Knowing the patch well, they were familiar with the sites where stolen cars were dumped. Sometimes they were easy to find as the flames the thieves had ignited lit up the night sky. They made their way slowly northwards to Devil’s Dyke, making sure they clocked every car, moving or stationary, on the way.
Roy Grace used to visit Devils Dyke with his wife Sandy. They liked to park at the top of this 2,000-acre beauty spot and walk across the fields, taking in the panoramic views of the city and the patchwork of the mid-Sussex farmland to its north. So named because, legend has it, the magnificent downland valley was dug by the Devil to flood the local churches.
There are a number of small stopping points along the meandering road that leads to the top; some are just passing places, some bus stops and some, like Poor Man’s Corner, handy little car parks that serve as viewpoints.
As that particular car park came into view, it seemed empty, with not even a carload of teenagers sharing a crafty joint. Ever professional, Jo turned the car towards the narrow entrance as a movement caught her eye.
She made out a jerky figure desperately yet pathetically trying to lift an arm in a plea for help. Crunching the car to a sudden halt, Richard and Jo jumped out and rushed towards the blindly stumbling form, and leant the poor soul up against the car, unable to determine if they were dealing with a man or a woman. If you stretched your imagination you would possibly have recognized a mutilated shape that might be a head. You might just have been able to work out the facial features. If you’d thought about it, the gurgling spluttering groans could have been an attempt at speech.
Were it not for the fact that this horror had been discovered in a rural car park way off the beaten track, you could easily have assumed that the devastating injuries had been the result of a collision with a 70mph truck. It wasn’t. This was pure evil, plain and simple. This poor soul had been beaten and kicked almost to death. Every single facial bone had been broken, probably by repeated stamping, as if crushing a tin can. Richard and Jo knew that he had been left to die, and he certainly would if they didn’t act swiftly. From the description of his clothing, Jo and Richard established this was indeed Glynn Morgan. However, his own mother wouldn’t have recognized him.
Roy Grace, in retribution for damage to Cleo’s car, dumped the hateful Amis Smallbone in the same area in Not Dead Yet. We know from Smallbone’s whingeing to his fellow villain Henry Tilney the physical toll the five-mile walk back had on him, a reasonably healthy yet odious specimen. No chance then that a man with his head and face completely staved in would survive it. He wasn’t meant to.
The paramedics worked miracles, stabilizing and treating him on the gravel and grit of the rough car park. They knew that time was running out. The temperature was close to freezing. It was a balance between getting him to the specialists he would need, but not killing him in the process. Eventually they were able to gingerly lift him and glide their way to the hospital, knowing that every pothole could be a killer. The staff at the Royal Sussex County Hospital worked against all the odds in trying to save his life.
As the duty DS, it was my turn to have my sleep disturbed. Once again my mobile phone chirped at me in the small hours. As soon as I was a safe distance from the sleeping Julie and our beautiful babies – my life would not be worth living if I woke them up – I listened to Mick Burkinshaw’s staccato briefing, trying to comprehend not only what had happened but why.
Motive is all-important in such cases. Sometimes the hypotheses are hard to swallow. Crime investigation is intrusive. It strips away all privacy and dignity. Branson and Grace brought this into sharp relief when divulging to the father of Janie Stretton, shortly after her murder in Looking Good Dead, that she had been a high-class hooker. No secret is safe.
Roy Grace, at the start of every murder enquiry, refers to the Murder Investigation Manual. The route to his favoured MIR-1 – Major Incident Room One – is adorned with checklists from it. However experienced, we all need reminders.
This was not yet a murder, but I was sure it would be. Why would anyone want to kidnap someone off the street, steal their car, crush their head and leave them on a hillside to die? The manual offers possible reasons people kill, including gain, jealousy, revenge, elimination, thrill, hate, to name but a few. To get to the bottom of this I had to find the ‘why’ as well as the ‘what’. That might involve asking difficult questions of Glynn, if he survived, Fiona and all who knew them. One thing I was sure of – you don’t kill someone for an old rust heap of a car.
Later, we would need to broach the delicate subject of the relationship between Fiona and Glynn and whether there were skeletons in any cupboards, but now I needed to think like the attackers. Why Glynn? Why take him from the street? Why drive him away? Why so brutally attack him? Why focus the battering on his head? Where was the car? What was the big idea?
As I danced around the gloomy spare bedroom trying to get my trousers on and hoping the jacket I’d grabbed was from the same suit, I was making call after whispered call getting facts, triggering fast-track actions, pulling a team together.
Apologetic yet assertive was the style I used to call teams out, just as Roy did when Stuart Ferguson’s lorry was recovered in Dead Man’s Grip and on many other occasions. I needed who I needed. Apologize for disrupting their plans, yes; accepting no for an answer – never.
From the dearth of clear information I had to plump for a plausible scenario. It could have been many things but I tried to eliminate what I could. I had to strip away the unlikely to see the obvious. I needed to see what was in front of me and understand what it was telling me.
Having gently kissed Julie and our three miracles goodbye, as I was leaving the house I was told that Fiona had mentioned that she had seen a previous employee, McLellan, just before the attack. Was that relevant?
Thoughts were racing through my head as I rushed into work. McLellan might know where the takings were kept and how much there could be. Glynn himself was in no fit state to speak but Fiona had revealed that he had the shop keys with him. Surely McLellan would know that. Was that it? Was this an over-the-top burglary? Where were the keys now? I was soon at Hove Police Station and in Senior Investigating Officer mode.
The grisly task of searching the blood-soaked clothing the hospital staff had cut off the pitiful victim was one I delegated to the PC on guard. I needed to know if the keys were still with him. I sent officers to the shop to check for any sign of a break-in. Both enquires were negative; no keys, no sign of a forced entry.
No sign of a burglary, but why would there be if they had used the keys and been tidy when they went in? One of my first instructions from home had been for the nearest CCTV camera, which was on a lamppost fifty yards down the road, to be pointed towards the shop. I’d asked for it to be watched in case anyone went there after the attack. The second part of my message didn’t get passed on. I was livid about that. In those days you couldn’t review CCTV quickly. It all needed downloading onto VHS tape. I’d wanted someone monitoring it in live time. I’d been let down and someone would pay, but there was no time for that now.
Only one thing for it. I phoned Mick. ‘We need to get Fiona to tell us if there are spare keys to the shop. If there are we need to get in there now and check to see if anyone’s been in.’
‘Just in time. We were about to take her up to the hospital.’
The phone went quiet. I’d been put on mute. Was he setting me up as the bad cop to get what we wanted, even though it delayed her seeing Glynn? Click. ‘Good news, Graham, she’s got a set with her. Do you want us to go down there?’
‘Yes, but keep that shop watched while you are on your way. I need to know if anyone’s been in there since lock-up. Get a SOCO to meet you there. One who hasn’t been near Glynn or the Dyke. I’m not losing this job on cross-contamination.’
Fifteen minutes later Fiona, Mick and a PC huddled in the narrow doorway of Perfect Pizza, waiting for the SOCO, Dean O’Hara. When he arrived, he and Mick w
ent in. Assured it was empty, and getting the forensic OK from Dean, he called Fiona through.
Still shaking with fear and worry, she checked the till. Fine. Then looked down at the safe. Open. Crouched down. Empty.
‘It’s gone, they’ve got all the money.’
‘How much?’
‘Only today’s takings. We used to have up to about £5,000 on a Saturday as we paid the wages on a Sunday, but not any more. There was probably only £600 or £700 tonight.’
Mick was straight on the phone. That was it. I was going after McLellan. He was right there when Glynn was snatched, he probably knew the old banking procedures and had assumed they were still the same, and he would certainly know where the money was kept. I needed more, but Mr McLellan and I were going to have a chat. He had a lot of questions to answer and, if my hunch was right, he or his clothes would be covered in blood.
Dawn was breaking and we were already beyond the Golden Hour. The Grace novels mention this period of sixty minutes following a crime, and it is critical: the immediate aftermath of discovering a crime or victim provides the best chance of finding forensic evidence, witnesses and getting the truth out of people. So time was now against us. My team knew this. On days like this we worked like Trojans for as long as it took. No-one was waiting in the wings to take this over from us so everything was put on hold from now until we could come up for air.
We had the scene at Poor Man’s Corner taped off and being searched. While not quite on the scale of the chicken farm in Not Dead Yet, it was a large windswept area that, being Sunday, ramblers would want to reclaim.
We needed the CCTV footage from all the shops near Perfect Pizza as well as our own. We needed to speak to anyone who might have seen the car being driven off. We needed intelligence on McLellan; was he capable of this and who did he knock around with?
I needed everything to be done in parallel but McLellan was my priority. With those of my team who had not been near Glynn, the Dyke and now the pizza shop, I went in pursuit of our man armed with a search warrant. We were surprised when McLellan, who was five foot ten and athletic, coolly let us in.
He denied leaving Moulsecoomb, claiming to have been watching MTV with his soon-to-be brother-in-law, Phillip Hurley. He seemed plausible. Hurley, a gangly six foot four bus driver, gave the same account. My team searched both McLellan’s and Hurley’s houses. We found nothing in Hurley’s. But in McLellan’s we recovered what appeared to be some stained black jeans and a grubby dark jacket. We couldn’t work out whether it was blood or grime but I decided the suspicious clothing should be seized and McLellan arrested. We needed more on Hurley, so left him.
Having booked our man into custody, we had a series of lucky breaks that normally only occur in the movies. Mick Burkinshaw had relayed to the CCTV staff my wrath that no-one had bothered to watch the camera in live time. This persuaded them to get the tapes copied quicker than normal.
‘Get over here, Graham,’ he said as I walked into the bustling CID office, ‘and tell me who you think this is.’
On the flickering screen in front of him was a CCTV image of two men side by side, who were dead ringers for McLellan and Hurley. Mick paused the tape. ‘Now watch.’ He pressed ‘play’.
There before my eyes were the same men darting into the doorway of Perfect Pizza. Nothing happened for a couple of minutes then, bold as brass, out they came, this time face to camera. I needed no more convincing. ‘Well done, Mick. You’ve cracked it’
‘It gets better.’ Amazingly they ambled into a taxi office a few doors down then, a minute or so later, came out, got into a cab and were driven away.
We had got them.
‘Get out and nick Hurley,’ I instructed DC Lee Taylor.
‘No need,’ said DC Steve Flay as he replaced the telephone receiver. ‘The idiot’s just turned up at the front desk with some fags for McLellan!’ Lucky break number two.
‘Well, get down there and nick him for attempted murder then!’
Our two suspects locked up, and having arranged for full forensic searches of their houses, I turned my attention to poor Glynn. Things weren’t looking good. He was in Intensive Care but barely alive, wired up to machines that were performing every function his body couldn’t.
Like Nat Cooper who was devastatingly injured in a motorbike crash in Dead Tomorrow, he’d had emergency surgery to ensure he could breathe, but his brain was so badly injured it was swelling dangerously. Fiona wouldn’t leave his side. We needed to speak to her but that could wait. He was going to die – I was sure of that – and her place was with him.
Normally, a Detective Superintendent would have taken on this enquiry. Just my luck, none were available. There were no dedicated Major Crime Teams in those days so, unless Glynn died, it was down to me to lead the investigation. As Grace was taught in his training, J Edgar Hoover once asserted that ‘no greater honor or duty is bestowed on an officer than to investigate the death of another human being.’ I felt both honour and duty even though Glynn was not dead yet.
As suspects, McLellan and Hurley did their best, sticking to the story that they had been in all night. They dismissed the evidence of the female bus driver we found, who knew Hurley well, who said she had taken them from Moulsecoomb to Hove. They scoffed at the taxi driver we identified who took them home again just as the CCTV had shown. They denied we’d find any forensics on their clothes. The ID parades, CCTV evidence, their discredited account and the blood they must have known we would find didn’t shake their resolve.
We plugged on for days. Home became a distant memory for most of us: just a place to snatch a couple of hours’ sleep, a quick cuddle with our loved ones and a change of clothes.
We were still looking for Glynn’s car, still sifting witness statements and CCTV footage. We had daily late-night and early-morning meetings with the Crown Prosecution Service. The pager was always by my side waiting for the inevitable message that Glynn had died. During a custody extension hearing at Brighton Magistrates’ Court, I was poised to whisper to the prosecutor that we were now dealing with a murder.
Amazingly that message never came. Call it a miracle, call it the wonders of medical science, but Glynn gradually started to rally. First came small signs, just a tiny response to stimulus, then minute, almost imperceptible movements, followed by months of the very best care and rehabilitation the National Health Service could provide. His optic nerve, however, had been severed and he would be blind for life. His face needed a complete rebuild, his memory was a total blank, but he survived. The skill of the surgeons and the love of Fiona gave him a second chance.
As for McLellan and Hurley, they were charged with attempted murder and remanded in custody to await trial. Tough for Hurley who had no previous convictions but absolutely right nonetheless.
We soldiered on after the charge. As Grace reflects in Dead Man’s Grip, that’s when the real work begins. Convictions don’t happen by themselves. We found the car, not far from Perfect Pizza. Inside was a balaclava that contained one of Glynn’s hairs. Glynn had never owned such a garment so had it been put on him to stop him recognizing McLellan? The icing on the cake came when the brilliant forensic scientists found a significant amount of Glynn’s DNA in the blood on the clothing of both suspects.
What had started as a hunch became a cast-iron case. Even arrogant pleas of not guilty, allegations of police corruption and an attempt to ban the blinded victim from the courtroom ‘in case it swayed the jury’ didn’t pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. Both men were convicted and imprisoned for a staggering thirty-seven years between them.
Glynn got a life sentence of blindness however. He was forced to rebuild his life and try to make sense of why he was so nearly killed for a paltry £620. He and Fiona made a new but quiet life for themselves, refusing to be bitter, refusing to hate.
My final memory of the trial was an indication of how some in the criminal justice system refuse or are unable to see the horror of what is at the root of their profess
ion. We all experience it; to some it’s a sick, heartless game.
Having spent hours in the witness box being accused of planting what must have been about a pint of blood on the clothes of both defendants from the vial of a few millilitres we had for testing, I bumped into one of the defence legal team outside the Old Bailey after the verdicts. He tapped me on the shoulder and glibly remarked, ‘Well done, Graham, old boy. Good case and right result. Sorry about all that nonsense regarding the blood. When one has one’s instructions one has to try, you understand.’
Understand? How dare he? How dare he try to minimize the horrors inflicted by his client by downgrading the trial to a debating society joust? That was typical of some. Never mind the rights and wrongs, never mind searching for the truth, never mind the victim. Throw some mud where you can and hope you get enough jurors to doubt for a moment. Do what it takes, and see if you get one up on justice and let the guilty walk free. How do they sleep?
11: THE SILENT ASSASSIN
As Peter James notes in You are Dead, never say the word ‘q**et’ to a police officer. It’s like mentioning the Scottish play to an actor. It’s a sure way to bring down the wrath of the gods. ‘Q’ is as far as you dare go in describing the kind of day you are having or hoping for. Complete the word and you are doomed! Some joker must have bellowed it from the rooftops one unseasonably bright October morning in the late nineties.
Sundays were never ordinary. As the duty DS at Hove I worked every other weekend, which could be gruelling, but never dull. Sundays could start in a myriad of ways. It might be clearing up the many and varied prisoners from the excesses of the night before, waking up the ‘never at home’ suspects with a very early morning knock (never rely on a Sunday lie-in if you are wanted by the police) or using a rare lull in demand to plough through mountains of tedious paperwork accumulated during more frantic weeks. Sundays were never a day of rest.
Death Comes Knocking: Policing Roy Grace’s Brighton Page 17