This particular one started with all the signs of being an opportunity to clear the decks so, in true CID style, I took my team for breakfast to the ever-popular Carats Cafe at Shoreham Harbour. This jewel of a diner is hidden from the rest of the world by Shoreham Power Station and the lock gates, the place where, in Dead Man’s Grip, young Tyler nearly met a very grisly end and through which Tooth executed his Houdini-like escape.
Carats doesn’t do mediocre, either in quality or quantity. Neither do detectives with a rare hour away from the grind, so we gorged ourselves on a gut-busting full English before making our way back for our Q day. Some hope.
Having abandoned the rusty CID car in the last free parking bay in the police station back yard I was met by Sergeant Russ Bagley who was just on his way out.
‘Don’t go far, Graham, I may need you.’
‘Oh no! You dare ruin my plans for the day!’ I threatened. ‘What have you got?’
‘My lot have just found a body in a camper van. Seems the poor fella’s dog had been pining outside.’
Russ was a recently promoted patrol sergeant but had previously been an experienced DC. As described at the discovery of Ralph Meeks’ corpse in Dead Man’s Time, policy was that if a death was potentially suspicious, then a DS had to attend and ‘call’ it as such. I trusted that Russ would only ask for me if genuinely needed although I never minded helping even the more cautious sergeants.
It’s very lonely being the one who has to decide whether or not a death is natural. The relatives expect us to get it right. If we are suspicious then the balloon goes up and a whole machine akin to that described in all the Grace books kicks in. If not it’s quite low-key. At times we all need a second opinion, and I would never deny that to a colleague. I came to wish that I had someone to consult that day.
I sloped back to the office, reluctant to settle in to anything that I couldn’t drop. Something told me I would soon be back in the car again.
Sure enough the call came. ‘Seems an odd one, Graham,’ reported Russ. ‘The van’s all locked up. We had to force our way in. The poor chap appears to have fallen over but the bizarre thing is there’s a small window that’s broken but no glass around and we can’t find the keys.’
‘What about the window? Couldn’t someone have got in through there?’
‘Not unless they were an Oompa-Loompa. The window’s too small and in the wrong place, also there’s no sign of a disturbance. I’m just not happy with it. Can you pop down?’
Glad of any excuse to leave those reports for another day, DC Lee Taylor and I hopped back into the CID car and drove the short distance to First Avenue, which runs off Hove Seafront.
Parked at the back of the monolithic King’s House, the HQ of Brighton and Hove City Council, the tatty VW camper van was guarded by uniformed officers and encircled by blue and white ‘Police’ tape. Other than its ‘For Sale’ sign in the window and the shattered pane there was nothing to set it apart from any other vehicle among those belonging to day trippers enjoying time at the beach.
Lee and I wasted no time in establishing the story. A whippet, whimpering around the van, had caused passers-by to become curious so they called the police. The first officers to arrive were sceptical that this was a police matter. Then their sixth sense caused them to agree with the concerned bystanders. There was more to this than a stray dog. They tried and failed to find a way into the van so, using their batons, they forced an entry. Inside was a sight they had hoped they wouldn’t see.
Slumped in the cramped floor space was a shabbily dressed man, probably in his early sixties. His head was resting against a blue body board. There was no doubt he was dead, but his eyes held a startled expression. A closer examination revealed the faintest abrasion on his left temple but no other obvious signs of injury. Unusually, there was no sign of alcohol or drug misuse and the putrid aroma of decomposition was yet to arrive. As Russ indicated, even from the broken window there was no internal or external debris and the van was tidy. This was a really tricky scene to read.
Sadly it’s not uncommon to find people having died alone and in squalid circumstances – but this one didn’t seem right. I couldn’t put my finger on it. There was no sign of a fight or broken glass from the shattered window; the van was locked but the keys could not be found. All these facts, singly and collectively, were calling out their importance as I tried to fathom out what they were telling me.
Recognizing that this might indeed be suspicious, I gave the order to seal off the street and treat the immediate area as a crime scene. Never an easy decision given the chaos that causes, but necessary under such circumstances. The impact on the public of me shutting off a busy thoroughfare, and on police in tying up scarce officers to protect the area, meant that I was probably the least popular person in Hove that morning.
I called out the duty Senior SOCO and Police Surgeon. They were with me in no time. Dressed head-to-toe in white forensic paper suits, together we gingerly ventured further into the van. We took in what we saw, considered its meaning and tried to understand what it was telling us.
There is no perfect checklist for suspicious deaths, so experience, judgement and hope supplement knowledge.
After as much examination as we dared in such an open setting, we were still unable to determine what had happened. We needed more. Surely the body itself and any minute forensic traces in the van would unlock the story for us?
I summoned the mortuary team to take the body away, and the low loader to remove the van to a forensically secure yard. I called a POLSA to start a fingertip search of the immediate area and arranged for an early post mortem. In the meantime our reflective Sunday changed tack and pace and my team and I slogged on to identify and understand our tragic victim.
We quickly worked out who he was. Anthony Robinson was a local man, a popular chap, who was well known in the close-knit community around the chic Norfolk Square in central Brighton. Once a cheap rental area, described by Grace in Not Dead Enough as the abode of students, transients, hookers and the impoverished elderly, this part of the city had undergone a transformation. Anthony was the proprietor of the successful Spectrum Copy Shop and known for being always cheery and on hand to help local people and businesses with that last-minute printing or typesetting.
Home was a well-appointed flat a couple of miles away on the blustery Hove seafront, which he shared with his faithful whippet Bonzo. He loved surfing and would regularly pack himself and Bonzo off to Devon and ride the West Country waves. His VW camper van, while entirely in tune with his surfing lifestyle, was getting old and tired and he needed to sell it. It had attracted little interest and he was apparently getting concerned he would be stuck with it.
Nothing we unearthed that day gave any clue to how and why he died. And in hindsight neither could it have. You couldn’t make up what really happened – unless your name is Peter James.
It was only at the post mortem at Cleo’s Brighton and Hove Mortuary the following day that the truth started to emerge. The slight abrasion we had all seen was, unbelievably, an exit wound from a tiny .22 bullet, its track through his head only shown up by X-ray. This stunned everyone. No-one had spotted the even smaller entry wound on the opposite side of his head under the hairline.
All my firearms training at Gatwick Airport had taught me that gunshot wounds were visible on entry and catastrophic on exit. This is graphically described following the shooting of Marla in Not Dead Yet. The bullet pushes flesh, muscle, sinew and bone ahead of it and out of the body. A gaping mush of death. This was nothing like that: a barely perceptible entry and a tiny exit. I beat myself up for months after. How did I miss that?
The nature of police humour being what it is, my supportive colleagues never missed an opportunity to recall the time I missed a gunshot wound. Plenty of DS Norman Pottings came out of the woodwork reminding me of this oversight. The real Tom Martinson, Chief Constable Martin Richards QPM, even made mention of it in my retirement speech some fifteen ye
ars on! The truth, and the nature of .22 injuries, would never be sufficient to defend me from the ribbing. That’s coppers for you.
From the outset this was not only a baffling whodunnit but, to complicate matters, became a where, when and why dunnit, a real quandary. However the answer to the who became apparent as a result of the tenacious nature of my partner in crime DS Bill Warner. Bill, once again, was interfering in matters that simply did not concern him.
He was trawling the force incident logs for his daily adrenaline rush: what could he meddle with in other parts of the county that had absolutely nothing to do with him? It didn’t take him long to find something. Little did we know though that, for once, his inability to keep his nose out of other people’s business would be of some use.
The title of the incident serial leapt off the screen: ‘Armed Kidnap’. What followed was fascinating. A terrified middle-aged couple, Mr and Mrs Purnell, had been kidnapped at gunpoint twenty-five miles away in Eastbourne and forced to drive north, snatched while trying to sell their camper van. A man had produced a gun and pointed it at Mrs Purnell’s head. He ordered Mr Purnell to drive to London. On reaching the M23 he then demanded to be driven to Gatwick. He clearly did not appreciate that they had just entered the place with the most armed police and CCTV outside London. It also had plenty of convenient dead ends.
On arrival, with breathtaking courage, Mr Purnell told his wife to get out and the gunman either to shoot him or get out too. Amazingly the man chose the latter and ran into the heaving South Terminal.
The terrified hostages raised the alarm and were able to help police swiftly locate their assailant. His arrest by heavily armed officers was both rapid and decisive. It was only at this point that the story of a mad five days of drug trafficking, deception, theft, kidnapping and murder started to emerge.
South African Denis Mulder knew little of Brighton. It’s unlikely that he ever intended to visit the UK, let alone this quirky city. However when you are dealt cruel cards you never know where it will end.
He had been a highly successful, multilingual entrepreneur. He owned a swimming-pool business in his homeland but wanderlust got to him. A fanatical sailor, he acquired a number of yachts around the Caribbean and enjoyed a healthy income chartering them to wealthy businessmen. He too enjoyed the seafaring life but one day suffered a massive stroke while offshore. This left him partially paralysed and needing to relearn to speak. Without health insurance he found the treatment costs as crippling as his illness and had to sell his boats and business to settle his medical debts.
Once back on his feet, he moved to Europe and acquired a franchise selling rooftop tents for cars. According to intelligence, recognizing that this wasn’t going to keep him in the style to which he had become accustomed, he diversified into the seemingly lucrative business of cannabis trafficking. Expecting a quick buck, he smuggled a large quantity of weed into England in his highly conspicuous Renault estate complete with rooftop tent.
More by luck than judgement he evaded the attention of Her Majesty’s Customs and somehow ended up in Brighton. There, in the beachfront Volks Tavern bar, he naively approached two potential buyers of his stash. Seizing an opportunity exposed by his criminal and geographical ignorance, they hoodwinked Mulder into driving the 160 miles to Bristol to sell to a Mr Big, promising a handsome return on his investment. Of course no such person existed and inevitably they stole his drugs and he returned penniless.
Broke, cold and in a strange country, Mulder decided he needed a camper van as a warmer alternative to his canvas-topped station wagon. All he had to his name were his wits and the .22 pistol he had carried undetected for years.
A few days prior to the kidnapping of the sharp-witted couple, he had seen an advert in a window of a van parked close to Hove seafront. He rang the number scribbled on the notice and agreed to meet the vendor for a test drive. This would turn out to be the last thing Anthony Robinson would ever do.
Painstaking detective work eventually helped piece together the brutal events on that fateful drive. Through the jigsaw of testimony that emerged it became clear that the two had driven the van eastwards on the A27 to Lewes and then retraced their journey west towards the scene of the Dead Simple dramatic car chase close to Shoreham Airport and the River Adur.
For reasons known only to Mulder, the van pulled over in a layby just east of Southwick Tunnel. We could only guess what happened there between the two, possibly a dispute over the price, possibly an attempt to steal the van, but whatever it was, all the evidence points to that short stop being the scene of the execution.
One shot to the head with a .22 pistol was all it took to end the life of this hugely popular and fun-loving surfer, who was probably in the back of the van while Mulder stood outside. The bullet was never recovered, having presumably broken the window on its way out of the van, hence there was no shattered glass when we found the body. Mulder must have driven the van back into the city, body in the back, parked it and dutifully locked it up, before leaving it where it was found. We don’t know if Bonzo witnessed the murder of his master. Being a dog lover, I sincerely hope not.
Curiously, during the interviews that followed Mulder’s arrest, he provided a full picture of the kidnapping, yet casually and callously made only passing mention of ‘killing the guy in Brighton’. We brought in the most able and tenacious interviewers but they could elicit no more than an unequivocal yet bland admission that he had shot Robinson in cold blood.
The full story is really known only to Mulder, as he has never yet had the humanity to tell it.
Imagine being one of Mr Robinson’s nearest and dearest. Imagine not knowing how and why your loved one died. Cruel enough to rob someone of their life, but it rubs salt in the wounds of those left behind to tantalize them with an admission, but not the courtesy of an explanation.
Mulder was not a clever killer but his ruthlessness made up for that. There seems little doubt that were it not for the brave evasive action taken by his hostages at Gatwick he would have gone on to kill again. He had brushed with death through his stroke and it seemed that his survival instinct was so strong that, in his mind, it overrode everyone else’s right to life.
Some might regard it as fanciful if Peter James were to link such a complex and contradictory character to this kind of violence but, as is ever the case, nothing is too bizarre or inexplicable to happen in Brighton.
A life sentence was the least Mulder deserved but he remains one of the hardest men to fathom. His guilty plea meant the facts couldn’t be explored, so only he knows what turned this previously successful, sick, failed drug dealer into an executioner of the type thankfully we rarely see.
12: THE BODY BUTCHER
Dogs love bones. It’s in their nature. All bones, any bone. They just love them.
There is something heart-warming when a faithful hound sprints back to its owner with a gift in its mouth, found while rummaging through the undergrowth. A bouncy ball, maybe even a gnarled branch from a nearby oak – the look of triumph on the mutt’s face warms the cockles of your heart.
Late one balmy evening in July 1999, that joy was tarnished for a middle-aged lady as she called her dogs in for the night near a pig farm in Bexhill, East Sussex. She crouched down, her arms out wide, as her dog bounded towards her with an object protruding either side of his salivating mouth. Strange-shaped stick, she thought, strange colour too. A bit bigger than his usual find. As the distance between them narrowed so her curiosity heightened. Not another mangy rabbit?
With a proud flourish he dropped it in front of her.
It took her a moment before the horrific truth hit her. A severed human hand, riddled with maggots and emitting the pungent stench of death and decay, lay festering at her feet.
Two and a half weeks earlier, I was enjoying a weekend off, leaving Bill Warner at the helm of Hove CID as duty DS. Julie and I had spent the Saturday afternoon with Conall, Niamh and Deaglan at their friend’s second birthday party near Gatw
ick. The summer sun provided the first outing in shorts, tee-shirts and flip-flops, and brought a wave of optimism that there would be balmy days ahead.
Julie and I spent most of the time counting in threes to make sure we could track all of our children and checking that they were not damaging themselves or wandering off. As was the way in those days our conversations with others were invariably centred around the kids with answers such as, ‘No, we feel blessed, not burdened’, ‘Yes, it was hard in the early days but we both mucked in’, ‘Yes, we know it will be expensive when they go to uni’.
‘They are very natural babies, if that’s what you mean,’ was a retort we used to rebuff one of the more intrusive questions people would ask.
As the party drew to a close we said our goodbyes and clipped our exhausted trio into their car seats across the back of our huge Volvo estate car. As if waiting for a lull in the child-shepherding, my phone started to buzz.
‘You’re not on call, are you?’ enquired Julie, knowing the answer but fearing the worst.
‘No,’ I said as I looked at the display. A sense of relief washed through me as I saw who was ringing. ‘It’s only Bill,’ I said. ‘He will only want to moan or brag about something. I’ll answer it then he can leave me be.’
Julie took the driver’s seat and I answered the call.
‘Hi, mate,’ I chirped. ‘What have you done this time?’
‘Ah, Graham,’ Bill droned in a manner that invariably preceded some bombshell he was waiting to drop. ‘Were you having a nice weekend?’
‘I still am, mate, unless you have finally come to accept what I have said all along – that you can’t cope without me there to guide you.’ I glanced at Julie as she drove and detected a faint sign of exasperation on her face as she sensed this would be a long call of banter and brickbats being exchanged.
Death Comes Knocking: Policing Roy Grace’s Brighton Page 18
