He looked at clues, like that flashing clock and the normally ferocious black dog that witnessed the slaying, from a slightly different angle. They started to take on new meaning. Did the clock indicate that something had happened to cut the power temporarily? Assuming the clock reset itself at 00.00, could it be telling George how long it was since the brutal attacks? Did the fact that the guard dog had seemingly not intervened indicate that he knew the killer?
A story was starting to emerge but it triggered two very different and conflicting hypotheses among the investigators: two versions of events that would create irreparable divisions in the senior team, threaten careers and almost deny justice to the mother, father and son lying broken and butchered in their own home. A struggle between the old and the new. One thought the answer lay in some as yet unknown murky gangland feud and the other within the emerging facts.
The Teeds came from Bradford, West Yorkshire. Paul’s parents had separated when he was young and, initially, he and his brother had lived with their mother and stepfather. Paul didn’t take to his mother’s new husband and they regularly fell out. Unlike his brother, he would not accept the bullying by his stepdad but often that meant fleeing home. He got into trouble from time to time, including a bungled burglary of a butcher’s shop where the fact that all but a fraction of their haul was in unusable cheques should have taught him to follow another career. Amazingly he avoided prison for this. Perhaps that gave him a sense of invincibility.
Things weren’t much better for him in Shoreham. Despite finding love and marrying his girlfriend Helen, his high hopes for a new life away from his troubled past were soon dashed. His father had reluctantly allowed him to work at the club. He and Helen had moved into the second flat but literally living above the shop he was unable to escape his father and Hilda, and had become fed up with their drinking and arguing. By now, he and Helen had a three-year-old daughter and he knew he had to make his own way in the world — he just didn’t need his dad constantly reminding him of that.
George Teed was a big, brash self-made entrepreneur with fingers in more pies than Mr Kipling. He seemed born to run this small exclusive, but seedy, nightspot whose membership defined much of the society scene in Brighton at the time.
Dripping with gold and with pockets full of cash, he embodied the work hard/play hard philosophy of the early eighties, not as brash as Harry Enfield’s ‘Loadsamoney’ but equally flamboyant. Nothing in his life was understated. He was a heavy boozer, as was his wife, and they frequently had violent alcohol-fuelled rows. Such garishness inevitably attracted the attention and envy of rivals, enemies and even the downright greedy. Of course, that was bound to be one line of enquiry. Any SIO would be mad not to look hard at that as a motive. A motive, but not the motive.
The early evidence was, however, pointing at something much closer to home. The successful Teed’s disappointment with Paul was no secret. He was often heard deriding his son as a sponger, and had just given him three weeks’ notice to quit the flat, forcing him to put his name down for a council house. ‘Stand on your own two feet,’ he had repeatedly insisted.
Every family has its problems. There are always skeletons to be found, if you know which cupboards to look in. It does not mean, however, that they all go round killing each other. Indeed, leaping too quickly on family discord has derailed many an investigation. Conversely, many have been scuppered by being too timid to confront domestic strife. It is a stark reality that most people are killed by someone they know. Could this be a case of a son trying to expedite his inheritance while eliminating some major grief from his life?
As a DI, George Smith was not senior enough to run a murder enquiry so was asked to lead the outside enquiry and interview teams. A D/Supt and a DCI were appointed as SIO and deputy.
However, there was real tension. Many highly experienced senior detectives had reservations about HOLMES. They had been used to applying their ‘detective’s instinct’ and gut feeling in murder enquiries. They saw that influence being chipped away with the introduction of computers and incident room staff who, they feared, might undermine their leadership. George, the champion of HOLMES, was acutely aware of this risk and soon realized that his sceptical bosses had set up a second ‘incident room’ operating in the old way from the DCI’s office.
Members of the official murder investigation team spotted Regional Crime Squad officers visiting this second incident room but details of the actions they were undertaking or the intelligence they were supplied with were not shared with the HOLMES team. This was the worst of both worlds; each room in ignorance of what the other was doing.
Foremost in the minds of the ‘old school’ was the gangland massacre theory. The DCI, with years of experience investigating organized crime, was comfortable dealing with the dark and grubby landscape of vendettas, hit men and dirty money. He was in his element investigating this hypothesis. George and his team on the other hand were making progress elsewhere.
Helen would often stay with friends and relations in Yorkshire, as she had that weekend. She didn’t fancy going to the big reunion of Teed’s South London friends that the Lighthouse Club was hosting. It wasn’t her scene. It was not unusual, following these visits, for Paul to make the 500-mile round trip when she needed collecting. And, so he said, that was exactly what he did in the early hours of that fateful morning. Grateful that his dad had let him drive his brand new distinctive Range Rover, he claimed that about 1 a.m. on the Monday he left George, Hilda and David safely tucked up in bed and drove north.
In his mind he believed he had constructed a perfect alibi. If to the outside world he could put himself 250 miles away when the killing was supposed to have happened, he hoped he would get off scot-free. Luck goes both ways in murder investigations. Both police and assailant rely on it in equal measure.
Almost anyone who has just committed a violent crime will be uptight and jittery. They will inevitably drive differently — too fast, too slow or plain erratically. Any sharp-eyed beat copper spotting this will at least note down the licence number and check it through the Police National Computer in case it is stolen. Just as the PC outside Buckingham Palace did on seeing a Range Rover at four o’clock that morning.
Other, normally insignificant, factors were becoming relevant. The £370 young Teed had in his usually empty pockets (about my monthly take-home pay at the time) was in stark contrast to the paltry 53p his successful father had in his trousers close to where he lay.
It did not seem right either that at the end of his marathon drive Paul would feel the need to take in the washing before he went indoors, leaving Helen to be the first through the communal door. It turned out that he had expected the bodies to be found by the cleaners, hours earlier. The absence of police activity when he pulled in told him that the staff could not have turned up that morning.
He panicked and left the discovery to Helen. He would have known the scream was coming. He knew the House of Horrors he had left as a welcome for her. The bloodbath his darling spouse was about to walk into would be branded on her memory forever. His reaction to her terror however was yet another example of his odd behaviour.
‘Paul!’ she had hollered. ‘Paul, help. Hilda’s on the floor. She’s covered in blood. Oh God, no. Paul, please come and help,’ she implored.
‘Oh Christ, phone 999,’ was all he replied.