I couldn't help but smile as I watched him approach in the rear-view mirror. So the man I'd once known as Billy West had changed his name – or part of it, anyway. I hadn't seen him in maybe ten years, but he didn't look much different than he had done then. Except for the 'tache. This was a new edition, and presumably part of his disguise. Because there was no way Slippery Billy West wasn't on the run. The man had spent a lifetime struggling to extricate himself from the jaws of justice, and with more than a little success too, especially where his dealings with me were concerned.

I'd first come across him back in London around 1991, when my colleagues and I in CID had put him under surveillance on suspicion of gun-running. He was an ex-soldier who'd served in the Falklands conflict and Northern Ireland, and who'd ended up being court-martialled when he and a fellow squaddie had held up an army payroll truck at gunpoint and relieved it of its contents. That was the only time, as far as I was aware, that he'd ever spent any time behind bars. Our surveillance of him for the gun-running lasted close to a month, and when we nicked him and raided the lock-up he was using for his business, we recovered three handguns and an AK-47 assault rifle. But in court, Slippery claimed to know nothing about the weapons, and used as his defence the fact that he wasn't the only keyholder to the premises, which was true. Two of his cousins, both of whom did work for him now and again, were indeed keyholders, and in the end it came down to the fact that it couldn't be proved beyond doubt that he was the one the guns belonged to, particularly as there were no prints on any of them. So he'd been acquitted.

I had the same trouble with him again a couple of years later when, acting on intelligence, I'd led a raid on his flat in King's Cross in the hunt for a significant quantity of cocaine. Unfortunately, the bastard had reinforced not only the front door but the bathroom door too, for a reason that quickly became apparent.