Death Comes Knocking: Policing Roy Grace’s Brighton

by Graham Bartlett

  In the early 1990s, the UK was at the tail end of a property boom. Vendors were still making silly money on get-rich-quick schemes buying and selling houses. Mortgage companies couldn’t keep up with business and no-one looked too carefully at how credit-worthy applicants actually were. The risks were low for financiers as, if the borrowers failed to pay, the property in question would have soared in value and they would be quids in.

  David Henty had never earned an honest buck in his life. He certainly didn’t have payslips or audited accounts to prove his income. That did not seem to matter to the bank manager who chose to lend him £175k – 100 per cent of the purchase price – to buy the prestigious 1 Wykeham Terrace. Providing Henty could make the monthly payments, cash of course, and the property continued its meteoric rise in value, how could he lose?

  Many of Brighton’s villains live in swanky mock-Tudor houses in Hove – on streets such as Dyke Road Avenue and Shirley Drive, which Glenn Branson in Dead Man’s Time nicknamed ‘Nob Hill’. Grace, in Dead Like You, shares Branson’s skewed opinion of its residents, musing that while most were squeaky-clean its garish opulence also attracted some of the city’s wealthy ne’er-do-wells.

  However with Henty’s artistic taste, which he would exploit later in his career as a successful art forger, he chose this delightful and grand period terraced house just yards from Brighton’s Clock Tower, adjacent to the 900-year-old mother church of the city, St Nicholas of Myra, and on the doorstep of the Western Road shopping centre. This was one of the best located and most well appointed homes in the county.

  Like Steven Klinger in Dead Man’s Footsteps, Henty’s steady, suspicious accumulation of wealth had awarded him the police status of ‘person of interest’ some time ago.

  I had joined CID from uniform about six months previously and was revelling in rising to the challenge my new Detective Inspector had set me when I joined.

  DI Malcolm ‘Streaky’ Bacon was a dapper and immaculately groomed gent. His pencil-thin moustache and ramrod posture gave the false impression he’d been a Regimental Sergeant Major in a previous life. He could easily have been a batman to Brigadier Neville Andrew, the Bursar at the Cloisters school in You Are Dead.

  ‘We want young blood in the office, Graham, but you will work harder than you ever have before and you will be judged on results,’ was Streaky’s greeting to me on day one.

  Julie and I had just bought our first house together and had become engaged to be married. She knew what CID would mean. Long hours of hard work. She was no stranger to that herself, however. She had become a check-in supervisor at Gatwick Airport. A sixteen-hour shift dealing with multiple flights, anxious passengers, long delays and stressed staff was a normal day at the office for her. On the plus side, it meant that short, last-minute holidays to anywhere in the world were there for the taking. She gave me so much support and encouragement while keeping me grounded at home. I landed one in a million with her.

  Just as well. I was working like a trouper.

  The networks and characters behind the crimes I was looking into were fascinating. While in uniform I’d had little insight into the machinations of the city’s underworld. The work there was very reactive. Here as a detective I was paid to get under the skin of every criminal and see what I could unearth.

  I was surrounded and supported by colleagues who had for decades been trawling the gutters of the city’s criminal networks and I was absorbing everything I could from them. In the few snatched hours each day that Julie and I had together in our new two-up, two-down starter home, I would regale her with tales of derring-do, of how we had busted this scam or tracked down that villain. I was relishing this new life.

  We had been paying more and more attention to Henty. So, when he bought his new pad we started to look even harder, just as he knew we would. Police scrutiny was expected in his world. It was always safer for him to assume that the police were watching and listening, rather than not. For his own sanity he had to balance this with not becoming paranoid. With this attitude, he was able to have some fun in his predicament.

  David and Cliff used to meet in a lovely little cafe in Stanmer. This tiny, beautiful village comprises a farm, a dozen cottages, a church and a manor house in stunning parkland to the north east of the city.

  Soon aware the police were observing them regularly and suspecting that surveillance officers were hiding up in a barn opposite their meeting place, they took to donning crash helmets as they arrived and then spending hours sipping coffee, soaking up the heat of the roaring fireplace that was the centrepiece of the coffee shop. They did not have that much to say to one another, but they delighted in the thought of the cops freezing their extremities off in the dung-infested cowshed over the road, while they nestled in the warmth.

  One of their scams around this time was the forgery and distribution of MOT vehicle roadworthiness certificates and car tax discs. Through their network of printers and ‘fencers’ they had practically saturated the city with these fake documents. In the days before any databases or electronic detection devices, police officers had to rely on a keen eye and their own judgement when assessing the validity of any documents. Henty and Wake’s products were of fine quality and rarely, if ever, called into question.

  Word got round that they had a talent for making very passable official papers and soon a prominent London-based gangland villain nicknamed Lenny the Shadow got to hear of them. He had earned this sobriquet due to his seemingly mystical ability to appear and disappear in the blink of an eye.

  Like the evil Marlene Hartman, who sourced street children and sold them for the price of their organs in Dead Tomorrow, Lenny had a criminal network with tentacles that spread across the world. He dealt, not in thousands, but in millions of pounds.

  Around this time the province of Hong Kong was just a few years away from being handed back to the Chinese. As the 1997 deadline drew closer, its citizens were starting to panic, many unwilling to surrender their Western lifestyle. Consequently the region was experiencing a feverish rush for British passports. Residents wanted to claim UK identity to preserve the freedoms they had become so accustomed to. As with any surge in demand, the opportunities to make a quick buck were tantalizing.

  Lenny saw the gap in the market almost immediately and looked round for a reliable network of forgers who were up to the challenge of making 3,000 UK passports for onward sale in Hong Kong. They had to be available quickly and to a standard that would pass inspection by seasoned immigration officials. He estimated that he could market them for £1,000 each making this a £3-million operation. Half of that would be his, half the forgers’.

  David and Cliff were immediately shortlisted for the job. They had proven their worth in all the selection criteria. Cliff was known for his work ethic. If he took on a job, he worked at it slavishly and expected all around him to do likewise. David knew this serious-minded approach would ensure the seemingly impossible timescales would be met. This was business and a lot of money and their reputations were at stake.

  They worked out that to provide the passports to the desired quality and in time, they would need three others to assist them. Their cut of £1.5 million would still be very attractive at £300k each, and David was already spending his share in his head.

  He had been offered the opportunity to buy a Scottish castle for £1 million with a down-payment of just £100k. The remainder of the money, financed through yet another dodgy mortgage, would be paid back by filling the place with fake antiques and selling them to unwitting rich American tourists. The passport income would solve his headache of coming up with the deposit.

  He knew the stakes were high. No government warms to anyone who fakes their passports, especially as part of a get-rich-quick scheme. Both David and Cliff had young families and commitments that lengthy periods in prison would render them unable to meet. They had to consider carefully whether the risks were worth taking.

  As any wise businessman would do when faced with such a deci
sion, David sat down and talked it through with his wife. It would be her who bore the burden of supporting the family should it all go wrong. For his part, Cliff needed no second opinion. This was a golden opportunity and there was no way his wife, Jan, would be given the chance to persuade him otherwise.

  Having carefully weighed it all up, both David and Cliff made the call to Lenny.

  ‘We’re in!’

  There followed a frenzied period where the pair sought out the skills and materials to create 3,000 passports so perfect that, even under the closest scrutiny, they would be indistinguishable from the genuine article.

  They needed the correct paper, identical rexine (the leather-like material used for the distinctive dark blue cover), the right inks and a high-quality gold foil for the coat of arms. Photos would be added later, but creating these little booklets would be no mean feat.

  It so happened that Cliff, who had a more modest taste in houses but whose flamboyance came out in his choice of cars, lived in the nearby suburb of Peacehaven, next door to a printer, Barry Cheriton. Unlike the rest of the team, Barry had never once had so much as a parking ticket. His credentials were simply the skills of his trade, and that he got on well with his felonious neighbour.

  Cliff went to great, but subtle, lengths to dazzle him by flaunting his glamorous lifestyle. He reassured him of the rewards, should he take up his offer to ‘just do a bit of printing for us’ and minimized the risks by maintaining that Barry would be only a bit player in whom no-one would be interested. It worked a treat; Barry could not resist.

  Barry was like a gangly love-struck teenager in this new underworld. He would do anything to impress Cliff and David. They treated him like the liability he was. His blundering ways together with his habitual tendency to lie his way out of any corner meant that he needed watching closely.

  To produce 3,000 fake passports Barry could hardly use his employer’s presses, so they had to find a safe place for him to work that had all the right machinery and where no-one would ask questions.

  Wilson Press, in nearby Uckfield, was well known as the place where many extreme right-wing publications were printed. Owned by Holocaust denier Anthony Hancock, it was no stranger to clandestine printing runs, nor to police surveillance. The day staff had long since learned to ask no questions. It was the ideal place to rent overnight for Barry to print a few passports. None of the team particularly liked Hancock, but this was business and they knew they needed him. A few thousand pounds would be enough to buy his silence, an essential guarantee when working a scam on this scale.

  The irony was lost on no-one that a place so accustomed to promoting racism and intolerance was to be used to enable 3,000 people to enter and reside illegally in the UK.

  When they needed to, David and Cliff claimed that their materials were to help them manufacture personal organizers. It was enough to satisfy even the most curious.

  While this lucrative new project was taking shape, they were starting yet another scam. Music cassettes, even then, could cost up to £6 a throw. They worked out that if they could find a way of producing counterfeit versions for a fraction of that, they could put on a decent mark-up, yet still retail them for far less than the High Street.

  Having procured a copying machine that could create duplicates to industry standards and hundreds of thousands of blank tapes, all they needed, once more, was a printer and a press for the labels and inserts. The timing was perfect. It transpired that Barry could churn out very passable artwork. He and Hancock’s machines had never worked harder in their lives, all under Cliff’s unrelenting supervision.

  Soon box-loads of crystal-clear chart-topping cassettes were on the streets, changing hands for £1 each or £3 for five. Given that they only cost 50p to make, the profit margins were impressive.

  Henty and Wake could not believe the demand. They had staff employed on shifts each running off hundreds of copies a day. It was netting them £1,500 per week.

  However, selling such huge quantities of counterfeit goods at markets and car-boot sales is not the best way of staying below the police radar. It was this that flagged up that Henty and Wake had engineered this new racket. We knew nothing yet of the passports.

  Police surveillance showed them dashing around the city stashing boxes at various garages and houses. What did not seem to fit were the trips to London to faux-leather factories and the purchase of yards of gold foil. No-one had seen a tape decorated with either of these. Clearly there was some multitasking going on.

  By researching possible uses for those materials, supported by intelligence coming in, we became aware of their passport project. At first we thought that they were just trying their hand at making a few to see what they turned out like. Never in a million years did we think that they stood to make nearly £300k each, nor did we realize the connection to Lenny.

  As we were trying to fathom out exactly what was going on, 1 Wykeham Terrace was playing host to a thriving cottage industry in counterfeiting. The kitchen had been taken over for the shaping and cutting of rexine, the bath was filled deep with dye to achieve just the right hue for the covers. Other rooms were used for the drying, stitching, quality control and packing operations. They were certainly working hard for their money.

  Their business brains ensured they adopted a creative approach to any problem that threatened to derail their production. Old-style passports had two elongated ovals cut into the front cover. One would reveal the holder’s name, the other the document number. They wrestled with how to recreate these shapes in a way that would look like the real deal.

  When they were forging car tax discs, they faced the same quandary in replicating the perforated circular circumference. In that case, they found that a metal pastry cutter hammered onto the paper did the trick perfectly. Applying the same principle, they carefully manufactured a razor-sharp steel die to strike down on the cover. They were delighted with the results.

  When the pages arrived from the printers, David spotted a problem. The background on any official document is always, deliberately, incredibly busy. On a passport, however, it is overlaid with the multicoloured image of a complex crest. Barry had not spotted this. Its omission was an error that could fatally scupper the whole project.

  David and Cliff were furious. How could Barry have been so stupid? They needed a solution and needed it quickly. It would ruin all the pages to run them through the printer again. This could set them back weeks.

  Barry had a suggestion. ‘I could design a template to match the genuine one and build up the colours using screen-printing.’

  ‘What, on every page of every passport?’ asked an incredulous David.

  ‘It’s the only way. We’ve come too far and I’ll work night and day. It’ll take some time but it’s do-able.’

  ‘OK. It had bloody better be. We’ve got one and half million quid and a reputation to protect,’ threatened Cliff.

  The date was soon set for David and Cliff to travel to London and show Lenny the samples of their handiwork. Barry had to sweat blood to rectify his schoolboy error in time. The others took deliveries of the freshly corrected pages on a daily basis and with care and precision stitched them together into more than acceptable imitations of UK passports.

  As the day loomed, the counterfeiters were exhausted. They had known that to earn a prize of this size they would have to graft, but this had taken even Cliff’s industrious nature to new levels.

  A sense of achievement and impending prosperity prompted David to treat his wife to an intimate dinner at the world-famous English’s Restaurant and Oyster Bar in Brighton’s Lanes. Generally acknowledged as the city’s oldest and finest seafood restaurant, over the years it has hosted the rich and famous, such as Charlie Chaplin, Dame Judi Dench and, of course, Peter James.

  There, they excitedly planned their future with riches that just months ago would have been beyond their wildest dreams. Castles, holidays, fast cars; nothing was beyond their reach.

  The following day
, Cliff had to pop out to sort out some problems with the tape production leaving David, Barry and one of their helpers putting the finishing touches to the samples before the trip to London later in the day.

  As with several large-scale police operations in those days, the investigative arm of CID knew little of the hundreds of hours of surveillance or the huge intelligence case being built by those in covert roles. We only found out about what had been happening on the day itself. This was all to do with operational security – the need-to-know principle that ensured the risk of leaks was kept to an absolute minimum. The downside was that we had to play catch-up. To keep an operation secret the painstaking evidence-gathering often had to wait until after the arrests had been made. This meant taking statements and securing exhibits relating to events that had long since passed.

  As every Grace novel reminds us, briefings are the centrepiece of any investigation. They are the place where information is shared, snippets of intelligence checked out, updates given and priorities set. Roy Grace is deft at ensuring that during his, there is control and structure yet even the most junior officer feels able to speak up; it is often they who have the nugget that all the others have been waiting for.

  I did just that myself once when I plucked up the courage to suggest Ian McLaughlin as a suspect for a homophobic murder. It was him. It turned out he had killed before and did so again while on day release from prison in 2013. He will now die in prison.