‘Paul, for the past few days you’ve been bottling it up, something has got to give. Look at the state you are in. Would you now like to tell me?’ said George.
‘Mr Smith, I’m frightened,’ Paul confided, tears spilling from his bloodshot eyes.
‘Shall we discuss what happened?’
Desperately he replied, ‘I don’t know if I can trust you.’
‘Hopefully over the past few days you’ve got to know me. I’ve treated you with consideration and compassion. I’m not going to act any differently whatever you decide to tell me,’ George reassured him.
‘How can you say that, Mr Smith? It was so wicked,’ cried Paul.
The cracks were starting to show. Those last four words were the first glimmer of truth. George knew he had to strike now or risk losing his chance forever.
‘Paul, why did you do it?’
A wild and uncontrollable wail was all Paul could offer. He wept from his very core. George sat there silently, feeling sorry for the young man. This conflict is quite common in the more humane officers. It is not our place to forgive but equally we are not there to hate or condemn. George could see Paul’s conflicting grief and guilt but knew he was seconds away from the elusive confession he needed.
Pulling himself together Paul continued between the tears.
‘I’m so frightened, I feel so cold. What’s going to happen to me? I’m not mental. I don’t want to go to a loony bin. I don’t want to be locked away for thirty years. Be honest with me, Mr Smith, what’s going to happen to me?’
Sensing that Paul was veering away from the facts and focusing on himself, George steered him back on track.
‘Let’s sort it out first and we can deal with that matter later. Why did you do it?’
As if it suddenly dawned on him Paul declared, ‘I loved them! I loved them both. They both told me to clear out and never come back. Dad was sloshed and he was shouting at me. He said I was lazy and never had been any good. They were both shouting at me and treating me like a child. I couldn’t handle it. Then she was dead on the floor, all covered in blood. I was standing there holding the bat. It was horrible.’
Crestfallen he went on to describe how he had snapped under a torrent of abuse and lashed out wildly with his brother’s metal baseball bat. The strategy he was using was now becoming clear. He was trying to mitigate the horror by implying impulse and provocation. It’s rare that people in such tight corners have the clarity to think these things through though.
Was it really likely that they had such a row at that ungodly hour of the morning? What about the convenient fact that his wife just happened to be away? What about that shotgun? Why was all the money in his pocket and none in his dad’s?
It was time for the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.
‘Paul, tell me about Larry. What do you know about him?’
‘Who? What’s this about?’ a startled Paul replied.
‘The man you tried to get to kill your dad,’ George continued. ‘The man who let you down at the last minute. The man you gave your shotgun and this sketch to. Ringing any bells?’ he queried, laying a faxed copy of the drawing in front of him.
Paul’s world crumbled. The game was up. No more excuses. No more lies.
Piece by piece, Paul tearfully confirmed Larry’s account, that it was not an impulse crime but a cruel, cynically planned execution for revenge and a few thousand pounds. Defeated, he wrote a statement. With Paul’s permission George invited John back into the room, whereupon the account was read out and endorsed by all.
Years later, Paul was adamant that if his request for legal assistance had been met in Sussex, this could have all been wrapped up very quickly. He had only wanted someone by his side, he claimed. He knew what he had done was evil and unforgiveable but just needed some support.
On his arrival back in Shoreham Police Station the next day, Teed asked to see a vicar. Paul would assert in 2014 that in the course of the killings something deep had happened within. In his words, ‘I went through the door of the flat an atheist and came out a believer.’ But at the time his ecclesiastical consultation, rather than eliciting a deeper confession of what drove Paul to do what he did, only triggered a further demand for a solicitor and an attempt to retract his admissions.
This time his request for legal advice was granted. In a further confirmatory interview Paul resorted to a cornucopia of lies, denials, half-truths and silence. George wasted no more time; Teed was charged with the three murders just half an hour later.
Cadet Jim Sharpe had now become PC Jim Sharpe and had recently been posted to Shoreham. One of his first tasks was to escort Teed to court for his initial remand hearing. Handcuffed to him on the bench seat of a rickety blue police prison van Jim, in his customary convivial way, struck up a conversation. While his memory of the exact nature of that chat is less clear now, he recalls the empathy he felt. Here were two young men about to start on very different life journeys, one in the police, the other in prison.
Jim met Paul many times over the ensuing months. While in police custody in Shoreham awaiting further hearings, Paul grew to like young Jim. His easy style, not common among police officers those days, together with him allowing Helen to visit, made those court appearances more bearable.
The subsequent trial wrestled with all sorts of issues such as the retracted admissions, the refusal of legal advice initially, and the status of John McKenna. Many trials collapse following a successful assault on police and prosecutor practices. Once George’s team had eliminated every possibility other than Paul being the killer, such an attack was the only tactic left if there was to be any hope of the defence winning him his liberty.
George had to front this for Sussex Police. It isn’t unusual for a senior officer to be set up to draw the venom of defending counsel. I have done it often, absorbing all the criticism personally, and, in most cases, it protects others.
Pummelled in the witness box, as Grace has been on many occasions, George had to bob and weave. He had to explain and re-explain every decision, every act, hoping that his honest accounts remained consistent in the eyes of the jury. This included the denial of access to the solicitor, which was a particular worry for him.
His meticulously written notebook and seventy-eight-page witness statement certainly helped, as did his conspicuous integrity and obsessive attention to detail. The arguments lasted for hours but George won every point.
His bosses’ scrutiny of their young DI’s performance during the trial reminded George that the outcome of this contest would determine his future career. Everything was on his shoulders. Resolute yet isolated, George knew who was going to be the fall guy if Teed walked free. Despite his unerring honesty and professionalism George felt angry, lonely and vulnerable. If the old triumphed over the new he, and many like him, would be finished.
Thankfully, despite all the grubby accusations thrown at the police by the defence, the jury saw sense. Three clear cries of ‘Guilty!’, one for each victim, rang out from the jury foreman across the hushed Lewes Crown Court. Justice delivered for George, Hilda and young David Teed.
A mandatory life term followed but, stunningly, no appeal. No desire to overturn verdict or sentence. Just a solemn acceptance of his fate and twenty-three years to dwell on his evil was how it ended for Paul Teed.
George felt he and his modern tactics had been vindicated. Two years later he worked with the Deputy Chief Constable to take charge of a major review of Sussex CID. Promotion came soon after and he became the first serving UK police officer with ‘special dispensation’ from the Home Secretary to operate as a full member of the Security Service (MI5). He operated as a member of K2 Branch (Counter-espionage), which also saw him work with MI6 and, in the USA, with the FBI and CIA. On his return he headed Brighton CID then moved on to work in other sensitive areas of policing. He was my boss when I was a DC and I held him in the highest regard. His sense of justice, fairness and respect were a huge influence on me as I matured
in service. His bosses went on to embrace the new world, both achieving further promotions.
Paul is now free. I was fascinated by what becomes of a person who has wiped out his family once they have been released, so I tracked him down. Although I doubted that he would agree to meet, incredibly he was very keen to.
Peter James and I have, over the years through our different professions, met many killers, but not mass murderers and certainly not those who have had twenty-three years of incarceration to contemplate their act.
We met Paul in an austere roadside pub half way between Leeds and York. When we drove up in a black Mercedes it must have looked like we were carrying out a drugs deal. We didn’t know what to expect, we didn’t even know what Paul would look like now. As a thin, gaunt man in his fifties climbed out of a rackety Ford Fiesta that had lurched into the empty car park, blue smoke spewing from the exhaust, we guessed we hadn’t been stood up.
He was much cheerier than I had expected, but Paul’s prison pallor bore testament to the way years inside, with the stale air, drug culture and diet of cheap food sap the vitality from every pore.
Over the next three hours he laid bare his life before, during and after the slaying. He knows what he did that night was truly bad. He accepts that he meticulously planned the deaths yet, despite the evidence, maintains that neither his father, Hilda nor David had any idea what had happened to the others, such was their clinical yet brutal execution. He blames his actions on a slow build-up of tension, animosity and jealousy. The seed, he says, was sown months before with every cross word or fallout thereafter fuelling his determination to take their lives.
He is philosophical about his life in prison. He talks about inmates being broken machines and needing their software fixing (as opposed to those in psychiatric hospitals who he says have hardware problems). He is less convinced that jail is effective at the reprogramming prisoners so need.
Nowadays he is forever trapped, defined and scarred by that moment of evil madness. He struggles to find employment; he secured a job once in a garden centre but they got cold feet when they found out he had battered three people to death. He has turned to painting and tries to sell his abstract artwork online.
He has become deeply spiritual; he believes in signs and portents such as black dogs – like his father’s Great Dane and one he owned that was crushed by a train in 1984 at the site of the 1989 Purley rail crash – and the number twenty-three, his age at the time of the murders and the time he spent incarcerated.
He is a great believer in destiny but, above all, he is clear that he chose to do what he did; no-one forced him. He accepts that he had no right to do it and insists that he regrets it every day. Only he knows how much.
He wonders what life would be like if he had made different decisions. The true tragedy is however, whatever was going on in his head, he denied the others any choices; he took those for himself with every swing of the bat.
Unlike several killers I’ve met who are clearly psychopaths and have no conscience, enabling them to live guilt-free with the knowledge of what they have done, Peter and I both got the sense from Paul that he is, deep inside, consumed with remorse. His victims are long dead and buried, and Paul is now at liberty. But I don’t see him ever being a free man. He will be chained to his conscience forever.
3: KNOCKERS AND NOBLEMEN
I recall in my childhood my dad insisting, in his usual no-nonsense way, that every Sunday evening we all sat down to watch BBC’s Antiques Roadshow. In my boyhood naivety I believed that the world of antiques was populated by quaint gentlefolk receiving honest windfalls. The one I later battled with in Brighton was riddled with deceit, extortion and violence.
In the years following the Second World War, rag and bone men, of the kind immortalized in Steptoe and Son, were a familiar sight. They would traipse Britain’s streets with a horse and cart, yelling ‘rag and bone!’, inviting people to throw junk such as broken vacuum cleaners out of their houses. But a group of low-lifes in Brighton decided they could enjoy a much more lucrative door-to-door trade by conning unsuspecting people out of their antiques. They became more proactive knocking on front doors, frequently targeting the frail and elderly, offering to buy their antiques and valuables for instant cash.
These ‘knocker boys’, as they became known, had only a rudimentary knowledge of antiques – enough to spot items of value – but their game was to cheat people. A particularly pernicious trick was to carry a bag of sawdust in their pockets. On entering the house of an elderly person, they would furtively pour the sawdust on the ground beneath the best piece of furniture, then warn the victim they had woodworm, and offer to take it off their hands before it spread to all the other furniture. If an owner refused to sell any high-value items the knocker boy would pass the details to a burglar, who would later steal them and give the knocker boy a cut.
Some of these knocker boys graduated into a life of faux-respectability, setting themselves up as bona fide antiques dealers in well-stocked shops in Brighton’s famous Lanes.
In Regency times privileged classes would divide their balmy days between their modesty-saving bathing machines on the beaches and strutting around The Lanes. This compact network of fisherman’s cottages would evolve into a market place crammed with a delightfully eclectic mix of art dealers, furniture shops and bric-a-brac stalls. As time passed and Brighton grew, The Lanes gained the reputation as the go-to place for classic collectables – and so it remained until recent years, when most dealers turned from the failing antiques market to the more profitable second-hand jewellery trade.
However, this warren of Aladdin’s caves had a dark side, and it soon became the go-to place to fence stolen property. I was struck by the insightful 1996 Independent newspaper headline that proclaimed:
If your antiques have been stolen, head for Brighton – the Sussex resort is now a thieves’ kitchen for heirlooms.
It was fair advice.
While enjoying the latest gripping crime novel it is sometimes tempting to write off some authors’ extremes as poetic licence, the writer getting carried away with the story and leaving reality at the door. However, Peter James throughout the Grace series shows flawless authenticity in his depiction of the evil that some are capable of in the pursuit of wealth.
From my days as a DC with Brighton CID, amid catching rapists, robbers and burglars I became very familiar with the vermin who preyed on the lonely and the vulnerable.
The image of Ricky Moore, the slimy antiques dealer in Dead Man’s Time, is one I recognized immediately: ‘Fifty-three, balding, long, lank grey hair, shiny white open-neck shirt undone to show his medallion, cheap beige jacket, fingers adorned with chunky rings, booze-veined face and sallow complexion but he knew how to charm his way into any old lady’s house no matter how canny she was!’
From eyeballing them across an interview room table in the dank grey Brighton Police Station cell block, I could conjure up many a real villain matching this description.
There may well be antiques dealers who are loveable rogues. You have to laugh at some of their nicknames, ‘Two-fingered Wadey’, ‘Banjo Banham’, and ‘The Dude’ for example. Some will be straight, with a genuine passion for making profits for themselves and their grateful vendors. But many are just crooks, plain and simple.
I hate to think how many trusting and gullible grandmothers and war heroes I met whom these chancers had fleeced. Far too late, they realized they had been duped and I found it heartbreaking when spelling out that the odds of recovering their treasures were hovering just above zero.
The ruse relied on careful target selection, the ability to pass themselves off as experts, and of course plenty of charisma. However repugnant the inner person may be, like Ricky Moore, the knocker boy must come across to his target as a favourite son.
Many were able to pull this off, but several simply skipped the charm and relied on unadulterated violence and intimidation.
Terry Biglow is described in Not Dead
Yet as being from one of the biggest crime families in the city, whose activities included protection rackets, drug dealing and of course the illicit antique trade – not a person to be messed with. No surprise that the Biglows and the repulsive Smallbone family (of which the hateful Amis is portrayed as particularly contemptible by James), had Brighton crime sewn up.
There were at least four similar families in my time in Brighton CID. Their tentacles spread into almost any scam you could mention and their reputation for extortion was notorious among would-be challengers. The slam of the cell door on these heartless villains was such a sweet sound.
All through my early career as a detective at Brighton there was a small but highly functioning specialist team who had these criminals firmly in their sights.
The Antiques Squad was housed in a sweltering broom cupboard on the first floor of the imposing Brighton Police Station overlooking the palatial and airy American Express building. Its DS and four DCs held the most complete and sophisticated intelligence of every known criminally active antiques dealer and knocker boy in the UK.
They reflected the more positive traits of Peter James’ DS Norman Potting and I looked up to these old-school detectives. Most of the time they kept themselves to themselves but their knowledge, expertise and intuition were awe-inspiring and I wondered if I would ever have it in me to graduate to their level.
One of the stars was DC Nigel Kelly. He was like a terrier. He would overwhelm his adversaries with a racing intellect and his awesome grasp and recall of every tiny detail. Even the wiliest crooks would need to have their wits about them if they wanted to pull the wool over Nigel’s eyes. I took over an investigation from him once and I will never forget the exasperated look in his eyes as he briefed me when I failed to follow each intricate twist and turn as it was fired at me like a Gatling gun.
As well as being looked up to by rookies such as me, the Antiques Squad was the peril of many a villain. So feared were they that many ne’er do wells would sell their own grandmothers, in an effort to divert the squad’s attention to someone else.
Death Comes Knocking: Policing Roy Grace’s Brighton Page 5
