Double Locked: Front Stack, #2

By Vincent Frost and V.M. Frost

Double Locked – book two in the Front Stack series - the cops of Task Force Team Uniform X-Ray 646 are back on the street!


London 2012 – year of the Olympic games.
Single mum Kylie Evans lives a simple and fairly satisfied life up on the 20th floor of Boultham House in West London. Then one life-changing day, bent cop Paul Mitchell crashes into her world bringing disaster, the stink of fear and the danger of the streets.
Across town, in the domain of Task Force cops, Jax Jackson, the Cat, Dynamo and Bullseye: Falklands veteran and PTSD sufferer Dave Hinds, has found happiness in the form of a pretty girl cop. A chance encounter between Hinds and Mitchell will soon wrench open up the gates of hell for all concerned…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vincent Frost
• Release date: Nov 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201126766

Book preview

Prologue

To absent friends...

The chorus of Sonny and Cher's I got you babe, reverberating around the function room of Carshalton's Greyhound Hotel slowly diminished. The sing-along; a tribute to UX646's fallen comrade, was gradually replaced by the hum of laughter, banter among the cops, and polite small talk with those outside their circle.

Police Constable Emma Babes Cash, had been killed when a Taser; discharged by a colleague, had ignited the gas-filled room, home to Houndshale's flasher; Balvinder Kapoor. Emma's father; himself a retired police inspector, stood in a corner of the room speaking to the first person to have come across his stricken daughter - PC Vinny Jax Jackson.

The wrong side of forty, Jax had left school at sixteen with no qualifications. He'd gone on to work as a baker; then short order cook, before enlisting in the British army, where he rose to the rank of sergeant. Leaving the army at around the time of the first Gulf War, Jax had undertaken all manner of employment - a bit of security work, assistant to a vehicle examiner and even moonlighted for a shady character in Manchester who had won a contract to paint the exteriors of a string of funeral parlours. He'd never been particularly drawn to becoming a police officer, but on a whim, while working as a social worker in a residential kid's home for troubled adolescents; he'd filled out an application form for the police and after a long wait, had been accepted.

Standing at five foot eight inches tall, he'd never have made the regulation height had he applied a few years earlier, but equal opportunities had prevailed, and it had been decided that in order to attract recruits from more diverse backgrounds such as those races who are naturally shorter than their European counterparts; the height limit would be abolished. In the event, this only served to attract a new wave of short British recruits - including Jax!

Athletically built, he'd never quite escaped the military fitness regime that had been imposed upon him from an early age and if pushed he could still do an eight-minute mile. His close-cropped red hair had started to go grey at the temples and with this, the fiery nature of redheads began to abate, leaving a fairly mellow character who through life's experiences, had learnt to keep his temper and impetuosity at bay.

That said however, it was still liable to manifest itself when he was subjected to extreme provocation! Controlled aggression, he'd found, was a valuable asset when facing threats of violence out on the street. His philosophy - drawn from a life of varied employment and contact with people from all walks of life, was that he'd happily chat to anyone on the street regardless of their criminal past, so long as they showed him respect - but take the piss and young red-haired Jax would make a sudden guest appearance!

He'd enjoyed his first few years as a beat cop, and finding he was among a tight group who shared his cynical view of life, he'd finally found himself in a job, which he actually enjoyed turning up for.

Seven years later, he'd just about had his fill of repetitive domestics - which could include complaints such as: my boyfriend took the TV remote control from me and he won't give it back.

He'd seen enough dead bodies in various stages of decomposition to last him a lifetime, and as for low level, revolving door slag, he'd had a gut full of them too. On his seventh consecutive night duty, he'd been trawling the borough's newsletter, when he spotted a vacancy for the Borough Task Force.

Houndshale's BTF sounded like the change of scenery Jax needed. Apart from an attractive shift pattern, the BTF teams were pretty much left to their own devices as long as they generated results. Unlike their peers on core shift, they didn't appear to be slaves to the radio - and if that meant no longer having to go to domestics to sort out people's lives for them - then Jax was up for giving it a shot!

The BTF remit, it seemed, revolved around targeting drug, robbery and burglary hotspots and disrupting gangs through stop and search. They were all trained in method of entry techniques and were sought after to provide an entry team for the execution of search warrants.

The team's secondary role was to provide riot-trained officers to those London boroughs in need of extra support. This support was known as aid. Jax was already what the Metropolitan police referred to as a level two officer, and to that end, he undertook the annual riot training at the public order training centre at Gravesend. He'd already done the odd bit of aid away from his home borough of Houndshale.

Each of the two BTF teams were a ready made level two serial and as such, always at the forefront when level two officers were required. The BTF consisted of an inspector - in the current form of The Man Williams, two sergeants, and two teams of seven constables.

Much of their level two aid was football related - both with their local team at Spentford - known as the Seals, and the premier teams such as Chelsea. Most of the other aid was provided to central London: where on any one day, there seemed to be some kind of protest or demonstration taking place.

Along with the independence the BTF seemed to enjoy, Jax liked the idea of working away from Houndshale once in a while. It was about time he saw how the rest of the Met worked; and smashing down bad guys' doors in the early hours definitely appealed - so he'd spent the rest of his seventh night duty, hunched over an application form.

All this had been six years ago now, and he'd seen various sergeants come and go, policed countless demonstrations - both violent and benign - traversed London countless times and even held the line during the Tottenham riots.

Of the original members of his team there were none - they'd gone off to specialise on firearms units, traffic or the Territorial Support Group. He bumped into them every so often: especially the TSG guys, who invariably were tasked with the same aid. Six years after his last domestic call, he now had the dubious honour of being the longest serving PC on the team.

Jax, who'd been first into the carnage of what was left of Kapoor's bedsitting room, had found the retired inspector's daughter lying on her back in the middle of the room. She'd been covered in dust and debris, a chunk of still-smoking shrapnel embedded in her forehead. Jax spared her surviving father the gory details, telling him only that he didn't believe his daughter had suffered.

Looking at the assembled mourners, Jax spotted his teammate, PC Tam Porridge Face Morris. He was standing alone by the bar, looking sorry for himself.

Swathed in plaster cast and bandages, Porridge Face had been the cause of the explosion at Kapoor's place. Faced by the knife-wielding pervert, he'd failed to identify the noxious substance filling the room and had engaged Kapoor with his X26 Taser.

Morris never let the truth get in the way of a good story - if you told him you'd been to Tenerife - he'd been to Eleven-erife. He could have easily been known as Billy Liar, but it was his face that had given birth to his nickname of Porridge Face.

A bad bout of teenage acne had left scars on his face that made his skin look not too dissimilar to a bowl of cold lumpy porridge. On any given day though, if asked, he was capable of producing a whole host of reasons for the state of his face. These ranged from: It had been caused during the Iraq war, while he shielded a woman and her children from an exploding grenade - to, his face had been dragged along the road while hanging on to the fender of an armed robber's getaway car following a bank job.

Apart from the lunar landscape that was his face, Morris had the unfortunate additional curse of practically being a hunchback. His head, a mass of dark curls - much like a white man's Afro - seemed to sit on top of his shoulders without connecting to his neck, which appeared nonexistent. This gave the impression that his torso was abnormally short. His belly stuck out like that of a heavily pregnant woman. Despite his outward appearance of a hunchbacked egg on legs, Porridge actually fancied himself as a bit of a ladies man, but really, he was all retch and no vomit.

He really wasn't in any fit state to be attending a funeral, but true to form, he'd said something about his injuries being no more than flesh wounds, before discharging himself. His presence at Emma's funeral had initially given the others some cause for concern, but Emma's father had been magnanimous and not levelled any blame at Porridge.

The next member of Task Force team UX646 to approach Emma's father, was sergeant Ian Jarvis. In his early forties, and without a spare ounce of fat on his body, the skipper was a keen sportsman; but years of competitive sport had left him with a bad back. To alleviate his back pain, he'd switched his office chair for a Swiss ball and invariably got to his feet with a groan of, Oh, me back!

With his tanned face, boyish looks and non-regulation hair length, Jarvis was the thinking woman's Richard Gere. He certainly had an eye for the ladies, and with an infectious laugh, that you couldn't help but be drawn into, he normally had them eating out of his hand! His habitual response to the antics of his team was to raise his eyebrows and gaze heavenward in silent appeal.

Jax took the skipper's arrival as his cue to mingle with the mourners and spotting a big guy who stood head and shoulders above the rest of the assembled mourners, he made a beeline for him.

Craig Dynamo Johnson stood at six-foot two. His passion was the gym and diet. Protein mad, he'd been known to consume twenty eggs in one day alone! He carried what was a portable larder - a blue cool bag of gigantic proportions, containing his two-hourly meals. If he were to be parted from his food for a few minutes over his two-hour limit, he'd get very tetchy indeed!

Worshipping at the altar of the gym most days, his biceps bulged and strained against the white cotton of his uniform short-sleeved shirt. So big were Dynamo's arms, the material actually cut into his skin. Filling the large sleeves of a police shirt took some doing - Jax's own sleeves flapped around his arms like bellbottomed trousers on skinny legs! When Dynamo smiled - which was most of the time - his perfect white teeth filled his head and his eyes radiated the playfulness of a puppy dog.

Dynamo's luxuriant head of hair was stylishly gelled into a quiff, and whether it was his intense bodybuilding regime, his huge protein intake, or just a faulty thermostat, the big man was forever complaining about being hot. Whatever the temperature, he was the only cop on the team to wear short sleeved uniform shirts come rain or shine. The minute he entered a room, his first act would be to complain about the heat and throw open all of the windows. While the others shivered in their coats and berated him for admitting what was for him a cool breeze - but for the rest of them an icy blast - he would flash that disarming grin of his and carry on regardless.

Jax, who felt the cold more than the others, would eventually strike a compromise and close the window nearest to the computer terminal where he was working. This normally drew the kind of comments reserved for the oldest member of the team:

'Ah, poor old man, shall I fetch you a nice tartan blanket to put over your legs?' Constantly messing around, you only knew he was serious when he followed up a story with, and I'm not even joking.

Dynamo's overheating issues didn't end at the office either: once they were all out and about in the carrier, the big man would generally ensure that he sat up front in the operator's seat. This way, he could control the heating system, and not content with turning the heat right down, he'd normally try to sneak the air conditioning on too! His reasoning behind this was to say that; the driver was in charge of the driving controls, while the operator was in charge of everything left of the steering wheel!

He'd been sent home from school on many an occasion: his inability to concentrate misdiagnosed as bad behaviour. No longer a schoolboy, his reluctance to keep still and low boredom threshold persisted, and there wasn't a lot in life that the big man took too seriously. He was impossibly playful and tactile and once, when he'd met a corpulent superintendent on the stairs, and they'd almost walked into each other while both choosing the same way to go, Dynamo had simply thrown his arms around the startled superintendent and given him a big hug!

Dynamo was great fun to have on the team and almost without exception; he could lighten the mood of the most miserable bastard on the carrier. He was also useful in a scrap, and when the team executed search warrants, there weren't many doors that could defeat him. He simply slogged away until either the door gave way or the masonry surrounding it crumbled!

Jax hadn't been chatting to Dynamo for more than a couple of minutes; when Adie The Cat Black joined them. Mischievous grin in place, the Cat farted, before cheekily asking whose round it was.

Called the Cat after his main two passions - coffee and tits - Adie was the king of banter. His stock of put down lines seemed inexhaustible. Like Dynamo, The Cat was a gym junkie who liked to dress down in the latest fashion and was on a never-ending quest for worldly information. Another beneficiary of the relaxed height rule, he was a follower of fashion both in the way that he dressed, and the style in which he furnished his home. His house was equipped with the latest TV and audio, and when it came to furniture, IKEA didn't remotely feature. He liked nothing more than to spend hours in front of his oversized TV, watching either the Discovery channel or National Geographic. He could bore for England on air crash investigations, weird and wonderful weapons, underwater gold mining and ice road trucking.

The Cat suffered from an endearing issue with mispronouncing words almost on par with a victim of metathesis. In his eagerness to repeat knowledgeable quotations, he tended to get them wrong - generally with hilarious results. Words such as specific, came out as pacific, while supposedly came out as supposebly.

One of the Cat's more memorable faux pas had been when repeating a joke he'd heard previously. It had revolved around the subject of some persona non grata with the punch line misquoted as:

'He was left feeling about as welcome as a lamb chop at a Bar Mitzvah!'

For all his mispronunciations, he was a likable member of the BTF and pretty good at sarcastic put-downs, be they at the expense of his colleagues, or some half-witted low-level criminal on the street.

The Cat enjoyed a game of golf and could often be found on a golf course playing alongside high ranking and influential officers. This was his way of networking, and although this didn't appear to be done out of servility, it left him well placed when certain plum vacancies or more exotic training courses came about.

Jax and Dynamo were just berating him for fouling the air with his habitual flatulence, when the penultimate member of UX646; seeking the familiar company of his friends, came over to the bar. Like his teammates, Ollie Bullseye Knight, had done the obligatory rounds of small talk with Emma's family and friends and now intended to sink a few pints in Babe's honour.

Permatanned, Bullseye was around the same age and height as Jax. He wasn't tall in the way that tourists to the capital may have expected him to be, and his ready smile seemed at odds with his pugnacious reputation. His filthy mind, ramrod straight back and trim figure, were testament to his past employment.

Bullseye had sailed around the world with the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, been an airman with the Royal Air force, spent time as a cop in the Ministry of Defence police and been a radio dispatcher for Jax's old force, over at Thames Valley.

A keen darts player, Bullseye, was the newest member of UX646 and when he'd arrived, he'd brought his dartboard to the office, where he'd found a space in between desks, to hang it. Within a few weeks, even the most reticent of darts players, had taken the game up and during down time, games of arrows, were now de rigueur.

At the start of each shift, Bullseye could be found in front of the tin mirror on his locker door. With a brush of the kind your sister might have had back in the 70's in one hand, he fastidiously patted strands of thinning grey hair into place with the other. He was fond of proudly telling anyone who took the piss out of his grooming habits, that he'd had the same brushed back hairstyle for the last thirty years.

Still fishing for a free drink, the Cat was pleased to see the BTF guvnor sidling over to join them.

Inspector John The Man Williams had been known affectionately as The Man, ever since he'd accompanied the team on an early morning raid. Standing behind the ruins of what had been his front door, the subject of the search warrant; a weasel-like petty thief, had attempted a feeble attack on the officers before being floored and cuffed. Looking up from his filthy carpet, he'd indignantly asked to whom he could make a complaint. At that, and right on cue, the guvnor had stepped into the room and announced that he was the man.

Meaning that he was the man to whom complaints should be addressed, it had unintentionally come out more like, Yeah I'm the man around here, what's the problem? What had made it all the funnier had been the fact that he was a true gentleman devoid of all bravado. Nonetheless, the name had stuck.

With the look of a genial uncle, the guvnor's stocky frame belied his past as a marathon runner. Laughter lines were etched around his sparkling eyes and he had the relaxed air of a man who had reached the point in his career at which he was happy to remain, while counting down to retirement and a decent pension.

He was a keen golfer; and when pensive, Williams would pick up whatever golf club-like implement he could find with which to swing at imaginary golf balls. Armed with his improvised golf club, The Man would dispense wise advice on both life and the intricacies of police procedure.

This disparate band completed borough task force team UX646, but the untimely demise of Emma Cash, had left a vacancy on the team. This not being the appropriate time to discuss her replacement, UX646 went over old stories and drank to her memory. Having now been joined by skipper Jarvis, they all raised a glass. Murmuring, 'to absent friends...' they drained their glasses.

Chapter One

Drinking in the last chance saloon

The George and Dragon public house in Shanworth didn't have a lot of history. Built to accommodate the burgeoning welfare housing in the 1960's, it had less than an illustrious past, and its only claim to fame had been, that not long after opening, it was host to a grisly murder.

Tommy The Gentleman Butler had been despatched to Houndshale by his east end gangland bosses to meet their west London counterparts. He was to investigate the possibility of expansion and acquiring more turf from which to run their business. The George and Dragon was on the estate on which Houndshale's number one mobster lived and so was chosen as the venue. After a hard night's drinking behind closed doors, and much needling, there had been one hell of an argument.

Denigrating them as not being proper Londoners, in a reference to Houndshale's proximity to Surrey, Tommy made the mistake of vocally dismissing the west London mob as, Surrey sheep shaggers.

After gamely managing to smash one of the gang over the head with a bar stool and push a beer glass into the face of another, Tommy had gone down under a hail of pool cues. Literally kicking the east London gangster to death, the sheep shaggers threw him into the pub's chest freezer and left the hapless landlord to clean up the mess.

Early the next morning, the west London mob called in a favour from a Filebridge meat merchant who hooked Tommy up next to his pig carcasses, and drove him back to the east end where he was deposited unceremoniously at a lock up owned by his ex bosses.

Fifty years later and the George and Dragon was on its arse. With the brewery long since having pulled out, the current landlord couldn't muster more than a handful of customers and he'd resorted to buying his booze on a sale or return basis from the local cash and carry. The pub had never been pretty, but with its paint peeling and the interior stinking of damp, it was only a matter of time until the landlord defaulted on the rent and got closed down. The only people drinking in there these days, were down and out all day drinkers and a gang of low level coke dealers who'd made the George their base. It wasn't what the landlord had wanted, but with the menace of young dealers, the gang terrorised him and did as they pleased.

One of the dealers, a spotty but dangerous man known unimaginatively as: Skinny Man, had moved into the pub's upstairs accommodation and it was from this less than salubrious headquarters, that he plied his trade. He'd become so blasé, as to keep his stash at the pub.

There is little honour to be found among drug dealers and it wasn't long before the activities of Skinny Man came to the attention of the police. As was often the case, a rival dealer had turned informant, and through Crimestoppers, he'd dropped skinny man in it. The rival's whisperings had eventually made it onto the police CRIMINT system and alerted the cops to the goings on at the George.

CRIMINT is basically a good intel tool. It was designed to keep tabs on local criminals and consequently keep the cops informed on the latest comings and goings of the criminal fraternity. It features reports on who runs drugs for which dealer, who drives what car, and even who drives whilst disqualified. Some of the information comes from Crimestoppers - the anonymous phone call facility for nosey neighbours, rival drug dealers or disgruntled ex-girlfriends, which serves to provide information to the police.

Other CRIMINT entries are provided by police officers, Police Community Officers, or paid informants.

A good tool in principle; CRIMINT is overloaded with gossip, whispers and rumour. PSCO's in particular love to input such trivia as, I saw this person talking to this person, and, today at such and such a time, I saw so and so walking down the High Street. It's akin to the kind of gossip network upon which East Germany's STASI relied during the cold war - 50% bollocks, 40% malice and 10% truth.

To be fair, among the dross, there's the odd rough diamond to be found, and enough information on the same subject, can provide enough information to be put before a magistrate to secure a search warrant.

Within the metropolitan police, there is an amateur intelligence army that slaves over CRIMINT whenever they can get to a computer terminal. They barter information with all the fervour of young boys swapping football cards, competing among one another for the best and most up to date intelligence. These CRIMINT monkeys even call each other up at home to swap jealously guarded information. The intel addicts feign friendship with junkies and petty criminals in order to glean information in relation to dealers and fences.

You don't need to be Sherlock Holmes to know that junkies don't turn in their dealers any more than turkeys vote for Christmas, but their every word is eagerly and meticulously recorded.

Through necessity, drug addicts are accomplished liars to the point of actually convincing themselves that they speak the truth. If they think that they can gain advantage by telling the cops any old shit - they generally do just that.

After such encounters, the CRIMINT monkeys get very excited and rush to the nearest nick to input what amounts to bullshit, before swapping the so-called hot info in hushed tones with their fellow believers.

Ultimately it falls to the officers of the borough intelligence unit to