Gangbuster

by Peter Bleksley

  We first knew about Baigrie when police in Scotland phoned to ask us to check an address in Philbeach Gardens and had warned us then, ‘He’s top of our wanted list. Watch out, he’s very, very dangerous.’ He was a 37-year-old hard case who had escaped from Saughton Prison near Edinburgh in October 1983 while serving a life sentence for blasting a pub manager to death with a sawn-off shotgun. He’d also got a lot of form for armed robbery, so he was a tasty villain by any standards.

  He’d made a fantastic escape from prison, which was as maximum security as you could imagine, by removing a plaster cast from a broken arm, using it to smash a window without making any noise, and going over the wall. He’d been on his toes for well over 18 months and nobody had got a sighting of him. Officers in Scotland searched the address of Baigrie’s best friend and went through it with a fine-tooth comb for clues to his whereabouts. They accounted for every item of correspondence, every article, except for one telephone number, a London number. The Scottish detectives did a subscriber check on it and traced it to a flat in Philbeach Gardens. It was just an unaccounted-for telephone number at that stage, nothing particularly significant. It might have been an old mate or ex-girlfriend, but they wanted it checked out. A colleague of mine traced it to a house which had been divided into flats which had all been rented out. He asked me what I thought we should do. The phone checked out to a man called Fred Robertson so we weren’t all that confident it was connected to Baigrie. As it happened, it was a moody name he was using.

  We arranged a search of the flat the following morning in one of the Yard’s famous ‘dawn raids’. Two of us would be armed – myself and DS Jim Clarkson – and we were to exercise the utmost caution in view of Baigrie’s past history of violence. I’d always wanted to be a firearms officer and had worked hard on my course to be as good as possible. I was confident I would have no qualms about shooting someone dead if the circumstances merited it. I was a qualified marksman and proud of it.

  We steamed into the flat at the crack of dawn the next day, smashing down the door and went in with guns drawn. It was a twin-bedded room, one of which was occupied by a young guy in his late teens and the other was empty. We got the terrified lad out of bed at gunpoint and started to search the flat. He told us he shared the room with a ‘lovely bloke’ who was a builder who had gone out the previous night, pulled a bird and hadn’t come home. He gave the name of Baigrie’s suspected alias, Fred Robertson. But there was still no firm evidence that this really was our man. So I nicked an old photograph of ‘Robertson’ I found in a drawer with a view to sending it to Scotland to see if the lads up there could identify it as Baigrie. That’s as far as we could take it at that moment, and with such an early start to the day breakfast became a more pressing objective. That’s when I spotted the Transit van over the road. And James Baigrie suddenly loomed very large in my life.

  The siege went on for two days with our negotiators setting up a telephone link with Baigrie inside the van in a bid to talk him into surrender. But Baigrie did not respond positively, saying he was going to ‘shoot his head’, to use his own expression, rather than surrender. In an attempt to break the stalemate, the police decided to whack a couple of Ferrett CS gas canisters through the rear windows of the van to force him out. But only seconds later, there was a muffled bang from inside and Baigrie had left his brains dripping off the roof of the Transit. Baigrie had ended the siege the way he had predicted. I wasn’t surprised. All he’d got to look forward to was going back to prison for the rest of his life and he must have reckoned this was the best option. He’d enjoyed himself since his escape. He’d re-established his lifestyle, got a new ID, had a good time, crumpet, booze, earning a few quid as a builder. His options were very limited.

  I’d been long gone from the scene when the shooting happened. In fact, I was at a black-tie CID function at a big hotel in Kensington and was chatting to some pals when a uniformed police officer came in. I thought, what’s a helmet doing here? He tapped me on the shoulder and said he wanted a word outside.

  ‘It’s all over at Philbeach Gardens,’ he said, ‘your man has just topped himself.’

  I was told later that the trained psychologist at the scene had become increasingly concerned that Baigrie was going to kill himself and our lot had only decided to go for the CS gas option in an attempt to save Baigrie from himself. It was the first time that CS gas had been fired by the police on mainland Britain. Baigrie had put both barrels of the gun to his head and pulled both triggers. They asked me if I wanted to go to the scene afterwards for a look but I knew what it would probably be like so I declined their generous invitation.

  I suppose it could easily have been my brains splattered over Philbeach Gardens. When they examined Baigrie’s gun, they found the firing pin had only discharged one cartridge. The pin had hit the other cartridge but had failed to fire it. One superintendent had the theory that the first trigger could have been fired when Baigrie pulled out the gun and pointed it at me in the van. I don’t know to this day whether that was a possibility but I count it as another of my nine lives taken care of.

  It transpired that Baigrie was only in the van because the landlord of his bedsit had tipped him off. We’d spoken to him the previous day and he thought it was a load of rubbish because his tenant was such a lovely, hard-working bloke who always paid his rent on time. The Old Bill had got it all wrong, he reckoned. He told Baigrie – or Fred as he knew him – that we’d been in looking for him and Baigrie had decided to level with his young roommate about his dodgy background over a few pints before clearing off in the Transit. They went out and got absolutely arseholed. Baigrie went out and got in the back of his van expecting the cold to wake him up at the crack of dawn and he’d hoped to be long gone before we arrived. But he obviously got so pissed he overslept and his alarm clock turned out to be me coming in through the back doors at first light.

  There were quite a lot of people, like the civil liberties lot, who thought the police might get a bit of a kicking over it, what with using CS gas and ripping off the van doors with grappling hooks fitted to a Land Rover. I was mightily relieved when the coroner who heard the inquest into Baigrie’s death said the police had done everything right to try to get Baigrie out alive. He said I hadn’t done anything to prompt the siege and had acted in the best traditions of Scotland Yard in everything I did. What he was saying was that I could have started letting off bullets, trying to take him out without giving the geezer a chance. At the end of the day, I’m glad it was his gun that killed him, not mine, though I would have had no qualms about it if it had come down to a him or me shoot-out.

  The letter of congratulations I received later from my divisional commander, Detective Chief Superintendent Basil Haddrell, did my prospects at the Yard no harm at all. This was real police work and I couldn’t get enough of it. I woke up each day waiting for the next job, never mind the risks, never mind the hassle. I was pumping.

  It was the first time I had been forced to draw my gun in earnest and it wasn’t the last. I’d learnt the hard way that you don’t mess with firearms. During my training at Lippitts Hill, I had been taken ‘hostage’ by two of the instructors in an exercise, right nasty bastards who weren’t known to us, who had been recruited from the Army as a sort of test of our self-control and discipline. I was handcuffed, made really uncomfortable, and these guys were really pissing me off. Real sadistic bastards, I thought. You get so into role, like you do working undercover, that your survival instincts start coming to the surface. They served me up a dinner with only a metal fork to eat it with and I was still handcuffed. One geezer was sitting to my right scratching his arse and really irritating me. The gun that they had was left unattended across the room.

  I was so seriously, seriously in role that I thought while he wasn’t looking I could stick the fork in his eye, incapacitating him for long enough to grab the gun and shoot both geezers. Afterwards, I told them I was that close to stabbing him in the eye, one more push and I’
d have gone for it. I know now that if I had reacted like that, they would never have let me loose with a gun in a million years. Severe character flaw, Bleksley. End of career.

  I told the two blokes afterwards, ‘You want to be careful who you choose as a hostage. If it’s anybody with a short fuse like me, you could have been in trouble. I was ready to do you both.’ They just smiled.

  * * *

  On the subject of sadists, I can honestly say I’ve met some wacky women in my time but I think Margi Dunbar, the torture queen, just about takes the cake. She was a lesbian prostitute who ran a sado-masochistic sex parlour in Queensgate, South Kensington, catering for that weird breed of pervert who likes to be whipped, beaten and humiliated. Margi lived with an equally oddball partner called Christine Offord, effectively as man and wife, and had even gone to the lengths of having a baby by artificial insemination.

  Unfortunately, it had all gone wrong and Christine had ended up dead in the bath with her neck crushed and broken with an iron bar. I was on the murder squad formed to investigate her death. Margi had to be among our prime suspects.

  I couldn’t believe my eyes when I went into their brothel. There were leather harnesses, rubber suits, chains, handcuffs, gags, torture equipment of all sorts. Scrawled on the walls were sick messages for the clients like ‘Lick My Boots, Dog!’ ‘Worthless Slave!’ and ‘Your life is nothing, your death is nothing’.

  These two women made a fortune dishing out pain and punishment to their punters. Christine, the dominant one of the partnership, had persuded Margi to have a baby by inseminating her with the sperm of a young medical student and they pretended to lead a ‘normal’ life at a plush home in Hounslow, Middlesex, 30 miles away from their sordid vice world in Kensington. Margi operated a similar sex-for-sale racket to Offord from a flat in nearby Cornwall Gardens, Kensington, advertising her services as Miss Whiplash and charging wealthy clients £100 an hour to be tortured on a rack till they bled or strung up against a wall and thrashed with a leather whip.

  I have to say, Margi did take a shine to me, even though she was a lesbian. She used to sit with her legs apart showing her crotch or even playing with herself in front of me and saying, ‘Come on, Blex, when are you going to fuck me?’ No chance of that. I wouldn’t have put my dick near Margi Dunbar if she was the last woman on earth.

  For some bizarre reason, two detective inspectors were allocated to this murder, which was very unusual and was to be very destructive to the course of the investigation. It meant each DI had his own agenda, each having their own ideas as to who had done it. It was a divisive squad right from the start, causing problems we could have well done without. I was assigned to one DI, with some friends of mine, and the other one was a bit of an old sweat who’d been around a bit and had all his old hands on his team.

  I suspected right from the start they were barking up the wrong tree, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell them. They had decided to go off at a tangent and investigate some people who, as it transpired, had fuck all to do with the murder.

  Christine Offord’s throat had been crushed against a wall with the iron bar causing excruciating pain and a horrible violent death. Then she had been tied up and put in the bath. Pretty horrendous all round. I decided the only sensible place to start my investigations was at the beginning and work systematically through every scrap of evidence we could dig up.

  So who was the last person to see Christine alive? Margi Dunbar pretty soon became a key suspect and was arrested for questioning. She really was as weird as they come. She was in possession of some drugs which might have been partly responsible for her condition. But she was definitely not of this planet. The two DIs tried to get some sense out of her, some clues or a confession, but with little or no success. As I was at the heart of the inquiry, I was asked to go in to question her. I didn’t get very far either. Margi was right off the wall! But the interview served to reaffirm my suspicions that she had something to do with Christine’s death. We had to release her after we’d held her in custody for the maximum amount of time and we took her back home.

  Margi used to talk filth all the time, just for the sake of it. She was obsessed with sex. When I’d got her back to the house, she started to come on really strong, flashing her fanny and asking me to lick it and saying things like, ‘Come on, you dirty copper, come and stick it up here, you know you want it.’ Then she would start playing with herself.

  We were once in her garage when she started picking up things and using them as sex toys, dildos. I couldn’t believe my eyes or ears. I thought, What is going on here? Lesbians, prostitutes, nymphos … what’s it all about? This was London’s vice world at its seediest.

  We had come to a bit of a standstill in the investigation so I decided to spend a long time interviewing Margi’s ‘maid’, who showed punters in and out of her torture chamber. I use the term ‘maid’ advisedly – ‘minder’ would have been more appropriate.

  She was in fact a he, a huge man called Tony. He was a man mountain but he was gay and a bit of a teddy bear, as soft as you can come across, which was just as well seeing the size of him. He could move some furniture. I found out from him that there were two people unaccounted for in our enquiries so far, two blokes who had been on the premises on the last occasion before Christine had been found dead. I was deeply interested in finding out more about them.

  I’d managed to get snippets of information from Tony. One was that he’d heard the word ‘Littlehampton’ mentioned. All the time you are looking for a trigger word that might fire the investigation down the right path. Tony said these two characters were enraptured by Margi, who did have a sort of intoxicating personality if you are into that sort of thing. He only knew their christian names – Barry and Bob. So that gave me three trigger words – Littlehampton, Barry and Bob. It had taken days to elicit this information but I knew I had something important to work on. Two people never mentioned by anyone else, who appeared to have been deliberately left out of the scene. I felt very excited at the development, and I felt at last we were getting somewhere. I then rang Littlehampton Police Station on a long shot, and this is how fate or luck can help you out. I spoke to a detective there and told him I was fishing in the dark but had two names, Bob and Barry, and did he know of any pair of oiks who hung around together who fitted the names? He said he wasn’t sure.

  I told him this was a major murder inquiry with sexual links, deviancy and so on.

  He said, ‘Fuck me, I’ve got a geezer called Barry on bail for allegedly interfering with a 13-year-old boy. Is that any use to you?’

  I thought, Bingo. This is it.

  My next move was to go down to Littlehampton and, with the help of the local CID boys, identified the two mystery suspects – Robert Causabon-Vincent, aged 41, and Barry Parsons, 45, two partners in crime who fitted the bill exactly as the men who had been in Christine’s flat the night she’d been murdered. We staked out their houses for a night then went in and arrested them the next morning.

  They were eventually convicted at the Old Bailey and jailed for life. Margi was found guilty of manslaughter and given seven years after the court heard that she had hired the two men to kill her lesbian lover. But she was later cleared on appeal as a result of the trial judge’s misdirection to the jury and freed from her sentence.

  The Old Bailey jury sat through the most bizarre evidence and you could see that some of them were really uncomfortable with all the details about stormy lesbian passions, torture chambers and Margi’s beautiful baby being born into the middle of it all.

  It seemed that the two of them had lived together for about seven or eight years with Offord being the older of the two and acting as ‘husband’ in the weird partnership. Offord, a posh sort who was educated at a leading girls’ school and divorced from her businessman husband, had persuded Margi to have the baby to cement the affair. But it only brought a load of grief with Christine objecting to Margi taking the little boy to her basement torture chamber while she
worked. The two killers were petty crooks who carried out burglaries in London and on the south coast. Causabon-Vincent had visited Margi as a client, presumably for a good thrashing or something, and had become sexually obsessed with her. He introduced her to his pal, Parsons, a one-time builder who was nicknamed Psychopathic Barry after he told her he had killed more than 80 people. It was a load of bollocks, of course, but it led to them becoming involved in killing Christine and putting her naked in the bath to make it look as if it had been just a sex game that had gone wrong and not a deliberate killing. They might easily have got away with it if I hadn’t had a lucky break.

  Throughout all this, Margi, who was from the back streets of Liverpool with a pretty poor education, had denied any involvement in her lover’s death and said all along that she had adored her and hadn’t wanted any harm to come to her. She said Chrissie treated her better than most men treat their wives and their lifestyle certainly suggested that, with Chrissie heaping expensive presents like jewellery and clothes on Margi like a proud husband. Then she wanted Margi to have the baby to make things complete and this was arranged through some sort of artificial insemination agency, with Christine present at the birth like a proud dad.