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He holds his MAC-10 in the air like in a surrender and pulls out this cheesy grin over his face. ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘This ain’t even got no bullets man. We can share up the action bredders. Plenty to go round yeah?’

Sixteen men with wheel braces, baseball bats, big long fuck-off knives, one even had a Samurai sword, spend five minutes going to work on this guy. By the time they finished, this guy had to be scraped off the ground with a shovel.

These were the guys that Spooks had supposedly sold his sister to. My Kira! When I found out, I went white. Well you know what I mean. You might as well find out that your girl’s dead. I spent weeks feeling as if she had died. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what sort of shit they had lined up for her. But all I had was my imagination and in it, they spent a few weeks breaking her down and then when she finally got a taste for the needle she did whatever.

Sorry. Just give me a minute yeah?

In my head they got her and they drugging her and – sorry.

I can’t even believe I’m crying after everything else that happened with her later. But just thinking about it here and now brings it back. I feel like I’m back there. Living it and ––

Is it okay to have a break, Judge, for like five minutes?

What I was trying to say before I got all messed up before the break was that you can’t really understand what drugs will do to a person. Yeah you have heard about it but you probably haven’t ever seen it, first-hand, up close. When a person gets addicted, and believe, it don’t take long, it’s like nothing else. I can’t even describe it. How do I explain to you what it does to a person? Actually it does about five different things at once.

First it takes your mind. It takes everything that drives a human being out and throws them all away. Crack or heroin ain’t got no room for anything else in a person’s life. Not family, not work, not clothes, not washing, not even food. Think about it for a second, what it must be like to be like that. You wake up in the morning or afternoon or whatever and you have only one thing on your mind. You want nothing else, just that hit. You don’t want food or drink, you don’t want to get dressed, you don’t want to speak to anyone, you don’t even want to take a shit. So you hunt high and low for a hit. And then another one. Until eventually it takes your body and bit by bit destroys it.

Then it takes your conscience. You would jack your own mum on her own doorstep for some money for a hit. There is nothing you won’t do for your fix. Then when everything else is gone or ruined, crack will take your soul. When that happens, you ain’t even a person any more. You’re just some breathing meat and bones.

It makes me laugh. I heard some people on the tube once talking about prostitution, just chatting shit and that. This one woman she goes, ‘Eugh, disgusting. Why would you do that to yourself?’ when some woman I’m guessing she thought was a prostitute walked on. ‘Just think of all those horrible men you would have to have sex with,’ blah blah blah. This is why you would do that to yourselves. For a hit, a person will do much worse than that. A man would cut off his own dick for it. Trust. It is not a game. The only thing that keeps you going is the promise of another hit. Weird thing is that the only reason any of them is still alive is because they are keeping themselves alive for the next high.

That is what they were doing to Kira. I felt helpless just thinking about her. She was gone. Untold horrible shit was happening to her. And to make matters worse there was nothing I could do about it. What could I do? I am many things but I ain’t Sam L. What you would do is probably phone the police. What the police would do though as I found out is pretty much nothing.

She wasn’t missing. She was an adult. If she wanted to go hang out in the North with some bad boys and smoke a bag of crack that was up to her. Why the fuck should they do anything about it? I got nothing against Five-O for what it’s worth. Yeah some of them are low-lifes but they basically no different from like a bin man or whatever. They do what they have to do and no more. If someone empties a bin all over the street on your road, they might pick it up. If you empty one all over your own front yard, they leave it the fuck alone. If you want to live in a pigsty what business is it of anyone else’s?

That was that then. She was gone and my head had gone into some dark places. I started to think about her in like the past tense even though it had only been a couple of weeks. How she used to sit when she was reading her book. What she used to wear when she went to work. What the last thing she said to me was. What the last thing I said to her was. And that, that is what woke me up in the end. I had said some shit to her after the argument we had had about how I would allow the boy who smashed my Z3 for her.

‘I’ll let it go but only because I ain’t ready to let you go.’