In the meantime, Becton officers were checking likely garages, lock-ups, scrap yards, and the council’s store of abandoned and burned-out vehicles. The city’s CCTV tapes, alas, were wiped after 28 days – leaving Becton without pictures – but a trawl through Traffic’s stop/check records had come up with something deeply interesting. On the 11th November, the last day the victim had been seen alive, a random stop/check at the top of the city, near Hilsea Lido, had snared the very same guy. An air gun had been found in the back of his van. This didn’t warrant an arrest, or even a caution, but the location might be significant. Hilsea Lido was close to Hilsea Lines, a relic of the city’s nineteenth century fortifications. Not many people went there after dark. It was, in the words of one D/S, “a top bogging spot”.
By now, a search of the victim’s flat had found two mobile phones. After application to the phone company, these would produce billing records, including a list of the last calls he’d made. By use of a technique called cell site analysis, it might also enable Becton to track the victim’s movements had the phone been active during the final hours of his life.
All this, to the tyro crime novelist, was top stuff but even more astonishing was the volume of details that – already – were beginning to emerge about the victim’s lifestyle. The guy was twenty three years old. He appeared to have had a number of relationships in his young life, significant or otherwise. None of them lasted longer than a month but these women seemed to want to mother him. Only six months ago, he’d been badly beaten up over a drug debt by two men who were rapidly becoming prime suspects. On another occasion he’d threatened to screw a house belonging to an associate’s mother. From all these accounts, gathered in the last eight hours, there emerged a picture of a lawless, chaotic world of petty transactions, crimes gone wrong, multiple grudges, and spasms of retributive violence. The victim, probably of his own volition, had led a truly shit life. In the fug of the Major Incident Room, it was hard not to feel the first prickles of sympathy.
After the squad meet broke up, I met Steve in the corridor. How was it going? He paused and checked his watch. He was already looking at 750 hours of overtime. Another call to headquarters.
By Day Two, Becton was beginning to settle down. Investigators always talk about “the golden hours” in any major enquiry – that first day when you give every available tree a big shake and see what falls out - but it was obvious already that Becton was going to take more than this. Gathering worthwhile evidence can be a painstaking job and it was now Steve’s task to piece together exactly what had happened, charge the bad guys, and make it stick in court. He’d secured his extra overtime and anticipated running the enquiry at full strength for maybe a month. In his view, the people Becton was up against were both violent and cunning. There’d be no easy wins but in the end he had total confidence that he’d get a result.
A couple of hours later, I found myself with a D/S called Dave Sackman. Dave was an incomer from the Met but had been with the Hampshire force - Hantspol - for a long time. He was mad about football and spent a lot of his spare time coaching a youth team up in the sprawl of Leigh Park. Like Dave Hopkins, he had the gift of conjuring a conversation, and a relationship, from virtually nothing. He was also one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met.
I asked him how it was going. He said it was going fine. The time scales on TV drama, he told me, are all to cock. This kind of stuff always takes a lot longer than you’d ever imagine. We move very methodically, meeting by meeting, and we chose our time to strike. Will we bottom it out in the end? Of course we will. Why? Because our gang is a lot bigger, and a lot more clever, than theirs.
This was fighting talk. What about resources?
Dave pulled a face. In his view, the guys up at HQ just hadn’t got a clue how stretched the Major Crime set-up had become. 71 unallocated actions? Just ten blokes on the ground? Impossible.
The full squad gathered again at five o’clock for an update. The all-important van remained untraced but the Intel Cell were starting to put together a picture of the victim’s last days. In prison, it seemed, he’d been a worried man. After release, the pressure seemed to have got worse. He was delivering drugs for one of the prime suspect’s associates and being paid in those same drugs. The prime suspect, increasingly pissed off with him, was one of the men who’d allegedly administered the beating. The victim’s young life was falling apart. On the day he disappeared, he’d taken a series of calls from the prime suspect. After that, silence.
Steve had, by now, decided to scoop up both prime suspects. Arrest strategies were discussed and assistance requested from the Fratton pro-active team. The arrest would take place at six am at two addresses in North End. Arrangements were made for full forensic searches at both premises. Suspects’ cars would be seized and likewise combed for evidence linked to the victim. The men would be taken to separate police stations and interviewing teams would be briefed by the TIA. In the meantime, another suspect would be placed under surveillance to gauge his reaction to the arrests
This, on the face of it, struck me as a bold move. D/I Martin Shucker was the Deputy SIO under Steve Watts. He grinned. “There’s always a gain,” he said, “whatever happens. Either they’ll blame each other or implicate someone else.”
I went to bed that night trying to imagine what it must be like to be Steve Watts. I’d been seriously impressed by the reach of the Major Crimes machine, and by the painstaking level of detail which accompanied every small step forward. But it seemed to me that Becton was a million miles away from closing the case. Steve might well have the right names in Becton’s frame but trying to establish a reliable account that might spark any kind of breakthrough, on the basis of the evidence so far gathered, felt like a very big ask. I’d said something of the sort to Steve that evening before our ways had parted. The fact that I was expressing an opinion amused him. He made no comment.
The arrests were effected before dawn the following day, both on suspicion of murder. The suspects were booked into separate custody suites and conferenced with their lawyers. It was gone midday before the first interviews began.
At 13.19, Scenes of Crime investigators found a significant quantity of blood under one of the suspect’s kitchen tables. Swabs were taken and despatched to London for priority DNA analysis. At more or less the same time, evidence from elsewhere established that the engine on the victim’s van had recently been swapped for another. Detectives making burned vehicle checks had therefore been looking for the wrong engine number. Steve, desperate for reinforcements, ordered the checks to be re-done.
By now, thanks to the demands of the two interviews, Becton was reduced to just six D/Cs at the sharp end. Steve worked the phones, the robber baron of the Major Crime Team trying to snatch bodies from CID offices across Hantspol. At 14.02, ten D/Cs from the Force Crime Unit arrived. They were Steve’s for two days. Go for it.
At 16.01, word arrived that one of the two suspects was gobbing off. Nothing incriminatory, alas, but a warning that “very dangerous people are involved”. The other suspect, on legal advice, was saying very little. In these situations the police are obliged to make pre-interview disclosure to the suspect’s lawyer and in this case the brief had decided that the evidence gathered to date was thin. No point, therefore, in offering hostages to fortune. The other suspect’s wife was also refusing to answer questions.
It was at this point, with Steve Watts boxed in by the PACE clock which dictates when a prisoner must be released, that I had a conversation with one of Becton’s more experienced D/Cs. Her words have stayed with me ever since. This is what she said.
“It’s the system. The law. PACE (The Police and Criminal Evidence Act). All this stuff is designed by people who haven’t got a clue about the practical consequences. We have to obey the system. We have to work within it. And you know what? The system constantly lets us down. There’s always someone looking over your shoulder. There’s n
o trust, no leeway, no scope, no freedom. You meet young kids, four years into the Job. They’re good, they’re talented, they’re bright, they want to make it work, but you know what? They leave. They go. They’re off. Why? Because this job’s become fucking impossible. You move at snail’s pace. There’s no alternative. Because of the system.”
Steve’s detachment that afternoon was impressive. He’d put most of Becton’s chips on the square marked Early Arrest and he was very happy to let his interview teams, under their Tactical Interview Advisers, get on with it. Every time I popped my head round his office door he was bent over the keyboard. More forms to fill in. More e-mails to send. By now, I’d given up asking about the overtime.
In the late afternoon, one of the SOC teams searching the suspects homes came up with three items: a cable tie, a pair of bungee clips, and a video with the victim’s name of it. None of these items offered definitive proof of anything but the weight of circumstantial evidence was beginning to move in Becton’s favour. From the other premises, meanwhile, a search team were reporting more blood stains in the kitchen where a set of knives appeared to be one short. In addition, the team had found yet another bungee that exactly matched the one recovered from the victim’s body. This, plus a scissored cutting from last week’s News, describing the find in the woods.
It was at this point that Andy Harrington, a veteran of situations like these, took me aside. “It’ll be the laws of chemistry that fuck ‘em,” he said. “Not the laws of the land.” This little assurance seemed, at first sight, to sit oddly against the despair voiced by the D/C I’d talked to earlier but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Both detectives recognised that the legal system made life hard for the Men in Blue. But Andy recognised, as well, that pharmacology was on the side of the angels. The guys making serious money from narcotics were often partial to a toot or two themselves, leading to seriously daft judgement calls. One major importer from the Pompey area, very definitely under the influence, had been arrested for nicking a bottle of milk from a milk float.
By now, rather fittingly, Andy’s Intel Cell was beginning to put the web of mobile phone calls together. This was simply evidence that the calls had happened, with no clue to their contents, but on what was probably the last day of the victim’s life, he took four calls from the prime suspect. The last one was at 17.21. After that, the prime suspect never phoned him again. This, in Andy’s phrase, was a prime indicator.
Of what? I’d spent the last hour of so wondering about this quickening trickle of circumstantial evidence: the bungee cords, the cable ties, the missing knife, the cutting from the News, and now the sudden break in communication between the prime suspect and the man he might have killed. How soon before co-incidence ceases to be co-incidence? What kind of weight might a jury place on evidence like this?
The evening wore on. From neither custody suite were there signs of any kind of breakthrough. The two men had been arrested at 06.00. Very soon, Steve would have to decide whether or not to go for a twelve hour extension. By the time I left to go home, he’d yet to make the call.
The following morning, I reappeared at the Major Crimes Suite. Steve had decided to apply for the 12 hour custody extension and a uniformed Superintendent had signed it off. To maximise the extra time he’d applied for reinforcements and Becton now had fifty D/Cs out on the street. The original overtime ceiling of 750 hours had now doubled and in Steve’s estimation it could still go a whole lot further.
I sensed that this was, in its way, a declaration of war. Every force in the UK (there are 42 in all) has different priorities. Some believe that the public are more pissed-off by the irritations of volume crime, than by the far more remote possibility of being murdered. They therefore devote the bulk of their resources to the battle against anti-social behaviour and petty theft, and keep the major crime apparatus on starvation rations. Not Hantspol.
To Steve’s immense satisfaction, Operation Becton was getting the fullest backing. The bosses, like Steve himself, believed that it was time to draw a line in the sand, to send a message. The deeper the Becton squad penetrated the tangle of relationships, feuds, burglaries, assaults, drugs offences, and other criminal mayhem that surrounded the body in the woods, the more obvious it became that these guys needed reminding just who was in charge. Beyond Becton lay anarchy. And Steve was having none of that.
At the custody suites, the interview teams were holding off pending the results of forensic searches. Scenes of Crime had nearly finished with the lead suspect’s property and were now concentrating on his car and a trailer recovered a couple of streets away. By now, there appeared to be evidence linking this guy with housebreaks beyond the Portsmouth area and both the car and the trailer had been removed for full forensic treatment. Might the car have been used to take the victim out to the woods? SOC were taking seat tapings, floor sweepings and print lifts from every available surface. Sheets of paper in the glove box carried indentations that might, or might not, prove significant. From the trailer, meanwhile, came builder’s aggregate, scraps of carpet, rolls of bin liner, sundry clothing, plus a diary belonging to the suspect. Each of these items raised a separate action, widening Becton’s reach.
The flat belonging to the other suspect was also getting the treatment. So far, Scenes of Crime had recovered 30 print lifts, a good deal of stolen property, a cache of bondage gear, and a stack of porn videos. While this offered good background colour, there was still nothing to tie either suspect to the death of Becton’s young drug runner.
Back at the Major Crimes Suite, meanwhile, a handful of fit-looking men with scary haircuts had turned up. They were toting silver boxes of the kind we used to cart round with film crews and they locked themselves in one of the offices before blacking out the ribbed glass panels with rolls of dustbin liner. When I asked Steve what was going on, he refused to comment. Months later, at Winchester Crown Court, the trial judge made reference to covert tape-recordings of conversations at the defendants’ homes, conversations which revealed a callousness on their part towards what had happened to the victim. Were these guys from the sneaky beaky covert ops unit? Almost definitely. Had they planted a device at the suspect’s house? No comment.
At this point, late morning, there was still no news from the custody centres. Then, around midday, came a breakthrough. A couple of Becton’s detectives, still hunting for the victim’s Escort van, discovered an incident back in November, the day after he disappeared. At 00.46 the fire brigade had been called out to a vehicle blaze on an industrial estate in Fareham. When detectives visited the site, the scorch marks were still visible on the concrete in front of Unit 36. The van, according to fire brigade records, had been totally burned out and what little was left of the engine block had been sent to a local scrap yard. Fare-ham lies at the bottom of the A32, just along the coast from Pompey. The body had been found seven miles north, a two-minute drive off this very same road.
The find generated a blizzard of actions. Steve ordered a POLSA search of the area around the seat of the fire. A nearby skip was declared a Scene of Crime. When detectives discovered that it had been emptied three times since the fire, Steve wanted the contents traced. House-to-house calls blanketed nearby premises. More detectives descended on garages on the presumed route the suspects might have taken that night, looking for petrol receipts and witness evidence. CCTV cameras were plotted, in case the taped pictures hadn’t been wiped (alas they had). And D/S Dave Sackman took himself off to the scrap yard where the remains of the van had ended up.
I was present at the afternoon management meeting when Dave returned. The smile suggested that Becton was about to take a giant step forward. Steve asked him what he’d got for him.
“I found the van”, he said.
There was a brief silence, an exchange of looks around the table, then Dave reached into his jacket pocket and produced a spoon, carefully wrapped in an evidence bag. According to the scrap yar
d records, the victim’s burned-out van had been sold to a recycling business in the West Midlands, where the remains had been melted down and turned into cutlery. Even Steve was laughing.
At this point in the investigation, Becton began to suffer from information overload. A torrent of evidence, much of it hearsay, was beginning to come in from the guys on the street. This confirmed that the victim had found himself in the eye of a particularly vicious storm. He, like the lead suspect, was an alleged housebreaker. He had a habit of letting people down, of getting on their nerves. He was unreliable, devious, and may – or may not – have burned someone’s house down. Either way, it seemed he’d come in for regular beatings, both in and out of prison, often at the hands of the two lead suspects. One of these beatings allegedly involved a hammer. Another time the victim’s head was apparently smashed against a concrete post, damaging him badly enough to put him in hospital. Steve was right. Poor choice of company.
It wasn’t until the afternoon that the interviews began again. The interviewing teams were feeding in fresh evidence, hoping to leverage an admission or two. News that his car and trailer had been seized appeared to shake the lead suspect who promptly went No Comment. The other guy, who’d gone No Comment from the off, was equally unhelpful.
By now, Andy Harrington’s Intel Cell were slowly piecing together the web of phone calls that might tell the story of the victim’s final hours. This painstaking plotting of one call against another was far from complete but he was reasonably certain that the coming days and weeks would supply the missing pieces in the evidential jigsaw. The victim, it seemed clear, had once again overstepped the mark. In Steve’s view, it seemed that everyone had a motive - whether it was arson, theft or sex – to sort the victim out. In the end, he said, Becton was dealing with a beating that got out of hand. “This is something that went way over the top,” he said. “And now we have to bottom it out.”
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