I kept saying no, to give him the impression that I wasn’t interested, but all the time I was grooming him for tax purposes. He kept on and on, and I could tell he was really excited. I could see it was a challenge for him to get in with the mysterious black Scouser who was knocking around his manor.

In the end, still feigning reluctance, I agreed to help him out by offering to shift some of his gear for him. On the surface, I whined and moaned and told him, ‘Oh, go on then. Just this once, as a favour to you, I’ll buy some.’

He brought me a sample of his brown, and I sent it to my boy in Scotland for testing. That night, I got the call from my man who said, ‘It’s high purity. Buy it. It’s champion.’ I arranged to meet the Asian guy in his lock-up garage opposite his shop to buy one kilo off him for £15,550. I only bought the one to make him feel relaxed and happy. If I had asked for more, he might have felt a bit out of his league. Slowly, slowly, catchy monkey.

A few days later, the Asian guy said, ‘I’ve got a couple of kis. D’you want them?’ I could tell he was getting a hard-on about being in the underworld. It must have been a change from getting up at 4 a.m. and having to chat to the gobshite community-care types who hung around his newsagents in the morning. He was thinking he was Tony Montana. So, in the end, I agreed to buy a couple of kilos from him for 30 grand.

About a week later, he told me he’d just received a delivery of ten kilograms of heroin. I said, ‘Well if I’m gonna buy ten, I may as well buy twenty, but you have to give me a better price.’

Greed had now got the better of him, so he came back and said, ‘OK, £250,000.’

I said, ‘Look, if I want 20, then we do the operation in the garage again.’

He replied, ‘Well, OK, but you’ve got to come by yourself.’

I got some counterfeit money and put it in a big washing bag. I then went to his garage and showed it to him, and he showed me the gear. Now, 20 kilograms is quite heavy to physically run with, so I had the car parked right outside.

The last thing the Asian guy expected was a tax job. He knew my name and where I lived, but what he didn’t know was that my name was bogus and the flat was rented. Still, he had brought an Asian bodyguard, just in case. I started haggling over the price and gesticulating with my hands, as you do when you’re bartering. ‘Look at that hand there – look at my left hand,’ I said, pretending as though I was indicating at some part of the transaction. As his eyes followed my left hand, I whacked him with my right. It’s one of my little tricks – an old one, but it still works. The Asian guy went down, and I kicked his bodyguard with such force that he flew across the room. I grabbed the gear, and before I knew it I was in the car and away.

I crept back to the flat to get some of my stuff and sent the heroin to Scotland for sale. Wholesale, it was worth £250,000. Ounced up and danced on, we would enjoy a total return of half a million. I slipped back into Liverpool to find a safe house for a few days, before I went out of town to get my dough. On my way there, I bumped into Johnny Phillips, of all people. He dropped a bombshell. Apparently, I was going to be on Crimewatch the following week as the poster boy for Britain’s most wanted man. There would be warnings out saying how dangerous I was and how I shouldn’t be approached, etc. Johnny reckoned the police would find me. ‘Things are going to hot up for you,’ he said. ‘If I was you, I’d get off.’

Now, when a thing like that happens, you know it’s time to leave. I’d been walking round Manchester being a happy-go-lucky Scouser, but now everyone in the country would know my face. As I had little time, I bought a direct flight from London City Airport to Rotterdam. There wasn’t even enough time to get one of my blag passports, so I ended up using my own. I was panicked, to be fair. I phoned Rodriguez, who was in Scotland with the gear. ‘Sell the gear for £500,000,’ I said. ‘Take £100,000 for yourself, and you can give me my end next time I slip back into the country.’ I picked up five grand cash for spends from my kitty in Liverpool and headed for a new life on the Continent.

At first, everything went well. I breezed through check-in and security, had a continental breakfast at the leather-trimmed bar in departures and chatted with the exotic business travellers from Milan and Munich. Everything was how it should have been on a glamorous business trip to a new and exciting life. I got on the plane with the five grand stuffed down my drawers. The air stewardess smiled and flirted with me, then announced there would be a slight delay. No probs. I was still buzzing from the champagne livener I’d enjoyed at the bar. I settled back to read my Daily Telegraph and the obligatory in-flight Newsweek.

The next minute, I felt some pressure on the back of my seat. A voice came into my ear: ‘All right, Stephen. It’s DC McDougal here. We’ve got a van outside on the runway. You know where you’re going, don’t you? And it ain’t Rotterdam.’ Fuck. The bizzies had caught up with me. So near, yet so far.

The game wasn’t over yet. I immediately looked around to assess the lie of the land. What about the escape exits? As I lined him up for an uppercut, I thought about jumping from the emergency exit. However, I’ve got an edict that I never assault a police officer in an official situation, especially if he was being fair. If an officer knew my ID, I never assaulted him, because ten years down the line it could come back to haunt me. So, instead, I told him I’d go quietly.

You have to be quite thick-skinned not to feel embarrassed about being escorted off a plane full of passengers. It’s the stereotype of the big black criminal being shackled and led away in front of a gossiping, slightly fearful white crowd, loving the drama of it. But I had actually conditioned myself not to care – to keep the focus on my next move. You can’t be worrying about what the man in the street thinks about you. You’ve got to be thinking about how you’re going to get from A to B – and, most importantly, how you’re going to avoid incarceration. However, at that time, the only conclusion I could come to was that I was fucked and facing 20 years.

When I got back to the Liverpool nick, a solicitor called Enzo Scarri came to see me. ‘I’ve been sent to you by one of your friends,’ he said. ‘You’ll be going home tonight.’

‘Bollocks,’ I thought. ‘Not in a million years.’

I said, ‘If I’m going home tonight, you can have a grand out of that five grand the bizzies have taken off me.’ Now, I didn’t know what this guy had in mind, but I was prepared to give it a shot. Enzo refused the £1,000 but still came up with a plan.

He quickly flipped through my legal papers and started reading the statements about the pressing engagement with Mona. After I had burned Mona, we had stolen his Mercedes and driven it up to Scotland. During that journey, I’d got stopped by a police car for speeding. I had given them a false name, Peter Purlough, backed up with a matching ID. Apparently, the copper who had stopped me had said in a statement that the man driving (me) had a distinguishing mark on his forearm. He’d gotten mixed up – my distinguishing mark was actually on the back of my arm.

Enzo said to me, ‘When you go upstairs to do the ID in front of the copper, say fuck all and just show them the inside of your forearms. Don’t show them the outside. When they ask to see the outside of your arms, refuse.’

Lo and behold, that minuscule technicality got me off. When Daily Mail readers complain about fancy lawyers working the justice system with the odds stacked in favour of the criminal – they’re fucking right. And God be with them.

The police were fucking furious and rightly so. They were determined to get me back inside, so they even tried to pin the speeding offence on me. Then, at the magistrates’ court, the copper who had mistakenly identified me bumped into me on the stairs. My lawyer argued that he had contaminated the case, and it was as good as binned. However, before it was dismissed, the magistrate wanted to see the mysterious distinguishing mark for herself. Instead of just letting me go, she looked me up and down. She explained that she had to examine my body for tattoos and scars – just to make sure. She came round from the bench, and I could hear her breathing heavily. I was 33 with a body like Adonis. I reckon all she wanted to do was to have a perv of me. She was an elderly white woman who most probably had fantasies about black criminals. It was quite amusing to say the least, and she probably wouldn’t have complained if I had turned her around and bent her over. Of course, I didn’t, but she let me off anyway.

When I got out, the first thing I did was visit Marsellus’s family. He was doing 15 years, and his bird was in bits. They were skint. Furious, I dug out my trusty Morphy Richards and headed towards Mona’s ken to get even with him for grassing us up.

I got hold of Mona on the phone. ‘Listen, you cunt,’ I said. ‘I’m coming to iron you again. This time I’m going to do your face. You deserved to be burned the first time, and I’m gonna burn you again. You’ve put Marsellus in jail, and you’ve caused me to go on the run for a year.’

A few minutes later, he called back. ‘Stephen. Back off. We’ll pay you compensation.’ Music to my ears. I slammed on the brakes, did a U-ie and headed to the gym for a massage. The next day, 40 grand in cash was dropped round at Marsellus’s bird’s house. Not enough to see her through the sentence, but better than a boot in the face.

As I was working out, it struck me that I had had a very lucky escape. I could see the writing on the wall – one day my nine lives were gonna run out. Ever since Andrew John had been murdered, I’d been in touch with my own vulnerability. Now it was beginning to go deeper – existential. I started to question my own mortality – my own morality.

For fuck’s sake, what was all this shit for?