by Neil Woods
‘You serious, sir?’ I gave him a look of complete shock and bemusement.
‘Aye! This’ll be a long night. Sure we could all do with a pick-me-up.’
Right then, bloody hell. I had been meant to go through to Manchester that morning anyway to interview a suspect. Why shouldn’t I pick some khat up on the way back? I knew exactly where to find it. From Kentish Town Road in London to the south end of Princess Street in Manchester, the British khat trade was booming, catering to the market of Somali refugees from the civil war. You could buy bushels of the stuff for a few pounds a pop.
I did my interview, raced across town to buy four big bags of khat and began making my way back to Glossop. Unfortunately, I was running late, and got pulled over for speeding by a Manchester traffic cop.
I apologised profusely, showed my warrant card and explained that I was trying to make it back for the arrest phase of an important operation. He gave me a talking-to, then told me to be on my way, and that ‘we’d say no more about it’. I apologised again, thanked him for understanding and drove the rest of the way well under the limit.
By the time I made it back to base, everyone seemed more excited to try khat than for the actual bust. They brewed it up into a foul-tasting tea, then we all went off to do a major drug bust while buzzing our heads off on a legal high.
Luckily the raids went off without major incident. The operation cast a wide net, sweeping up everyone from major gangsters to a local DJ who had tried to impress Cate and Jenny by getting them a few pills. Of course, in the eyes of the Drugs Squad and CPS he was no different from the guys ordering beatings and shootings, and ended up getting six years.
The trials themselves, though, turned into an absolute nightmare – and, in a small way, made British legal history.
The law had recently changed in quite a profound way. In the old days, the police only had to present evidence that was directly admissible for the case at hand. Under the new disclosure laws, we had to show the defence team every single bit of evidence gathered in an investigation, no matter how irrelevant.
Unfortunately, no one told the guys manning all our specially deployed observation points.
These were cops, stuck outside nightclubs for hours at a time. Of course the evidence folders were full of shots of women’s cleavages, people throwing up, and an almost artistic series featuring an intoxicated couple stumbling out of a club and proceeding to make prolonged and explicit love on the town hall steps.
The DS lads may have thought this was all hilarious – the defence lawyers certainly didn’t. They called the entire prosecution case into question, ordering a massive voir dire – a pre-emptive examination of evidence.
It got completely ridiculous. Case officers found themselves getting followed home and having their phone records checked by private detectives hired by the defence solicitors, to make sure we weren’t colluding to get our stories in order. To my knowledge, this is still the most extensive voir dire in British legal history, and formed the basis for quite a bit of future case law.
We were incredibly lucky that we had a detective named Andrew Cooper on our squad who was an expert in disclosure legislation, and who guided us through the process with incredible diligence and precision. It’s really down to his superb, disciplined effort that we were able to shepherd the cases to successful convictions. But it was a close-run thing.
There was, however, one further fallout from Operation Betta.
I walked back into the New Mills station a week after the bust, to find DI McAllister waiting for me with an expression of gleeful malice. ‘Woods. My office. Now.’
‘What’s all this about, then?’ He triumphantly threw a document down on his desk.
It turned out that the traffic cop who had stopped me for speeding had not only grassed me up after all, but had written the incident up saying that I had been abusive and threatening. Reading over his notes, I was appalled. He had completely misrepresented the incident to make me sound like some sort of overbearing thug.
I’ve never used abusive language in anger to anyone in my life. I found the implication genuinely insulting. It also made me wonder – if this was how evidence on another cop could get misreported, think how bad it could get on the street. Maybe all those people who said they didn’t trust the police might just have a point?
McAllister, on the other hand, was obviously relishing the moment. He’d hounded me for months trying to find some evidence of inner evil – finally he had his ammunition. He savoured it, giving me an hour-long tirade about discipline and duty, and finally notifying me of an official written warning.
I was annoyed, but I also accepted that I had screwed up, and could take a fair reprimand. But McAllister had saved one last blow.
‘And you can forget about your CID application. Not this year, Woods… not this year.’ He gave me a look of sheer smug self-satisfaction.
I walked out of that office feeling utterly defeated. CID was so obviously where my talents could be put to best use. The fact that McAllister would actually weaken the force just to spite me, and that he would be so shameless about it, was appalling.
All I could do was to keep repeating to myself, ‘Six months… six months till the CID application window opens again.’ But it was deeply disheartening to feel so undermined by my own bosses.
Things with Sam had actually been getting better. We had started taking Tanith and Gareth for walks together on the moors, and even taking the odd night off to go to the pictures together – just like young parents are meant to do.
Sam had announced that she wanted to quit her job to become a primary school teacher, and had thrown herself into the training with the energy and focus that I had always admired in her. She seemed the happiest I’d seen her in years. Throughout all my recent undercover jobs, and the harassment from DI McAllister, it was this improvement in our family life that had kept me going.
So the fall was all the more brutal when things once again took a turn for the worse. This time, things spiralled further and faster than ever.
Sleepless night followed sleepless night, amidst endless rounds of shouting and recrimination. Eventually I found myself at 5 a.m. splashing water on my face and looking at myself in the mirror. That’s when it hit me. Or at least, that’s when I first admitted it to myself.
I had made a terrible mistake in my life by marrying Sam. I needed to face that truth and accept its consequences.
There was a massive rush of exhilaration and release as I was finally able to give up the denial and false hope. We didn’t work as a couple. Fine. I would leave. I would simply get a divorce, take the kids and—
The realisation shot through me like a bullet in the gut. The kids.
In any divorce Sam would get the children. I knew the law – courts favour the mother, and there was nothing I could do about it. If I left, I would be abandoning my children to be raised by Sam, with no guarantees of how often I would be able to see them. I sank onto the edge of the bathtub, completely winded.
I was trapped. Until the children were old enough to make their own decisions, I would have to stay in this marriage. Gradually the chaos in my mind resolved into a strange kind of order. Somehow making this decision felt fatalistically liberating. At last I knew my role, and could feel a new sense of purpose. I would stay and pour every ounce of love and care I had into bringing up my children.
I splashed some more water on my face, then crept into bed to lie awake and watch the dawn break as I mentally prepared myself for the battles that lay ahead – both on the streets and in my own home.
CHAPTER 10
WAKEFIELD
I WAS AN undercover cop. I knew when I was being watched.
DI McAllister was crossing the line. After the speeding incident on Operation Betta, his constant observation and harassment switched into a new gear. Almost every day there was something: a demand to present my evidence book; my locker getting turned over; a call into his office for yet another talking-to.
I’m all in favour of professionalism and discipline, but there was something else at work here. I’d catch him watching me, taking sidelong glances and making notes in a little black pocketbook. I’d done criminal surveillance. I knew it wasn’t a coincidence that everywhere I went in the station, there he’d be, checking on my every movement.
Or was it? Maybe this was just my own weird psychodrama? Maybe with all the pressure at home I was just getting paranoid and imagining it all? Maybe Sam was right? Maybe I was actually losing it?
It’s a terrible feeling to doubt your own intuition. Out on the streets, it was my instincts that kept me alive. But now at home and the office – the very places where I was meant to feel safe – I was beginning to mistrust my own feelings.
The doubt gnawed at me. I had to know what was going on. I had to see what he was writing in that little pocketbook.
So, I launched my own little covert operation. I’d worked undercover – I knew how it was done. I waited for a busy night shift, when everyone else had been called out of the station. I reckoned I had about twenty minutes.
I sprang up and snatched the key to McAllister’s office from the hook by the noticeboard. I carefully opened his door, and began rifling through his desk for that pocketbook. I went through drawer after drawer. A minute passed, then another. Finally, I flipped open an unmarked folder and there it was.
It was insane.
The front page was simply marked ‘Woods’. What followed was a day-by-day account of my every action, just as if he were collecting evidence for a case. He was noting down how many chocolate bars I ate in a day; how many times I went to the toilet. Sometimes he counted how many times I coughed in an hour.
This was obsessive behaviour.
I didn’t know if it was part of some evangelical crusade, or just an underlying personality disorder, but McAllister was operating at a level of neurotic fixation that bordered on the sociopathic.
The important thing was that at least I knew it wasn’t just in my head. I wasn’t the crazy one. But even so, what was I to do?
I put the pocketbook back exactly as I had found it, hung the office key back on its hook and sat back down at my desk.
What should I even do with this information? I couldn’t exactly go to the higher-ups and say that I’d broken into my own DI’s office. On the other hand, there was no way I could stay in this department under these conditions.
As I saw it, there was only one way out. I would put in another application for CID, and in the meantime keep my performance so perfectly by the book that even McAllister wouldn’t be able to sabotage me.
For the next six months I was like a machine. I was early every shift, with my buttons polished just how the DI liked them. I kept my head down and made my paperwork more of a priority than actual investigations. If that’s what McAllister wanted, that’s what he would get.
Luckily no undercover assignments came up to distract me, and after six months, and a letter of support from Jim Horner, word finally came through.
For the first time I actually felt that I was taking proactive control of my own career. I was learning to fight the good fight in my own way.
McAllister never did confront whatever demons he was battling with. Ten years later he walked out onto the moors and never returned. When the police combed through his computer they found he had been cruising the Internet for months, researching the best way to kill oneself so that the body is never discovered. Whatever issues the two of us may have had, he was still a cop like me. It’s deeply sad that he was never able to resolve the turmoil that obviously made him so unhappy.
Detective training was everything I ever hoped it would be.
Every person on that course had made a conscious decision to be there, and the instructors were the most experienced, knowledgeable cops on the force. These guys wore suits, not uniforms, and specialised in highly complex investigations to catch the most dangerous criminals. They drilled us in the tactical fine points of hunting down elusive suspects and weaving together multiple strands of evidence.
It was also fun as the training centre in Wakefield was next door to a nursing college.
Since my 5 a.m. epiphany, I had come to terms with the idea that I was staying in my relationship with Sam for the sake of the kids. But even so, the thought that I was trapped in a destructive, unhappy marriage was deeply depressing.
But, one Friday on the course, the whole team piled into a local club. We were drinking and dancing when with no warning a girl from the nursing school pulled me into a corner for a snog.
I felt a tidal wave of joy and relief – and not an atom of guilt. We didn’t take it any further, but it was a deep moment. Sam was the only woman I’d ever been with, and allowing myself this freedom was important and liberating.
As we had our parting kiss, though, that girl gave my tongue a playful bite. By the next day, it had swollen and looked like a length of rope. I had to rush to A&E, where it turned out I had something called glossitis. I was prescribed antibiotics. As much as it stung though, it was nothing compared to the teasing from a group of cops when you’re seen copping off with a girl, then turn up the next day with an infected tongue.
My career as a detective began right at the deep end. Usually for a major operation, the bosses would use people with perhaps ten years’ experience in CID. But one woman from the course developed a stress-related issue and had to drop out, and I was thrown into the mix to replace her.
This was a firearms job.
A group in Derbyshire were operating as a legitimate business, selling decommissioned guns. But, under the counter, these guys were also selling the kit and instructions to turn them back into working shooters.
Their record books linked them to sales all over the country, from Fort William to Dorset, and they were reckoned to be one of the major suppliers of clandestine weapons in the UK. Our job was to prove criminal intent.
We were handed twenty bulging sacks full of receipts and invoices, and told to somehow piece this all together and link these guns with those being used on the streets of Britain.
Detective Constable Harry Dick, who ran the unit, is, to this day, probably the most intuitive, insightful and determined cop I ever met on the job. He was also very Scottish. Now, try saying that name with a Scottish accent. One of the detective sergeants happened to be named Phil Cox. So, whenever Harry was making a call, the entire team would crowd around just to hear him say, ‘Aye, we’ll come down and see you, it’s Harry Dick and Phil Cox… No, this is not a wind-up… Yes, those are the real names… Yes, I know!’ and slam the phone down.
Under these two was a team of five other detectives. We worked this one investigation, as a specialised unit, for eighteen months.
Harry worked out a system of matching the sales in the record book with a database of the receipts, then cross-referencing the results with gun crime records in the relevant areas.
These guys made leaps of logic and intuition that left me in the dust. They could scan a file and spot impossible connections between disparate scraps of evidence, which would eventually lead to criminals behind bars and guns off the street. I soaked up their knowledge like a sponge, and found my own work improving in leaps and bounds.
Once you start following a major firearms ring, there’s no telling where you will end up. We raced all over the country chasing those guns, finding ourselves in situations that were downright surreal.
Tracing a couple of rifles, we stumbled on an elderly gay couple, newly retired to an old mining village near Durham. But there was something different about this particular couple – they happened to be ex-loyalist paramilitaries from County Derry in Northern Ireland.
The village itself was made up of about seventy small houses, set among the rolling dales. One couldn’t imagine a more quaint, sleepy retirement spot. Why would anyone, even ex-Orangemen, need guns in an idyll like this? With these two, however, the guns were only the start of it.
We kicked
in their door, and held the two old fellas in the living room. The rifles turned up easily enough, along with another pair of handguns.
Then I was sent to have a look upstairs. I stepped into the spare room, and swung open the door of a large wardrobe set against the opposite wall. Then I saw it.
Sitting on the shelf were several bunches of brownish paper tubes tied together with string; rivulets of a weird waxy type of sweat streamed off each one.
A bolt of pure panic shot up my spine. Images from old movies, and a half-remembered counterterrorism module, flashed into my mind. Was it? It couldn’t be… But it was. It was fucking dynamite. That ‘sweat’ was bloody nitroglycerine.
My head snapped round to the window. It was a blazing hot August day; the sun was streaming through the glass, turning the room into a greenhouse. With my heart pounding in my chest, I backed out of the room very slowly, retracing my steps one by one.
As I went, there was a tiny voice in my head saying, ‘Come on Neil, this isn’t a minefield, walking backwards isn’t going to help if that stuff blows,’ but I just couldn’t help it.
I made my way downstairs, pulled my fellow detectives aside and related what I had seen. I was immediately greeted with uproarious laughter and a round of, ‘Yeah Neil, dynamite, of course there is, mate… right.’
I have to admit to a certain satisfaction when Phil Cox swung open the wardrobe door and immediately whispered, ‘Oh… Oh, right,’ under his breath, then retraced his steps backwards, exactly as I had.
Of course, we couldn’t dispose of this material. We called the Royal Ordnance, who sent over a red-faced officer with a Lord Kitchener moustache, who didn’t speak so much as bark like an indignant walrus. ‘Right then,’ he huffed patronisingly, ‘apparently you lads think you’ve seen some dynamite. Let’s see what it really is, shall we?’