The man crushed by his fall was quickly identified as Barry Cheriton. As someone unfamiliar with police investigations, we hoped that he would prove the weak link and open up the secrets of this intriguing crime. However, he had more pressing priorities to attend to, like having his wrecked foot and ankle repaired.
As the evening went on, we searched the plethora of houses, garages and printing works identified throughout the weeks of surveillance.
One particular garage was rammed to the rooftop with scores of boxes containing thousands of cassette tapes. Elsewhere was the tape copying machine, pages of inserts, a foil embossing device, tapes ready for sale and reams of paper and rexine. All had to be seized, documented and their movement accounted for from now until the trial. Early in Dead Simple Grace faces the consequences of being unable to explain the chain of the continuity of an exhibit while under cross examination at Lewes Crown Court. This is territory defence barristers invariably attempt to exploit when faced with a damning case against them — like this one.
Dave and I went across to Peacehaven with a photographer to search Cheriton’s house. It had been a long day but one full of surprises and successes. We were running on adrenaline. As we heaved open the up-and-over garage door we revealed a huge tangerine-coloured four-armed screen printer sitting centre stage on the concrete floor. Surrounding this cumbersome contraption were pages and pages to be used in fake passports. A stencil replicating the crest that appeared on each page sat on a table nearby.
‘Bloody hell!’ Dave and I gasped in unison. Having had the whole set-up photographed, we started the painstaking search.
As I glanced at one of the pages, something caught my eye.
‘Dave, how do you spell Britannic, one N or two?’
‘Two, isn’t it? Why?’
‘What about Majesty? J or a G?’
‘J. What are you doing, some kind of crossword?’
‘Thought so. Come and look at this,’ I said.
Dave wandered over and chuckled as he looked at the page that had sparked my curiosity.
The well-known passage on the inside of each British passport proudly proclaims that ‘Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requests and requires in the name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.’
The Henty/Wake/Cheriton version, however, started ‘Her Britanic Magesty’s Secretary of State requests and requires...’
‘The proofreader wants shooting,’ said Dave.
We wondered whether the whole batch would have been rejected on this basis by whoever had ordered them.
Having gathered up all the evidence in this anonymous makeshift print factory, we headed back to the nick. Little did I know that over the next sixteen months I would become a master at dismantling and re-assembling this ancient press, as we had to produce it to countless prosecutors, defence lawyers and courts.
Henty and Wake knew their number was up. All their dreams had been shattered. There would be no Scottish castles and no £300k windfall to fund a new life of luxury. They decided to give us one last snub. Normally, reticent villains will at least sit in an interview room even if they ignore every question. It gives them relief from looking at the walls in their six by eight-foot police cells.
David and Cliff, on the other hand, decided that they would not even do that. When asked to step out for questioning they just sat and stared, moving not a muscle. In an irritating act of defiance, they had resolved not to give us an inch.
Based on the evidence that had been amassed in the preceding months, together with the damning scene we had gatecrashed, Henty, Wake and, eventually, Cheriton were charged with counterfeiting passports and music tapes. Tully was lucky, he walked away scot-free.
On being remanded in custody, Wake and Henty had engineered it so they could share a cell in Lewes Prison. True businessmen that they were, they spent their time not lamenting their predicament, but planning their next scam. They needed to cut their losses and find the next opportunity. They plotted and schemed, even though they didn’t know when they would be free to put their plans into action.
Surprisingly, they only remained in custody for three weeks before a bail application was granted. In the next year and a quarter of unexpected liberty, while awaiting trial, they stumbled across a fabulously simple, yet lucrative, scheme involving stolen cars from the Republic of Ireland.
Henty was stopped, late one night, driving an Irish car. The officers, convinced it was stolen, struggled to confirm that fact. David overheard a radio message explaining that there was no protocol with Ireland that would help quickly identify questionable cars.
Always alert to an opportunity, the germ of an idea took root. If that was the case then surely he could import stolen cars on an industrial scale from Ireland, give them new identities and sell them on. Using his trusted contacts, he worked the scheme for months, exploiting the naivety of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority staff into believing his account of legal imports and lost documents, to persuade them to re-register the cars in the UK.
He was caught eventually but not until the scheme had provided a tidy nest egg for his family should he lose his impending trial.
As Grace grumbles in Dead Tomorrow, having inherited a new role that includes reviewing files for forthcoming trials, the bureaucracy of the criminal justice system is almost beyond belief.
The amount of evidence we had to gather over the months was colossal. We needed to source all the material, confirm all the surveillance sightings, cost everything and prove that all three were guilty as charged. One enquiry took us to Gatwick Airport, where a senior immigration officer told us that, aside from the spelling mistakes, these passports were the best forgeries he had come across.
When the trial finally took place, the defence did their best. They queried the exhibits, tried to convince the jury of a host of coincidences, sought to dissuade them from assumptions and attempted to place the whole scam at the door of some of the witnesses. They were hoping that they had sown just enough doubt to win a marginal acquittal. However, the surveillance evidence, the incriminating material we found on the raids and the painstaking tracing of all the passport and tape components, secured swift guilty verdicts.
The sentences were an eye-watering jolt for Henty and co. Five years apiece sent an unequivocal message to other would-be forgers. The spoils may be tantalizing but the penalties are severe even if, like Cheriton, you had a blameless past. As for Lenny the Shadow, he did what all shadows do when you try to shine a light on them. He disappeared.
We are all human and, like Grace when he saw Gavin Daly being led away for murder in Dead Man’s Time, I felt a twinge of pity for the three as they were taken down to the cells. They deserved all they got, but they had taken a huge gamble, the loss of which they and their families would pay for dearly.
Even with the shock of such a long time away, David and Cliff still plotted and came up with projects for the future. Most, if not all, were on the right side of the law, including stocking vending machines in Cyprus, selling discarded plastic to the Chinese and marketing popular paintings online. Others, involving more stolen cars, won Henty nine months in a Spanish prison and Wake later went back to prison for money laundering.