by Robert White
Biography
Robert White is an Amazon best selling crime fiction author. His novels regularly appear in the top ten downloads in the Crime and Action and Adventure genres. Robert is an ex cop, who captures the brutality of northern British streets in his work. He combines believable characters, slick plots and vivid dialogue to immerse the reader in his fast paced story-lines. He was born in Leeds, England, the illegitimate son of a jazz musician and a factory girl.
He hated school, leaving at age sixteen. After joining Lancashire Constabulary in 1980, he served for fifteen years, his specialism being Tactical Firearms. Robert then spent four years in the Middle East before returning to the UK in 2000. He now lives in Lancashire with his wife Nicola, and his two terrible terriers Flash and Tia.
Novels by Robert White
Rick Fuller Thrillers:
THE FIX
THE FIRE
THE FALL
THE FOLLOWER
Det Sgt Striker Thrillers:
UNREST
Stand alone novels:
DIRTY
BREAKING BONES
BREAKING BONES
By
Robert White
www.robertwhiteauthor.co.uk
Copyright © Robert White 2017
The right of Robert White to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
First published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Published 2018 by Robert White Books
ISBN-10: 1911445588
ISBN-13: 978-1911445586
For my wife Nicola
Author’s Note
I have enjoyed writing this work, probably more than any other. Maybe it is because it is set in the town where I worked as a cop for fifteen years. Maybe it is because it falls in the era I consider to be my heyday.
Who knows?
What I will say is this. Contained in these pages are instances of historical fact. The Falklands war and the Maze breakout, being just two. And inserted inside these real events are my fictional characters and their fictional escapades. I have done my best to ensure that the factual information contained in these pages is correct. Any mistakes, however, are my own.
Now, for those legal eagles amongst you, I have to admit to bending some of the rules when it comes to police investigative work, and both military and civilian legality, including coroner’s courts’ process. They are minor changes but help to maintain the pace of the tale. I hope it doesn’t spoil your enjoyment. Indeed, I hope it increases it.
Robert White
Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
PREFACE
Detective Jim Hacker
When I first began to follow the criminal careers of Frankie Verdi, Eddie Williams and Tony Thompson, I had no idea how powerful they would become, or how it was possible for three individuals to nurture such a criminal empire from their meagre beginnings.
During the thousands of working hours spent attempting to bring the three to justice, I cannot say I ever witnessed a single ounce of compassion, remorse or regret from them. I found them to be nothing more than ruthless, violent creatures, incapable of feeling anything.
Not even fear.
The three boys were all born within months of each other, lived in the same town and attended a perfectly good school. I would like to be able to explain away their ferocious nature, their calculated coldness, by telling you about their deprived childhood, but I cannot.
All came from average, working-class homes; were neither rich nor poor, and wanted for little. They had summer holidays, birthday and Christmas presents, and parents who loved and cared for them.
I cannot begin to suggest what went wrong, as I am neither doctor nor psychiatrist.
Frankie, Eddie and Tony had been inseparable from being small children. They played together in the narrow streets of Preston, Lancashire, and to the casual observer, or neighbour, it would have appeared that they were developing normal friendships and basic social skills.
The fact was, by the time they left Blessed Sacrament Primary, for Preston High School aged eleven, they had formed a relationship so close, so tight and so impenetrable, that neither their parents nor peers could get close to them.
It was on 11th June 1976 that the youths gained their now infamous nickname. The boys were in their fourth year of high school and all had celebrated their fifteenth birthdays. During the morning break between lessons, Tony Thompson, who, in these more enlightened times, would be described as a child with “learning difficulties”, had been unfortunate enough to run into the school bully whilst enjoying a cigarette behind the science block.
The older, bigger youth had repeatedly punched Tony, bloodied his nose and robbed him of his pack of ten Embassy.
That afternoon, the three friends waited for Tony’s attacker to leave the school gates, and in front of dozens of witnesses, including mathematics teacher John Swindles, they fell upon the bully. Armed with compasses stolen from their technical drawing class, they stabbed the youth over a hundred and twenty times.
The one-inch spike on the end of the compass was, of course too short to cause a fatal blow, but the sheer number of puncture wounds inflicted to the boy, including seventeen to his face, ensured he was hospitalised for a week.
John Swindles later told police officers, that even in his days in the parachute regiment, he had never witnessed such a frenzy of brutality and violence.
A Lancashire Evening Post crime reporter nicknamed the boys, “Three Dogs”, due to the ferocious nature of the assault, and the pack instinct they had used to formulate the attack. That headline, together with mugshots of the dishevelled youths, splashed across the inside of the paper, created instant infamy.
“The Three Dogs” were born and were never going to look back.
One week after the attack, the three were summoned to Preston Juvenile Court. They entered pleas of guilty to wounding and possession of an offensive weapon.
Their parents sat at the back of court in total shock, as Frankie, Eddie and Tony were sentenced to six months in an approved school, the maximum the court could impose.
In the early seventies, the government went to great pains to inform the public that their latest young offenders’ institutions, recently renamed “approved schools”, were a far cry from the previously badged borstals, first built in the Rochester town of the same name almost a hundred years earlier. These new and improved prisons
had moved away from the grim regime of the old institutions and were a shining example of the government’s policy to reduce youth offending.
Whatever the policy document may have said in 1976, the establishments were still borstals in everything but name.
The Three Dogs were detained in Kirklevington Approved School for Boys, Stockton on Tees.
The government’s latest arrangements, like most of its money, had failed to reach the North of England, and the establishment had a reputation for taking in naughty boys, and turning out super-fit psychopaths.
The boy’s “training” was all six a.m. runs, porridge for breakfast, cleaning, chores, bricklaying, farming in all weathers. And the dreaded birch.
Corporal punishment was supposedly banned in all borstals and training centres back in 1972.
The governor of Kirklevington had no stomach for breaking this ruling, or watching his boys beaten for their misdemeanours. But when his back was turned, his guards were not so squeamish. Indeed, some took great pleasure in dishing out the supposedly banned cane.
The Three Dogs suffered greatly at the hands of one particular prison officer.
P.O. Jeffrey Morris.
He hated the way the boys showed no fear of him, or the harsh regime at the centre. Frankie Eddie and Tony, particularly Tony, were beaten at regular intervals. They each took their physical assaults in silence, just as they endured the removal of any privileges.
Morris ensured that the three each had their detention extended every time they stepped out of line, and it was not until the 8th of July 1977, almost thirteen months after their six-month sentence, that The Three Dogs were released.
As the boys had all reached sixteen years old, the Board of Education ruled that they need not return to school.
Tony used some of the knowledge he had gained inside Kirklevington and took a job as an apprentice bricklayer. Frankie had no choice but to work for his Italian father in the family restaurant, and Eddie found he enjoyed tinkering with cars in a back-street garage just off Plungington Road.
To most onlookers, it would seem that The Three Dogs had been rehabilitated by the harsh prison regime. The boys were all employed, and quietly getting on with their lives.
I, for one, was not so sure.
Almost a year to the day of the boy’s release, on the 15th of June 1978, Prison Officer Jeffrey Morris was found beaten to death in the front room of his Kirklevington flat. His facial injuries were so severe that the police were forced to use dental records to identify him. The coroner stated that Morris had been systematically beaten and remarked in his report that the perpetrators had taken hours, rather than minutes, to inflict the horrendous injuries that eventually took his life.
Within days, my suspicion that The Three Dogs had murdered Morris, were to be founded.
CHAPTER ONE
18th June 1978
Tony Thompson strolled along Whitmore drive enjoying the warm afternoon sunshine. Three schoolgirls giggled behind their hands as the handsome boy, dressed in the latest fashions, passed them by.
Tony noticed them too and increased the length of his stride. He didn’t like girls his own age. They made fun of him for being “slow”. The younger girls, however, liked Tony… a lot.
Every few paces he pushed a handful of wayward curls from his forehead. When the girls were out of sight, he stopped, checked that his shoes were as immaculate as they had been when he’d left his parent’s house seven doors away, adjusted the waistband of his new flared trousers, and strode into the driveway of Frankie Verdi’s home.
He hummed You’re The One That I Want, the current number one. In fact, watching Grease at the Ritz, had almost made him ditch his flash flares for a pair of 1950s style Wranglers with turn-ups; but Tony figured Travolta looked cooler in Saturday Night Fever, and stuck with the crisp pressed flared trousers.
He didn’t knock on Frankie’s door, but simply shoved at it and padded down the carpeted hallway of the Verdi’s modest council-owned property.
The parlour door was closed tight, and he could hear the hushed voices behind.
He opened it wide enough to push his mass of raven curls inside.
“You two okay for tea?” he asked.
Eddie Williams pointed to a pale green pot, three cups, saucers and spoons, sitting atop a sturdy wooden kitchen table.
“Just brewed,” he said.
Tony nodded and gave a broad grin. He loved it when Frankie called a meeting. It made him feel important. “Cool,” he said.
Frankie sat holding court at the head of his mother’s ancient table, resting his elbows on the heavy chequered cloth.
He was the oldest of The Three Dogs, by four months and had used this to his advantage in the early days. Being physically the strongest ensured he ruled the roost using his size and natural aggression.
As time passed, and the other two could match him, and in the case of Eddie, even out-fight him, nothing had changed. The others seemed simply to accept Frankie as their natural leader. No member had ever said a word about it, and he had never been challenged. It was just the way it was.
“Sit down Tony,” he said softly. “Pour the tea and listen. This is important.”
The tea tippled, and the cups rattled happily on their saucers.
Frankie sipped his briefly before setting it down. “Did you burn all the clothes Eddie?”
Williams gave a withering look. “Done,” he said.
“He was just asking Eddie,” chipped in Tony.
Frankie held up a hand. “I had to ask, you know me on details. It was the last bit of forensics the coppers could’ve got us on.”
“Well they’re ash now,” muttered Eddie.
Tony leaned in, he had no idea what forensics were, but it sounded good. “That’s cool eh Frankie… ash… eh? Coppers can’t do anythin’ with ash mate.”
The Verdi family had first settled from their Palermo home to Glasgow but had moved south of the border before Frankie was born; even so the lad’s accent was a strange mixture of Lancashire, Italian and Glaswegian. He also bore an uncanny resemblance to Italian Scot, Tom Conti.
He smiled at Tony, reached forward, and ruffled his wayward mop. It was the action of a loving father or older brother, rather than a mere seventeen-year-old.
“Yes Tony, everything is cool, and ash is just that… ash.”
Frankie rarely raised his voice. He found the quieter he spoke, the more people listened. He pointed a finger and settled into his rhythm.
“The script is this Tony… it was no good topping that bastard Morris, if no one knows it was us what did him in is it?”
Tony looked puzzled.
Frankie spoke slowly, quietly.
“So, we’re going to let the cops know it was us what topped him right? …that it was us who smashed the bastard’s face to a pulp. Obviously, the cops will come down from Kirklevington an’ nick us.”
“Obviously,” mimicked Eddie.
Frankie shot him a look and soldiered on. “But then… when they have to let us go ’cos they can’t prove anything… ’cos we’re so on top… so clever… well… everyone round here will know it was us what did him eh? Everyone will stand up and notice us… The Three Dogs. We’ll have the one thing that no one round here has Tony… respect… total fuckin’ respect.”
Frankie leaned in. “And with what I’ve got planned for tonight, the whole town will be talkin’ about us.”
Eddie Williams sipped his tea and set his cup carefully back in its saucer, so as not to stain Mrs Verdi’s tablecloth. For a seventeen-year-old, he was a monster. The year in Kirklevington had ensured that Eddie had worked on his body every day.
Unlike the other two teenagers, his almost white-blonde hair was cropped unfashionably short. He visited his barber weekly, spent an average man’s weekly wage on his suits, and was a regular dance
r at Wigan Casino’s “all-nighter”. From a tender age, Eddie had been thought of as a lady’s man. His clear pale skin, dazzling eyes and natural muscular physique always ensured he had many female admirers.
Secretly, he was anything but.
He was, however, a drug dealer, and it was these activities that made him so popular amongst the Wigan faithful. It was Eddie who provided the dancers with the speed, that kept them spinning all night.
Eddie made a hundred quid a week selling whizz.
This, of course was shared amongst The Three Dogs. It was another of Frankie’s rules. Once all dues were paid, everything the three made over and above was either shared equally or saved. Frankie’s tips, Tony’s foreigners and Eddie’s drug money all went into the pot.
This meant that aged seventeen, the boys each had a disposable income of eighty quid a week.
he average working man in the north of England earned thirty-five pounds. No wonder the boys were the best dressed on Moor Nook Estate.
Eddie’s eyes flashed when he spoke. He was the most unpredictable of the three. This was no mean feat, but his extremely short and violent temper constantly simmered below the surface; waiting to explode at any given moment. His liking for his own amphetamine sulphate did little to calm the ticking bomb.
He looked directly at Tony.
“The plan is to give Fat Les from Marl Hill Crescent the word on the dead screw. He’s a fuckin’ grass… everyone knows that. Once we drop the info to him, he’ll be off to the plod like a rocket.”
“Les, the ice cream man? He’s a grass?” asked Tony.
Frankie stood up and turned to the window. The afternoon sun lit up his face. It gave him an almost cherubic appearance. He had yet to start shaving and his skin was as smooth as it was sallow. His slender frame and boyish good looks belied his uncompromising vicious nature.
“Yeah Tony, Fat Les is a stinking grass. Once we give him the word on Morris, he’ll spill his guts to the plod, no danger.”