‘I hope we aren’t going to accept it. If he’s done what you say he needs sacking, not being able to sneak out with a month’s notice and his reputation intact.’
‘Yes, that’s the plan. The Met are clear that we shouldn’t accept it and our Chief Officers agree.’
In that short exchange one of my supposedly finest sergeants had gone from hero to zero. I can forgive a lot of things, see them in context, but leaking information, especially for money, cuts to the heart of all the police stand for. He was finished.
To his credit, his admissions were swift. Taking his sacking with good grace and his early guilty plea must have helped cap his prison sentence at ten months. He was lucky, as selling the fox story was not the only time his greed had usurped his oath of office.
Two more leaks emerged, one involving a child protection visit to a local celebrity and the second regarding a search for dead bodies. Just as no-one suspected Andy ‘Weatherman’ Gidney of being the corrupt computer investigator in Looking Good Dead, who kept evil Carl Venner plied with expertise and confidential information, so no-one had seen Bowes was a mole.
It does pain me to think what he must have gone through in prison. Corrupt police officers are just a shade higher in the pecking order than paedophiles. However, he knew the stakes and got what he deserved.
Most cops have flawless characters and integrity. Most have impeccable morals. When the bad apples are exposed, however, we all feel shame. Every one of us feels let down. We all have to work that little bit harder to regain lost trust. But we do, as the pride we have in the job is indestructible and we can never let those outlaws within prevail.
14: TAKING CHANCES, SAVING LIVES
Drugs hurt everyone. It’s a startling statistic that 80 per cent of all property crime in the UK is drug-related.
As Peter James says when quantifying Skunk’s drug habit in Not Dead Enough, few users are on a £10 per day habit; it’s more like £30. So, with 2,500 people in Brighton and Hove whose lives revolve around sticking needles in what’s left of their veins and pumping in an unknown cocktail of poisons, that’s at least £75,000 (nearly three times the UK average annual wage in 2015) going into the hands of drug dealers and organized crime every day. To get that kind of money most have to steal, and they never get market value for their booty. That, therefore, results in excess of an estimated quarter of a million pounds of goods stolen every day.
Many users will do anything they can to get the gear they so desperately need. They steal, cheat, rob and, if necessary, kill. Skunk is horrible, the scum of the earth. Relentlessly pursued by DC Paul Packer, whose finger he had bitten off in a previous encounter, few will feel sad at his grisly comeuppance, being flame-grilled in Cleo’s MG. While his waking each morning ‘to the sensation that the world was a hostile cave about to entomb him, sweating and hallucinating scorpions crawling across his face’ is unlikely to evoke much sympathy, perhaps there will be at least some understanding of his single-minded determination to do whatever it took to score the drugs he craved.
No-one starts out deciding to become a drug addict. No-one is born evil either, but we are all a product of our upbringing and environment. Who we love. Who loves us. Who we hate. What’s right. What’s wrong. Nothing can change that. Unless of course, like me, you experience a shocking revelation which makes you question all your values.
I was a detective through and through. Even when I wasn’t officially a detective I behaved like one, being inquisitive, tenacious and with a pretty clear notion of right and wrong. Police locked up the bad people to protect the good. The law told us who was bad and who was good. Simple. Thieves, fraudsters, drunks, yobs, druggies, whoever – they were our enemies, they were the ones whose imprisonment we celebrated. Job done. Good Guys 1, Villains 0. People like us were always the virtuous. We had the upbringing, the principles that stopped us stepping over to the dark side.
It was one of those days in the late 1990s when everyone else seemed to be out of the CID office doing exciting things, and I was confined to barracks catching up on a bewildering backlog of paperwork. I hated those days but I couldn’t ignore a ringing phone.
‘Is Russ there, Graham?’ asked the caller from the front desk.
‘No, he’s out. I think he might be at the hospital seeing the bloke who got stabbed last night.’
‘Oh, there’s someone down here with a letter from him saying he can collect his property. He was released from prison for burglary this morning and wants his clothes back.’
Oh great, another half hour of my life I won’t get back, I thought. Sifting through some mangy bag of clothing and then handing it back to some low-life who won’t be in the least bit grateful, and will probably ask about that mysterious £200 that he will allege was in the pocket.
’OK, I’ll be down,’ I said wearily, having scanned the office without spotting anyone I could delegate to.
Asked to describe him after nearly twenty years, I would have had no chance. I’m sure the reverse was true too. But there was no mistaking him. The first glimpse made those two decades vanish in an instant and his dropped jaw was all the confirmation I didn’t need.
‘Graham?’
‘Sam? Bloody hell, mate. How are you? Listen, I can’t stop. I’ve got to give some con his stuff back, but can you hang about?’
‘It’s me. I’m that con, Graham. It’s me you’re here to see,’ he chuckled.
Years back, Sam’s family and mine had been close. Our parents knew each other before we were born. They lived down the road from us and, like mine, Sam’s parents were hard-working and lived for their children. He had two younger brothers and his older sister was good friends with mine.
I don’t remember a time in my childhood when Sam wasn’t around. Summers, Christmases, weekends, all those memories included Sam and me playing together, getting into scrapes – I can still remember being told off by an irate motorist for throwing grass cuttings at her car from the supposed cover of Sam’s picket fence.
A lot changed when I joined the police at eighteen. I moved away from home and immersed myself in a new life. I drifted away from many of my friends, although it was never a conscious decision and I often wished I’d stayed in touch with my roots. So when I didn’t see much of Sam I didn’t think it was odd. I’d occasionally bump into him when I was back in Shoreham but I just accepted that blokes move on. He would be doing well. He was like me, and we were the good guys. He’d be fine.
‘But they said you’d been in prison,’ I gabbled.
‘In and out for years, Graham. I’m surprised you didn’t know.’
The next two hours passed in the blink of an eye. He explained how he had started off doing well, great job, loads of money, parties, popularity, drink. How that began to change through the odd spliff, pills, a little heroin – just to try, mind, more and more addiction, lost jobs, bankruptcy, stealing, eroded trust, broken relationships, risk-taking, burglary, capture, chances, relapses, more crime, prison, helplessness, loneliness; a dark, bottomless spiral.
I was stunned. We had been peas in a pod. Following separate but parallel tracks. At some point, an unseen signal master must have switched the points so our destinations became very different. But deep down we still had lots in common. It hit me that Sam could so easily have been me, and I could have been him.
Drugs do bad things to people. All drugs. They mess with your health and your mind. Heroin did it for Sam. He, like so many others, was trapped in a cycle of addiction and imprisonment.
I’ve never taken an illicit drug, not even once, but what if I had, what if I got trapped like Sam did? It made me realize that every villain has a story. Equally, as Grace reflected, while watching the film The Third Man in Not Dead Enough, most villains try to justify what they have done. In their warped minds, it is the world that is wrong, not them.
That day I grew up. I started to see criminals as people who did bad things rather than just as bad people: a subtle but important distinction that he
lped develop my thinking over the rest of my career.
Something had happened that day to shift my perspectives on good and evil. I didn’t predict, however, that it would see me ridiculed in the press, criticized by ministers, yet supported by my more courageous bosses, lecturing internationally and saving many lives.
The chance meeting with Sam had set me on a road of reflection. It had a massive impact on me. I was still a sergeant so fairly junior in the scheme of things but I spent years afterwards soul-searching as to how much difference we actually make criminalizing rather than treating drug users. What was the point? Hell, it was circumstance alone that put me on a rewarding career path and Sam in jail.
I struggled with why do we treat drug addicts as criminals but alcoholics as patients? Sure, people steal and rob to get the money to buy drugs and that needs to be dealt with – even Sam would agree – but if we could get those people off drugs they wouldn’t need to do all those things. And they might stop killing themselves too.
Drugs are rife in Brighton and Hove. The city has won many awards in its time but the award for ‘Drugs Death Capital of the UK’ for the eleventh consecutive year doesn’t get presented at some swanky reception at the Dorchester. This grubby title, however, provides much of the backdrop of Brighton and Hove throughout the Grace novels. The presence of drug turf wars and the impact on users is a constant Roy Grace theme, whether overtly described or as part of the back story of his most odious adversaries. It’s the undercurrent that, in fact and fiction, runs through everything that is Brighton.
At its worst, the city was losing about one son, daughter, mum or dad a week to the misuse of drugs. That is just the people who died of an overdose, never mind those who have succumbed to blood-borne viruses or taken their own lives as a direct result of drug use. If we’d seen similar numbers of deaths on the road there would have been a national outcry. The common attitude was, because it was drugs and drugs happen to other people, it had to be their fault. So who cares?
Well, I did – a lot. It was a scandal. The treatment services were struggling hard to reverse the trend through needle exchanges, methadone clinics, medically provided opiate programmes, issuing naloxone (a drug which reverses the effects of overdose), but the police were just smashing down doors, some at residential treatment centres, arresting people for possession of drugs and putting them into an ineffective criminal justice system.
A colleague who was at the forefront of taking out the Mr Bigs of the drugs world reflected recently that all he ever achieved was to create career opportunities for the next in line. Locking up the likes of Vlad Cosmescu from Dead Tomorrow, who was dealing in drugs, cigarettes, pornography, counterfeit goods and human beings, doesn’t mean the crime will stop.
Brighton and Hove had more than its fair share of attention from the big boys of the Regional Crime Squad, National Crime Squad and Serious and Organized Crime Agency, investigating our premier criminals. They recognized that much of the wealth in the city was made on the back of a thriving heroin and crack cocaine trade. These top detectives knew the real prize were the assets amassed by these racketeers, who were more afraid of losing their money than their liberty.
The Proceeds of Crime Act provided a very visible form of justice for communities. People were delighted to see the wealth and opulence so lavishly showcased by their apparently unemployed neighbour being whisked away on the back of a police car-transporter or advertised by a ‘House For Sale’ sign as the removal truck trundled away shortly after the prison van.
In 2005 I was promoted to DCI to head Brighton and Hove CID. Personal tragedy had struck the year before when my father died of cancer. I missed him terribly and we had forged an even stronger bond since he had saved our lives in the car crash.
His loss rocked me to the core but I was so proud when the Chief Constable awarded him a posthumous Certificate of Meritorious Service. An award for Special Constables was then commissioned in his name and a display was established in Brighton’s Old Police Cells Museum that marks his life and contribution to policing. My uniform is now displayed there next to his. Back together where we belong.
However, Dad was a strong, no-nonsense, proud man and he would have been thrilled that I had reached such a senior level at the place and in the job we both loved.
I did not go into this new job with any particular agenda other than to do the very best I could to make the city safer and for it to feel safer too. However, I had risen to a level where I could do something about our unjust drugs strategy. Sometimes you have to reach a certain rank to get your voice heard.
The flow of drugs into the city from places such as Liverpool, South London and Wolverhampton appeared unstoppable. We weren’t bad at taking out the dealers. The problem was, no-one in the police was doing anything to stem the users’ insatiable appetite for the stuff that was killing them. So as we locked up the latest gang of pushers more rocked up to meet the unrelenting demand.
Leadership guru Dr Stephen Covey once said, ‘Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.’ We needed to find a different wall.
It’s hard to prove a negative, such as how many people didn’t die or weren’t robbed, so it was always easier for the police’s effectiveness to be measured on the outputs, the things they did that were easy to count: seizures, arrests, warrants. I decided this was going to change. I wanted to talk about saving lives and getting people help rather than how much of this and what weight of that we happened to find, or how many doors we kicked in.
It was a risk. My career could come to a crashing halt. However, I had once been inspired by Chief Inspector Stuart Harrison. Stuart, a maverick with a mission, espoused the belief that ‘forgiveness is easier to obtain than permission’. This stuck in my thoughts as I tried something different.
We were going to find a new way of fighting this unwinnable war on drugs. Our old tactics weren’t working; they never really had. I became like a stuck record going round saying ‘users belong in treatment, dealers belong in prison’. I knew we could slow the demand, get people well again, lock up dealers and cut crime.
Thankfully, I had two right-hand men whose character and vision were critical to what I wanted to do.
My kids used to say when my phone rang at home, ‘Is that Paul again?’ DI Paul Furnell pops up in Dead Tomorrow as the switched-on intelligence manager that he is. Now a Detective Superintendent, he is one of those sickening people: tall, good-looking, intelligent, likeable yet very persistent. He’d call day and night.
The Brighton Divisional Intelligence Unit, which he ran, was not so much the engine room of the division, more its furnace. The energy generated in their expansive open-plan office was white hot. Nothing could ever wait until tomorrow, jobsworths were excluded, everyone was fired up to catch the bad guys and catch them now. In the middle of it was Paul acting as ringmaster, whipping the team into frenzies of activity. The downsides were that he regarded his team’s overtime budget as being a monthly rather than annual allowance and if he had something he wanted to do, he would badger me into submission. A pain in the proverbial but he got stuff done and I needed that.
Sergeant Richard Siggs – Siggsy – was a giant with a big heart. A county rugby coach and former public order trainer, he wasn’t the first person you would think of as suitable to cajole drug users and down-and-outs into treatment and shelter. However, he had already won the national Tilley Award for his work with the street-homeless. His colossal physique together with his gentle nature had a tremendously persuasive effect on people who needed convincing that they should seek help. Tough love, he called it. One reformed drug user, Sean, once told me, ‘If you have Siggsy behind you telling you to go into treatment, you kind of have to go, don’t you!’
The street market works in the city exactly as explained in Dead Man’s Footsteps, as Grace follows a ‘migration’ of users towards their dealer, Niall Fisher, observing their att
empts at furtive behaviour.
These migrations are fascinating to watch. A dealer will arrive at a particular place. Word would get out that they were there and dozens of users would emerge from alleyways, squats and the like, briskly descending on the pusher. Following swift, almost imperceptible exchanges of cash and drugs, all would evaporate into the ether, leaving no trace of the trade in death that had just occurred.
So I got Paul to take over the enforcement role of what became Operation Reduction, relentlessly targeting such dealers, catching them in the act, getting them banged up and denying them time to set down roots.
Siggsy, together with the inspirational Director of Crime Reduction Initiatives, Mike Pattinson, developed a partnership that identified the most criminally active drug addicts. Cops and drugs workers patrolling the streets together hunted down those who needed treatment and from whom the city needed a rest. They were given a stark choice: enter the Op Reduction treatment programme that we had created and remain there or be targeted by the police and locked up. A carrot and stick approach but, with Siggsy and his team providing the ‘or else’ factor, in four years over 500 users went into treatment who wouldn’t have otherwise. Meanwhile, during the same period, Paul’s teams arrested around 600 dealers all of whom, faced with the weight of evidence against them, pleaded guilty.
The users were what we branded ‘revolving door prisoners’. We first meet one such convict, Darren Spicer, the fictional prison-dwelling burglar, in Dead Like You. A high achiever at school but his chances blighted by the effects of his father breaking his back falling through a roof, his abusive mother and a spell in an approved school, he inadvertently books himself a one-way trip to the hopeless oblivion that drug addiction brings. A victim of circumstance, like Sam, his whole life becomes a cycle of prison, craving and offending. Branson once tells him that they haven’t bothered to change his bed sheets in Lewes Prison during one of his brief episodes of liberty. They probably hadn’t. The name might be fictitious but the story is spot-on.
Death Comes Knocking: Policing Roy Grace’s Brighton Page 22