7: Every Detective’s Nightmare
Crimes and tragedies don’t always happen in office hours. For a detective, being on call means that at any moment during the day or night a phone call can come out of the blue that will require you to instantly drop all your plans for the following days and sometimes weeks — if not months. Some jobs crash into you with such devastating force they leave you damaged forever.
It was late 1995 and I had been promoted to DS about eighteen months previously. After a short stint in Child Protection I was back on CID, running a small team of detectives. Julie and I had just celebrated our third wedding anniversary and had moved into a spacious four-bedroom house in Burgess Hill, about thirty minutes from Brighton.
While life was good, my two great ambitions — further promotion and having children — were evading us. Julie was making a huge success of running the Gatwick to Scotland Air UK passenger service operations but we were rattling around in our new home. We craved the patter of tiny feet.
Beep beep beep: three sounds that at 4 a.m. one morning dragged me from sleep. Wake up properly before you phone in, Graham, don’t make a fool of yourself.
Then there was the usual rummage to locate my grey message-pager under a pile of clothes in the inky-black bedroom. Pressing its button, I floodlit the room.
‘Shit, sorry, Julie!’ I muttered as she grabbed the duvet, flung herself over and burrowed under the bedclothes.
As usual, the message gave no clue. Just a bland ‘Please call Control Room Ext 35280 re serial 76.’ The messages never betrayed the waiting horror.
The polar opposite to Sandy Grace or Ari Branson, the police wives in the Roy Grace novels, Julie accepted much about my job. If a mould for the perfect policeman’s wife was needed, Julie was it. My long days, the late-night and early-morning phone calls, cancelled days off, being on call, bringing rainforests of paperwork home: she took everything in her stride. She absorbed my moods, my stresses, and my tears; there were plenty of those. Cops are human. The horror, the helplessness mostly stays in the ‘job’ side of the brain but sometimes it breaks through the psychological shield into the ‘home’ side and that’s when it hurts. Hurts like hell. Julie would rightly wonder why I put on such a cheery and brave face to friends and family when she knew that inside I was fighting demons. I could be so unfair to her.
Two things, however, she could not stand. First, if I tried to start a phone call before I had woken up properly — she had been known to grab the phone from me and tell the confused caller to whom I was talking nonsense, ‘Graham will ring you back in five minutes’; second, if I used the bedroom phone to call in, unnecessarily waking her from an already disturbed sleep.
So, having safely navigated the stairs in the 4 a.m. half-light, I squinted at the telephone keypad and punched out the well-worn numbers that would connect me to some perky wide-awake controller.
‘Hi, it’s Graham Bartlett, someone paged me to ring in re serial 76.’
‘Oh, morning, Graham. Serial 76, let me look, oh, right, that’s a cot death, I’m afraid.’ Otherwise known as Sudden Infant Death syndrome, it didn’t get any worse.
Shit, shit, shit, shit. Get a grip, Graham, get a grip.
I’d been around a long time and had dealt with most things, but I hated, detested, anything connected with harm to children. I wasn’t alone. The toughest cops in the world could turn into emotional wrecks or angry hulks at the very mention of child abuse or a youngster being injured or killed.
Odd, really, that early in my career I had been so keen to spend a short time as a Child Protection detective. Perhaps that was a professional reaction to my desire to wrap all children, anyone’s children, in cotton wool. Whatever it was, the anger evoked in dealing with child abusers, violent parents and people who cared more about drugs and alcohol than their kids was offset by saving children from a catastrophic start in life.
A study in 2012 reported that 29 per cent of prisoners had experienced child abuse and 41 per cent had witnessed violence in the home. Not all abused children go on to offend just as not all criminals suffered abuse. However, the robbing of a child’s innocence and safety by the very people who should be protecting them provides the worst possible start in life.
Around this time, however, my aversion to being called out to a hurt or dead child was particularly acute. My personal struggles risked overwhelming my professionalism. These battles were rising closer and closer to the surface every day.
I was a pretty typical uncle. Julie was a perfect aunt. Our nieces and nephews were, like Roy Grace’s god-daughter Jaye, loved beyond words but nothing could be a substitute for children of our own. As with Roy and Sandy, years of trying had resulted in nothing. Month after month of tests, heartache, self-pity, angst and wondering ‘why us’ defined our lives and emotions. It was so hard to hide our jealousy and longing when we heard of others’ good news. People close to us even delayed telling us of their impending new arrival to spare our tears. Often Julie and I would cling to each other in the small hours weeping and asking why we had been denied the gift of a child again this month. It really hurt and it started to creep into the job. When dealing with child abuse, an inner voice would bellow at me why can they pop out children just to abuse and neglect when we can’t have just one? Personal feelings have to be ignored when work demands it; but it was a struggle.
Tragic as these cot death calls are, they are rarely more than that — a natural death, and a world-crushing tragedy for a family whose questions would never be answered but whose loss would be total. However, there was always the terrible possibility that one or both of the parents had murdered the baby. Thinking the unthinkable, that’s what the police are for. We have to be suspicious. The ABC of crime investigation is never more relevant than when dealing with cases involving children.
Grace uses a phrase to lecture young or perfunctory detectives: ‘Assumptions are the mother and father of all fuck-ups.’ He’s right. No-one sends a DS to a house in the middle of the night just to provide tea and sympathy. So while we have to provide pastoral care, we have to approach each home where a cot death has occurred as a potential crime scene. Not easy. There was no way I was putting on the white forensic suit and wrapping the place in blue and white ‘Police’ tape but I knew I might have to switch from good cop to bad cop in the blink of an eye. A tough stance to take but one I was prepared for. And all the more so in this instance as I knew the family, for all the wrong reasons. The father and mother being well-known receivers of stolen goods and occasional drug users, there was a rich history between them and the local Old Bill. To add to that, all the children were on the Child Protection Register as, despite loving them, the parents struggled to provide them the care and nurture they deserved.
Thankfully, their history gave me the excuse of calling a more senior officer, the duty DI, who would no doubt make my investigation easier as he would take all the hard decisions. This could have been one of four I worked with. I would have been happy for it to be any of them except one, Clive. Just my luck, it was him.
A big man in every way, Clive’s entrance into any room was invariably preceded by a bellow, a guffaw or a crash of furniture. Sartorially he always looked as if he had dressed in the dark, but that just made everyone even fonder of this big friendly giant. His experience and wisdom made him the go-to DI for almost everything — except cot deaths. His closest friend had recently lost a child in this way and Clive had got very close to the tragedy by practically living with the family to support them in their darkest days.