Death Comes Knocking: Policing Roy Grace’s Brighton

by Graham Bartlett

  This one, however, was really more of a chat. The venue was the nicotine-stained, threadbare-carpeted CID office that had the appearance of having been equipped at a car boot sale; each battered and bruised piece of furniture was different from its neighbour. Each workstation, however, was the nerve centre of dozens of investigations into man’s appalling inhumanity to man. As Grace reflected in Dead Simple when revisiting that self-same office, each desk appeared as if ‘the occupant had abandoned it in haste and would return shortly.’

  The information was a tad light on detail. All we knew was that we were going to storm 1 Wykeham Terrace, and a few garages dotted around the city. There was only sporadic mention of tapes, printers and passports. All I picked up was that ‘stuff had been happening’ and we needed to crash through Henty’s door to find out exactly what.

  I was still working with DC Dave Swainston and I felt incredibly privileged to be learning from such a seasoned master; he relished the most complex and arduous investigations and what he didn’t know wasn’t worth knowing.

  On hearing of hundreds of thousands of tapes, and a hint of the counterfeiting of passports, Dave volunteered to run the investigation, as it would be something different to get his teeth into. I knew, given how closely we worked, if Dave took this job on then so would I. I couldn’t wait.

  This was long before the days of Local Support Teams who now would crash open doors and secure premises needing to be searched. This raid was down to us suits.

  Off we went, crammed into our oh-so-identifiable unmarked CID cars. Anyone watching us screech, in convoy, up the traffic-choked North Street towards the Clock Tower would have wondered what on earth was going on. So did I.

  It really wasn’t essential to race to the target address. The only point at which it becomes necessary to go hell-for-leather is when you risk being seen by your quarry. Frankly, tearing up the road was nothing more than ego-boosting, adrenaline-pumping fun.

  As we cleared the Clock Tower, the cars juddered in unison to a halt opposite the ivy-clad, stone-arched entrance that provided Wykeham Terrace with privacy from the outside world. Today it worked to screen us as we squeezed out of our three-door saloons, allowing us a few more seconds of surprise.

  Eight of us raced up the flint steps into the courtyard in front of the imposing Tudor-Gothic facade of the terrace. Now was the time to rush.

  We sprinted out of the shadows and leapt up the steps leading to house number 1. DS Don Welch, a rugby-playing, marathon-running giant, booted open the huge front door.

  As we raced in creating an ear-splitting din with our shouts of ‘police’, ‘stay where you are’, and ‘nobody move’, we heard pounding footsteps and shouts above us. A door banged and it became clear that whoever we had disturbed didn’t want to hang around to say hello. Dave and I raced up the stairs, knowing that whatever their intentions, the architecture of the building would make any escape attempt futile.

  Behind Wykeham Terrace sits Queen Square. Between the two is a ten-foot-wide void that drops four storeys from the rooftop. Only the bravest free-runner would have any hope of leaping across and we, of course, had officers watching and waiting on the other side.

  As we reached the first landing, I was distracted by a terrifying scream followed by a thud then further shrieking coming from outside. Dave and I turned and found a doorway to a narrow balcony overlooking the backs of the houses. My gaze turned towards the sickening cries coming from the depths below. I could just make out in the shadows a crumpled figure writhing around.

  ‘Help me. Help me.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said, ‘we’re coming to get you. Where does it hurt?’

  ‘I’ve bust my ankle.’

  ‘OK, OK, we’ll get help.’ I shouted to the stricken fugitive. ‘Well, he’s going nowhere,’ I quipped to Dave.

  At that moment, I heard more shouting above.

  ‘Come down now. You’re going to kill yourself,’ yelled a detective hidden from our view.

  ‘What of it,’ came the reply, ‘I’m stuffed.’

  I gazed up into the afternoon sunlight and saw David Henty teetering precariously on the rooftop. With nowhere to go, he was stranded, and seemed frozen with fear, looking desperately around for an escape route. Then he peered down into the void, apparently weighing up his options. The sight of his crippled comrade writhing in agony below discouraged him from any attempt to leap.

  As Cleo points out to Grace in Dead Man’s Grip after learning that he had been scaling huge chimney stacks, many cops are terrified of heights. I am a proud member of that club. I was petrified that, as the new boy, I would be sent up after Henty.

  Lots of voices were pleading for him to come down safely and I was relieved to see him being skilfully coaxed into the arms of waiting police officers. Probably the promise of having a moment to say goodbye to his wife, coupled with the agonizing cries of his companion below reminding him that it would bloody hurt if he jumped, had something to do with it.

  Other officers came to guard our crippled fugitive, waiting for the Fire and Ambulance Services to extract him from his impossible position while Dave Swainston and I went back into the house to join our colleagues, assessing the scene.

  With time now to survey what we had, I couldn’t believe what I saw. Our timing had been perfect. We had literally burst in mid-production. The kitchen worktops were littered with passport components: offcuts of rexine, strips of gold foil, fake immigration stamps alongside inkpads and odd-looking oval-shaped metal templates. It was the counterfeiting equivalent of a smoking gun.

  Only one person, Stephen Tully, a well-known armed robber, had bothered to stay behind and welcome us and, despite his assertions that he had only popped in to see his god-daughter, he was led off in handcuffs.

  Cliff Wake, oblivious to what had been going on and having dealt with the tape issue, walked blindly into the gardens at the front of Wykeham Terrace. He was quickly pounced on, cuffed and taken into custody before he knew what was happening.

  The search of the house then commenced in earnest. First, though, the SOCOs photographed the damning kitchen scenes. It was vital to capture a record of how we found the house – a factory in full production.

  Unlike Grace we did not have the benefit of a POLSA (Police Search Advisor). However, we did go through the house with a fine-tooth comb. We even sent specialists down the chimney of a neighbouring house, as Henty had been seen stuffing something into it, from where they recovered passport remnants.

  Henty, years later, would insist that we missed a box full of the finished product hidden in the house, and another in a car parked nearby. He said that he quickly had them recovered and burned while in custody. We never did find very many, a surprise given that the passports were due to be delivered to Lenny, so perhaps he was right.

  The man crushed by his fall was quickly identified as Barry Cheriton. As someone unfamiliar with police investigations, we hoped that he would prove the weak link and open up the secrets of this intriguing crime. However, he had more pressing priorities to attend to, like having his wrecked foot and ankle repaired.

  As the evening went on, we searched the plethora of houses, garages and printing works identified throughout the weeks of surveillance.

  One particular garage was rammed to the rooftop with scores of boxes containing thousands of cassette tapes. Elsewhere was the tape copying machine, pages of inserts, a foil embossing device, tapes ready for sale and reams of paper and rexine. All had to be seized, documented and their movement accounted for from now until the trial. Early in Dead Simple Grace faces the consequences of being unable to explain the chain of the continuity of an exhibit while under cross examination at Lewes Crown Court. This is territory defence barristers invariably attempt to exploit when faced with a damning case against them – like this one.

  Dave and I went across to Peacehaven with a photographer to search Cheriton’s house. It had been a long day but one full of surprises and successes. We were running on adr
enaline. As we heaved open the up-and-over garage door we revealed a huge tangerine-coloured four-armed screen printer sitting centre stage on the concrete floor. Surrounding this cumbersome contraption were pages and pages to be used in fake passports. A stencil replicating the crest that appeared on each page sat on a table nearby.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Dave and I gasped in unison. Having had the whole set-up photographed, we started the painstaking search.

  As I glanced at one of the pages, something caught my eye.

  ‘Dave, how do you spell Britannic, one N or two?’

  ‘Two, isn’t it? Why?’

  ‘What about Majesty? J or a G?’

  ‘J. What are you doing, some kind of crossword?’

  ‘Thought so. Come and look at this,’ I said.

  Dave wandered over and chuckled as he looked at the page that had sparked my curiosity.

  The well-known passage on the inside of each British passport proudly proclaims that ‘Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requests and requires in the name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.’

  The Henty/Wake/Cheriton version, however, started ‘Her Britanic Magesty’s Secretary of State requests and requires . . .’

  ‘The proofreader wants shooting,’ said Dave.

  We wondered whether the whole batch would have been rejected on this basis by whoever had ordered them.

  Having gathered up all the evidence in this anonymous makeshift print factory, we headed back to the nick. Little did I know that over the next sixteen months I would become a master at dismantling and re-assembling this ancient press, as we had to produce it to countless prosecutors, defence lawyers and courts.

  Henty and Wake knew their number was up. All their dreams had been shattered. There would be no Scottish castles and no £300k windfall to fund a new life of luxury. They decided to give us one last snub. Normally, reticent villains will at least sit in an interview room even if they ignore every question. It gives them relief from looking at the walls in their six by eight-foot police cells.

  David and Cliff, on the other hand, decided that they would not even do that. When asked to step out for questioning they just sat and stared, moving not a muscle. In an irritating act of defiance, they had resolved not to give us an inch.

  Based on the evidence that had been amassed in the preceding months, together with the damning scene we had gatecrashed, Henty, Wake and, eventually, Cheriton were charged with counterfeiting passports and music tapes. Tully was lucky, he walked away scot-free.

  On being remanded in custody, Wake and Henty had engineered it so they could share a cell in Lewes Prison. True businessmen that they were, they spent their time not lamenting their predicament, but planning their next scam. They needed to cut their losses and find the next opportunity. They plotted and schemed, even though they didn’t know when they would be free to put their plans into action.

  Surprisingly, they only remained in custody for three weeks before a bail application was granted. In the next year and a quarter of unexpected liberty, while awaiting trial, they stumbled across a fabulously simple, yet lucrative, scheme involving stolen cars from the Republic of Ireland.

  Henty was stopped, late one night, driving an Irish car. The officers, convinced it was stolen, struggled to confirm that fact. David overheard a radio message explaining that there was no protocol with Ireland that would help quickly identify questionable cars.

  Always alert to an opportunity, the germ of an idea took root. If that was the case then surely he could import stolen cars on an industrial scale from Ireland, give them new identities and sell them on. Using his trusted contacts, he worked the scheme for months, exploiting the naivety of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority staff into believing his account of legal imports and lost documents, to persuade them to re-register the cars in the UK.

  He was caught eventually but not until the scheme had provided a tidy nest egg for his family should he lose his impending trial.

  As Grace grumbles in Dead Tomorrow, having inherited a new role that includes reviewing files for forthcoming trials, the bureaucracy of the criminal justice system is almost beyond belief.

  The amount of evidence we had to gather over the months was colossal. We needed to source all the material, confirm all the surveillance sightings, cost everything and prove that all three were guilty as charged. One enquiry took us to Gatwick Airport, where a senior immigration officer told us that, aside from the spelling mistakes, these passports were the best forgeries he had come across.

  When the trial finally took place, the defence did their best. They queried the exhibits, tried to convince the jury of a host of coincidences, sought to dissuade them from assumptions and attempted to place the whole scam at the door of some of the witnesses. They were hoping that they had sown just enough doubt to win a marginal acquittal. However, the surveillance evidence, the incriminating material we found on the raids and the painstaking tracing of all the passport and tape components, secured swift guilty verdicts.

  The sentences were an eye-watering jolt for Henty and co. Five years apiece sent an unequivocal message to other would-be forgers. The spoils may be tantalizing but the penalties are severe even if, like Cheriton, you had a blameless past. As for Lenny the Shadow, he did what all shadows do when you try to shine a light on them. He disappeared.

  We are all human and, like Grace when he saw Gavin Daly being led away for murder in Dead Man’s Time, I felt a twinge of pity for the three as they were taken down to the cells. They deserved all they got, but they had taken a huge gamble, the loss of which they and their families would pay for dearly.

  Even with the shock of such a long time away, David and Cliff still plotted and came up with projects for the future. Most, if not all, were on the right side of the law, including stocking vending machines in Cyprus, selling discarded plastic to the Chinese and marketing popular paintings online. Others, involving more stolen cars, won Henty nine months in a Spanish prison and Wake later went back to prison for money laundering.

  The difference between them and many criminals today is that despite their prolific offending they never bore any animosity towards the police and never complained about their comeuppance. And, being businessmen, they had other people and schemes in place to ensure that the money kept rolling in.

  Twenty-five years on, Dave Swainston and I spent a very pleasant morning with Henty reminiscing over the old days, swapping war stories and musing about some of the ‘what-ifs’ of those days when we were on opposite sides of the law.

  He and Wake knew that all businesses have their ups and downs, and our ups were their downs. They never failed to make a buck even if sometimes they paid the price with their liberty. That was the life they had chosen and custody provided a time of reflection to brainstorm the next scam to help them up the social ladder.

  Henty proudly explained to Peter James and me on another visit that he now produces paintings openly branded as fakes and makes a pretty penny bringing masterpieces to the masses. His new wife is insistent that his life must now be on the straight and narrow and, so far, he has not let her down.

  Wake, when we spoke with him, was looking forward to his release from prison. When I asked him what he planned to do he was quick to remind me, ‘Graham, you know me, I’m never going to be poor now, am I?’

  I chose not to ask any more. Nowadays, ignorance can be bliss.

  6: HORROR AMONGST THIEVES

  Everyone needs friends. People who stick by you through thick and thin. Grace and Branson have just that in each other: a lifelong bond, underpinned by trust, tolerance and forgiveness. Sometimes it’s only when these are tested to the limit that you can really be certain whether those around you are the real deal.

  One middle-ranking villain made some huge assumptions about the bona fides of his mates. His wake-up call came in the most eye
-wateringly brutal manner imaginable.

  DC Andy Mays is a great friend of mine. We first worked together playing undercover cops in the banally labelled Plain Clothes Unit at Gatwick Airport in the late 1980s and his first wife worked with Julie. We socialized together often and Andy arranged my stag night before Julie and I jetted off to get married on a beautiful Seychelles island in 1992.

  His career eventually moved into a world too secret for these pages but no less exciting for it. We are friends to this day.

  We shared a good number of years too as DCs on Brighton CID and, during that time, Andy developed a phenomenal talent for getting villains to talk to him – not just because, being a lookalike of Phil Mitchell from EastEnders, he resembled most of them.

  Policing is often very reactive. We think that we have our fingers on the pulse and that intelligence-led proactivity is how we get our best results. We flatter ourselves. Like the consequences of the crash that killed Tony Revere in Dead Man’s Grip, the most serious jobs are the ones we often fail to see coming.

  There does seem to be something about Sundays that causes them to generate the most intricate and intriguing policing challenges. The late shift on this particular winter’s day in 1992 was no exception.

  Andy was clearing an outrageous backlog of reports that his sergeant had been badgering him over, while willing the clock to tick round to 9 p.m. when, as was the custom, he could go to the pub. The phones rarely rang on a Sunday so when his did, he sensed his evening was about to be disrupted. With a sigh he reluctantly lifted the grey receiver.

  ‘CID. DC Mays.’

  ‘Oh, hi. It’s the control room here. Response are at a job in the Rose Hill area where a chap has fallen out of an upper-floor window. The sergeant is saying he doesn’t think the bloke is going to survive. He’s in a really bad way. They’ve taken him to the hospital and they are asking for CID to meet them there.’