Fallen Angel by Kevin Lewis

went past, much to her embarrassment.
    By the time Jack had turned twenty it was an open secret that he was making his living from petty crime – mostly burglary and car theft – though no one on the estate seemed overly concerned, because he always struck far from home. He had one or two minor run-ins with the law but was lucky enough to come away with nothing more than a couple of official warnings.
    Things got more serious a few years later when the head of a gang of drug dealers was found stabbed to death on the edge of the estate. Jack was arrested and charged with murder within weeks but insisted he wasn’t guilty; he was victim of a simple case of mistaken identity. Four days before the trial one of the main prosecution witnesses vanished off the face of the earth; two days later, two witnesses informed the police they would be withdrawing their statements. The case collapsed.
    Everyone knew what had happened, and from then on Jack’s reputation as a ruthless gang leader only grew.
    Within five years Jack had moved away from the estate and into a house in the leafy South London suburb of Chislehurst. In his absence his lieutenants still ran the Blenheim Estate, which ensured that Jack retained a financial stake in every gram of smack, coke and weed, as well as every stolen video camera and cloned credit card that passed through the place.
    By the time Stacey Collins joined the police force, Jack’sempire had expanded to include several other estates and a wide range of other contraband. When Stacey made detective, Jack became her secret weapon in the fight against crime.
    The agreement between them was mutual. Stacey was an ambitious officer looking to get results, and Jack wanted to protect his investments. Therefore he would provide her with tips about the activities of rival drug gangs, point out good places to look for clues about the identities of unknown armed robbers and let her have samples of counterfeit currency being produced by foreign syndicates. On more than one occasion he even told her where to find the bodies of victims of contract killings.
    It was a covenant with the Devil. Stacey’s career went from strength to strength, and she rapidly gained a reputation as a hard-nosed detective who got results, but Jack benefited too. Most of his information led to action against gangs who were trying to muscle in on his patch, which resulted in a huge boost to his profits.
    There were other advantages for Jack. He was given occasional, subtle hints about potential police investigations into his growing criminal empire, detailed explanations about the latest technology and how the police could use it to build cases against him – information that he then used when deciding how to focus his resources.
    For the most part, Stacey managed to avoid doing anything illegal – not that she ever wanted Jack to know that. The hints about police investigations amounted to little more than underworld gossip. The information about new technology came from sources available to the publicif they looked hard enough: the Internet, technical journals, law reports and court cases.
    But Stacey knew that when you made a deal with the Devil, you were putting your soul on the line, and one day he would come along to collect. She had tried time and time again to cut her ties to Jack, which was why it had been so long since she had seen him, but it had proved almost as impossible as cutting her ties to the Blenheim. You can take the girl out of the estate, but you can’t take the estate out of the girl.
    Jack had a similar problem. He had made so much money in his criminal career that he could easily afford to go legit, but the adrenalin rush he got from criminal activity had proved every bit as addictive as the drugs his gang sold on the estates he controlled.
    The question of why Jack had wanted to meet with Stacey so urgently was still hanging in the air, so she repeated it. ‘So what’s all this about?’
    He tried to