The Drop

was of no consequence to me whatsoever.
    ‘Detective Sergeant Sharp you do know,’ he told me.
    ‘We’ve had the pleasure,’ we all shook hands. ‘Inspector,’ I said giving him my best hundred-watt smile, ‘would you like to join me for some lunch, your colleague too of course? This Sauvignon is excellent,’
    ‘No thank you Mister Blake,’ he said, like I had just offered him an all-expenses trip to the Bahamas in return for forgetting a murder I’d committed, ‘do you have somewhere for a private conversation?’ A bit rich, considering his very public entrance.
    ‘Of course,’ I assured him, ‘always happy to assist Northumbria’s finest.’
    I led them into a poky little office out back and we sat around a desk normally used by the restaurant’s bookkeeper, ‘how can I help?’
    ‘By dispensing with the usual bullshit,’ he told me. He was leaning forward in his chair, an excitable sort who couldn’t wait to tell me what was on his mind.
    I decided to play the genteel, slightly-incredulous suspect, the kind you might see on an episode of Inspector Morse . ‘I’m not sure if I follow Inspector.’ Sharp smirked slightly.
    ‘Heard of the Marshall brothers?’ he asked, ‘Don’t answer that, course you have.’
    ‘I think I may have read about them in the newspaper.’
    ‘I’ll bet you did,’ he nodded emphatically, ‘A lovely bust, that one. They’d ruled half of Manchester for donkey’s years, then, one day we took down one of their dealers for the third time. I mean, he was looking at more Porridge than Ronnie Barker.’
    ‘Use that joke a lot do you?’ I asked him.
    He ignored me. ‘So he lays down for us and starts bleating; names, dates, places, money, grams and kilos. Yeah, they were shifting kilos, the cocky buggers. He gave us a name and we busted him, that bloke gave us a name and we busted him too, and so on, all the way up the big, long, greasy pole right to the very top. You see, nobody wants to be the only one doing life. You’d have to be a right mug, so you sneak on the guy who’s giving you orders and taking home more money than you for less risk, in theory,’ he added the ‘in theory’ like it was darkly significant, ‘there’s a kind of resentment that we find quite easy to tap into. Before you know it we’d got all the lieutenants, knocked them down one by one like dominoes, till the Marshalls had no one left to do their dirty work for them. Then we came after the brothers, see. Did you hear what they got in the end?’
    ‘Ninety-nine years.’
    ‘You do remember,’ he said triumphantly.
    ‘Of course, he had a good eye for the headlines the old “hanging judge”. I thought at the time it was quite a coincidence how his carefully considered sentences all added up neatly to ninety-nine years.’
    ‘Terry Marshall got thirty-two years,’ and he whistled like he was impressed, ‘minimum recommendation was twenty-five. The judge may have liked headlines but he had a good sense of humour an’ all. There’s Terry standing in the dock at his age and he says “I can’t do all that time” meaning he is going to be long dead by the end of his sentence and do you know what the judge said. “Do your best,” and DI Clifford laughed until he almost choked. “Do your best?” You should have seen the look on poor Terry’s little face. I mean imagine it, you’ve robbed and thieved and battered and murdered till you are at the top of the whole shitty pile and how do you spend your last days; sharing a tiny cell for twenty-three hours a day with a mugger and a rapist until you finally die. He’s got to be asking himself every hour of every day what was it all for?’ he paused to let that sink in, ‘that’s how it ends for people like him - but it doesn’t have to be like that for everybody who works for the top boys.’ He leaned forward like he was sharing a conspiracy with me. ‘You know Bobby Mahoney is on a list don’t you? I mean right at the top of that list, along with a few cockneys, a couple of Scousers and some Jocks I could mention.’
    I tried to look blank, ‘New Year’s Honours?’
    ‘SOCA’s hit parade.’
    SOCA or the Serious Organised Crime Agency, was created with the merger of the National Crime Squad and the National Criminal Intelligence Service, to become an organisation the tabloids had taken to referring to as the British F.B.I. They were meant to tackle drug barons, people traffickers and large scale money