The Last 10 Seconds

‘Thanks for coming, gents,’ he said, getting up and shaking our hands in turn. He wasn’t a big guy, no more than five nine, but he had the wiry build of a featherweight boxer, and he projected an aura of menace that comes naturally to the more serious criminals.

He offered us a seat on the bed, but we preferred to remain standing.

The guy I was working with was a veteran copper called Colin (I can never remember his last name), a short, stubby cockney with silver, slicked-back hair and a face that looked like it had been whacked with a spade. ‘I hear you want to buy some high-quality chang,’ he grunted, while I stood next to him, hands crossed in front of me, acting the part of his bodyguard.

‘I hear you’ve got some to sell,’ answered Slade cleverly, refusing to be drawn, knowing that if we were undercover police officers then it would be illegal for us to encourage him to commit a crime by offering to sell a product he hadn’t specifically asked for. All annoying semantics, you might think, but we had to be very careful how we operated if we wanted a case to stand up to a judge’s scrutiny.

And that was the theme of the meeting. In the ten minutes we were in there, Slade was the one asking the questions – about our background, credentials, the size of the product we could deliver – but, at the same time, we couldn’t get him to admit that he actually wanted anything.

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.