Death Comes Knocking: Policing Roy Grace's Brighton

9: Death Comes Knocking

The one good thing about a belly punch from Mike Tyson is that eventually you recover. Two solemn cops, however, wearing white hats, and one gleaming, chequered BMW blocking your drive and you just know it’s not going to end well. After this, nothing will ever be the same again; there will be no recovery. We call it delivering the death message.

Few people like late-night callers. Someone raps on the door the wrong side of midnight disturbing your deepest sleep. It takes some moments to become compos mentis. The kids are in bed; the last thing they need is to be woken. You grab a dressing gown, hoping it’s yours. Anger mellows to curiosity then ferments to trepidation. The hazy silhouette of those figures through the glass will sap any remaining hope as your realization of their terrible task overwhelms you.

Thank goodness for police training, you think. For the hours they must spend rehearsing for this most dreadful duty. For all the scenarios they are taught: kids, mums, granddads, crashes, murders, suicides. Thank goodness too for the counselling they get, for this must be awful for them. Thank goodness.

Thank goodness, then, that you don’t know they aren’t trained in this at all, and counselling? Forget it. We just have to get on with it, learning as we go along, and we all do it differently. And none of us has ever found the perfect way, because that does not exist. Why? Because no death is the same, no family like another.

I remember hearing of a lady who lived in a basement flat in central Brighton. Her son was in the Army in Afghanistan and she knew that the strict military protocol following the death or injury of a soldier was that a senior officer would deliver the terrible news. She was petrified that each day death would come knocking. Therefore she developed the habit, whenever she saw a pair of shiny shoes descending the steps to her front door, of rushing to the back of the flat and refusing to come out of hiding in case it was the Casualty Notification Officer with the news she dreaded. She did this for months and missed many a caller as a consequence. Eventually her son returned unharmed.

As a fresh-faced eighteen-year-old recruit I remember a wily old training sergeant drumming into me and my fellow rookies that, where possible, when making an unannounced visit the first sentence must go something like, ‘Hello, it’s the police, there’s nothing to worry about.’ Privately, and definitely out of the fearsome trainer’s earshot, we used to scoff at this advice. It seemed so unnecessary.

Once out on the streets and assuming that nothing we learned about street craft at training college would survive contact with the public, I spurned that nonsense.

Not long after being unleashed on the public of Bognor Regis, I attended a burglary and needed to search the neighbours’ gardens for the fleeing offender. It was around midnight and I thought it would only be polite to knock and ask permission to check the back of one particular house. There were lights on, what could go wrong?

My sharp rap on the door while updating the control room through the ancient Burndept personal radio affixed to my lapel launched a lifelong lesson for me.

‘Who is it?’ a croaky voice demanded.

‘It’s the police,’ I proudly announced.

‘What do you want?’ — the voice now quiet and shaky.

‘Please open the door, madam. I need to speak to you,’ I said.

The door rattled as the locks and chains were released. The shard of light between door and frame slowly widened to reveal a very frightened-looking middle-aged lady.

She was tiny. A pink candlewick dressing gown enveloped her pencil-thin frame. Her eyes were bloodshot and her straggly blonde and grey hair was matted to her scalp. Her cheeks were rosy, not through drink or healthy glow but worry and dread.

‘No. Oh God, please no!’ she cried.

Baffled, I spun around to see what had provoked this outburst.

‘No, oh God, I knew when he didn’t phone something had happened. Oh no, what am I going to do? How am I going to carry on?’

By now curtains were twitching, lights were coming on and an impromptu drama was unfolding in which I was the villain.

‘I’m sorry, madam,’ I blurted out, raising my hand to try and quieten her. ‘What are you saying? What’s happened?’ Not realizing that it was me who had lit her fuse.

‘My husband said he’d call when he got to Manchester. That should have been hours ago. What’s happened to him? Is he dead? Please say he’s not. Please say he’s alive,’ she begged.

‘I am sure he is, madam — alive that is,’ was my attempt at reassurance. ‘I just want to look in your garden if that’s OK.’

‘You bastard!’ Her worry and angst had morphed into rage and was aimed squarely at me. ‘Why didn’t you say? Have you no idea? I was convinced you’d come about Doug. Don’t they teach you anything at training school?’ she yelled.

All I could mutter as I made my exit was a pathetic ‘Sorry’, omitting to add that they actually did teach me lots but this one lesson I chose to ignore. We never did find the burglar, and from that day the phrase ‘there’s nothing to worry about’ never left my lexicon.

As I matured I realized that telling people of the demise of their loved one is a huge responsibility. Of all the tasks that befall the police this one just had to be done right. No second chances, no retakes. Every word mattered, every gesture counted. The grieving process could hinge on how well or clumsily that dreadful message was delivered.

There is something very sobering in standing outside someone’s house late at night, seeing their shadow behind the curtains, knowing you are just about to rip the heart out of their lives forever.

It’s bad enough to see a wretched body surrounded by scorched foil or needles, vomit, mucus and the detritus of a life given over to heroin. Horrible to find what a few minutes previously was a laughing, joking, and loving young person, mangled within the wreckage of a hatchback, itself concertinaed into a sturdy oak tree. Tragic to hold a dying lad whose ill-judged retort to an aggressive drunk drew the single punch that crushed his eggshell skull. All are terrible things that police officers have to face.

For me, though, the death message was worse than any of those. In Dead Simple as Grace goes to see Phil Wheeler, whose son had just been killed thanks to his ambition to become a hero, he reflects that talking to the recently bereaved is the single worst aspect of police work. I couldn’t agree more.

Many of the grisly aspects of the job can at least be lightened by gallows humour. A traffic officer once ambled into the station kitchen, looked at my spaghetti bolognese, and demanded to know how I had managed to so quickly recover the human remains of the fatal crash he had just come from. Death messages are the exception. No-one makes light of them. It’s as if prolonging the solemnity is a mark of respect — like sharing the pain for someone you never knew.

The palpable trepidation in the car as PCs Omotoso and Upperton make their way to break the dreadful news of Tony Revere’s death to his girlfriend in Dead Man’s Grip is something all cops relate to. Their careful but clear approach in giving the awful message is drawn from experience and natural humanity, not training. The real, and now very sadly deceased, Tony Omotoso insisted on getting the word dead out as quickly as he sensed the situation allowed. Others ensure that the grieving relative actually says the ‘D’ word themselves to help them understand. Everyone has their own style. However it’s done, it’s an awful job.

You go through the words in your mind — never string it out because as soon as they see you they know; whatever they do and say, they know. You try to predict the response — impossible. Remember you may be investigating a crime but most of all remember that you are about to wreck their world.

‘You’re lying’, ‘you’re wrong’, ‘he doesn’t touch drugs’, ‘he can’t be dead, he called me earlier’, ‘you bastards’: I have faced all of these reactions when giving the news everyone dreads. Disbelief, blame, anger, all aimed at you, the messenger. All regretted later on but all quite normal. You have to take it on the chin.

I was on the wrong end of horrendous abuse and vitriol about 3 a.m. one summer morning. I had come from the mortuary and tried to tell a hysterical mum that her son had died of a drugs overdose. She howled. She shouted. She swore. She tried to throw me out, wanting to believe that if I weren’t there her son would still be alive. After she’d used up every ounce of emotional energy, I persuaded her to get her other son round to be with her. She reluctantly allowed me to remain until he arrived. He wasn’t much better, aggravated by the fact that he was a police officer from another force. Bizarrely, instead of comforting his mum he started by questioning my investigation and trying to give me advice. I had to take it all in my stride, seeing it as a reaction to something I never wanted to experience. As the hours went by my presence was accepted even if my news wasn’t. I hope that in time the pain eased.

Another evening, a car full of teenagers had plummeted off the cliffs at Brighton onto the Marina Village. Two of the lads inside died but miraculously not all were killed. I hadn’t been to the accident but was tasked with visiting the family of one of the survivors to break the news. All of the occupants had grown up together and the tragedy had been due to a simple lapse of judgement. A community was about to be devastated. There is no instruction book for how you tell a mum that while her son was alive — critically injured and on life support, but alive — that his best friends had died a horrible death plunging over a hundred-foot cliff to the ground below.

It was a long, hard evening with that family, trying to keep up with them on their rollercoaster of emotions: relief, guilt, grief, hope and despair. I will never know whether my approach, along the lines of ‘this is really awful but try to cling on to hope and the fact that he is alive and in the very best hands’, worked, but it was all I could think of. Sometimes gut instinct, common sense and humanity are all you have to fall back on; you have to hope they get you through.

Occasionally you have to adopt a parental role towards those whose world you have just destroyed.

Following yet another young life being snuffed out decades before its time by drugs, it fell to me to break the news to the young man’s parents. It was the middle of the day and they were hard to find, but death is notoriously disrespectful of convenience.

I eventually tracked the father down to his small shop close to Brighton’s border with Hove. Thankfully the lunchtime rush had yet to materialize so the shop was empty.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Murphy. I’m from the police. Do you mind just shutting the shop for a while as I need to talk to you?’

‘Yes, of course, Officer, what’s the problem?’ he chirped. Only I knew that would be his last cheery word for years.

Having secured our privacy, I went through the basics of quickly checking his identity, as you never want to give a death message to the wrong person, confirmed who his son was, and then I told him.

‘I am very sorry to tell you that we have found your son dead in his flat this morning. We are sure it’s him and the early indications are that he died of a drugs overdose.’

He stared at me in frozen shock. No emotion.

‘I have to tell Pam, my ex-wife, his mother. I suppose I should do that after I close up tonight.’

‘No, that needs to happen now. How would you like to do that?’

‘Well, she ought to be told but I can’t close the shop.’

‘Really, you can. You must. You can’t stay at work. It probably hasn’t sunk in yet but this is going to hit you very hard.’

‘Do you think so? I mean, do you think I should shut up the shop?’

‘Yes, absolutely. Please do it. How would you like Pam told? Shall we do it?’

‘No. I must. Can you come with me though?’

‘Of course.’

After what seemed like an age I helped Mr Murphy towards my waiting unmarked car. He had not yet broken down, he had not yet asked the thousands of questions I knew would come; he had gone onto autopilot.

As we drove the short distance to Pam’s office in the centre of Hove we agreed that we would ask for her to be fetched and that I would request a quiet room. He would then break the terrible news and I would support him by answering any questions and helping with any arrangements.

I took the liberty of parking directly outside, placing the Police Vehicle Log Book on the dashboard to ward off any overzealous traffic warden. We climbed the narrow stairway to the office reception. We introduced ourselves and I persuaded them to give us the privacy we needed.

So far so good. I would stay in the background while the tragedy unfolded between the bereaved parents.

In walked Pam. It seemed she had been told nothing, still less that her ex was with a police officer.

‘Hello, I am DS Bartlett,’ was all I said before the man beside me wailed like a banshee.

‘What? What’s going on? What’s happened? Will someone please tell me?’ Pam demanded.

The stoic determination Mr Murphy had shown earlier had crumbled at the critical moment. There was no way this poor lady was going to hear the terrible news from him. We should have agreed a plan B but I knew I needed to step in and fast.

‘I am afraid to tell you that your son has been found dead this morning. He was in his flat and we think he died of a drugs overdose,’ I said gently, for the second time within an hour.

Now I had two banshees. The screams must have been heard right through the adjacent offices. I had to get these two out of here quickly.

Bombarded with questions, denials, more questions and waterfalls of tears I managed to extricate the two devastated parents from the building, into the car and away to nearby relatives. There I went through the announcement for the third time, before leaving the mum and dad in the care of someone they loved.

I have no doubt they weep to this day. No-one should have to bury their offspring. As Grace says in Dead Tomorrow when explaining to Cleo why Lynn Beckett went to such lengths to save her daughter Caitlin’s life: ‘The gods have no greater torment than for a mother to outlive her child.’

There are lots of aspects of the job that don’t necessarily fit in with the idea that the police’s role is to cut crime. Giving death messages is an obvious one. Just as Grace applies Locard’s principle of ‘every contact leaves a trace’ to the forensic quandaries facing him with the recovered bodies in Dead Tomorrow so it applies to the personal contacts the police have with ordinary people. The way officers speak to and treat those they are telling of an unexpected death will mark those people for life. All personal baggage must be left at the door. Be it the fight they have just been to, the tray full of reports waiting for them, the grief from home for being late off duty, nothing must interfere with that moment.

Bad enough that the bereaved have been visited by the angel of death, but to taint that further with arrogance, insensitivity or clumsiness would be criminal. Thankfully officers acting in such a way tend to be confined to television fiction; in reality they are invariably all you would hope them to be.

I pray you never have to find out for yourselves.