Peter Mellor was usually based at Lockleaze, the former district police station which serves as the Bristol area headquarters for the CPT, but had come over to Portishead, my base as Deputy Chief, in order to brief me on anything he felt I should know about which had happened while I had been on leave. He was exceptionally able at keeping his ear to the ground, and I trusted his judgement more than that of any other cop I knew. A briefing from Mellor was always invaluable. However it appeared that on this occasion I was going to have to face the boss without that luxury.
We obediently followed Titmuss into his lair, with me rubbing my stained jacket in desultory fashion with the back of one hand.
‘Attention!’ whispered Mellor at the door.
Titmuss, who vaguely resembled a younger Captain Mainwaring without the charm, was wearing a dark pin-striped double-breasted suit so stiffly formal it was something of a miracle that he could move in it. I knew I could safely bet a month’s salary that he was going out to lunch. Or to a lunch, I should say. He was very hot on the kind of occasions any normal copper would volunteer to police an England soccer international with Germany in order to avoid. Chamber of commerce lunches, Rotary lunches, civic investitures. And you could always tell when he was going to one because of both the expression and the suit that he wore — each clearly inclined towards self-importance.
Titmuss slapped a file on the desk in front of him and peered through his round gold-framed spectacles. Even his eyebrows bristled when he was in this sort of mood.
‘We’ve had a complaint,’ he began. I felt my back involuntarily stiffen. What had Mellor and I done now, I wondered fleetingly.
‘...of an exceptionally delicate nature even within the realms of the CPT,’ he went on. ‘One that will have to be treated with extreme discretion.’
So it was just another child abuse incident. Terrible to think like that, or to be relieved at such a matter, but it was not normal for our cases to be filtered down from Titmuss. As well as being Titmuss’s deputy, I also had direct control of the Bristol and South Gloucestershire division at Lockleaze. The social services and the medical authorities, sources of most of our workload, would normally report straight to me or one of my officers — six sergeants and twenty-four constables — rather than to the big boss whose job was the overall administration of the team.
‘Just the thing for you, Rose,’ continued Titmuss, reverting briefly to patronising mode.
His inference was plain enough. The importance of CPT work is pretty obvious, but only months previously I had been heading the Avon and Somerset’s biggest murder investigation in years, the serial killing of male prostitutes and, I know it’s awful, but a major murder investigation is inclined to be the ambitious detective’s dream job. Some of us find a big murder hard to follow, and Titmuss, rather curiously as he was the CPT chief, liked to rub it in by implying that I had in some way been demoted to an area much more suitable for a woman.
I was in any case aware that was really nonsense and that I had the kind of track record which made Titmuss’s patronising approach to me quite unforgivable, but the bloody man had the knack of getting under my skin and I had to force myself to concentrate on the job in hand. Child abuse is something police officers, like the vast majority of people, find especially abhorrent, and I knew better than to allow Titmuss to get in the way of the remains of my brain.
I picked up the file and glanced at it. The child believed to have been the victim of abuse was a nine-year-old Down’s Syndrome boy. I looked at Peter Mellor. All the banter had gone from him now.
‘The woman who reported her suspicions is a teacher at the special school this boy attends,’ said Titmuss. ‘Apparently he made some remarks which might incriminate the father, usual thing...’ Titmuss paused and coughed almost nervously. ‘The boy’s name is Stephen Jeffries — his father is Richard Jeffries.’
I studied Mellor again. He looked as blank as I did.
Titmuss noticed our lack of reaction.
‘Name doesn’t mean anything to you? Good, that’s what I was hoping for, and why I want you, Rose, to handle the investigation personally along with Peter. Keep things straightforward. If the pair of you had been in CPT longer you’d be bound to know him. Richard Jeffries is a doctor, a respected Bristol GP. He is also a qualified paediatrician who many times over the years has taken part in strategy discussions.’
Mellor gave a long low whistle. I remained silent. Waiting.
Strategy discussions are a formal part of the child abuse investigation procedure when representatives from Police, Health, Housing and Social Services decide what further action should be taken in a case. Any allegation of child abuse against a doctor would be a particularly tricky one to deal with, but this was even worse — a suspect who was a paediatrician actually involved in child protection work. So that’s why we’ve had all this build up, I thought. No bloody wonder.
After a brief pause Titmuss continued. ‘This one could be very messy,’ he said, and for once I agreed with his every word. ‘Let’s try to be a jump ahead, shall we? Top priority, eh? Now get on with it.’
I left his office with a sinking heart, in little doubt that I was in a no win situation. In addition I was bogged down with paperwork as usual and the Jeffries case was far from all I had to deal with. The Avon and Somerset CPT investigates 800 cases of suspected child abuse every year, and around a quarter of these are in the Bristol and South Gloucestershire area. I had difficulty enough keeping a jump ahead of Titmuss, let alone anything else.
However we had been told to give top priority to the Jeffries investigation — not without justification I had to admit — and top priority it would get. There was one up side to it all. As I was now heading a specific enquiry it made sense for me to move over at once to Lockleaze, which houses its own customised computer system, the filed records of previous child abuse cases going back a minimum of seven years, and a victim suite, designed to look like a sitting room in an ordinary house so as not to cause unnecessary distress to children we needed to question during an investigation. Only at Lockleaze could I ensure that I would always be at the hub of the action. So I installed myself there that afternoon in a temporary new office which had been hastily cleared for me. It was little more than a broom cupboard — after all the old police station was already so overcrowded that there were not even enough desks to go round should all the detective constables based there ever have turned up for duty at the same time — but it put me at a welcome distance from Titmuss the Terrible. And I found, as I began to set up the investigation and organise a team to check out Dr Jeffries as discreetly as possible, that I did not miss the comparative luxury and space of Portishead at all.
The next day Mellor and I drove across the city to Stephen Jeffries’ school, Balfour House, which specialised in tutoring handicapped children, to see the teacher who had reported her suspicions.
Claudia Smith was a pretty young woman in her late twenties who seemed to me to be perhaps overly confident, but she had been trained to understand children like Stephen Jeffries and to spot any problems they might have, and there was no doubting the sincerity of her concern.
‘I’ve been teaching Stephen for two years and in the last few months I have noticed some disturbing aspects to his behaviour,’ she explained, brushing aside locks of the rather lank almost black hair which seemed to habitually fall across her face. ‘He seems to have become rather hyperactive and he has started to touch the other children, particularly the girls, in a way that if not always overtly sexual is certainly over familiar. Once he actually appeared to me to be simulating sexual intercourse with one of our little girls.