Bonded by Blood by Bernard O'Mahoney Page B

him ‘bollocks’. Our word is our bond. Do your part of the deal and you’ll get your dough. He agreed and we went our separate ways. We didn’t have any intention of giving him a penny.
    A member of the firm named Mark accompanied me to the next meeting. Gillings and Woods met us at an out-of-town location near Bristol. Billy came over to our car and I asked if Woods had retracted his statement. Billy said he wouldn’t unless he got half of the money upfront.
    ‘Put Woods in your car and take him down the road,’ I said. ‘Then tell him to get out. Drive away and don’t look back.’ Billy asked why. I told him that Woods was going to be shot. Billy said he didn’t want any part of it. ‘OK. Tell Woods to get in our car because we want to discuss payment with him.’
    Billy agreed, but he kept repeating that he didn’t want to be involved in any shooting.
    Woods came over. ‘There’s no problem, get in the car,’ I said. We drove to a deserted lane. A gun was produced and Woods was told to get out of the car because we didn’t want any of his ‘shit or blood’ messing up our vehicle. Woods was ordered to lie on a grass bank. The gun was put to his head. He was terrified. He had not yet got over being shot six weeks earlier. His whole body was shaking and he was weeping. He was told that the firm did not pay grasses. ‘Now you are going to die.’
    ‘I don’t want any money, I just don’t want any trouble,’ he said.
    ‘First you break into our friend’s house and rub shit over the walls and now you come and demand £20,000. It doesn’t work like that.’
    ‘I’ll retract my statement and that will be the end of it,’ he said.
    He was told that if he didn’t, people would come back and he would vanish. The talking was over. Woods went away and within three hours he had retracted his statement. We returned to Basildon and Thomkins contacted a solicitor. The solicitor said he would check to see if Woods’s statement had been retracted. If it had, he would arrange for Thomkins to give himself up the following day. The solicitor was not aware that Woods had been threatened; he thought he had retracted his statement of his own free will.
    The next day, I took Thomkins to Barking station in east London and we said our goodbyes. He travelled to Bath, where he gave himself up. What we hadn’t counted on was Steve Woods’s wife. She had not retracted her statement, so Thomkins was charged with attempted murder, threats to kill and possessing a firearm with the intention of endangering life. He was remanded in custody to await trial.
    Obviously a lot of our conversation around that time was about Thomkins. Some liked him, some didn’t. Once he was out of the situation, I was told that he had been talking behind my back about me. It was a hammer blow. I had done all I could to help him and yet he had been slagging me off to big himself up. I wasn’t happy at all, but our world was overflowing with such people.
    I contacted Steve Woods via a third party and told him Thomkins’s protection had been removed. Woods and his friends could do as they wished. I went to visit Thomkins in Horfield prison in Bristol with two friends who were going to see him, while he was being held on remand. I told them I wanted to go and see him first. I would only be five minutes. They could wait outside. I went into the visiting room and Thomkins held out his hand. ‘All right, mate,’ he said.
    ‘You’re no fucking mate of mine. You’ve been slagging me off.’
    A prison visiting room isn’t the best place to settle one’s differences. At that moment, I didn’t really care. I went for Thomkins. The prison officers were alerted and Thomkins backed off to where they were. I walked out of the visiting room and have not seen him since. It is a shame because I considered him a good friend. Why he did what he did to me, I will never know. He was later sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for shooting Steve Woods.
    With