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CHAPTER 1

FIXED

I often wonder how very different my life might have been if I hadn’t gone out to Crystals nightclub, in Leicester, on that fateful night back in October 1996. There might have been a good film on the telly. I might have stayed in with my girlfriend instead. I might have sat there, got stoned and just not bothered to get my arse in gear. But my old school mate, Paul, and I did go out that night, and we ended up in the nightclub at precisely the same moment as the Russian.

And it changed the course of our lives forever.

How did my life come to this?

There was nothing for us in Leicester. I’d left school without any qualifications, and had worked in my uncle’s scrap yard for £20 a week, but had got fed up skinning my knuckles taking out alternators at 7 a.m. on dark, freezing-cold mornings, so I was on the dole.