Death Comes Knocking: Policing Roy Grace's Brighton

14: Taking Chances, Saving Lives

Drugs hurt everyone. It’s a startling statistic that 80 per cent of all property crime in the UK is drug-related.

As Peter James says when quantifying Skunk’s drug habit in Not Dead Enough, few users are on a £10 per day habit; it’s more like £30. So, with 2,500 people in Brighton and Hove whose lives revolve around sticking needles in what’s left of their veins and pumping in an unknown cocktail of poisons, that’s at least £75,000 (nearly three times the UK average annual wage in 2015) going into the hands of drug dealers and organized crime every day. To get that kind of money most have to steal, and they never get market value for their booty. That, therefore, results in excess of an estimated quarter of a million pounds of goods stolen every day.

Many users will do anything they can to get the gear they so desperately need. They steal, cheat, rob and, if necessary, kill. Skunk is horrible, the scum of the earth. Relentlessly pursued by DC Paul Packer, whose finger he had bitten off in a previous encounter, few will feel sad at his grisly comeuppance, being flame-grilled in Cleo’s MG. While his waking each morning ‘to the sensation that the world was a hostile cave about to entomb him, sweating and hallucinating scorpions crawling across his face’ is unlikely to evoke much sympathy, perhaps there will be at least some understanding of his single-minded determination to do whatever it took to score the drugs he craved.

No-one starts out deciding to become a drug addict. No-one is born evil either, but we are all a product of our upbringing and environment. Who we love. Who loves us. Who we hate. What’s right. What’s wrong. Nothing can change that. Unless of course, like me, you experience a shocking revelation which makes you question all your values.

I was a detective through and through. Even when I wasn’t officially a detective I behaved like one, being inquisitive, tenacious and with a pretty clear notion of right and wrong. Police locked up the bad people to protect the good. The law told us who was bad and who was good. Simple. Thieves, fraudsters, drunks, yobs, druggies, whoever — they were our enemies, they were the ones whose imprisonment we celebrated. Job done. Good Guys 1, Villains 0. People like us were always the virtuous. We had the upbringing, the principles that stopped us stepping over to the dark side.

It was one of those days in the late 1990s when everyone else seemed to be out of the CID office doing exciting things, and I was confined to barracks catching up on a bewildering backlog of paperwork. I hated those days but I couldn’t ignore a ringing phone.

‘Is Russ there, Graham?’ asked the caller from the front desk.

‘No, he’s out. I think he might be at the hospital seeing the bloke who got stabbed last night.’

‘Oh, there’s someone down here with a letter from him saying he can collect his property. He was released from prison for burglary this morning and wants his clothes back.’

Oh great, another half hour of my life I won’t get back, I thought. Sifting through some mangy bag of clothing and then handing it back to some low-life who won’t be in the least bit grateful, and will probably ask about that mysterious £200 that he will allege was in the pocket.

’OK, I’ll be down,’ I said wearily, having scanned the office without spotting anyone I could delegate to.

Asked to describe him after nearly twenty years, I would have had no chance. I’m sure the reverse was true too. But there was no mistaking him. The first glimpse made those two decades vanish in an instant and his dropped jaw was all the confirmation I didn’t need.

‘Graham?’

‘Sam? Bloody hell, mate. How are you? Listen, I can’t stop. I’ve got to give some con his stuff back, but can you hang about?’

‘It’s me. I’m that con, Graham. It’s me you’re here to see,’ he chuckled.

Years back, Sam’s family and mine had been close. Our parents knew each other before we were born. They lived down the road from us and, like mine, Sam’s parents were hard-working and lived for their children. He had two younger brothers and his older sister was good friends with mine.

I don’t remember a time in my childhood when Sam wasn’t around. Summers, Christmases, weekends, all those memories included Sam and me playing together, getting into scrapes — I can still remember being told off by an irate motorist for throwing grass cuttings at her car from the supposed cover of Sam’s picket fence.

A lot changed when I joined the police at eighteen. I moved away from home and immersed myself in a new life. I drifted away from many of my friends, although it was never a conscious decision and I often wished I’d stayed in touch with my roots. So when I didn’t see much of Sam I didn’t think it was odd. I’d occasionally bump into him when I was back in Shoreham but I just accepted that blokes move on. He would be doing well. He was like me, and we were the good guys. He’d be fine.

‘But they said you’d been in prison,’ I gabbled.

‘In and out for years, Graham. I’m surprised you didn’t know.’

The next two hours passed in the blink of an eye. He explained how he had started off doing well, great job, loads of money, parties, popularity, drink. How that began to change through the odd spliff, pills, a little heroin — just to try, mind, more and more addiction, lost jobs, bankruptcy, stealing, eroded trust, broken relationships, risk-taking, burglary, capture, chances, relapses, more crime, prison, helplessness, loneliness; a dark, bottomless spiral.

I was stunned. We had been peas in a pod. Following separate but parallel tracks. At some point, an unseen signal master must have switched the points so our destinations became very different. But deep down we still had lots in common. It hit me that Sam could so easily have been me, and I could have been him.

Drugs do bad things to people. All drugs. They mess with your health and your mind. Heroin did it for Sam. He, like so many others, was trapped in a cycle of addiction and imprisonment.

I’ve never taken an illicit drug, not even once, but what if I had, what if I got trapped like Sam did? It made me realize that every villain has a story. Equally, as Grace reflected, while watching the film The Third Man in Not Dead Enough, most villains try to justify what they have done. In their warped minds, it is the world that is wrong, not them.

That day I grew up. I started to see criminals as people who did bad things rather than just as bad people: a subtle but important distinction that helped develop my thinking over the rest of my career.

Something had happened that day to shift my perspectives on good and evil. I didn’t predict, however, that it would see me ridiculed in the press, criticized by ministers, yet supported by my more courageous bosses, lecturing internationally and saving many lives.

The chance meeting with Sam had set me on a road of reflection. It had a massive impact on me. I was still a sergeant so fairly junior in the scheme of things but I spent years afterwards soul-searching as to how much difference we actually make criminalizing rather than treating drug users. What was the point? Hell, it was circumstance alone that put me on a rewarding career path and Sam in jail.

I struggled with why do we treat drug addicts as criminals but alcoholics as patients? Sure, people steal and rob to get the money to buy drugs and that needs to be dealt with — even Sam would agree — but if we could get those people off drugs they wouldn’t need to do all those things. And they might stop killing themselves too.

Drugs are rife in Brighton and Hove. The city has won many awards in its time but the award for ‘Drugs Death Capital of the UK’ for the eleventh consecutive year doesn’t get presented at some swanky reception at the Dorchester. This grubby title, however, provides much of the backdrop of Brighton and Hove throughout the Grace novels. The presence of drug turf wars and the impact on users is a constant Roy Grace theme, whether overtly described or as part of the back story of his most odious adversaries. It’s the undercurrent that, in fact and fiction, runs through everything that is Brighton.

At its worst, the city was losing about one son, daughter, mum or dad a week to the misuse of drugs. That is just the people who died of an overdose, never mind those who have succumbed to blood-borne viruses or taken their own lives as a direct result of drug use. If we’d seen similar numbers of deaths on the road there would have been a national outcry. The common attitude was, because it was drugs and drugs happen to other people, it had to be their fault. So who cares?

Well, I did — a lot. It was a scandal. The treatment services were struggling hard to reverse the trend through needle exchanges, methadone clinics, medically provided opiate programmes, issuing naloxone (a drug which reverses the effects of overdose), but the police were just smashing down doors, some at residential treatment centres, arresting people for possession of drugs and putting them into an ineffective criminal justice system.

A colleague who was at the forefront of taking out the Mr Bigs of the drugs world reflected recently that all he ever achieved was to create career opportunities for the next in line. Locking up the likes of Vlad Cosmescu from Dead Tomorrow, who was dealing in drugs, cigarettes, pornography, counterfeit goods and human beings, doesn’t mean the crime will stop.

Brighton and Hove had more than its fair share of attention from the big boys of the Regional Crime Squad, National Crime Squad and Serious and Organized Crime Agency, investigating our premier criminals. They recognized that much of the wealth in the city was made on the back of a thriving heroin and crack cocaine trade. These top detectives knew the real prize were the assets amassed by these racketeers, who were more afraid of losing their money than their liberty.

The Proceeds of Crime Act provided a very visible form of justice for communities. People were delighted to see the wealth and opulence so lavishly showcased by their apparently unemployed neighbour being whisked away on the back of a police car-transporter or advertised by a ‘House For Sale’ sign as the removal truck trundled away shortly after the prison van.

In 2005 I was promoted to DCI to head Brighton and Hove CID. Personal tragedy had struck the year before when my father died of cancer. I missed him terribly and we had forged an even stronger bond since he had saved our lives in the car crash.

His loss rocked me to the core but I was so proud when the Chief Constable awarded him a posthumous Certificate of Meritorious Service. An award for Special Constables was then commissioned in his name and a display was established in Brighton’s Old Police Cells Museum that marks his life and contribution to policing. My uniform is now displayed there next to his. Back together where we belong.

However, Dad was a strong, no-nonsense, proud man and he would have been thrilled that I had reached such a senior level at the place and in the job we both loved.

I did not go into this new job with any particular agenda other than to do the very best I could to make the city safer and for it to feel safer too. However, I had risen to a level where I could do something about our unjust drugs strategy. Sometimes you have to reach a certain rank to get your voice heard.

The flow of drugs into the city from places such as Liverpool, South London and Wolverhampton appeared unstoppable. We weren’t bad at taking out the dealers. The problem was, no-one in the police was doing anything to stem the users’ insatiable appetite for the stuff that was killing them. So as we locked up the latest gang of pushers more rocked up to meet the unrelenting demand.

Leadership guru Dr Stephen Covey once said, ‘Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.’ We needed to find a different wall.

It’s hard to prove a negative, such as how many people didn’t die or weren’t robbed, so it was always easier for the police’s effectiveness to be measured on the outputs, the things they did that were easy to count: seizures, arrests, warrants. I decided this was going to change. I wanted to talk about saving lives and getting people help rather than how much of this and what weight of that we happened to find, or how many doors we kicked in.

It was a risk. My career could come to a crashing halt. However, I had once been inspired by Chief Inspector Stuart Harrison. Stuart, a maverick with a mission, espoused the belief that ‘forgiveness is easier to obtain than permission’. This stuck in my thoughts as I tried something different.

We were going to find a new way of fighting this unwinnable war on drugs. Our old tactics weren’t working; they never really had. I became like a stuck record going round saying ‘users belong in treatment, dealers belong in prison’. I knew we could slow the demand, get people well again, lock up dealers and cut crime.

Thankfully, I had two right-hand men whose character and vision were critical to what I wanted to do.

My kids used to say when my phone rang at home, ‘Is that Paul again?’ DI Paul Furnell pops up in Dead Tomorrow as the switched-on intelligence manager that he is. Now a Detective Superintendent, he is one of those sickening people: tall, good-looking, intelligent, likeable yet very persistent. He’d call day and night.

The Brighton Divisional Intelligence Unit, which he ran, was not so much the engine room of the division, more its furnace. The energy generated in their expansive open-plan office was white hot. Nothing could ever wait until tomorrow, jobsworths were excluded, everyone was fired up to catch the bad guys and catch them now. In the middle of it was Paul acting as ringmaster, whipping the team into frenzies of activity. The downsides were that he regarded his team’s overtime budget as being a monthly rather than annual allowance and if he had something he wanted to do, he would badger me into submission. A pain in the proverbial but he got stuff done and I needed that.

Sergeant Richard Siggs — Siggsy — was a giant with a big heart. A county rugby coach and former public order trainer, he wasn’t the first person you would think of as suitable to cajole drug users and down-and-outs into treatment and shelter. However, he had already won the national Tilley Award for his work with the street-homeless. His colossal physique together with his gentle nature had a tremendously persuasive effect on people who needed convincing that they should seek help. Tough love, he called it. One reformed drug user, Sean, once told me, ‘If you have Siggsy behind you telling you to go into treatment, you kind of have to go, don’t you!’

The street market works in the city exactly as explained in Dead Man’s Footsteps, as Grace follows a ‘migration’ of users towards their dealer, Niall Fisher, observing their attempts at furtive behaviour.

These migrations are fascinating to watch. A dealer will arrive at a particular place. Word would get out that they were there and dozens of users would emerge from alleyways, squats and the like, briskly descending on the pusher. Following swift, almost imperceptible exchanges of cash and drugs, all would evaporate into the ether, leaving no trace of the trade in death that had just occurred.

So I got Paul to take over the enforcement role of what became Operation Reduction, relentlessly targeting such dealers, catching them in the act, getting them banged up and denying them time to set down roots.

Siggsy, together with the inspirational Director of Crime Reduction Initiatives, Mike Pattinson, developed a partnership that identified the most criminally active drug addicts. Cops and drugs workers patrolling the streets together hunted down those who needed treatment and from whom the city needed a rest. They were given a stark choice: enter the Op Reduction treatment programme that we had created and remain there or be targeted by the police and locked up. A carrot and stick approach but, with Siggsy and his team providing the ‘or else’ factor, in four years over 500 users went into treatment who wouldn’t have otherwise. Meanwhile, during the same period, Paul’s teams arrested around 600 dealers all of whom, faced with the weight of evidence against them, pleaded guilty.

The users were what we branded ‘revolving door prisoners’. We first meet one such convict, Darren Spicer, the fictional prison-dwelling burglar, in Dead Like You. A high achiever at school but his chances blighted by the effects of his father breaking his back falling through a roof, his abusive mother and a spell in an approved school, he inadvertently books himself a one-way trip to the hopeless oblivion that drug addiction brings. A victim of circumstance, like Sam, his whole life becomes a cycle of prison, craving and offending. Branson once tells him that they haven’t bothered to change his bed sheets in Lewes Prison during one of his brief episodes of liberty. They probably hadn’t. The name might be fictitious but the story is spot-on.

The users Siggsy and Mike were targeting were given special treatment to help them break this futile cycle. Their possession and use of drugs was not subject to criminal sanction provided they went to, and stayed in, treatment. Yes, I had to defend falling arrest rates; yes, the numbers of drug seizures fell (although the volume increased thanks to Paul’s focus on the bigger fish); but we cut crime, saved money and saved lives. Not bad going — and I slept soundly at night.

Some sections of the press questioned whether this top cop had gone soft. A government minister made specific mention that the government did not support my views on decriminalization. Thankfully I convinced my bosses that this approach would, in the long run, be more effective and humane than our traditional approaches. As time went on, my critics started to see sense in what I was doing. Brighton was hailed for all the right reasons.

In early 2008 a strong batch of black heroin was hitting the streets. So called as it turned that colour when prepared for injection, it was 70 per cent pure; its lethal strength was wiping people out. Addicts are typically used to purities of around 30 per cent or less, the remaining mixture being cut with compounds such as citric acid, caffeine and sometimes brick dust. Often these adulterants kill as much as the drug itself. The death toll had suddenly doubled and, as the coroner put it, taking heroin had become like Russian roulette; users had no idea what they were taking.

Op Reduction made tackling whoever was behind this its number one priority. Through a variety of overt and covert methods, Paul and his team soon identified a gang from Liverpool who had infiltrated the drug market in Hove. Using locally known and trusted street dealers, the Mr Bigs quickly had a supply network established.

Planning the arrest of these peddlers in death was agonizing. As the users were dropping like flies, the temptation was to hit the dealers hard and fast. That would have been foolish. Swift arrests do not always lead to swift justice. We would probably have been able to nail only the lower ranks of the street dealers and there would be plenty to fill their shoes. We had to hold our nerve despite the risk of more deaths.

The evidence against the main dealers had to be unassailable. We had long since abandoned the hope of a convenient ‘cough’ in an interview, where the accused fills in all the gaps. This used to happen in the old days when villains considered their arrest a fair cop. Those days had long gone and police had to battle for every piece of the jigsaw. We now assumed the accused would keep silent and employ a range of tactics to block our discovery of more evidence. Without a fully built case, all an early arrest would achieve was a few hours’ inconvenience to the suspect and the police showing their hand.

However, one sunny May lunchtime, expert detective work and careful planning culminated in an explosive action drama erupting close to the tranquil Hove Lawns.

The evidence was finally in place, the conspiracy to supply drugs all but proved. Paul was bouncing with anticipation, ready to strike. Unbeknown to the targets, who were no doubt cursing the painfully stop-start seafront traffic, their plans for the day were about to be rudely disrupted.

It’s easy for unmarked police cars to hide in plain sight; there’s nothing like a heavy traffic jam to act as camouflage. The network of streets around the coast road allow cop cars to invisibly race into position, surreptitiously surrounding the preordained location where the arrests would take place.

The targets were showing no sign of sensing anything wrong. It had to stay that way. The crawling traffic gave the firearms commanders the upper hand; the strike had become a ‘when’, not ‘if’.

The timing had to be right, the safety of everyone paramount, the element of surprise total. The threat of force must be overwhelming. A firefight was not an option. The targets had to know resistance was futile; they could not attempt to flee.

Through carefully rehearsed procedures, everyone knew what had to be done. The operation was handed over from the Silver to the Bronze commander, the sign that the strike was moments away. Bronze’s fine judgement was now critical. Not too soon, not too late. Once he gave the order, it was the point of no return. Training took over. Everyone was poised, psyched up to swoop.

‘Strike,’ came the crisp command.

A cacophony of shouts, racing engines and the sight of scruffily dressed men donning chequered baseball caps and thrusting machine guns and pistols at them, stunned the occupants of the stationary saloon. Even if the villains did manage to muster some courage and try to break through the blockade of police cars, they had no hope.

‘Armed police! Get out of the car. Put your hands on your head.’ Bystanders fruitlessly looked round for the TV cameras or a gaudily dressed director bellowing ‘Cut’ through his megaphone.

All they saw was crestfallen drug dealers spread-eagled on the tarmac, awaiting their trip to the cells, guns pointed at their heads and their wrists bound together with cable ties. A quick search revealed £1,000 in cash stuffed in one dealer’s pockets.

A few short months later, the evidence overwhelming, justice was dispensed at Lewes Crown Court. Following their guilty pleas to conspiracy to supply heroin Liverpudlians John Lee and Karl Freeman were jailed for ten and nine years respectively. Their minions Darren Hogarth and George Wood each received two-and-a-half-year sentences for supplying heroin and crack cocaine.

A good outcome, if ever there can be one, given how many deaths these four were directly responsible for.

There are still drugs in Brighton. People still deal, people still die.

About a year before I retired, I took part in a BBC TV documentary with comedian Russell Brand, who was exploring the merits of an abstinence-based approach to drug rehabilitation. He was fascinated by the work we were doing in the city and the impact it had. Managing the hundreds of autograph hunters who besieged us as he interviewed me walking around some of the hotspots was a challenge in itself, but we got our message across clearly — users need help, pushers need jail.

In 2012, given Peter James’ passion for Brighton and Hove, his concern for the people who live in and visit the city — particularly the vulnerable — and his determination to use his profile for the good of others, he volunteered to chair a Commission to examine whether the city was doing enough to reduce the impact of drugs on its people. As the city’s Police Commander I acted as an advisor.

Peter’s leadership and vision, supported by the international drugs expert Mike Trace, enabled twenty recommendations to be put before the City Council and other services which, if adopted, would enable the city to start to reduce the number of lives that drugs wrecked, and stem the misery drugs cause.

An unforeseen by-product of the Commission’s recommendations was my being asked by the BBC to make another documentary after I’d retired. This one was to examine the Drugs Consumption Rooms operating in Frankfurt. These are supervised places where users can take their own heroin, safe in the knowledge that the equipment is clean and medics are there should things go wrong. I was asked to consider whether they would be a solution in Brighton. The horrific sights I saw of people struggling to find a working vein in their ulcerated bodies will stay with me forever. Grace visits this same Consumption Room in You Are Dead in his search for Sandy.

Frankfurt’s problems were far greater than ours and for them these Consumption Rooms have been a godsend. In the twenty years since they were established, the yearly drugs death rate has plummeted from 147 to 30. Things aren’t so bad in Brighton and providing the principles of Operation Reduction are sustained, these controversial facilities will not be needed.

Through all the hard work, the city has now lost its drugs death top spot. Crime is right down and dealers don’t stay free for long any more. The struggle goes on and I doubt it will ever be over, but if we continue to treat addiction as an illness and remain ruthless towards the dealers we will save lives. And that must be good.

15: Live or Die — You Decide

The classic 1950s image of the British bobby is that, portrayed in Dixon of Dock Green, of a portly, ruddy-faced, cheery fellow who helps the elderly across the road and clips the ears of miscreant children. Not many postcards depict the other side. Not many souvenirs show elite muscle-bound police marksmen bursting from unmarked cars and shooting gunmen dead in a rapid fire-fight.

I’m glad UK police officers aren’t routinely armed. It would change the dynamic of British policing forever and would drive a wedge between the service and the communities. The small but highly mobile and flexible Tactical Firearms Unit is charged with bringing the most critically dangerous situations to a safe conclusion. That is all we need in my opinion.

It’s worth noting that in 2013–14 there were around 125,000 police officers in the UK yet only approximately 6,000 of those were authorized to carry guns. Furthermore, shots were discharged by police in only two of the 14,864 firearms operations that year. In contrast, according to the Brazilian Forum for Public Safety, between 2009 and 2013 that country’s police killed 11,197 people. That, to me, demonstrates the status quo is more than satisfactory for the time being.

In 2009 I’d risen to what, in my eyes, was the dream job. I was Brighton and Hove’s top cop. Its Divisional Commander, the Chief Superintendent of Police.

It had not been an easy climb and neither should it have been. Running the policing of a city as diverse and complex as this required experience, tenacity, patience and grit. I had been a police officer for twenty-six years serving at every rank in Brighton and Hove. I drew on every moment of that to equip me for this privilege. Crucially I had spent eighteen months as the Deputy Divisional Commander and a year as a Detective Superintendent.

The pressure was relentless but during my four-year tenure I relied on a brilliant team of senior colleagues and an exceptionally brave and dedicated 650-strong army of men and women who risked life and limb for the safety of others.

A photograph of my inspiration, my dad, resplendent in his Special Constabulary uniform, stood adjacent to my computer screen, watching my every move with his enigmatic smile softening his chiselled features. During my toughest and loneliest moments of command I would hear him silently implore, ‘Come on, Graham. Pull yourself together. People are relying on you and you have a duty to get through this.’

Beside Dad were pictures of Julie and the children, by now eleven and growing into charming, intelligent and loving kids. It’s a cliché but they were my rock, my raison d’être. The four of them kept me grounded, reminding me that there was a life outside the job and that was very important. Julie always showed unerring support for me. The fact that, despite my overwhelming workload, I tried to make time for all of the children’s special events meant that unlike some of my colleagues I managed to remain central to the lives of my family. This created a bond from which, now they are grown up, Julie and I still reap the benefits.

Two years on, the policing challenges in February 2011 were as routine as they ever got. Although the city was enjoying a drop in the number of house burglaries, people were having their phones and wallets stolen at a greater rate than before and our neighbourhood policing teams were getting to grips with that.

However, we soon became worried about a spate of armed robberies of small post offices happening in Hove and just north in nearby Burgess Hill. All the descriptions of the perpetrator were very similar. Thankfully no-one had been hurt but there had been seven in all and they showed no sign of abating.

A few years previously, I witnessed the life-changing effect that being caught up in two armed robberies in a couple of weeks had on a colleague’s wife. Her breakdown and inability to return to work underlined to me the heartless disregard robbers have for their victims. They just see them as an irritating barrier between their greed and the loot.

This run of crimes was certainly unusual enough to capture the attention of the public, the police and those who feared they might become victims. They are rarer now than in years gone by as the risks of being caught have escalated in direct proportion to the advances in technology and forensics.

Those who still choose to put themselves in jeopardy by committing this old-fashioned crime tend to be desperate, drug-addicted and living on the margins of society. Over the years, armed robbery had become less of a way of life, more a desperate last-ditch attempt for survival.

Burgess Hill is one of the many commuter towns that have sprung up in the last 150 years alongside the main London to Brighton railway line. It’s a popular place to live for those working in the capital or Brighton, which is ten miles away, but who are either disinclined or financially restricted from settling in either.

On a dark Tuesday evening during the frantic run-up to Christmas, a local convenience store close to Wivelsfield railway station, on the outskirts of the town, was crammed with commuters and residents making use of its small sub post office to send last-minute parcels and cards to loved ones.

Out of the blue, in burst a man wearing a beige stocking over his face. Pulling a small handgun from his pocket he bellowed at horror-stricken staff, demanding cash. Pushing one person to the ground, he grabbed the money that a terrified colleague threw at him. Gathering it up, he scurried out, sprinted past the railway station, through a small housing estate and disappeared into the patchwork of fields that lay beyond.

He netted in excess of a thousand pounds and, while no shots were fired, staff and customers were severely traumatized by the ordeal. Thankfully, because of astute and alert witnesses, a very precise picture of the man started to emerge which would be critical in the weeks to come.

Frustratingly, while this description provided a valuable tool to eliminate possible suspects, no amount of investigation or publicity threw up his name. Detectives worked tirelessly to shed light on who this robber was before he struck again.

Following a lull over the Christmas and New Year period there were two further attacks, both in the centre of Burgess Hill and both in areas and premises swamped with CCTV. This was the sign of a desperate man becoming even more reckless — a recipe for disaster.

The first, late one Friday afternoon at a bank close to Burgess Hill’s main railway station, yielded nothing. The man burst in disguised this time in dark clothing, a scarf around his face and wearing a black beanie hat, waving his gun around. He stood inches from the counter staff, yelling his demand for cash to terrify them into submission.

Despite his brazenness, the staff had been trained well. The moment his intentions became clear, in a reflex response, they flung themselves to the floor and triggered the metal shield that created an impenetrable barrier between the cashiers and the public area. Bewildered, he was not quite quick enough to react to the security shutter as it flew up. He was just too slow in pulling his hand away before the razor-sharp steel clipped it as it engaged. The DNA yielded by that fleeting graze was the breakthrough that the detectives were waiting for. While the robberies happened in another town, I was putting huge pressure on my investigators to speed up the forensic results and get the man off the streets. However, even with me breathing down their necks, the answer did not come quickly enough.

The following Monday, again just before closing time, the Burgess Hill main post office became his next target. Dressed in identical clothing he again threatened staff and customers with his black handgun, shouting his demands. This time he was luckier and a few hundred pounds were handed over by the petrified postal workers. He fled as quickly as he’d arrived and, despite the area being flooded with cops, he vanished.

Finally, the DNA result came back. We learned that, with a likelihood of one billion to one, our man was Michael Fitzpatrick, a forty-nine-year-old career criminal whose graduation to armed robbery had been typical if not predictable. Out on licence from prison, Fitzpatrick had a string of previous convictions ranging back through his adult life. It started with minor theft, drugs, a bit of violence that escalated to armed robbery and conspiracy to murder. But nothing as brazen and desperate as this. It was from these arrests that we had his DNA. A further arrest would almost certainly mean an immediate recall to prison. Unfortunately, as in the fictional Darren Spicer’s case, that is inevitable for far too many habitual offenders.

Looking for such dangerous people is more complex than TV dramas would have you believe. It’s not sexy, it’s not always exciting, but it is ruthlessly efficient. Gone are the days whereby a maverick DI would meet a snout in the pub, walk round the corner, kick a door in and get his man — if those days ever existed at all.

The key to any police investigation is information. Without this the police are impotent. The hunt today is fuelled by the investigative detectives who focus on building the evidence and the intelligence officers whose sources can be more nebulous. Both work together in a quest to predict the target’s next steps. ‘Brains’ beavering away in darkened rooms pull together the information to guide commanders and operatives alike, advising them where their suspect is likely to be, when, with whom and the danger he — or she — poses. There is no scientific formula but professional judgement is key.

Manhunts where the quarry could be armed are even more complex. The intelligence gathering is similar but the arrest phase must take place with trained and accredited firearms officers and commanders literally calling the shots. I often ran operations such as these and would ultimately be the one accountable for the outcome. However, each and every officer below me would be responsible for their own actions, including firing their gun. A commander could never instruct anyone to shoot, other than in truly exceptional circumstances. That was always down to the officer concerned.

Not Dead Yet gives a taste of how manhunts happen. The close protection operation of Gaia Lafayette and the hunt for her stalker were driven by Grace with separate but interdependent structures in place to allow the whole complex plan to come together.

The planning of the police response is faultlessly described and takes place in the office of the Gold commander, Chief Superintendent Graham Barrington. Observant readers will have worked out the similarity of the name to mine. The office described is exactly as my office looked, down to the reference to the sweet messages penned by Barrington’s triplets on the huge whiteboard. My alter-ego’s physical description, however, is all too flattering. I am not athletic and fair-haired and I have only ever run one marathon.

I was not directly running the search for Fitzpatrick. As the Divisional Commander, however, I knew that the outcome of this operation would be mine to manage. I was the public face of policing and would come under huge pressure if we had another robbery or worse. That said, I knew all of those who were involved and my trust in them was absolute. Despite them being the best around, though, however good the plan, however good the team, as Grace says, ‘with guns around sometimes people get hurt and that’s when all hell breaks loose.’ This gave rise to a number of sleepless nights over the years.

As with the fictional Chief Superintendent, during the hunt for Fitzpatrick the Gold commander was weighing up all the intelligence, possible sightings and suggestions for places to raid, and making the final call. It was the paucity of information that I found most exhilarating when in command. It is easy to decide to act when there is certainty. However, when the best you have is probability, alongside crazy time and staff constraints, all your synapses go into overdrive drawing on all your professional experience and judgement before giving the green light. In the ‘squeaky bum moments’ that follow, you hope beyond hope you have it right. It’s one of the greatest buzzes of senior command; Grace experiences it in every book and, like me, he thrives on it.

That February morning, as on every day since Fitzpatrick had been identified, there had been a dedicated intelligence cell working to locate him. The team that would carry out the arrest was the crack Tactical Firearms Unit.

Officers were aware our man knew that police were looking for him, and that he was probably still in the area. His desperation was likely to be extreme as this could not end well for him.

Out of the blue, intelligence came in that at lunchtime he would be going to the Sidewinder pub in the Kemp Town area of Brighton. One of the worst places possible to try to arrest an armed suspect is in a pub. The presence of the suspect and other members of the public, whose sobriety and compliance could not be relied upon, together with the availability of ad hoc weapons such as glasses and furniture, render armed raids on pubs suitable only for the direst emergencies.

Therefore the default tactic is to sit and wait. Try to take the suspect outside by surprise with such an overwhelming show of force that resistance becomes futile. Such arrests are, in the vast majority of cases, resolved swiftly, if not quietly. Such was the intention that day.

Just after 1 p.m., an unmarked car containing covert armed officers was crawling around the area hoping to spot Fitzpatrick, hopefully somewhere they could safely overwhelm him, arrest him and neutralize any threat he might pose.

Rock Place runs between the vibrant centre of Kemp Town, the famous gay village, and the seafront. This area is always throbbing with people and traffic. Rock Place, however, seems out of place. It feels like a homely backstreet with a few shops, a pub, a garage and a music school. It’s impossible for two cars to pass along its short length.

The police car inched its way towards the bottom of the street when suddenly Fitzpatrick appeared on foot in front of them. Their heart rates accelerating into overdrive, they eased their BMW to a gentle halt and did what they were trained to do.

The doors flew open and, using the car as cover, they burst out and shouted their challenge at Fitzpatrick.

‘Stop, armed police!’ Their guns aimed directly at him.

Unlike thousands of suspects before, this one hadn’t read the script. Crazily he pulled his own pistol out of nowhere and pointed it straight at the officers.

In a split second they had to weigh up the threat. Real gun or not? Threat or no threat? Shoot or don’t shoot? As mentioned previously, only a snap decision is possible.

Believing their lives were in imminent danger they fired three shots at Fitzpatrick. Two slammed into him, devastatingly rupturing his internal organs. He crashed to the ground. The gun flew out of his hand. The officers then did something many would consider bizarre but goes to the core of being a cop. They rushed in and, as Grace did with Carl Venner, tried to save the life of their would-be killer.

Having battled to stem his bleeding, they soon handed over to the paramedics who spent a further thirty agonizing minutes trying to get him breathing before rushing him to the nearby Royal Sussex County Hospital. Once there, a team of twenty-five doctors and nurses combined their skills in attempting to save him before he was finally pronounced dead. In all, police and medics struggled for an hour and forty-five minutes from the moment he pulled a gun on armed officers before they accepted defeat. Their determination to preserve human life was in stark contrast to his contempt for theirs.

I will never forget the mid-afternoon text from my deputy and good friend Superintendent Steve Whitton. ‘We found Fitzpatrick. We’ve shot him and it’s not looking good.’ Brief and to the point.

It took my breath away. The Divisional Commander for West Sussex, Steve Voice, had recently overseen the aftermath of a fatal police shooting in the village of Fernhurst on the Sussex — Hampshire border. From his experience, he penned a guide to our role following such an event. It became my bible.

Managing the impact on officers and the community was a commitment that continued from the moment of the shooting right through and beyond the inquest. Initially, issuing any public statement was the domain of the Independent Police Complaints Commission who rightly investigate when people are killed at the hands of the police.

It was imperative that we were able to include something in those initial press releases to indicate that the man who had been shot was armed and dangerous and that the police had been threatened. The diplomacy of Steve Whitton in getting two small but significant references into the media statement — that the dead man was wanted for armed robberies and that a non-police-issue gun was found near his body — had the effect of practically eliminating any ideas that trigger-happy cops were cruising the streets of Brighton shooting at will, which may otherwise have prevailed.

At the subsequent inquest, it was established that the gun was an airgun. This only become apparent after the gun was closely examined. The armed officers had no chance of knowing this when it was aimed at them. It was also revealed that Fitzpatrick had told a friend he’d rather be dead than go back to prison. The jury returned a lawful killing verdict, and noted that Fitzpatrick had probably died within two minutes of being shot. They found, too, that the officers had been forced to make that split-second decision to protect the lives of the public and themselves. Their conduct was described as exemplary.

Lots of public meetings, briefings to elected and executive officials and MPs, painstaking preparations for the inquest and IPCC report and convening Independent Advisory Groups became a huge part of my job. Apart from a couple of examples of injudicious statements in the media, the impact of this tragedy on the life of Brighton and Hove was minimal.

It’s not always that way. The press can take delight in writing thousands of words and many column inches dissecting a decision that an individual cop has had milliseconds to make. Anyone can be wise in hindsight; my former colleagues rarely have that luxury.