‘Very funny,’ muttered Bill, ‘at least I can recognize a gunshot wound when I see it.’
‘Out of order,’ I declared. ‘What is it? I am enjoying some time with the ones I love and you come nowhere near that classification.’
‘We think we’ve got a murder.’
‘You think? And there were you questioning my crime scene analysis skills. What do you mean, think?’
‘Well. We are pretty sure but we haven’t got a body. David Gaylor is here and is asking if you can come in.’ My heart sank. Weekends at home were precious, not least because they gave me an opportunity to take over the childcare, allowing Julie to catch up with friends and sleep. I knew if this was a murder, home would become nothing more than a staging post and dressing room for me for the next month or so. I loved investigating homicides but I adored my new family and these conflicting demands tore me up. I knew I would have to go in.
‘I suppose David wants me there to ensure that you don’t stand officers down just before the suspect walks through the door. Am I right?’
‘Touché,’ Bill replied.
As I finished the call, I looked across at Julie. She knew what was coming.
‘Babes. I’ve got to go in. They think they have a murder but no body and they need me there.’
‘How can you have a murder with no body?’ she asked, as ever not revealing the disappointment and frustration she must have been feeling.
‘It’s not common but sometimes the facts point towards a crime but the body has been disposed of or hidden. Could be a long job.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Can you give me a hand settling the kids when we get home before you shoot off? At least we have had a nice afternoon.’
I leant across the gearshift and kissed her on the cheek as we finally left the motorway for the homeward stretch.
‘I must have been very good in a past life to have deserved you,’ I remarked.
‘Yes, you must, but I am sure you’ll pay me back with your bodyweight in flowers and chocolates,’ she replied, a resigned smile spreading across her face.
She pulled up outside our house and I started heaving pushchairs and babies out of the car as my mind raced with scenarios that might be awaiting me. Getting out and about with the kids in those days was a logistical nightmare that needed to be approached like a military operation. Julie was the commander-in-chief and I was the quartermaster. Everything had to be counted out and then counted back, into its designated storage. We had recently returned from our first foreign holiday with the babies and planned our stores so precisely that after a week we had just one out of ninety-six nappies unused.
Kit stowed and children settled, I quickly transformed myself from casual barbecue bum to professional detective, ensuring that I did not commit the cardinal sin of combining a spotted tie with a striped shirt.
As I dashed down the stairs, Julie was already serving up rations of meatballs, mashed potatoes and peas to three gurgling, chuckling, hungry mouths. With a quick kiss for each and a sincere but feeble apology, I jumped into the car and headed south.
As I squeezed the car between two people-carriers in a far corner of Hove Police Station car park around 5 p.m. it became clear that I was not the only one whose weekend plans had been dashed.
I climbed the two storeys to the CID floor and as I walked briskly along the corridor, the excited mumble of speculation and one-sided phone calls that define the early hours of any murder enquiry grew louder.
I stepped through the DCs’ office door, to be greeted by Mick Burkinshaw. ‘Eh up, Graham. Don’t worry, we’ve got an overtime code.’ This was one of the more typical concerns at the outset of any enquiry.
The issue of such a code meant a separate budget and this often was seen by some as being handed carte blanche to work as long as it took to finish the job, sure that they would be handsomely recompensed. Overtime was seen as a great perk and made up for the personal disruption murder enquiries brought.
I remember, some years after Giles York, who later became Chief Constable, being at a briefing I was holding for a major public order event. We provided the hundreds of officers with a bewildering catalogue of details about what was anticipated, what their job was, where the threats might come from, their meal arrangements and the overtime code. Giles pulled me to one side at the end and remarked, ‘What is it about cops, Graham? You can give them all the information they will ever need to do their job and keep themselves safe, but it’s only when you tell them the overtime code that any of them get their pens out.’
I walked into DCI David Gaylor’s office, where Bill had already taken root.
‘Ah, Graham. Thanks so much for popping in,’ joked Bill.
David was in his familiar focused murder mode. He was our boss, but was also a hugely experienced detective with a rapier mind. His hypotheses and orders would come thick and fast when he was in this zone and woe betide us if we missed anything.
‘Thanks, Graham. I think the best thing is to get Mick Burkinshaw and Dave Corcoran in here to bring us up to speed first hand rather than me tell you,’ he said.
I still had only the very basics that Bill had delighted in passing on in that phone call, which now seemed hours ago.
‘Burky, Corky, DCI’s office now,’ bellowed Bill with a feigned military bark.
David and I looked at each other and lifted our eyebrows, recognizing we were in the presence of a troublesome child who was beyond help. Burky’s jocular response was less restrained, typical of the Yorkshireman.
‘Fuck off, Bill. You are nothing without us. In fact you are nothing full stop and the boss only called Graham in because he wanted some brains at DS level.’
As Bill was about to counter, David raised his hand and reminded us, ‘Gents, there will be plenty of time for Bill-bashing later. For now we have a body to find and a murder to solve. Now go through for Graham’s benefit what has happened this afternoon.’
Mick and Dave were two of the most experienced detectives we had. DC Dave Corcoran was a loveable rugged Irishman whose life revolved around greyhounds, Guinness and horse racing.
The pair couldn’t have been better chosen to start this enquiry. Both detectives had good old-fashioned copper’s noses, enabling them to read people and situations as if words on a page. Grace uses body language to detect liars. The eyes go left or right when a person lies. It’s not conclusive but it is a good signal that something is amiss. Spotting and taking notice of anomalies is an essential ability for detectives. As Grace grapples with a long-running enquiry in Dead Man’s Grip, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s quote is foremost in his thoughts: ‘A precise and intelligent recognition of minor differences is what is required of a good detective.’ Mick and Dave were good detectives.
I had worked with them for a couple of years and felt privileged and reassured in equal measures that it was they who were about to brief me.
‘Now then,’ started Mick. ‘About one thirty today a local drunk by the name of Jeff Mighell called the switchboard and told the operator he had some information about a body. He was a bit pissed and slurring but thank God the call taker stuck with him. He said that the other day, he couldn’t be sure when, he was chatting to a girl called Jenny Shaw. She’s seventeen and lives with her boyfriend Reg Connolly in a flat at the top end of Hove. I take it you know these three?’
We all nodded. None of us was surprised that this mystery had a cast of very familiar characters.
Jeff was typical of so many in Brighton and Hove and could often be found in our cells sobering up. He was a sorry character who was a bit of a joke in the area.
The city had a huge problem with alcohol. It’s a tourist destination, a stag and hen party favourite, and had a disproportionate number of pubs and off-licences together with a hard core of street drinkers. Alcohol-related deaths of men in the city were running at about 22 per 100,000 people, which was almost twice the rate for the whole of England, and nearly two and a half times the south-east average. That’
s a lot of lives lost to booze. Add to that the 32 per 100,000 lost to drugs in the city and the problem with substance misuse starts to become clear.
Drunks were part of the landscape, whether they are begging, fighting or collapsed in the street. Like so many, though, in his more lucid moments Jeff had a heart of gold and hated himself for his drunken lifestyle.
Reg was a drunk too, but with a nasty streak. Odd, as he came from a very close and proud family. He’d migrated to the city from the north west of England and was into drugs, petty crime and beating up his young girlfriend. Reg stole and scammed his way through life and heaven help anyone, including the police, who tried to stop him.
Jenny, on the other hand, was a vulnerable young girl who, despite coming from a big and equally close local family, had been allowed to make her own decisions, her own way in life, far too soon. Poorly educated and with no effective role models, she moved in with her thug of a boyfriend with all the danger that entailed.
The police had been called to their flat several times following disputes between the two but rarely were we able to persuade Jenny to end their relationship or to keep Reg away for anything more than a few days.
‘They were by the shops just round the corner,’ Burky continued. ‘Jeff said that she was really upset. Not unusual apparently as it’s common knowledge that Reg knocks her about but this seemed worse. He says she burst into tears and threw her arms round him.’
‘Bloody hell, she must have been desperate from what I can remember of Jeff,’ interjected Bill.
Ignoring him, Burky continued. ‘So he asked her what’s up and she said, “Come round to the flat. I’ll show you.” As they arrived Jeff asked her if Reg would mind, as he had beaten him up before. Jenny just stayed silent as she opened the door. She didn’t go in but pointed to the cupboard just to the left. He squeezed past her and peered in.
‘Well, there slumped inside with a gaping hole in his chest, blood crusting all around it, was Reg. Lifeless. Jeff couldn’t work out how long he might have been there but he knew he was dead. He says there were blood and drag marks all around and down the hallway towards the lounge. He says he was too scared to go in any further.
‘He said he gagged, turned to Jenny and said, “What the fuck?” She apparently was shaking and bawling her eyes out but managed to blurt out, “I’d had enough of his beatings, Jeff. He was going to kill me. I stabbed him when he was asleep. I had to but I am so scared. I’m going to go to prison, aren’t I?” So, helpful as ever, Jeff just told her he wanted nothing to do with it and turned and ran. He has been thinking of nothing else since so he decided eventually he had to call us.’
We were all hooked, listening intently and scratching all the gory details in our blue A4 investigators’ notebooks. None of us wanted to be the one to forget a critical nugget.
Dave Corcoran took up the story. ‘So, thanks to the experience and judgement of the call handler, she didn’t dismiss Jeff as some rambling drunk. She had a gut feeling that there was something in this so she called the CID office and Burky and I went out to find Jeff. It wasn’t hard. We got him out of the pub and sat him in the car. He was pissed but basically repeated what he had told the operator. So we brought him back here for a statement and went straight up to Jenny’s.’
Between them Burky and Corky described what they found.
As Jenny opened the door she’d had the look of the frightened little girl she was. Without naming their source, they gently explained what they had been told. She said nothing but meekly allowed them in.
The flat was filthy – the sort of place, we say, where you need to wipe your feet on the way out. However, a wall of bleach fumes hit them The surgical cleanliness of the cupboard was in stark contrast to the rest of the squalor. They noticed a body-shaped outline on the floor. That, together with the absence of a bed convinced them Jeff was right. The missing piece, however, was a body.
A dead body with a knife in its chest is pretty easy to call as a murder. You know what you’ve got and there is an obvious starting point. No body, a silent, frightened girl and the word of a drunk makes that decision less clear-cut. However, Burky and Corky both knew you can always step back from declaring an incident a murder but you can rarely make up ground if you don’t.
They arrested Jenny for murder, called for back-up to seal off the house and summoned the cavalry.
Since then David, as SIO, had already called in the teams he needed, and now started to allocate the roles. I was to run the incident room, and Bill the outside enquiry team: the detectives who would be talking to witnesses, taking statements and hopefully solving the case.
In those first few hours we interviewed Jenny’s family, traced her handful of friends and sought to find out whether Reg was alive or dead. We tracked down some terrified youngsters who, like Jeff, had been shown the grisly body but sworn to silence by Jenny. Their relief at being finally permitted to unburden themselves of their macabre secret was immense. For us it was critical corroboration.
However, the top priority was finding Reg, one way or another.
We had exclusive use of the same Specialist Search Unit that Grace relies on so often. From searching Brighton and Hove’s various waste disposal tips to rummaging through a container of rotting animal carcasses, they followed every lead. In our desperation, there was nowhere we wouldn’t ask them to look.
We’d been running the enquiry for what seemed like an age but were missing this essential ingredient. We had the murder scene, we had some damning evidence, we had a pitiful suspect. As far as we could we had shown there was no trace of Reg since the time Jeff saw him dead in the cupboard. At a stretch, that would probably be enough to go to trial but we knew the defence would insist that he had just moved on and that Jeff and the others were deluded. We needed the clues the corpse would hold. The pressure was on.
Despite the training and experience Police Search Advisors amass throughout their careers they will concede they are no match for the combination of warm weather and inquisitive dogs. It’s not that POLSAs don’t solve crimes, it’s just that when you are looking for a body that has been missing for weeks you can’t beat the canine nose. We were clinging to the hope that the current heat wave would work its magic.
In hindsight, the recovery of the body was inevitable but when it came it was a huge relief. As with Hilary Dupont, when her dog unearthed Janie Stretton’s human remains in Looking Good Dead, the day for our dog owner was unremarkable. Little did she know that it would end with her dog subjected to the ignominy of being forensically combed and plucked of human blood and sinew and she herself having to provide a bewilderingly detailed witness statement describing what she saw, when, how and where.
For Grace the finding of the butchered remains was the first piece in the jigsaw; for us it was almost the last.
Once Reg’s first hand had been retrieved, we had a focus. Finally we knew where to look. Our search parameters had been set by a dog and we used him again to lead us to the remaining body parts. Our operation moved from Hove to Bexhill and for a short while life was on hold for the residents in the lanes around the find, as the police Major Incident Vehicle, countless Scenes of Crime and dog vans and a fleet of personnel carriers gridlocked the narrow country roads.
Open-ground searching takes lots of cops. Lots of cops mean a huge support structure. It’s like the circus coming to town. As with the recovery of the first body from the storm drain in Dead Man’s Footsteps every expert known to man turns up at a deposition site. All hoping theirs is the ‘ology’ that will crack the case.
Eventually, Connolly’s severed head with its startled staring eyes, two blackening legs and his other arm were found scattered close to the farm.
This time we were able to accurately mark their position, photograph them from all angles, recover them carefully and fingertip search the immediate surroundings. Grateful as we were to the dog for giving us the tip-off, he selfishly didn’t think about the evidential trail when he found the
first limb.
As each body part was recovered it was carefully moved to the mortuary for examination.
It’s no coincidence that Roy Grace spends so much time there and it’s certainly not all to do with it being Cleo’s place of work. Dead bodies hold secrets. In the days of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, the crime scene was the centre of the investigation. While still important, many crimes are now solved in the mortuary or forensic labs. The absence of a body deprives the SIO of vital clues.
I went to numerous post mortems in Cleo’s Brighton and Hove Mortuary as each body part was found. Always a soulless place, it is accurately described in Not Dead Enough as being ‘a crucible in which human beings are deconstructed back to their base elements’. Its ethereal grey, which Peter James captures superbly, soaks every wall, surface and cadaver. It is a dire place that most visit only when they absolutely need to. But you have to find something to make the awfulness a little more bearable. One strategy is another use of gallows humour such as the term shared between police and morticians to describe a body mid-post mortem: ‘canoe’. Why so? Well, that is what a human body resembles when it’s been slit from neck to groin and all its internal organs removed.
With the various post-mortems Reg was becoming blacker and blacker as the cycle of freezing and defrosting restarted the inevitable decomposition. I hate post mortems at the best of times. Despite the efforts to retain his dignity, this appeared to be a prolonged ghoulish jigsaw puzzle being played out over many days. The picture that emerged was that he had been precisely and expertly dismembered.
Symmetrical amputations with striation marks gave away the use of professional razor-sharp high-powered instruments. This told us that whatever Jenny had done she had surely been helped by someone who knew what they were about.
We had the killer but it seemed Brighton and Hove was home to a butcher for hire. We had to find out where and by whom Reg had been chopped up.
We searched a local butcher’s shop as we had intelligence that was where the deed was done – it wasn’t. There were parallels with Dead Tomorrow in which people with surgical skills were evidently involved in the death of the unwitting organ donors. Whoever dismembered Reg remained a worrying mystery. Was there a market in hacking up bodies that we were unaware of? Was there someone out there prepared to capitalize on that? If there was, we never found out who.
Death Comes Knocking: Policing Roy Grace’s Brighton Page 19
