Gotcha! - Prologue

Prologue
Wednesday, 2 March 1983. A fresh spring day. Clouds scudded across the sky, bringing with them the occasional shower of light rain. A group of police officers from Scotland Yard's Drugs Squad were searching a large scrap yard in Dalston, a poor inner city district of East London.
The officers were looking for pills. It was a daunting task. The yard, which was sandwiched between railway viaducts, covered some three acres of ground. It was littered with stacks of steel pipes and girders, piles of scaffolding, and the wrecks of motor vehicles. Small fires were lit here and there, filling the air with an acrid stench.
The yard was a hive of activity. Radios played from the workshops and lock-up garages clad with corrugated iron that were huddled under the Victorian brick arches of the railway. Nearby, there was a weighbridge for lorries, stores piled high with bales of scrap paper, and lean-to sheds full of unidentifiable pieces of heavy machinery.
The officers, led by Detective Inspector Ian Malone, gingerly picked their way between the oily puddles and rusted metal towards the yard's prefab two-storey offices.
The owner of the yard was a man named Jimmy Knight, who they knew to be a very wealthy man. He had made a fortune out of the scrap metal business and had put the money into a leisure complex in Stanmore, North London. The officers thought, wrongly as it later turned out, that Jimmy's scrap yard was being used to manufacture and hide drugs destined for the club scene.
They knew that Jimmy Knight had two younger brothers, John and Ronnie. Two other brothers had died some years beforehand: one murdered in a vicious Soho brawl; the other was struck down by a tumour on the brain.
John was quiet and kept himself to himself, seemingly a respectable businessman. Among other things, he ran a garage in North London. Ronnie, by contrast, was a very public figure. He was married to an actress, Barbara Windsor, from the Carry On films, and owned a nightclub in the West End.
	The officers strode into Jimmy Knight's large untidy office, where they found six chairs roughly arranged to form a semicircle around his desk. It was as if a meeting had been in progress and had been quickly broken up, possibly when the officers had been clocked at the yard gates. Plastic cups half-full of warm tea littered the desk. To the officers' minds, whoever had been there, had left in rather a hurry.
	Jimmy had nothing to say, but the officers' suspicions were heightened when they found five smartly dressed men lurking in a room nearby, behind a locked door. The men, all in their forties, had an air of self-confidence about them that, to the experienced officers, spoke volumes. They'd seen it all before.
The five were highly evasive, reluctant to tell the police what they were doing, meeting at the yard like that. So the officers took down their details. One man turned out to be a wealthy north London property dealer called Terry Perkins. Another man, John Mason, ran a nearby laundrette. He was there with his mate, Ronnie Everett, the landlord of a pub in the Grays Inn Road.
Another man tried to give the police a false name and address, but he was quickly recognised by one of the officers, as Billy Hickson. His real identity was confirmed after further questioning at a local police station. Hickson had done time for armed robbery.
The fifth man was Jimmy Knight's younger brother, John.
To the officers it was all very intriguing. They knew that the Knight family had some heavy connections, but they were surprised at the set of people they had found hiding in that room. All of the men had form in one way or another.
During the thorough search of the yard a box was found containing some specialist glassware, the kind one might use for the chemical synthesis of drugs - or so the officers thought. Jimmy Knight was charged but later acquitted. He told the magistrates that the glassware belonged to someone else in the yard. Jimmy said he knew nothing about it. 'How should I know what goes on. All I do is rent out the lock-ups. What the men do inside them is their own business.'
Despite the police's suspicions, the five men meeting at the yard that day had done nothing wrong. But still, the meeting was duly logged by the officers. The men's names were added to the Drugs Squad's intelligence database, purely for its own internal use.
And no more was thought of it.