It’s bad enough to see a wretched body surrounded by scorched foil or needles, vomit, mucus and the detritus of a life given over to heroin. Horrible to find what a few minutes previously was a laughing, joking, and loving young person, mangled within the wreckage of a hatchback, itself concertinaed into a sturdy oak tree. Tragic to hold a dying lad whose ill-judged retort to an aggressive drunk drew the single punch that crushed his eggshell skull. All are terrible things that police officers have to face.
For me, though, the death message was worse than any of those. In Dead Simple as Grace goes to see Phil Wheeler, whose son had just been killed thanks to his ambition to become a hero, he reflects that talking to the recently bereaved is the single worst aspect of police work. I couldn’t agree more.
Many of the grisly aspects of the job can at least be lightened by gallows humour. A traffic officer once ambled into the station kitchen, looked at my spaghetti bolognese, and demanded to know how I had managed to so quickly recover the human remains of the fatal crash he had just come from. Death messages are the exception. No-one makes light of them. It’s as if prolonging the solemnity is a mark of respect — like sharing the pain for someone you never knew.
The palpable trepidation in the car as PCs Omotoso and Upperton make their way to break the dreadful news of Tony Revere’s death to his girlfriend in Dead Man’s Grip is something all cops relate to. Their careful but clear approach in giving the awful message is drawn from experience and natural humanity, not training. The real, and now very sadly deceased, Tony Omotoso insisted on getting the word dead out as quickly as he sensed the situation allowed. Others ensure that the grieving relative actually says the ‘D’ word themselves to help them understand. Everyone has their own style. However it’s done, it’s an awful job.
You go through the words in your mind — never string it out because as soon as they see you they know; whatever they do and say, they know. You try to predict the response — impossible. Remember you may be investigating a crime but most of all remember that you are about to wreck their world.
‘You’re lying’, ‘you’re wrong’, ‘he doesn’t touch drugs’, ‘he can’t be dead, he called me earlier’, ‘you bastards’: I have faced all of these reactions when giving the news everyone dreads. Disbelief, blame, anger, all aimed at you, the messenger. All regretted later on but all quite normal. You have to take it on the chin.
I was on the wrong end of horrendous abuse and vitriol about 3 a.m. one summer morning. I had come from the mortuary and tried to tell a hysterical mum that her son had died of a drugs overdose. She howled. She shouted. She swore. She tried to throw me out, wanting to believe that if I weren’t there her son would still be alive. After she’d used up every ounce of emotional energy, I persuaded her to get her other son round to be with her. She reluctantly allowed me to remain until he arrived. He wasn’t much better, aggravated by the fact that he was a police officer from another force. Bizarrely, instead of comforting his mum he started by questioning my investigation and trying to give me advice. I had to take it all in my stride, seeing it as a reaction to something I never wanted to experience. As the hours went by my presence was accepted even if my news wasn’t. I hope that in time the pain eased.
Another evening, a car full of teenagers had plummeted off the cliffs at Brighton onto the Marina Village. Two of the lads inside died but miraculously not all were killed. I hadn’t been to the accident but was tasked with visiting the family of one of the survivors to break the news. All of the occupants had grown up together and the tragedy had been due to a simple lapse of judgement. A community was about to be devastated. There is no instruction book for how you tell a mum that while her son was alive — critically injured and on life support, but alive — that his best friends had died a horrible death plunging over a hundred-foot cliff to the ground below.
It was a long, hard evening with that family, trying to keep up with them on their rollercoaster of emotions: relief, guilt, grief, hope and despair. I will never know whether my approach, along the lines of ‘this is really awful but try to cling on to hope and the fact that he is alive and in the very best hands’, worked, but it was all I could think of. Sometimes gut instinct, common sense and humanity are all you have to fall back on; you have to hope they get you through.
Occasionally you have to adopt a parental role towards those whose world you have just destroyed.
Following yet another young life being snuffed out decades before its time by drugs, it fell to me to break the news to the young man’s parents. It was the middle of the day and they were hard to find, but death is notoriously disrespectful of convenience.
I eventually tracked the father down to his small shop close to Brighton’s border with Hove. Thankfully the lunchtime rush had yet to materialize so the shop was empty.
‘Good afternoon, Mr Murphy. I’m from the police. Do you mind just shutting the shop for a while as I need to talk to you?’
‘Yes, of course, Officer, what’s the problem?’ he chirped. Only I knew that would be his last cheery word for years.
Having secured our privacy, I went through the basics of quickly checking his identity, as you never want to give a death message to the wrong person, confirmed who his son was, and then I told him.
‘I am very sorry to tell you that we have found your son dead in his flat this morning. We are sure it’s him and the early indications are that he died of a drugs overdose.’
He stared at me in frozen shock. No emotion.
‘I have to tell Pam, my ex-wife, his mother. I suppose I should do that after I close up tonight.’
‘No, that needs to happen now. How would you like to do that?’
‘Well, she ought to be told but I can’t close the shop.’
‘Really, you can. You must. You can’t stay at work. It probably hasn’t sunk in yet but this is going to hit you very hard.’
‘Do you think so? I mean, do you think I should shut up the shop?’
‘Yes, absolutely. Please do it. How would you like Pam told? Shall we do it?’
‘No. I must. Can you come with me though?’
‘Of course.’
After what seemed like an age I helped Mr Murphy towards my waiting unmarked car. He had not yet broken down, he had not yet asked the thousands of questions I knew would come; he had gone onto autopilot.
As we drove the short distance to Pam’s office in the centre of Hove we agreed that we would ask for her to be fetched and that I would request a quiet room. He would then break the terrible news and I would support him by answering any questions and helping with any arrangements.
I took the liberty of parking directly outside, placing the Police Vehicle Log Book on the dashboard to ward off any overzealous traffic warden. We climbed the narrow stairway to the office reception. We introduced ourselves and I persuaded them to give us the privacy we needed.
So far so good. I would stay in the background while the tragedy unfolded between the bereaved parents.
In walked Pam. It seemed she had been told nothing, still less that her ex was with a police officer.
‘Hello, I am DS Bartlett,’ was all I said before the man beside me wailed like a banshee.
‘What? What’s going on? What’s happened? Will someone please tell me?’ Pam demanded.
The stoic determination Mr Murphy had shown earlier had crumbled at the critical moment. There was no way this poor lady was going to hear the terrible news from him. We should have agreed a plan B but I knew I needed to step in and fast.