and provide him with information about anyone who set themselves up as a dealer without his approval. She also agreed to see us once a week at the police station where we had a regular line-up with her. Jilly wasn’t the only junkie Paul had providing us with sexual favors, all of which might give the impression he’s a hard man. Certainly this is the appearance he cultivates, but actually he’s somewhat sensitive about his macho self-image. Back in 1972, Jilly had the singular misfortune to be around just after a colleague made a crack about Lever always taking last place in our gang-bangs.
Paul, like any virile male, enjoys slapping whores around while he’s screwing them, and on this particular occasion he was determined to prove through sheer ultra-violence that he didn’t harbor any unnatural sexual desires. As I gave Jilly a poke, Lever grabbed her right arm and broke it over his knee. O’Sullivan was in agony, but Paul took great pleasure in amusing himself by making the bitch indulge him with an extended sex session before allowing her to go to the hospital. On the surface this might sound somewhat sick, but Paul is basically a good bloke, and he genuinely believes that being a bit psycho is the most rational way to deal with whores and crims. After all, the only thing these reprobates respect and understand is brute force. Indeed, what other way is there to deal with someone like O’Sullivan? In the early ’60s she had offers of marriage from more than one of her upper-class johns, but she turned them down and became a junkie instead.
It was Jilly’s decision to live the low-life and what she got from us was no more than she had coming for choosing to subsist, as her extended Irish family have done since before the days of Cromwell, beyond the pale. Jilly wasn’t just a junkie and a prostitute, she was also a pickpocket, a thief, and she engaged in checkbook and other frauds. Any reasonable person will agree that without laws and police officers prepared to carry out a dirty job vigilantly, society would collapse into pure jungle savagery. That said, there are still too many do-gooders who love besmirching the name of the Metropolitan Police, and an inquest into Jilly’s life and death would in all likelihood bring to light the type of facts that fuel the enmity these bleeding hearts feel toward us.
Police officers like me deserve whatever perks we can pick up, providing this doesn’t impinge upon the rights of law-abiding citizens. Bending the rules goes with the territory of upholding the law; if I stuck to official procedures my hands would be tied with red tape. Punks and whores really don’t count as far as I’m concerned, nor do the pinkos who bleat on about police oppression. In a sane society criminals wouldn’t have rights, and the police wouldn’t have to break the law to protect decent folk.