Weaving through Brighton’s backstreets early that Sunday evening, 4 February 1990, I was on top of the world.
Barely seven years into my police career, I had finally started working for Brighton CID. For now, I was only a temporary detective constable – just a month into my trial posting – but the first few weeks of the 1990s felt like a new beginning. Alongside my new job, Julie and I moved into our new house and a diamond sparkled on her ring finger.
Making the most of a surprisingly ‘Q’ – we never said ‘quiet’, that tempted fate – late shift I had grabbed the opportunity to spend a few hours tracking down witnesses to a large-scale fraud at a local furniture shop. Not the most adrenaline-pumping crime to investigate but, for me, it was the work of a proper detective so I threw everything I had at it.
Back in my car and cruising into the dimly lit backyard of Brighton Police Station, even the prospect of spending the rest of the evening ploughing through the mountains of reports and prosecution files piled up on my desk could not dampen my ardour. I wormed around the crammed patrol and CID cars searching for a parking space, when I was suddenly forced to stand on the brakes.
Three police cars, lights strobing and sirens blaring, sped across my bows. I swore under my breath, watching in the rear-view mirror as the convoy squealed out of the yard and away towards East Brighton.
I stole one of their parking bays, jumped out of the tiny Mini Metro and marched to the back door, tapping in the security number before heaving it open. Having just come from uniform I knew the call that spawned their urgency could be anything from a struggling shoplifter to a murder in progress. But as I narrowly avoided being bowled over by three more PCs sprinting down the stairway, I guessed this was no cat stuck up a tree.
I was still getting used to the lag between the rush of the emergency ‘shout’ and CID getting a look in. So, having leapt up the stairs three at a time and burst into the capacious open-plan CID office, the serenity of the room took the wind out of my sails.
‘What’s going on?’ I panted. ‘I’ve just nearly been wiped out by three response cars on blues and twos. What’s the job?’
‘Calm down, boy,’ murmured my wily tutor, DC Dave Swainston, not even looking up from the statement he was reading. ‘If it’s one for us we’ll find out soon enough.’ Suitably chastised, I slumped into my battered swivel chair, contemplating my ever-growing workload with considerably less gusto than five minutes before.
Was it a mistake moving to CID after all? Was I going to miss the cut and thrust of dashing around on uniform response, fuelled by adrenaline and fast food, literally not knowing where I would be headed next?
I settled down and scanned a couple of new crime reports which had been mysteriously gifted to me while I was out, resigning myself to perhaps never knowing what all the fuss had been about.
A short while later I glimpsed a uniformed inspector sliding quietly into the detective sergeants’ office just across the corridor, closing the door behind him.
I pricked up my antennae.
What was going on? Was it connected to the speeding police cars?
I tingled in the hope of my first big job as a detective.
DS Kevin Bazyluk – Baz – strode into the DCs’ office. Baz was the most tenacious detective I knew. For him there was only one way of doing things – the right way. While he was not in the least bit scary, you crossed him at your peril. Every cog of every investigation that hit his desk had to be followed up to the nth degree. Try as we might, we could never get anything less past him. An utter professional, he was the perfect DS for a trainee detective like me. Some of the more seasoned detectives would sneak over to his desk while he was out to cross tasks off his notorious ‘to do’ list that related to them.
I was never that brave.
‘Right, everyone, listen in,’ he barked. ‘Stop what you’re doing, finish your phone calls.’
The silence he demanded descended instantly.
‘I’m not sure what we’ve got but I’m guessing none of us will be going home on time,’ he forewarned us.
‘Baz, get to the point,’ pleaded Dave Swainston who, with just a few years to retirement, was the only one bold enough to answer back.
‘Dave, wind your neck in for a moment, please.’ Baz paused. ‘Right. Two jobs have come in. First there’s been a call to Whitehawk – a seven-year-old girl, Claire Perkins [her name has been changed to protect her life-long anonymity], is missing. She’d been out roller-skating but now she’s vanished. That was two hours ago.’
No banter now, just rapt attention. Fathers thinking of daughters and everyone fearing the worst. No one needed reminding that nearly a quarter of a million people go missing in England each year. Most either turn up or have made a rational choice to disappear, but a seven-year-old girl vanishing late on a winter’s afternoon – that was as bad as it got.
‘Added to that,’ continued a sombre Baz, ‘a couple have just come across a naked young girl wandering along the Devil’s Dyke Road, covered in blood and mud, crying her eyes out. WPC Debbie Wood and a DS from Hove are dealing with that.’
‘Shit, Baz, it’s pissing down and freezing. It’ll be worse up there on the Downs,’ observed DC Steve Bowers.
Undeterred, Baz glanced at his notes. ‘They are meeting the little girl’s parents at the Royal Alexandra Children’s Hospital. We are on standby to pick up any urgent actions that come from there or the scene.’
The events of a little over three years before and the catastrophe that followed were written across every face. Surely this could not be happening again.