Backstory

by Hurley, Graham

  Some of that buccaneering spirit had clung to both J-R and Pughie and after I’d brought Dave Hopkins into the conversation they began to open up. I still have my scribbled notes from that evening. Morale at the coal face, they said, was shit. Zero resources, zero back up, and everything driven by performance targets. Handcuffed by umpteen procedural diktats, the odds were stacked against nailing the guys who really mattered.

  The serious money in Pompey, they said, came from narcotics. By now they’d started giving me names I recognised, people I’d either met personally or heard of through mates. These were guys for whom Pughie and J-R were Filth but the odd thing was the degree of grudging respect that both these detectives had for their MO. The top guys in the supply business organised themselves sensibly. They were sharp. They were canny. They paid for the best legal and financial advice and when it came to something more robust they relied on blokes they regarded as brothers-in-arms. These relationships extended city wide and had often been forged in the days of the notorious 6.57 crew, a bunch of hard-core scrappers who followed Pompey Football Club to away games the length and breadth of the kingdom. Now middle-aged, the guys who’d made it to the top were enjoying the proceeds from years of canny investment, mainly in cocaine and property. Against this, Pughie and J-R implied, the Filth didn’t have a prayer.

  This was more than interesting. J-R was nearing the end of his CID career. He’d nearly done his thirty and the more he talked, the more I realised he couldn’t wait to get out. He’d had enough of stroppy line managers, evil budget-holders, huge piles of paperwork, risk-averse bosses, and endless grief from a long list of hate figures including local politicians, Home Office civil servants, clueless graduate recruits, vindictive journos, carping wives, and a huge army of council tax payers – “customers” for fuck’s sake - who couldn’t wait to get stuck in about pisshead kids and all the other aggravations of the night-time economy. Was this why he’d become a copper? To get dicked around by the great unwashed?

  At the end of the evening, out in the street, I asked him what he was going to do with the rest of his life. He peered at me under the lamplight. Was this a serious question? I said it was.

  “Easy, mate.” He grinned. “Has to be drugs, doesn’t it?”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Zero chance of getting caught.”

  I spent a long time thinking about that answer. J-R was talking about the guys at the top of the supply chain, not the low-life who pushed the stuff at street level, or the young junkies I’d met through my documentary work. He was describing a bunch of home-grown Pompey lads who’d tasted the money to be made from ecstasy in the late eighties rave scene and had sensibly traded up to the laughing powder in the hunt for even fatter profits. I knew what cocaine had bought these guys. I’d seen the houses, the cars, the flash motor cruisers. I’d heard about the freebie invites to Premiership directors’ boxes and the wild excursions to Marbella and Dubai. This was the kind of material that might find a place in my forthcoming crime novels. Not least because it felt so real.

  That evening at the Eldon was a great start. I’d glimpsed what we scribes call a narrative arc – an on-going battle between the beleaguered forces of law and order and the teeming chaos out there in Pompeyland. But to do the coming three books proper justice I had, somehow, to find out a great deal more about the police. How their machine worked. The extent of its authority and reach. And how widely shared were the frustrations I’d picked up from Pughie and J-R. Only then could I go back to these two guys and squeeze them for a little more.

  A couple of days later, I took a call from a voice I didn’t recognise. He turned out to be the secretary of the local branch of an organisation called Common Purpose. I’d met this lot before. It’s a charity with branches all over the country. Every year, they chose a cohort of thirty six men and women, selected in equal thirds from the public sector, the private sector and the voluntary sector. They meet for one long day each month for roughly the period of a year. Each of these days is themed – it might be economic affairs, or law and order, or education. Top speakers arrive from the four corners of the kingdom, address the delegates, and invite debate. For two or three years I’d been part of the Common Purpose Culture Day, talking about documentary film-making, but now the secretary had something else in mind.

  “We’ve had someone drop out”, he said. “Do you fancy coming on board with next year’s lot?”

  He meant as a delegate. I said that sounded fine. He said there was a price involved: £5,000. This enrolment fee, of course, is normally paid by your sponsoring organisation – IBM, say, or the Royal Navy – but I had neither an employer nor five grand. The secretary wasn’t convinced.

  “Are you sure?”

  I laughed. He obviously thought all authors were rich. When I confirmed there was no chance of me giving Common Purpose a cheque for £5,000 there was a brief silence. Then he said they might be able to offer some kind of scholarship as long as I paid something upfront. I asked how much. He wondered whether I could manage fifty.

  “Fifty quid?”

  “Yes.”

  “Deal.”

  Every Common Purpose year begins with the new boys (and girls) gathered at a local hotel. Ours was the Post House at the top of Hayling Island. The first morning was devoted to various ice-breaking exercises. One of them involved all thirty six of us sitting in a circle. You were asked to bring a small item of some personal significance, chuck it down there on the carpet, and then spend ten minutes or so explaining why it mattered so much.

  My keepsake was a boarding card from Ethiopian Airways. A couple of years earlier, thanks to an invite from Oxfam, I’d spent some time in Angola, researching life amongst the minefields. Ethiopian Airways was by far the cheapest way of getting to Luanda. Hence the boarding card.

  My time in Angola was all too brief but it made a huge impression. The country was in the middle of a vicious civil war and both sides were sowing minefields with gay abandon. Most of the victims out in the countryside were innocent civilians working the fields and many of them ended up in the country’s capital, legless and sometimes armless, trying to beg a living amongst the gridlocked traffic. In a number of respects that experience of Angola had changed the way I looked at life, as I tried to explain to my new chums in one of the hotel’s function rooms.

  An hour or so later, I found myself in the restaurant, queuing for the buffet lunch. The guy ahead of me – tall, soft Canadian accent – turned round. He wanted me to remind him of the title of the book I’d written as a result of my Angolan adventures. It was called The Perfect Soldier, the squaddies’ nickname for your average anti-personnel mine (never sleeps, never gets pissed, always works first time).

  “The Perfect Soldier?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s on my bedside table. I’m halfway through it.”

  I resisted the temptation to inquire how he was getting on. Instead, I asked him what he did for a living.

  “I’m a copper,” he said, “a uniformed superintendent. I run the northern half of the city.”

  “Here? In Pompey?”

  “Sure.”

  We became friends. His name was Roly Dumont. He was, by common consent, a total one-off, highly unusual, one of those inspired gambles a bureaucracy can sometimes find itself making. As the top cop in Pompey North, Roly could open virtually any police door in the city. He had a keen, sceptical intelligence, and a teacher’s gift for making complicated issues seem simple. He didn’t suffer fools gladly, so you had to keep up, but he was passionate about crime fiction. If I was looking for a near-perfect introduction to my new fictional world, then here it was.

  Over the following weeks, Roly offered me a senior copper’s view of the city that was, though I didn’t know it at the time, to sustain more than a million words of crime fiction. Whenever I stumbled over something I thought interesting, he’d make a phone ca
ll and arrange an introduction. Thanks to Roly, I began to understand about the importance of so-called passive data, anything from forensics to CCTV, from mobile billing to cell-site analysis. With each new twist in the plot came another door, another office, another face, and another hour of note-taking. A lot of this research was simply factual, me making sure I had the right bits of the jigsaw in the right place, but with this sensible emphasis on procedure – the grammar of policing - came something subtler. Conversation by conversation I was slowly becoming aware of what it really felt like to be a working copper.

  Pughie and J-R had been right. They’d never spelled it out, probably because they thought it too obvious, but policemen lived in a bubble of their own making. By definition, as law enforcers and gatherers of evidence, they’d staked out their own patch of territory slightly removed from the rest of us. The culture was indeed changing – both inside and outside the force – and as a direct result it was impossible not to pick up a whiff of paranoia.

  These men and women had circled the wagons. Already, in three brief years, New Labour had brought in hundreds of new laws. Each had to be understood, interpreted, enforced. This might not matter to you or me but Blair’s incessant courtship of the media filtered down through top Home Office civil servants and resulted in constant changes of tack out there on the street. One month the targeted offence might be domestic burglary. The next, vehicle theft. Then a Daily Mail leader would send countless uniforms in pursuit of infant shoplifters, or crack dealers, or rogue asylum seekers. Everything had to be logged, counted, analysed, gently spun, then despatched via force HQ to the honchos at the Home Office. Blair might have been enjoying the party of his dreams but at every level in the force it was impossible not to detect a sense of growing disenchantment. Whose tail was wagging whose dog? And how come these guys from London are pissing all over Pompey’s lamp posts?

  This isn’t stuff that figures hugely in prime time cop drama. And neither should it. But it very definitely begun to shape itself as a sub-plot in my own little take on what contemporary policing was really about, not least because all these procedural changes – a direct result of New Labour’s legislative incontinence – had begun to change the nature and the feel of the Job. This was daunting enough but its corollary was an even bigger challenge. Whoever my fictional lead-guys turned out to be, they had – in some small or large way – to reflect that change.

  By now it was late spring and I was beginning to map the wiring diagram that kept Pompey’s CID operation together. Most enquiries, generated by so called “volume crime”, were handled by teams of detectives at divisional level. These were the D/Cs that occupied large open offices and spent most of their time juggling a number of jobs as the tide of petty crime ebbed and flowed around the city. A typical caseload might include shoplifting, minor assaults, housebreaks, vehicle theft, and a whole range of drug-related offences. These sharp end detectives reported to Detective-Sergeants, or “skippers”, who in turn did the bidding of a Detective Inspector, or D/I.

  Already, after a number of conversations, I’d sensed that this was the desk my series hero would have to occupy, largely because it offered me – and hence my readers – a useful overview as the plot developed. A D/I on division was where the investigative buck stopped. This was the guy with his thumb in the dyke when it came to somehow containing the swamp of volume crime. This was the poor bastard who had to cope with all the bollocks about performance indicators and risk management while trying to put an ever-lengthening queue of delinquent kids and sundry low-life in court. If I was after someone on the edge of a nervous breakdown, I need look no further.

  Major crime, on the other hand, was infinitely more sexy. Force-wide, there were three Major Crime Teams and the one responsible for the eastern part of the force area was based at Pompey’s Kingston Crescent police station. Major crime was defined as murder, kidnap and stranger rape and I was gladdened to discover that our patch had generated no less than 12 killings over the past year and a half. The guy in charge was a Detective Superintendent called Steve Watts and Roly thought he’d be happy to see me.

  I’d already heard about Steve Watts. J-R was a big fan. Wattsie, he said, was a detective’s detective. Led from the front. Didn’t put up with any crap from anyone. Lots of experience. Fair but tough as fuck.

  I made a call and we arranged to meet. Steve occupied a big sunny office on the third floor of a block behind the police station. This was the heart of the Major Crime Team. There were photos of his kids on the window sill behind the L-shaped desk and a conference table with space for eight chairs suggested a lot of meetings. A poster for Kosovo hung on the wall beside a couple of flip charts and a bookcase held bound copies of the Criminal Law Review. Steve himself sat behind the desk, shooting regular glances at his P/C screen. He was a big man, physically imposing, with a dry sense of humour and a taste for exquisite suits. His voice was low and he disliked having to repeat himself. If you were wise, you listened hard and wrote everything down. J-R was right. This wasn’t a man with time to waste.

  Our meeting that morning, the first of many, was central to my understanding of the way CID works. It turned out that my suspicions about the treadmill of volume crime were spot-on. The blokes on division, said Steve, had his fullest sympathies, especially the D/I in charge. Everything that was complicated, everything from child protection issues to the management of informants, ended up on his desk. He worked ball-breaking hours for very little reward. His only guarantee, the only thing he could be absolutely sure of, was that so-called “vol crime” would never go away. It was like the weather, or gravity. Pompey scrotes would never give up. Never. You could depend on it. Yet this same luckless divisional D/I was expected to drive the PI stats ever upward and somehow put a shine on the city’s face.

  The PI stats, of course, were the dreaded Performance Indicators, a set of yardsticks the Home Office used to benchmark individual forces. This was the cross that uniform and CID both had to bear, part of New Labour’s determination to quantify and measure absolutely everything, but to Steve Watts’ quiet satisfaction neither murder nor rape were subject to PIs. This I found puzzling. Why on earth not? Steve looked briefly troubled. Twat question. How on earth do you quantify evil?

  For the next hour, he gave me a feel for the Major Crime machine. How the Major Incident Room down the corridor worked. The kind of difference the HOLMES 2 software had made, keeping tabs on a fast-expanding enquiry. How the Senior Investigating Officer’s best friend was his Policy Book, a record of every decision he made. What the Receiver, and the Statement Reader, and the Actions Allocater did. How an enquiry’s Intelligence Cell was constantly scoping the forward radar, looking for promising lines of enquiry, constantly squeezing the orange until there was nothing left to know. How the theory and practise of interviewing came together in the PEACE formula (Preparation, Encounter, Account, Challenge, Evaluation). And why, at every stage of an investigation, everyone had to be thinking court. “We’re evidence gatherers,” he said. “And every single particle of that evidence has to be lawyer-proof.”

  Coming away from an interview like that, priceless in all kinds of ways, it was impossible not to be aware of the sheer size of the challenge I seemed to have taken on. For the first book, to kick off the series, I fancied putting my D/I on division. That way I could expose him to the rough and tumble of Pompey life, already a major feature of the books I had mind. Pressure is the working novelist’s best friend and the D/Is I’d met for real had to cope with lots of it. After a couple of books, though, the development of the series might warrant a step upwards, into the world of Steve Watts, where a murder or a stranger rape might offer a little more in the way of job – and maybe plot – satisfaction. Either way, though, it was very obvious that I had to get the procedural small print right. Otherwise these conversations would be over.

  It was at this point that I began to develop an interest in bird watching. Roly was a pa
ssionate birder. By now I was getting to know him a bit and I think I understood why. He had an innate gift for analysis and tabulation – getting things in the right columns and the right order – and this served him equally well in the office during working hours, and out in the field at weekends. He also had a talent for understanding the bigger picture: how a tiny detail can shed light on something important though apparently unrelated.

  The appearance of a super-rare Long billed Murrelet in South Devon, for instance, can signal immense jet stream disturbances high in the stratosphere thousands of miles away because this little bird is a native of Eastern Russia and Japan and has no business to be chasing fish off Dawlish beach. These linkages fascinated me, as did the sheer depth of his knowledge. At dusk, in the depths of the New Forest, he could pick up the distinctive churring of a night jar at extreme ranges. Likewise, the briefest stir of movement amongst the reeds at the edge of one of the ponds on Milton Common would alert him to the presence of a family of coots. How did he know all this stuff? And how could he remember it?

  By now, I was beginning to get a fix on the kind of detective I wanted to spend my next three working years with. He needed to be someone reflective, someone solitary, someone a little abandoned by life. At work, he’d be harassed and pressurised as everyone else in the Job and as a direct result – like many coppers I’d got to know – he’d make sure he did something completely different in his spare time. Football wouldn’t be my guy’s game. Neither would rock-climbing or jet skiing or any of the countless contact sports favoured by younger detectives. Birding, on the face of it, felt like a bit of a steal but the more I thought about buying my man a pair of binos or a decent scope, the more it made sense.