‘Charlie Romeo Zero Five, are you available to attend 73 Crestway Rise, off Hollingbury Road? Distressed call from a woman who says her husband has just pushed dog faeces into her face. He’s threatening to kill her. She’s locked herself in the toilet. Grade One. She’s hung up, but I’m trying to call her back.’
All calls were graded. ‘Grade One’ meant immediate response. ‘Two’ meant get there within one hour. ‘Three’ was attend by appointment. ‘Four’ was no police attendance required and to be resolved over the phone.
Juliet turned to Matt. ‘OK?’
‘Rock ’n’ roll,’ the Special Constable replied. They grabbed hi-vis jackets from the rack at the far end, and the keys to a pool car, then hurried downstairs.
Less than two minutes later, with Juliet driving, they pulled out of the car park in a marked Ford Mondeo estate, turned left and headed down the steep hill towards London Road. Matt leaned forward against his seat belt, punched the buttons for the blue lights and siren, then tapped the address into the satnav, whilst at the same time listening to further information from the call handler. The victim’s name was Lorna Belling.
Juliet knew from her years of experience just how scary and dangerous a situation like this could be.
7
Monday 18 April
On a Friday afternoon in September 1984, a quietly spoken man with an Irish accent checked into room 629 at The Grand hotel on Brighton’s seafront. He signed the register under the name of Roy Walsh. Just one of the numerous late-season visitors to the seaside resort. Probably on business, the front-desk clerk had thought, judging from the dark suit he was wearing. She was wrong.
His real name was Patrick Magee and he was a field operative of the Irish Republican Army. In his luggage was a 20lb bomb made of Frangex — a brand of gelignite — wrapped in cling film to mask the smell of explosives from sniffer dogs. It was fitted with a long-delay timer made from video recorder components and a Memo Park Timer safety device.
Some time before checking out two days later on the morning of Sunday 16 September, he unscrewed a panel beneath the bathtub, activated the timer, placed the device inside the cavity and carefully replaced the panel. In little under a month’s time, the annual Conservative Party Conference would be taking place in Brighton. From earlier intelligence-gathering, Magee knew that the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, would be staying in the room below this one.
Three weeks and five days later, on Friday 12 October at 2.54 a.m., the bomb exploded. Five people were killed, and over thirty were injured; several, including the wife of cabinet minister Norman Tebbit, were left permanently disabled.
The mid-section of the building collapsed into the basement, leaving a gaping hole in the hotel’s facade. While her husband, Denis, slept, insomniac Margaret Thatcher was still awake at the time, working on her conference speech for the next day in her suite. The blast destroyed her bathroom but left her sitting room and bedroom unscathed. Both she and Denis were shaken but uninjured. She changed her clothes and they were led out through the wreckage, and driven first to Brighton’s John Street police station and then to a room in the safety of a dormitory building for new recruits and informants at Malling House, the Sussex Police Headquarters in Lewes.
Later that morning the IRA issued a statement:
Mrs Thatcher will now realise that Britain cannot occupy our country and torture our prisoners and shoot our people in their own streets and get away with it. Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always. Give Ireland peace and there will be no more war.
For many of the hundreds of police officers who either attended on the night or took part in the investigation, this incident, which came close to wiping out the government of its time, was the high point of their career. Roy Grace’s father was one of those on duty that night who was sent urgently to the scene. He was then delegated to be part of the escort team taking the Prime Minister and her husband to a safe place.
Detective Superintendent Roy Grace had always had an open mind on the paranormal, dating back to a childhood experience. If pressed on religious views, he would describe himself as agnostic, but privately he believed that there was something out there. Not a biblical God on a cloud, but something, for sure. And he’d consulted mediums on a number of occasions in his quest to find out the truth about what had happened to his first wife, Sandy.
Coincidence was another thing that had always intrigued him, and sometimes put a smile on his face. His recent office move from the industrial estate in Hollingbury, which had housed Major Crime for the past fifteen years, to his current office, in the Police HQ at Malling House, had done just that: directly across the corridor from where he now sat was the very suite where his father, along with several fellow police officers, had brought Margaret and Denis Thatcher to safety on that terrible morning.
His new office, small, narrow and stark, had formerly been a bedroom in one of the dormitory buildings. The one window, behind him, was shielded with vertical silver blinds. It had the smallest sliver of a view, through a narrow gap between two other identical brick buildings, of the soft round hills of the South Downs in the distance.
To the left of his desk was an array of plug sockets and switches, left over from when it had still, until recently, been a bedroom. Facing his spartan desk was another, in mirror image, which replaced the small round conference table he’d had in his office at Sussex House. No doubt in time he would get used to these new quarters, but for the moment he found himself, almost ridiculously, missing the old building, with its inefficient heating and air-conditioning, and its absence of any canteen — and the occasional treat from Trudie’s, the stall up the road selling delicious bacon rolls and fried-egg sandwiches.
The facilities here were certainly way better. In addition to an on-site canteen, there were dozens of delis and cafés nearby, and Tesco, Aldi and the more upmarket Waitrose supermarkets were only a ten-minute walk away.
One thing did make him smile. Something his father had told him while he was only days from dying of cancer in Brighton’s Martlets Hospice, which had looked after him so wonderfully well, right up to his last minutes. Jack Grace had been a big, burly man, the kind of cop you’d never want to mess with unless you were a drunken idiot. But in the final days, as the cancer had eaten away all those pounds of flesh, leaving him almost skeletal, his father had still retained his sense of humour and his sharp mind. He had told Roy the story of the hunt for those responsible for the IRA outrage, and the unintended problems that it had caused.
The police had gone back through six months of The Grand hotel register, calling up the phone numbers of all the guests to check on them. The first number his dad called had been answered by a woman. He’d asked her if she could verify that her husband had been staying at the hotel on that weekend. She’d replied, in shock, that her husband had told her he had been in Scotland on a fishing trip with his mates.
The vigilant enquiries by Sussex Police had eventually unearthed more than a dozen husbands and wives who had lied to their spouses about their whereabouts on that weekend, resulting in seven divorces. It led, ultimately, to a change in the way the police conducted future enquiries, to a more subtle line of approach.
But as he thought about that again now, he was reminded of his own past life. One lesson Roy Grace had learned in his twenty-odd years in Sussex Police was that if you wanted to work in Homicide, you just had to accept the unpredictable nature of the job. Murders seldom happened at convenient times for the investigators. Time and again, whatever plans you had made, whether it was your wedding anniversary, or the birthday of a child or a loved one, or even a holiday planned months in advance, they might have to be shelved without notice.