Free Gangbuster by Peter Bleksley Page B

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 youare 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 ofsuccess 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