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.Also I checked you out with Helena James.She seemed to think it was reasonable that I speak to you.’Funny, Helena hadn’t mentioned that.‘Did Jayce tell you what I wanted to know?’‘George Hollis and Steve Jaeger, right? A charming pair.’‘What more can you tell me about them?’‘Plenty.Hollis has quite a pedigree.You know that he worked out of Harlesden nick during the early eighties,’‘Special Incident Squad, Jayce told me.’‘You know the score on those units.They were completely results driven,’ Baxter went on.‘Always a dangerous objective, in my book.Minor considerations like truth and justice tend to get sidelined.Hollis was young and hungry when he joined the squad and presumably impressionable.He would have learned a lot from the more experienced officers on the squad and not all of it good.We know that a number of dubious practices were rife among those élite squads at the time.’Mariner had grown up with the folklore; unrecorded evidence taken in cars en route to the police station, the ‘correction’ and fabrication of information recorded in pocket books, the use of intimidation and physical violence during interviews.The bad old days.‘I understand Ryland had linked Hollis to a number of miscarriages, including Joseph O’Connor’s,’ he said.‘That was classic Hollis, and the first hint we had that there was more going on.O’Connor’s was one of the first cases that the JRC handled.His brief was referring the case on the grounds that his client’s statement had been coerced.When Geoff looked at the transcripts, this was borne out.He’d talked to Joseph O’Connor and could see that there were words and phrases that he just wouldn’t have used.He wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.’‘So how did you get involved?’‘Geoff and me go way back when to he was a prosecutor, and bloody good he was too.We’d been involved in a couple of corruption cases before and he knew my views.In the end it’s what compelled me to leave.I’d just set up in business, mainly working with the complaints authority to support the drive against police corruption.As part of the investigation into Hollis, Geoff got us to trawl back through transcripts of other cases that he’d had been involved in, some of them going back years.‘Geoff had a nose for a bent copper and he could tell that O’Connor wasn’t just a one-off.Naturally, as part of the enquiry we looked deeper into the circumstances surrounding O’Connor’s arrest, and that was when we learned that Marvin Jackson had been arrested along with O’Connor but released without so much as an interview.It didn’t make any sense, especially when he was the one with the history, so we started to explore the possible reasons for that.The one that leapt out and smacked us in the face was that at about that time Jackson was registered as an informant, with Steve Jaeger as his handler and supervising officer—’‘George Hollis.’ Mariner was ahead of him.‘But given the length of time that Jackson was on the books there were surprisingly few results arising from information he’d supplied, in fact the luck seems to have all run the other way.’‘That was a hell of a risk for Hollis to take.’‘He’d been at Harlesden for a while by then and he was a powerful figure.We put him under surveillance and found that there seemed to be something more than a professional relationship between him and Terry Brady.It wasn’t hard to figure out.Hollis was taking a cut of Brady’s dirty money in return for keeping him out of trouble, giving him information on raids that were going down, that kind of thing.Hollis got complacent, took to holidaying on the Costa del Sol in one particular villa, owned by Terry Brady.He even had the barefaced cheek to meet him out there a couple of times.’‘That’s when you took those photographs.’Baxter smiled.‘This job isn’t all about sneaking around in car parks in the pouring rain you know.There is some glamour.’‘It looks to me as if you had a strong case.’‘It took us a while to assemble the evidence and Geoff was thorough.You know what it’s like.Corruption amongst police officers, like miscarriages of justice, is a big thing.You have to get it right.There was another complication too.The Home Office was breathing down our necks because they didn’t want another corrupt police officer scandal.’‘So what happened?’‘To be honest I don’t really know.We were all set to move on it the middle of last year.Hollis was coming up to retirement anyway.He was just over fifty at the time and was planning to go out in a blaze of glory.I think it was that more than anything that rankled with Geoff; that this guy was about to be held up as an exemplary officer when in truth he was anything but.But just as we were due to subpoena Hollis’s bank details he slipped out of sight.He got to take early retirement due to so-called “ill health”.’ Baxter spat out the words with contempt.‘Bastard jumped before he was pushed.’‘Do you think someone tipped him off?’‘He got wind of it somehow.Hollis was popular [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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