In the end, Colin lost his rag with him. ‘Are you in the fucking market for some gear or not?’ he demanded. ‘Or are we just wasting our time with the hired help?’ His words were designed to provoke an angry reaction, to get Slade to start boasting about his seniority (as criminals will often do when their reputation’s called into question), and I remember thinking that, given Slade’s reputation for violence, Colin was taking a bit of a risk.
But Slade just smiled. ‘Ask around about me, and you’ll see I’m in a position to do business, big business, but I’m careful who I deal with. Maybe we’ll talk again soon.’ And with that he turned his back, signifying that the meeting was over.
‘Do you think he sussed us?’ I asked as we got back to the car.
‘No reason why he should,’ grunted Colin, opening the door. ‘Our legend’s good. We’ll get him soon enough. He’s greedy. I could see it in his eyes.’
The smell hit me as soon as I sat down. Overcooked meat.
I frowned, exchanging glances with Colin. He’d smelled it too. Then we heard the sizzling. Like bacon frying in a pan. Followed by a desperate, muffled mewing, a sound that instantly reminded me of an injured dog. And it was coming from inside the car.
We both turned round.
Tony Boyle was sitting in the back seat, although it took several seconds to work out that it was him, because his face was melting in front of us as the acid did its work, smoke rising from the dying flesh in thin, stinking coils. Only his head was moving, swinging frantically from side to side, because he was strapped like a mummy from mouth to ankles with brown parcel tape, rendering him helpless as he burned.
Instinctively, Colin reached out to pull what was left of the masking tape away from Boyle’s mouth, and jumped back as the acid burned his fingers.
Yelping in pain, Colin called for an ambulance while I used the Swiss army knife I was carrying to cut the tape from Boyle’s body. I kept telling him it would be all right, that help was on its way, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at the damage being wreaked on his face, or stop myself choking at the toxic stench that was filling the car.
Finally, I managed to cut off all the tape, but when I tried to pull him from his seat so we could get him outside to throw water on the wounds, I found he was stuck fast. It was only when I looked down through the smoke that I saw the reason why.
The bastards had nailed his feet to the floor.
The whole meeting had been a set-up. Slade had known we were cops all along, and this was his way of teaching us a lesson. We had nothing on him, either. He hadn’t incriminated himself, and we had not a scrap of evidence to connect him to the attack on Boyle. In fact, like all good gangsters, he had the perfect alibi, having been in the presence of two undercover police officers while the crime went down.
Although he remained a target of the NCS, intelligence on him began to dry up. Nobody would talk, and it was considered far too dangerous to instigate another undercover op. The net result was that Jason Slade became even more well established on the Essex underworld scene.
As a police officer, you have to get used to the fact that for every success you have there will always be at least one failure, and usually a fair few more. You learn to move on when you take a hit, not taking it personally, hoping for better luck next time. That was exactly what I did. I was traumatized by what I’d witnessed, but not so much that I couldn’t do my job.
And then, just under a year later, I read about the tragic case of the father who’d been found dead in his car in Epping Forest, along with his six-year-old daughter. Tony Boyle, whose facial injuries had been so bad that his wife had asked for a divorce, and whose daughter had grown terrified of him, had simply not been able to carry on and had decided to take his only child with him.
I felt rage then. Real anger, the kind I’d experienced when I heard about the way Wolfe had murdered my brother. At that time, only a few years had passed since John’s death, and the wounds were still raw. Jason Slade reminded me of all the injustices in the world. As far as I was concerned he was directly responsible for the deaths of Boyle and his daughter, yet he was at large and still untouchable.
But Slade had a weakness. Although he lived with a long-term partner, he also had a mistress whom he visited most Wednesday nights after he’d been out with his cronies. We’d known about her at the time of the undercover op, and had even bugged her flat at one point, but to no avail. It was a stupid move on Slade’s part to keep to such a specific and obvious routine, especially as he travelled there alone, but it served my purposes, because one Wednesday night I waited in the driveway of the mistress’s block of flats to meet Slade when he arrived there.
I’d been building myself up to it for several weeks, knowing that I was stepping way over the line, but for once letting the rage guide me in my actions.
Sure enough, at about half past midnight one fine, balmy summer’s evening, Slade’s Jag pulled into the driveway, and as he got out of it, looking more than a little worse for wear, and walked towards the main door, fiddling in his pocket for keys, I launched myself out of the shadows, a balaclava over my head and an image of Tony Boyle’s burning face in my mind.
At the last second he saw me coming but wasn’t fast enough to get out of the way. I had three two-pound coins wedged between my fingers, acting like an improvised but less lethal knuckleduster, and I bunched my fist as tightly as possible and unleashed a flurry of punches to his face, opening up a number of nasty little cuts as I sent him sprawling over the bonnet of the Jag, a feeling of real catharsis flowing through me.
Before he could recover, I was on him again, dealing blow after blow to his head and body, not giving him a chance to fight back as I beat him to the ground. I knew, like me, he’d been a boxer in his youth, and that he might also be armed, so it was essential I incapacitate him as quickly as possible. He was bleeding badly from his nose and cheek, and even in the darkness I could see his face beginning to swell, which pleased me no end. I wanted to humiliate this bastard and make him pay for some of the suffering he’d inflicted on his victims.
He landed on his back on the gravel, but as I grabbed him by the collar of his black leather jacket and dragged him to his feet, he threw a whip-like punch that hit me in the side of the head, catching me completely by surprise.
I let go of his jacket and retreated a couple of steps, shaking my head to clear it, but Slade was clearly nothing like as incapacitated as I’d thought and he was on his feet like a shot, coming at me in a classic protective boxer’s stance before launching a well-aimed three-punch combination that sent me reeling before I could muster a decent defence.
My nose was bleeding under the balaclava, and I began to panic. I couldn’t believe how stupid I’d been to go after him like this. Either I should have brought a real weapon, something that would have shifted the balance in my favour, or better still, taken the sensible option and not come at all. Instead, I’d compromised, and now I was going to pay for it.
I was wobbling precariously, partly stunned, as Slade came in close, grabbing me by the throat with one hand, a look of pure rage on his battered face, and yanking off my balaclava with the other.
It might have been a year but I could see the spark of recognition in his face, the realization that he knew me from somewhere. Then the surprise as he remembered exactly where.
Which was when I came to my senses and drove my knee right up into his groin with all the strength I could muster, managing to gather enough to lift him bodily from the ground. He let out a single, tortured gasp, and as I delivered a quick uppercut to his jaw, he went down like a sack of potatoes.