I needed everything to be done in parallel but McLellan was my priority. With those of my team who had not been near Glynn, the Dyke and now the pizza shop, I went in pursuit of our man armed with a search warrant. We were surprised when McLellan, who was five foot ten and athletic, coolly let us in.
He denied leaving Moulsecoomb, claiming to have been watching MTV with his soon-to-be brother-in-law, Phillip Hurley. He seemed plausible. Hurley, a gangly six foot four bus driver, gave the same account. My team searched both McLellan’s and Hurley’s houses. We found nothing in Hurley’s. But in McLellan’s we recovered what appeared to be some stained black jeans and a grubby dark jacket. We couldn’t work out whether it was blood or grime but I decided the suspicious clothing should be seized and McLellan arrested. We needed more on Hurley, so left him.
Having booked our man into custody, we had a series of lucky breaks that normally only occur in the movies. Mick Burkinshaw had relayed to the CCTV staff my wrath that no-one had bothered to watch the camera in live time. This persuaded them to get the tapes copied quicker than normal.
‘Get over here, Graham,’ he said as I walked into the bustling CID office, ‘and tell me who you think this is.’
On the flickering screen in front of him was a CCTV image of two men side by side, who were dead ringers for McLellan and Hurley. Mick paused the tape. ‘Now watch.’ He pressed ‘play’.
There before my eyes were the same men darting into the doorway of Perfect Pizza. Nothing happened for a couple of minutes then, bold as brass, out they came, this time face to camera. I needed no more convincing. ‘Well done, Mick. You’ve cracked it’
‘It gets better.’ Amazingly they ambled into a taxi office a few doors down then, a minute or so later, came out, got into a cab and were driven away.
We had got them.
‘Get out and nick Hurley,’ I instructed DC Lee Taylor.
‘No need,’ said DC Steve Flay as he replaced the telephone receiver. ‘The idiot’s just turned up at the front desk with some fags for McLellan!’ Lucky break number two.
‘Well, get down there and nick him for attempted murder then!’
Our two suspects locked up, and having arranged for full forensic searches of their houses, I turned my attention to poor Glynn. Things weren’t looking good. He was in Intensive Care but barely alive, wired up to machines that were performing every function his body couldn’t.
Like Nat Cooper who was devastatingly injured in a motorbike crash in Dead Tomorrow, he’d had emergency surgery to ensure he could breathe, but his brain was so badly injured it was swelling dangerously. Fiona wouldn’t leave his side. We needed to speak to her but that could wait. He was going to die — I was sure of that — and her place was with him.
Normally, a Detective Superintendent would have taken on this enquiry. Just my luck, none were available. There were no dedicated Major Crime Teams in those days so, unless Glynn died, it was down to me to lead the investigation. As Grace was taught in his training, J Edgar Hoover once asserted that ‘no greater honor or duty is bestowed on an officer than to investigate the death of another human being.’ I felt both honour and duty even though Glynn was not dead yet.
As suspects, McLellan and Hurley did their best, sticking to the story that they had been in all night. They dismissed the evidence of the female bus driver we found, who knew Hurley well, who said she had taken them from Moulsecoomb to Hove. They scoffed at the taxi driver we identified who took them home again just as the CCTV had shown. They denied we’d find any forensics on their clothes. The ID parades, CCTV evidence, their discredited account and the blood they must have known we would find didn’t shake their resolve.
We plugged on for days. Home became a distant memory for most of us: just a place to snatch a couple of hours’ sleep, a quick cuddle with our loved ones and a change of clothes.
We were still looking for Glynn’s car, still sifting witness statements and CCTV footage. We had daily late-night and early-morning meetings with the Crown Prosecution Service. The pager was always by my side waiting for the inevitable message that Glynn had died. During a custody extension hearing at Brighton Magistrates’ Court, I was poised to whisper to the prosecutor that we were now dealing with a murder.
Amazingly that message never came. Call it a miracle, call it the wonders of medical science, but Glynn gradually started to rally. First came small signs, just a tiny response to stimulus, then minute, almost imperceptible movements, followed by months of the very best care and rehabilitation the National Health Service could provide. His optic nerve, however, had been severed and he would be blind for life. His face needed a complete rebuild, his memory was a total blank, but he survived. The skill of the surgeons and the love of Fiona gave him a second chance.
As for McLellan and Hurley, they were charged with attempted murder and remanded in custody to await trial. Tough for Hurley who had no previous convictions but absolutely right nonetheless.
We soldiered on after the charge. As Grace reflects in Dead Man’s Grip, that’s when the real work begins. Convictions don’t happen by themselves. We found the car, not far from Perfect Pizza. Inside was a balaclava that contained one of Glynn’s hairs. Glynn had never owned such a garment so had it been put on him to stop him recognizing McLellan? The icing on the cake came when the brilliant forensic scientists found a significant amount of Glynn’s DNA in the blood on the clothing of both suspects.
What had started as a hunch became a cast-iron case. Even arrogant pleas of not guilty, allegations of police corruption and an attempt to ban the blinded victim from the courtroom ‘in case it swayed the jury’ didn’t pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. Both men were convicted and imprisoned for a staggering thirty-seven years between them.
Glynn got a life sentence of blindness however. He was forced to rebuild his life and try to make sense of why he was so nearly killed for a paltry £620. He and Fiona made a new but quiet life for themselves, refusing to be bitter, refusing to hate.
My final memory of the trial was an indication of how some in the criminal justice system refuse or are unable to see the horror of what is at the root of their profession. We all experience it; to some it’s a sick, heartless game.
Having spent hours in the witness box being accused of planting what must have been about a pint of blood on the clothes of both defendants from the vial of a few millilitres we had for testing, I bumped into one of the defence legal team outside the Old Bailey after the verdicts. He tapped me on the shoulder and glibly remarked, ‘Well done, Graham, old boy. Good case and right result. Sorry about all that nonsense regarding the blood. When one has one’s instructions one has to try, you understand.’
Understand? How dare he? How dare he try to minimize the horrors inflicted by his client by downgrading the trial to a debating society joust? That was typical of some. Never mind the rights and wrongs, never mind searching for the truth, never mind the victim. Throw some mud where you can and hope you get enough jurors to doubt for a moment. Do what it takes, and see if you get one up on justice and let the guilty walk free. How do they sleep?
11: The Silent Assassin
As Peter James notes in You are Dead, never say the word ‘q**et’ to a police officer. It’s like mentioning the Scottish play to an actor. It’s a sure way to bring down the wrath of the gods. ‘Q’ is as far as you dare go in describing the kind of day you are having or hoping for. Complete the word and you are doomed! Some joker must have bellowed it from the rooftops one unseasonably bright October morning in the late nineties.