Inspector John Rodway was readjusting to home life after a relaxing Spanish holiday when the call came. A snapped, one-sided conversation with his boss, Superintendent Dave Tomlinson, told him his rest days were cancelled and he was to come immediately to Brighton Police Station.
He had yet to catch up on the news but knew a little of two girls having been found murdered the day before. John was from the old school and sought no further explanation. The adage of ‘never being off duty’ can be stretched but policing fosters a mindset that when you are called, you go – no questions asked.
John did not know the girls but, as a father, he struggled to hide his shock and horror once he heard the details. However, he knew emotion and pity never caught killers. Only steely determination, ruthless professionalism and focus would do that. As an inspector, and with his track record, he knew whatever role he was earmarked for, he had to stop this tragedy getting any worse. This was a principle I would imbue in detectives or commanders I mentored in years to come.
And he would do his damnedest to make sure it did not.
It did not take long for John to predict that the job he landed – setting up and running the house-to-house enquires in Moulsecoomb – would become a poisoned chalice; possibly the toughest and most complex challenge of his career to date.
John was a legend. A man-mountain, his entry into any room would invariably be accompanied by his thunderous voice either bringing its occupants to order or ribbing some poor unfortunate who happened to catch his eye. He saw the police as, first and foremost, problem solvers. He was too long in the tooth to expect everything to come with its own preordained and rehearsed plan. He knew that following most major incidents you just had to do the best you could and, in the absence of any other guidance, you made it up.
This is one of the reasons I have reservations about the recently introduced Direct Entry scheme, enabling civilians with no previous policing experience to join the service as superintendents. Those I have met on the scheme are highly intelligent, likeable and capable people, but I worry about their ability to innovate with no operational background.
By the time I reached that rank, when called upon to make critical operational decisions, I drew on every ounce of my experience. My judgement came from years of service – learning from my and others’ mistakes – and watching better leaders than me in action. I used that grounding so those I led could trust my decisions and follow my orders. I wonder how you make up for that with a few weeks of training.
John’s ability to inspire others through his self-assurance, powers of persuasion and people’s downright fear of the consequences of incurring his wrath gave him a faithful following. When pressed for time, John would think up a plan, sometimes write it down, sometimes not, handpick a team and create the illusion of a well-thought-through, tried-and-tested strategy. One through which, by his sheer weight of personality and absolute self-belief, he would deliver a result. The most effective way of harnessing the support of wary communities is to deploy local, familiar officers able to build on existing relationships, rather than throwing in scores of cops from far-flung corners of the force who know nothing about them.
Some estates and communities take years of nurturing to engender anything close to confidence in the police. Even then it is often confined to one or two beat officers who would tire of hearing the back-handed compliment, ‘I hate the police. But not you, you’re all right. It’s the rest of them I can’t stand.’ It is not that these officers are soft or have gone over to the other side. It is down to them investing years in befriending the locals and understanding the patch. It takes huge skill to read the psychology of the residents, work out the networks and hierarchies and then set firm but fair boundaries.
My job in Moulsecoomb, a few years later, was different. As a response driver, I raced into the neighbourhood, blue lights flashing and sirens wailing, coming down hard on criminals or suppressing the violence that would erupt from nowhere. I did not have the luxury of getting to know people. We were seen as the illegitimate force, the cops they hated, poles apart from the local bobbies, but, nonetheless, the ones they called when the need arose.
Some writers depict house-to-house enquiries as being a casual, almost incidental, affair. A couple of officers rapping on doors asking some benign questions of whoever happened to answer, then moving on. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is a methodical, painstaking activity designed to smoke out each and every person who may have been in the area on the night in question and then elicit from them every snippet of information, however insignificant it may seem.
With a killer on the loose, John needed every ounce of his creativity, guile and personality to pull it off. He had no time to ponder the what, whys or wherefores. He needed lots of officers, and quickly, to find out what the locals knew, suspected or just heard, and report back to the rapidly mushrooming investigation.
Thank goodness for community beat officer PC Eric Macintosh. Over the previous eighteen months, the diminutive ‘Mac’, a self-effacing, unassuming bobby, had embedded himself so well he was as much part of the community as any resident. Despite his easy style, he was tough and stood no nonsense. Any cop who ventured into the estate hoping to attract the same respect and trust Mac had built up received short shrift. Only Mac could fearlessly walk – or in his case, shuffle – alone around Moulsecoomb’s streets.
Not only was he untouchable but he was a one-man database of who was who among the estate’s complex and enigmatic networks. When I worked in Moulsecoomb, the formal handover file was an irrelevance. It was Mac who told the real story of what was going on and who needed nicking. He spoke in riddles and nicknames. He knew the good from the bad, the ones who were at it and those who could be relied upon, in the right circumstances, to whisper in his ear.
He quickly developed a sixth sense of the estate’s mood and how best to approach its people. While I was stuck at Gatwick, friends who had been deployed to the enquiry returned with tales of this charmer who could literally open closed doors.
During Operation Salop, the code name randomly allocated to the investigation, Mac was critical to unlocking the inherently suspicious and anti-police families who might just have held the key to catching Britain’s most wanted killer. Once tasked, John made sure that Mac never left his side.
Running one of the largest house-to-house operations Sussex Police ever faced presented a huge problem. There was no time to reverse this deep-rooted hatred of the force. If John had had about fifty years and infinite Macs at his disposal, then maybe he could have managed it, but instead he had to somehow convince the residents that there was no difference between the good cops (like Mac) and the bad cops (everyone else).
Winning over the residents’ hearts and minds proved to be a long game. Convincing some people the mass of uniforms knocking on their doors were only there to find out who had killed the girls was a struggle. Years of bitter experience made many suspicious that, once they allowed the police over their threshold, all their secrets would be exposed.
The inconvenient truth in the wake of horrific murders is that life, in all its shades of grey, carries on. People will still be burgled, have domestics, fight and take drugs. Cars will still be stolen and some crashed. Sometimes that calls for an unwelcome robust police response amid the softly-softly approach. Not everyone comes quietly, so occasionally the police will use force either to keep the peace or make an arrest. Word of heavy-handed policing or an ‘honest’ thief getting his collar felt can spread like wildfire along with an ‘I told you so’ disaffection.
Sergeant David Gaylor, who would later become the model for Peter James’ Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, was drafted in from rural Chichester. Recently promoted out of CID, David knew how murder investigations worked but had never experienced anything on this scale. David remembers John’s brief clearly. His first order was to forbid anyone involved in the house-to-house to respond to emergency calls, and vice versa. It would be fatal for a bobby to be seen dragging little Jimmy off in handcuffs at dawn only to return all nicey-nicey with a clipboard as night fell.
Secondly, John made it crystal clear that while the officers were deployed, their sole focus was to find potential witnesses. If they suspected a motorbike secreted down a side alley to be stolen or saw someone wanted for failing to pay their court fines, they were to turn a blind eye. It would take just one over-zealous cop asking too many questions or checking the Police National Computer to trigger frosty receptions and slamming doors.
Many of those deployed, like David, were not local and had never experienced the complexity of policing Brighton. It was vital they understood the community and its dynamics. They also needed to know everything that had gone on since their last tour of duty. Before each shift, John briefed the whole team on each and every incident the police had responded to, its background, its outcome and the mood on the estate. Officers had to know the answers to inevitable questions such as, ‘Why did your lot drag off Bill from next door last night?’ or ‘I hear number 42 was burgled yesterday. What did they get away with?’ He also updated them on the investigation and anything, or anyone, particular to look out for.
One major problem was that many houses here were home to unofficial lodgers. All were council houses, which meant low rents but a strict ban on subletting. If caught, every tenant – legal and illegal – faced eviction. Often PCs would only be allowed into the kitchen, as the rest of the house was given over to sleeping accommodation for whoever could pay a sly tenner for a room.
This vital income stream was jealously guarded by the official householder and, as it was the only way the guest could keep a roof over their head, the last thing anyone needed was to be grassed up to the Housing Department.
‘Just don’t ask,’ was John’s brief. ‘It is none of our business but you make sure you speak to everyone who lives there or was there on the night. Miss one person and this whole exercise will have been a waste of time.’
One of the biggest shocks, particularly for those who had leafier beats elsewhere in Sussex, was the abject poverty. Few had ever seen houses heated by stolen railway sleepers or their own internal doors burning in open fireplaces. Despite these and other desperate measures to provide shelter and warmth, almost without exception the cops found a proud and upstanding community prepared to do their bit to help unmask the killer.
The residents slowly warmed to the officers and began to trust them. They were proving true to their word; they really were only interested in the murders. Nothing else seemed to matter. At first, few believed the killer to be local. Maybe that was too much to stomach; the overwhelming view was the killer was an interloper. Many latched on to a ginger-haired man who had been spotted lurking around schools, despite the inescapable fact that it would have been nigh-on impossible for a stranger to cajole or drag the girls into the den. Either they knew their killer, or he knew the killing ground and found or followed them there. He had to be a local.