Lies And Consequences Collection

Prologue

My father was a field-promoted captain in the Royal Artillery Regiment during the Second World War, but after the surrender of Italy he was attached to Military Intelligence interrogating captured Axis troops, remaining stationed in that country until 1945. Back home he served a further seven years in "The Colours" before applying to join the London police. He was turned down because he had one false tooth! The Metropolitan Police had the choice from so many returning British Forces personnel that such a small inadequacy of a missing tooth was deemed to be undesirable in a perfect police force; however, that presumed perfection was not evident in later years. I was born four years after my father returned home.

I cannot speak of the integrity of the police in London before I joined in 1971, but through the late "60s and early "70s reports of the alleged corruption in the Met were regularly carried in the national newspapers and openly spoken of. It ranged from the ordinary constables, in a patrol car, stopping a drunk driver and accepting the equivalent of a week"s wage to drive that drunk and his or her car home, to high-ranking criminal investigation detectives taking bribes from violent robbers to turn a blind eye, or, in some notorious cases; covertly assist! No station or department was immune to this endemic practice.

I was at Oxford when the offer to join the "Job" was first put to me. I declined that offer, favouring to stay and follow my chosen path of studying analytical chemistry and my secondary recreational pastime; the science of psychology. Three weeks into my final year at university, my father died of a sudden heart attack. He was forty-nine and employed at the War Department. My mother died two months later from a broken heart.

The security of a degree became less important to me on accepting another approach from a senior Metropolitan police officer named Barrington Trenchard. He spoke passionately about his desire to root out this criminality that was being linked to Members of Parliament. He wanted me and knew my weakness.

My self-importance had led to some written articles of mine being published on the utopian dream of right and wrong. The complexity of realism that he threw at my argument destroyed the idealistic world I lived in. Both the ordinary men and the extraordinary, who wished to serve the cause of justice were being challenged by the ensnarement of those who wished its desecration.

Sometime after Trenchard"s presentation, I became a fully signed-up and committed custodian of justice. As I was coming straight from university I was to be fast-tracked, becoming an inspector within five years, but no one mentioned Jack to me, nor the tracks he travelled to impose his kind of virtue.

I was about to find out that justice could be found in more places than a court of law, and bribes come in more ways than mere money.