Gangsters' Wives (3 page)

We soon discovered that Dave was looking at seventeen years if found guilty. I couldn’t let myself think about it. I wouldn’t have been able to carry on if I had and I knew I had to remain focused – for Dave, and for the kids.

He served a year on remand before the trial. He was in Belmarsh which was a Category A. I visited him three times a week. The other co-defendants were at Wormwood Scrubs. I’d go pick the wives up and take them to visit.

During that year he was inside, I was his arms and legs. I wanted to do my bit to help Dave with his case. It was lonely though. I’ve never wanked so much in my whole life. I got to know me intimately if you know what I mean. I got to know the workings of a vibrator. I learned to take it apart and put it back together again. I can make it work without batteries!

When the court case came up, I was a witness so I couldn’t go into the court until it was my turn to be called. I asked a friend who could do shorthand to go to court for me and take notes so that I could stay on top of things.

In court, they showed footage of them all at the airport. Dave looked at it too and said, ‘Listen, I treat you as professionals, so now you treat me as a professional. I’m in security. Do you think if I thought there was over a million pounds of cocaine in that suitcase I’d be standing way over there? Are you nuts? I’d be
in
the fucking suitcase. I promise you, that is not how I’d look after a suitcase like that.’

The prosecutor tried to say that Dave was responsible because he introduced the two people who came up with the plan. Dave went: ‘Oh really? If I introduced that lady customs officer to that man over there, and later on they meet up and have a shag and she gives him Aids, am I guilty of murder? I introduced them, he put his cock in her, does that mean I’m guilty of that?’ As soon as he said it, everything went quiet and I was thinking: Oh no, no, no, babe, you’ve blown it. Then the judge said to the lawyer: ‘Well, answer Mr Courtney.’ I was so relieved. I thought: Thank god.

When he was acquitted, it was the most amazing feeling, just indescribable. He had everything stacked against him. Each of the jury members had an armed guard going home with them. There were armed guards on the public gallery, helicopters, the works. If you were a member of a jury, you’d think if a man needs that level of protection, he’s got to be guilty. They’re not going to pay all that money for someone who might be innocent. But they acquitted him.

Out of the five who were in court, only Dave was acquitted. We went to a hotel and decided to try for a baby then and there. We’d talked about it while he was in prison, but I’d said, ‘I want to have a baby with you, but not if you’re in here.’ I remember having a shag and doing a handstand.

Our daughter Courtney de Courtney was born nine months later. She’s white, I mean really white. When she says, ‘Mum’ you can hear the wind of people’s heads turning. Trust me, she’s white.

We got married 17 March 2001. We’d gone out to Joey Pyle’s wedding in Las Vegas and Dave proposed to me there. It was romantic. It was wicked. You know how weddings make you go a bit emotional? Well, just before Joey walked his wife out of the chapel, Dave turned to me and asked me to marry him. I said, ‘Yeah!’ He said, ‘We can do it tomorrow.’ I said, ‘
Really
?’ I had no doubts whatsoever.

We got married the very next day. It was wicked. I took my vows holding his bollocks in my hand the whole time. No kidding, I was holding his penis – because if there’s anything sacred enough for me to take a vow on, it’s that.

It’s hard for the kids sometimes because Dave is who he is. You can understand parents being dubious sometimes about letting kids come round to our house because of what they read about Dave in the papers.

I’ve tried talking a bit to Courtney about it, explaining it’s every parent’s right to protect their children. I’ve said, ‘You’re a lovely girl, but you might be friends with someone whose parents’ perception of your dad isn’t good. If they don’t invite you round it’s because of what they’ve read about your dad.’

The worst time was when Dave was up in court over the bent copper case and people thought he was a grass. That was awful for Courtney because suddenly there were no parties, no nothing.

You’d invite kids round and they wouldn’t be allowed. I can understand – the chances were someone was going to shoot him so why would you want your child round my little girl’s house?

That was a truly awful time. The copper at the centre of it was called Austin Warnes.

He was asked by a private detective he knew to plant cocaine in his client’s wife’s car so that the client would win custody of his kid, as they were divorcing. We didn’t know any of this. One day we went to meet Austin. We met him on the common and he said: ‘I need your help, mate.’ He told us he’d been seen talking to Dave and he needed to come up with a reason. He told Dave that if his boss called him in and asked what he’d been doing, he should just say he was giving Austin information about a load of drugs being sold by two women. He said he’d made up some names so the stories matched – and one of them was this woman, the mother of the child. Only we thought they were just made-up names.

The boss did pull Dave and ask him and Dave told him what he’d been asked to. Because of that it looked later on like Dave set this woman up.

When the police found drugs in the woman’s car and she was pulled in, she said, ‘Hang on, I think my husband is involved here.’ When the police were asked why they searched her car they said they were acting on the information of an informant. They were asked to name the informant. Of course they said Dave.

The police had the detective bugged so they heard when he and Austin hatched the plan and they were watching them from the off. Austin was saying ‘can you say this’, ‘can you say that’, so when the police pulled us in, they
knew
we didn’t know anything.

When they arrested Dave, we were on our way back from Manchester. They plotted to arrest everyone involved at the same time – six a.m. They didn’t bank on the fact that Dave was going to be picked up at six o’clock in the morning by a driver to go to Manchester to do ‘An Audience With …’ We went, did the gig, went to the Cavern, all that, and we were on our way home, having a shag in the back of the car. I thought: something’s weird. Then I saw the lights and thought: not again. They just came and nicked him. Didn’t say who they were, just came and nicked him.

When I came home, I tried to locate him, but none of the police stations would admit they had him. In the end after I threatened to report him as a missing person, they told me ‘he’s incommunicado’. I didn’t know what they were nicking him for or where they’d taken him.

About three hours after I’d got home, they raided the house. I had a photo I’d taken of Dave and Austin sitting on a bench. They were watching us at the time – they had surveillance up trees and lip-reading experts on hand – so they knew that I’d taken a picture of that meeting. But what they didn’t know was that Dave was actually recording that meeting as well. He said: ‘Right, why am I doing this?’ and Austin said: ‘To help me out of a spot of bother, Dave.’ It was all on tape.

I think that’s what the police were looking for – the photo and tape of that meeting which were evidence that Dave didn’t know what was going on. So when the policewoman started questioning me about the common, I said, ‘I know what you’re looking for and it’s not here. Dave’s not an idiot.’ I went up to my room where I knew the picture was. I said I needed to get a new nappy for Courtney, and I slipped the picture down the inside of my jeans, right under where I had Courtney on my hip, and I kept her there the whole time. They didn’t find it.

The tape wasn’t in the house. The tape was elsewhere. When I went to see Dave I asked him what I should do about the tape and he told me to give it to police, but to make sure I made copies first. So that’s what I did.

The price for being a grass in this life is you get shot. Dave could have got shot because of what Austin and the others tried to say about him. It’s a good thing people know Dave and they trust him, or that would have earned him a belly button in the forehead. It’s nasty.

For a couple of days while Dave was in the nick, a friend of ours got his minders to stay with me. These men were all round the house. But when Dave came home he said, ‘Nah. Fuck that. I’ve done nothing wrong. No one is going to come and shoot me. If I’ve informed on someone, there’d be someone in prison saying “Dave grassed me up for this”.’ If anyone ever said to Dave, ‘I heard you’re a grass’, he’d say, ‘I’ve heard I’m a grass as well, but who did I grass up then?’ And nobody ever had a name. They’d say, ‘I just heard.’

I know Dave wasn’t a grass. When the geezers were out there, minding us, I didn’t feel like we were in danger. My mind was on Dave. But when Dave came home and sent them away I felt even better. I felt safe because I knew he hadn’t done anything wrong.

When the case came to court, Dave warned the authorities not to put him in the dock next to Austin. He said, ‘If you put me in the dock with that guy, I’ll knock him out. Don’t do it.’ The first day of the trial, Dave came in dressed as the court jester and that Austin was standing in the court waiting room. Dave just went right up to him and knocked him out. I was shouting at Austin: ‘You’re a liar. You’ve been around my kids in my home and you’ve still done this to us. Why?’ All that stuff made me feel so bad for Dave, even though he was found not guilty. He should have been patted on the back, not made out to be the bad guy. But you know I’m glad I know things like that go on in this world. I’m glad I’m well informed. I feel enlightened by that knowledge, not threatened.

There’s always something going on with Dave. Sometimes I listen to my mates stressing about what to wear and I think: ‘Oh, if only that was my only concern. The luck of only being worried about that … I know I’d get bored in the end, but it’d be so nice not to worry about him.

He’s been hurt a lot. One time he got shot in the ankle when he was working on the door. It was a drive-by. Dave was in the hospital. He had his boys positioned at the end of his bed, and two boys outside the ward. The police came and offered him an armed guard. Dave said, ‘What can your people do that mine can’t do?’ They said, ‘But we’ve got armed guards.’ Dave said, ‘The only thing that your boys have got that my boys haven’t got is a bit of paper saying they’re allowed to use their guns.’

But the doctors have a duty to their patients. They’re not going to put their patients at risk by having a few of Dave’s burly mates guarding him. They patched Dave up and sent him away. It never healed properly.

But that’s nothing compared with his accident at the end of 2001. Well, I say accident, but I think the police tried to run him off the road. He was in a coma for a month. I believe their sole intention was to stop Dave going to court and opening up a can of worms.

They pit-manoeuvred him, clipping the car so that he lost control on the motorway. They’re trained to do that. That’s the only time in history that they haven’t been able to retrieve any video footage off that motorway. Never before has it been known but the cameras weren’t working on that side of the road that night. Really? What a surprise.

First I knew of the accident was a notice stuck on my door telling me to contact the police. They didn’t put it through the door, they stuck it to the outside of the door so I didn’t see it until I left the house later that day. And even then I just thought: Oh no, he’s been nicked again. I rang the solicitor and said, ‘Dave’s been nicked again.’ The solicitor told me to ring the police, so eventually I did and was told he’d been involved in an accident. I said, ‘Sorry?’ I just couldn’t get my head round it. It just didn’t seem real.

They said he was down at Darent Hospital in Dartford. When I got there he was in the resuscitation room. I knew it was serious then. I thought: Oh God, what’s happened to him?

The doctor came out of the room and said to me: ‘The police keep coming in trying to do blood tests and what have you. I’m trying to keep your husband alive. That’s my job. I appreciate they have to do their job, but they have to let me get on with mine.’

The minute he said that, my head started whirring and I was thinking about what really had happened.

When the doctor took me in, I was really shocked. In Resuscitation, there are beds in the middle of the room and you can walk all the way round. I was standing right at the head of the bed, looking down at Dave’s face, so he could see me upside down. He’d had a tracheotomy but was still conscious at this stage. I leaned down and he whispered: ‘I’ve really hurt myself.’ It was awful.

Then he went unconscious. Though we didn’t know it then, he would be in a coma for a whole month.

I was still in shock and started looking at his notes. They’d resuscitated him by the side of the road for half an hour, got him into an ambulance, raced him to hospital, and taken him straight to Resuscitation because they lost him again. It was horrible. He was so badly injured. He had a fractured skull, broken ribs, punctured lungs and his pelvis was completely shattered.

Dave had said to me a long time before that if he was ever on a life-support machine, he’d want me to turn it off. He’d watched friends of his get ill with things like MS and he’d said to me, ‘Babe, I don’t care if you fall out with my mum and she never speaks to you again but do not have me resuscitated to be like that. If I’m like that, turn me off. Do not leave me like that.’

While he was in the coma, he was read his last rites. Later Dave told me he could hear what was going on. He kept coming in and out of consciousness, but he could tell what was happening. He could feel my tears on his arm and hear his mum crying and hear this man saying ‘last rites’ and he said it was almost like he was inside his own body trying to run to his arm to make it move. He said he was remembering how he’d said to me, ‘Don’t let them do that to me. Turn me off.’ And he was thinking: Don’t do it, babe.

To be honest, I didn’t get that far. I didn’t think about him not making it, or about switching him off. I didn’t think any of that. I just knew he was going to come round. Don’t ask me how. I just knew it.