It was one of those days in the late 1990s when everyone else seemed to be out of the CID office doing exciting things, and I was confined to barracks catching up on a bewildering backlog of paperwork. I hated those days but I couldn’t ignore a ringing phone.
‘Is Russ there, Graham?’ asked the caller from the front desk.
‘No, he’s out. I think he might be at the hospital seeing the bloke who got stabbed last night.’
‘Oh, there’s someone down here with a letter from him saying he can collect his property. He was released from prison for burglary this morning and wants his clothes back.’
Oh great, another half hour of my life I won’t get back, I thought. Sifting through some mangy bag of clothing and then handing it back to some low-life who won’t be in the least bit grateful, and will probably ask about that mysterious £200 that he will allege was in the pocket.
’OK, I’ll be down,’ I said wearily, having scanned the office without spotting anyone I could delegate to.
Asked to describe him after nearly twenty years, I would have had no chance. I’m sure the reverse was true too. But there was no mistaking him. The first glimpse made those two decades vanish in an instant and his dropped jaw was all the confirmation I didn’t need.
‘Graham?’
‘Sam? Bloody hell, mate. How are you? Listen, I can’t stop. I’ve got to give some con his stuff back, but can you hang about?’
‘It’s me. I’m that con, Graham. It’s me you’re here to see,’ he chuckled.
Years back, Sam’s family and mine had been close. Our parents knew each other before we were born. They lived down the road from us and, like mine, Sam’s parents were hard-working and lived for their children. He had two younger brothers and his older sister was good friends with mine.
I don’t remember a time in my childhood when Sam wasn’t around. Summers, Christmases, weekends, all those memories included Sam and me playing together, getting into scrapes — I can still remember being told off by an irate motorist for throwing grass cuttings at her car from the supposed cover of Sam’s picket fence.
A lot changed when I joined the police at eighteen. I moved away from home and immersed myself in a new life. I drifted away from many of my friends, although it was never a conscious decision and I often wished I’d stayed in touch with my roots. So when I didn’t see much of Sam I didn’t think it was odd. I’d occasionally bump into him when I was back in Shoreham but I just accepted that blokes move on. He would be doing well. He was like me, and we were the good guys. He’d be fine.
‘But they said you’d been in prison,’ I gabbled.
‘In and out for years, Graham. I’m surprised you didn’t know.’
The next two hours passed in the blink of an eye. He explained how he had started off doing well, great job, loads of money, parties, popularity, drink. How that began to change through the odd spliff, pills, a little heroin — just to try, mind, more and more addiction, lost jobs, bankruptcy, stealing, eroded trust, broken relationships, risk-taking, burglary, capture, chances, relapses, more crime, prison, helplessness, loneliness; a dark, bottomless spiral.
I was stunned. We had been peas in a pod. Following separate but parallel tracks. At some point, an unseen signal master must have switched the points so our destinations became very different. But deep down we still had lots in common. It hit me that Sam could so easily have been me, and I could have been him.
Drugs do bad things to people. All drugs. They mess with your health and your mind. Heroin did it for Sam. He, like so many others, was trapped in a cycle of addiction and imprisonment.
I’ve never taken an illicit drug, not even once, but what if I had, what if I got trapped like Sam did? It made me realize that every villain has a story. Equally, as Grace reflected, while watching the film The Third Man in Not Dead Enough, most villains try to justify what they have done. In their warped minds, it is the world that is wrong, not them.
That day I grew up. I started to see criminals as people who did bad things rather than just as bad people: a subtle but important distinction that helped develop my thinking over the rest of my career.
Something had happened that day to shift my perspectives on good and evil. I didn’t predict, however, that it would see me ridiculed in the press, criticized by ministers, yet supported by my more courageous bosses, lecturing internationally and saving many lives.
The chance meeting with Sam had set me on a road of reflection. It had a massive impact on me. I was still a sergeant so fairly junior in the scheme of things but I spent years afterwards soul-searching as to how much difference we actually make criminalizing rather than treating drug users. What was the point? Hell, it was circumstance alone that put me on a rewarding career path and Sam in jail.
I struggled with why do we treat drug addicts as criminals but alcoholics as patients? Sure, people steal and rob to get the money to buy drugs and that needs to be dealt with — even Sam would agree — but if we could get those people off drugs they wouldn’t need to do all those things. And they might stop killing themselves too.
Drugs are rife in Brighton and Hove. The city has won many awards in its time but the award for ‘Drugs Death Capital of the UK’ for the eleventh consecutive year doesn’t get presented at some swanky reception at the Dorchester. This grubby title, however, provides much of the backdrop of Brighton and Hove throughout the Grace novels. The presence of drug turf wars and the impact on users is a constant Roy Grace theme, whether overtly described or as part of the back story of his most odious adversaries. It’s the undercurrent that, in fact and fiction, runs through everything that is Brighton.
At its worst, the city was losing about one son, daughter, mum or dad a week to the misuse of drugs. That is just the people who died of an overdose, never mind those who have succumbed to blood-borne viruses or taken their own lives as a direct result of drug use. If we’d seen similar numbers of deaths on the road there would have been a national outcry. The common attitude was, because it was drugs and drugs happen to other people, it had to be their fault. So who cares?
Well, I did — a lot. It was a scandal. The treatment services were struggling hard to reverse the trend through needle exchanges, methadone clinics, medically provided opiate programmes, issuing naloxone (a drug which reverses the effects of overdose), but the police were just smashing down doors, some at residential treatment centres, arresting people for possession of drugs and putting them into an ineffective criminal justice system.
A colleague who was at the forefront of taking out the Mr Bigs of the drugs world reflected recently that all he ever achieved was to create career opportunities for the next in line. Locking up the likes of Vlad Cosmescu from Dead Tomorrow, who was dealing in drugs, cigarettes, pornography, counterfeit goods and human beings, doesn’t mean the crime will stop.
Brighton and Hove had more than its fair share of attention from the big boys of the Regional Crime Squad, National Crime Squad and Serious and Organized Crime Agency, investigating our premier criminals. They recognized that much of the wealth in the city was made on the back of a thriving heroin and crack cocaine trade. These top detectives knew the real prize were the assets amassed by these racketeers, who were more afraid of losing their money than their liberty.