Death Comes Knocking: Policing Roy Grace's Brighton

7: Every Detective’s Nightmare

Crimes and tragedies don’t always happen in office hours. For a detective, being on call means that at any moment during the day or night a phone call can come out of the blue that will require you to instantly drop all your plans for the following days and sometimes weeks — if not months. Some jobs crash into you with such devastating force they leave you damaged forever.

It was late 1995 and I had been promoted to DS about eighteen months previously. After a short stint in Child Protection I was back on CID, running a small team of detectives. Julie and I had just celebrated our third wedding anniversary and had moved into a spacious four-bedroom house in Burgess Hill, about thirty minutes from Brighton.

While life was good, my two great ambitions — further promotion and having children — were evading us. Julie was making a huge success of running the Gatwick to Scotland Air UK passenger service operations but we were rattling around in our new home. We craved the patter of tiny feet.

Beep beep beep: three sounds that at 4 a.m. one morning dragged me from sleep. Wake up properly before you phone in, Graham, don’t make a fool of yourself.

Then there was the usual rummage to locate my grey message-pager under a pile of clothes in the inky-black bedroom. Pressing its button, I floodlit the room.

‘Shit, sorry, Julie!’ I muttered as she grabbed the duvet, flung herself over and burrowed under the bedclothes.

As usual, the message gave no clue. Just a bland ‘Please call Control Room Ext 35280 re serial 76.’ The messages never betrayed the waiting horror.

The polar opposite to Sandy Grace or Ari Branson, the police wives in the Roy Grace novels, Julie accepted much about my job. If a mould for the perfect policeman’s wife was needed, Julie was it. My long days, the late-night and early-morning phone calls, cancelled days off, being on call, bringing rainforests of paperwork home: she took everything in her stride. She absorbed my moods, my stresses, and my tears; there were plenty of those. Cops are human. The horror, the helplessness mostly stays in the ‘job’ side of the brain but sometimes it breaks through the psychological shield into the ‘home’ side and that’s when it hurts. Hurts like hell. Julie would rightly wonder why I put on such a cheery and brave face to friends and family when she knew that inside I was fighting demons. I could be so unfair to her.

Two things, however, she could not stand. First, if I tried to start a phone call before I had woken up properly — she had been known to grab the phone from me and tell the confused caller to whom I was talking nonsense, ‘Graham will ring you back in five minutes’; second, if I used the bedroom phone to call in, unnecessarily waking her from an already disturbed sleep.

So, having safely navigated the stairs in the 4 a.m. half-light, I squinted at the telephone keypad and punched out the well-worn numbers that would connect me to some perky wide-awake controller.

‘Hi, it’s Graham Bartlett, someone paged me to ring in re serial 76.’

‘Oh, morning, Graham. Serial 76, let me look, oh, right, that’s a cot death, I’m afraid.’ Otherwise known as Sudden Infant Death syndrome, it didn’t get any worse.

Shit, shit, shit, shit. Get a grip, Graham, get a grip.

I’d been around a long time and had dealt with most things, but I hated, detested, anything connected with harm to children. I wasn’t alone. The toughest cops in the world could turn into emotional wrecks or angry hulks at the very mention of child abuse or a youngster being injured or killed.

Odd, really, that early in my career I had been so keen to spend a short time as a Child Protection detective. Perhaps that was a professional reaction to my desire to wrap all children, anyone’s children, in cotton wool. Whatever it was, the anger evoked in dealing with child abusers, violent parents and people who cared more about drugs and alcohol than their kids was offset by saving children from a catastrophic start in life.

A study in 2012 reported that 29 per cent of prisoners had experienced child abuse and 41 per cent had witnessed violence in the home. Not all abused children go on to offend just as not all criminals suffered abuse. However, the robbing of a child’s innocence and safety by the very people who should be protecting them provides the worst possible start in life.

Around this time, however, my aversion to being called out to a hurt or dead child was particularly acute. My personal struggles risked overwhelming my professionalism. These battles were rising closer and closer to the surface every day.

I was a pretty typical uncle. Julie was a perfect aunt. Our nieces and nephews were, like Roy Grace’s god-daughter Jaye, loved beyond words but nothing could be a substitute for children of our own. As with Roy and Sandy, years of trying had resulted in nothing. Month after month of tests, heartache, self-pity, angst and wondering ‘why us’ defined our lives and emotions. It was so hard to hide our jealousy and longing when we heard of others’ good news. People close to us even delayed telling us of their impending new arrival to spare our tears. Often Julie and I would cling to each other in the small hours weeping and asking why we had been denied the gift of a child again this month. It really hurt and it started to creep into the job. When dealing with child abuse, an inner voice would bellow at me why can they pop out children just to abuse and neglect when we can’t have just one? Personal feelings have to be ignored when work demands it; but it was a struggle.

Tragic as these cot death calls are, they are rarely more than that — a natural death, and a world-crushing tragedy for a family whose questions would never be answered but whose loss would be total. However, there was always the terrible possibility that one or both of the parents had murdered the baby. Thinking the unthinkable, that’s what the police are for. We have to be suspicious. The ABC of crime investigation is never more relevant than when dealing with cases involving children.

Grace uses a phrase to lecture young or perfunctory detectives: ‘Assumptions are the mother and father of all fuck-ups.’ He’s right. No-one sends a DS to a house in the middle of the night just to provide tea and sympathy. So while we have to provide pastoral care, we have to approach each home where a cot death has occurred as a potential crime scene. Not easy. There was no way I was putting on the white forensic suit and wrapping the place in blue and white ‘Police’ tape but I knew I might have to switch from good cop to bad cop in the blink of an eye. A tough stance to take but one I was prepared for. And all the more so in this instance as I knew the family, for all the wrong reasons. The father and mother being well-known receivers of stolen goods and occasional drug users, there was a rich history between them and the local Old Bill. To add to that, all the children were on the Child Protection Register as, despite loving them, the parents struggled to provide them the care and nurture they deserved.

Thankfully, their history gave me the excuse of calling a more senior officer, the duty DI, who would no doubt make my investigation easier as he would take all the hard decisions. This could have been one of four I worked with. I would have been happy for it to be any of them except one, Clive. Just my luck, it was him.

A big man in every way, Clive’s entrance into any room was invariably preceded by a bellow, a guffaw or a crash of furniture. Sartorially he always looked as if he had dressed in the dark, but that just made everyone even fonder of this big friendly giant. His experience and wisdom made him the go-to DI for almost everything — except cot deaths. His closest friend had recently lost a child in this way and Clive had got very close to the tragedy by practically living with the family to support them in their darkest days.

I gave him a call. ‘OK, Graham,’ he said. ‘You crack on. I’ll get myself sorted and be with you soon.’ No hint of when. I was sure I detected the faint sound of his heart breaking. Once he’d battled his own demons and steeled himself for the emotional tightrope he was about to walk, I knew he would join me.

Invincibility cloak on, I headed to the quiet semi on a sprawling council estate, feeling like a trespasser, as I always do when crossing the threshold of a house where death has visited. There are no words that can comfort a family who have been robbed of a child. This household knew me well. In different times, we were antagonists, but now we were on the same side — probably, possibly.

I went in alone. The shock and bewilderment hit me like a force field. Tears streamed down the ashen cheeks of the parents and their three surviving young children as they hunched on the tatty sofa in the smoke-filled lounge, looking lost and stunned. Furniture was sparse but I had to sit. At six foot tall I would often use my height to an advantage with seated suspects, but now I had to get down to their level, using body language to demonstrate our equality; my role here was to serve, not intimidate. Only the coffee table remained vacant so I took my chances. Thankfully it was sturdy.

The account they whispered out through the sobs was typical, if the unexplained death of a baby can ever be typical. Fed well in the small hours, cuddled to sleep, put in the cot and slept forever. No crying, no pain, no clue. Found a couple of hours later for no other reason than Dad’s habitual check when he used the bathroom. Frantic attempts to revive, rushing to neighbours, panic, despair, and endless distress. Then the heartless system kicked in and took over.

‘You know we have to do some extra checking, Mike, with, well you know, the kids and the Social Services and all that?’ I explained. A reluctant but understanding nod was the affirmation I needed and all I knew I would get.

The worst part for me is seeing the body. Most deaths the police go to are tainted with blood or a dirty syringe but babies just go. Nothing helps you to rationalize their passing. Even Cleo, eventually Roy Grace’s second wife, with all her years’ experience in the mortuary, seeing the most terrible sights, never grew hardened to the death of a child; ‘they got her every time’.

I see them as china dolls, but always hope they will suddenly open their eyes. But of course they never will. They look so precious and fragile and all the more disturbing because of it. This baby was lying just as he had been when put to bed, never to wake again. Kids are different. They really get to you.

The personal angst Julie and I were going through made the horror of attending a baby death even harder but I snapped out of it and regained my professional composure. We had to seize the bedding, bottles and clothing in case they held clues. I decided that we needed to check with the neighbours just in case they had heard or seen anything untoward. This last measure was unusual but, in my judgement, necessary given the previous concerns. Mike understood and wanted it all over and done with as soon as possible so that he and his family could try to reconstruct what was left of their wrecked lives. I was soon to regret this decision.

Having finished at the house, I sucked in the crisp morning air to flush my mind of the horror and grief. Just then my pager chirped. ‘Graham, get back to the nick before you go to the mortuary. Clive,’ the message read. There were no mobile phones back then, and Clive knew I had to accompany the baby’s body to the morgue, so despite his message, I thought he would be happy to wait. Following the mortuary van through the streets of people waking to a new day, I wondered how many of the bleary-eyed souls we passed could ever guess the wretched cargo it carried.

After the little body had been booked in I phoned Clive, presuming he wanted an update. ‘Since when did we do house-to-house enquiries for cot deaths? Might as well have arrested them for murder,’ he yelled.

What had got to him, when he hadn’t even had the balls to come to the scene? Bite your tongue, Graham. Say nothing you’ll regret.

‘Clive, I’m not having this conversation with you on the phone. This is hard enough. I’ve done what I’ve done and now I’ve got the post mortem from hell to watch.’

‘Don’t you know what these poor families go through? Well I do and it’s agony. They don’t need you trashing their lives further,’ he shouted.

He wasn’t bloody listening. Where was his heart? Oh yes, I’d heard it breaking when I called him earlier.

Seeing this as completely out of character, I finished by saying, ‘You don’t know what I know and feel. I’ll see you later,’ and hung up.

I knew what was behind his rant, but he didn’t realize the personal battles I was fighting. Why should he? He was my boss though; I knew he wouldn’t let me get away with talking to him like that, and I’d have to face the music when the time came. However, that was nothing compared to what awaited me in the next room.

Peter James describes, with eerie accuracy, what a mortuary feels like. In Dead Simple he writes: ‘A post mortem was the ultimate degradation. A human being who had been walking, talking, reading, making love — or whatever — just a day or two earlier, being cut open and disembowelled like a pig on a butcher’s slab.’ Now replace those verbs with ‘gurgling, crawling, giggling, suckling’ and you start to get a picture of what it’s like at the post mortem of a baby. Horrific, surreal, scarring but necessary.

As I was gowning up, my stomach heavy with dread, in walked Clive. ‘Hi, Graham, thought I’d come down and give you some support.’ His sudden change of mood stunned me.

‘Clive, is this the right place for you to be? You don’t have to stay, I’ll be fine.’

‘No, you can’t do this alone.’

‘It would be a lot easier if I did,’ I muttered so he couldn’t hear, fearing another Incredible Hulk moment.

I will never forget the tenderness of the pathologist as he dismembered that little boy. He was so gentle but seeing that delicate body cut up was the saddest, most solemn experience of my life. The only thing that helped me through was the knowledge of how much doctors learned from post mortems.

In the UK post mortem examinations, or autopsies, are carried out to determine how someone died. They happen where the death is unexpected, sudden or violent or, in some circumstances, to help medical researchers understand more about a particular illness or condition. One day, the opening up of the body of a barely cold baby might unlock the key to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome itself. Or, as sometimes happens, the pathologist might learn the cause of death was something much darker. I was here to ensure that, in that eventuality, the coroner and the criminal courts had the best evidence to help them reach the right decision. My personal demons were, for now, locked away.

When the autopsy came to an end neither Clive nor I fancied the traditional breakfast detectives indulge in when they have been called out early. Neither of us mentioned the slanging match from earlier either. Had he forgotten? Unlikely. Was he embarrassed? Probably.

Whatever we did and did not talk about, one thing is for sure; we should have got that morning out of our system, but in those days a stiff upper lip was the only acceptable response — unless the sun was over the yardarm, when it was all right to have a large whisky or two.

No suspicious circumstances were found, so my involvement should have ended that day. That was the plan.

Cops aren’t made of stone though; we take this stuff home with us. We bury it while we can but it burns away from the inside. It hurts, it scars, it changes us. And what I had seen, smelt and experienced that morning would subsequently test my marriage to the limit.

The next day Julie and I were guests at a lavish wedding in one of the most affluent villages in rural Surrey. Our good friends were tying the knot in a beautiful church on the green and we were to celebrate afterwards at a stunning country manor hidden miles from the beaten track. The wedding saw the usual nerves, tears, compromised guest lists and a pushy photographer who always wanted ‘just one more’ to keep us from our drinks.

Arriving at the reception something triggered the memories, emotions and feelings of seeing that little boy, naked and cold, on the slab. Every piece of china reminded me of his delicate skin; every child playing led me to reflect how he would never do that; the cutlery, to me, became the pathologist’s tools of disfigurement.

I needed to get away but was trapped, forced to join in the celebrations and pretend to be happy. I sought solace in the help at hand: beer, red wine, white wine, anything to blot out my nightmare. I don’t remember the speeches, I was there only in body — but finally the baby under the knife, and everything else, had been blotted out in a haze of alcohol. The next thing I remember it was dark, I was cold and I was being violently shaken. Somehow I had found my way to the car and sunk into a drunken stupor in the passenger seat. Julie was shouting at me.

‘Where the hell have you been? I’ve been looking for you everywhere, everyone has for hours.’ She threw herself into the driving seat and we sped off into the night. Our journey home was silent and, from what I can remember of it, mainly involved me dropping off to sleep and only stirring when the car was thrown around a roundabout or as we ground to a halt at traffic lights.

The second post mortem within forty-eight hours was my own.

The next morning Julie demanded, and deserved, answers, despite me suffering the hangover from hell. For the first time all my weaknesses and insecurities poured out. I told her about my fears for our future, my terror of losing my professionalism, my helplessness with the family, the horror of the post mortem. Everything. She was furious that I hadn’t opened up to her before, hadn’t told her everything, hadn’t allowed her to hold me and help my pain subside. She hugged me. I wept.

Normally we cope. The training kicks in and we switch on the work filter. But sometimes, that filter is not strong enough and everything comes crashing through. I was lucky, I picked myself up and many of my ex-colleagues still don’t know this story.

Policing is hard. The physical traumas can be dreadful but so too can those inside your mind, the ones that no-one can see. Not until they erupt, leaving your loved ones to pick up the pieces. My rock, Julie, did that time and time again and to her I owe everything.