A Dangerous Place E-Book

Simon Farquhar

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 386

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Shortlisted for the Crime Writer's Association Gold Dagger award for non-fiction. In September 1970, two boys met in the playground on their first day at secondary school in North London. They formed what would be described at the Old Bailey thirty years later as 'a unique and wicked bond'. Between 1982 and 1986, striking near lonely railway stations in London and the Home Counties, their partnership took them from rape to murder. Three police forces pooled their resources to catch them in the biggest criminal manhunt since the Yorkshire Ripper Enquiry. A Dangerous Place is the first full-length account of the crimes of John Duffy and David Mulcahy. Told by the son of one of the police officers who led the enquiry, exhaustively researched and with unprecedented access, this is the story of two of the most notorious serial killers of the twentieth century and the times they operated in. It is the story of the women who died at their hands. It is the story of the women who survived them, and who had the courage to ensure justice was done. And it is the story of a father, told by a son.

Leseprobe

A DANGEROUS

PLACE

SIMON FARQUHAR

The Story of the Railway Murders

A DANGEROUS

PLACE

First published in 2016

The History Press The Mill, Brimscombe Port Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2016

All rights reserved © Simon Farquhar, 2016

The right of Simon Farquhar to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 6952 9

Original typesetting by The History Press

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

For Dad, from number two son

CONTENTS

Preface

1 Dedication

2 Collusion

3 Alison

4 Maartje

5 Anne

6 Convergence

7 Separation

8 Severance

Afterword

References

PREFACE

Any writer is excited by an invitation to write. I was also surprised and intrigued when I received a message in May 2015 from Mark Beynon of The History Press, following an obituary I had written for The Independent. The piece had paid tribute to the broadcaster Shaw Taylor, for many years the face of law and order as the presenter of the television programme Police 5, the Crimewatch of its day.

When pinning the article up on Facebook, I had made mention of the occasion on which my father appeared on the programme, appealing for information in the case of the murder of Alison Day. I said that I still believe my father’s refusal to obey his superiors and close that enquiry down, and his subsequent connecting of Alison’s death with that of schoolgirl Maartje Tamboezer, did, in the long run, probably save a few lives. The pulling together of three separate police inquiries into one of the biggest manhunts in criminal history, coupled with some outstanding detection all round, surely speeded the identifying of the killers, even if one of them would evade justice for a long time.

‘Sounds fascinating. Would you like to do a book?’ came the message from Mark. Very few people have the chance to pay tribute to a parent in such a practical or demonstrative form, and so for that opportunity, and for his constant devotion to the project, I have Mark to thank, which I do most sincerely.

I was never going to follow in my father’s footsteps professionally. But writing this book has allowed me the experience of doing so in the literal rather than the metaphorical sense. Walking the murder sites he visited, talking to his colleagues and piecing together a case that dominated the final year of his career has been by turns fascinating, disturbing, compelling and humbling.

Writing a book about someone you admire always runs the risk of resulting in a hagiography. Having not done the rounds of Her Majesty’s Prisons, I have been unable to find anyone with a rough word to say about my father. But what I have found is an understanding of the job he did and an understanding of the resilience, mental discipline and determination that he needed to do it well. Like any other profession, be it nursing, bricklaying or acting, there are good and bad police officers. This book is about some of the good ones.

Many of the officers who were involved in the pursuit of John Duffy and David Mulcahy have never spoken publicly about the case before, or no longer choose to do so. Therefore I must express my particular gratitude to those officers who agreed to do so purely out of support for this project and affection for my father.

All the police officers who have contributed to this book, both serving and retired, have been invaluable in their assistance. Although I hope that the inclusion of their words within the text in itself reflects my appreciation, I must personally thank Paul Dockley for his enthusiasm, receptiveness, sincerity and superb recall throughout; all the officers of Operation Lea, specifically Brian Roberts and John Manners; two long-standing colleagues of my father’s, Barry Fyffe from Operation Lea and Dave Cant from Flying Squad days, who have been unceasing in their assistance; and John Hurst, the driving force behind the arrest of John Duffy in 1986, who has been charming and supportive. Caroline Murphy took time to give me a fantastic account of her work on Operation Marford, and Mick Freeman from the outset has been unceasingly helpful, the sort of person who is a godsend to a project like this. I must also thank Gordon Reynolds, Colin Hockerday, Keith Hider and Michael Taylor. Outside of the police, special thanks also go to Marc Barrett, Professor David Canter, Richard Priestley, Riel Karmy-Jones QC, Monica Weller and, for placing his trust in me, Mr Kenneth Day.

Several organisations have been extremely cooperative, so thank you to Ian Carmichael and all at the Press Association, the staff of the British Library, Kathleen Dickson at the BFI, the BBC, James West at ITN, Fremantle, Getty Images, REX Shutterstock, the National Archives, the Hampstead and Highgate Express, Hertfordshire Constabulary, the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service.

On a personal level, Fiona Fenn Smith and Michael Fadda have been quite magnificent in their enthusiasm for this project from day one. The debt I owe my fine friend, the inexhaustibly instructive and edifying W. Stephen Gilbert, is a colossal one. As fellow writers, both Stephen and the ebullient Ian Greaves have been empathetic; as friends, they have been tonics.

Thank you also to Chris Maume; my agent Nick Quinn; friends and colleagues Octavia Lamb, Jolene McGowan, Suzanne Becker, Martin Duncan and Christina Thummanah, who make it a pleasure to come to work every morning; old friends Gavin Monks and Johnny Horth; Andrew Conway, Mark Nickol and Nick Kirby, the oldest of friends; Lu Frazer, Louise Henry, Jules Porter, Kristel McCartney, Julie Thompson, Joey Langer, Norman Eshley, Dan Austin, Howard Hill-Lines, Jill Singer, Laura Milne, Holly Brown, Kasha Gawelda, Jody Merelle, Debra Sargeant, Tony Smith, John Goldschmidt, Bobbie Seagroatt, Joe McFadden, Pauline Lynch, Wendy Grahame, Victoria Gooch, Doremy Vernon, Linnie Reedman, Maggie Stride and Luke Healy; Twiggy, Leigh and Ace Lawson for a decade of friendship and advocacy; and my brother Martin and my mother Barbara, both of whom I hope are pleased with my efforts. And last but never least, Juliet Fletcher, for whom there will always be honey for tea.

1

DEDICATION

There is a house on a hill, overlooking the Moray Firth in the north of Scotland. This softly changing part of the world was the place where my father was born and raised. Once he and my mother had retired here, the room I’m in now is the room in which he would sit on summer evenings, reading books of history and occasionally looking out at the blurry blue of the bay and the barley fields that sway like gospel choirs. This is a place far away from the city he policed, both spiritually and geographically.

For London is a land where change is merciless, a land where the only thing that can’t be bought is silence. That much never changes. My father’s London was a London there is little trace of now. The scruffy London of ‘George Davis is Innocent’1 slogans. A city still overcast by the heavy, slow shadow of the war. A city propped up by corrugated iron fences and camaraderie. A city of police and thieves. A city which was, and still is, a dangerous place.

My father was a man of quiet pleasures. I picture him at the end of the garden, pottering away in the greenhouse. I suspect now that his garden wasn’t just the place where he found solitude after a working week in a growling, dangerous city, but that it was also his way of staying connected with the land he had come from and would one day return to.

He and I stood on Sunnyside Beach2 somewhere in the years between his retirement and his death, as he spoke of the ending to his favourite film, Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero, which was shot only a few bays away, at Pennan. ‘After he leaves Scotland, he gets back to his flat in Denver late at night and takes a beer out of the fridge, then he hears sirens outside. And he stands on the balcony looking out across the city, and as it fades back to that shot of Pennan, he’s obviously thinking of how, just for a short time, he’s been in a place so far removed from all the crime and all the madness that goes on in the city. I thought that was wonderful.’

When a man dies, a library burns to the ground, so the proverb tells us. I am now going to try to rescue what I can from the flames. For scattered about this house are the fragments that when pieced together tell the story of my father’s career in that dangerous city. In a battered white vanity case in the attic are all the press cuttings my maternal grandmother kept, which have somehow ended up sandwiched between reminders of dental appointments and half-term holidays inside a threadbare 1984 Flying Squad diary. At the bottom of a wardrobe are the slight relics of my father’s National Service. And in a large, deep wooden chest, or a ‘kist’ as it is called in these parts, buried under three generations of photographs and cards, is a hand-sized red leather autograph book, presented to him upon his retirement from the Metropolitan Police in April 1987. Each page is covered with dedications in police ballpoints from his colleagues. The stories behind many of the inscriptions are now lost to time, but one arrests me with its sincerity and accuracy: ‘Many thanks, Charlie, for your measured, professional and dedicated effort for justice.’

I will never know a more valiant man than my father.

This is the story of his last case. My father is not the only hero of this story, for there are many. This is a story of suffering and of evil, but it is also a story about dedication, and it is dedicated to my father and to everyone else who played a part in bringing John Duffy and David Mulcahy to justice. For this world is a dangerous place, not only because of the people who do evil, but also because of the people who don’t do anything about them, to modify a different proverb. And this is also dedicated to all those who suffered, all those who lost their lives and all those who lost loved ones because of those two men.

I hesitate to call my father an old-fashioned man: traditional is the better word. He was an exemplar of his generation, one of a breed born with so little who achieved so much, blessed with an unimpeachable sense of duty and discretion. He was always immaculately dressed, his top button always done up and his tie always straight, even if he had arrived home in the early hours of the morning and then departed again before the milkman had been, an occurrence which certainly wasn’t unusual in our household. He respected learning and was devoted to his family; despite the cruel hours his job demanded, I can honestly say that he never once missed a school play, a prize-giving day, a carol service or a birthday party. He was 40 when I was born, and I was 40 when he died. Only now, as I piece together his working life, can I fully appreciate the might with which he achieved all he did and the depth of his commitment to being a husband and a father, as well as to being a fine detective. He was a success. Not a ‘winner’, as that would suggest luck played a part. What he achieved he achieved through skill, application and endeavour.

He was born Charles John Farquhar on 30 April 1932, the only boy of six children, and nicknamed ‘Toux’, a local word meaning ‘little’, as he was the youngest. His eldest sister, Betty, was twenty years his senior. His mother, Jane, went into hospital for a hernia operation when he was 12, and died under anaesthetic. Life for her had been punishing, which was why he ensured that my own mother never wanted for any household appliance that would make domesticity a little easier. After Jane’s death, his sister Jean gave up her nurse’s training to look after him and his father, James, was a farm labourer who was later a gardener at Cullen House, the commanding seat of the Earl of Seafield. That grand dwelling has long since been converted into flats, his work gone to waste as its gardens are now unkempt, with even the ornate faux-classical temple in the grounds conquered by towering weeds. Not all of us get to leave behind some evidence of our working lives.

My father was a quiet man with a commanding morality. At his funeral, his school friend John Bain told me that ‘as boys, if any of us were getting up to evils, your dad would very firmly say, “You don’t do that.”’ When I was 7, I tentatively stole a pencil from the stationery cupboard at school, then boasted of my little dare to him. I can still remember his reaction as he ordered me to return it, a reaction not of anger but of consternation. My elder brother Martin has a little story which perfectly illustrates this side of his character:

When I was about 16, I came home one day and triumphantly announced to him that I’d found £50 in the street, a tidy sum in 1979. All I could think of was which records I was going to buy with my new-found wealth. You can imagine my horror when he looked up over the newspaper and told me to hand it in to the police station, insisting that some elderly or less-fortunate person might be relying on that money for a week or more and may have nothing else. He tried to console me by saying that if it wasn’t claimed within a week it would be mine and I would feel better for having done the right thing.

A long week passed as I planned my future investments. But then, a week later, I was told by the PC at the front desk that the money had been claimed. The final insult was that the police told the person who’d lost it where I worked and he came into the shop, said ‘cheers’ and left! I moaned for weeks about the injustice of it, and Dad was clearly amused, but he showed his softer side by giving me £20, saying ‘consider that a finder’s reward’. Still ungrateful, I told him I was £30 down, to which, in a very insightful way, he said: ‘Son, £30 is a small price to pay for your integrity.’

Apart from his strong moral code, the only hint in his early life towards his future career was his reading of the double-page reports of Old Bailey trials in Sunday newspapers, though this was a national pastime of the age, immortalised in George Orwell’s essay ‘The Decline of the English Murder’ (1946). Upon leaving school, he became an apprentice baker at John McKenzie’s in Cullen. (He still made bread occasionally when I was growing up, and it was excellent.) He would set his alarm on his day off just for the satisfaction of being able to silence it and go back to sleep.

He made no secret of his admiration for the Attlee government, the founding of the Welfare State and Harold Wilson, but beyond that he rarely volunteered his political views and kept his voting habits a secret, like many of his generation. I did learn after his death, however, that as a young man he had actually been a member of the Labour Party, and had travelled as far as Brighton attending conferences.

Now I lift a tin out from the foot of the wardrobe to learn the story of his National Service. Called up when he was 18, medically examined on 26 July 1950 in Aberdeen, and pronounced as Grade 1 in terms of physical fitness with ‘a fresh complexion’, he was to present himself at the Royal Signals, Catterick Camp, near Richmond in Yorkshire on Thursday, 21 September. His full-time service lasted two years and two weeks; he was promoted to lance corporal in 1951, then to sergeant the following year, being based at Reading, on Salisbury Plain and at Osnabrück in Germany. He was due to take part in the Korean conflict, but contracted frostbite, which may well have saved his life since many of his fellow soldiers never returned.

Upon his discharge from full-time service, his conduct was described as ‘very good’, with the following testimonial:

He has been employed as a wireless operator during his stay with this regiment. He has worked well and has shown that he can absorb theoretical detail. He can be relied upon to carry out duties without military supervision. Those serving under him respected him and did exactly as they were told or asked, proving that he had complete control.

Back in Scotland, he joined the workforce on the Great Glen Hydroelectric Scheme, constructing the mighty Dundreggan Dam. Situated in a wild, treacherous wilderness near Invermoriston, a few miles beyond Loch Ness, the dam crowned the first underground hydroelectric power station in Britain and brought affordable electricity to the people of the Highlands.

The Scots had proved themselves an indomitable breed in military service, and many of them were being welcomed into the police force in the years that followed the Second World War. So once work was completed at Dundreggan, Charlie moved to Glasgow to join the Ministry of Civil Aviation Constabulary.

The east–west divide in Scotland has blurred now, but in those times it was pronounced. Glaswegians were a noisier breed than their surly neighbours. My father rarely spoke to me of his time in Glasgow, but it was a city he held little fondness for until he returned for a weekend break the year before he died and found himself delighted by it; his earlier displeasure was probably a symptom of homesickness.

Whatever the case, his time there was short. A dissatisfaction with Glasgow but an affinity with police work inspired him to apply to join the Metropolitan Police, and he was called to a Medical and Selection Board at 201–205 Borough High Street, on Tuesday, 30 December 1958, so a torn card in a drawer tells me. Successful, after Hendon Police Training School (where one visiting lecturer was the celebrated ‘Fabian of the Yard’3) he was stationed at Islington Green. He came down from Cullen early the following year and moved into police accommodation at the Olive Section House in Canonbury, bringing with him the framed black-and-white aerial photograph of his home town which now hangs on the wall behind me.

A future colleague, Dave Cant, tells me that:

So many Scots rose through the ranks to become senior officers quite swiftly; they’d proved themselves during the war or afterwards as a no-nonsense bunch and had shown they had the impetus to uproot. You and I are Londoners, but we both know London can be a very lonely place. People don’t talk to each other. You had to prove you were capable of surviving, and Charlie did.1

The crime rate rose sharply now; 1959 saw indictable offences reach 160,000, the highest recorded figure to date. Five years later, the figure topped a quarter of a million.2

These were the dying days of the bobby on the beat, before Britain moved from ‘deterrent to reactive policing’.3 The early sixties were definitely not the Swinging Sixties. In fact, a few ghosts of Victorian London were still roaming around. The music halls may have been derelict and the docks running dry, but for the hobos at least, time stood still. My father used to speak of how in those days ‘a genuine old-fashioned tramp would lay all his money and possessions out beside him when he put his head down for the night, so that if someone wanted to rob him, they could do it without harming him’, and that ‘in those days, if you gave a beggar a couple of bob, you could be fairly certain he’d spend it on a bacon roll’.

Vagrancy was rife, perhaps boosted by the number of men displaced or traumatised by wartime experiences, and therefore down-and-outs made for a significant part of a policeman’s lot at that time. I remember driving through Islington with my father one Sunday evening several decades later, and him pointing to a doorway and telling a story; frustratingly, the only line of it I can now remember is ‘there was a dead vagrant in the hallway and I wouldn’t go upstairs’. Perhaps this had been his first encounter with a corpse (although he never got used to post-mortems, and said autopsies on meth drinkers were often the most stomach-churning).

In the days before thermal underwear, it wasn’t unknown for policemen to wear pyjamas under their uniforms on cold nights. When the cold got too much to bear, a solution could be to escort a fragrant vagrant to what was known as ‘The Spike’ (possibly named after the metal spike on which admissions tickets issued at the local police station were placed). There, paraffins4 were fed, put in a bath and given a change of clothes. It was a grim place, but taking them in kept a cold copper off the street for a couple of hours.

My father was often encouraged to write a book of his police experiences, but it never happened, probably due to modesty as much as endless DIY commitments. Nevertheless, occasionally over a flask of tea at the side of the road on holiday, he’d reminisce about incidents from those days on the beat, such as the time when a woman made a complaint that the man occupying the flat opposite was exposing himself to her every evening. When my father commented that you couldn’t get a clear view from where he was, she replied, ‘You can if you stand over there.’

A significant case while he was stationed at Islington began as a complaint made by the local lending library that books were being defaced. The perpetrators weren’t selective; the seventy-two books ranged from children’s stories to Betjeman’s poetry. One of the library staff was suspicious of two rather shifty local men, who turned out to be playwright Joe Orton and his lover (eventually his killer) Kenneth Halliwell, exasperated at the library’s anodyne array of reading material. They were both sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and fined £262. The vandalised book covers, which viewed today are rather a scream, are now on display at Islington Museum.

My mother, Barbara, was an East End girl working in a wool shop on Essex Road when she met my father on a double date:

One of the first things I remember him dealing with was up at Camden Passage; long before it was gentrified, it was where a lot of prostitutes had rooms, and I remember a tale where a rich client paid one of them five pounds for her to strip off and throw cream buns at him.

‘If we keep seeing each other like this we’ll end up getting married’, said one evening as the couple were passing The Marksman pub on Hackney Road, was the closest she got to a proposal. They married in 1962, and resided at 240c Clapham Road. My brother Martin was born almost a year to the day later, but money was tight and hours were anti-social. ‘I wondered what I’d let myself in for,’ she remembers. ‘I was newly married with a baby, and I used to hang out of the window all night watching the traffic and wondering if he was ever coming home.’

By now he had joined the CID, with which he toured the stations of East London over the next decade. ‘Some of the dregs of society you see in those thirty-odd years in the job are hard to conceive,’ reflects Dave Cant, ‘but Charlie being down the East End in those times would have been quite something.’ Comedy was essential if you were to maintain your sanity amid the tragedy. He continues:

Charlie and I first met on ‘E’ division in 1966, down at Holborn. A hairdresser called Patricia Langham had been found dead in her flat in Kilburn, naked on her bed with her arms folded across her. She’d been banged on the head and sexually assaulted. It transpired that she’d had some trouble with the ballcock on her toilet and called out a plumber, then called him back when she’d not been satisfied with the job he’d done, and in a fit of temper he’d killed her.

We had no leads at all, but we noticed that the handle on the toilet chain looked very new and had a print on it. So we set about interviewing every plumber in North London. And when we got down to the last few, this particular one was never in. Finally we saw him and he put his hands up to it and confessed, but he was baffled at what had taken us so long. It transpired that after the murder, he’d taken an overdose and when they’d rushed him into the New End Hospital in Hampstead, a nurse who was new had gone through his pockets to try and find some identification and opened a sealed envelope which contained his confession. Fearing she’d get into trouble for opening it, she’d thrown it away. And actually in the Occurrence Book at the station that evening, there were two entries, one after the other on the page, one being the murder, and the other this attempted suicide!

The other funny thing on that one was that while Charlie and I were searching the flat a second time we found two theatre tickets down the back of the sofa. The governor, Ray Dagg, sent officers to sit on either side of the seats on the night of the performance, and who should turn up and sit down there? Only a PC from the station and his mistress: the tickets had fallen out of his pocket when he’d been searching with us a few days earlier!

Charlie and I got our experience on jobs like that. Years later if Barbara was watching something on telly he wasn’t interested in he’d go upstairs and telephone me and we’d laugh back at these things. He was a very shrewd man with no airs and graces. I miss him taking the piss out of me.

I came on the scene, as my father used to put it, in 1972, by which time the family had moved out to Essex, the traditional dormitory for East London folk. Around this time, as a detective sergeant, he did his first stint on the Flying Squad, then based at Scotland Yard. (It was tremendously arresting in the school playground to be able to say your dad was in the real-life Sweeney5 during the time that the television series was being broadcast.)

Charlie arrived at Scotland Yard during the first exposure of widespread corruption6 that changed public perception of the police forever in the mid-seventies; he said that at that time if you had a bit of information, you were scared to let anybody know because you had absolutely no idea who you could trust. The commissioner who did the most to stop the rot, Sir Robert Mark, reflected years later that for some officers ‘virtue became fashionable … the great majority of the CID must not only have been honest but anxious for reform’.4

A collection of engraved silver tankards glinting on the top of the Welsh dresser are the souvenirs of the stations Charlie served at through the seventies. Working his way around City Road, Forest Gate, West Ham and Plaistow as a detective inspector produced its fair share of memorable moments. At Plaistow in November 1976, he investigated an arson attack on Ye Old Black Bull pub on Stratford High Street, which had been bought by footballer Bobby Moore and renamed Mooro’s. It was one of a string of ill-advised business ventures for Moore, and the fifth act of sabotage directed at him. In March 1972, the Country Club in Chigwell that he ran with Sean Connery had been damaged in an arson attack; the following month, his office was burgled; in January 1973, thieves broke into his clothing warehouse and attempted to set fire to it; and two months later his clothing factory was vandalised. With Mooro’s, an arsonist struck a week before the doors were due to open, causing £6,000 worth of damage.5

Speaking about the case on television in 2002, Charlie said:

It looked as though white spirit or turpentine had been thrown about the place and set alight. We did all the forensic examinations, but in that area as usual, nobody’s talking. We put it down to perhaps a little bit of gangsterism in the background, but we never got to the bottom of it. Bobby Moore was never a suspect; he was a footballer, and I think he was a bit naïve. He didn’t always choose the best sort of people to get involved in business with.6

A policeman’s experiences of humanity are frequently a cocktail of the macabre and the eccentric, and Charlie experienced one notably dreadful example of this at West Ham, when a man visiting his elderly upstairs neighbours to complain about a leak found the skeleton of the husband lying in the bed. He had died in his sleep ten years previously, and his widow, Mrs Violet Blackholly, who ‘hoarded everything she obtained’, had claimed ever since that he had left her. At the inquest, it was called ‘an incredible story which a coroner rarely comes across in his career’.7

My brother recalls that at West Ham, ‘a new young PC was threatened with a gun. Dad spotted him in the canteen afterwards and realised there was something wrong as he was holding his newspaper upside down. He was having a complete breakdown; his career was over. Dad was very upset by it.’ Dave Cant adds, ‘Charlie was so aware of those sorts of situations. He was a tough man but he had a very caring presence about him.’

A letter sent in sympathy to my mother after my father’s death refers to a case which I remember my grandmother telling me was the only time she saw my father not managing to quite shake something off when he came home from work. The letter is from Dick Kirby, a former police officer and now a crime writer:

When Charlie arrived at West Ham, morale was at an all-time low, but it did not take long before his dynamic type of leadership made itself known. Detective Inspectors at West Ham were not known for making arrests. Charlie put that to rights when he was informed of the death of a child in mysterious circumstances. He simply walked across the road to the hospital, handcuffed both of the graceless parents and marched them straight back into the charge room.8

It was the diligence of legendary local GP and police surgeon Hannah Hedwig Striesow,7 a powerhouse of humanity who had fearlessly refused to allow the child to be returned to his parents, that had seen the boy secured with his grandparents, a couple who were, in my father’s words, ‘rough, but good’. When their custody of him was brought to an end, the result was tragedy. I can still recall my grandmother saying to me that ‘Dad would come home at that time, lift you up and cuddle you, and say, “Hello, I’ve missed you,” jokingly, but you could tell that this had weighed on his mind’. The case would not be the last time that my father was critical of the actions of social workers in cases involving children.

A second stint on the Flying Squad in the late seventies placed him under the command of Michael Taylor, who tells me that:

his reputation was very high indeed. A very determined detective with a bulldog quality. I wouldn’t have wanted him chasing me if I was a villain, that’s for sure. Notably at this time he arrested armed robber James Moody8 after a siege in South London. Actually, Moody subsequently escaped from Brixton and years later was shot dead in a Hackney pub while playing a solitary game of pool.9

The Flying Squad then underwent a reorganisation, being split into four units, based at Rigg Approach, Tower Bridge, Barnes and Finchley, the last of which my father was posted to in 1981. It becomes clear to me now that the next three years were the happiest of his life. Thoughts of the early eighties create a myriad of happy impressions in my mind, and I fancy that this is in no small part due to him reaching the peak of professional satisfaction at this time, and that somehow enthusing us all. He made the first of many television appearances soon after he arrived at Finchley, clad in his duffle coat, at the scene of a violent robbery outside Barclays Bank in Marylebone High Street.9 When I went into school the following morning, it seemed as if everyone in my class had been watching.

I once got talking to two former armed robbers in a Fulham pub, who spoke wistfully of a golden age of smash-and-grabs now long past (because most cash is moved around electronically nowadays, and also, there is more money to be made through drugs). I was struck by how they used the words ‘job’ for a raid and ‘working’ for the planning stages, without any hint of irony, perhaps to give their activities a veneer of respectability. Armed robbers (‘blaggers’) and gangsters may be two of the least defendable breeds of villain, threatening people’s lives with no psychological motivation beyond greed. Yet strangely, their public images render them as folk heroes to many. Buster Edwards,10 who my father described as ‘a vicious little bugger’, was the subject of a rom-com, Buster (1988); similarly, the Krays’ legend seems indestructible, due to a combination of nostalgia and cunning spin. My father once told me of how, during their reign of terror, the twins menaced the owner of a television shop into giving them a free set, which they then donated to a local old people’s home – with maximum publicity.

Cops and robbers is a game for two teams, and as much as the bad guys talk just like they do on the television, so do the good guys. Many a time I remember hearing my father on the hall telephone using phrases such as ‘nick him’. My friend Jonathan and I would occasionally be chauffeured to school at this time by him and his driver, the affable and assured Harry Duncan, with the police radio chattering away all the while. I remember how fairly alarming exchanges would float into the car which the two old pros up front never seemed remotely fazed by; it was all in a day’s work for them. Another of Charlie’s colleagues, Gordon Reynolds, endorses my view of his happiness at Finchley, explaining that ‘we had a tremendous team. I think we arrested more people in the process of committing armed robberies than anyone had ever done. There were seventeen successful operations in one year, we could do no wrong. And Charlie was leading that, all credit to him.’10 But it’s fascinating to discover that things didn’t bode well at all at the start, as Dave Cant explains:

The previous DCI at Finchley was Tony Lundy, who ran all the supergrasses; at one stage he’d had about fifty or sixty armed robbers in custody awaiting trial. Prisoners were naming names in return for lighter sentences. But he was too successful; there were concerns about these fellas who’d done the crimes getting lighter sentences for snouting their mates. He had an informant who was getting thousands of pounds in 10 per cent rewards for information, and it was making people uneasy. So he was moved from Finchley rather suddenly, and in came Charlie. I arrived there just after he did, expecting Lundy to still be in charge, walked into the office, and this voice went: ‘Canty, you bastard, put the kettle on!’ To be honest, I worshipped him. I worshipped the ground he trod on, and I’m not just saying that.

But he confided in me that he was deeply unhappy with the situation he’d found himself in. Lundy was coming back to Finchley every evening, tidying up on a few jobs, and after saying hello, was going out and chatting to the other men on the team and taking them up to The Torrington, which was the pub we used. Charlie got a sense that things were being put around that he wasn’t party to.

He was a very different personality; Lundy was brash and upfront, with a bottle of scotch in his desk, whereas Charlie grew geraniums on the windowsill; outwardly he might have thrown them a bit at first. But he very discreetly put a stop to what was going on, and within months the results he started getting on pavement jobs11 were superb, I mean really top quality arrests. He was respected in no small part because he was straightforward and honest.

Gordon Reynolds continues:

When I arrived at Finchley, morale was very low. After a few weeks Lundy was moved on, and Charlie had the thankless task of coming in to pick up the pieces. It wasn’t an easy job at all. What was so rare was that he would always back you up if he thought your intentions were good, and that is so rare.

Colin Hockerday agrees, summing him up as a ‘detective’s detective’:

One night around midnight I got a call from a guy I knew who owned a hotel in Acton. He was suspicious about a rather cagey guest at the bar who was flying out of Heathrow the following day. I got dressed and breezed in there as if I was just passing. The bloke wanted to order a minicab in the morning so I arranged for an officer to pose as a driver, but somehow the bloke tumbled and had it away on his toes. We headed to Heathrow to see if we could spot him, but had no luck. On the way back a report came over the radio of a robbery at Kutchinsky’s, the jewellers on Bond Street; they’d made off in a Rolls-Royce that belonged to Mike Yarwood.12 It turned out there was a connection, but at the time I had to go back to Charlie and explain what I’d been up to. It was a time when he was under huge pressure over budgets, but rather than offload that pressure on me, he heard me out and said I was quite right to have acted as I did. It was so refreshing to have a boss who allowed you to have a bit of initiative.11

‘Armed robbery’ and ‘violent crime’ are hackneyed phrases, but petrifying situations to be faced with. To combat them, a team needs to be fearless, loyal and staunch. Leadership of such a unit is a formidable task, but ‘he was quite brilliant at getting the whole team to gel’. Gordon Reynolds explains:

In those situations, facing blokes with sawn-off shotguns, the adrenaline is pumping through your veins. We tailed a gang who were going to rob the Nationwide at Hatch End once; I remember we steamed in and your dad stuck a gun in a robber’s ear at the counter. You go in very hard and don’t give them the chance to do anything, but it’s afterwards when you’re sat in the canteen having a cup of tea that as you stand up, your legs turn to jelly and the danger you were in hits home.

But there were plenty of laughs at Finchley, as Dave Cant testifies:

One morning Charlie was issuing the guns, while my job was to do the tea. I knew my station in life. One of the men was handed his gun and thought the safety catch was on. I’d just started to pour the tea out of this huge urn when a bullet came screaming out of the incident room, through the door, into the tea urn and out the other side, liquid gushing out like in one of those old Westerns when someone shoots a water tank. Suddenly they all come running in saying, ‘Canty, Canty, you all right?’ I said, ‘I’m fine, but the tea’s fucked!’ They covered up the bullet hole in the door with an Elastoplast that stayed there for years. Actually, it’s probably still there now.

Underneath the camaraderie, life was being risked on a regular basis, but the only hints I ever got of this were my mother occasionally saying, ‘Oh he woke up with a start in the night, dreamt of being shot again,’ and my memory of him enduring a stomach ulcer for a time.

This was a London of rogues and rascals, a London of blaggers, of crime reporters with Sohoitis13 and con men preying on the outwardly honest: Charlie knew well both the streets and the characters that pestered them. After he had retired, I was with him one afternoon in the West End when he was spotted by a man doing the three-card trick,14 who promptly did a runner. ‘Some of the characters he knew,’ says Dave Cant. ‘He could talk to people, a great skill. If he needed a bit of info, he knew where to ask around.’ Having gleaned the term from The Sweeney, as a child I asked him once, ‘Dad, do you have informants?’ ‘Don’t ask such things,’ was his gentle reply.

After three years, he was promoted to detective superintendent, and his time at Finchley was at an end. After a modest celebration with his team, he came home and sat quietly in the living room. It was one of the only times I knew him not quite manage to keep his emotions in check. Only now, after getting an insight into those glory days, do I understand why.

He was now appointed one of the superintendents on ‘3 Area’ (East London) Major Investigation Pool, and stationed at Romford. Those final three years were to prove powerful and triumphant, although the mystery of 80-year-old local eccentric Dorothy Cleveland,12 who was found strangled in her flat, remained the only unsolved murder he investigated. (He did confess to me he was fairly certain that a door-to-door salesman was responsible, the motive being theft, though he could never prove it.)

Immediately preceding the case that this book centres on was one that was equally harrowing, equally significant criminologically, and one that must also be remembered.13

A 14-year-old girl, Keighley Barton, disappeared one morning in August 1985 while walking her dog on Wanstead Flats. The dog, a German shepherd, whose appearance alone would have warded off an unknown attacker, returned home to Keighley’s mother, Theresa, visibly traumatised.

The police soon unearthed a horrific history of sexual abuse that had been committed by stepfather Ronald Barton for most of Keighley’s life. Theresa had initially been unaware of his appalling record of past offences, which included convictions for grievous bodily harm and seven sexual offences against teenage girls, one of which had resulted in a jail sentence. When Keighley was 8, Barton had been charged with two acts of gross indecency towards her, for which he had received a twelve-month suspended sentence. He had been arrested again in 1982, but the case was dropped on the day of the trial because Keighley refused to testify against him. Two years later, he was arrested and charged again, only for Keighley to again withdraw her allegations at the eleventh hour.

The child was placed in council care, but regularly ran away and returned home. The abuse of mother and daughter by Barton, sometimes at gunpoint, continued until 1985, when Theresa called the police again and took out a court order to protect them both from him. Shortly after this, she met a new partner. Barton was incensed, and began spying on her and making abusive telephone calls.

That this had been allowed to persist paints a deplorable picture of social services and the legal system at that time. At last, however, Barton was under arrest, though he denied all knowledge of Keighley’s disappearance. My father believed he had abducted her to abuse her again, and had then murdered her to prevent her testifying against him, as well as to enact revenge on her mother. I recall him telling me that when he visited Barton’s parents to search the house, Barton’s father quipped, ‘I’m not going to lift a finger to help you, but if anything’s happened to that kid, he’ll have done it.’

The search for Keighley lasted for fifteen months. Her mother received two letters from her claiming she was alive and denying any abuse had taken place, but my father was convinced she was dead and had been forced to write them in her final moments; and so, despite no body being found, he charged Barton with murder. There were unlikely sightings of Keighley as far afield as Ireland in the months that followed; one of her teachers also reported seeing her shopping locally, which was a serious challenge to the already almost unprecedented aim of securing a murder conviction without a body being found.

On a Sunday afternoon a few weeks before the trial, my father was just about to carve when the telephone rang. The message was that Barton, on remand at Brixton, had ‘something to say’. Charlie drove across London, and when he confronted him, found that all he’d wanted to say was ‘fuck off’. Barton then turned to the prison officer and said, ‘Take me back to my cell.’ My father jovially replied, ‘I hope you look forward to the Christmas cards I’ll be sending you counting down the years, Ron. Inside they’ll read “one over thirty”, “two over thirty” … keep an eye out for them.’ I understand now why my father would always jokingly refer to him over the years as ‘my pal, Ron’. How else do you cope with spending several months of your life dealing with such a creature other than to cast them as an object of ridicule?

In October 1986, the jury took five hours to find Ronald Barton guilty of murder. He was sentenced to life, the judge describing him as ‘an evil, cynical and depraved man from whom society, your wife and family deserve to be protected for many years’. My father had achieved one of the only convictions for murder without a corpus delicti in British criminal history.