Backstory Page 7

  The following day happened to be a Saturday. The investigation had been at full throttle since Tuesday. The D/S in charge of Outside Inquiries, John Murray, hadn’t had a day off since Christmas. At eight o’clock in the morning, Steve conferenced with his two Tactical Interview Advisers. To press charges, he needed either an admission of guilt from the two suspects, an admission from someone else, or conclusive forensic linking either or both to the dead victim. In all three cases, the interview teams had so far drawn a blank. Both TIAs agreed that there was nothing left to throw at these guys and that there was therefore no point in going to the magistrates court for a final 36-hour extension.

  Steve nodded. He needed to clear the ground beneath Becton’s feet. He wanted to review the evidence, consolidate what seemed useful, and plot investigative pathways forward. He ordered the washing machines in both the suspects’ premises to be seized for full forensic analysis. The work on the car and the trailer was on-going. Under the circumstances, there was no point in hanging on to either prisoner. That morning they were both granted police bail and told to report back in twelve week’s time.

  Later that day, I met one of the D/Cs who’d been with the lead suspect when he got the news that he was to be released. How had he reacted? “The guy broke down,” he said. “Completely lost it. Blubbed. Shook hands. Wanted to see his mate. The works.” So had he expected to walk free? “Fuck no, of course not.”

  I passed this news on to Steve. It didn’t appear to surprise him.

  Nearly three weeks later, Steve invited me to an all-day review of Becton’s progress to date. A series of power-point presentations established that the victim was probably killed at the Deposition Site in the woods, and had died from asphyxia having been garrotted by the bungee cord. He’d got the knife wounds the same night but the broken rib was an older injury.

  The blood in the lead suspect’s kitchen had turned out to be animal, seemingly the household cat tormented by fleas, and there’d been no indications of a cleaned-up crime scene. There followed a detailed profile of the victim and a fast-expanding army of suspects from Andy Harrington.

  The victim, he said, had mental health issues, drug issues, and childhood issues. He moved from address to address and never stayed longer than six weeks. He spent most of his life in the middle of a web of stolen goods, sundry drugs, and unsettled debts. He was regularly beaten up by a number of associates, sometimes for good reason, sometimes because they fancied it. These guys, who were all in the frame for the killing, included petty thieves, fences, drunks, drug dealers, shoplifters, fraudsters, housebreakers, psychopaths and serial shaggers. As a cast list for novels to come, as you might imagine, this gave me serious pause for thought.

  The Becton review ended with a longish list of to-do items which would carry the investigation forward. They included offender profiling, further cell-site analysis, an extended trawl for witnesses, a possible slot on Crimewatch, and the preparation of detailed interview packages ahead of the re-arrest of the lead suspects and perhaps others.

  The arrests were made two months later on the morning of Tuesday 3rd April. More than a year later, two men stood trial at Winchester Crown Court.

  On 31 May 2002, Raymond John Hunt and Paul Fawley were convicted of murder. As far as the judge could determine, Hunt had an argument in the victim’s van and stabbed him. The victim begged to be taken to hospital. Instead, Hunt phoned Fawley to enlist his help. They met and drove in convoy to the wood where the victim was strangled. Both Hunt and Fawley then headed south to the Fareham industrial estate and set fire to the victim’s van.

  Both men later made representations for a minimum term sentence, by which time they both admitted involvement in the murder. According to Hunt, Fawley strangled the victim while Hunt looked on in horror. According to Fawley, Hunt strangled the victim while Fawley stood by in shock. Dismissing their representations, the judge sentenced them both to imprisonment for life. He also complemented the Operation Becton squad, under its SIO Det Supt Steve Watts, for their diligence and expedition.

  There’s a postscript to Becton which deserves a mention. Once the jury had retired to consider their verdict, Steve got a note from the victim’s family. They wanted a meet. Steve and John Murray, the D/S who’d handled Outside Enquiries, were happy to oblige. The victim’s sister, who’d maintained close contact with the unfolding enquiry through Becton’s Family Liaison Officers, said how surprised she’d been that the police had gone to so much bother over someone who’d had a record like her brother’s. Whatever the verdict, she wanted Steve and his team to know that she and the family were grateful for the efforts they’d made, and presented him with a small glass plaque inscribed with thanks from the family. “I was really touched,” Steve told me later. “You always do your best but a gesture like that really matters.”

  Four

  As you might have gathered, the experience of shadowing Operation Becton was a bit of a turning point in my career as a crime writer. The above account is, at best, a summary of those insanely busy days and doesn’t begin to tally the sheer volume of evidential detail that an investigation like this must necessarily throw up. SlightIy dazed by it all, I came away with a genuine admiration for any conductor who can keep an orchestra like Becton’s in tune. Whatever the pressure, Steve Watts marshalled his troops with a confidence that was itself remarkable. If you live in Hampshire and are unlucky enough to have someone you love murdered, you’ll get quality service. If, on the other hand, some drunken scrote kicks your wing mirror to pieces in the middle of the night, you might be disappointed by what doesn’t happen afterwards.

  So where next for my fictional hero? I knew by now that force-wide there were seven D/Is on Major Crimes. So why shouldn’t Joe Faraday be one of them?

  At this point I needed to float the idea past one of my many new contacts. His name was John Ashworth and – guess what – he was a D/I on Major Crimes. He’d come highly recommended by J-R and we’d already met a couple of times before I embarked on the near-vertical learning curve that was Becton. John Ashworth, said J-R, was a bit of a loner, a bit of a maverick. He was deeply pro-active, played his cards extremely close to his chest, and rarely shared information with anyone. This sounded like a bit of a handicap when it came to letting me into his professional world but I waited a couple of days for J-R to put a word in then lifted the phone. John Ashworth invited me along to his office at Kingston Crescent and the moment I stepped in I knew that J-R was on the money. This guy had madness in his eyes.

  As it happens, I love people on the edge. They’re prone to make instant judgments and if they decide you’re OK you’ll never look back. John, I think, decided I was OK. We talked for maybe an hour and it quickly became apparent that he enjoyed poking the organisation in all kinds of ways that didn’t necessarily marry with accepted procedure. The two phrases I scribbled in my notebook were “impatient as fuck” and “tight as a clam”.

  This was a guy, as J-R had promised, who liked nothing better than to grab an inquiry, make it his own, shield it from all interference, and conjure a result. I sensed there was a little of Paul Winter in this approach but John Ashworth was a thinker, too, and that put him squarely on Faraday’s patch. Like both my guys, John had no patience with time-serving or what he termed “all the managerial bollocks.” In his view, there was a lot to being a good detective that you simply couldn’t teach. You went into every situation – managerial or otherwise – watching your back. With the bad guys you were wise not to think in black and white. You had to talk and keep talking. You had to regard everyone as a potential source of priceless information and develop ways of winkling it out of them. Above all, he said, you had to be thinking enemy all the time.

  Paranoia, in John’s case, is too meager a word. He really did regard himself as the sole recruit in some private army – or at least I thought he did until I began to get to know him better and realized that he had a great deal
of time for a handful of fellow detectives including the scary Steve Watts and the matchless Andy Harrington. These were can-do guys, very much in the John Ashworth mould, and liked nothing better than cracking-on. So where would this developing series of meets lead me?

  Early on, I sussed that John’s preparedness to share anything remotely confidential in terms of the Job was strictly limited. He’d be more than happy to tell me how useless he was when faced with a promotions board. Once, given some twat scenario for which he he’d just been allotted ten minutes to prepare an Operations Order, he politely slid the sheet of paper back across the desk. Why? Because the circumstances described bore absolutely no resemblance to real life. “Strategic perspectives” was another phrase that made him laugh. What the fuck did “strategic perspectives” actually mean? Where was a “strategic perspective” when you really needed one?

  This was a lovely mind-set, tailor-made for the kind of fiction I wanted to write, but when it came to real secrets John would eyeball me for a second or two then offer a regretful shake of the head. No way would he open up about who really ran the cocaine scene in Pompey. Neither would he volunteer a single detail of any of his current jobs. This was naturally a bit of a disappointment but as we got to know each other we evolved a mutual understanding that served as makeshift rules of engagement. Procedural stuff was never a problem. He’d explain why things happened the way they did and exactly where I might find an opportunity to go off-piste. When it came to sorting out the kind of story I wanted to tell I could ping ideas off him and he’d tell me where – in real life – it wouldn’t work. Once I’d finished the first draft of whatever novel I happened to be writing he’d be more than happy to read it. Beyond that, we’d have another pint, get a bit more pissed and laugh a lot.

  By now it was summer. Becton was en route to the Crown Court and I was sitting on the beach wondering how to put Joe Faraday to the test. There was no way I wasn’t going to build in all that Becton research but I knew that I had to avoid the real facts of the case. The last thing I wanted was 400 pages of Pompey low life featuring a shallow grave, a bungee cord and a couple of cable ties.

  By now, thanks partly to conversations I’d had with members of the Becton squad, I’d become very aware of a growing problem with kids in the city. They appeared on the police radar because they generated so much aggravation – a mix of shoplifting, other forms of petty theft, and randomly pointless acts of criminal damage. These were the kids who set fire to waste bins and empty properties, who took a perverse glee in keying brand new cars, who nicked charity boxes from shops and church halls, who found their way onto the tops of Pompey’s soaring municipal tower blocks and bombarded passers-by with little splatty bomblets of dog shit rolled in Kleenex, who hung around on the street just waiting for trouble, or the opportunity to hurry it along. They were also into graffiti and there came a moment when this vague curiosity of mine hardened into something more focused.

  This was a kid I judged to be in his early teens. He was thin: torn jeans, stained hoodie, brand new Nikes. He was using a black aerosol on the freshly painted wall surrounding an up-market apartment block. Do the Planet a Favour, he scrawled. Kill Yourself.

  This was either class war or street wisdom straight out of the existentialist handbook. It might have belonged in an Albert Camus novel. I needed to talk to someone in the know, like a social worker. J-R’s partner, Rhona Lucas, sounded perfect. Part detective, part priest, she worked with persistent young offenders in the city. We met at the Brook Centre, an unlovely building in the heart of Somerstown, one of Pompey’s dodgier areas. A boy of maybe nine was sitting in the play area, spinning his chair this way and that, kicking out aimlessly at anything he could reach. From down the corridor came the thunder of drums. When I asked Rhona what was going on she told me it was an anger management class. Better to have lots of noise, she said, than yet another bill for broken furniture.

  Later we talked about the boy in the chair. We’ll call him Mattie. He hadn’t been to school for more than two years but he was a champion shoplifter, regularly emptying Woolies of Pokemon cards, and had near-professional tumbling skills. He’d spent most of his young life on the run from various authority figures, and had lately been adopted by a gang of older boys who’d taught him how to TWOC cars.

  I asked about his family. Hadn’t any one been in touch with them? Rhona looked pained. A succession of step fathers had driven this lad onto the streets. Only this week, Rhona had tried to get in touch with mum but her phone had been cut off after non-payment of the bill and she’d run out of credit on her mobile. A couple of visits had drawn a volley of abuse through a locked door. The last remaining option was some kind of letter but that was also a non-starter because the woman couldn’t read.

  Mattie was a child, said Rhona, who’d grown up in the bareness of a flat without a table. He’d never sat down to share a meal. His mother, beset by issues of her own, was hopeless as a provider and as a result young Mattie was almost permanently hungry. He’d learned how to beg money in pub gardens during the summer, and he knew he could eat food straight off the supermarket shelves without troubling the lady at the checkout, but living hand to mouth like this had turned him into a loner. He doesn’t let strangers close, she said. His behaviour can be seriously challenging. I nodded. I was still looking at Mattie, at the ever-revolving chair, at the flailing legs. She might have been talking about a wild animal.

  This image stayed with me for weeks to come. Thanks to Rhona I began to meet other kids, hear other stories. I was also put in touch with other workers in the field, men and women as patient as experienced as Rhona herself. One of them had done time himself, a couple of years inside for violence and affray that had sharpened his understanding of what was going so badly wrong. This is what he told me.

  “What you’ve got to understand is that these aren’t deprived kids, kids starved of offers of help. They might have had a shit upbringing, or no upbringing at all, but now they’re surrounded by people who genuinely want to make a difference. We’re talking the whole pack of cards here: the Old Bill, social workers, church people, educational welfare, probation, down-home do-gooders, the lot. But it doesn’t work and you know why? Because these kids are beyond feeling, beyond reach. They haven’t a clue about structure or boundaries. They’ve become insensate. They don’t give a stuff about the causes or consequences of what they do, about the kinds of lives they lead. But what they have going for them is what they share, what they all agree on, and that’s about how empty and fucking pointless most of life is. These kids are in it for the laugh, for the crack, for each other. They love money, or the idea of money, because they figure it’ll buy them anything: freedom, excitement, status, pleasure, even a moment or two of power. That’s all bollocks, and they’ll twig it in the end, but in the meantime these kids are really dangerous – and you know why? Because they have no fear.”

  This keyed in with something that had just happened to my youngest son, Jack. He was at uni in Manchester studying psychology. A couple of weeks earlier, while he was taking a bath in the shared student house, his mate had answered a knock on the front door. The next thing Jack knew was a black guy with a gun telling him to get out of the bath. Naked, face down on the hall carpet, he waited for half an hour with the gun to his head while the guy’s accomplice took debit cards to the nearest ATM. If the PIN numbers were wrong, Jack and his mate would get a bullet each. That evening he lost £200, his lap top, and one or two other items. He didn’t sleep much for the next week or so and spent a lot of time trying to figure out what it took to pull a stunt like this.

  The attending police were moderately sympathetic but pointed out that students were easy marks. These kind of stuff, they said, was happening more and more often. In the end, more for his own peace of mind than anything else, Jack settled on an explanation of sorts. The word he used on the phone was anomie. According to Wikipedia, anomie described “the breakdown of social
bonds between an individual and their community ties, with fragmentation of social identity and rejection of self-regulatory values”. A bit wordy, perhaps, but near-perfect for what I was picking up in my conversations around Pompey. Anomie, indeed.

  And so Mattie, and all the other Matties, became Doodie. Doodie is 11 years old. He hasn’t seen the inside of a classroom for a very long time. His mum is on the game to pay her smack bills. A series of step-dads have driven him onto the streets. Near-feral, young Doodie is well known to a selection of taxi-drivers, pub doormen, bus drivers, park rangers, postmen, and the nice man at a supermarket bakery who gives him hot rolls round the back in return for the promise of unspecified sexual favours.

  Doodie is deeply streetwise. In winter, he knows the safest places to kip: chiefly abandoned buildings with ill-fitting windows and dodgy locks. When it gets really cold, he sleeps on the floor of a council flat occupied by an 18 yr old prostitute. By and large he knows how to avoid trouble, especially from the mad and the bad and the crazy old guy who always wants to set his dog on you, but a couple of times he’s been nicked by the police. This doesn’t bother him in the least. On the first occasion, when he was just eight, they couldn’t use handcuffs because his wrists were too small. The second time, they had to give him a box to stand on in the dock. When the magistrates read the social worker’s report and put him in council care, he absconded within a week.