Today
Detective Sergeant Sarah Gilchrist was reading the Guardian with increasing irritation when her phone rang. She ignored it, focusing instead on the offending article, from the newspaper’s crime correspondent.
The headline read: ‘No Action To Be Taken Against Police Officers Involved In Milldean Massacre.’
The article went on:
The Police Complaints Authority today announced that no action is to be taken against any officers from the Southern Police Authority in connection with the so-called ‘Milldean Massacre’ in which four people were shot and killed in a police raid on a house on the Milldean estate, Brighton, last year.
A spokesperson said that whilst a report from the Hampshire police, who had investigated the incident, was ‘highly critical’ of the system that was in place for armed response operations in the Southern Police Authority, it had been unable to conclude exactly what had occurred during the operation and thus was unable to assign blame.
The spokesperson added that the Hampshire police regarded this as ‘highly unsatisfactory’ but felt unable to say whether the officers involved were being deliberately obstructive or were just responding to the chaos of such an operation. An additional problem was that only one of the dead people had been identified: Stephen Strong, known as Little Stevie, a male prostitute.
Since the massacre two of the officers involved have died in suspicious circumstances, one has committed suicide and three have retired due to ill health. Only one — Detective Sergeant Sarah Gilchrist — continues as a serving police officer, though she will never again be part of an armed unit.
The only scalp taken as a consequence of the Milldean Massacre was that of high-flying Chief Constable Robert Watts. The morning after the killings he defended his officers in terms that were felt to prejudice the official investigation beginning that day.
Watts — a much-decorated former army officer and the youngest chief constable in the country — had been generally regarded as a poster boy for modern policing. Married with two children, he refused to resign for his error of judgement but did so when newspapers published accounts of his affair with Detective Sergeant Sarah Gilchrist.
Whilst there was no suggestion that he was protecting DS Gilchrist, who has been fully exculpated by the inquiry, the revelation of the affair and her proximity to the massacre was regarded as significant.
The violent robber Bernie Grimes, the man the armed police were attempting to detain, remains at large. Indeed, it is speculated that he was never in the house that was raided. The Police Complaints Authority, Hampshire Police and Southern Police have all declined to answer accusations that the armed raid was actually on the wrong house.
Commenting on the fact that the report will remain confidential, Southern Police’s Chief Constable Hewitt said: ‘There is nothing to be gained by publishing the report. The killings were a tragedy but we must put the past behind us. We now have systems in place to ensure that such a terrible error does not occur again.’
Sarah Gilchrist dropped the newspaper on the low table beside her. Bastards. She hated that nothing had been resolved, that she was no nearer knowing exactly what had happened. Especially given all that it had sparked: the arrival of Balkan gangsters, grotesque medieval deaths, a bloodbath in the Grand Hotel and another in a village outside Dieppe. John Hathaway, Brighton’s crime king for the past four decades, left to die, stuck on the end of a pole on a cliff-top.
She shuddered at the thought of her own close encounter with the psychopathic Bosnian torturer Miladin Radislav, also known as Vlad the Impaler. He’d come for her as part of his vengeful rampage through Brighton. She vividly recalled his grey face and his cold eyes as he bore down on her on the beach whilst she was embroiled with a gang of feral girls. The irony was that his arrival had saved her from them.
She swallowed bile and lowered her feet from the wrought iron framing the balcony and looked down on the pretty garden below her. She had liked it here at first in Clarence Square. It was central — the shops were just up the road, the sea just down it — and it had been a little oasis of sunny quiet. In the daytime at least.
The small hotels on either side of her did get noisy on summer nights. Especially when those dirty weekenders who had balconies and had their French windows open moaned, groaned and bellowed into the square through the night.
But now it was an oasis no longer. Noisy lovers were the least of it. She felt exposed, vulnerable. The journalists had been bad enough. As the time had approached for the Police Complaints Authority to make its announcement, she had avoided the balcony because of the journalists harassing her. Some threw notes up. Others shouted her name repeatedly from the street below.
Only a few days earlier one had taken a room in the hotel next door and climbed on to her balcony to photograph her. She’d freaked out when she’d heard him tapping on the window. When the photo appeared in several newspapers the next morning, she thought of complaining to the Press Complaints Commission. Then she discovered the chair of the PCC was the editor of one of the papers that had splashed her all over its front page.
But her fear now was that if a journalist could get easily get close, so could Miladin Radislav.
She was standing near her balcony when the phone started again. It was DI Reg Williamson, her sometime partner, recently promoted to be her acting boss. The promotion was hers by rights, but she’d had no rights after Milldean. Williamson was conscious of that and never pulled rank on her, treating her as a partner in exactly the same way as before. Indeed, usually deferring to her.
‘Reg,’ she said. ‘Why is it I know you’re not calling for anything good?’
‘Experience?’
‘That would do it.’
‘Actually, it’s not so bad. Wanted you to check on that girl you rescued on the beach. She should be about ready to give a statement about those girls who attacked her.’