people up and make money out of it, which he did handsomely, that with every passing day he was putting himself in more and more danger. I’ve always been a gambling man and I wouldn’t have given him better than evenmoney of making his next birthday.
Just half-an-hour before he was shot, he was fixing the meet with me to grass up yet more villains, another drugs gang. The word had been out for him for a long, long time. He was so active the police had had to set aside two batches of officers to deal with him. A colleague and I were handling him more or less on a daily basis for his drugs work and long-standing colleague Jim Clarkson, a DI on the Regional Crime Squad at East Dulwich was handling his other crime stuff – counterfeit currency, stolen gear of every variety, art thefts, this, that and the other. That’s how prolific Norris was.
He was discussing a future job with Jim Clarkson over a few pints in the Fox in Belvedere on the night he died. I rang him in the bar there to check that he was OK for the next day’s breakfast meet on a new drugs job he was putting up. That’s how he worked, moving from one cop to another with more underworld information.
The next morning I picked up my colleague, DS Bill Trimble, a pleasant, quiet, former long-serving uniformed officer, not the usual hard-nosed Yard DS you sometimes come across, and we were driving to meet Norris for breakfast to discuss the job. The radio was on and that’s when I heard it. When they gave his name, they’d got it slightly wrong – Maurice or something like that, but I knew.
A couple of minutes later, my mobile rang and it was my boss DI Charlie Eubank and he said, ‘Blex, have you heard?’
I said I’d just heard an item on the radio with the name slightly different but I was assuming it was our man.
He said, ‘Yes, it’s him.’
I said, ‘Well, best I don’t bother going to the café then. Norris won’t turn up now.’
Bill, my colleague, was absolutely shell-shocked, aghast at the news. I literally saw the colour drain from his cheeks.
That was the morning I coined the phrase ‘better dead than nicked’, because there had been a lot of suspicion about Norris’s dealings with informant handlers over the years. At one point, one trusted colleague and I were the only officers allowed to deal with him. A lot of people had been struck off the list of handlers because of suspicions they had been got at, backhanders going to and fro, palms greased. I can say, hand on heart, that I was saying that for other people’s benefit, because I’d heard the rumours and I was well aware of some of the shenanigans that were supposed to be going on. I said that if he’d been nicked with a huge great parcel of drugs, he would have sung like a canary taking everyone down with him, in the job or out of it, who had ever taken a drink off him. That’s the sort of person he was. There would have been no loyalty to anyone. He was a grass and he was always looking to cover his backside. He’d have taken everyone down with him to save his skin.
Bill fell apart. I had to take him to my flat and give him a large brandy. He knew Norris well. In fact, he was due to collect some money off him over a betting coup that had come off over the weekend. Bill was a big greyhound man and he’d given Norris a tip and Norris had lumped on it large and he was going to give Bill a drink out of his winnings. Not corrupt, but possibly unwise in the circumstances.
As Bill sat there ashen-faced, I said to him, ‘Comeon, pull yourself together; he’s only a dirty stinking grass who’s got wiped out. It’s not anyone we’re going to grieve for.’
But Bill was really, really upset. To me it was another reminder that you must never get to like these people, never get too close. Never kid yourself they are real friends. You can pretend to like them, but once you walk out that door you don’t have to carry it on.
By the time Bill had regained his composure and we
Just half-an-hour before he was shot, he was fixing the meet with me to grass up yet more villains, another drugs gang. The word had been out for him for a long, long time. He was so active the police had had to set aside two batches of officers to deal with him. A colleague and I were handling him more or less on a daily basis for his drugs work and long-standing colleague Jim Clarkson, a DI on the Regional Crime Squad at East Dulwich was handling his other crime stuff – counterfeit currency, stolen gear of every variety, art thefts, this, that and the other. That’s how prolific Norris was.
He was discussing a future job with Jim Clarkson over a few pints in the Fox in Belvedere on the night he died. I rang him in the bar there to check that he was OK for the next day’s breakfast meet on a new drugs job he was putting up. That’s how he worked, moving from one cop to another with more underworld information.
The next morning I picked up my colleague, DS Bill Trimble, a pleasant, quiet, former long-serving uniformed officer, not the usual hard-nosed Yard DS you sometimes come across, and we were driving to meet Norris for breakfast to discuss the job. The radio was on and that’s when I heard it. When they gave his name, they’d got it slightly wrong – Maurice or something like that, but I knew.
A couple of minutes later, my mobile rang and it was my boss DI Charlie Eubank and he said, ‘Blex, have you heard?’
I said I’d just heard an item on the radio with the name slightly different but I was assuming it was our man.
He said, ‘Yes, it’s him.’
I said, ‘Well, best I don’t bother going to the café then. Norris won’t turn up now.’
Bill, my colleague, was absolutely shell-shocked, aghast at the news. I literally saw the colour drain from his cheeks.
That was the morning I coined the phrase ‘better dead than nicked’, because there had been a lot of suspicion about Norris’s dealings with informant handlers over the years. At one point, one trusted colleague and I were the only officers allowed to deal with him. A lot of people had been struck off the list of handlers because of suspicions they had been got at, backhanders going to and fro, palms greased. I can say, hand on heart, that I was saying that for other people’s benefit, because I’d heard the rumours and I was well aware of some of the shenanigans that were supposed to be going on. I said that if he’d been nicked with a huge great parcel of drugs, he would have sung like a canary taking everyone down with him, in the job or out of it, who had ever taken a drink off him. That’s the sort of person he was. There would have been no loyalty to anyone. He was a grass and he was always looking to cover his backside. He’d have taken everyone down with him to save his skin.
Bill fell apart. I had to take him to my flat and give him a large brandy. He knew Norris well. In fact, he was due to collect some money off him over a betting coup that had come off over the weekend. Bill was a big greyhound man and he’d given Norris a tip and Norris had lumped on it large and he was going to give Bill a drink out of his winnings. Not corrupt, but possibly unwise in the circumstances.
As Bill sat there ashen-faced, I said to him, ‘Comeon, pull yourself together; he’s only a dirty stinking grass who’s got wiped out. It’s not anyone we’re going to grieve for.’
But Bill was really, really upset. To me it was another reminder that you must never get to like these people, never get too close. Never kid yourself they are real friends. You can pretend to like them, but once you walk out that door you don’t have to carry it on.
By the time Bill had regained his composure and we
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