Never Apologise, Never Explain - James Craig [60]
Happy to let the kids run off as much energy as possible, the two men took up residence on a bench and contemplated the view in comfortable silence, looking west across the playing-fields towards the London Central Mosque. They knew each other well enough not to worry about small talk. In fact, their relationship went all the way back to their Metropolitan Police training at Hendon College in the early 1980s.
Dominic was a genuine, 100 per cent cockney. He came from East London and was a West Ham fan. Carlyle came from West London and supported Fulham. Straight out of college, they had worked the bitter Miners’ Strike together. They had spent much of the time speeding their tits off on the picket line together, courtesy of Dominic’s ready supply of amphetamines. They had both been outsiders, piss-takers, awkward-question-askers. They were chippy bastards – but solid chippy bastards always willing to do more than their share of the dirty work, and more than happy to do extra overtime. There was enough common ground for them to build a solid friendship during the fourteen-hour shifts far from home.
Once the strike was over, Dom didn’t take to the relatively sedate life of a policeman back on the beat. There was an entrepreneurial spirit gnawing away inside him, and in the end he had just too much get-up-and-go for the Force to satisfy him. Within a year of the strike ending, he left the Metropolitan Police and went into business for himself. Once, in the early days, he had asked Carlyle to join him. But then, as now, Carlyle couldn’t see himself working for a drug dealer. Even if he was rather ambivalent about what Dominic did for a living, he certainly didn’t want to get involved.
Over the following years, their paths had crossed many times since, sometimes by accident, sometimes by one seeking the other out. That was not so surprising: they had a lot of mutual interests, given what Dominic Silver did for a living. Almost three decades later, while Carlyle was merely an undistinguished career cop, Dominic Silver had become something of a legend among certain sections of the Metropolitan police force. The son of a policeman, the nephew of a policeman, he was the archetypal good boy turned bad, but with an honesty and a style that gleaned a little goodwill from even the most hard-nosed copper. Even now there was still a part of Dom that remained ‘one of us’ in the eyes of many police officers of a certain age.
However, there was also a large part of Dominic Silver that had left his life in uniform a very long way behind indeed. Now at his professional peak, Silver was maybe in the third or fourth tier of drug dealers across the whole of London. This was not a bad place to be, reasonably comfortable, avoiding the problems facing those higher up the ladder as well as those below him. His operation was turning over maybe low millions each year, with clients including a swathe of minor celebrities and some of the newer entries in Who’s Who. He even had a couple of corporate clients who still bought on account, despite the recession.
Dominic had built up his business slowly, one step at a time, always avoiding conflicts and solving problems without resorting to violence, wherever possible. As the years turned into decades, his reputation grew. In a business where to survive three years was rare, to have survived three decades was a major miracle. He had never been arrested, never mind convicted, of any offence. He was not some nut job who’d let success and so-called ‘easy