by Peter James
Most of the occupants were in uniform black tops, with shapeless black trousers and heavy-duty boots. A cluster of stab vests and yellow hi-vis jackets hung on pegs and police radios sat on several work surfaces, emitting incessant low-volume bursts of sound. The room was manned round the clock, the twenty-four hours divided into three shifts – earlies, lates, nights – and there was a briefing at the start of each shift to update the incoming officers on all ongoing police activities in the city, and potential situations.
Some crews went straight out on patrol in vehicles. Other officers, as Juliet Solomon was doing, remained at their desks, filling out forms and reports, transcribing statements from their notebooks, radios sitting just below their chins in their stab vest pockets, listening out for a Control Room request to attend a call, or sometimes a more mundane delivery mission.
Shortly after 7 a.m., Juliet’s radio came alive.
‘Charlie Romeo Zero Five, are you available to attend 73 Crestway Rise, off Hollingbury Road? Distressed call from a woman who says her husband has just pushed dog faeces into her face. He’s threatening to kill her. She’s locked herself in the toilet. Grade One. She’s hung up, but I’m trying to call her back.’
All calls were graded. ‘Grade One’ meant immediate response. ‘Two’ meant get there within one hour. ‘Three’ was attend by appointment. ‘Four’ was no police attendance required and to be resolved over the phone.
Juliet turned to Matt. ‘OK?’
‘Rock ’n’ roll,’ the Special Constable replied. They grabbed hi-vis jackets from the rack at the far end, and the keys to a pool car, then hurried downstairs.
Less than two minutes later, with Juliet driving, they pulled out of the car park in a marked Ford Mondeo estate, turned left and headed down the steep hill towards London Road. Matt leaned forward against his seat belt, punched the buttons for the blue lights and siren, then tapped the address into the satnav, whilst at the same time listening to further information from the call handler. The victim’s name was Lorna Belling.
Juliet knew from her years of experience just how scary and dangerous a situation like this could be.
7
Monday 18 April
On a Friday afternoon in September 1984, a quietly spoken man with an Irish accent checked into room 629 at The Grand hotel on Brighton’s seafront. He signed the register under the name of Roy Walsh. Just one of the numerous late-season visitors to the seaside resort. Probably on business, the front-desk clerk had thought, judging from the dark suit he was wearing. She was wrong.
His real name was Patrick Magee and he was a field operative of the Irish Republican Army. In his luggage was a 20lb bomb made of Frangex – a brand of gelignite – wrapped in cling film to mask the smell of explosives from sniffer dogs. It was fitted with a long-delay timer made from video recorder components and a Memo Park Timer safety device.
Some time before checking out two days later on the morning of Sunday 16 September, he unscrewed a panel beneath the bathtub, activated the timer, placed the device inside the cavity and carefully replaced the panel. In little under a month’s time, the annual Conservative Party Conference would be taking place in Brighton. From earlier intelligence-gathering, Magee knew that the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, would be staying in the room below this one.
Three weeks and five days later, on Friday 12 October at 2.54 a.m., the bomb exploded. Five people were killed, and over thirty were injured; several, including the wife of cabinet minister Norman Tebbit, were left permanently disabled.
The mid-section of the building collapsed into the basement, leaving a gaping hole in the hotel’s facade. While her husband, Denis, slept, insomniac Margaret Thatcher was still awake at the time, working on her conference speech for the next day in her suite. The blast destroyed her bathroom but left her sitting room and bedroom unscathed. Both she and Denis were shaken but uninjured. She changed her clothes and they were led out through the wreckage, and driven first to Brighton’s John Street police station and then to a room in the safety of a dormitory building for new recruits and informants at Malling House, the Sussex Police Headquarters in Lewes.
Later that morning the IRA issued a statement:
Mrs Thatcher will now realise that Britain cannot occupy our country and torture our prisoners and shoot our people in their own streets and get away with it. Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always. Give Ireland peace and there will be no more war.
For many of the hundreds of police officers who either attended on the night or took part in the investigation, this incident, which came close to wiping out the government of its time, was the high point of their career. Roy Grace’s father was one of those on duty that night who was sent urgently to the scene. He was then delegated to be part of the escort team taking the Prime Minister and her husband to a safe place.
Detective Superintendent Roy Grace had always had an open mind on the paranormal, dating back to a childhood experience. If pressed on religious views, he would describe himself as agnostic, but privately he believed that there was something out there. Not a biblical God on a cloud, but something, for sure. And he’d consulted mediums on a number of occasions in his quest to find out the truth about what had happened to his first wife, Sandy.
Coincidence was another thing that had always intrigued him, and sometimes put a smile on his face. His recent office move from the industrial estate in Hollingbury, which had housed Major Crime for the past fifteen years, to his current office, in the Police HQ at Malling House, had done just that: directly across the corridor from where he now sat was the very suite where his father, along with several fellow police officers, had brought Margaret and Denis Thatcher to safety on that terrible morning.
His new office, small, narrow and stark, had formerly been a bedroom in one of the dormitory buildings. The one window, behind him, was shielded with vertical silver blinds. It had the smallest sliver of a view, through a narrow gap between two other identical brick buildings, of the soft round hills of the South Downs in the distance.
To the left of his desk was an array of plug sockets and switches, left over from when it had still, until recently, been a bedroom. Facing his spartan desk was another, in mirror image, which replaced the small round conference table he’d had in his office at Sussex House. No doubt in time he would get used to these new quarters, but for the moment he found himself, almost ridiculously, missing the old building, with its inefficient heating and air-conditioning, and its absence of any canteen – and the occasional treat from Trudie’s, the stall up the road selling delicious bacon rolls and fried-egg sandwiches.
The facilities here were certainly way better. In addition to an on-site canteen, there were dozens of delis and cafés nearby, and Tesco, Aldi and the more upmarket Waitrose supermarkets were only a ten-minute walk away.
One thing did make him smile. Something his father had told him while he was only days from dying of cancer in Brighton’s Martlets Hospice, which had looked after him so wonderfully well, right up to his last minutes. Jack Grace had been a big, burly man, the kind of cop you’d never want to mess with unless you were a drunken idiot. But in the final days, as the cancer had eaten away all those pounds of flesh, leaving him almost skeletal, his father had still retained his sense of humour and his sharp mind. He had told Roy the story of the hunt for those responsible for the IRA outrage, and the unintended problems that it had caused.
The police had gone back through six months of The Grand hotel register, calling up the phone numbers of all the guests to check on them. The first number his dad called had been answered by a woman. He’d asked her if she could verify that her husband had been staying at the hotel on that weekend. She’d replied, in shock, that her husband had told her he had been in Scotland on a fishing trip with his mates.
The vigilant enquiries by Sussex Police had eventually unearthed more than a dozen husbands and wives who had lied to their spouses a
bout their whereabouts on that weekend, resulting in seven divorces. It led, ultimately, to a change in the way the police conducted future enquiries, to a more subtle line of approach.
But as he thought about that again now, he was reminded of his own past life. One lesson Roy Grace had learned in his twenty-odd years in Sussex Police was that if you wanted to work in Homicide, you just had to accept the unpredictable nature of the job. Murders seldom happened at convenient times for the investigators. Time and again, whatever plans you had made, whether it was your wedding anniversary, or the birthday of a child or a loved one, or even a holiday planned months in advance, they might have to be shelved without notice.
The rate of relationship break-ups was high. His marriage to Sandy had been just such a casualty, when she had left him and gone missing for a decade. He was determined never to let that happen with Cleo, his second wife. And he was feeling all kinds of conflicting emotions.
Facing him was a bank of shelves on which were stacked the box files and policy documents relating to the cases he was working on. Trials of several murder suspects he had arrested during the past twelve months were impending, one of whom was Brighton’s first serial killer in many years, Dr Edward Crisp. This workload, combined with his Senior Investigating Officer call-out responsibilities, was heavy.
But temporarily eclipsing that were the worries about the responsibilities now facing him following the death in Munich of Sandy. In particular, responsibility for her ten-year-old son, Bruno.
His son, as he had only recently discovered.
He’d agreed with Cleo that Bruno should come to live with the two of them and their baby son, Noah. But he was worried by what kind of upbringing his former wife had given him – especially during the two or three years Sandy had been a heroin addict. He would find out soon enough. He had to fly to Munich later this week to deal with all the formalities and to meet with the boy, who was currently staying with a school friend, and bring him to England. At least, apparently, he spoke good English. How would he feel about being uprooted to another country? What were his likes and dislikes? His interests? God, just so much to think about, and very importantly right now, too, Sandy’s funeral.
Initially he had thought it should be a quiet one in Munich, which she had made home for her and Bruno. Her maternal grandmother was from a small town in Bavaria, near Munich, and it was possible she had been seeing some of her family there, although he doubted it. People who deliberately disappeared knew the dangers of making contact with anyone from their former lives. But her parents, claiming to be too old to travel all the way to Munich, had pleaded for her to be brought back to England.
He had never got on well with Derek and Margot Balkwill at the best of times, and since Sandy’s disappearance even less so. He was convinced they’d believed in their hearts for all these years that he had murdered their daughter and only child. It wasn’t her parents who changed his mind, it was Cleo, suggesting that it might be comforting for Bruno to be able to visit his mother’s grave easily, whenever he wanted to – if he wanted to.
All the time that he was making these arrangements, vitally important though they were, he could not risk taking his eye off the ball on the prosecution cases he was in charge of – not while he had his boss, ACC Cassian Pewe, on his back.
And just to complicate matters further, due to recruiting issues resulting in a shortage of detectives, Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Branch were dangerously short of manpower. Kevin Shapland, the detective deputizing for him as Acting Head of Major Crime, was away on annual leave, and Grace had agreed to stand in and cover his week as the on-call SIO.
Ordinarily, even with Shapland away, it wouldn’t have been a problem as he could have shared some of his workload with his colleague and close friend, Detective Inspector Glenn Branson. But Glenn was also abroad on holiday with his fiancée, Siobhan Sheldrake, a journalist on the Argus newspaper, staying at her parents’ villa near Malaga. Instead he asked another colleague, Guy Batchelor, currently a temporary Detective Inspector, to come and see him. Batchelor was an officer he had come to respect and trust enormously. Grace felt confident that between the two of them, they could cope with the workload for the couple of days it would take him in Germany – he hoped – to sort out the arrangements for his late former wife and his son.
He felt a lot less confident about bringing a child he had not known about until these past few weeks into his and Cleo’s life.
But he had no option.
Did he?
Cleo understood. She said it would be fine. Somehow.
He wished he shared her optimism.
8
Monday 18 April
Matt Robinson peered out of the window, through the heavy drizzle, looking at house numbers. They raced round a long crescent, past a shabby parade of shops – a newsagent, an off-licence, a community centre – and then up an incline. The whole street had a neglected, unloved feel about it. The houses, erected in the 1950s post-war building boom, were a mishmash of terraces, semis and the occasional, slightly grander-looking, detached one. But most of them were badly in need of a fresh coat of paint and hardly any of the small front gardens showed any sign of loving care.
‘You know, this could be a lovely street,’ he said. ‘Why does it look so crap? Why doesn’t anyone care for their garden?’
‘Coz that’s where they wipe their feet when they leave,’ Juliet Solomon said, cynically.
It was an old police joke, when entering a shithole of a dwelling, that it was the kind of place where you wiped your feet on the way out. Except it wasn’t a laughing matter. Too often they went into a dwelling where the carpet was covered in mouldy food cartons, dog faeces and vomit, with a baby crawling around – but inevitably a brand-new, massive TV screen on the wall.
‘There! Seventy-three!’
He pointed at a house that was a definite cut above the others. A decent-sized three- or possibly four-bedroom detached structure, the front facade recently painted white, a shiny navy blue and rather classy front door, new-looking leaded-light windows that were over-ornate for the place, making him wonder if the owners had been the victim of a persuasive double-glazing salesman, and a neatly tended front garden with two beds of healthy-looking daffodils and rather grand stone balls on top of each of the two brick pillars. Parked on the drive between the pillars was an old model MX5 sports car, with gleaming red paintwork, a black hardtop and a hand-written sign in the rear window: FOR SALE, £3,500.
As Juliet brought the car to a halt, Matt informed the call handler they’d arrived. She replied that she had still not managed to reestablish contact with the caller.
They climbed out of the car, pulling on their hats, and hurried up the path to the front door. Matt had attended more domestics than he could remember. There would be at least one on every shift, and you never knew what to expect when you rang the doorbell. One time he’d been punched in the face by a gorilla of a man, and on another occasion the door had opened and a glass vase had hurtled past his head.
Juliet rang the bell, which triggered the yapping of several dogs. She pushed open the letterbox, peered through, then let it flap shut and stood back. Matt joined her, instinctively dropping one hand to the holster containing his Captor pepper spray.
The yapping increased. They heard a woman’s voice shouting, ‘Down! Back! Get back!’
Moments later the door opened a few inches, and an attractive-looking woman, elegantly dressed but with slightly dishevelled blonde hair, peered out at them, a bunch of shaggy puppies around her ankles. She looked nervous and her mascara had run down her tear-stained face. Her lower lip was split, with a trail of congealed blood below it. There was more congealed blood below her nostrils. She was clutching a mobile phone.
‘Mrs Belling?’ Juliet said gently. ‘Mrs Lorna Belling?’
She nodded, as if unable to speak, then nodded again. Then in a trembling voice, barely above a whisper, she said, ‘Thank you for coming. I’m sorry – sorry t
o have bothered you.’
‘I’m PC Solomon and this is my colleague, SC Robinson. Is your husband inside?’ Juliet asked.
She shook her head. ‘No – I saw – heard him – leave for work about ten minutes ago.’
‘Can we come in and have a chat?’
‘Please,’ the woman replied, weepily. ‘Please. Let me just put the dogs in another room so they don’t run out.’
She closed the front door, then a few moments later opened it again, and ushered them into a small, immaculately tidy hall, with white wall-to-wall carpeting on which were several urine stains, two of them looking fresh. The dogs, in another room, were all still yapping.
The officers followed her through into a small kitchen, with one wall taken up by a huge tank filled with tropical fish. On the table were laid out hairdressing tools and a number of bottles of shampoo, conditioners and sprays, along with a laptop. Through a sliding glass door they could see a large dog and a bunch of puppies in a small conservatory, and a beautiful garden beyond, with a hot-tub, wicker furniture and several ornaments.
The woman indicated for them to sit down and then pulled up a chair opposite the wooden table and laid her phone on the table’s surface. ‘Would you like some tea or coffee?’ she asked.
‘We’re fine, thank you,’ PC Solomon said. Suddenly there was a loud voice over her radio and she turned the volume down, then pulled out her notebook. ‘Tell us what happened?’
The woman stood up, walked over to the worktop and tore off a sheet of kitchen towel, which she used to dab her eyes. As she sat back down she said, ‘I’m breeding puppies – Labradoodles.’
‘Awww,’ Juliet Solomon said. ‘I love those dogs, always wanted one!’