The Wrong Man: The Shooting of Steven Waldorf and The Hunt for David Martin (2 page)

‘He said, “Let's face it, Guv – ninety per cent of the gear in here is bent and the other ten per cent's iffy.”'

Harry gave a blackened, gap-toothed grin. ‘I hope your first-class gave you a bollocking for going there in the first place,' he replied.

The ‘first-class' that Harry was referring to was the station's detective sergeant (first class) who was traditionally in charge of the aids to CID; and it was alleged that some of the first-classes offered a degree of protection to the scrappies in return for a highly unofficial bursary, to save them from the depredations of the feral aids who, it was said, would nick anybody for anything.

But I was able to smile at Harry in spite of the implied insult and I shook my head. ‘Not on that occasion,' I replied. ‘Because the first-class was with me and I'll tell you something else, Harry.' I leaned forward and picked up a rather wide, but weightless, spring-back binder which should have housed Harry's legitimate business transactions. ‘It's amazing what you can find if you're prepared to look for it,' and with that I dropped it on the table. A thin coating of dust arose from the binder, a mute testimony that little had been added to the file for some time. I added, ‘Or not, as the case may be.'

Harry's jowly, lugubrious features sagged and he swallowed noisily. ‘Am I going to be turned over, Guv?' he asked plaintively. ‘Are you putting it on me?'

Abruptly, I stood up. ‘I really don't fancy looking round the place – not right now, that is,' I replied. ‘Tell you what – why don't you and I go and have a drink, and I'll tell you what I've got in mind.'

Harry brightened up immediately. ‘Right!' he said and off we went to the pub round the corner. I felt fairly sure that Harry had something I wanted and that ‘something' was the whereabouts of Eric.

This was a classic case of ‘the stick and the carrot'. The stick was the implied threat that if that scrap metal yard was to be searched – as Harry had said, ‘turned over' – then it was quite probable that some non-ferrous metal of an incriminating nature would be found, which Harry would find perplexing to explain away. Given the paucity of invoices in his spring-back binder, Harry might have had to have accepted, with ill grace, the inevitability of ‘a stretch' – or, to the uninitiated, twelve months' imprisonment. But then, almost immediately, I had offered him the far more acceptable compromise of a carrot: the offer of a drink in more salubrious surroundings than his odoriferous office and where Harry could marshal all of his perspicacity to determine precisely what was on offer.

By today's standards, you may think that this was slightly unconventional policing but this is now and that was on Friday 14 January 1983. Unorthodox or not, that was the way things got done during those halcyon days with New Scotland Yard's Flying Squad – commonly known as ‘The Sweeney' and more officially as C8 Department – and now I'll tell you how I came to be in Harry's scrap yard.

Over the previous two months, my Flying Squad team and I had effected the arrest of the leader of a highly organised and deeply despicable gang of blaggers – robbers, to you. They had carried out raids on the homes of elderly, wealthy women in the Belgravia area of London and attacked, chloroformed and bound and gagged them before making off with their treasured possessions. Two such raids had resulted in the gang becoming £30,000 richer. Men who make their living by attacking elderly ladies seldom possess much moral fibre and the gang leader was no exception to the rule. I had arrested him, with the aid of that very large officer from Ulster, Gerry Gallagher – of whom you'll hear much more later – at a quarter-to-two in the morning as he endeavoured to make an escape through the window of a first-floor flat in West London. Not only did the gang leader confess to everything he'd done, he also informed us of robberies that he and his gang had planned to carry out in the future, took us to the venues of these planned robberies and identified each of the other gang members. They were brought in, admitted their respective parts in the individual offences, were charged and were now in prison, on remand.

And to be fair – this is no time for false modesty – it was a terrific case, one in a long line of sensational arrests involving snouts, fast drives across London and punch-ups with seasoned villains. So in this current investigation, everybody was accounted for – everybody, that is, but Eric. We knew
who
he was but not
where
he was. Eric, whose criminal career had commenced over twenty years previously, was no fool. He was constantly on the move and if the gang leader had possessed an idea as to his whereabouts, I have no doubt he'd have told us. But he didn't, so he couldn't. Therefore, I put the word about and then I got the whisper that if anybody knew of Eric's address, it'd be Harry the Scrappie.

So that was how Harry and I came to be drinking large scotches on that cold January evening; and it paid off. The address he gave me for Eric was way out in the boondocks and as I bade farewell to Harry, I also made it quite clear that if Eric should receive a warning telephone call of our impending arrival, our next meeting would be not quite so convivial.

In the ordinary run of things, I should have submitted Harry's name, under a suitable nom de plume, to be considered for an ex-gratia payment from the Yard's informants' fund for his valuable input into revealing the whereabouts of a much-wanted blagger, who in the due process of time would share among his contemporaries a total of twenty-six years' imprisonment. Not on this occasion, though. Harry had profited from not having his business brought under careful scrutiny; it was a case of quid pro quo.

It had gone six o'clock when I made my way back to the Flying Squad car, a nondescript Rover 3500, parked some distance away; my driver, Tony Freeman, was behind the wheel. All squad vehicles were fitted with two-tone sirens, a gong and two radios: the main set could send and receive messages to and from Information Room at Scotland Yard and vehicles all over the Metropolitan Police District (MPD). There was a second, small set, also known as the ‘car-to-car-radio' and these were used during squad (and other specialist units) operations for contact between the operational vehicles but which only had a limited transmitting and receiving range – about two to three miles. Usually, since the vehicles were inevitably in close proximity to one another, that did not present a problem. As I got into the car, I asked, ‘Anything happening on the air?'

Tony shook his head. ‘A right load of that CB
1
crap on the main set,' he replied, and then he added, ‘Funny thing, Dick. I think C11 must be nearby. I heard them on the small set a little while ago – all of a sudden, I heard someone say, ‘‘Oh, fuck!'' Dunno what it was all about.'

‘Nothing else since then?' I asked and Tony shook his head. ‘Right, let's head back to CO,
2
see if anything's happening.'

Tony dropped me off on Scotland Yard's concourse and I got into the lift and ascended to the fourth floor, Victoria Block, pushed open the swing doors, turned left and walked down to the end of the long corridor (Flying Squad offices on the left and C11 – or Criminal Intelligence – on the right) towards the main squad office. There was no one about; it seemed that they'd heeded the wise police dictum: that it was POETS
3
day.

There was just one person in the squad office: Jim Moon, once an ace squad driver, now in retirement supplementing his pension by manning the telephones and the radio.

‘Anything happening, Jim?' I asked but Jim shook his head. ‘Nothing for you, Sargie.'

I picked up the Police Almanac which housed the telephone numbers for all the police stations in all the United Kingdom's different constabularies, found the one covering the area where Eric was living and asked the local detective inspector to nab him for us. ‘That's great!' responded the Inspector. ‘We want the little bugger as well, but we didn't know where he was!' Of course, the Inspector hadn't made the acquaintance of ‘Harry the Scrappie'.

I booked off duty and went home to Upminster, Essex, rescued a steak pie from the oven, which, had I arrived home three hours previously when it had been freshly cooked, would have been quite tasty, made incisions into it to release the scorching heat and poured myself a glass of red. As I finished the meal, I poured myself another glass and then I realised it was time for the news. I switched the television on. There on the screen was a yellow Mini, registration number GYF 117W, its doors wide open, spotlights illuminating it and the commentator was saying, ‘A man has been critically injured in a police ambush in a West London street in what may be a case of mistaken identity. Witnesses said marksmen surrounded a car in a traffic jam in Pembroke Road in Earls Court and opened fire.'

Just then my wife Ann came into the room. ‘Is this what made you late?'

I shook my head. ‘No, first I've heard about it … shh … I want to hear …'

‘The driver was shot several times in the head and body,' continued the commentator. ‘Scotland Yard said the ambush was part of an operation to recapture escaped prisoner David Martin.' Now the camera focused on one of the first witnesses on the scene, secretary Jane Lamprill, who said the man seemed very badly injured. ‘He was about thirty,' she said, ‘but I couldn't even see the colour of his hair because of the blood.'

‘Christ!' I exclaimed. ‘The wrong bloody man!'

‘No, they said it wasn't clear if it was this Martin man or not,' said Ann, but just then the phone rang. It was the Inspector from the constabulary to say that Eric had been arrested. ‘He's singing like a bird to our job,' he chuckled, ‘although he did look a bit worried when I said the squad wanted to have a word with him!'

‘He fucking needs to be!' I scoffed. ‘Just lock him up tonight and we'll be along to see him tomorrow morning.' I rang off and telephoned the rest of the team for an early start the following day. As I went up to bed, the name ‘David Martin' was going round and round in my head. Who was he? All right, it was a fairly common name but where the hell had I heard it before?

The next day, Saturday, Tony and I, together with the rest of my team were heading north out of London. We reached our destination, a small market town in the middle of nowhere, where I met, and spoke fairly briskly to Eric who promptly confessed everything confessable in a written statement. The constabulary officers wanted to charge him with their offence, take him before the local Magistrates' Court and remand him in custody and this suited me to the ground. Later, we could have him produced on a Home Office order to join the rest of the gang on a remand hearing at our Magistrates' Court and then we could commit the whole lot of them to the Old Bailey for trial.

We set off back to London and I was glad that the ‘Eric' business had been transacted so quickly. Today was my mother's 78th birthday and since my father had died four months earlier, it was especially important for me and the family to be with her at this time.

As we reached the borders of the Metropolitan Police District, I called up the Flying Squad office on the RT set: ‘Central 899 from Central 954; Jim, book us back in the MPD, please – see you soon.'

The reply was immediate: ‘Central 954 from Central 899; get over to ‘Delta Delta' as quick as you can – there's a flap on!'

I acknowledged the call as we came out of the Hanger Lane gyratory system and on to the A40. ‘Delta Delta' – otherwise Paddington Green police station and ‘D' Division's Divisional Headquarters – was just a short distance away; and as we tore towards the A40(M), two-tones wailing, I was thinking, ‘Why Paddington? Why us?'

All was soon revealed. The nick was crowded with police officers, a lot of them Flying Squad. It was from ‘D' Division that the operation had originated to hunt down David Martin, who, charged with shooting a police constable, had escaped from custody. Somehow – nobody seemed quite sure how – matters had gone tragically wrong and had resulted in armed police shooting and seriously wounding an innocent young man, a 26-year-old film editor named Steven Waldorf. One of the officers who had fired shots which had injured Waldorf was attached to ‘D' Division.

Morale at Paddington Green police station was, quite understandably, at rock bottom and the operation, which had been headed by ‘D' Division's Detective Superintendent George Ness, was now, on orders from on high, being handed over to Commander Frank Cater who the previous week had taken over the running of the Flying Squad.

My team and I were part of 12 Squad, which along with 10 Squad was now appointed to the investigation. The officer in charge of operational matters was Detective Chief Superintendent Don Brown, who I later discovered was a seasoned and highly respected squad officer. Arriving on the same day as Frank Cater, Brown had returned to the Flying Squad for his third and final tour.