by Dick Kirby
Fred Arnold organised Martin’s conveyance between Brixton and court and his return. He and two temporary detective constables would drive to Lambeth police garage, meet the driver of the seven- to eight-seater prison van with clear glass windows and thence to Brixton prison. The van was always accompanied by Arnold driving his authorised vehicle, a Honda Accord, either in front or behind. Martin incessantly looked out of the windows at the roads they were travelling along, the buildings, the side streets. As they drove north along Brixton Road, they turned left and crossed the junction with Clapham Road, on towards Vauxhall, then north again along the Albert Embankment. All the time, Martin’s eyes were flickering from side to side, up and down, perhaps weighing up chances, evaluating the route; then across Westminster Bridge, up Whitehall, on to Piccadilly Circus and up Regent Street until, just before Oxford Circus, turning right into Great Marlborough Street.
Martin always had a magazine to read in the van but on one occasion, Darby suddenly noticed that Martin was scratching at the magazine with his long nails and he snatched it away from him. He saw that what Martin had been scratching was the registration number of Arnold’s car. Darby immediately brought this to Arnold’s attention who replied, ‘By the time he gets out, I’ll have bought another car.’ Arnold later told me, ‘I wasn’t alarmed by the occurrence but observed him intently, at all times. I felt it best to monitor all that Martin did to get further into his character as he was so clever and devious.’
There were other indentations made by Martin’s fingernails which were indecipherable. It was thought that these might have been some sort of code in connection with an escape attempt. Information was received – and how reliable it was, was anybody’s guess – that criminal associates of Martins were planning to attack the escort with Belgian pump-action shotguns to secure his release.
There are alternative explanations to the fingernail scratching on the magazine. First, that by acquiring Arnold’s registration number, this could also lead to him accessing Arnold’s home address, simple enough for someone of Martin’s ingenuity. From there, this could lead to associates of Martin’s kidnapping and threatening Arnold’s wife and daughters in exchange for Martin’s freedom and this is not as fanciful as it might sound; within three years, I would be dealing with a kidnapping where a family was kept tied up in their home overnight until the criminals’ plans were satisfactorily carried out.
The second interpretation is that incorporating the information regarding the attack on the prison convoy was all a blind, a distraction, that this was disinformation, promulgated by Martin or at his instigation. In this way, everybody’s attention would be focused on the journeys from prison to court. Once he was back at Brixton he would be treated as a security risk and since he had escaped from there ten years previously (plus other attempts at escape from other high-security prisons), no one was going to take any chances. And while he was at court, there would be sufficient police officers to ensure his detention in the dock and when he was in the cells he would be incarcerated there for the shortest amount of time. As he was to be remanded on each occasion, he would be dealt with first, returned to the cells and there would be no question of him waiting for the ordinary prison van to turn up; he had his own bespoke prison van waiting to whisk him back to Brixton.
So the route was varied and no such attempt to ‘spring’ Martin was made – but the fingernail indentations were an ominous sign which might mean something or nothing. Darby’s assessment of the prisoner was that ‘Martin was one man you couldn’t give an inch to,’ he told me. ‘There was something scary about him.’
Three months passed. This was a long time between arrest and committal to the Old Bailey, where it was intended that Martin would stand his trial, but the police were meticulously assembling their case to ensure it was absolutely watertight. In addition, Martin was utilising delaying tactics. This was a common ploy, used by many manipulative criminals who knew there was no chance of bail. The reasons were multi-faceted; first, the amount of time that they spent on remand would be deducted from whatever sentence they ultimately received. Next, it afforded them days out of the remand prison. Also, they could extract enormous satisfaction from manipulating the system by making irritating and nonsensical demands. It was puerile behaviour but then it suited Martin, who possessed a shallow personality.
There was another reason. After being deposited at Great Marlborough Street court, Martin had become thoroughly acquainted with his cell. Initially, while waiting to go into court Martin had been handcuffed to two officers in his cell. But as time passed and Martin appeared quiet and subdued at his court appearances, security grew lax and he went and stayed in his cell unaccompanied. Matters were going just the way he had planned them and Martin had plenty of time, therefore, to make his preparations.
It was the practice of the officers escorting Martin to arrive at court early, lodge him in the cell – always the same cell – and then go off for breakfast. And why shouldn’t they? When the prison van entered the secure area behind the court building, the huge yard gates would be swung shut behind it and locked. Martin would then be taken in handcuffs down the metal staircase to the cells, the handcuffs would be removed, he would be placed in his own private cell, the door locked and bolted. From the metal staircase, one could clearly observe the structure of metal spikes around the roof guttering. It was difficult to imagine more robust security measures – and of course, Martin was safely ensconced in his cell.
He arrived at court on Christmas Eve 1982, and meekly allowed himself to be inserted into his usual cell for the twenty-eighth – and final – occasion. At 10.30 a.m. the jailers went to his cell in order to take him into court and were astonished to discover it was empty. As the escorting officers returned from breakfast, two of the court staff were on the pavement outside the court and one shouted, ‘Martin’s escaped from his cell!’
Martin had got out of his cell, into the corridor, gone to the top of the court, forced a skylight and made his way over the spikes and across the rooftops; all this, and remember, Martin had suffered a bullet wound which had smashed his collarbone just three months previously. He got in through a service door of the London Palladium theatre and walked downstairs. Martin looked at the theatre’s empty 2,286 seats – by that afternoon, every one of them would be filled by a pre-Christmas audience to be entranced by the matinee performance of Michael Crawford playing the eponymous role in the musical Barnum – but nobody noticed the slim, fair-haired man as he padded down the stairs. At that moment, the only person topping the bill of the prestigious Palladium was that well-known escape artist David Ralph Martin.
Martin strolled out through the Palladium’s foyer into Argyle Street, mingled very briefly with the last-minute Christmas shoppers – and vanished.
The Hunt
The balloon went up – as they tend to do on these occasions – and the investigating team from Marylebone had their Christmas leave cancelled and the manhunt for Martin got underway, this time from an incident room at Paddington Green police station. Simultaneously, an internal investigation commenced in which the unhappy gaoler at Marlborough Street court featured to determine precisely how Martin had escaped.
The Chubb Lock & Safe Company had since its inception in 1804 been justly proud of their appliances and since they supplied the locks for the cells at Great Marlborough Street court they sent a top team from their headquarters at The Chubb Building, Fryer Street, Wolverhampton to carry out a thorough examination of Martin’s cell door. The lock was not damaged in any way and was in perfect working order. To them, Martin’s disappearance was a complete mystery.
In November 1982, Susie Stephens had moved into a second-floor flat above a drinking club named ‘Lately’ at 175 West End Lane, Hampstead. Police were aware of this change of address because since Martin’s £100,000 flat at Crawford Place had been recovered by the owners, Taylor Woodrow Ltd, Martin had authorised Detective Sergeant Tom Martin to restore some of the property, plus his c
lothing in the flat, to Stephens.
Within a very short space of time from Martin escaping, armed officers were at Stephens’s flat searching for him, including Police Constable John Barnie and an inspector. ‘We searched the flat thoroughly,’ he told me, ‘including looking behind the bath panel and under the kitchen sink.’ There was no trace of him but officers from the inquiry remained in and around the premises, working on the assumption that Martin would turn up. He didn’t; but the boyfriend of Tracye Nichols, one of the other occupants of the flats, arrived for Christmas dinner and was mightily alarmed to have a detective leap out and point a gun at his head. He was not the only person to have their yuletide festivities disturbed; later that day Stephens went to visit her parents at the family home in Devon to discover that they too had received an unannounced visit from armed police officers and were understandably furious.
The likeliest places where Martin might go were raided, without success; this included his parents’ address at Clissold Park. ‘It was not the type of area where cats and dogs would willingly walk through,’ wryly said former Detective Sergeant Roger Baldry, ‘let alone human beings!’ Baldry, who was then attached to Stoke Newington police station and who was armed, covered the car park at the rear of the block of flats while other officers went to the front door. ‘Everyone,’ admitted Baldry, ‘was a bit twitchy at the time,’ which probably explained why a furtive gluesniffer in the car park suddenly found the business end of a Smith & Wesson Model 10 revolver shoved up his left nostril.
A confidential wanted poster (For Police Eyes Only) for Martin was quickly assembled. Headed ‘THIS MAN IS VERY DANGEROUS’, it featured two photographs of the subject, one in drag, the other not. ‘BE ON YOUR GUARD’, the officers were warned. ‘HE WILL NOT HESITATE TO SHOOT’ and since five of the handguns from the gunsmiths burglary were still unaccounted for, this was a chilling warning. Lastly, ‘DO NOT TAKE ANY CHANCES’ and this too was prescient advice; it would be a reckless officer who did.
The Chelsea Kitchen restaurant is now situated in the Fulham Road, but at the time of the hunt for Martin, it was sited at the ‘smart’ end of the King’s Road, near Sloane Square. Clive Cox was then a detective constable at Chelsea police station and he received a call from the restaurant to say that Martin was in the premises. He had been recognised by the manager since he had been a regular customer. Cox and other officers were detailed to go to the restaurant and, if necessary, follow Martin until the ‘D’ Division officers could arrive. Martin emerged from the restaurant; he was followed by a waitress who shook a napkin in his direction to identify him to the police. Martin later told Stephens that he had seen this rather overt signal, plus he was relying on his anti-surveillance instincts so he walked slowly along King’s Road, using the shop windows as mirrors and with his hands in his pockets he walked across the road, saw Cox and instantly identified him as being a police officer. There was no sign of the other officers so, as Cox told me, ‘At this point I thought I would try to follow him.’
Martin walked into Cheltenham Terrace, a one-way street next to the Duke of York’s Territorial Army base headquarters and got into a dark saloon car, correctly parked, facing the King’s Road. But then he turned the car around, driving off against the oncoming traffic; Cox flagged down an area car but it was too late. ‘I knew he was dangerous,’ Cox said. ‘He kept two guns, one to hand over, the other to shoot you with.’
Therefore it was decided to keep up observation, and follow Martin’s girlfriend. On New Year’s Eve, following her return from her parents’ home, Superintendent Ness and DS Martin had interviewed Stephens and left her in no doubt that in the event of David Martin contacting her, she should inform them immediately.
According to Stephens, during a three-hour interview she was told, ‘You know that if we see him, we’re going to have to kill him? This time there can’t be any mistakes.’ Was that really said? And if it was, was it done, not as a threat of future intentions but to promote a positive, helpful reaction?
What I do know is that I used a ploy, similar to the one allegedly suggested to Stephens, when I was looking for a south London tearaway who had escaped from prison and was allegedly in possession of a firearm with which, he had supposedly stated, he would use on any police officer impertinent enough to try to arrest him. I spent the best part of a week fruitlessly searching for him while spending fairly substantial amounts of the commissioner’s budget for information, which prompted the detective inspector to scrawl caustically across the ‘expenses’ section of my CID diary, ‘Try nicking your informant!’ Eventually, I confronted the escapee’s brother – not the sharpest knife in the drawer – and made a suggestion which caused a look of near-imbecile consternation to appear on his acne-marked face. ‘Wot?’ he gasped. ‘Yew expect me to stick up me own bwuvver?’
‘Look at it this way,’ I said reasonably. ‘Wouldn’t it be better for him to give himself up, go back to jail, have a bit more added on to his sentence for breaking out and then, later on, to be released; or for him to meet up with me and have his brains blown out all over the ceiling?’
The pure, inescapable logic of this solution worked. The following day, the escaped prisoner – minus a gun, if indeed one ever existed – surrendered himself to me. Of course, this highly satisfactory state of affairs would not have come about had his sibling been aware that I was not an authorised shot, but I thought it unnecessary to inform him of this pertinent fact.
But even supposing this was said to Stephens, it did not have the desired effect. Keeping observation on her was not a twenty-four hour a day matter; to start with, it was very much an ad hoc affair. There were insufficient staff to carry out full surveillance, plus they had other enquiries to carry out, so the observations were fairly haphazard. At some stage, it seems that a warrant was granted by the Home Secretary to have her telephone calls intercepted; but when Martin telephoned her – using an American accent and the alias ‘Pete’ – to ask if she would watch the Sylvester Stallone film First Blood at the Paris Pullman cinema with him in the Fulham Road on 3 January 1983, and then to dine at Parson’s Restaurant thereafter, it appears the police were unaware of it. Afterwards, Martin, who was driving a BMW, dropped her off in Abbey Road and she walked the rest of the way home. Two nights later, they met for a meal at the same restaurant.
On 6 January, the police may not have seen Susie Stephens meet up with Peter Enter, a 26-year-old electrician from St Charles Square, 295 Ladbroke Grove and Lester Kenton Purdy, a 31-year-old film editor of Grovelands Road, Palmers Green. Travelling in two vehicles, one a Ford Capri, the other a hired Mercedes G-Wagen (much needed for its capacity), they made their way to Pickfords in Fulham, where the outstanding charges of £74 were paid, the items stolen by Martin were signed for in the name of ‘J. Perry’ and the goods were taken to Enter’s basement flat.
It was not until the following day that an observation post (OP) was set up in a disused flat, above the NatWest Bank and opposite Stephens’s address. However, it may have been set up too late to observe Stephens leaving to carry out a second journey to transport the remainder of Martin’s stolen property to Ladbroke Grove. On Monday 10 January, Stephens met Martin at the Odeon Cinema at Swiss Cottage, thence to the ABC Cinema in Fulham to watch Steve Martin in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid and afterwards they went for a meal at a restaurant in Hampstead. If the watchers saw her leave the flat, they may not have known it was her; two other girls lived in the flats and in any event, Stephens would later admit that she wore a black wig, different clothes and high heels, used anti-surveillance techniques and changed tube trains on four or five occasions when she went to meet Martin. On that occasion, Martin – he was then driving a Ford Sierra (of which more later) – dropped her off at Hampstead Tube Station, after they arranged to meet the following night at Swiss Cottage. When Stephens failed to keep the appointment, an irritated Martin telephoned her on Wednesday 12 January and was dismissively told that ‘something had come up’.
I
t was on the day following Martin’s aggrieved phone call that Superintendent Ness called a meeting at the incident room. Some of the members of his team were present and they had the added assistance of C11, Scotland Yard’s Intelligence Branch.
C11 – it had previously been known as C5(2) Department – had been formed in March 1960. Its aim had been to collate details of all the top criminals (known as ‘Main Index’ men, including some who had never been arrested) and gather information about them – sightings, car registration numbers, associates – by means of the local collators’ offices, via the beat and CID officers on whose ground the criminals lived. In addition, C11 operatives’ informants, telephone intercepts, covert OPs, photographs and bugging devices (both in buildings and on vehicles) were utilised in order to collect and disseminate the information to the units most suited to deal with it: the Flying Squad, the Regional Crime Squad or the Drugs Squad. The unit provided Prison Liaison Officers, who reported back details of serious offenders about to be released from prison as well as passing on information gleaned from other prisoners.
C11 seldom carried out arrests themselves; of course, if necessary they could do so, but that was not their specified role, which was a clandestine one. Having carried out their work, they melted back into the shadows. They also possessed a fleet of nondescript vehicles: vans (whose sides often displayed untruthful business logos), cars, taxis and motorcycles. Their surveillance squad which was set up in 1978 was second to none; mainly recruited from the uniform branch1 they were highly trained, with interchangeable and reversible clothing, and they were unobtrusive, able to neatly fit into the surroundings of an East End pub, as they would be in the American Bar at the Savoy.2 Other surveillance officers were trained by the Special Air Service as ‘rurals’: operatives who would climb trees, burrow into the ground and on one auspicious occasion, an officer remained up to his neck in water for forty-eight hours to keep observation on suspects. Needless to say, any police officer who involved C11 in their investigations held them in the highest esteem.
