THE SECOND PART of the podcast tells the sad stories of three people who came from Easter Europe in search of employment and a better life. Instead, they found only death. Click the link below to listen to the second part of It’s Murder In Wisbech
The van skids to a halt on the lonely hill top lane. Occasional distant lights from isolated farms and cottages are all that pierce the darkness. The young men inside the van giggle as they open the rear doors and throw the girl from the dirty mattress on which she has been sprawled. She hits the roadside with a body-jarring crunch.
Thus begins the 23rd episode in the career of Yorkshire copper, Alan Banks, who we first met in 1987, when he had moved from London to the Yorkshire Dales to work in the market town of Eastvale. Banks is now Detective Superintendent, but what long-time readers of the series might call The Eastvale Repertory Company are pretty much all present and correct, in the shape of fellow cops Annie Cabbot, Winsome Jackson and Ken Blackstone. We even have a guest appearance from one of Banks’s less wholesome colleagues, Richard “Dirty Dick” Burgess, who is now working for the National Crime Agency, the closest thing to the FBI within the UK.
The unfortunate girl we meet in the first few pages does not take the stage again, unless we include her appearance on the mortuary slab. She has been found by a shocked cyclist, the morning after her ride in the van ended so abruptly. She is stark naked, and has died from a severe beating. Whatever took place on Bradham Lane is not the most pressing concern for Alan Banks, however. He is called to a high level conference and brought into what will become an investigation into the life and crimes of Danny Caxton, a much loved and respected entertainer and performer on stage and TV. Caxton, like his real life counterparts Savile and Harris, was ever-present in living rooms and lounges of ordinary people up and down the land, for decades. Now in his eighties, he has been accused of historic sex crimes.
While Banks must focus on the Caxton case, by his new seniority he must also oversee the investigation into the murder of the girl on Bradham Lane. Annie Cabbot is doing most of the legwork on this, and with the help of Detective Constable Geraldine Masterson, she discovers that the dead girl is Mimosa ‘Mimsy’ Moffat. Mimsy was 15, knocking-on 25, sexually attractive and experienced, and with a home life so bad that neither ‘home’ nor ‘life’ seem to be the right words. Cabbot and Masterson begin to explore the connection between Mimsy and the Pakistani Briton who runs a kebab shop on the edge of a nearby run-down estate.
By this time, we have met Danny Claxton in his Ponderosa-style home, and a thoroughly reptilian character he seems to be – a far cry from the smiling, handsome and genial TV presence of his younger days. Banks’s chief witness – and accuser – is Linda Palmer. She is now a widow in middle age, but has become a respected and well published poet. Her accusation about Caxton dates back to what should have been a happy family holiday in Blackpool in the 1960s.
As the two cases run their parallel courses, I found the investigation into Mimsy Moffat’s death the more compelling. Robinson takes an unflinching look at the issue of vulnerable white girls being groomed and abused by men of Pakistani origin. He exposes the extremes of views held by all those involved, from the men themselves, the girls and their relatives and – most tellingly – those in positions of power, such as the police and social workers. Banks himself, probably due to his management responsibilities, keeps his own anger in check, but Robinson allows Annie Cabbot to voice her violent disgust – a feeling which I infer is shared by the author.
The book is only a whodunnit for a short period of time, as there are enough clues for CriFi buffs to work out who murdered Mimsy. Robinson’s broader message seems to be a variant on Who Killed Cock Robin? For the fly, the fish, the beetle and the owl we could probably substitute:
‘”I,” said the policeman, “with my fear of being called racist.”‘
‘” I,” said the social worker, “with my political correctness.”‘
‘”I,” said the kebab shop owner, “with my attitude towards women.”‘
‘”I,” said the mother, “with my drug addiction and neglect.”‘
There is closure, of a kind, in both cases, but Robinson, in his epilogue, offers us nothing resembling a happy ending. This book is, at its core, a brilliant police procedural. Crime fiction fans are no strangers to the police interview room, but Robinson not only uses the staple ingredient very cleverly, he gives it a lick of fresh paint, a new carpet – and maybe even a nice vase of flowers on the table. My only irritation was – as always with Banks – that we learn far more than we ever need to know about his tastes in music, but an irritation is all it was, and it didn’t spoil my enjoyment of this excellent book.
When The Music’s Over is on Amazon, as well as in all decent book shops, and you can find out more about Alan Banks and his creator by visiting Peter Robinson’s website.
Newly promoted Detective Sergeant Fiona Griffiths, of South Wales Police, might be said to have a disability. She suffers from…..no, wait, we mustn’t use the word ‘suffers’, in case of causing offence. ‘Has’, maybe? OK, DS Griffiths has Cotard’s Syndrome. This strange condition can manifest itself in many ways, the most extreme of which convinces the person concerned that they are actually dead. Less extreme symptoms include partial disconnection between brain and body, and some of the traits of Asperger’s Syndrome, such as an inability to read or understand social gestures or convention.
So Fiona has been employed as part of some diversity box-ticking exercise, yes? Nay, and thrice nay. After the horrors of her teenage years, when she was institutionalised and in a pharmaceutical haze, she went to university, excelled, and then joined the police. This might be considered an odd career choice, given that Fiona has an the kind of electric intelligence which might not sit well within staid police procedures, but even more strange because her father was – and let’s not mince words – a notorious Cardiff gangster. Father? Well, no. Another intriguing ambiguity is that Mr Griffiths and his homely wife are not Fiona’s blood parents. Fiona came into their lives when they emerged from a social function to find an infant girl sitting in their Jaguar coupe. No message. No name. No reason.
At this point, it is best to make clear that Fiona’s search for her real ancestry and her ambivalence about her adoptive dad’s occupation are a recurrent theme in the career of Fiona Griffiths. Author Harry Bingham introduced us to this remarkable young woman in Talking To The Dead (2013). This debut was followed by Love Story With Murders (2014), The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths (2015) and This Thing Of Darkness (2016).
In this welcome return, Fiona is called to the strangest of crime scenes. Is it a crime scene? Maybe not. A young woman is found, very dead, but dressed in white linen, remarkably peaceful, surrounded by votive lights, and lying on a table in a Dead House – an ancient form of mortuary chapel attached to a medieval church. An autopsy concludes that she died, basically, from heart disease, as young as she was. While the local police are intent on wrapping the case up as unexplained, Fiona is struck by two irreconcilable facts. Why would a woman who has had, according to the autopsy, subtle – and expensive – cosmetic surgery, have stubbly unshaven legs?
The ensuing investigation romps along at great pace, as Fiona – teamed with a grumpy, phlegmatic Camarthen Detective Inspector – uncovers a terrifying conspiracy involving, among other things, Ukranian oligarchs, wild Welshmen who eat badgers, a secret tunnel under a Brecon hillside – and a community of distinctly unsaintly monks.
Just as in This Thing Of Darkness there was a terrifying passage where Fiona was hanging on for dear life to the a boat thrashing about in a storm, there is a section here which will be very hard going for anyone who suffers from claustrophobia. Fiona and her temporary boss struggle through a tunnel system under a Welsh hillside, and I felt every second of it – the constriction, the inability to move more than a few inches, and the sheer terror of being in a virtual rock coffin.
Aside of creating a unique central character, Bingham writes like an angel. His descriptions of the Welsh countryside put you right there in the muddy field, with the smell of sheep, and the distant haze of smoke from a hard-scrabble hill farm chimney. Fans of Fiona Griffiths will know that she courts danger, gets herself into the most terrible scrapes, but will come out fighting like a five-foot-nothing whirling Dervish. Her boss says:
“And well done, I suppose. I can’t think of any other officer of mine who’d have got themselves into that situation. But I can’t think of anyone who’d have got out of it either.”
I wrote, when reviewing an earlier Fiona Griffiths novel for another book site:
“In a lifetime of reading crime fiction I have never come across anyone quite like Fiona Griffiths …. Read this book. Enjoy every syllable.”
The publishers have used that quote on my edition of The Dead House, and I stand by every word. You won’t read a better book all year.
You can buy The Dead House from Harry Bingham’s Amazon page and check up on the previous adventures of Fiona Griffiths. Harry’s website is here.
A FREE LUNCH? As in ‘no such thing as’? Normally, the old adage is pretty true, but it seems that you can feast your mind. if not your tummy, with a genuine free offer from author Wendy Cartmell (left). She is best known for her series of Sgt. Major Crane stories, featuring the gritty Military Policeman, but she has a more recent heroine, Emma Harrison. She is an Assistant Governor of Reading Young Offenders’ Institution, and while her charges are callow youths, they are well versed in all kinds of villainy, and the broken lives which have pitched them into the Institution have made some of them very damaged indeed.
In Joint Judgment, she faces a career-defining challenge as she strives to defuse a potentially catastrophic situation, as first the Institutes doctor is attacked and badly hurt, but then the Art Teacher is brutally killed. In order to prevent further bloodshed, she enlists the help of Sgt. Billy Williams, of the Special Investigations Branch of the Royal Military Police.
As far as I can see, there is absolutely no small print here, so let’s go ahead with the all important links. Firstly, why not pay a visit to Wendy’s publisher, Endeavour Press, and see what else they have been up to.
You can follow these links to get a Kindle version, or a PDF of Joint Judgment.
Thanks to Wendy Cartmell and Endeavour Press for their generosity. In return you might like to let the wider world know what you think of the book. You can do this by following this link to the book’s Amazon page. You can also take a look at Wendy’s website to read about her other books.
AUGUST, 1865. Queen Victoria was in the 28th year of her reign, but had become a virtual recluse after the death of Prince Albert in 1861. Palmerston was Prime Minister, and the Salvation Army had been founded in Whitechapel. In America, the Civil War was over, but Lincoln was dead, and Andrew Johnson ruled in his stead.
On the evening of Monday 7th August, a man brought three children, aged six, eight and ten, to the Star Coffee House and Hotel, Red Lion Street, Holborn, London. He had previously arranged accommodation, saying that they would all shortly be leaving for Australia. On the Tuesday evening, he put the children to bed and left the hotel, stating that he world return shortly. On the Wednesday morning, neither the man nor the children came down for breakfast. Sensing that something was wrong, the hotel manager entered the rooms occupied by the children, and found a terrible sight. All three were quite dead, and there was no sign of the man.
The testimony of Dr George Harley, physician, (below right) was this:
“On the 9th of August last I was requested by Dr. ROBERTS, of Lamb’s Conduit-street to visit Star’s Hotel, where, as he informed me, three children were supposed to have been murdered, and that in case of so serious a nature he deemed it advisable to have a second opinion. On the third floor, in the front room, No. 6 of the above-named hotel I saw two boys lying on their backs in bed quite dead. The younger of the two, ALEXANDER WHITE, aged eight was near the back, the elder, THOMAS WILLIAM WHITE, aged nine years, toward the front part of the bed. The bodies of both were cold and stiff, and although their countenances wore the placidity of slumber they nevertheless bore the pallor of death. The eyes were half open; the pupils semi-dilated. On turning down the bedclothes both bodies presented a mottled appearance, from the extreme lividity of some parts, the deadly pallor of others. The attitude of the youngest child was that of a comfortable repose. The head slightly inclined to the left side. The hands were folded upon the abdomen. The legs gently crossed. The fingers of the right hand still retained within them a penny-piece, which fell from their stiffened grasp while the body was being turned upon its side, with the view of detecting marks of violence.”
He continued:
“In the back bedroom, No. 8, of the same floor lay the dead body of a somewhat emaciated but handsomely featured boy, HENRY WILLIAM WHITE, aged ten years. The attitude and complexion of this child closely resembled that of his brothers. His expression was calm, the eyelids were closed, the pupils were natural, the face was deadly pale. A small quantity of fluid had flowed from the mouth on to the collar of his shirt, and that part of the left cheek in contact with it was mottled red and purple. The legs and toes were slightly bent the hands partially closed, the nails and finger tips intensely livid. A spot of feculent matter soiled the sheet. The rigidity of death was well marked in every l imb, and livid discolorations in all the depending parts of the body. No marks of violence were observable, but a slight odor was perceptible about the mouth. The whole chamber had a peculiar ethereal smell.”
He concluded:
“I have to add that the history of the cases, the appearance and attitudes of the bodies after death, the result of the post mortem examinations, and the chemical analysis lead me to the conclusion that Henry William White, Thomas William White, and Alexander White died from the mortal effects of a poisonous dose of prussic acid.”
The three dead children were identified as Henry White, aged ten years,Thomas White, aged eight years and Alexander White, aged six years. The parenting of these three children had been bizarre, to say the least. Their father – or at least the man who accepted them as his own – had been married to the boys’ mother, and by an awful coincidence was a schoolmaster in Featherstone Buildings, only a stone’s throw from the hotel where they died.
The boys’ mother had been living with a man called Ernest Southey, and the three lads had been passed backwards and forwards several times between Mr William Henry White and his wife. Finally, they had been ‘in the care’ of Southey and Mrs White, as it was put about that they intended to emigrate to Australia. Not only did Mr White’s description of Southey match that of the hotel staff, Southey was known to the police. Earlier in the year, Southey, who was, by occupation a billiard marker, had been involved in a strange case where Mrs White tried to inveigle money from a member of the aristocracy, and Southey had intervened on her behalf.
The Home Secretary, Sir George Grey (left), announced a £100 reward for the apprehension of Southey. It was to prove unnecessary. Having poisoned the three boys, the fugitive, who obviously subscribed to the old adage about sheep and lambs, had traveled down to the Kent seaside town of Ramsgate where, it transpired, his real wife and daughter lived. Having met them, and pleaded for their forgiveness for his long absence and neglect, he then shot them both dead with a pistol. He was caught red-handed, and gave himself up without a struggle.
At this point it became clear that Ernest Southey was none other than Stephen Forwood, his latest victims being Mary Ann Jemima Forward, and her daughter Emily. He was brought to the magistrate in Ramsgate, but then produced an astonishing document, apparently penned in the interval between his arrest and the court appearance. He proclaimed to the court;
“On Monday, the 7th instant, I took three children, whom I claim as mine by the strongest ties, to Starr’s Coffee-house, Red Lion-street, Holborn. I felt for these children all the affection a parent could feel. I had utterly worn out and exhausted every power of mind and body in my efforts to secure a home, training, and a future for those children, also the five persons I felt hopelessly dependent on me. I could struggle and bear up no longer, for the last support had been withdrawn from me. My sufferings were no longer supportable. My very last hope had perished by my bitter and painful experience of our present iniquitously-ineffective social justice, and for this I shall be 
charged with murder, for criminal murders as well in the truest, strongest sense of the charge. I deny and repudiate the charge, and charge it back on many who have by their gross and criminal neglect brought about this sad and fearful crisis. I charge back the guilt of these crimes on those high dignitaries of the State, the Church, and justice who have turned a deaf ear to my heartbroken appeals, who have refused me fellow help in all my frenzied efforts, my exhausted struggles; who have impiously denied the sacredness of human life, the mutual dependence of man, and the fundamental and sacred principles on which our social system is based. Foremost among these I charge the Hon. D. Lord Palmerston, the Attorney General, Sir George Grey, the Hon. Mr. Gladstone, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Lord Ebury, Lord Townshend, Lord Elcho, Lord Brougham, Sir E. B Lytton, Mr Disraeli, Sir J. Packington, Earl Derby, Lord Stanley, Mr Crossley, and the Bishop of Bath and Wells. I Under all the terrible run of my life I have done for the best.”
Whether the wretched man was exhibiting an early version of what we would come to know as The Blackadder Defence – wearing underpants on the head and sticking knitting needles up the nostrils, in the hope that he would be considered totally mad – we shall never know. Forward’s lawyer half-heartedly went for a plea of insanity, but his efforts were ignored.
The authorities in London wanted Forward returned to them, but the Kent police had him under lock and key, and they had no intention of letting him go. Regarding the murder of the boys, Forward’s trial produced evidence that Mrs White had grown tired of him, and he had threatened her with dire consequences should she not take him back. He was sentenced to death, and was eventually executed in January 1866. A local newspaper takes up the story.
On 11 January 1866, at the County Goal in Maidstone one of the most notorious murderers of Victorian Kent paid the final penalty for his crimes. This was Stephen Forwood (or Forwood) also known as Ernest Walter Southey. He was the last person to be publicly executed at Maidstone Goal (below)
A contemporary account tells us:
The morning of Thursday 11 January 1866, was very cold, a severe snow storm driven by a harsh wind prevailed and this kept the usual crowd that gathered for this occasion down to about 1500 persons. The execution was presided over by Mr. F Scudamore, the Under-Sheriff of the County of Kent accompanied by some of his officers.
Arriving at the Gaol just before midday they immediately went to the cell where Forward was held. The executioner was Calcraft who acted as executioner at Stafford and in the “Midland Counties”. The prisoner asked for permission to speak and “exclaimed in an audible voice”, ” I desire to say in the presence of you who are now assembled, and in the presence of Almighty God, into whose immediate presence I am now about to depart, that I die trusting only to the merits of the God-man Jesus Christ”.
The prisoner was now “pinioned” by Calcraft (above) and as he was lead to the scaffold he could be heard praying loudly. Just before he was placed on the drop he shook hands with Major Bannister, the Governor of the Gaol, and with the chaplain. To the chaplain he made his last request that when he was upon the scaffold the chaplain would only utter the following prayer” Lord, into thy hands we commend the soul of this our brother, for thou hast redeemed him. Oh Lord, thou God of Troth.”
Forward said that his reason for this request was that he wished to “concentrate the whole powers of his soul and spirit into one mighty act of volition, and render himself up to God in the words mentioned.” The request was granted and as the chaplain began to speak, the drop opened and Forward “ceased to exist”.
The Maidstone and Kentish Journal describes the scene so:
The scaffold was hung round with black cloth to such a height that when the drop fell only just the top of the convict’s head was visible to the crowd. The body, after hanging an hour, was cut down and a cast of the head taken. In the afternoon the body was buried within the precincts of the gaol.
Edwin Ruck, the Registrar for the East Maidstone District, registered the death on Saturday 13 January 1866. The informant being the Governor of the Gaol, Major C W Bannister, the cause of death was stated as “Hanging for Murder’.
We cannot know if Stephen Forwood’s piety on the scaffold stood him in any stead in the place where he was heading, but we can state that it did absolutely no good to the four children and the woman for whose deaths he was responsible. Of the London sites connected with the case little or nothing remains. Where The Star Coffee House and Hotel once stood, at 21 Red Lion Street, we now find a nondescript, but doubtlessly very expensive block of flats. The Featherstone Buildings, where William White taught his grammar lessons, was totally destroyed by German bombs during the Blitz.
Just as tabloid newspapers, even in this digital age, still hope that a juicy headline will shift a few more copies, the ballad writers and hacks who turned out broadsides may have seen a temporary upsurge in sales, as they dramatised the terrible events of August 1865.
Stuart Neville (left) returns with another hard-bitten and edgy tale of life and crimes in Northern Ireland. Set in a fictional village on the edge of Belfast, we are reunited with DCI Serena Flanagan, who first appeared in Those We Left Behind. Like much of life in Ulster, fictional and real, religion and the stresses and strains it places on secular life is never far from the surface. The sacred influence in this case is provided by the Reverend Peter McKay. The clergyman is a widower, but we find that he has been taking his parochial duties above and beyond what is normally expected. The recipient of his pastoral care is Roberta, the attractive wife of Henry Garrick.
The unfortunate Garrick has been of little solace to his wife in recent times, as he was lucky to escape with his life after a catastrophic road accident which resuted in him losing both legs, and rendering him totally dependent on his wife and visiting carers. When he is found dead one morning, with empty sachets of morphine next to his bed, it is clear that the poor man has had enough of his living death, and decided to make it final. Flanagan is sent to the scene, and as is the way with these things, her bosses expect her to sign off the death as a suicide.
But this is crime fiction, and regular readers will know that suicides in these stories are seldom what they seem to be. They will also know that police Inspectors are rarely happy, healthy people, untroubled by their job and with idyllic family lives. Flanagan doesn’t buck the trend. She is recovering from cancer, and the intensity she brings to the job is having a destructive effect on her relationship with her schoolteacher husband and their two children.
Flanagan has a nagging suspicion about the death of Mr Garrick, and she is troubled, not by the arrangement of family photographs around the bed, but by the one that is missing – that of the Garrick’s young daughter – and only child – who was drowned in a tragic accident in Spain.
This is a cleverly written book on many levels. We know early in the piece that Henry Garrick’s death is not what it seems to be. We can also make a shrewd guess as to who is responsible. Neville uses the narrow space occupied by the few unknowns left to us to expand the characters, describe their unsettled personal lives, and paint a mesmerising picture of the ordinary – but strangely intense – lives of church-goers in the parish of Morganstown. The final action set piece, as Flanagan homes in on the killer, is as gripping as anything Neville has written. The title? It is taken from lines written by the American writer Dennis Lehane.
“I can’t just live for the other world. I need to live in this one now.
So say the fallen. So they’ve said since time began.”
You can buy So Say The Fallen from good booksellers, and from Amazon.
As they say, in America, “School’s Out!” On the evening of Saturday 28th June 2008, school was pretty much out for a group of teenage London boys. Their GCSE exams were finally over and, despite nor being legally old enough to drink, they were having a night out to celebrate. They went to Shillibeers (left), a popular bar and brasserie in Holloway. Among the group was Ben Kinsella, a 16 year-old pupil at Holloway School.
During the course of the evening an argument broke out between one of Ben’s friends and a group of other young men. It seems it was yet another chapter in the sorry tale along the lines of “Who d’you think you’re looking at?” Apparently peripheral in the row, but eager to get involved, was Jade Braithwaite. 19 years old, and 6’6” tall, he already had an extended criminal record for various offences involving drugs, robbery and violence.
Ben Kinsella was at no time involved in the disturbance, which was eventually broken up by the pub doormen. In the small hours of the morning, Ben’s group decided to call it a day, and set off to walk home, unaware that Braithwaite had ‘phoned two friends – Juress Kika and Michael Alleyne, both 18 years-old, and with similar histories of violence – to say that he had some unfinished business and needed their help. Below, left to right, Kika, Braithwaite and Alleyne.
When Braithwaite, Kika and Alleyne reappeared, Ben’s friends – who had been involved in the original fracas – decided to run for it. Ben, wrongly believing that he had nothing to fear, simply carried on walking. In a short but savage attack, lasting just a matter of seconds, the trio kicked Ben to the ground and inflicted a flurry of stab wounds to his body, puncturing his lungs and pulmonary artery. He was able to stagger from the scene, and collapse into the arms of his friends. Despite the best efforts of the medical services, he died later that morning, from catastrophic and irreplaceable blood loss. The moments before and after the attack were captured on closed circuit security cameras.
The map below shows the location where Ben was stabbed.
The three killers were quickly captured by the police, but during the resultant investigation, Braithwaite and Alleyne first denied knowing each other, and then tried to blame each other. Throughout the process, and during the trial, Kika, exercised his right to silence. Each was sentenced to 19 years in jail, and this was later upheld when they appealed against what they said was the severity of the sentence.
It is worth adding, in full, the complete victim statement made to the Old Bailey court by Ben’s mother, Deborah.
“I make this statement and the feelings and emotions are felt by all my family but no amount of words could ever express the daily pain we feel for the loss of Ben. On 29 June 2008 our beautiful son Ben was brutally and savagely stabbed to death. We as his family have been left devastated and in total despair. Our whole world has been totally turned upside down. Ben went for a good night out and never came home again.
Ben had only just finished school – a straight-A student, he had a job and had got his place in college (he never learnt of the wonderful exam results he had achieved and worked so very hard for). Ben loved life, he loved living and he had so much to live for. He knew where he was going and where he wanted to be.
Ben loved nothing more than to make people laugh, he was a fun-loving, happy-go-lucky boy with a heart of gold and would do anything for anyone. A testimony of this was his funeral that was attended by so many friends who filled the church and pavements outside.
Ben loved art and wanted to be a graphic designer, he loved his family, cooking, football, music and girls. The people who murdered him knew nothing about our Ben, not a hair on his head, a bone in his body, not anything about our wonderful son. They had never met him before or spoken to him – they just cruelly took his life away with knives for no apparent reason.
We had brought Ben up to always walk away from trouble. This sadly cost him his life. He walked away to get safely home and they took advantage of that – he was one boy on his own. It seems unfair their intent was to stab someone that night.
We were a big, happy, loving family (we are one down, one missing). We are hard-working and just wanted the best for all our children in life. There are now just three of us at home. We have had to move house because it broke our hearts to not see Ben in his bedroom curled up sleeping and safe in his bed. We so miss Ben’s love and laughter and most of all the boy thing in our family. Ben was our precious son that we cherished and were so immensely proud of, and by the way we had brought him up.
He had values and respected everyone he met. We as a family will never know the man he would have become, the wife he would have met and the children he would have had. This has all now been taken away from siblings, his grandmothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends and us.
No parent or sibling should ever have to go through or see what we have seen with our son. He died in front of us, we then had to visit him in a morgue, the undertakers and finally to bury him. We can now only visit Ben at a cemetery, our beautiful son who so loved life.
We cry every day for the loss of Ben, we do not sleep like we did before. Nearly a year on our nights are still filled with nightmares, of our son’s last moments and what he went through that fatal night. Our lives will never be the same – we have all been so deeply affected. We as a family will never get over the loss of our Ben. We are just trying to get through it. Our family now face a lifetime of feeling this way.
Nothing we can say or do will ever bring Ben back. All we can hope and pray for is that justice will prevail, maybe then we can find some form of closure to this awful event that has devastated our family’s lives.”
BELOW – BEN KINSELLA’S FUNERAL
WHEN YOU ARE OLD AND GREY – if not full of sleep, there will be times when images from youthful days reappear in the mind’s eye. When I was young, there was no internet, little television and, in terms of images, newspapers were King. Mostly, it is the faces of notorious criminals that I remember. Gunther Podola, long forgotten now, but at the time a notorious cop-killer; Harry Roberts, sneering out at us from the newsprint, while he evaded capture for so long; the baleful peroxide glare of Myra Hindley; the troubled but defiant ‘Jack The Lad’ face of James Hanratty. The one face, and figure, that entranced me most, however was the earliest – the sharp, brassy, night club features of Ruth Ellis.
Ellis chose her path in adult life based on her natural vivacity and an appreciation that she could earn more from nude modelling and ‘clipping’ punters in a night club than she could by working in the typing pool or in a factory. As a child her home life had been chaotic, so she had developed the necessary survival skills to make her own way in the austere world of post-war Britain.
Ellis became manager of her own club, The Little Club, and it seems that the clientele included a number of ‘Tim-Nice-But-Dim’ gentlemen, products of minor public schools, but with aspirations way in excess of their capabilities. One such was David Blakely although, to be fair, his wealthy background meant he had attended (and failed at) one of the country’s top schools, Shrewsbury. His passion was racing cars, and although he would never come close to emulating the feats of his friend, Mike Hawthorne, his death could be viewed as equally tragic as that of Hawthorne, four years later.
Ellis and Blakely became lovers, if not partners, but neither was faithful to the other. Blakely was physically violent; Ellis was violently jealous. On 10th April, 1955 – Easter Sunday – Ellis waylaid Blakely as he left a Hampstead pub, the Magdala. She shot him dead with a .38 Smith and Wesson revolver. Despite the day, there was to be no resurrection.
Ellis was arrested at the scene and made no attempt to deny her crime. The trial was something of a formality, and in 1955, the death sentence was mandatory for premeditated murder. Despite various attempts to have the sentence revoked, Ruth Ellis was hanged on Wednesday 13th July, 1955. The hangman was Albert Pierrepoint. (below, a scene from the film Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman, with Timothy Spall and Mary Stockley)
In a former life Jean Harrod was a British diplomat who served all over the world. One hopes that she gave the lie to Sir Henry Wotton’s famous assertion that a diplomat was “an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” Now she has retired from that demanding role, and is free to give full reign to her vivid imagination.
She has settled in Yorkshire, and in addition to writing plays, she has embarked on a series of crime thrillers featuring British career diplomat Jess Turner. The second of these is Deadly Deceit, and opens with Turner being sent to the seemingly exotic British Overseas Territory of the Turks and Caicos Islands, TCI for short.
She is on a troubleshooting mission, as the Governor has been involved in a mysterious near-fatal car accident, and someone with the proverbial ‘safe pair of hands’ is required to step into the breach.
Crime fiction has a much used trope – that of ‘The Odd Couple’. Nothing to do with Neil Simon’s immortal characters, of course, but think of Holmes and Watson, Wolfe and Goodwin, Dalziel and Pascoe, Morse and Lewis. They tolerate, irritate, admire and, occasionally, infuriate each other, but the device allows writers to have great fun with the law of opposites. Readers were introduced to Jess Turner’s ‘other half’ in the first book in the series, Deadly Diplomacy. He is Queensland cop DI Tom Sangster. As you might expect, in order to be a foil for the urbane and sleek Turner, he has to be a bit of a rough diamond. Sangster is no fool, however, as his crime clear-up rate testifies.
Given the fact that Turner and Sangster live worlds apart, Jean Harrod will have to continue coming up with convincing reasons for them to meet up. In this case, it is TCI’s proximity to the stricken island republic of Haiti. Boatloads of Haitian migrants are arriving on TCI, and the patience and compassion of the locals has been wearing pretty thin. Sangster’s homeland has its own problems with ‘illegals’ of course, and he has been attending a conference in Miami – a short flight from TCI – with US Immigration officials.
Turner and Sangster uncover a nasty racket in people smuggling, which involves not just shady villains down at the waterfront, but some very eminent people. Although there are a couple of grisly killings, and a very convincing description of a tropical hurricane, I would class this novel as a romantic thriller. It’s none the worse for that, however, and it makes a refreshing change to have central characters who are neither near-alcoholics, black-humoured nor self destructive. I have not had the pleasure of meeting the author, but I suspect that there is a little something autobiographical about Jess Turner. Deadly Deceit is out now. Buy now on Amazon.
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