Gangbuster (6 page)

The letter of congratulations I received later from my divisional commander, Detective Chief Superintendent Basil Haddrell, did my prospects at the Yard no harm at all. This was real police work and I couldn’t get enough of it. I woke up each day waiting for the next job, never mind the risks, never mind the hassle. I was pumping.

It was the first time I had been forced to draw my gun in earnest and it wasn’t the last. I’d learnt the hard way that you don’t mess with firearms. During my training at Lippitts Hill, I had been taken ‘hostage’ by two of the instructors in an exercise, right nasty bastards who weren’t known to us, who had
been recruited from the Army as a sort of test of our self-control and discipline. I was handcuffed, made really uncomfortable, and these guys were really pissing me off. Real sadistic bastards, I thought. You get so into role, like you do working undercover, that your survival instincts start coming to the surface. They served me up a dinner with only a metal fork to eat it with and I was still handcuffed. One geezer was sitting to my right scratching his arse and really irritating me. The gun that they had was left unattended across the room.

I was so seriously, seriously in role that I thought while he wasn’t looking I could stick the fork in his eye, incapacitating him for long enough to grab the gun and shoot both geezers. Afterwards, I told them I was that close to stabbing him in the eye, one more push and I’d have gone for it. I know now that if I had reacted like that, they would never have let me loose with a gun in a million years. Severe character flaw, Bleksley. End of career.

I told the two blokes afterwards, ‘You want to be careful who you choose as a hostage. If it’s anybody with a short fuse like me, you could have been in trouble. I was ready to do you both.’ They just smiled.

On the subject of sadists, I can honestly say I’ve met some wacky women in my time but I think Margi Dunbar, the torture queen, just about takes the cake. She was a lesbian prostitute who ran a
sado-masochistic
sex parlour in Queensgate, South Kensington, catering for that weird breed of pervert who likes to be whipped, beaten and humiliated.
Margi lived with an equally oddball partner called Christine Offord, effectively as man and wife, and had even gone to the lengths of having a baby by artificial insemination.

Unfortunately, it had all gone wrong and Christine had ended up dead in the bath with her neck crushed and broken with an iron bar. I was on the murder squad formed to investigate her death. Margi had to be among our prime suspects.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I went into their brothel. There were leather harnesses, rubber suits, chains, handcuffs, gags, torture equipment of all sorts. Scrawled on the walls were sick messages for the clients like ‘Lick My Boots, Dog!’ ‘Worthless Slave!’ and ‘Your life is nothing, your death is nothing’.

These two women made a fortune dishing out pain and punishment to their punters. Christine, the dominant one of the partnership, had persuded Margi to have a baby by inseminating her with the sperm of a young medical student and they pretended to lead a ‘normal’ life at a plush home in Hounslow, Middlesex, 30 miles away from their sordid vice world in Kensington. Margi operated a similar sex-for-sale racket to Offord from a flat in nearby Cornwall Gardens, Kensington, advertising her services as Miss Whiplash and charging wealthy clients £100 an hour to be tortured on a rack till they bled or strung up against a wall and thrashed with a leather whip.

I have to say, Margi did take a shine to me, even though she was a lesbian. She used to sit with her legs apart showing her crotch or even playing with herself in front of me and saying, ‘Come on, Blex, when are
you going to fuck me?’ No chance of that. I wouldn’t have put my dick near Margi Dunbar if she was the last woman on earth.

For some bizarre reason, two detective inspectors were allocated to this murder, which was very unusual and was to be very destructive to the course of the investigation. It meant each DI had his own agenda, each having their own ideas as to who had done it. It was a divisive squad right from the start, causing problems we could have well done without. I was assigned to one DI, with some friends of mine, and the other one was a bit of an old sweat who’d been around a bit and had all his old hands on his team.

I suspected right from the start they were barking up the wrong tree, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell them. They had decided to go off at a tangent and investigate some people who, as it transpired, had fuck all to do with the murder.

Christine Offord’s throat had been crushed against a wall with the iron bar causing excruciating pain and a horrible violent death. Then she had been tied up and put in the bath. Pretty horrendous all round. I decided the only sensible place to start my investigations was at the beginning and work systematically through every scrap of evidence we could dig up.

So who was the last person to see Christine alive? Margi Dunbar pretty soon became a key suspect and was arrested for questioning. She really was as weird as they come. She was in possession of some drugs which might have been partly responsible for her condition. But she was definitely not of this planet. The two DIs tried to get some sense out of her, some
clues or a confession, but with little or no success. As I was at the heart of the inquiry, I was asked to go in to question her. I didn’t get very far either. Margi was right off the wall! But the interview served to reaffirm my suspicions that she had something to do with Christine’s death. We had to release her after we’d held her in custody for the maximum amount of time and we took her back home.

Margi used to talk filth all the time, just for the sake of it. She was obsessed with sex. When I’d got her back to the house, she started to come on really strong, flashing her fanny and asking me to lick it and saying things like, ‘Come on, you dirty copper, come and stick it up here, you know you want it.’ Then she would start playing with herself.

We were once in her garage when she started picking up things and using them as sex toys, dildos. I couldn’t believe my eyes or ears. I thought, What
is
going on here? Lesbians, prostitutes, nymphos … what’s it all about? This was London’s vice world at its seediest.

We had come to a bit of a standstill in the investigation so I decided to spend a long time interviewing Margi’s ‘maid’, who showed punters in and out of her torture chamber. I use the term ‘maid’ advisedly – ‘minder’ would have been more appropriate.

She was in fact a he, a huge man called Tony. He was a man mountain but he was gay and a bit of a teddy bear, as soft as you can come across, which was just as well seeing the size of him. He could move some furniture. I found out from him that there were two people unaccounted for in our enquiries so far, two blokes who had been on the premises on the last
occasion before Christine had been found dead. I was deeply interested in finding out more about them.

I’d managed to get snippets of information from Tony. One was that he’d heard the word ‘Littlehampton’ mentioned. All the time you are looking for a trigger word that might fire the investigation down the right path. Tony said these two characters were enraptured by Margi, who did have a sort of intoxicating personality if you are into that sort of thing. He only knew their christian names – Barry and Bob. So that gave me three trigger words – Littlehampton, Barry and Bob. It had taken days to elicit this information but I knew I had something important to work on. Two people never mentioned by anyone else, who appeared to have been deliberately left out of the scene. I felt very excited at the development, and I felt at last we were getting somewhere. I then rang Littlehampton Police Station on a long shot, and this is how fate or luck can help you out. I spoke to a detective there and told him I was fishing in the dark but had two names, Bob and Barry, and did he know of any pair of oiks who hung around together who fitted the names? He said he wasn’t sure.

I told him this was a major murder inquiry with sexual links, deviancy and so on.

He said, ‘Fuck me, I’ve got a geezer called Barry on bail for allegedly interfering with a 13-year-old boy. Is that any use to you?’

I thought, Bingo. This is it.

My next move was to go down to Littlehampton and, with the help of the local CID boys, identified the two mystery suspects – Robert Causabon-Vincent, aged 41, and Barry Parsons, 45, two partners in crime
who fitted the bill exactly as the men who had been in Christine’s flat the night she’d been murdered. We staked out their houses for a night then went in and arrested them the next morning.

They were eventually convicted at the Old Bailey and jailed for life. Margi was found guilty of manslaughter and given seven years after the court heard that she had hired the two men to kill her lesbian lover. But she was later cleared on appeal as a result of the trial judge’s misdirection to the jury and freed from her sentence.

The Old Bailey jury sat through the most bizarre evidence and you could see that some of them were really uncomfortable with all the details about stormy lesbian passions, torture chambers and Margi’s beautiful baby being born into the middle of it all.

It seemed that the two of them had lived together for about seven or eight years with Offord being the older of the two and acting as ‘husband’ in the weird partnership. Offord, a posh sort who was educated at a leading girls’ school and divorced from her businessman husband, had persuded Margi to have the baby to cement the affair. But it only brought a load of grief with Christine objecting to Margi taking the little boy to her basement torture chamber while she worked. The two killers were petty crooks who carried out burglaries in London and on the south coast. Causabon-Vincent had visited Margi as a client, presumably for a good thrashing or something, and had become sexually obsessed with her. He introduced her to his pal, Parsons, a one-time builder who was nicknamed Psychopathic Barry after he told her he had killed more than 80 people. It was a load of bollocks, of course, but it led to them becoming
involved in killing Christine and putting her naked in the bath to make it look as if it had been just a sex game that had gone wrong and not a deliberate killing. They might easily have got away with it if I hadn’t had a lucky break.

Throughout all this, Margi, who was from the back streets of Liverpool with a pretty poor education, had denied any involvement in her lover’s death and said all along that she had adored her and hadn’t wanted any harm to come to her. She said Chrissie treated her better than most men treat their wives and their lifestyle certainly suggested that, with Chrissie heaping expensive presents like jewellery and clothes on Margi like a proud husband. Then she wanted Margi to have the baby to make things complete and this was arranged through some sort of artificial insemination agency, with Christine present at the birth like a proud dad.

Apparently, it all got stranger and stranger with Christine becoming more and more butch, wearing men’s clothes when she was off-duty from her business and even buying men’s Y-fronts from Marks and Spencer’s. At the same time, she demanded that Margi wore more feminine sexy clothes, see-through nighties, stockings and suspenders. But it wasn’t what she really wanted. Margi told me she was a gay girl and wanted to make love to another woman, not a make-believe man. The last straw came, apparently, when Christine said she wanted to go the whole hog and have a sex change.

I was pleased with the outcome of the case. Right at the start, one senior officer came into the office and said, ‘Just do enough to keep the relatives happy.’ Now that really pissed me off. She might have been a
prostitute, she might have been a lesbian, but she didn’t deserve any more than anyone else did to end up murdered. So we did a little more than keep the relatives happy. We put the men who killed her behind bars for a long, long time.

I still shudder at the depravity of those two women. If I live to be 100, I’ll never understand how anybody could pay good money to have electric nipple clips fitted to their bodies, their testicles beaten or thrashed over a whipping stool, bound by their hands and ankles. Apparently, Christine once had a punter in for slave treatment and set him polishing her floor. Then she went out for the rest of the day and came home at night to find him still hard at work and in possession of just about the shiniest floor in London. He loved it.

I
suppose it should have been ‘Not Tonight, Josephine’ or even ‘Not Any Night, Josephine’. But this particular Josephine was irresistible. A slim, superfit, gorgeous aerobics instructor working at the top keep-fit studio in London. Great figure, great personality. The trouble was, she was up to her beautiful armpits in the drug scene, not so much a dealer but a go-between for jet-setters looking to buy recreational drugs. And she was heavily hooked on cocaine herself.

She came on to the scene when a reliable informant of the undercover unit told us he could arrange a meet with a woman who was actively touting for business involving large amounts of cocaine. The snout said she was claiming to be in a position to introduce would-be buyers to a big-league dealer who could supply substantial quantities of
good quality coke, or ‘Charlie’ as she called it. It looked like a tasty lead. Senior officers approved a covert operation and I was briefed to go in as a potential buyer.

I was introduced a few days later to Josephine in a pub in Fulham, the normal sort of ‘neutral’ territory favoured by undercover detectives in this sort of operation. I would always nominate pubs, hotel bars, hotel rooms, clubs, restaurants, some public place or other, partly for security reasons and partly for the right atmospere, where all parties would feel comfortable dealing with the business in hand.

There was an immediate spark between us. She was a good-looking woman, intelligent and witty and really toned-up from working at the top health studios in central London. She was a little older than me, but you would have been hard pushed to tell if we stood side by side. We got on well at our first meeting. As far as she was concerned, I was an up-and-coming dealer looking for some coke; she clearly had contacts who could supply it. ‘I’ve got a friend who has plenty,’ she said.

We talked it over in general terms, nothing heavy to start with. She made it clear that she was a
go-between
and would have to introduce me to the man who controlled the operation, Fernando Perez, who lived in Kensington in a plush apartment and worked for the Peruvian Embassy.

‘You’ll like him,’ she smiled coyly.

Right away, I thought he had got to be bringing the stuff in from South America in diplomatic bags. It looked like a classy operation.

The meeting went well. Josie and I agreed to go ahead and buy some stuff. She said she’d set it up
right away. We parted with a kiss on the cheek. The signals were go.

I went back to the Yard and reported the situation to my superior officers. I told them this woman and I were hitting it off so well that, to enhance my credibility as a drug buyer, I’d like to take her out socially after our next business meeting. It was a logical step as we’d really hit it off, and it might make her reveal more than she would about her connections on the drug scene. And, by the by, there was more than half a chance of a serious leg-over. Only I didn’t tell my bosses that. She was a suspect under investigation and I was a copper. A dangerous liaison that had to be treated with the utmost caution. Should I cross that line with the lovely Josephine?

A couple of meetings later and I finally met Perez, the main mover and shaker of this particular cocaine network. Once again, it went well. We got on famously. He was impressed with my phoney gangland credentials — a dealer heading for the top, money to burn. Both Josephine and Perez had liked me, apparently, and Perez was happy to do the business. One thing led to another and I set a dinner date with Jo to get to know each other better. She was fun. A lot better to be dealing with than most of the low lifes I have met on the drug scene.

It soon became obvious that she was very seriously hooked on cocaine. She was taking a lot by any standards. At her home in Fulham, she was habitually smoking it as crack, reducing cocaine to rocks by mixing it with baking powder and cooking it. But doing her brains on crack every day just didn’t seem to gel with her fitness lifestyle. She was obviously in the supply business to fund her habit.
But I still couldn’t help liking her.

The extent of her addiction was fully revealed after our meal out at Brown’s Hotel. I’d spared no expense wining and dining her. By the time we were going home, the dinner, the drink, the whole ambience meant we were only going back to her place for one thing — sex. It was the seal on our relationship and I didn’t know anything in the police manuals which prohibited a good shag with a tasty bird. Or perhaps I did in the back of my mind but chose to ignore it. We arrived back at her place both up for it, fired by some good wines and liqueurs. The aphrodisiac for her seemed to be danger. To her I was an up-and-coming gangster taking the drug scene by storm. Pony tail, flash car, big talk, shares in a couple of snooker halls. We went into the kitchen and Jo started pouring us a couple more drinks. We brushed against each other and there was electricity. Then it was into a passionate clinch and we were tearing at each other’s clothes. I couldn’t believe my luck, this was work, I was being paid for making love to a beautiful woman.

We stumbled from the kitchen, leaving our drinks untouched, into the bedroom and fell on to the bed virtually naked. She caressed and kissed every part of my body. It was the most incredible night of passion I can remember. She was insatiable. We’d have sex then she’d be on the bedside pipe, a toot of crack then back to bed for more, rarin’ to go again. This went on all night long. Nothing was out of bounds. She kept going back for another puff on the pipe then leaping back for more sex. She even supplied the condoms, slipping them on skilfully and sensually. She’d done that before! I did a couple of lines of powdered coke. I could hardly have refused, as it could have blown my cover.

I stayed all night, and I must say it was one of the most amazing of my life. Although it wasn’t strictly planned, we both knew it was going to happen. As we’d left the restaurant earlier, I made a coded telephone call to allow the surveillance team backing me up to stand down and go home. I wasn’t going to keep them up all night watching a flat while I was inside enjoying myself. And they might get nosey with their video cameras.

The pillow talk suggested she was warming to me a bit too much, a bit worrying as I knew she was eventually going to get busted. I put it to the back of my mind. She beckoned me back to bed for a final session before breakfast. Forget the cornflakes! Obviously, I didn’t have time to go home to shave or change and headed straight off to the Yard to update my bosses … or tell them as much as I thought they should know.

I dragged myself into the squad office bleary-eyed and bedraggled, completely shagged out. They would have panicked if I hadn’t been there first thing so it was important to put in an appearance whatever my condition. I went into the guv’nor’s office clutching my receipt from the restaurant, one of the best in town, and started the debrief, if you’ll pardon the expression, about how the meeting had gone.

I told them the drug deal was progessing well. It was likely to go off pretty soon. Then came the burning question, which from my appearance they knew the answer to already: ‘Well, did you take her out after the meet?’

I said, ‘Yes, it was good.’

‘Did you give her something to eat?’

‘Yes, Guv.’

‘Plenty of drinks?’

‘Oh yes, Guv, plenty.’

‘You don’t look as if you’ve been home.’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘So you stayed then?’

‘Er, yes, Guv.’

They knew by the smile on my face that they needn’t ask much more. But there was only so much I was prepared to tell them, a lot was personal now. I didn’t feel they needed to know we’d been at it all night in more positions than the
Kama
Sutra
or that she had kept herself fuelled up on crack. Our secrets and lies.

Then came the tricky business of the bill. It was close on £200 and I knew the Yard could be difficult with some expenses. My boss took it from me and said straight away, ‘Oh that’s not too bad, Blex.’ I looked at him a bit surprised, then looked at where his finger was … right by the VAT figure. I said, ‘No, sorry, Guv’nor, you’re looking at the wrong line … that’s just the VAT.’ He just went, ‘Fucking hell.’ So I said with a big grin on my face, ‘It was worth it.’

We planned to do the cocaine deal on a Saturday morning and I’d persuaded Perez to use his basement flat, in Abingdon Road, W8. I’d done a close recce and knew it was a flat that the police could access easily, it wasn’t a Fort Knox. The whole geography of the area suited me and my knowledge of this type of operation. Jo and I agreed that after we had done the trade we were going to Brighton for the weekend to celebrate our first successful deal of many, a new Bonnie and Clyde partnership. Poor cow. She turned up on the day, although she wasn’t strictly a part of the deal, and was scooped up in the raid along with
Perez. It was a good nick, a foreign envoy using diplomatic channels to smuggle in cocaine and flogging it all over London. Quite a capture. He was later jailed for possession of a kilo of cocaine with intent to supply.

As Jo was being nicked, I’d legged it off down the road to make it look like I had escaped, hoping she wouldn’t put two and two together and know that it was me who had stitched her up. Guilty conscience, I suppose. My colleagues searched the weekend bag she had packed for going away with me and found a nice batch of freshly-baked hash cookies and two wraps of cocaine. When the team met up later for a drink, it was, ‘Oh, you really were going to have a good weekend away, weren’t you?’

Jo was charged with possessing the drugs intended for our weekend treat but not with the main cocaine conspiracy in order to protect our undercover operation. She got fined for it, and not jailed thankfully. I don’t know whether she ever realised that it was me who had betrayed her. Our paths never crossed again … but she’s a girl I’ll never forget. Betrayal is the name of the game in the world of undercover policing. Sometimes it leaves a bitter taste.

There were times when I was in situations where I genuinely got to like the people I was investigating, like Jo. I felt a real affinity. In different circumstances, perhaps, we could have been real friends. It happens now and again, that you end up liking the people you are setting up. They might be on the other side of the fence, but they can still be likeable people. And at the end of the day, if you are an undercover copper I don’t even know whether you
are given the freedom to have a judgement; you only have one choice — you have the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. There can be only one loyalty, to the police service and the public, your paymasters.

You are always walking a tightrope between good and bad to some degree or other, whatever crimes you are investigating. It goes with the territory. But there are no demarcation lines when it comes to murder. And an informant in the Midlands had tipped off the police there that a murder was in the offing, a murder that could only be stopped by the intervention of undercover officers. It was a murder that would have devastating repercussions if we failed to halt it.

I had just been posted back to Carter Street Police Station in Walworth, South London, after a highly successful series of undercover operations with Scotland Yard’s Central Drugs Squad. Under the police rules of tenure, brought in to help prevent pockets of corruption building up after the scandal of the Obscene Publications Squad in the Seventies, detectives weren’t allowed to stay in one squad or at one station for more than three years. I had no choice but to fall in line with this policy though I and many fellow officers thought it was ludicrous, especially in the highly specialised area of undercover work. We would be living this very secretive life under various aliases, only going out to meet people undercover, never letting our real identities be known, building up contacts in the underworld and so on, then suddenly you were put back to being a public domain detective at a local nick dealing with day-to-day burglaries and muggings. By then, I’d had a lot of
success with covert operations and our argument against being transferred back to normal duties was quite simply that it placed us in danger. We envisaged a situation where we would be called out to an inquiry, going off to meet someone, saying, ‘Hello, I’m DC Peter Bleksley,’ and them taking one look at you and realising that last time we’d met I’d been a fucking drug-dealer. You’re blown out, the informant’s blown out and a job which might have been running for months is blown out.

Sometimes, an undercover job doesn’t come to a successful conclusion and you just withdraw gracefully. They won’t deal with you, they can’t deal with you, they choose not to deal with you — there were myriad reasons why a job might collapse. You pull out and let them carry on in the hope that you might get another crack at it another time. Then back on conventional CID duties you could potentially meet a suspect from a previous undercover job and be sussed out.

However, the management at the Yard were unyielding in these matters, as they largely are to this day, so it was back to Carter Street for me near where I had started my police career pounding the beat in a pointy hat years earlier. I was told, however, that it wouldn’t be too long before I was back with SO10.

I hadn’t been at Carter Street more than a few days when there was a call from HQ.

‘Blex, are you available?’

I told them, ‘Yes, I’d like to think I am, but I’ll need to square it with the bosses here.’

I walked up to the DCI’s office, a very old-style detective called Hughie Parker. He was out, it was lunchtime. I rang SO10 back and said I couldn’t get
permission to get away.

‘We need you,’ they said, ‘there can’t be any ifs, buts or maybes. We need you straight away. Who’s your Chief Super?’

At that time it was Bill Griffiths. So they went right over Hughie Parker’s head to the Chief Super and told him, ‘There’s a sensitive operation coming up and we need his experience. Now.’

Griffiths asked what it was about but the Yard boys wouldn’t tell him. Then I got a call from Griffiths upstairs saying, ‘OK, you can go.’ When Hughie Parker got back, he went ballistic because I’d vanished without his say so.