Michael Dibdin - Dirty Tricks

And I had in fact peaked, although of course I didn’t see it that way. In the two years following my belated conversion to the doctrine of self-help and free enterprise my life had changed out of all recognition. There seemed no reason to suppose that the changes would stop there. On the contrary, I was full of plans and projects of every kind. Alison and I were ineluctably drawing closer together, and our complete union appeared to be just a matter of time. I dreamed of a large gothic revival mansion overlooking the Parks, where Alison would preside with effortless grace over the elaborate rituals of North Oxford social life. At other times I found myself attracted to the idea of a manor house in a Cotswold village, a gem of classic restraint and rustic charm where we would keep dogs and horses. Then there would be long lazy summers at the cottage in the Dordogne, and, once Rebecca was off our hands, impromptu trips to Venice and Vienna, to Mauritius and Morocco.

Nor were these mere idle fantasies. We had the money, we had the freedom, and even more important we had the taste and the style, the breadth of vision, the experience. But they were to count for nothing, and all because of a man named Hugh Starkey.

If a dramatist were to take the liberty of ascribing what Aristotle calls the catastrophe — an apt enough term in this case — to a totally extraneous character who pops up from nowhere towards the end of the last act, he would rightly be ridiculed. Life does it all the time, though. Forget anything I may have said about the reasons for my present circumstances. The disastrous turn which events were about to take was due not to anything I did or failed to do, but to a man I never even met.

In August 1988 a group of masked men ambushed a Securicor van in Wolverhampton, seriously injuring one of the guards. Following a tip-off from an informant, Hugh Starkey was picked up for questioning and later charged. Starkey was a minor-league villain from the Handsworth area of Birmingham with a long and uninspiring record of rubbishy offences like holding up petrol stations, extorting protection money from Asian and Chinese restaurateurs and breaking into bonded warehouses. While in police custody he signed a remarkably full and copious confession, naming the other members of the gang and citing a string of other unsolved crimes for which they were responsible. So forthcoming had he been, in fact, that it was widely assumed he had done a deal with the authorities in return for a reduced sentence. Much to everyone’s surprise, when the case came to court Starkey drew a baker’s dozen just like the men he had informed on.

About two years later, while Clive Phillips was awaiting trial for murder, our Hugh got a break. In the course of inquiries into a string of supermarket holdups, Greater Manchester police discovered incontrovertible evidence that on the day the Securicor van had been attacked Starkey had been on their patch, taking part in an abortive attempt to rob a Gateway supermarket in Salford. Security cameras mounted over the entrance had videoed him and two other men as they fled. This didn’t do much to improve Hugh Starkey’s image as an upstanding member of the community, but it was extremely embarrassing for the police force which had charged him with the Wolverhampton job. The Home Secretary ordered an inquiry, which discovered among other things that a number of passages had been inserted into Starkey’s confession after it had been signed. Disciplinary proceedings were brought against various senior officers, including a certain Chief Inspector Manningtree, who had transferred from the squad six months after Starkey’s arrest because his wife was ill and wanted to return to her native Wales. When the police in Rhayader discovered that they had a full-scale murder hunt on their hands, they asked headquarters to send up someone with the necessary experience to handle the case, and who better than a man who had served for five years in a big city Serious Crimes Squad?

When these facts came to light, Clive’s solicitor was engaged in the thankless task of preparing to lodge an appeal against his client’s conviction. In the absence of any new evidence or witnesses he knew this was a total waste of time. Clive stoutly maintained that he had signed a limited confession under duress, and that this had subsequently been doctored to include statements he had never made. Until now his solicitor had never believed this himself, let alone felt that there was the slightest chance of getting anyone else to do so. The Hugh Starkey scandal changed all that. Within weeks a lively media campaign was underway. The quality papers ran thoughtful, heart-searching articles expressing grave and widespread anxieties concerning the present system of policing, while the tabloids slammed and blasted their readers into a state of outraged moral indignation. From one end of the land to the other, the air was redolent with the stink of bent filth.

The first I knew of all this was during one of my occasional walkabouts at the school. Keep everyone on their toes was the idea. I knew it was no use trying to treat the staff as responsible adults. They wouldn’t be working for me if they were. In the teachers’ room I noticed an article pinned to the notice-board with three large felt-tipped exclamation marks beside it. It had been cut out of one of the local free papers. The headline read RESERVOIR VICTIM’S FIRST HUSBAND ALSO DIED MYSTERIOUSLY.

With the help of large photographs of Karen, Dennis, the house in Ramillies Drive, the Elan Valley and the Cherwell boathouse, the ‘exclusive’ article covered a two-page spread. ‘Our own reporter’ first summarized the events leading up to Clive’s conviction and then the ‘recent developments which have created demands for the case to be reopened’. But most of the article was devoted to what was termed ‘an astonishing oversight’ by the police, namely their failure to note the ‘disturbing parallels’ between the circumstances of Karen’s death and that of her first husband, ‘local Chartered Accountant and Rotary Club stalwart Dennis Parsons’.

Since these parallels amounted to no more than the banal coincidence that both Karen and Dennis had ended up in the water, one was initially left with the impression that the article was a feeble attempt to fake a sensational breakthrough where none existed. But the facts as printed were so scanty in relation to the claims being made that another solution eventually forced itself on this reader at least. The ‘disturbing parallel’ was not the one which the reporter described, but one which he could not mention for fear of legal action: my involvement in both deaths. My name was mentioned only once — in the caption beneath the photo of the house, where I was identified as the present owner of a property ‘marked by death’ — but my absence hovered over the whole article like a malign spirit.

I have no doubt whatever that this piece was ghost-written by ‘our own reporter’ to a scenario supplied by Clive through his solicitor. The rag in which it appeared was after all an advertising medium, for sale by the column, page or spread. Clive’s advertisement merely took a rather unusual form, that’s all. There was no follow-up in the legitimate press, and I forgot all about the incident until a few weeks later, when my answering machine recorded a call from a Chief Inspector Moss, or some such name.

It was a grey, gloomy day with a bitterly cold easterly wind which had brought the pavement out in grease spots. I had been out for a walk along the canal, and I got home feeling depressed and bewildered, full of disgust for myself and others. In this state of mind the message from the police seemed less alarming than it might otherwise have done. If I had been enjoying the fruits of my crimes more, I might have felt guiltier about them. As it was, I was so miserable that I might as well have been innocent. I called back and made an appointment to see Moss the following morning.