It’s a fair cop

So having to write this as I am bound to forget some of the details, but today was the first time I have ever entered a police station and sat in an interview room.

Having binge-watched Adolescence last week when I had COVID, I felt I had done some preps. Wow, that was a pretty amazing series. I watched the whole thing in one go so it felt like just one long screen shot.

Back to today, though. I recently wrote about how my birth dad, Harry, was murdered in 1980, and how I have recently met up with my half sister and we have been looking for more details on our dad. Today was the day we had a chat with a Detective Inspector and a Family Liaison Officer (I am not saying names because I have no idea if I can). We went into an interview room and I noticed the chairs were screwed to the floor. It reminded me of the Mens Bar in the Students Union in Newcastle where the agric students used to have a weekly session and end up throwing all the furniture around, so the powers-that-be decided to screw everything to the floor. The same reason was given for the interview room. How scary would that be.

The reason for our meeting was to learn more about Harry’s murder. We had sent some questions in beforehand as events took place 45 years ago, and all we had was a couple of blurry newspaper articles with scant detail, most of which transpired to be incorrect. That’s journalists for you. Bending reality to sensationalise and tell a story they think people want to read, despite not knowing the full facts. So DI (let’s call him John), DI John explained what he had found out given they had the police records from the time. He explained that policing in the 1980s was a very different thing to now, and that this was apparent in the records that they held. Everything was on paper and the language used reflected the world as it was then. I completely got that. When I first got hold of my adoption papers, the language in the forms, correspondence and descriptions of the people involved were a snapshot of the society in the early 1960s. For example, I was handed over, aged 6 months, to my new adopted parents by the Bournemouth Moral Welfare Society. Reminds me of a Monty Python song…

Anyway, I digress. So, three men, known to Harry, turned up at his flat in Bournemouth to do some business. As I kind of worked out given the information I had already, Harry was a bit of a wheeler dealer. An Arthur Daley of his day. The words in the report were “lovable rogue”. He didn’t have a jewellery shop but kept his jewellery in a big leather case at home. How he got the jewellery was not 100% known – so he was a “fence”. He had a few different ladies living with him at different times. So it looks like he enjoyed his life but it was quite messy.

The three guys turned up one Saturday afternoon having been drinking. They wanted to sort some business out but things turned nasty. Harry was hit by the butt of a shotgun, a decanter and stabbed in the neck with a kitchen knife. They ran off, jumped in their car, with his jewels, and were arrested about 12 hours later. The car had been seen outside the house by two sets of neighbours, and the three men were already known to the police. They were arrested and confessed to everything.

There’s no need for me to go into loads of detail, but at times it was like listening to a radio play or an audiobook as DI John read out some paragraphs from the various reports. How they had buried the leather case in the garden and one of the girlfriends was walking about wearing the jewellery. It seemed like a story Ronnie Barker might tell in Porridge.

We were with DI John and his colleague for a good hour and a half. It was brilliant. We found out that Harry had a sister who identified his body. So we have some more leads to find family members. What we both really want is a great photo of Harry. Given it was the 1980s, there were no photos of Harry in the police reports and those that were taken were of the crime scene which I didn’t want to see and weren’t offered.

They were all sentenced, one for murder and aggravated robbery, and two for manslaughter and robbery. That is all I want to know about them. My interest lies solely in Harry and I feel like I have a little more definitive colour on the “lovable rogue”. He wasn’t a drinker, but loved to gamble. And probably was able to charm the birds off the trees. We probably have lots of siblings out there somewhere.

Checking the boring details, he was 2 inches higher than stated on my adoption papers (5’ 11” not 5’ 9”) – maybe he carried on growing into his 50s. He was balding at the front of his head and had grey/brown curly hair at the back. I am glad he was a bit of a character and not some boring accountant.

Husbant reminded me that I had actually been in a police station earlier this year – in Barbate following a robbery at our villa. I had forgotten that but it didn’t really count as I had no idea what was really going on as the whole interview was in Spanish but luckily we had an interpreter and I was on holiday. But it’s a fair cop…

Off to Naples tomorrow to eat more Italian food, drink more Italian wine, and look at some beautiful art. Ciao!