Peter James - Death Comes Knocking - Policing Roy Grace's Brighton

Each of these incidents serves as a reminder that with an unarmed police force, it is the courageous thin blue line who risk happening upon tooled-up villains willing to kill in the name of freedom or revenge.

There is never a good time to get murdered. Most people would rather avoid it altogether. But if you were going to be bludgeoned to death you probably would not want it to happen when the police were wrestling with transition and turmoil.

Times were changing. In 1985, when I was posted to Gatwick, science and technology were only just creeping into policing.

For those of us of a certain age the mid-1980s seem like only yesterday. It is worth remembering that much of what Roy Grace’s detectives now take for granted, such as DNA testing, had hardly been thought of then.

How would DS Annalise Vineer, Grace’s crime analyst, cope with no internet and computers that were just word processors? What could DS Norman Potting do with next to no CCTV, no mobile phone data and no ANPR system to plot villains’ movements across the country? How about Glenn Branson not being able to readily access information from the Passport Agency, Department of Work and Pensions or hospitals?

Until the early 1980s most murders were the work of local villains and rarely part of a pattern that crossed county boundaries; people were less mobile in those days. The slaying of thirteen women and the attempted murder of a further seven in northern England, which led to the 1981 conviction of the York-shire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, was a gruesome exception to that rule. The fact that the investigating police forces operated their own paper-based systems resulted in Sutcliffe being interviewed nine times before being unmasked as the killer. It took this to persuade the police, subsequently, that they had to get their act together and fast.

Detective Inspector (DI) George Smith was a high flyer, the Grace of his time. Quiet, intelligent and ruthlessly professional, he was going places. He was also young and athletic, and a regular starter for the Brighton CID football team. As the perfect role model for any young up-and-coming detective, he was the ideal choice as head of CID training. With that came the responsibility for introducing the technological product of the Ripper failings, the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System (HOLMES), to Sussex Police. The vision was that this computer would be welcomed by all Senior Investigating Officers (SIOs) as the silver bullet to aid any murder enquiry. Sadly, some Luddites saw the system as a needless interference with their tried and tested methods. George, however, was the personification of police modernization.

In early 1985, shortly after the IRA bombing of Brighton’s Grand Hotel where Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government were staying, and after his stint in training and introducing HOLMES, George had earned his first operational CID command in my then home town, Shoreham-by-Sea. This small but vibrant annexe of Brighton, just a mile and a half west of the city’s boundary, features heavily in Grace’s world. For example, the demise of Vic and Ashley after the car chase in Dead Simple and the horrific execution of Ewan Preece that gave Dead Man’s Grip its name took place in Shoreham.

Real drama happens there too. In a typical blurring of fact and fiction, the hallmark of Peter James’ novels, the day Grace turned thirty and his wife Sandy disappeared he was investigating the death of a biker in Shoreham Harbour. That was, in reality, sixteen-year-old Hell’s Angel Clive ‘Ollie’ Olive, who in 1973 made the error of sleeping with the girlfriend of a rival gang leader. In brutal revenge, Ollie had a weighted chain wrapped around his ankles, and was dumped, still alive, into the harbour. His leathers protected his body from the ravenous lobsters, crabs and eels that inhabit the inky, icy depths but they feasted heartily on his exposed head, providing police divers the grisly find of a skull stripped clean some weeks later.

A few months before that murder, George had dealings with Ollie’s girlfriend over an unconnected matter. His skilful and sensitive way with people was such that after Ollie’s body was discovered, she would speak to no-one but him, even though he was just a young DC.

George was like a dog with two tails when he was given his own CID. As now, in those days the station DI had status. He was in his early thirties, and had risen quicker than most. Even Grace didn’t make DI that swiftly.

Mondays are normally a busy day of catch-up for DIs: assessing the events of the weekend, making sense of crime trends, digesting what the informants are saying and setting priorities for the coming week.

As Grace knows, call-outs have a habit of coming at the least convenient time. Monday, 4 February 1985 was such an occasion. Following a frenetic shift, George was at home slapping coats of paint on the dining-room wall. As he was ruminating on the day that was and the week that would be, the telephone shrilled him back to the present.

‘Boss, we thought you might like to know we’ve had a call to the Lighthouse Club at Shoreham Harbour. There’s a woman’s body. Seems her stepson and his wife have come home and found her there. Looks like a murder.’

‘Right, I’m coming in,’ announced George, before reeling off his list of instructions and requirements to safeguard the evidence which, experience told him, might unlock whatever mysteries this tragedy held. Awful though this would be, he was not entirely sorry that he had an excuse to leave the painting for another day.

Satisfied that he had set enough activity in train to buy himself a few minutes, he jumped in the shower to scrub off the splatters of emulsion. However, even those moments of steam-induced reflection were denied him when, again, the phone rang. Hopefully the station sergeant did not guess that his new DI was dressed in nothing but a fluffy bath towel when he delivered the grim update.

‘Sorry, boss, we’ve found another body. The lads at the scene are saying it could be a murder/suicide.’

‘OK, we’ll see when I get there. Thanks for letting me know.’

This changed nothing at that early stage. One body, two bodies, it didn’t matter. The key was to lock the scene down. No-one was to enter without a reason and a white over-suit. Everyone had to be logged in and out, all witnesses identified and whisked off to make their statements. The balloon that Grace puts up when he goes to murder scenes may be much larger now but, even back then, it still went up.

George’s personal world had now been put on hold for the foreseeable future. He did not have an assistant to cancel everything as Grace does but, like Grace, he would dedicate whatever it took of his life and his energies to get to the bottom of the horror that was just unfolding.

As you drove along the busy Brighton to Worthing coast road, you could have been forgiven for not spotting the squat cream edifice of the now-demolished Lighthouse Club at the mouth of Shoreham Harbour. Adjacent to where I used to go to Sea Scouts, it was nestled between the nineteenth-century limestone Kingston Buci Lighthouse and the warehouse that hosted the twice-weekly Shoreham Car Auctions. In the 1960s it was a sailing club, of which Peter James was a member. He would delight in rigging up the fourteen-foot Scorpion dinghy he kept there, hauling it down to the water’s edge and putting to sea for a day cruising along the Sussex coastline.

By 1985 it had become a private drinking club with celebrity members such as the late world motorcycle Grand Prix champion — and local playboy — Barry Sheene. It was also the place to go for many dubious characters who fancied themselves as movers and shakers. When George arrived just after 9 p.m., it became obvious that no moving or shaking would be going on there for quite a while.