For Queen and Currency: Audacious fraud, greed and gambling at Buckingham Palace Read online

  A fully clothed Laura shortly emerged and asked PC Page for the latest. ‘There’s nothing new to report,’ he replied with a smirk, before getting down to further gentle flirting.

  Two days later, he was on the phone to Laura. ‘PC Page here,’ he said, still maintaining the veneer of police business. ‘Er, I was wondering if you’d like to go out for dinner?’

  Laura was twenty-five, unemployed and a single mum on benefits. Her hard-working parents were paying off the clothes catalogue bills she continued to run up. Laura fancied the cocky copper and felt she could have some much-needed fun with him. They arranged to meet at a restaurant bar on a boat in Lakeside, a new, sprawling shopping centre nearby.

  That night the conversation flowed easily. Their flirty banter gave way to some discreet intimacy and details about their pasts.

  Page explained he was from Leytonstone in east London and had been brought up since he was a baby by his grandparents, because of some family problems that he wasn’t ready to go into.

  He regularly saw his mum and dad, but talked most warmly about his grandfather. Page then regaled her with the story of how he came to join the Territorial Army when he was just sixteen.

  I was the only one of my little gang who got caught trying to steal some kit from their garage on the Lea Bridge Road. Everyone else had it away and this TA officer says to me, ‘What are you doing?’ I says back, ‘I’ve come to join.’ So when I met up with the others, they asked what happened, thinking I’d been nicked, and I told them I’d joined the fucking TA! It was either that or get nicked.

  Laura realized her date could talk for England and took her chance to ask if he wanted another lager. It was important that she was seen to pay her own way.

  ‘I can’t,’ Page replied. ‘I’m on late turn.’ Laura looked quizzically at him. ‘I’ve got to be on duty later tonight,’ he explained.

  ‘Go on,’ she urged, reaching down into her shoe.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Page.

  ‘That’s where I keep my money. I didn’t want to carry a purse.’

  Laura had tapped up her parents for some going-out cash. They were used to it, especially during the weekend. And although generous with his daughter, Laura’s father would delight in infuriating her with the same phrase as he handed over the money: ‘Don’t spend a pound if you’ve only got a penny.’

  Laura was one of five sisters; her dad, Paul Keenan, was a foreman in the local council’s housing division and her mother, Marie, worked as a hospital assistant. A natural-born Essex girl, Laura left school at fifteen and worked briefly with her twin in a factory putting labels on tins of mackerel. Before getting pregnant with Thomas, there were spells as an uptown shop assistant and later as an estate agent. But whenever she worked, Laura always lived beyond her means, spending more money on clothes than she could ever earn or wear.

  With first-date nerves behind them, over the next few weeks the new lovers spoke regularly on the phone. Some calls went on for hours, especially when Page was working nights.

  In August, he took himself off to Los Angeles for a few weeks’ holiday. He told Laura it was pre-booked and promised to call her often. In the end he only managed to sneak away twice to dial her digits. The need for discretion was essential as Page was leading a double life.

  The young police officer was on holiday with his fiancée of two years. They had met at an east London college when Page was studying computing. But the relationship was on the wane, at least from Page’s point of view. Only he couldn’t be straight with either of the two women now firmly in his life.

  When Page returned from America, Laura let him have it for the too few phone calls. It was his first inkling of her possessiveness and insane jealousy. He liked it, but foolishly tried to pacify her with a travelogue that included the time he saw Baywatch being filmed.

  Over the following weeks, Page’s close police colleagues got to know more about Laura, largely because he was showing her off. In turn, she joked with friends that her new boyfriend was ‘stalking’ her. ‘Whenever I’m up the shops with Thomas in the pram he’s there, in his uniform, with his copper mates,’ she told them.

  In truth, Laura loved his reciprocal jealousy and protective ways, without feeling any sense of suffocation. She felt they had instantly ‘gelled’. But on occasions it could be embarrassing. He once clocked her crossing a zebra just before a white-van driver peeped his horn. Page put on the siren and pulled him over.

  ‘Firstly, you’re not wearing a seat belt,’ he said officiously. ‘And secondly, what was you doing to that woman?’

  ‘Come on mate!’ implored the driver. ‘She was lovely!’

  His attempt to find common cause with a fellow geezer fell on deaf ears. ‘I know she is,’ Page spat back. ‘That’s my fucking wife!’

  The driver wasn’t to know the truth and went into a verbal reverse gear apologizing for his inappropriateness.

  Page wasn’t afraid to put his police colleagues straight either, regardless of their rank. When Laura one day delivered his lunch to the police station, Page walked into the control room to find a number of officers huddled over the CCTV monitor.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ he asked.

  ‘You’d give that one, wouldn’t you,’ replied a sergeant.

  ‘I would, skip, and I am, because that’s my missus!’

  At this stage of their courtship Laura was the more reserved of the two. She put it down to lingering bad memories of her last relationship with Thomas’s father. Page, however, was free-falling in love and often skived off work for some ‘victim liaison’. Lying in bed together he would blank calls from the control room asking for assistance.

  One day a new skipper at Grays police station wanted to accompany Page on duty. ‘I’ve got a lot of witness statements to take, skip,’ said Page, thinking quickly and hoping his boss would back off.

  ‘That’s alright, I’ll give you a hand,’ said the new sergeant. Page persisted and managed to avoid the bonding session. Instead, he sloped off to Laura’s to pump her for further information on the still unresolved case of the nuisance caller.

  Impressionable colleagues respected Page’s strutting confidence. They never grassed him up, preferring to play tricks on the young recruit. One night they sneaked up on the couple’s love nest and shone police lights on the bedroom window, as if it was a siege. When Page finally leaned out half naked, there was no one about but he soon noticed that his new J plate Ford Scorpio was plastered with ‘POLICE AWARE’ stickers on the windscreen. This was not an occasion for door-to-door inquiries, he thought.

  However, the light-headedness of their early relationship took a sour turn when one day Laura called Page at home and his Aunty Pat answered.

  ‘How dare you ring this number,’ she said.

  ‘Well, Paul gave it me,’ Laura hit back.

  ‘He’s engaged!’

  ‘Well, that’s not my problem,’ she said, after a short pause.

  Inside Laura was fuming. She extricated herself from the conversation without appearing floored, but seethed with anger in the hours leading to Page’s homecoming. No sooner inside, she tore into him without taking a breath. Page knew it was on top and came clean about the Los Angeles holiday. But he assured Laura that he loved only her and would call off the engagement.

  Their relationship survived and spilled into 1994 like a bar brawl. In April, Page enlisted a police friend and requisitioned a riot van to move Laura into a two-bedroom house owned by one of her sisters. Laura made space in the wardrobe for his police uniform. He even persuaded her it was time for the sound of tiny feet – an Alsatian puppy called Max.

  But one careless day the tinderbox of their relationship went up following a schoolboy security lapse. Page had left his mobile phone at the home he now shared with Laura. Normally, Laura would have let it ring out but jealousy and mistrust were poisoning her thoughts.

  ‘Oh hello. Where’s Paul?’ asked the female voice politely.

&
nbsp; ‘He’s not here. Who are you?’ snarled Laura.

  ‘I’m his fiancée.’

  ‘Really!’ Laura replied sarcastically. ‘Then why aren’t you with him now? The bitchy banter continued until Laura had had enough and decided to play her top card.

  ‘Oh! And by the way, I’m pregnant with Paul’s baby,’ she told his fiancée with sweet venom. Just then, Page came home and Laura thrust the phone at him. ‘It’s your fucking fiancée.’

  ‘I ain’t got one,’ he blurted out pressing the red button and tossing the handset.

  ‘LIAR!’ screamed Laura, and then stormed to the wardrobe to grab his uniform and helmet.

  ‘Please, love!’ Page begged as she threw them out of the window.

  ‘Fuck off! And don’t ever come back here again.’

  The neighbours had started to bang on the wall. ‘SHUT UP!’ one shouted. This infuriated Laura even more. She leaned out of the window and shouted back, even louder, ‘FUCK OFF YOU! We’re rowing here.’ Turning to Page and pointing at the door, she said: ‘And you can fuck off too. And take Max with you.’

  Page gathered those belongings that remained in the wardrobe and left without swagger.

  The puppy chewed most of Aunty Pat’s furniture over the next few weeks. So she was glad to see the back of her nephew when Laura melted and took him back.

  This time, Page was telling the truth when he swore to his pregnant girlfriend that he loved only her and would raise Thomas as his own.

  The fragile domestic peace didn’t stop his colleagues, who now had the measure of Laura, from winding her up. One night they left a highly perfumed police cravat belonging to a flame-haired female officer in Page’s sports bag. As predicted, Laura searched it when he was asleep. Her heart beat with rage as she stomped upstairs to confront him. Stuffing the police cravat in his half-asleep face she demanded to know whose it was.

  ‘It was planted by one of the lads,’ said Page. ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  Laura covered the cravat with fly spray and threw it at him. ‘Take it fucking back,’ she shouted.

  Many years later, she told me, ‘There’s not one woman he’s worked with that I haven’t insulted.’

  £ £ £

  Page won his black belt in karate at the age of thirteen. In 1988, he was selected to represent England under-17s in the European Championships in Hungary.

  As a reward, someone thought the team of largely inner-city boys would enjoy meeting their local MPs at the House of Commons. Page’s parliamentarian didn’t show, so he was introduced to a young Tory from Henley called Boris Johnson.

  The wannabe man-of-the-people clearly wasn’t paying attention. He gave Page one of those fake punches to the chest and said, ‘Make sure you beat the Japanese.’ When he left the room, the karate team looked at each other. ‘What a wanker!’ they agreed.

  Page earned significant career breaks within the police from his talent for karate. Although young, he was mature in a sport that demanded self-restraint. During his interview for Essex Police they’d picked up on his work teaching karate to inner-city Asian and black kids in east and south London. The Leytonstone boy had grown up in a multicultural neighbourhood with many different friends. Through teaching karate to inner-city kids he knew how to gain respect and communicate with young people on the streets.

  Like many other forces, Essex was wholly unrepresentative of the ethnic minorities it policed. Yet for Page it was the most natural thing to knock around with black and Asian kids. Casual racism was not a value he shared with the canteen culture of 1990s British policing.

  There was, however, another aspect he did embrace wholeheartedly – so-called ‘noble cause corruption’. Those on Essex’s patch who couldn’t be caught red handed but who officers believed were ‘at it’ would be singled out for beatings and for being fitted up with crimes they hadn’t done.

  ‘I accepted and appreciated the hatred of scroats when I joined the police. I didn’t need to be sold on the idea. I didn’t question the techniques taught us,’ Page recalled.

  This policing philosophy is in part born of a frustration with the criminal justice system and anger at the lack of respect on the streets. The solution for some police officers is a no legal nonsense approach to physically sorting out criminals and sex offenders who prey on the young, old and vulnerable. In that regard, Page was not by any stretch of the imagination a pc PC.

  At Essex, he was given the nickname ‘Punchy’ because he could be relied on in a fight or when local criminals needed confronting.

  ‘I remember the Battle of Ockenden. We had a thing for these two half-caste brothers. One of them broke the ribs of a dog handler. I got hold of him and strangled him until he cried,’ Page recalled. The assault took place in front of a senior officer who didn’t say a word, he claimed. ‘Back then young cops like me were looking for leadership.’

  Other elusive troublemakers would get a beating when they were eventually caught.

  A prolific car thief on our patch got caught nicking a car stereo in a car park. He started to fight then hid under one of the cars. It was about 1 am. There was about twenty of us. We dug him out from underneath the car and kicked the shit out of the cunt like a football. [After a while] some [officers] were saying ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’ But you know what? He didn’t even complain.

  Paedophiles were also given a violent lesson when Page was on duty. One was arrested for back chatting and cuffed behind his back so that he couldn’t break the fall when thrown into the police van, head first. When he came to in the cells, it was time for another beating.

  ‘The hate’ for these people was instilled by old-school Essex officers, said Page. ‘There was the thin blue line. And then there was us, the dirty stuff, below it.’

  £ £ £

  After the British police karate championships, Page drove back to Grays for night duty. His face was black and blue, but he felt good because the Metropolitan Police was head-hunting him.

  Sir Brian Hayes, the deputy commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, had apparently encouraged Page to switch forces after seeing him fight for Essex that night.

  There were some reservations about transferring to the biggest UK police force. A colleague had warned Page to ‘watch his back’. The well-wisher was simply pointing out that in Essex, where you were a name not a number, no one would grass up another officer, unlike the Met where it was impersonal and the politics so venal.

  Ironically, Page’s transfer to the Met was delayed pending the outcome of an assault complaint he was facing. The incident had taken place on the day Page turned twenty-four. He was called to a children’s home on 17 April 2005 to arrest one of the vulnerable boys for criminal damage. Page had the boy in a headlock on the way back to the police station and was forcing him to sing ‘Happy Birthday’.

  The boy later complained to his social worker. But Page denied it and there was no corroboration, so an internal inquiry dismissed the complaint.

  Punchy was going to the Met.1

  Chapter 2

  The ‘mobile classroom’

  Marylebone is a busy police station covering the north side of London’s bustling Oxford Street. Paul Page arrived at his first Metropolitan Police posting in September 1995.

  His new patch had a large transient community of shoppers and tourists who attracted all sorts of thieves from street muggers and pickpockets to gangs targeting department and boutique stores.

  North of Oxford Street lies the upmarket residential communities of Fitzrovia, Baker Street and St John’s Wood, near Lord’s cricket ground. As with much of London, here the rich rub shoulders with the under-privileged and new immigrant communities living in nearby housing estates. In the mid-1990s, these concrete warrens presented the police with another problem: turf battles between black, Asian and Somali gangs.

  It didn’t take long for Page to find his feet and establish himself among colleagues and superiors as a go-to cop when the tough got out of hand. In his own words, he was ‘
an officer to be relied on’. Being a self-defence instructor helped this image, but it was what happened on Marylebone’s streets that cemented the rep Page carried from Essex to the Met.

  Oxford Street and its discreet side roads are used by a diverse group of street traders hawking fake or stolen fashion labels, perfumes and electrical goods. There was a feeling among some Marylebone officers that these traders were liberty takers. They conned people but had no fear of arrest because often they were released the next day and back on the streets looking for a new mark.

  Page was a willing participant in what he says was a vigilante culture that operated at Marylebone. He recalls going on patrol with a plan to deal with the traders, who upon seeing the marauding police officers would run away abandoning their merchandise on the street. Those not in pursuit would scoop up the spoils for sharing out back at the police station. However, according to Page, other officers got wind of the scam and took it to a new level of audacity. Rather than just steal the fake-designer merchandise, they also ‘put a few bodies on the custody sheet’. In other words, they arrested the traders and handed in only some of the gear to be used as ‘evidence’ against them. The rest was divided up between the police.

  Police corruption trials and complaints to the watchdog over the last two decades indicate that such practices were almost certainly common in pockets of the Met, especially among officers in specialist squads targeting armed robbers, lorry hijackers and drug traffickers. However, Page’s allegations about Marylebone police station are uncorroborated by prosecution or disciplinary action taken against any officer.

  Clearly, corrupt officers like Page were not going to grass themselves up while still serving in the police and colleagues who were not involved in the corruption were unlikely to blow the whistle and become pariahs at work. As for the traders, there was no benefit to be gained from making a complaint.

  Even if the Met’s anti-corruption squad were called in, Page claims it didn’t always spell trouble for officers under suspicion.